No Holds Barred with Olbermann

Keith Olbermann has been given quite a bit of leeway to pound the drum for the overtly liberal media. His most recent work is this 8 minute speech—quite erudite and extremely critical of the president—demanding an apology from George Bush.

’Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ for Sept. 11 by Keith Olbermann (MSNBC) is the full transcript (search about 75% of the way down the page). He lambastes the Bush administration—in particular Bush and Cheney—for daring to deem everyone who doesn’t kowtow before them as “soft on terror” and “appeasers”. Five years after the attack on the World Trade Center, Olberman sees the gaping hole in the ground pointing the finger of blame squarely at the administration … and no one else.

“…anyone who claims that I and others like me are soft or have forgotten the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic dilettante and at worst an idiot, whether he is a commentator or a vice president or a president. … Terrorists did not steal our newly regained sense of being American first and political 50th, nor did the democrats, nor did the media, nor did the people. The president and those around him did that.”

Incredibly, he was allowed to continue, tearing into Bush even further for the runup to the Iraq war (and implicitly the mirror-image runup to the coming attack on Iran):

“The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped in to supporting a war on the false premise it had something to do with 9/11, is ‘lying by implication.’ The impolite phrase is ‘impeachable offense.’”

So, the I-word has been spoken on network news. It’ll never happen, but it’s nice to know that journalism may need a defibrillator, but it’s not dead yet. As to the inevitable response from a White House that spins like a top, that “[Bush] is preserving our freedom”, he wonders how that can be when the same spin-machine deems any use “of that freedom [as] somehow un-American.” Olbermann closes by showing a clip from an episode of the Twilight Zone, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street., which includes this closing quote from Rod Serling:

“‘The tools of conquest,’ he said, ‘do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.’”

A fitting summation to the policies that preceded 9/11 and all that followed it. That episode is from almost 50 years ago and lashed out against an equally dark period in American history: the McCarthy years and the Red Scare. History is a wheel.