Ed Morrissey writes that NBC’s Brian Williams (who in the past has attempted to pay favorable lip-service to his viewers in the Red States, but trashed bloggers) said on the Nightly News that America’s founders “probably were considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England”. Morrissey responds:
Did Washington bomb women and children indiscriminately in order to chase the British out of North America? Did John Hancock send teenagers with bomb belts into marketplaces to kill as many people as possible to destabilize colonial society? This comparison insults the intelligence and the memory of those who fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War, which (despite what’s commonly thought) mostly saw European-style, set-piece combat between uniformed forces.
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. It also continues the generation-long effort to rewrite American history to eliminate the idea of American exceptionalism, where all forms of government are relatively equal and democracy is simply another choice with no special moral value over monarchies or autocracies.
Shame on Brian Williams, and shame on NBC.
The Punitive Liberalism introduced into the American culture during the late ’60s and the McGovern-era early seventies has radically cheapened our national dialogue. I’ll second Ed’s remarks: Shame on Williams–and his writers–for cluelessly uttering such rhetoric, and thinking, ala Dick Durbin, that no one would notice.
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