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By Andrea Peyser
June 19, 2015

Brian Williams is still a liar and needs to get off our TVs

He’s still a liar.

“Matt, it is clear that afterward, when I got out of the building, when I got out of the realm, I used a double standard. Something changed. I got sloppier and I said some things that were not true,’’ Brian Williams pathetically told Matt Lauer Friday in an “I’m Back!’’ interview that aired on NBC’s “Today’’ show.

Sloppy is accidentally belching on camera, not plumb forgetting that the Chinook helicopter in which you flew in Iraq was not fired upon, or that the body you claimed you saw floating down the street in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was really your living cameraman throwing back Jell-O shots at happy hour.

The worst part of this depressing blather was that Brian Williams, liar with a capital “L,’’ flat-out refused to utter the “L’’ word.

“I told the story correctly for years before I told it incorrectly,’’ he actually said.

“I was not trying to mislead people. That, to me, is a huge difference here.’’

He said he was powerless over his ego. Seriously.

But the nadir of this scary program, an insult to children and every viewer with an operating sense of honesty and morality, came when Williams would not admit that he deliberately made stuff up.

Lauer asked Williams if “you knew that you were telling a story that was not true?’’

“No,’’ Williams replied.

What?!

“It came from a bad place,’’ he said. (Where? Mars?)

At times, Williams sounded as if he did not believe that he’d done anything wrong, but rather that something wicked was done to him by an unknown force.

“I told stories that were not true over the years,” he said. “Looking back, it is very clear I never intended to. It got mixed up. It got turned around in my mind.’’

Now that he’s headed to a demotion as a breaking-news and special-reports anchorman on cable-TV network MSNBC, I worry about his sanity.

Can Brian Williams tell fact from fiction? And are we to accept that he can’t admit that he lied in our faces while cashing his monstrous paychecks?

“I got it wrong,’’ he said. “I own this and I own up to this.

“I’m sorry for what happened here’’— note that he did not say he’s sorry for what he said, but for “what happened here.’’

“I am different as a result and I expect to be held to a different standard.’’

Williams hasn’t changed, and he never will.

He’s got to go.