Brian Williams Defends Gunpoint Katrina Looting as Work of Desperate 'Heads of Family'

Change font size:  A |  A

Talk about your bigotry of low expectations . . .

Brian Williams has defended armed looting during Katrina as the work of heads of family providing for their own.

The NBC Nightly News anchor is in New Orleans on the second Katrina anniversary. He appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" at 7:30 A.M. EDT. Williams first passed along a predictable race-and-classed based explanation of the mismanaged relief efforts.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: That's when human life started to degrade. That's when people ran out of of bathroom facilities and started having to use the entire [Superdome]: no power, no circulating air, and worse, no information from the outside world. Somebody said "they [the victims] just weren't worth it."

A bit later, Williams offered up this defense of armed looting.

WILLIAMS: The looting we witnessed downtown, you could hear gunfire in the streets of the 25th-largest city in the United States. We keep saying human behavior degraded that week. There was a desperation that you can only get when you're the head of a family. You don't know where a meal is going to come from, you can't find bottled water. You don't know how you're going to get your family to high ground.

View video here.

Williams paints a portrait of heroic "heads of family" fighting to provide for their own. Was that the reality behind the gunfire, or was it the work of gangs taking opportunistic advantage of the chaos?