It seems that Brian Williams is a victim of his own pathology. It’s not as if anyone put a gun to his head and told him to lie about events in Iraq. But he didn’t want to be dismissed as merely an observer. He wanted to be seen as heroic.

We’d all like to be seen that way, but he was willing to lie for the glory. In fact, he was so desperate that as a member of his town’s volunteer fire department, he once claimed to have rescued a kitten from a burning building. Another time, he mentioned saving two kittens.

Unfortunately, lies are commonplace these days and there is little if any shame in being caught in the act. If Obama doesn’t tell 10 or 12 whoppers a day, he gets Josh Earnest, Jen Psaki or John Kerry, to go out and tell them on his behalf.

It’s hard to blame Williams, though. After all, when Walter Cronkite told lies about the Vietnam War, he was lionized. When Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein inflated the sins of Watergate, they made millions off book sales and got to see Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman bring them to life on the screen.

Compared to that, lying about seeing a body floating past his New Orleans hotel window in 2005 is small potatoes. Besides, if you recall, at the time the entire media universe was telling lies about Hurricane Katrina. The biggest lie was that somehow the fault was entirely George W. Bush’s. It surely wasn’t with the environmentalists who had prevented the Army Corps of Engineers from working on the levees. It wasn’t with Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco or New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin or with the thousands of New Orleans residents who didn’t bother removing themselves from the flood area. It wasn’t even blamed on Mother Nature. No, according to the liberal media, it was Bush’s fault for not swooping in and either reversing the flood or flying everyone out on his back!

Another little known aspect to the Brian Williams saga is that he is a frustrated comedian who let the NBC brass know back when the job was still up for grabs that he wished to be Jay Leno’s replacement.

At least now, thanks to all those doctored pictures of Williams showing him to be a real life Zelig standing next to Abe Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur and Neil Armstrong on the moon, he has inadvertently made millions of people laugh.

People are wondering what Williams will do if NBC decides he has lost so much credibility that he can’t be returned to his seat at the anchor desk. I would suggest that he buy a nightclub in NYC, the way Rodney Dangerfield did. Every night, Williams could perform stand-up at Brian’s Comedy Club and complain, like the legendary Dangerfield: “I get no respect.”

Islamists like to claim that modern-day terrorism is a payback for the Crusades of the 12th century. Unfortunately, that narrative breaks down when you realize that their two major targets – the U.S. and Israel – (aka Big and Little Satan) didn’t take part in the Crusades, perhaps because neither existed in the 12th century.

Besides, if there is anyone on speaking terms with Satan, it is clearly those committing atrocities around the world and calling themselves al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban.

If the West wasn’t as squeamish as a troop of Brownies, they would have taken up arms years ago when Iran first took hostages, and driven the Islamic degenerates from the landscape. You’d have thought that the world would have learned something from World War II, which could have been avoided if only the West hadn’t been so worried about what Hitler might do if confronted. Instead, they tried to make nice until he was well on his way to conquering all of Europe and leaving roughly 60 million corpses in his wake.

Whether one is discussing German Nazis, Islamic Nazis or cancer, you either eradicate it at the first sign or you wind up fighting it only after it has gained the upper hand.

In the wake of a young woman’s unfortunate murder by ISIS, it might seem unnecessarily callous to point out that Kayla Mueller wasn’t exactly a combination of Mother Teresa, Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary, the way she’s been depicted.

This is the sort of thing Al Gore would label an inconvenient truth, but Ms. Mueller may have gone to the Middle East in order to be a Good Samaritan, but as historian Ron Radosh has pointed out, she became a “useful idiot” working on behalf of Hamas.

She fell hook, line and sinker, for the lies of the terrorists, possibly influenced by her Syrian boyfriend. She not only took part in Palestinian demonstrations, but was a propagandist for Hamas, portraying them as freedom fighters. For doing nothing more than attempting to defend itself against the constant missile barrages targeting its civilian population, Ms. Mueller branded Israel a cruel and oppressive nation.

Idealism is not uncommon among the young, and it deserves to be cherished before it’s eventually corroded by reality. But idealism rooted in lies is indefensible. As we’ve seen in our own country, even after all the facts came out about Stalin’s atrocities and his legion of spies, there were still those who thought Stalin was a saint, that Julius Rosenberg was framed and that Alger Hiss was an honest man victimized by Republican witch hunters.

Unfortunately, thanks to ISIS, we’ll never know if Ms. Mueller would eventually have grown up, wised up and accepted the truth about those villains she mistook for heroes.

Finally, I would like to take this moment to pay my final respects to Lizabeth Scott (born Emma Matzo) who passed away on January 31, at the age of 92.

We had been friends for nearly 50 years. And although those who only knew her as Hollywood’s icy blonde icon of 1950 melodramas might be surprised, she was warm, funny, stylish and politically conservative.

Those who remember her remarkable voice will be happy to know that to the very end, she could melt the wax in your ears. Rest in peace, Emma.