Gunga Brian

Nobody ever called me Mary Poppins, and certainly my first reaction to the Brian Williams gotcha! was a hearty guffaw. But now that everyone is piling on, I'm beginning to feel sorry for the man. It was pretty small beer, compared to the outsized lies and posturing we get from our media and political celebrities on a regular basis.

(Think of "Gunga Dan" Rather in Afghanistan, and his "faked but true" documents purporting to show Dubya shirked his Air National Guard service; think of John Kerry magnifying his Swift Boat heroics in Vietnam; even think of Hillary claiming to have deplaned under sniper fire in Bosnia, though that was a whole lot more understandable than Williams's shoot-down; think about Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis, telling his students he was a platoon leader in Vietnam when he'd never been closer than West Point; think of the WW2 historian, Stephen Ambrose, plagiarizing material from another book about B-24 raids over Germany.)