Brian Williams: So Like Maybe I Had a Brain Tumor Or Something That Made Me Tell All Those Huge Lies

I don't know about this quote, it sounds like he may have been kidding, or just engaging in that patented Brian Williams Hyperbole we've all come to love.

But even if this quote isn't anything, hang on, there's more.

NBC sources said this to Vanity Fair, about Williams efforts to explain his Huge Lies:

"(He said,) 'Did something happen to (my) head? Maybe I had a brain tumor, or something in my head,'" a source told the magazine in its upcoming piece."“He just didn’t know. We just didn't know. We had no clear sense what had happened. We got the best (apology) we could get."

Okay like I said, that quote sounds like Reporter Bullshit to me. Sounds like the guy is trying to say, basically, "Wow, this is so far removed from my character, I have no idea how to explain it. Must be a brain tumor, who knows?"

Which is, whatever, bullshit too, but I don't take him as literally claiming he had a tumor.

The insiders revealed some mean stuff about Williams:

"Brian has very little interest in politics," one insider told the magazine. "It's not in his blood. What Brian cares about is logistics, the weather, and planes and trains and helicopters."

Before you say "Bullshit, of course this liberal had an interest in politics:" Bear in mind, many hardcore liberals are hardcore liberals precisely because they thoughtlessly accept the Default Assumptions of the liberal hive-mind without even realizing they've accepted any ideological inputs at all.

Brian Williams does in fact strike me as a lightweight. He does strike me as the kind of guy who would repeat every single element of Liberal Microthought to you, down the line, but could possibly not even realize he had endorsed the full litany of liberal claims. *

The sort of guy who would come across as non-deceptive on a lie detector, when he claimed he was just "down the middle and objective."

I'm not saying that's the case, necessarily. It could just be that Williams is a hardcore liberal, and these claims of him not being political are efforts from other hardcore liberals to distance the ideology from the stink of failure and scandal.

I'm just saying this doesn't strike me as completely impossible. I know many liberals who will tell me with a straight face -- believing themselves to be honest-- that they are just interested in "practical" results and disdain all ideologies.

Matter fact, Jonah Goldberg just wrote about a group of people insisting that they were non-ideological pragmatic centrists who were not left-leaning at all, because there was no left-leaning ideology at all.

Those centrists Goldberg was writing about? The staff of the Marxist/Labor Unionist newsletter, The Nation.

Now these NBC insiders got even meaner about the lightweight Williams:

Williams was described as very insecure because he had never been a foreign or war correspondent. The insiders said his gussied-up accounts of seeing bodies floating in post-hurricane New Orleans were his way of trying to prove his journalistic chops. "He didn’t want to leave New York," a onetime NBC exec told the magazine. "Getting him to war zones was real tough . . . but when he did go, he came back with these great stories that kind of put himself at the center of things."

The Vanity Fair article is here. I'm going to read that, but I thought I would get the excerpts up.

Stolen from Hot Air.

* The advantage of liberalism is precisely that the ubiquity of its transmission from those who own the cables and the tv cameras makes it the Default Ideology of People Who Don't Even Think About Politics.

It's the Default Ideology of the apathetic and the dummies-- which is a powerful position to be in, as that describes 75% of the population.

posted by Ace at 05:52 PM

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