So if there is no reason to keep piling on, why does it continue? Its so not necessary.
I guess, people still have things to say on the topic. It’s quite a big deal.
Personally, I find it fascinating but that doesn’t have much to do with BW who I’ve seen more of in the past week than ever before since I never watched the nightly news. However, if there is anyone to feel sorry for here it is the new news division president Deborah Turness who initially had to fix the Ann Curry Today Show debacle and has her hands full with the mess that is MSNBC. Nightly News was the only thing working. Or, not.
Miller514’s post was spot on.
Oh, don’t we know by now that the great Senator only took the initiative in creating the Internet after inspiring Love Story with his cherished Tipper? By the time, Fat Al pushed his legislation, the Arpanet-Internet was well beyond the initiative level. An inconvenient truth.
As far as Williams, he is responsible for his own destruction. Nobody else.
What’s odd about this post, xiggi, is that you start by giving a really good example of somebody who wasn’t responsible for his own destruction–citing examples unfairly used against him–and then stating that Williams is responsible for his own destruction. Well, maybe he is, but the linkage of his situation to Gore suggests a political motivation–or at least politically-motivated glee–in the downfall of a member of the liberal media.
I offered a sequitur to Jym’s post about Gore. To be clear, I must have missed the mark as I believe that it was he denials of Al Gore intent that was the politically motivated part. The plays on semantics have been ridiculous as I remain convinced that Al clearly wanted to take credit for his “initiative” and attempted to exaggerate the impact of his political contribution. The Internet would have been NO different today with or without that hopeless windbag. It just happened that one investment of the government did not find its usual wasteful destination. A blind hog story at best. Something akin the pre-K gym lady claiming credit for Tom Brady SB.
Both him and Williams share a parallel; the ridicule caused by embellishments and poor choices of words from people who really should not better. Their gaffes were no accidents, but the result of having been repeated over and over.
People who happen to have sympathy for such characters will go the extra mile to defend their actions and dismiss the original INTENT of the liars and perennial embellishers. Others are not that charitable.
How BW got linked to AG in this discussion I don’t really know. But politicians lying and engaging in sleazy behavior is to be expected, unfortunately. And, we have been told their personal lives don’t matter, so fine. In the case of Gore I personally think the sleaze did him in more so than the silly misremembering of his importance and the Love Story story was a hoot. BW’'s problem is that his tall tales were linked to his work. Separating lying on talk shows about news stories you are covering on the nightly broadcast is a very fine line. Probably, too fine and there was ultimately spillover.
^^^ and this perhaps because we had Cronkite before Dan Rather.
dadx is the one who first brought Al Gore into this discussion (post 217) with the oft-repeated, incorrect assertion that Gore claimed to have established the internet. But read below (and the Isaacson quote in a previous post):
Well, I was in the room for a live closed-circuit broadcast from the VP Office in circa 1998 when during a speech Gore said he helped invent the internet.
Hmm… the wording – created? Invented? established? Opened up? http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/11/04/a-cautionary-tale-for-politicians-al-gore-and-the-invention-of-the-internet
Ah, Walter Cronkite. Used to see him all the time in Edgartown. Wearing his Edgartown Red pants to The Kafe. He reminded me of a walrus. My dad used to say to the TV, “That’s not the way it is, Walter” and I’d dare him to say that to his face but he never did.
it should not be surprising that many talking heads are giving off the sympathetic vibe to circle the wagons for one of their own.
“If I’ve lost Bryan Williams, I’ve lost the country.”
Can’t imagine any thinking person muttering this, much less our president. There’s enough grunts out there doing the same work, though they might not be a pretty or plausible.
Whatever the connotational promiscuity of ‘created’ & ‘invented’, Gore should have stuck to claiming credit for the one thing he did have a hand in getting off the ground - Global Warming.
What a continuous pile of crap!
Why is it necessary to go in endless circles of deceit. The full excerpts of what Gore DID say in an answer to Blitzer is beyond any doubt. Safe and except for the people who DID benefit from the wasteful ways of the government and like to repaint the history of their “friends” and pretend the stories unfolded differently. I am not sure what differences it make between saying "I invented today’s internet and “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” Middle school kids would understand those words mean the same thing!
Add the fact that this was an obviously loaded questions (which was probably leaked to Gore’s staff by the overly friendly Blitzer" you can only conclude that Gore simply repeated what he really considered to be true, namely having been a driving force for the unveiling and “explosion” of the internet. That is what the terms “taking the initiative in creating something means.”
A person of his background in DC and education surely possessed an ample dictionary to reflect terms such as “I contributed to” or “I offered my support” but nope … that is NOT what the windbag expressed.
The fact remains that Gore has repeated the same behavior many times. From pretending to have been a force of change for environmental causes during his reign as VPOTUS to delivering the “inconvenient truth.” The sad reality is very different. During the Gore years, the US renewable industry never had it WORSE as Gore was busy building his “lockbox.” During the same years, the ED as in terms of education suffered from stagnant funding. Check the statistics!
Never stopped him to claim in his rehearsed speech that “I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”
Thank God for hanging chads!
Call it what you may (though its not very hospitable) but I listened to Isaacson speak about it (well yes, when he was hawking his book) and I am comfortable with his description. His book is not fiction. Looks like this is becoming a political thread, and sayonara thread. Can we please not go there?
Do we need Isaacson to decipher the meaning of simple words?
I don’t know why the Al Gore discussion is so compelling to some of you (I think he’s an irrelevant gasbag) but here’s some reasonably new information that I’m pleased to see:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/nbc-nightly-news-maintains-ratings-774743
I would have no problem with Lester Holt continuing to do the anchoring on this program and have never seen the need to speculate about Williams’ successor. I’m happy to see that he hasn’t lost any viewers and hope that they keep him in the chair.
I must admit I’m somewhat amused by the whole BW debacle, and will not care one way or another whether he returns to the anchor desk, or is forced to seek other employment. But, I would pardon Brian Williams a million times over if even ONE big banking head or investment co. CEO were to be identified and held accountable for the 2008 economic meltdown that nearly destroyed the US economy. Talk about lying liars that lie! And to this day not one has even been arrested, much less prosecuted. Most of them still wield staggering amounts of power in the financial sector.
By contrast, who exactly did Brian Williams hurt in claiming to have come under RPG fire as a correspondent in Iraq? Did anyone lose their home or life savings? Was anyone driven to suicide by financial ruin? Integrity and accountability have been steadily eroding at all levels in this country for a very long time, such that we no longer seen capable of figuring out the proportions by which condemnation should be meted out. Does Brian Williams really deserve a worse fate than those greed-driven Wall Street titans and the politicians they still carry around in their back pockets?