Maybe it’s because Brian Williams constantly has a smug, pseudo-intellectual look on his face, but his most recent confession of journalistic wrongdoing filled me with quite a bit of mirth. Apparently that story that he and NBC have been peddling, about Brian Williams being shot down by an RPG while reporting from Iraq in 2003, is entirely false. Yep. Wrong helicopter:

However, crew members told Stars and Stripes that Williams and his team were in a different helicopter, about an hour behind the three Chinook helicopters that came under fire that day.

Williams told the newspaper that he had made an inadvertent error.

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

“I spent much of the weekend thinking I’d gone crazy,” he added. “I feel terrible about making this mistake.”

Mistake? How is this a mistake? And Brian Williams wouldn’t have chosen to make this mistake? I’m sure he feels that way now. I’m sure he wishes he had made a different mistake right about now. Maybe one that couldn’t be contradicted by numerous eye-witnesses?

Anyway, how do you “inadvertently” believe that you were on a helicopter that was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade? Oops, sorry. Totally spaced that one out. I actually wasn’t shot out of the air by a rocket.

So Brian Williams has apologized for his “mistake.” But it doesn’t go nearly far enough in my mind. Because one does not just accidentally fabricate a story like this, and repeat it over and over for years. This is a lie. A mendacious, bald-faced, through your teeth, pants on fire, lie.

Why do so many left-leaning “journalists” get away with this? And would Brian Williams have ever even fessed up if his memory had not been jogged by, you know, the truth? Probably not. He would have kept riding around with his faux scholar look fibbing his fictions and disseminating his dissimulations. And no one would have been the wiser. Literally.