Olbermann does it again!
The full text of tonight's special comment is here. But these are some choice bits:
These lies are nothing new, of course. Being a bleeding heart liberal/progressive, East Coast-dwelling city girl, I've been hearing for years that I'm part of a great left-wing "fifth column" that hates America and doesn't give a shit about its security. Even though I live in New York City, and my state's senior senator has been screaming for years about the lack of adequate funding for port security.
At the risk of sounding like a meanie, I suspect a lot of these lies have to do with certain right-wing authoritarians and their craving for money and fame. For the professional conservative pundit, 9/11 was the best thing that could've ever happened. It provided cover for their continued crusade against anyone who might be slightly to the left of Barry Goldwater. Include liberals on your list of threats to America, but weave in current events and figure out a way to equate liberals with their ideological opposites--religious extremists. (In fact, Islamic extremists have much more in common with the American right wing than with the left.)
And we now know that this attitude extends all the way to Capitol Hill. The president shares their zeal to reshape reality. Only KO won't let him get away with it.
The same questions could be asked of Bushco's followers.
The lies and fantasies have gone on long enough. If the Bush administration would like to play blame games and if their supporters would like to spout more flatulent rhetoric, then they should examine their own mistakes. Bush should admit that his present cabinet can't hack it, and fire Rice and Rumsfeld. The remaining 35 percenters should accept that they made an error and that Bush's critics were right.
No more baseless accusations that they know to be untrue. Period.
More Olbie, to sum things up:
Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, “177 of the opposition party said, ‘You know, we don’t think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.’”
The hell they did.
One hundred seventy-seven Democrats opposed the president’s seizure of another part of the Constitution.
Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn’t be listening to the conversations of terrorists.
President Bush hears what he wants.
Tuesday, at another fundraiser in California, he had said, “Democrats take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. That means America will wait until we’re attacked again before we respond.”
Mr. Bush fabricated that, too.
And evidently he has begun to fancy himself as a mind reader.
“If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party,” the president said at another fundraiser Monday in Nevada, “it sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is — wait until we’re attacked again.”
The president doesn’t just hear what he wants.
He hears things that only he can hear.
It defies belief that this president and his administration could continue to find new unexplored political gutters into which they could wallow.
Yet they do.
It is startling enough that such things could be said out loud by any president of this nation.
Rhetorically, it is about an inch short of Mr. Bush accusing Democratic leaders, Democrats, the majority of Americans who disagree with his policies of treason.
These lies are nothing new, of course. Being a bleeding heart liberal/progressive, East Coast-dwelling city girl, I've been hearing for years that I'm part of a great left-wing "fifth column" that hates America and doesn't give a shit about its security. Even though I live in New York City, and my state's senior senator has been screaming for years about the lack of adequate funding for port security.
At the risk of sounding like a meanie, I suspect a lot of these lies have to do with certain right-wing authoritarians and their craving for money and fame. For the professional conservative pundit, 9/11 was the best thing that could've ever happened. It provided cover for their continued crusade against anyone who might be slightly to the left of Barry Goldwater. Include liberals on your list of threats to America, but weave in current events and figure out a way to equate liberals with their ideological opposites--religious extremists. (In fact, Islamic extremists have much more in common with the American right wing than with the left.)
And we now know that this attitude extends all the way to Capitol Hill. The president shares their zeal to reshape reality. Only KO won't let him get away with it.
No Democrat, sir, has ever said anything approaching the suggestion that the best means of self-defense is to “wait until we’re attacked again.”
No critic, no commentator, no reluctant Republican in the Senate has ever said anything that any responsible person could even have exaggerated into the slander you spoke in Nevada on Monday night, nor the slander you spoke in California on Tuesday, nor the slander you spoke in Arizona on Wednesday ... nor whatever is next.
You have dishonored your party, sir; you have dishonored your supporters; you have dishonored yourself.
But tonight the stark question we must face is — why?
Why has the ferocity of your venom against the Democrats now exceeded the ferocity of your venom against the terrorists?
Why have you chosen to go down in history as the president who made things up?
The same questions could be asked of Bushco's followers.
The lies and fantasies have gone on long enough. If the Bush administration would like to play blame games and if their supporters would like to spout more flatulent rhetoric, then they should examine their own mistakes. Bush should admit that his present cabinet can't hack it, and fire Rice and Rumsfeld. The remaining 35 percenters should accept that they made an error and that Bush's critics were right.
No more baseless accusations that they know to be untrue. Period.
More Olbie, to sum things up:
They are never wrong, and they never regret -- admirable in a French torch singer, cataclysmic in an American leader.
Thus, the sickening attempt to blame the Foley scandal on the negligence of others or “the Clinton era”—even though the Foley scandal began before the Lewinsky scandal.
Thus, last month’s enraged attacks on this administration’s predecessors, about Osama bin Laden—a projection of their own negligence in the immediate months before 9/11.
Thus, the terrifying attempt to hamstring the fundament of our freedom—the Constitution—a triumph for al Qaida, for which the terrorists could not hope to achieve with a hundred 9/11’s.
And thus, worst of all perhaps, these newest lies by President Bush about Democrats choosing to await another attack and not listen to the conversations of terrorists.
It is the terror and the guilt within your own heart, Mr. Bush, that you redirect at others who simply wish for you to temper your certainty with counsel.
It is the failure and the incompetence within your own memory, Mr. Bush, that leads you to demonize those who might merely quote to you the pleadings of Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
It is not the Democrats whose inaction in the face of the enemy you fear, Sir.
It is your own—before 9/11 - and (and you alone know this), perhaps afterwards.
Mr. President, these new lies go to the heart of what it is that you truly wish to preserve.
It is not our freedom, nor our country—your actions against the Constitution give irrefutable proof of that.
You want to preserve a political party’s power. And obviously you’ll sell this country out, to do it.
These are lies about the Democrats -- piled atop lies about Iraq -- which were piled atop lies about your preparations for al Qaida.
To you, perhaps, they feel like the weight of a million centuries -- as crushing, as immovable.
They are not.
If you add more lies to them, you cannot free yourself, and us, from them.
But if you stop -- if you stop fabricating quotes, and building straw-men, and inspiring those around you to do the same -- you may yet liberate yourself and this nation.
Please, sir, do not throw this country’s principles away because your lies have made it such that you can no longer differentiate between the terrorists and the critics.
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