Via Instapundit, Mark Steyn makes a few observations about Katie Couric's problem with the word 'we:'
Before Katie Couric's confession that "saying 'we' when referring to the United States" makes her uncomfortable fades from the news cycle, two observations:
1) You'd be hard put to find anything more institutionally uninterested in the world than TV news. "CBS World News Headquarters" is all headquarters and no world news.
2) It does help explain one of Katie's sillier comments, a few years back when the space shuttle Columbia crashed. On the Today show, she saluted the fallen crew as follows: "They were an airborne United Nations - men, women, an African-American, an Indian woman, an Israeli…."
No, they weren't an "airborne UN". They were an airborne America. For a start, if there was such a thing as a UN rocket, the Israeli guy wouldn't get anywhere near it, except on a one-way ticket to establish the viability of Ahmadinejad's new designated homeland for the Jews on Planet Zongo. I doubt even an EU space shuttle would be eager to admit any astronauts from the Zionist Entity. As for the "Indian woman", Kalpana Chawla was the American Dream writ large upon the stars: she emigrated to the US in the Eighties and was an astronaut within a decade. There's no other country on earth where you can do that. And I'll bet she had no qualms about using the dread "we" word.
When the shuttle crashed, Abu Hamza, Britain's famous firebrand imam, claimed it was God's punishment "because it carried Americans, an Israeli and a Hindu, a trinity of evil against Islam". God bless the old Islamofascist nut but at least he'd grasped the particulars of the situation, instead of just peddling witless one-worldist delusions. Perkiness doesn't make them any more attractive.
3) On the other hand, Miss Couric's reluctance to say "we" may simply reflect the fact that, given her current ratings, the plural may be a tad presumptuous.
