"I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled!"

MSNBC's Brian Williams on Biden's speech: "He didn’t run from it, he owned it. He owned this decision. He owned the fact that, as he put it, the buck stops with him."

Afghan vet @mattczeller: "I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled!" pic.twitter.com/AMSulYnNrp

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 16, 2021

Presidential historian Jon Meacham was speechwriting for Joe Biden and (apparently) did not disclose it to MSNBC.

And MSNBC has cut him off as a paid contributor, according to Fox News. 

Meacham worked on Biden's victory speech and then appeared on MSNBC commenting on the speech. MSNBC's Brian Williams asked him, "I’m not the historian that you are, and I don’t have the Pulitzer that you do, but do you concur that is the way we are used to hearing from our presidents?" To which Meacham responded, "Absolutely."

The implication of the question — as I see it there, out of context — is that Trump didn't speak in the conventional presidential way, and Biden restores the appropriate tone for the presidency. It's pretty awful to go on TV and comment on a speech that you wrote as if you were just hearing it.

Here's the NYT article from yesterday that made the disclosure of Meacham's speechwriting role: "Helping to Shape the Words of the President-Elect: A Presidential Historian/Jon Meacham, best known for writing about past presidents like Andrew Jackson and George Bush, has helped shape some of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s most significant speeches."

In [his victory speech], Mr. Biden spoke of a mission “to rebuild the soul of America, to rebuild the backbone of this nation, the middle class, and to make America respected around the world again” and was widely credited with striking the right tone about bringing the country back together. The language echoed the title of Mr. Meacham’s 2018 book, “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,” which has long served as a touchstone for Mr. Biden, who has reached out to Mr. Meacham in the past to discuss passages he liked....

It's very nice for Biden to read a book about America's soul and to want to get some of that high-flown rhetoric into his speeches, but the aspiration toward loftiness is shot to hell if Meacham goes on TV to admire what he's not telling us is his own work!

If executive heads don't roll, the network should keep Williams and let its viewers enjoy the embellished, punched-up, personalized version of the news.

"Brian Williams Might Have Also Lied About Navy SEALs, the Pope, and the Berlin Wall."

"We have some idea which of our special operations teams carried this out," Williams told David Letterman shortly after bin Laden was killed. "It happens to be a team I flew into Baghdad with, on the condition that I would never speak of what I saw on the aircraft, what aircraft we were on, what we were carrying, or who we were after."

In another telling, Williams said that he had been "told not to make any eye contact with them or initiate any conversation" with the SEALS. But, he said, that didn't stop him from befriending the men. According to Williams, he got into a conversation with one of the elite soldiers about the knife he was carrying. "Darned if that knife didn’t show up at my office a couple weeks later," Williams said. He also claimed that, nearly a decade after this supposed embed, a member of SEAL Team 6 sent him a souvenir from the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. "I got a white envelope and in it was a thank-you note, unsigned," Williams said during another Late Show appearance. "And in it was a piece of the fuselage of the blown-up Black Hawk in that courtyard. Sent to me by one of my friends."

Why are we only noticing the improbability of these tall tales now? It was out there in plain view all along. I mean, I wasn't viewing it. I didn't watch him on Letterman, but apparently this is Williams's style and why the network promoted him.

It's not enough for Williams to be fired. In fact, it's beside the point. If executive heads don't roll, the network should keep Williams and let its viewers enjoy the embellished, punched-up, personalized version of the news.

It's the NBC brand. Be out and proud!

The 4 a.m. screen shot puts everything into proportion.

Here's the Phys.org article that went up on Memeorandum at 5:55 ET on Tuesday morning, where it got my attention 5 45 minutes later as I checked my iPhone for the news before I got out of bed. I captured the screen shot and imagined that would make a good blog post. Is our world about to get shaken up? Will presidential candidates be asked if they are comfortable with a universe that's been around forever?

But the first blog post on Tuesday didn't go up until 7:56, and it was about a WaPo columnist's abstruse effort to support his assertion that it's "'trivial to compare' Roy Moore's trying to stop gay marriage in Alabama to George Wallace's blocking the door to racial integration at the University of Alabama." (The columnist thought what Roy Moore was doing is a much bigger deal.)

I'm seeing the old screen shot at 6 a.m. this morning because I plugged my iPhone into my computer just now. I'm remembering what I didn't blog on Tuesday and remembering what I saw on my iPhone this morning as I scanned the latest news from my supine position under the comforter. David Carr has died! He was only 58. He collapsed in the newsroom at the New York Times. Will I blog about his death when I did not blog the death of Bob Simon, reported on Memeorandum at 12:25 a.m. on February 10, whence it was read out loud from across the room by my husband Meade, causing me to ask: "Who's Bob Simon?"?

I had to be told he's one of the "60 Minutes" people. I don't watch "60 Minutes," but I do read the NYT, and I've read and enjoyed David Carr many times. Here's his 2008 article about his life as a crackhead:

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs — you need, actually — to keep them at a remove. Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices. Beyond impairment, there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict. Recovered or not, I am someone who used my mouth to constantly create one more opportunity to get high.

Here is what I deserved: hepatitis C, federal prison time, H.I.V., a cold park bench, an early, addled death.

Here is what I got: the smart, pretty wife, the three lovely children, the job that impresses.

That's a journalist reporting on the mind of an addict: an addict spreads around versions on the truth depending on what you think anyone listening to you seems to need. And isn't that what we've come to feel the journalists seem to be doing? [Insert reference to Brian Williams.] And isn't that what we expect the politicians to do, for example, when they are asked, as Scott Walker was the other day, about whether they are comfortable with evolution?

At the Facebook post where we have a long thread about Scott Walker's response — saying he needed to "punt" on that question and that it's not the sort of thing politicians should have to talk about —Annie Gottlieb says:

Why do we say we "believe in" evolution? That gives away the fact that "science" is our modern religion, the thing we look to for an explanation of our existence and a hope of defeating death. (The third thing religion supplies, meaning, science is not so good at, although it does somewhat justify social Darwinism if that's your cup of tea.) What's funny about it is that science itself, without the scare quotes, is exposing the fact that we don't yet understand evolution very well at all.

And I say:

Yes, this is something I notice all the time. And people are pressured to believe because of the prevalence of believers -- their domination in positions of authority -- and not because we understand and see the reasoning of the science. So it's not just like religion. It's like authoritarian religion. By the way, some physicists are casting doubt on the Big Bang theory. Will they move into the position of authority at some point? Why does it even matter whether we agree or not? We can't check their work. We can't have an independent position. We're just called upon to be sheep for the Good Shepherd. Might as well go with Jesus. He's pretty good.

Is it ridiculous to think that Brian Williams "'conflated' the helicopter he rode in 12 years ago with a different helicopter he saw and reported about that day"?

You wouldn't think so if you have an informed and nuanced understanding of the human the human mind, says Bob Wright in The New Republic.

Kenneth Norman, a psychologist at Princeton, studies how memories get distorted via “interactions between medial temporal structures and [the] prefrontal cortex.”... Norman likes to tell students about the time he was recounting to a friend something that had happened to him when he realized that it actually hadn’t happened to him. How did he know? Because it had happened to the friend he was talking to.... The memory Norman had appropriated was of seeing a famous actor in a particular restaurant. It was a restaurant he had actually been in, and the actor was someone he had seen—just not in person. So the key visual elements for the false memory were in place, ready for a little dramatic tweaking....

[Brian Williams] knew there were other witnesses to the original story. And, since he’s not stupid, that probably means his fabrications weren’t conscious and intentional, but, rather, were an illustration of human memory working as human memory often works. 

Why would human brains be so fallible? The best guess is that, from the point of view of the brain’s creator, natural selection, unreliable memory is a feature, not a bug....