Scapegoats - always useful!

I have been taught that when faced with a 'situation' the correct way to proceed is to keep to the facts. I have encountered (and still do) a good many situations where someone makes assumptions or says something they think might mitigate the circumstances before them only to find that their words later return to come back and bite them on the behindside.

Tony Haywood was placed in the stocks that is the US Congress and the representatives of the people sought to absolve themselves from any culpability and enamour themselves to the electorate in one exercise. Good old Mr. Waxman, chairing the proceedings (circus would be a better description), berated Haywood for stonewalling. Truth is, Haywood was acting correctly. If he doesn't know then the answer is to wait until he does before he states the facts - not stonewalling but prudence!

The problem is that the Congressmen didn't want facts they wanted him to throw up his hands and acknowledge that it was all his fault. The problem is that Haywood wasn't on the rig, he wasn't personally privy to the way they worked on the rig and he wasn't the person anywhere near the operations - he sits at the helm and drives the organisation - not the day-to-day operations on the ground. So who does need to before the Congressmen and answer the questions about this tragic incident?

Oh yeah, the people who did that were almost certainly (as I understand it) Americans.

Still, the media and the nation got their Aunt Sally and the Administration their scapegoat!

So what do we know about scapegoats? Aren't these a part of the OT historical stuff?

Well the 'Azazel' (Heb. Goat that leaves us) became the 'escape goat', the animal that thew people of God drove off into the desert on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) as described in Leviticus sixteen, twenty-one on:

"Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness. The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, and ahe shall let the goat go free in the wilderness."

The goat bears the sins of the nation and departs into the wilderness to die and with the animals death the sins of the nation die also. Sounds a bit familiar doesn't it?

I assume scapegoat, in the modern sense, to be someone who is generally held to be innocent (in that they have neither commissioned not committed (knowingly) the acts for which he or she is accused. The best bit is that having a scapegoat usually distracts attention from the real culprits. Now, who could that be I wonder?