Mistakes were made?

Has anyone noticed the Bush Administration's fondness of the phrase, "mistakes were made," which was most recently used to describe the political firings of eight US attorneys. As a commentator on NPR pointed out this morning, instead of using the active "I made mistakes" or "we made mistakes," the Bush Administration habitually uses the passive "mistakes were made," to acknowledge the making of mistakes but never explicitly admitting to making them and thus never explicitly accepting the responsibility for making them. For an administration whose 2000 campaign war cry was responsibility and accountability, it certainly has a clever way of dodging it.

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This reminds me rather of the Roman Catholics' "The teaching of the church has always been [insert dogma we just changed here]".

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