Brian Williams leads this week's list of Winners and Sinners

Sinner: Brian Williams
Network anchors are usually careful not to advertise their personal convictions, to avoid damaging their Q ratings or their carefully nurtured images of objectivity. But Brian Williams punched a couple of large holes in his own credibility with two vacuous blog postings this week.

Last Monday, the NBC anchor began by making fun of all the soft stories in Sunday's New York Times. Then he contrasted those stories (young gay couples who love to barbecue!) with a "sparkling piece of journalism" by the magnificent Peggy Noonan, which Brian thought should put her in the running for a Pulitzer.

Here are some of the brilliant Noonan insights Brian pointed us to:

• Has Obama "ever gotten misty-eyed over ... the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter's Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There's gold in that history."

• "John McCain carries it in his bones. Mr. McCain learned it in school, in the Naval Academy, and, literally, at grandpa's knee. Mrs. Clinton learned at least its importance in her long slog through Arkansas, circa 1977–92."

• "Mr. Obama? What does he think about all that history? Which is another way of saying: What does he think of America? That's why people talk about the flag pin absent from the lapel. They wonder if it means something. Not that the presence of the pin proves love of country—any cynic can wear a pin, and many cynics do. But what about Obama and America? Who would have taught him to love it, and what did he learn was loveable, and what does he think about it all?"

• In the words of Glenn Greenwald, "How trite, inane, and McCarthyite is this dreary right-wing pablum—even for Peggy Noonan?"

• But as devoted readers of Williams' blog quickly pointed out, the bigger problem with his posting was the fact that Williams was making fun of the Times after spending the previous eight days ignoring the paper's blockbuster expose of the networks' on-air use of retired military officers. Nothing on Nightly News—and nothing in his blog—explaining the silence. The Times had revealed that practically every one of these "experts" had multiple conflicts of interest—and most of their talking points came directly from the Pentagon's propaganda machine.

NBC, CBS, and ABC have all ignored the story, presumably because it makes all of them look terrible. But after Williams' blog readers pounced, the anchor finally offered a defense for the use of these retired talking heads—an account that many of his NBC colleagues considered wholly inadequate. Williams explained that he was close friends with two of the "heavily decorated U.S. Army four-star generals"—Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey—that they had made plenty of criticisms of the war and, therefore, there was no problem. Then he added: "I can only account for the men I know best," but he was sure that "[a]t no time did our analysts, on my watch or to my knowledge, attempt to push a rosy Pentagon agenda before our viewers." That is implausible.

In any case, the anchor's explanation ignored the main point of the Times piece: that virtually all of these generals, including McCaffrey, worked for or consulted with military contractors, and the big advantage of participating in the Pentagon's propaganda program was the number of inside tips they got about new war contracts that were becoming available in Iraq.

Winner: Andy Malcolm of latimes.com, who reported that Jeremiah Wright's disastrous appearance at the National Press Club was organized by a Clinton supporter, Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, a former editorial board member of USA Today who shared the dais with Wright.

Winner: David Zucchino, for a moving feature in the Los Angeles Times on the basic training of the American infantry in Iraq. "Marines learned to rub their hands together when examining a buddy for wounds in the dark; blood is sticky. They were told to carry markers for scrawling on the foreheads of the wounded: 'T' after applying a tourniquet, and 'M' after giving morphine."

Winner: Elizabeth Edwards, for her attack on the media's strobe-light journalism—in which "the outlines are accurate enough but we really cannot see the whole picture ... Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden's health care plan? Anything at all?" she asked. "But let me guess, you know Barack Obama's bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties."

Winner: Gerard Baker expresses horror in the Times of London at the Democrats' unfailing aptitude for snatching defeat from victory: "Four fifths of the American public think the country is on the wrong track. The President wallows in the highest disapproval ratings since polling began. The Republican Party has spent most of a decade bungling almost everything it touches, abandoning its principles and sinking into a mire of corruption, hypocrisy and incompetence. And here we are, six months from a presidential election, and it is the Democrats once again who seem to be staring defeat in the face."

Winners: Two California inventors who the New York Times reports are preparing to release a system that will let motorists distill ethanol fuel in their backyards. Though their "MicroFueler" faces some regulatory and cost hurdles (the system itself costs nearly $10,000), the inventors think their new "personal" refinery will shake up fueling as dramatically as the PC shook up computing. Just in time: the Globe and Mail quoted an economist who predicted that oil prices could reach more than $200 per barrel over the next five years. The same economist predicted that our northern neighbors could be paying around $8.50 a gallon by 2013.

Sinner: John McCain, for offering this handy alternative to actual health care: "Watch your diet, walk thirty or so minutes a day, and take a few other simple precautions, and you won't have to worry about these afflictions."

Winner: Felicitous phrase maker Gail Collins: "One hitch in the Clinton argument is that Hillary still has Bill, a walking encyclopedia of political near-death experiences."

Winner: Leon Wieseltier, for the most original Passover greeting for a goy: "The ink on the Times was not yet dry when Andrew Sullivan rushed to the defense of his idol, I mean Obama. When one types all the time, sooner or later everything will be typed, and so Sullivan, in his fury against Kristol, typed this: 'A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith.' Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain paschal wrath. Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let my people be!"

Andrew replied that this was "an extremely wounding blow." Then Leon made a rare retreat: "I know as an incontrovertible fact, based on my long acquaintance with him and his writings, that [Andrew] is not an anti-Semite."

Sinner: Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for telling Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes that the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment did not apply to those lucky prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, because Scalia does not believe that "anybody ever referred to torture as punishment."

Reporter: Richard Vanderford
Seen Something? E-mail to alert me to anything you see that warrants high praise or high dudgeon.

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.