In Vino Veritas

Mel Gibson, auteur of "The Passion of the Christ," was pulled over for speeding in Malibu in the middle of the night Friday, failed a sobriety test and was arrested.

Okay. Who cares -- right? Celebrities get liquored up and go for a spin all the time. Sometimes they get away with it. Sometimes they're unlucky and they get stopped by the cops. What's the big deal?

Well, I find this story (which I read about in the New York Daily News) interesting for a couple of reasons.

For one, his mug shot has not been released, which in most cases is standard operating procedure.

Secondly, the original police report on the arrest was suppressed by the police. A section of the revised (and toned down) report was obtained by and published on TMZ.com.

The second draft report is written by hand, and is difficult to read, but is revealing nonetheless.

Could the original report have contained too many embarrassing details about what the arresting officer (Los Angeles County Deputy James Mee) calls in the revised version a "barrage of anti-Semitic remarks" about "fucking Jews" made by the famously Catholic Mel Gibson?

"The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," Gibson is quoted as saying in the report, among other things.

Kinda makes you wonder what he's quoted as saying in the original report, doesn't it?

This is the same Mel Gibson, for those of you with short-term memory loss, who so adamantly denied that he was an anti-Semite at the time of the release of "The Passion of the Christ."

It'll be interesting to see how this story develops, since there is not only the original report and the mug shot still to be released (if the original report hasn't been destroyed by now, that is), but also a videotape of Gibson's sobriety test, in which he might possibly make other remarks not noted on the sanitized police report.

Too bad he wasn't talking in Aramaic...

Tom Moran