Stick with me on this. There's a common link between the Anthony Weiner scandal and the Brian Williams scandal. The circumstances are very different, and thank goodness Williams didn't accidentally tweet photos of the RPG in his pants. What's more infuriating than their respective episodes of derp is their stupidity and recklessness. Weiner moronically thought he could send photos of his penis to a virtual stranger on the internet and not get caught. The minute he clicked the send button, he was already doomed. He also didn't realize (or didn't care) how badly this would look for the Democratic Party. Throw John Edwards into the mix, too.
Likewise, Brian Williams failed to grasp that by lying about this, and apparently other anecdotes, from the perch of what ought to be an unimpeachable anchor chair, he would potentially toss the entire "liberal media" under the conservative entertainment bus, ripping a giant opening in the space-time continuum allowing every far-right crank to exploit it as an example of how the lamestream media is populated by lying liars. If your ass is at top of the heap -- the anchor of NBC Nightly News, watched by around nine million viewers every night -- you had better keep your house clean because if you go down for lying, you've killed yourself and inflicted a ton of collateral damage.
Knowing this, and he had to have known it, Brian Williams blurted out this white lie about Iraq anyway and, according to sources, a series of other lies that NBC is currently investigating. His stupidity and hubris alone are his biggest trespasses in my view. It doesn't matter that it was a personal anecdote rather than an actual news story about characters unrelated to his life -- he said it on the news. He told his tall tale multiple times in public, and that's all it takes for the piranha to swarm.
For example, two people with ethically questionable pasts, Sarah Palin and Dinesh D'Souza have piled on in spite of their own lengthy records of mendacity. Palin wrote on Facebook... CONTINUE READING