I know this is probably going to trigger a wave of enraged emails from Apple fans — or “Macolytes,” as I like to call them — but I can’t resist writing something about the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Steve Jobs and the backdating of Apple’s stock options, which Dan Farber of ZDNet wrote about recently. I wrote an earlier post about it here.

In that post, I said that I thought Apple — and Steve Jobs — had been getting a free ride on the whole options thing because the company and its products are so popular, and I still think that (it’s either that or the legendary Jobs “reality distortion field”). As BusinessWeek suggests in this article, Steve Jobs is effectively untouchable. Everyone would much rather talk about how the iTV unit is going to be announced at Macworld.

Of course, it’s possible that everyone is willing to overlook the Apple case because a) they are tired of the whole options-backdating issue, b) they don’t think it’s really that important — or even wrong, as my friend Rob argued in the comments on my previous post — or c) the company has absolved Jobs of any direct liablity, and therefore the whole issue is effectively closed.

That could be. But as far as I can see it, the facts are pretty clear from the WSJ story: Steve knew about the backdating, and while he didn’t benefit from it, he either actively agreed to it or approved it. He also personally benefited from a huge grant that was backdated, although he apparently didn’t know about it.

As a blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs puts it, this is the Hurd defense (named for the CEO of HP), which in a nutshell says “Did illegal activities occur? Yes. Was the current CEO in charge at the time of the illegal activities? Yes. Did the current CEO authorize said activities? Yes. And benefit from them? Yes. Therefore, the CEO is not responsible.”

Does that make sense? Only in Apple-land.

Apple managed to beat expectations with its latest financial results, boosting its profit by 27 per cent and setting a new record for Mac sales. Everyone seems pretty excited about the whole thing, and happy to talk about how great the iPod and iTunes are, etc. If they mention it at all, most news stories mention the whole options backdating problem way at the bottom as a kind of throwaway. Most blogs don’t mention it at all.

In fact, the options-backdating issue might as well not even exist as far as most coverage of Apple is concerned — and that goes for much of the mainstream media as well as the blogosphere, where Apple fandom reigns supreme. Blogging Stocks is about the only place that has consistently written about the issue in depth (and Soxfirst), instead of just worrying about whether some bad official will make Steve Jobs go away and kill the golden goose.

Can you imagine what kind of stink there would be if Microsoft was involved in something like this? People would be burning Steve Ballmer in effigy (ok, they already do that, but you get my point). But because it’s Apple, the assumption is — if anyone even bothers to think about it — that it’s some kind of misunderstanding, a book-keeping irregularity that Steve couldn’t possibly have known anything about.

Is that the case? No. Apple has said that Steve knew about it, but didn’t benefit from it. Is that really supposed to make it all go away? We’re not talking about Enron-style arcane book-keeping tricks here — we’re talking about pricing stock options just before blockbuster quarterly results are issued, so that they instantly soar in value, and back-dating them in other cases to ensure a big payout.

Sure, everyone else was doing it too, but that doesn’t make it right. Apple has been getting a free ride on the whole issue, as far as I’m concerned. I guess the legendary Steve Jobs’ “reality distortion field” extends pretty far.