Twitter Is Having a Ball With #BrianWilliamsMisremembers by Andrew Desiderio | 3:38 pm, February 8th, 201538 Twitter users are having some fun with the #BrianWilliamsMisremembers hashtag. Here are just a few examples:
Gelzinis: Brian Williams' snub of vets no laughing matter Back in the fall of 2006, long before Brian Williams confessed to “conflating” his helicopter adventures over Iraq, Neal Santangelo knew the NBC news anchor was a fraud. Santangelo, a Boston firefighter, former president of Local 718 and a proud veteran of the Navy submarine service, served on a committee that brought the Congressional Medal of Honor Society to Boston that year for its national convention. About six months before the society’s gala banquet at the Convention Center, Williams agreed to serve as master of ceremonies. But when he arrived on Saturday, Sept. 30, 2006, Williams told committee members Tom Lyons and Neal Santangelo that a “pressing engagement” back in New York prevented him from doing much more than greeting the audience of more than 1,000 guests … and leaving. As disappointed as Lyons and Santangelo were, they still arranged for a police escort to rush Williams through the tunnel to catch his plane back to NYC. After the banquet, as Santangelo, Lyons and other committee members relaxed in a lounge at the Colonnade Hotel, Neal Santangelo’s wife phoned from their room to say she knew why Brian Williams had to bail out of a Medal of Honor banquet. She was watching the chiseled face of “NBC Nightly News” ham it up with Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler in a Weekend Update sketch on “Saturday Night Live.” “I … cannot believe that you left us for this,” Neal Santangelo wrote in a letter to Williams a week after the banquet. “In an act of egotistical, blatant self-promotion, you deceived the (Medal of Honor) Recipients, declined to break bread with them and disrespected them. “You placed comedy before courage … Your conduct was irreverent, insulting, incomprehensible and shameful. You may attempt to ‘spin’ the issue to support your position, but that will do nothing but bring you further shame in my eyes.” The three-page letter Neal Santangelo wrote out of pure rage and emotion was never sent. “I didn’t want to send it off like some loose cannon,” Santangelo told me yesterday. “So, even though the local committee agreed with every word, we decided to run it past the national (Medal of Honor) society. “And what came back to us was, ‘Yes, we agree with what you’re saying, but we don’t want to burn any bridges with this guy.’ ” So, Neal Santangelo reluctantly demurred and stored the letter away in his computer. Until yesterday. Brian Williams still sits on several advisory boards of the Medal of Honor Foundation, an adjunct of the MOH society. They have declined any comment. Neal Santangelo smelled something rotten eight years ago. Nothing about Brian Williams’ “conflation” surprised him. On the contrary, it made him gleeful that what he felt in his heart and his gut about a guy who would run toward the spotlight, rather than share the genuine light of heroes, was proved to be true. “You need to apologize to America’s veterans,” Santangelo wrote to Williams back on Oct. 5, 2006, “and to the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces defending freedom around the globe. Anything less is unacceptable.” Well, it took eight years and the apology wasn’t all it should have been. But now the whole country knows what Neal Santangelo came to discover. Brian Williams is just another TV showman.
I see a way out of this imbroglio tha twill solve several problems at once. Williams clearly is finished at NBC News. The pompous asshats who run it surely cannot have rubes in Flyover country openly mocking them. But how to replace him? Luckily a solution exists. And it is one that will honor their commitment to the LGBT community. Replace Williams with another American hero, the Gold Medal winner formerly known as Bruce Jenner. He has the pompous self regard that Williams exuded, but also has shown America how vulnerable he can be. Ironically, Williams would be a great replacement for Jenner on the Kardashian chronicles. What do you think Kris?
the thing about someone will still pay for your birth control... and that last bit about reactivating... off the charts funny. imo
I saw something on drudge about a decision being reached soon. I for one have no reason to wish he be fired. He is just a new reader and "editor" on a network that really has no credibility any more anyway. Its not like he told us we could keep our doctors to get elected.