The unforgiving minute: In fairness to Mr. Williams

While he did tell what Huckleberry Finn called "a stretcher" regarding his time in Iraq in 2003, Brian Williams was a piker compared to the top eight members of the Bush Administration during the same time.

One wonders if any of them -- Dubya, Cheney, Condi, Rummy, or the rest -- considered taking themselves off the air for a few days.

One doubts it. One doubts it very seriously.

Williams only egged on, and surfed on, their crimes. He's a sad case -- albeit a sad case with magnificent hair -- but he's not the one who belongs in a cell in The Hague.

A quantum of umbrage: Mistakes

This has got to be the lamest excuse for telling a self-aggrandizing lie that I've ever heard.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted Wednesday he was not aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a false claim that has been repeated by the network for years.

Williams repeated the claim Friday during NBC’s coverage of a public tribute at a New York Rangers hockey game for a retired soldier that had provided ground security for the grounded helicopters, a game to which Williams accompanied him. In an interview with Stars and Stripes, he said he had misremembered the events and was sorry.

The admission came after crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes that the NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire. Williams arrived in the area about an hour later on another helicopter after the other three had made an emergency landing, the crew members said.

“I would not have chosen to make this mistake,” Williams said. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.”

He calls his choice a mere "mistake"? A mistake in which he "conflated" two aircraft - the one he wasn't on (that got shot down) and the one he was on (that didn't)? That's quite a slip-up, there, Sparky.

On the other hand, Williams can at least claim that his wasn't the worst, most shameful, indeed most despicable lie about Iraq told to the American public in 2003 by a famous person who left it out there and never paid a price for doing so. So there's that.

A quantum of umbrage: Colin Powell's unhappy? Who will that inconvenience?

So the former general and Secretary of State has unburdened himself of his feelings about North Carolina's SCOTUS-approved headlong rush back into the era of Jim Crow:

Moments after Gov. Pat McCrory left the stage, former Secretary of State Colin Powell took aim at North Carolina's new voting law Thursday, saying it hurts the Republican Party, punishes minority voters and makes it more difficult for everyone to vote.

"I want to see policies that encourage every American to vote, not make it more difficult to vote," said Powell, a Republican, at the CEO Forum in Raleigh.

"It immediately turns off a voting block the Republican Party needs," Powell continued. "These kinds of actions do not build on the base. It just turns people away."

The retired general served as the keynote speaker at the event and made his remarks moments after McCrory finished his remarks. His comments represent the most high-profile criticism of the Republican-crafted law that requires voters to show photo identification at the polls, cuts early voting days and makes it harder for students to vote.

Here's a list of reasons this doesn't matter, despite the fact that many commentators are making it sound like Powell went all Thunderdome on McCrory and the rest of his demented tribe:

First, it certainly doesn't matter to the NC legislators and governor.  "Punishing minority voters" and “turning people away” is the entire point of the exercise.

Come to that, Powell is exactly the sort of voter – if you know what I mean – that the NC laws were designed to disenfranchise anyway. His dismay and anger are their personal triumph.

Second, it doesn't matter to their base because Powell is part of the old Republican establishment, which the base now loathes, and he was part of the Bush II administration, which the base now pretends never happened.

Third, objecting to McCrory's claim that NC's new vote suppression laws are actually aimed at curbing voter fraud, Powell said this:

"You can say what you like, but there is no voter fraud," Powell said. "How can it be widespread and undetected?"

And there – right there – is why the rest of America doesn't care, either. Too many of us remember that presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003, when Powell insisted that Saddam's regime had an active WMD program – which, although he claimed it to be widespread, remains undetected to this day. Powell later called that speech a "blot" on his record, but he was wrong: That is his record. Karma's a bitch.

Even if he's on the right side of history – as he happens to be in this instance – he has pretty much no moral or political authority left to buttress his case. He has only his celebrity, and good luck with that. Perhaps he rues the day he ever met the Bush family, as well he might, but that's where things stand.

Rudy, Colin, and Laura get motivated!

The traveling financial and faith-healing tent show that is the Get Motivated! seminar will soon return to Portland, according to a billboard I saw downtown this week. Headliners include Rudy Giuliani and Colin Powell, both veterans of the tour, and relative newcomer Laura Bush.

A former mayor and former presidential candidate, a former First Lady, and a formerly respected Republican -- quite a slate.

You can read about my adventure at one of these events a few years ago here.

You can also get a sense of the chunk of change -- and it's considerable -- that these luminaries are going to pull in for an hour's worth of work here.

Nice work if you can get it, Mr. Mayor

In October of 2006, Rudy Giuliani came through Portland as the featured speaker on the "Get Motivated" Tour day-long event at the Memorial Coliseum. (And while he was in town he made an appearance at a Ron Saxon fundraiser.)

I had attended one of these a couple of years earlier and somewhat sheepishly recounted the story here. The closer you examined the selection process that bought our particular audience to the Coliseum that day, the less flattering it became: Far from being the "movers and shakers of Portland" that the emcee assured us that we were, I'm afraid it appeared that we were the 5,000 people that Portland managers felt they could most easily spare for the day.

It was a mixture of get-rich quick and old-time religion: Secrets to Success in Business and Life, and Beating the Stock Market with your PC. Suffice it to say that the "come to Jesus" moment in the all-day event was in the literal sense a "come to Jesus" moment. Buried in the fine print on the full-page ads in the Oregonian for weeks leading up to the event was this:

"SPECIAL BONUS: One of the most popular parts of The GET MOTIVATED Seminar is a special optional 15 minute bonus session on the Biblical Secrets of success."

Rudy--"America's Mayor," the maraschino cherry atop this Jesus and Compound Interest sundae--made his rock-star entrance to cheering fans, falling balloons, and Sinatra singing "New York, New York."

Now it appears that Rudy--and Colin Powell, and Steve Forbes--are back out on the "Get Motivated" circuit again.

And why not hit the circuit again? Certainly, those are three people whose opinions the Republican Party--or anyone else for that matter--has little interest in hearing about these days.

And it's a pretty sweet deal. Guilani had the stage for less than an hour the whole day. (I'm assuming that Rudy, Colin, and Steve will alternate tour dates rather than risk a scene by appearing on the stage together.) And for that, according to the May 2007 public financial disclosure report for his presidential campaign, Rudy netted $80 thousand per appearance. (The speaker's bureau that promoted him pocketed an additional $20K per appearance.)

(Click image to enlarge.)

In 2006-2007, Giuliani earned $9.2 million in speaking fees (not consulting--just speaking), of which about $2 million came from the "Get Motivated" organization. Eighty thousand for an hour's work, once or twice a month, is nothing to sneeze at. And improbable as it might seem, his fees are probably higher in 2009.

That probably softens the blow for all three men of being cast out of the Sunday morning talk show circuit.

The unforgiving minute

Three quotes concerning Powell's Obama endorsement:

[Regarding McCain's choice of the unqualified Palin and the McCain-Palin campaign's use of falsehoods to attack Obama personally] "I look at these kind of approaches to the campaign, and they trouble me. […] Over the last seven weeks, the approach of the Republican Party has become narrower and narrower."

-- Former Sec. of State Colin Powell
on "Meet the Press" this morning

Taking part in the collective lie about how the Republican party operates has always been part of Powell's schtick, and the fact that he's jumping off that ship right now doesn't really elevate him in my estimation.

-- Jane Hamsher, Firedoglake

The function of liberal Republicans is to shoot the wounded after the battle.

-- attributed to Eugene McCarthy

Minute's up.

Best line of 2006

John at Americablog looks over the sad wreckage of a once-admired man's reputation and gives it to us in one sentence:

Powell is now feeling brave enough to tell us what we already know.

See more of Colin Powell in [in]acton, here and here.