Regarding Juan Williams

Time to get this party started.  Lots to talk about as the Republicans try their ignorant best to drag this country back to third world status. 

But first a few words about Fox commentator Juan Williams.  I used to like him a lot.  He seemed basically Liberal, which is always a good thing, but then he got mixed up with the wrong crowd: Fox news.  I’m guessing that the lure of television face time and Fox money proved too much for him and his opinions and comments began to wander.  Then came his response to the comments on the View by the odious Bill O’Reilly. 

O’Reilly, of course, said while arguing against the construction of a mosque near ground-zero that Muslims killed us on 9-11.  Which was just another idiotic comment in the long history of idiotic comments made by various Fox news personnel. 

I googled, and there are over 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, including an estimated 2.5 million in the US.  There are approximately 50 countries that have  populations that are majority Muslim, most of them our allies.  If he had said that the people that attacked us on 9-11 were Muslim, that would have been an honest statement, but honesty doesn’t come naturally to conservatives.

So, since more than 99.9% of Muslims around the world  didn’t attack us on 9-11, including the business-owners, teachers, doctors, lawyers, cab-drivers and plumbers that live in the US, it becomes important for all of us possessing basic common sense and judgment to point out the idiocy of O’Reilly and the on-going conservative effort to convince Americans that all Muslims are our enemy.

At least you’d think so until Juan Williams, on the O’Reilly show, when asked by O’Reilly if his comments on the View had been wrong, replied that, in fact, he had been right and went on to say that he gets nervous on planes when he sees people dressed like Muslims.  It may be true that Williams gets nervous on planes when he sees people dressed in “Muslim garb” as he put it, even though I would guess that potential hijackers would be more likely to be dressed just like Juan Williams, but that was not the correct way to answer that question.    

The correct way to answer the question would have been:  “Damn straight you were wrong.  The Muslim world didn’t attack us, we were attacked by a few Muslim individuals.  And this insistence by conservatives that we are at war with all the Muslims in the world is dangerous, misguided, idiotic.”

But, even though he backtracked later during his response, this wasn’t his answer and NPR fired him.  Good, he deserved it.  He is now an unrepentant and unapologetic Fox news commentator, and as such has no credibility except in conservative world, where “fair and balanced” is a lie, and honesty is considered a weakness.