More Fun with Bill

“Bill O’Reilly was caught in a lie. No, not that one. Or that one. Or the whole sexual harassment loofah thing. This is not really news. Brian Williams being a fabulist was a little more surprising, but not really. Network and cable news are pretty much infotainment anchored by narcissists.”

―Brain McFadden

It is unfortunate, as Brain McFadden notes, that “there’s been no comeuppance for the liars that got us into the Iraq War”, an aspect of these weird chapters of the American press that seems strangely lost on all the right people. Wrong people. Right people. Whatever. What more and more seems like the inevitable fall of Brian Williams has its tragic aspects. That there really isn’t much for comeuppance in Bill O’Reilly’s case is hardly unexpected. But it makes for great comedy vérité.

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McFadden, Brian. “America at War: with Bill O’Reilly”. Daily Kos. 6 March 2015.

A Jump in the Water, Come on Baby Get Wet With Me

Perhaps it is a bit early in the day to be diving into the comics page, but we might as well pick up where we left off yesterday. Well, okay. Sort of. You know what I mean.

Mark Fiore animates the “Frog of War”, who in turn reminds that NBC News’ Brian Williams is hardly the only person to have lied about what went on in Iraq during the Bush Wars. The cartoonist himself reminds:

Sure, it boggles my mind how Brian Williams could embellish and “misremember” an event like his helicopter ride in Iraq years ago, but the firestorm around his imagined combat experience is inordinately fierce compared to the relative silence around all of the other Iraq War-era ‘misrememberings’, journalistic and otherwise.

Remember the networks’ “military analysts” who were part of a coordinated Pentagon propaganda campaign to sell the war, who personally profited from defense contracts at the same time? I don’t remember any higher-ups in the media or the military getting fired or suspended because of that shameful episode.