Posted on 06/30/2005 9:32:25 PM PDT by 68skylark
Durbinization alert:
Tons of readers are e-mailing me about NBC News anchor Brian Williams' comments tonight in which he apparently compared the Founding Fathers to modern-day terrorists. The remarks seem to pooh-pooh the story about Iranian president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's alleged involvement in the 1979 hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
Williams previewed his argument on his MSNBC blog:
Many Americans woke up to a curious story this morning: several of the former Iran Hostages have decided there is a strong resemblance between Iran's new president and one of their captors more than 25 years ago. The White House and most official branches of government are ducking any substantive comment on this story, and photo analysis is going on at this and other news organizations. It is a story that will be at or near the top of our broadcast and certainly made for a robust debate in our afternoon editorial meeting, when several of us raised the point (I'll leave it to others to decide germaneness) that several U.S. presidents were at minimum revolutionaries, and probably were considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England.
According to news watchers, Williams repeated the argument in his broadcast banter tonight with NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. Since I haven't watched an NBC Nightly News broadcast in, oh, five years, I'm hoping someone grabbed video of it.
According to this report, Williams told Mitchell:
"What would it all matter if proven true? Someone brought up today the first several U.S. presidents were certainly revolutionaries and might have been called 'terrorists' by the British crown, after all."
In his blog post, it was "several of us" who came up with the morally equivalent notion. According to the above transcription, the "several" was reduced to a lone "someone" by air time. Who brought it up, Brian? Who? Do tell. Is it your own fabulously ill-informed thought? Or can you blame one or two or several low-level staffers?
Bloggers are already on the case, natch...
The Dread Pundit Bluto comments:
If anyone needed another example of the insanity of the liberal doctrine of moral and cultural equivalence, which came into fashion during the Cold War, this is it. It's actually less offensive for Williams to imply that our Founding Fathers were terrorists than it is for him to put them on a par with the bloodthirs[t]y, unevolved barbarians who took over Iran in 1979.
Williams owes this country a sincere and abject apology.
Williams indulges in the same, tired moral equivalency that led Michael Moore to declare Zarqawi as the Iraqi version of the Minutemen from our war of independence. This minimizes the cruelty and inhumanity of the enemies of freedom that use civilians as their targets while trying to impose tyrannies far worse than anything George III could ever have dreamed in his most feverish illusions.
Media Lies: "That's it. I'm done with NBC."
I am quite the history buff and I have yet to see any type of mention where this happened or anything even remotely close. During the Revolutionary War, the British burned homes of settlers, executed traitors and ransacked the nation. We gave the British soldiers quarter for the most part and eventually shipped a large number of Red Coats back to England . . . alive. Never did American soldiers storm into buildings and take everyone inside hostage. Never!
I have a feeling Mr. Williams will be feeling a lot of heat in the next 24 hours. He's already sparking some major pre-Fourth of July fireworks. For once, I'll be interested in what he has to say. Stay tuned to his blog.
Brian Williams of NBC news just compared the new Iranian President to the Founding Fathers
Why can't the Iranian just show a photo of himself around that time and clear it up or better yet get the guy that looks like him to show his face?
What a country in which we live! Terrorists are coddled and set up as founding fathers, while our brave men and women in the military are labeled Nazis and torturers.
There's no end to moral equivalency smearing by the left. this is just the latest and most repugnant, considering that this comes just before July 4.
If a U.S. soldier (like George Washington) is like a Nazi, and if the founding fathers are like Islamic terrorists, then does that mean Islamic terrorists are like Nazis? Or is that being insensitive to terrorists?
"Several of us". Sounds right at NBC. And he was right to wonder about the "germaneness".
Here's hoping Williams does for NBC what he did for MSNBC.
But our founding fathers aren't bad guys. And I defy Brian Williams to keep saying that they are.
The brits were the one burning innocents.
Well I care. If he is indeed one of the hostage takers then it opens a whole can of worms regarding what we should and can do about it.
Declaration of Independence
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
There were atrocities on both sides -- especially by militia troops in the south on both sides. But these things were not the fault of our founding fathers.
When I see quotes like these it kind of reminds me of the construction worker who lacerated himself with a power tool then tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head several times with a pneumatic nailer because of the pain.
That's good!
I keep my supper down only because I stopped watching this crap years ago.
What an outrage! Despicable. I am sure back during the American Revolution that the Crown had but the greatest respect for the Revolutionaries in America and would never of thought them to be a threat to the Crown.
Yeah, I can relate. When I hear about this kind of thing I want to put a pneumatic nailer to my head -- so I don't have to hear about the opinions of blow-dried, air-headed celebrities.
Dan Blather = Brian Williams!!!
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