Moral Equivalency Watch

Apparently Brian Williams' blow dryer has singed his common sense. That's as good an explanation as any for why the NBC anchor would have made this blockheaded statement to Andrea Mitchell the other night. In a story on the newly elected Iranian president, a man who appears to some of the Americans who were held hostage in Tehran in the late seventies to be one of their abductors, Williams said:

"What would it all matter if proven true? Someone brought up today the first several U.S. presidents were certainly revolutionaries and might have been called 'terrorists' by the British crown, after all."

Evidently, at some point in Mr. Williams' educational journey he was taught that George Washington kidnapped and held foreign diplomats against their will for over a year, had them beaten and mistreated and in fear of their lives, which were repeatedly threatened, not because they had committed any crimes against the colonies but simply because they were British. Ah, you say Washington never did that? Maybe it was Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, or Jefferson. Maybe John Adams. It must have been one of those guys because Brian Williams said so on NBC.

For sophisticates like Williams terrorism is relative. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, don't you know. The fact is that the word terrorist denotes something pretty specific in today's parlance. It refers to one who deliberately undertakes to kill large numbers of innocent civilians in order to weaken opposition to whatever goals the murderer might have in mind. At the very minimum a terrorist is a murderer.

Since the word terrorist did not exist in the 1770s, when Williams says that the British might have regarded the founders as terrorists the only meaning he can be ascribing to the word is the meaning it has today. As such, his statement makes him look like a dunce.

Williams, like so many liberals, can't seem to escape the desire to draw a moral equivalence between Americans and America's foes. In their view, if our enemies are evil they're no more so than the very best men this country has produced. Evil, after all, has no objective definition. In the Orwellian Newspeak of the times evil is in the eye of the beholder. Thus, the liberation of fifty million people is a great atrocity, terrorists who deliberately murder women and children are compared by Michael Moore to the Minutemen of colonial America, Bush is Hitler.

It's as pathetic as it is stupid.