This is the first time I am reading that he did it at the desk.  That definitely changes things and I feel like an idiot.

Reconstructionist: "And, let's try to retain focus. Williams wasn't disciplined for lying about his speed. He publicly misrepresented events that occurred in the course of his reporting."

If you re-read what I wrote above, you'll note that I was simply playing off someone else's hypothetical, and clearly said so.

But my point was and is this: Brian Williams is a newsreader. He's not empowered to make decisions that potentially impact the lives of others in this country, whereas Paul Ryan is a ranking member of Congress who was not only the 2012 GOP candidate for vice president, but is the chairman of a very powerful and important House Committee that develops the federal budget.

And Congressman Ryan clearly fibbed about having run in multiple marathons, and further claimed that his best time was "2:50-something." The truth was that at the time he made his claim, he had run exactly one marathon in his life, and his time in that race was 4:03.

Personally, I think that completing even one marathon is an accomplishment in and of itself. But the fact that Ryan so casually misled his interviewer about something otherwise fairly banal is much more telling about him, than anything Williams is alleged to have said on his own behalf.

It's therefore probably not that much of a stretch for Ryan to then dissemble at length about the federal budget, and tell the general public that he's not cutting Social Security when an examination of his work product would clearly tell us otherwise. And that's the difference here between the two.

Look, I'm not defending what Brian Williams either did or is alleged to have done in his now-former capacity as the anchor of NBC Nightly News. That was never my intent at all.

Honestly, that guy has always epitomized to me the very definition of celebrity journalists, the sort who have a penchant for inserting themselves into their own storylines, more than likely as a means of elevating their own personal professional profile rather that serving the greater cause of journalism. (See "Cooper, Anderson.")

With these types of journalists, there's always an element of risk that at some point, they'll inadvertently become the story themselves, often at the expense of the bigger picture. And that's what seems to have happened with Williams, at least as far as I can tell.

So, while it's fine to "retain focus," let's also try to maintain some real sense of perspective here. There've been any number of people commenting about this particular story -- and about Bill O'Reilly's own dubious claims to have been a war correspondent, for that matter -- in the media and elsewhere, whose personal outrage meters are often in smoking ruins by the time they're done fulminating.

But when it comes to some public officials of influence offering similar personal embellishments or fibs, like Paul Ryan, Hillary Clinton and yes, even the late Ronald Reagan -- who, lest we forget, once told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir in November 1983 that as an officer in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the Second World War, he had personally witnessed the horrors of Nazi death camps in Europe, when in fact he had never even left his assigned post in Culver City, CA -- many of these very same pundits and critics have often just shrugged their shoulders and said, "Meh!"

It's that very sort of situational ethics which tends to bother me. As Scott noted earlier in this thread, people will embellish stories all the time for a variety of reasons -- some of them benign, some duplicitous and others apparently malevolent.

Sometimes, our own clarity of mind fades with the passage of time, and we'll recall a certain event in our lives that actually didn't quite happen the way we now seem to believe it did. Other times, people embellish for dramatic effect to impress an audience or listener, which seems to be the case with both Williams and O'Reilly. And there are those whose prevarications are offered for less than altruistic purposes, like Dick Cheney.

And what I'm noticing with increasing frequency is that critics are not really examining that person's possible reason or motive before rendering judgment, but are instead targeting the offending individual in their crosshairs on the basis of other criteria, such as personal politics.

And in William's case, his critics -- particularly those on the right -- obviously weren't seeking to enlighten the public and correct the record. Rather, they were simply looking to take the guy's scalp and have his job, in order to send some sort of message to the left or something.

Then critics on the left, looking to retaliate, proceeded to take to task Bill O'Reilly -- who tends to offer himself as a tempting target in any event -- over his claims about being in the Falkland Islands during the 1982 war between Britain and Argentina. And before we knew it, everyone's talking about the two of them like columnists in a gossip magazine, rather than perhaps reconsidering the actual stories they were covering at the time of their respective faux pas.

As I said earlier, I hardly ever watched NBC Nightly News while Brian Williams was anchor, so I'm not at all vested in his professional fate, although I certainly don't wish the man any ill will. I simply feel that since he's now served his penance as ordained by his bosses at NBC for whatever it was that he did, if the network brass are fine with him returning to work in another capacity, then so am I. Anyway, it's their money, not mine.

I can't speak for others here, but for me anyway, I think there are far more important things for me to be concerned about than the prospect of Williams anchoring "Breaking News" at MSNBC. I can only hope that in his case, he's since learned his lesson, and will henceforth resist any further personal urges to jack his own ego at the expense of the news itself.