As he appeared as a guest on Friday's Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN, moments after decrying Rush Limbaugh's recent "slut" comment, liberal talk radio host Montel Williams defended his infamous suggestion that Michele Bachmann should kill herself by decapitation as being unrelated to the recent Limbaugh matter.
While he was discussing his encounter with a wounded American soldier, he bizarrely brought up Limbaugh as if to suggest that the conservative host's strong words were a dishonor to the people who fight to defend the country. Williams:
I stop and think about all those guys, and they're over there looking back at us. And they're saying: You want me to die for you? You can't even communicate with each other respectfully, you can't even live up to the dream of our Constitution, "We the People," you got to call people names.
He tied in Limbaugh as he continued:
I find that the most despicable, disgusting piece of journalism I've ever seen. And, you know, I don't know if there's an apology that's great enough because I do have three daughters. And, though I may say things about people I don't like because of this political stance or that political stance, I'm never going after a person's soul. That was somebody's child. How dare you?
After host Piers Morgan asked, "You mean the Rush Limbaugh [controversy]?" Williams responded, "Yeah."
In the next segment, Morgan called out Williams's hypocrisy by bringing up his harsh words about Bachmann from September 2009, leading williams's unconvincing claim that his words were not as bad as Limbaugh's and that shining a light on his own words "is absolutely really part of the problem."
He first tried to rationalize his words by asserting that they were spoken "jokingly." Williams:
I don't know why the media decided to deflect Rush Limbaugh's comment and put something I said two and a half years ago on Air America in this context, but let's play it out. Ms. Bachmann said in some speech - and I don't have the exact words - but we should all slit our wrists and form a blood covenant. Those were her words.
And I was jokingly in the morning of my Air America show. When she said that, I played that piece, but, like I said, well, heck, if you're going to do that, just move it up about a foot and a half. What, how stupid is this? Now, I didn't say how stupid it is, we're going to slit our wrists because we want to help people and be compassionate.
He continued:
Now, somehow, that's been equated to what Rush Limbaugh had to say. Which to me is absolutely really part of the problem here because the network that did that is a network that doesn't understand what news is and doesn't understand how to make a report because if you can try to find an analogy between those to, I don't know where you're at.
-- Brad Wilmouth is a news analyst at the Media Research Center