The airing of the second part of Mel Gibson's Good Morning America interview with Diane Sawyer today means that we might finally be done with soundbites explaining how the tiny, Tequila-swilling demon living inside the actor's liver is the one that's anti-Semitic, not Gibson himself, at least until his publicity commitments for Apocalypto require a new round of public healing. Above, we've pulled a clip of Gibson's previously teased heart wounds/"the last thing I want to be is that kind of monster" run, which lost much in the translation from squirmy, live-action performance to pullquote. And on the ABC News website, there's some additional transcription of today's segment, including Sawyer's request that Gibson explain the little "Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" remark that ignited the entire controversy: [Warning: extensive blockquoting follows]

"Now, maybe it was just that very day that Lebanon and Israel were at it, you know," Gibson said of that night.

It was the 17th day of the raging war in Lebanon. A lot of people were worrying that the crisis was escalating out of control.

"Since I was a kid in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and now in the new millennium, you can read of an ever-escalating kind of conflagration over there in the Middle East that ... I remember thinking when I was 20, man, that place is going to drag us all into the black hole, you know, just the ... the difficulty over there," he said. "You start thinking will I ever see my grandchildren grow up? ... What's going to become of the world? What's going to press the button?"

"But there's a difference between saying that place is a tinderbox and the constellation of things happening there could take us all down, and saying the Jews are responsible for all the wars," Sawyer said.

"Well, I did," he said of his comment to the officer that night.

"The Jews are responsible?" Sawyer said.

"Well. ... Strictly speaking, that's ... that's not true because it takes two to tango," he said. "What are they responsible for? I think that they're not blameless in the conflict. There's been aggression, and retaliation and aggression. It's just part of being in conflict, and being at war. So, they're not blameless."

Gibson said that when people are drunk, they express what they think incorrectly.

"Now when you're loaded, you know, the balance of how you see things — it comes out the wrong way. I know that it's not as black and white as that. I know that you just can't, you know, roar about things like that. That it's wrong," he said.

When Sawyer countered that a lot of people would say he was still blaming the Jews, Gibson said he wasn't blaming them.

"No, no. Did ... did I say that?" he asked.

After several rounds on the Middle East, he said this was his statement of his true feelings.

"Let me be real clear, here. In sobriety, sitting here, in front of you, national television. ... That I don't believe that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. I mean that's an outrageous, drunken statement," he said.

It took a little prodding and a couple of explanations/qualifications, but Sawyer finally got him to say the magic words. So we're done now, right? Not so fast:

But he said something else was eating at him that night. He said he had realized he had been harboring an old resentment.

"The other place it may have come from is, you know, as you know, a couple of years ago I released the film 'Passion.' ... Even before anyone saw a frame of the film, for an entire year, I was subjected to a pretty brutal sort of public beating," he said.

"During the course of that, I think I probably had my rights violated in many different ways as an American. You know. As an artist. As a Christian. Just as a human being, you know."

Tens of millions of Christians who saw the film said it was simply evoking the New Testament version of Jews, Romans, and the brutal crucifixion of Jesus.

But the leaders of several Jewish organizations launched a campaign arguing that Gibson had seeded the film with deliberately anti-Semitic images. They also warned that Gibson might be inciting a new wave of hatred and even of violence against Jews.

He said that never happened.

"The film came out. It was released, and you could have heard a pin drop, you know. Even the crickets weren't chirping," he said. "But, the other thing I never heard was the one single word of apology."

Exhausted yet? Yeah, we are too. But there you have it: If the Jews had just apologized to Gibson for hurting his feelings during the Passion of the Christ controversy, he might not have bottled up all that resentment, and we might not still be making sugar tits and war-monger jokes two months later.