Dear Brian Williams,

You are a liar.

There. I said it. Now it's your turn.

Hmm?  Sorry, what's that?  It's easy for me to say, and hard for you?  Well, I should think so. After all, you're the one who lied, not me. Nonetheless, if you want me to consider exerting the herculean effort that would be required of me to resuscitate even a scintilla of the respect I once had for you, that is what you must do.  You must admit you are a LIAR. And this is me holding my breath, waiting for the moment when you actually do.

It wasn't too much to ask, Brian. Politicians, athletes, clergymen...they do it all the time.   Borrow a page from some of the practiced liars you've covered in your now asterisk-riddled career and just do what they did whenever they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar: hang your head, slump your shoulders, ooze contrition from every over-coifed hair on your head, look into the camera and admit you LIED. Can't do it, can you?   Yeah, I know. I saw your interview on the Today Show.  It was pathetic.  Like you.

Matt Lauer – and lord, speaking of deep-rooted inadequacies, how Matt tries! – asked you pointed questions that invited forthright answers. He encouraged you to speak plainly and came prepared with numerous workarounds should any of your answers prove evasive. But I bet even Mr. Intensity himself found his bag of quizzy tricks running dry from the slings and arrows of epic flummery you dished up. Granted, you jettisoned the 'misremembered' excuse, and there was nary a whisper of your having 'embellished' events that never actually happened, but there was not a hint of a tease that your lips were ever going to form the word “lie”, or any variation thereof, by the time that interview was over.  Every query was met with a stock, prepared litany of doublespeak pulled from your smoke-and-mirror mind, a turgid collection of memorized missives vetted better than any story you ever 'covered' in your life. Lauer spoonfed you chance after chance to clear the air, and each time when the moment arrived for you to bear your breast and be done with it all, you instead ducked into the same crock pot of rhetorical twaddle favored by the Pentagon and most of the best plagiarists I know.  You said everything but what needed to be said. Did you lie, yes or no?  No, Brian, your answer should not begin with the word “Look...”, or the phrase “You know...”.  It was a simple question befitting a simple answer, and the inclusion of one word that would salve the wound: LIE.  But you couldn't, and you didn't.  Even Lauer's perma-pained expression was inadequate to the horror of watching the waters of your ego spill over the last bulkhead to drown your integrity in a sea of self-delusion.  It was sad.  Worse than that, it was insulting.

You are – were – a newsman.  In a world where damn near every human on Earth can get custom-tailored information from a thousand thousand sources 'round the clock, you were relied upon to deliver the unvarnished Truth on a nightly basis.  Your broadcast is still one of the highest-rated half-hours of programming found anywhere on television any week of the whole year.  You were trusted to carry on the tradition of Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, and Peter Jennings, among a host of others whose shades now shake their heads at you from beyond the veil.  I almost don't have the heart to mention Tom Brokaw, your mentor, still among the living (though how he bore the news of your betrayal without dying from shame, I'll never know), who did his best to love the sinner and hate the sin, even as we couldn't ignore the quaver in his famous cadence speaking of your cowardly non-deeds.  Your job, Brian, was to shush the naysayers and the cynics and the unrepentant futurists who said the evening newscast was a relic of a bygone age.  We looked to your stoic veneer and unflappable deportment for reassurance in a world gone mad.  Every mine needs a canary.  You were ours.

Then, no thanks to you, we found out it was all bullshit.  And now you want your job back.

Now what the HELL gives you the right to think you should be allowed back?  You're not a politician (read: professional liar), Brian.  You're not a celebrity, who we'll love no matter what.  You can't tell us that Jesus forgave you (so why shouldn't the rest of us?). You were a goddamn newsman, and your one and only job in exchange for the millions you made each year was to tell the Truth.  You failed.  It comforts us not that you “blame [your] ego”. No kidding it was your ego.  You think it makes it better, finally acknowledging the elephant in the room that you were the last one to see?  That's like an arsonist blaming it on his love of warmth.  Your ego had loads of indulgences: a high-profile gig, universal respect, lucrative side jobs, a boss who catered to your every whim, and not to be repetitious but yeah, millions of dollars a year.  If your ego still raged unsated despite all that, you either have a personality disorder or fundamentally warped idea of how the universe works.  (But it definitely isn't a brain tumor).  Either way, it's not something that befits a newsman, and now your treachery has hastened the Waterloo of real news and the decay of true journalism.  When all we learn about the larger world spills from the collagen-infused lips of Kim Kardashian, we'll know it is your name we can curse.  I don't fear for you: to an overstuff ego that whores for attention and eschews context, those curses will still be like angel's song to your selective hearing.

So, since you had your one chance and proved to world that you cannot admit having lied, I offer an alternative to you, Brian.  Refuse MSNBC's perplexing and overly-generous offer and go off somewhere far away.  Lose twenty pounds; grow a scraggly, lice-infested beard, and spend your nights in a torch-lit cave pondering the difference between the Truth and a lie.  Emerge from the woods a few decades from now, haggard, reeking of pine sap and animal piss, and share with us what your years of reflection have wrought. Show us you can say the word “lie”, and use it in a simple sentence, such as “I lied about my time in Iraq”, or “I might have lied about some other stories”.  And we'll look back at you, at the shadow of the man we once took you for, and we will respond in the only way you deserve.

“Brian who?”

Sincerely,

America