Posted on 08/10/2006 7:11:55 PM PDT by governsleastgovernsbest
by Mark Finkelstein
August 10, 2006 - 22:01
Hat tip to poster 'nutmeg' at Free Republic.
Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News might have meant to praise the heroism and selflessness of our various service people. But he employed what was at best an incredibly awkward, at worst an inappropriate, offensive and simply wrong manner of doing it.
On this evening's 7 PM ET edition of Hardball, Chris Matthews mused about the UK-born terrorists whose plot was foiled today:
"Here we have maybe 24 people who have lived in London and England and the free world for all these years that become citizens, subjects of the Crown, and, yet, after having gotten to know us, they want to kill themselves to hurt us. Isn't that an even deeper conundrum here than the chemicals being used in these attacks?"
Williams: "And that, Chris, that last aspect, the willingness to take one's own life -- I always tell people there are guys on our team like that, too. They're called Army Rangers and Navy Seals and the Special Forces folks and the first responders on 9/11 who went into those buildings knowing, by the way, they weren't going to come out. So we have players like that on our team."
Wrong. Our people are highly trained to accomplish their mission in a manner that gives them the best possible chance of survival. Yes, they heroically assume great risks, knowingly putting their lives on the line. But it is grotesquely mistaken for Williams to suggest that their commanders are sending them on suicide missions. To compare them with terrorists - often young, confused people being exploited by cynical masters who send them to their deaths - is disgraceful.
He didn't say that first part, Matthews did.
Maybe I'm missing something .. but I took Williams comments as tough he was comparing the two
Precisely.
The liberal mind cannot get past the zeal, to see the motives behind the behaviors. Willimas is a typical blind liberal. Their abject blindness is why they impute motives to Bush that are irrational yet precisely what a liberal would do if roles were reversed.
Maybe ... but he should known better then to say a thing like that
I know that!!
He was directly responding to that comment tho.
Good grief. Not the end of the world.
His words were very poorly chosen is all we're saying.
This isn't the first time he sounds like a dunce!
I said that on the other thread and the poster said I must agree with Williams and think the Rangers and Seals were like terrorist.
I tried to make that point in the first sentence of the post.
You had to see how it happened; he was in London, he was on first, and it was the end of his segment and Chris asked him one more question.
Oh brother!!
That's it. Now they are grasping at straws and not to well either. I can't believe dumb can get dumber. There is a big difference between our special forces who know the value of life and a culture that doesn't or isn't allowed to.
This whole thing is a tempest in a teapot.
Ok ... that is true
But putting our guys in the same category of the terrorists is way out of line
I'm no friend of Brian Williams and definitely not a friend of the MSM but I really think he meant this as an accolade rather than a smear.
I understand what you are saying but Williams is being paid millions of dollars to not make such mistakes. This is not the first time he has been so reckless.
Everybody says things out of context; that's no need for us to take up arms for what appears to have been a slip of the tongue, i.e., not either having or taking the time to DIFFERENTIATE between why ours are better.
Where is the transcript? Without a full transcript to establish context it is impossible to tell if these remarks were just ambiguous and clumsy, or were as offensive as many here seem to believe.
It was an unfortunate statement that he obviously regretted making, and he certainly was not trying to be dismissive of our troop losses. Needless to say, he was hammered mercilessly by the left.
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