Budding Weasel-Boy Brian Williams (NBC News) issues a non apology of his stated equivalence of the founders of this country and OBL (HT: Michelle Malkin).
Here’s the essence of the defence:
“My question — and specifically the line, "what would it all matter..." was
meant to address the popular support within Iran for those who acted against the
U.S. and are now in positions of power. Those of you who are regular
readers of our blog know we spoke about this very issue yesterday in our
afternoon editorial meeting.
All I ask is that people re-read what was
said on the air. I've talked to several viewers today, and one conversation I
actually enjoyed was with a woman from Virginia, who said, "These days, you just
can't use the word TERRORIST for anything but a TERRORIST." And I take this nice
woman's point about the power of words in our current climate.
While I insist
that a re-reading of my question will prove that in no way was I calling the
framers "terrorists" (for starters, the word did not exist 229 years ago), I
regret that anyone thought that after a life spent reading and loving American
history, I had suddenly changed my mind about the founders of our nation.”
As Mr. Williams notes, the word terrorist, and the attendant phenomena of suicide bombers, murder of civilians, beheadings, etc. were unknown at the time of the American War of Independence. In many respects, the British record in the conflict was worse than the American.
However, that doesn’t slow down the moral equivalence being peddled by Mr. Williams and NBC. Of course he’s calling the framers “terrorists”. That’s the only reason to frame the subject the way they did. See the previous post on this issue here.
I have know idea about Mr. Williams love of America vs. the love of American history, and I have no idea (perhaps because I haven’t followed Mr. Williams to any great degree) about his thoughts on the founders of the nation. These are certainly two different topics, and it seems as though you can love American history without loving America.
Now I can believe that you can casually make a linguistic boo-boo like this. However, once it’s published on your (corporate, subject to edit by legal and others) website, and discussed on a news broadcast, you need to provide a better apology than “You rubes are too stupid to understand what I said”. Actually, we get what you said, that’s the problem.
A real apology would look like:
“I’m sorry that I inadvertently implied that America’s founders were the moral equivalents of Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. The words were poorly chosen, and I did not mean than anyone could rationally construe that George Washington or others of our founding fathers, could be construed as terrorists. Please forgive me for my clumsy formulation.”
That’s not a durbinized, weasel-worded apology. Notice the complete lack of blaming the readers / viewers for mis-interpretation.
Until we see something like this, we can only conclude the durbinization of NBC News continues.
OBTW, why are there any of the Iranian hostage takers left alive? Now that's a CIA scandal of major proportions.
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