Quote of the Day

Here, I think, may be the difference: while the soldiers whom Williams got to know in Iraq work for peanuts, relatively speaking, Williams makes enormous amounts of money. How much, I have no idea, but the numbers are no doubt available on the web. Hundreds of millions of dollars, I assume. In some sense, Williams is paid far more than he deserves. His modest skills as a glib speaker with a patrician mien and a midwestern accent have been, by any normal standard, massively over-rewarded.

I have no problem with that; no doubt Williams worked hard to get where he is. No one stumbles into success. Still, the kind of wealth that has been heaped upon Brian Williams gives rise to a phenomenon that has played much too large a part in our national life: liberal guilt. Again, this is pure speculation, but I suspect that Williams’s emotional need to portray himself (in his own mind, not just to outsiders) as someone who braved dangers, was shot at and nearly killed, was part of how he assuaged the guilt that came packaged with the hundreds of millions of dollars he has earned for doing, really, not much. (Note, too, how similar Williams’s story is to Hillary Clinton’s lie about “landing under sniper fire” in Bosnia.)

—“Do Brian Williams’s Lies Matter?”, John Hinderaker, Power Line.