Olbermann's Special Comment--GOP self-destruction imminent

Keith Olbermann gave a Special Comment on March 22nd, talking about how the Republican Party's self-destruction into obstructionism, hatred, and fear-mongering, is filtering down into their constituents. I think it is appropriate to show Olbermann's Special Comment, especially in the wake of the violence, hatred, and death that have been aimed at Democrats this week as a result of their voting for the health care bill. Here is the transcript of Olbermann's Special Comment.

Here is the video:

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Olbermann Special Comment--Dick Cheney's lies

I saw this story three days ago, but I didn't take the time to make a comment on it. Former Vice President Dick Cheney gave an interview with the Politico, where he warned that terrorists will engage in another attack on the U.S., and that the Obama administration will allow the terrorists to succeed in their attack. From the Politico.com:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration — “that’s about 11 or 12 percent” — have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”

The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher.” (Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have strongly disputed the recidivism figures, asserting that the Pentagon data have inconsistencies and omissions.) Cheney called Guantanamo a “first-class program,” and “a necessary facility” that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates' native countries.

But he said he worried that “instead of sitting down and carefully evaluating the policies,” Obama officials are unwisely following “campaign rhetoric” and preparing to release terrorism suspects or afford them legal protections granted to more conventional defendants in crime cases.

The choice, he alleged, reflects a naive mindset among the new team in Washington: “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”

Now I do not take credibility in whatever Dick Cheney says--he is like the crotchety old asshole that yells at the kids to get off his lawn [My apologies for the coarse language]. I seriously wonder whether Dick Cheney is evil, misguided, or just an angry man that has plunged into the depths of senility. Regardless of the speculation, Dick Cheney is pissed that the American voters have decided to elect a terrorist-loving Barack Obama into the White House, and he had to deliver a final, insulting, angry shot at both the Obama administration, and the American people. It was more fear-mongering coming from a man who now fears America, and its laws and freedoms. To be honest, I think the best way to respond to Cheney's rantings is simply to ignore him.

But the story came up on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. The original news story came up on Tuesday, where MSNBC's David Shuster questioned how unhinged Cheney has become after leaving office. Here is the original Countdown story:

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And last night, Keith Olbermann couldn't resist delivering his own special comment on Dick Cheney's rantings. Here is Olbermann's Special Comment:

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You can read the transcript here.

I will not go through the entire transcript of Olbermann's comment, aside from saying that Olbermann destroys much of Cheney's arguments and lies from the Politico interview. But what is really important in Olbermann's comment is that Cheney doesn't even realize that the Obama administration, and hopefully the American people, are moving away from the lies and fear-mongering that was prevalent in the Bush/Cheney administration, towards a government that has returned to ruling by laws and rational thought. From Olbermann:

"The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I'm not at all sure that that's what the Obama administration believes."

The first glimmer, in years, of sanity in any your remarks, Sir. That's not at all what the Obama administration appears to believe. It seems to be ready to use all avenues and all emotions, seeking love, respect, fear, diplomacy, shared experience, education, principle, and, yes, even rational thought. This President, unlike yours, seems intent on living in the real world rather than trying to re-shape an imaginary one, by force.

[....]

Of course, none of that mattered to Mr. Cheney, just as none of this matters to Mr. Cheney. Because, at heart, Mr. Cheney is not interested foremost in protecting this country. He is interested foremost in protecting Mr. Cheney. And the business of being Dick Cheney, of rationalizing one's own existence after one of the most reprehensible, myopic, unprincipled, and even un-American careers in the history of our government, depends on continuing to convince the gullible of us to live in abject fear and not with vigilance and common sense and principles.

We, sir, will most completely assure our security not by maintaining the endless, demoralizing, draining, life-denying blind fear and blind hatred which you so thoroughly embody. We will most easily purchase our safety by repudiating the "Bush System." We will reserve the violence for which you are so eager, Sir, for any battlefield to which we truly must take, and not for unconscionable wars which people like you goad and scare and lie us into.

You, Mr. Cheney, you terrified more Americans than did any terrorist in the last seven years, and now it is time for you to desist, or to be made to desist. With damnable words like these, Sir, you help no American, you protect no American, you serve no American — you only aid and abet those who would destroy this nation from within or without. More than 400 years ago, when a British Parliament attempted to govern after its term had expired, it was dispersed by the actions, and words, of Oliver Cromwell.

"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately," he told them — exactly as, Mr. Cheney, exactly as a nation now tells you: "Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.
"In the name of God… go!"

Let us hope that this is the last we will ever hear from Dick Cheney.

Olbermann Special Comment: McCain, suspend your campaign

This is a short, but powerful special comment by Keith Olbermann:



The transcript can be found here.

Olbermann Special Comment--McCain / Palin mudslinging attacks

On Monday, Countdown's Keith Olbermann gave a special comment, where Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin gave a stump speech in Clearwater Florida, attacking Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama for being "pals" with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers. Palin's attack on Obama incited the crowd to boo at Obama, even going as far as one anonymous person shouting out to, "kill him." Palin was silent, refusing to admonish the crowd for demanding Obama's assassination.

And there was even more hate within the Republican Party on Monday. Republican presidential candidate John McCain was speaking in Mexico on Monday, when McCain asked the audience, "who is the real Barack Obama?" An anonymous supporter replied, "A terrorist." The audience laughed, and McCain continues on, not admonishing the crowd for calling Obama a terrorist, but rather complaining at how McCain is upset at the "angry barrage of insults."

At Sarah Palin's Florida event"

[Arriving] reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

And finally, Pennsylvania Republican Party chairman Robert A. Gleason, Jr. called out Barack Obama's association with Ayers "alarming," and questions Obama's character in "that he knowingly associates with terrorists?" In short, the Pennsylvania Republican Party chairman called Obama "a terrorist's best friend."

So why am I bringing all this McCain hate up? Because it is all that McCain has left to campaign on. On Monday's Countdown fifth story, Olbermann reports the McCain strategist saying that McCain will lose, if the election is based on the economic crisis. Olbermann also provides the NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll numbers, with 59 percent of Americans saying that the economy is the most important issue in deciding the election, and Obama's national lead over McCain is at 49 percent over 43 percent. You can view Olbermann's story here:



The McCain campaign has attempted to compete in claiming that John McCain is now the candidate of change in this election, even though John McCain campaigned as a candidate of experience in the GOP primary. That strategy has failed since Obama had started his own presidential campaign as that of a change campaign, and has shown John McCain voting record to be 95 percent of the time in line with George W. Bush. The Obama campaign has linked John McCain with George W. Bush, and that a McCain presidency would be a third Bush term. But what has really sent the McCain campaign spiraling downward has been the economy. It has been the financial crisis, the steep slide of the stock market, accumulating into a $2 trillion loss in Americans' retirement savings over the past 15 months. Americans are wary of the $750 billion Wall Street bailout package, with a 55 percent majority of Americans opposed to using the government bailing out private companies with their taxpayer dollars. And even today, the International Monetary Fund is predicting that the U.S. will go into a deep recession, with a projected slowing to 1.6 percent growth this year, and a screeching halt to 0.1 percent growth for 2009. The economy is the big election news issue now. The McCain campaign cannot compete against the economic news with the stale, Bush economic policies of tax cuts for the rich and government deregulation in the face of a plummeting stock market and the wiping out of Americans' retirement savings. The only thing the McCain campaign can do is to wallow into the mud and go negative against Obama. I think the strategy here for McCain is to try to bring out the conservative vote with extreme, divisive politics, and hope that the fear mongering, Obama-is-a-terrorist, approach will peel off enough independent votes to win. I'm not sure that is going to happen, not with the deteriorating U.S. economy. But it is the only play that John McCain has, with less than a month to go in the election.

This brings us back to Keith Olbermann's Special Comment. Olbermann criticizes Sarah Palin's attacks against Obama, linking Obama with Ayers, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. These are non-issues that have already been investigated, reported, and commented on, in the press and blogs, months ago. And while Olbermann directly criticizes Palin for stepping into the mud, he also shows Palin's hypocrisy of attacking Obama on terrorism and religion with Palin's own association with the Alaska Independence Party, or Palin's relationship with Pastor Thomas Muthee, and the video showing Muthee protecting Palin from witchcraft. In reality, Olbermann states that "the wheels" are coming off the McCain campaign, as John McCain and Sarah Palin fail to shift Americans' attention away from the damning issue of the economy, to the personality and character issues of negative attacks on Obama. Not only are we watching the wheels come of the McCain campaign, but we are also watching the spectacular slow-motion train wreak of the McCain Straight Talk Express. Here is Keith Olbermann's Special Comment:



And here is the transcript.

Olbermann Special Comment: 9/11 TM

This is Keith Olbermann's Special Comment on yesterday's Countdown show, criticizing both John McCain and the Republican Party's crass political co-opt of the September 11th World Trade Center attacks. In one sense, it doesn't surprise me that the Republicans would politically use the September 11th attacks in this presidential election--they've used this tragic event before in the 2004 and 2006 elections, but without directly attributing the World Trade Center attacks directly within their campaign. Before, it has been on the edge with the GOP crediting themselves with no terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, or the Democrats will surrender to the terrorists, or the Democrats are aiding the terrorists, or in this terrorist age, you change a horse in mid-stream. But now John McCain and the Republican Party have decided to use the September 11th attacks as a means of inciting fear within the American public--vote for John McCain or you will die from terrorism! During former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's convention speech, there are plenty of instances where Giuliani is speaking in front of a backdrop of the New York skyline without the World Trade Centers. The RNC tribute video(at 7:04) of John McCain shows three New York City firemen at what appears to be the World Trade Center site, just after the attacks. Then there was the Republican Party's "9/11 tribute" during their national convention:



This is nothing more than a GOP co-opt of the WTC attacks, attempting generate fear within Americans that voting Republican will protect you from the evil terrorists. This is just blatant, cynical, and disgusting. And Keith Olbermann rips into McCain for using the victims of the WTC attack for their political ambitions. From MSNBC.Com:

Olberman chastises McCain to "grow up" in Special Comment

Here is Keith Olbermann's Special Comment from August 18, 2008 in which Olbermann chastises Republican presidential candidate John McCain to stop acting like a child with the McCain campaign complaining of media scapegoating McCain over his comments during the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, and McCain's violation of the "cone of silence" during Rick Warren's Presidential Forum at the Saddleback. Olbermann's Special Comment really shows the true nature of the McCain campaign here. It is a baseless campaign that will go to any depths in order to negatively attack Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama with character attacks, lies, slander, mudslinging, or even the kitchen sink, at Obama. The McCain campaign, now controlled by the Rovians, will make no attempt at defining McCain on the issues and policies, except in the vaguest of terms--and even then they will lie about McCain's flip-flops. It is a campaign that demands the mainstream media to follow their rules in questioning and criticizing everything that Barack Obama says, but ignoring anything that John McCain may say--and if the media even starts to question McCain, then the campaign throws a hissy fit. It is a campaign to elect an arrogant, spoiled, temper-tantrumed, ignorant, rich kid into the White House. And Olbermann calls out McCain for his childish behavior. From MSNBC.Com:



The transcript can be found here.

Olbermann weighs in on the Clinton donor superdelegate letter

Keith Olbermann weighs in on the entire Clinton donor super delegate letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It is just incredible. From Countdown:



I am amazed by Jonathan Alter's comment that the Clinton campaign is now in its death throes. WOW!

Countdown--McCaint's "Economy of Ideas"

I found this Countdown story on John McCain's big housing speech. It is amazing at how little McCain knows of the U.S. economy--of which McCain even admits his lack of knowledge on the economy. And yet, here he is giving a big speech on the housing crisis in which he is asking for experts to give him ideas on how to solve the crisis. Incredible. From Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

Olbermann Special Comment--Bush put telecoms ahead of citizens

Last night, Keith Olbermann gave another Special Comment on his Countdown program. The issue here is the Senate has refused to pass legislation permanently protecting the telecom industry, from prosecution, for helping the Bush administration in conducting domestic spying on American citizens. Bush wants to give the telecoms immunity. The Senate Democrats want to continue investigating the telecoms' role in this Bush domestic spying program. In a compromise, the Senate has extended the current surveillance law for another 15 days, with Bush signing the law, as both Congress and the White House continue this fight. In his Special Comment, Olbermann states that Bush is placing the telecom industry ahead of American citizens in threatening his veto of this latest surveillance legislation because it doesn't contain the immunity provision for the telecoms. Here is Olbermann's Special Comment:



And here is the transcript.

Olbermann Special Comment--The presidency is now a criminal conspiracy

I've been somewhat hesitant on writing about President Bush's new pick for attorney general, Michael Mukasey, or the Senate confirmation hearings on Mukasey. My belief here is that whoever President Bush nominates to the attorney general position, will be a complete, and utter, stooge to the Bush White House. There is just too much corruption and incompetence in the Bush White House. President Bush needs an attorney general who can keep the past seven years of dirt and crap covered, until after Bush leaves office. Supposedly President Bush nominated a consensus candidate that the Democrats could begrudgingly accept, especially considering just how bad the last attorney general of Alberto Gonzales was.

But a funny thing happened during the senate confirmation hearings of Mukasey. During the confirmation hearings, the Democrats started asking Mukasey a deceptively simple question: Is waterboarding torture? Mukasey has refused to answer whether waterboarding is torture, or not, and even has taken a stand that he doesn't even know if waterboarding is torture, or even if the U.S. has engaged in waterboarding. This has thrown the entire Senate confirmation hearings on Mukasey into a complete mess, and has again, brought up the debate on the Bush administration's use of torture, and waterboarding, against al Qaeda prisoners.

This brings us to Keith Olbermann's Special Comment. First, the Senate Judiciary Committee has voted to approve Mukasey for attorney general by a vote of 11 to 8, with Democratic senators Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein joining all nine Republicans on the committee to back Mukasey. The nomination now goes to the full Senate, where Mukasey will be confirmed. But still, we have this ugly issue of the Bush administration's use of torture, and how this administration refuses to even clarify, or comment, on whether they still use torture and waterboarding. First, I'm going to present the news story which leads into Keith Olbermann's Special Comment, tying Mukasey's approval in the Senate Judiciary Committee, the issue of torture, and the Bush administration's use of torture--even as President Bush has lied about the U.S. not engaging in torture. From YouTube, the story leading to the Special Comment:



And now here is Keith Olbermann's Special Comment. From YouTube:



And here is the transcript to Olbermann's Special Comment.

It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists...

All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others, from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

"Waterboarding is torture," Daniel Levin was to write. Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protester. He was no troublemaking politician. He was no table-pounding commentator. Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American and a brave man.

Brave not just with words or with stances, even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared or bought off.

Charged, as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday, with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora's box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation," Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them ... was to have them enacted upon himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be waterboarded.

Mr. Bush, ever done anything that personally courageous?

Perhaps when you've gone to Walter Reed and teared up over the maimed servicemen? And then gone back to the White House and determined that there would be more maimed servicemen?

Has it been that kind of personal courage, Mr. Bush, when you've spoken of American victims and the triumph of freedom and the sacrifice of your own popularity for the sake of our safety? And then permitted others to fire or discredit or destroy anybody who disagreed with you, whether they were your own generals, or Max Cleland, or Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, or Daniel Levin?

Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now.

Instead, he was forced out as acting assistant attorney general nearly three years ago because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn't do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.

And they waterboarded him. And he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die — still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us, the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love, he could not convince his being that he wasn't drowning.

Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally, it is torture! Practically, it is torture! Ethically, it is torture! And he wrote it down.

Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country's 43rd president: "The United States of America ... does not torture."

Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.

Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.

Waterboarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a couple of other men none of us really care about except for the one detail you'd forgotten — that there are rules. And even if we just make up these rules, this country observes them anyway, because we're Americans and we're better than that.

We're better than you.

And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or not waterboarding was torture had decided, and not in some phony academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty poseur attire of flight suit and helmet.

He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.

So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn't black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a physician entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had ever bothered to set any rules or any guidelines.

And then when your people realized that even that was too dangerous, Daniel Levin was branded "too independent" and "someone who could (not) be counted on."

In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn't count on to lie for you.

So, Levin was fired.

Because if it ever got out what he'd concluded, and the lengths to which he went to validate that conclusion, anybody who had sanctioned waterboarding and who-knows-what-else on anybody, you yourself, you would have been screwed.

And screwed you are.

It can't be coincidence that the story of Daniel Levin should emerge from the black hole of this secret society of a presidency just at the conclusion of the unhappy saga of the newest attorney general nominee.

Another patriot somewhere listened as Judge Mukasey mumbled like he'd never heard of waterboarding and refused to answer in words … that which Daniel Levin answered on a waterboard somewhere in Maryland or Virginia three years ago.

And this someone also heard George Bush say, "The United States of America does not torture," and realized either he was lying or this wasn't the United States of America anymore, and either way, he needed to do something about it.

Not in the way Levin needed to do something about it, but in a brave way nonetheless.

We have U.S. senators who need to do something about it, too.

Chairman Leahy of the Judiciary Committee has seen this for what it is and said "enough."

Sen. Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle piece in the New York political patronage system, and he has failed.

What Sen. Feinstein has seen, to justify joining Schumer in rubber-stamping Mukasey, I cannot guess.

It is obvious that both those senators should look to the meaning of the story of Daniel Levin and recant their support for Mukasey's confirmation.

And they should look into their own committee's history and recall that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even from Richard Nixon a guarantee of a special prosecutor (ultimately a special prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange for their approval of his new attorney general, Elliott Richardson.

If they could get that out of Nixon, before you confirm the president's latest human echo on Tuesday, you had better be able to get a "yes" or a "no" out of Michael Mukasey.

Ideally you should lock this government down financially until a special prosecutor is appointed, or 50 of them, but I'm not holding my breath. The "yes" or the "no" on waterboarding will have to suffice.

Because, remember, if you can't get it, or you won't with the time between tonight and the next presidential election likely to be the longest year of our lives, you are leaving this country, and all of us, to the waterboards, symbolic and otherwise, of George W. Bush.

Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn't who approved the waterboarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.

It is: Why were they waterboarded?

Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem if you don't care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared.

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn't interrupt.

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution,

Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual terrorist?

He'll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.

Now if that's what this is all about, you tortured not because you're so stupid you think torture produces confession but you tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction — well, then, you're going to need all the lawyers you can find … because that crime wouldn't just mean impeachment, would it?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.

Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the hidden explanations can all be perceived, in their exact proportions, in their exact progressions.

Daniel Levin's eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding has to vanish, and him with it.

Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an old car trying to start on a freezing morning to undo eight centuries of the forward march of law and government.

Thus Dick Cheney has to ridiculously assert that confirming we do or do not use any particular interrogation technique would somehow help the terrorists.

Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of waterboarding as torture.

Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed.

From its beginning as the most neglectful protection ever of the lives and safety of the American people ... into the most efficient and cynical exploitation of tragedy for political gain in this country's history ... and, then, to the giddying prospect that you could do what the military fanatics did in Japan in the 1930s and remake a nation into a fascist state so efficient and so self-sustaining that the fascism would be nearly invisible.

But at last this frightful plan is ending with an unexpected crash, the shocking reality that no matter how thoroughly you might try to extinguish them, Mr. Bush, how thoroughly you tried to brand disagreement as disloyalty, Mr. Bush, there are still people like Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of America as true freedom, where we are better, not because of schemes and wars, but because of dreams and morals.

And ultimately these men, these patriots, will defeat you and they will return this country to its righteous standards, and to its rightful owners, the people.

Olbermann Special Comment--Bush's hypocrisy against MoveOn ad

Keith Olbermann presented another Special Comment Thursday, criticizing President Bush's press conference and his attack against the Democrats on the MoveOn.org ad attacking General Petraeus. In addition to Bush attacking the Democrats on the MoveOn.org ad, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution Thursday condemning the MoveOn.org ad by a 72-25 vote, with 20 Democrats joining Republicans in supporting this resolution. President Bush attacked the Democrats in a rare press conference, saying:

"I felt like the ad was an attack, not only on Gen. Petraeus, but on the U.S. military," Bush said. "And I was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democratic Party spoke out strongly against that kind of ad."

Bush said that "most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like MoveOn.org" and they "are more afraid of irritating them than they are of irritating the United States military."

He said, "It's one thing to attack me. It's another thing to attack somebody like Gen. Petraeus."

It now turns out that the last question Bush answered on the MoveOn ad was probably a planted question. According to ThinkProgress:

Perhaps not surprisingly, the question came from Washington Examiner reporter Bill Sammon, who is also a frequent Fox News guest and formerly a Washington Times reporter. Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank notes that Bush was in “need of a pick-me-up” after a series of tough questions on the economy, Iraq, and SCHIP. Therefore, he “looked toward the back of the room” and personally chose Sammon, aka “Big Stretch.”

[....]

Sammon’s friendly softball paid off for the Bush administration. This morning, NBC’s Today Show covered Bush’s comments condemning MoveOn and Democrats, as did last night’s NBC Nightly News and ABC World News. The AP reported on Bush’s remarks, noting that he “criticized Democrats for not immediately condemning the MoveOn.org ad, which he called ‘disgusting.’”

And the Bush PR-spin machine grinds on.

Olbermann has a good wrap-up of Bush's press conference, and the latest MoveOn.org ad controversy here on YouTube:



And now let's get into Olbermann's Special Comment. From YouTube:



You can view the transcript of Olbermann's Special Comment here.

Olbermann Special Comment--Bush just playing us with 'troop withdrawal'

I've been somewhat avoiding writing about Iraq for the past couple of weeks because I'm not sure what else to say anymore. At times I feel like I'm stating the same argument again and again and again, while the Bush administration continues the same crap in keeping the Iraq war going. It is not surprising--President Bush wants the war to continue until after he leaves office and dumps the entire mess on his successor, while the PNAC neocons want the war to continue so they can maintain their American military imperialism and control of the Iraqi oil reserves. It gets frustrating.

That is not to say I haven't been watching the news. There has been plenty of news coming out on Iraq--all of it bad for the Bush White House. There is the August 30, 2007 GAO report that was leaked to the press, showing that Iraq has met only 3 of the 18 benchmarks needed to continue the Bush administration's troop surge. The final release of the report on September 4, 2007 also reflects this failure by the Iraqi government. There was the release of the National Intelligence Estimate on August 23, 2007 that showed the Iraqi government has failed to reign in the sectarian violence, or even effectively govern the country. None of that surprises me--the U.S. occupation of Iraq is lost. The question now becomes how much longer do we waste the blood of our young American soldiers and our treasure into this grinder?

It also doesn't surprise me that the Bush White House has been constantly spinning this story like crazy. Here is the August 15, 2007 LA Times story reporting that the Bush White House will be writing the Petraeus report. You can bet that the Bush administration will attempt to place a positive spin on the report in hopes of continuing the war until after President Bush leaves office. The Bush administration tried to limit the press coverage on the release of the report, suggesting to Congress that General David H. Petraeus would brief Congress on the report in private, while public testimony would come from Secretary of State Condi Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. It is obvious here that the Bush administration doesn't want Petraeus to publicly testify before Congress on the situation in Iraq, fearing the Petraeus may contradict himself with the report. It is all about the Bush PR-spin here. Keep the war going until President Bush leaves office.

So now we come to Keith Olbermann's Special Comment. Olbermann made his Special Comment on September 4, 2007. It was a commentary based on the revelations coming from a new book on George W. Bush's presidency by Robert Draper, Dead Certain. Olbermann gave two stories on the Draper book and the fallout on the Bush administration. According to The New York Times book review:

It is a portrait of the commander in chief as a willful optimist, proud of his self-confidence and convinced that any expressions of doubt would make him less of a leader: a man addicted to “Big Ideas and small comforts” (like riding his bike), a stubborn, even obstinate politician loath to change course or second-guess himself, and given to valuing loyalty above almost everything else.

It is a quintessential George W. Bush. Dead Certain gives the reader an intimate look inside the President's personality and his decision-making. And here is where Olbermann provides his Special Comment in again revealing the lies of this President in order to keep the war going.

Here is Keith Olbermann's Special Comment. From YouTube:



Here is the transcript:

And so he is back from his annual surprise gratuitous photo-op in Iraq, and what a sorry spectacle it was. But it was nothing compared to the spectacle of one unfiltered, unguarded, horrifying quotation in the new biography to which Mr. Bush has consented.

As he deceived the troops at Al-Asad Air Base yesterday with the tantalizing prospect that some of them might not have to risk being killed and might get to go home, Mr. Bush probably did not know that, with his own words, he had already proved that he had been lying, is lying and will be lying about Iraq.

He presumably did not know that there had already appeared those damning excerpts from Robert Draper's book “Dead Certain."

“I'm playing for October-November," Mr. Bush said to Draper. That, evidently, is the time during which, he thinks he can sell us the real plan, which is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence."

Comfortable, that is, with saying about Iraq, again quoting the President, “stay... longer."

And there it is. We've caught you. Your goal is not to bring some troops home, maybe, if we let you have your way now. Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal. You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.

Everything you said about Iraq yesterday, and everything you will say, is a deception, for the purpose of this one cynical, unacceptable, brutal goal: perpetuating this war indefinitely.

War today, war tomorrow, war forever!

And you are playing at it! Playing!

A man with any self respect, having inadvertently revealed such an evil secret, would have already resigned and fled the country! You have no remaining credibility about Iraq.

And yet, yesterday at Al-Asad, Mr. Bush kept playing, and this time, using the second of his two faces.

The president told reporters, “They (General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker) tell me if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces."

And so, Mr. Bush got his fraudulent headlines today. “Bush May Bring Some Troops Home."

While the reality is, we know from what he told Draper, that the president's true hope is that they will not come home; but that they will stay there, because he is keeping them there now, in hope that those from his political party fighting to succeed him will prolong this unendurable disaster into the next decade.

But, to a country dying of thirst, the president seemed to vaguely promise a drink from a full canteen -- a promise predicated on the assumption that he is not lying.

Yet you are lying, Mr. Bush. Again. But now, we know why.

You gave away more of yourself than you knew in the Draper book. And you gave away more still, on the arduous trip back out of Iraq hours in the air, without so much as a single vacation.

“If you look at my comments over the past eight months," you told reporters, “it's gone from a security situation in the sense that we're either going to get out and there will be chaos, or, more troops. Now, the situation has changed, where I'm able to speculate on the hypothetical."

Mr. Bush, the only "hypothetical" here is that you are not now holding our troops hostage. You have no intention of withdrawing them. But that doesn't mean you can't pretend you're thinking about it, does it?

That is your genius as you see it, anyway. You can deduce what we want. We, the people, remember us? And then use it against us.

You can hold that canteen up and promise it to the parched nation. And the untold number of Americans whose lives have not been directly blighted by Iraq or who do not realize that their safety has been reduced and not increased by Iraq, they will get the bullet points: "Bush is thinking about bringing some troops home. Bush even went to Iraq."

You can fool some of the people all of the time, can't you, Mr. Bush? You are playing us!

And as for the most immediate victims of the president's perfidy and shameless manipulation of those troops -- yesterday sweating literally as he spoke at Al-Asad Air Base -- tonight, again sweating figuratively in The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death, the president saved, for them, the most egregious "playing" in the entire trip.

“I want to tell you this about the decision, about my decision about troop levels. Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground, not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media."

One must compliment Mr. Bush's writer. That, perhaps, was the mostly perfectly-crafted phrase of his presidency. For depraved indifference to democracy, for the craven projection of political motives onto those trying to save lives and save a nation, for a dismissal of the value of the polls and the importance of the media, for a summary of all he does not hold dear about this nation or its people nothing could top that.

As if you listened to all the "calm assessments" of our military commanders rather than firing the ones who dared say the emporer has no clothes, and the president, no judgment.

As if your entire presidency was not a “nervous reaction," and you yourself, nothing but a Washington politician.

As if “"he media" does not largely divide into those parts your minions are playing, and those others who unthinkingly and uncritically serve as your echo chamber, at a time when the nation's future may depend on the airing of dissent.

And as if those polls were not so overwhelming, and not so clearly reflective of the nation's agony and the nation's insistence.

But this president has ceased to listen. This president has decided that night is day, and death is life, and enraging the world against us is safety. And this laziest of presidents, actually interrupted his precious time off to fly to Iraq to play at a photo opportunity with soldiers, some of whom will on his orders be killed before the year maybe the month is out.

Just over 500 days remain in this presidency. Consider the dead who have piled up on the battlefield in these last 500 days.

Consider the singular fraudulence of this president's trip to Iraq yesterday, and the singular fraudulence of the selling of the Petraeus Report in these last 500 days.

Consider how this president has torn away at the fabric of this nation in a manner of which terrorists can only dream in these last 500 days.

And consider again how this president has spoken to that biographer: that he is “playing for October-November." The goal in Iraq is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence." Consider how this revelation contradicts every other rationale he has offered in these last 500 days.

In the context of all that now, consider these next 500 days.

Mr. Bush, our presence in Iraq must end. Even if it means your resignation. Even if it means your impeachment. Even if it means a different Republican to serve out your term. Even if it means a Democratic Congress and those true patriots among the Republicans standing up and denying you another penny for Iraq, other than for the safety and the safe conduct home of our troops.

This country cannot run the risk of what you can still do to this country in the next 500 days.

Not while you are playing.

Olbermann plays Senator Craig's arrest tape

Keith Olbermann is on fire. Here is the YouTube video of tonight's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, where Olbermann plays the arrest tape interview between Minneapolis Police Sgt. Dave Karsnia and Craig after Craig was arrested for soliciting sex from a Minneapolis airport men's restroom. From YouTube:



It is just embarrassing. Craig knew he got caught soliciting sex and tried to make excuses in his defense--he didn't realize his foot touched Karsnia's foot, he has a wide stance and puts his feet out, he picked up a piece of paper, he picked up a piece of toilet paper, he picked up a piece of toilet paper with his right hand (which doesn't have a wedding ring, while Karsnia observed a wedding ring in his left hand). The most telling quote here is by Karsnia, where he observes "Embarrassing. Embarrassing. No wonder why we're going down the tubes."

Olbermann Special Comment--Go to Iraq and fight, Mr. President

Here is another Special Comment by Keith Olbermann on his Countdown program. Olbermann started this comment right at the beginning of his program, rather than presenting his comments at the end. And it is not surprising why Olbermann presented this comment at the beginning of his show--it is a comment on the Bush administration's attempt to scapegoat Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton for the administration's own disastrous war in Iraq. Let's get into Olbermann's Special Comment here. From YouTube:



Olbermann then interviews Massachusetts's Senator John Kerry regarding the administration's blame game of Senator Clinton on Iraq. From YouTube:



We've seen this type of behavior before from this Bush administration--a crass behavior of both blaming and smearing critics of its pro-war policy, and of this administration's own failure into sending this country into this disastrous war. When the Bush administration was trying to sell the war to the American people, it did so through a PR-campaign of fear of smoking guns turning into mushroom clouds, while painting critics of administration's war as being traitorous, or aiding the terrorists. We've seen how this Bush administration will break the law in outing a CIA officer Valerie Plame as a means of revenge, and to destroy the reputation of Plame's husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson's own criticism to the Bush administration's war. In the 2004 election, this Bush administration shifted attention away from resolving the Iraq war towards questioning whether a Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was patriotic enough by bringing up the old, anti-war scars of Vietnam, and linking those scars with questions of whether Kerry was tough enough to take the fight to the terrorists--even though Kerry had fought in the jungles of Vietnam, while President Bush used his family connections to avoid fighting in the Vietnam war. In the 2006 midterm elections, this Bush administration continued its smear campaign by stating that any Americans who would vote for the Democrats, are actually voting for the terrorists. And now this Bush administration is blaming Senator Clinton for criticizing its own failed conduct of this war? Can this administration's hypocrisy get any more outrageous?

Here is the transcript to Olbermann's Special Comment:

It is one of the great, dark, evil lessons, of history.

A country — a government — a military machine — can screw up a war seven ways to Sunday. It can get thousands of its people killed. It can risk the safety of its citizens. It can destroy the fabric of its nation.

But as long as it can identify a scapegoat, it can regain or even gain power.

The Bush administration has opened this Pandora’s Box about Iraq. It has found its scapegoats: Hillary Clinton and us.

The lies and terror tactics with which it deluded this country into war — they had nothing to do with the abomination that Iraq has become. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The selection of the wrong war, in the wrong time, in the wrong place — the most disastrous geopolitical tactic since Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia in 1914 and destroyed itself in the process — that had nothing to do with the overwhelming crisis Iraq has become. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The criminal lack of planning for the war — the total “jump-off-a-bridge-and-hope-you-can-fly” tone to the failure to anticipate what would follow the deposing of Saddam Hussein — that had nothing to do with the chaos in which Iraq has been enveloped. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The utter, blinkered idiocy of “staying the course,” of sending Americans to Iraq and sending them a second time, and a third and a fourth, until they get killed or maimed — the utter de-prioritization of human life, simply so a politician can avoid having to admit a mistake — that had nothing to do with the tens of thousand individual tragedies darkening the lives of American families, forever. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The continuing, relentless, remorseless, corrupt and cynical insistence that this conflict somehow is defeating or containing or just engaging the people who attacked us on 9/11, the total “Alice Through the Looking Glass” quality that ignores that in Iraq, we have made the world safer for al-Qaida — it isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault!

The fault, brought down, as if a sermon from this mount of hypocrisy and slaughter by a nearly anonymous undersecretary of defense, has tonight been laid on the doorstep of... Sen. Hillary Clinton and, by extension, at the doorstep of every American — the now-vast majority of us — who have dared to criticize this war or protest it or merely ask questions about it or simply, plaintively, innocently, honestly, plead, “Don’t take my son; don’t take my daughter.”

Sen. Clinton has been sent — and someone has leaked to The Associated Press — a letter, sent in reply to hers asking if there exists an actual plan for evacuating U.S. troops from Iraq.

This extraordinary document was written by an undersecretary of defense named Eric Edelman.

“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq,” Edelman writes, “reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.”

Edelman adds: “Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.”

A spokesman for the senator says Mr. Edelman’s remarks are “at once both outrageous and dangerous.” Those terms are entirely appropriate and may, in fact, understate the risk the Edelman letter poses to our way of life and all that our fighting men and women are risking, have risked, and have lost, in Iraq.

After the South was defeated in our Civil War, the scapegoat was Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and the ideas of the “Lost Cause” and “Jim Crow” were born.

After the French were beaten by the Prussians in 1870 and 1871, it was the imaginary “Jewish influence” in the French Army general staff, and there was born 30 years of self-destructive anti-Semitism, culminating in the horrific Dreyfus case.

After the Germans lost the First World War, it was the “back-stabbers and profiteers” at home, on whose lives the National Socialists rose to prominence in the succeeding decades and whose accused membership eventually wound up in torture chambers and death camps.

And after the generation before ours, and leaders of both political parties, escalated and re-escalated and carpet-bombed and re-carpet-bombed Vietnam, it was the protest movement
and Jane Fonda and — as late as just three years ago — Sen. John Kerry who were assigned the kind of blame with which no rational human being could concur, and yet which still, across vast sections of our political landscape, resonates unchallenged and accepted.

And now Mr. Bush, you have picked out your own Jefferson Davis, your own Dreyfus, your own “profiteer” — your own scapegoat.

Not for the sake of this country.

Not for the sake of Iraq.

Not even for the sake of your own political party.

But for the sake of your own personal place in history.

But in reaching for that place, you have guaranteed yourself tonight not honor, but infamy.

In fact, you have condemned yourself to a place among that remarkably small group of Americans whom Americans cannot forgive: those who have sold this country out and who have willingly declared their enmity to the people at whose pleasure they supposedly serve.

A scapegoat, sir, might be forgivable, if you hadn’t just happened to choose a prospective presidential nominee of the opposition party.

And the accusation of spreading “enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia” might be some day atoned for, if we all didn’t know — you included, and your generals and the Iraqis — that we are leaving Iraq, and sooner rather than later, and we are doing it even if to do so requires, first, that you must be impeached and removed as president of the United States, sooner rather than later.

You have set this government at war against its own people and then blamed those very people when they say, “Enough.”

And thus it crystallizes, Mr. Bush.

When Civil War Gen. Ambrose Burnside ordered a disastrous attack on Fredericksburg in which 12,000 of his men were killed, he had to be physically restrained from leading the next charge himself.

After the First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, authored and enabled the disastrous Gallipoli campaign that saw a quarter-million Allied soldiers cut down in the First World War, Churchill resigned his office and took a commission as a front-line officer in the trenches of France.

Those are your new role models, Mr. Bush.

Let your minions try to spread the blame to the real patriots here, who have sought only to undo the horrors you have wrought since 2002.

Let them try it, until the end of time.

Though the words might be erased from a million books and a billion memories, though the world be covered knee-deep in your lies, the truth shall prevail.

This, sir, is your war.

Sen. Clinton has reinforced enemy propaganda? Made it impossible for you to get your ego-driven, blood-steeped win in Iraq?

Then take it into your own hands, Mr. Bush.

Go to Baghdad now and fulfill, finally, your military service obligations.

Go there and fight, your war. Yourself.

Olbermann Special Comment--Chertoff's "gut feeling!"

Time to get into a fun Olbermann Special Comment on Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff's "gut feeling" about the increasing risk of a terrorist attack in the United States. I found the actual Chertoff "gut feeling" quote through YouTube:



The Chertoff's "gut feeling" became breaking news on MSNBC, a political analysis on CNN, and a top story on ABC News. It was even reported on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

That is some pretty impressive news reporting and political punditry on Michael Chertoff's gut. I think my gut is telling me something too--there is going to be another terrorist attack in the world today. Let's look on the news sites--Iraq journalist for N.Y. Times shot to death, My gut predicted that terrorist attack! Can my gut get a job at Homeland Security?

I can't really say why Chertoff gave his gut feeling on potential terrorist attacks in the United States. It is a statement that presents no proof, no intelligence evidence of an attack, nothing. And yet, Chertoff was happy to make such a statement, and sit back and watch the news media play up the fears of evil terrorists are about to attach the United States because Chertoff's gut tells him that. In one sense, Chertoff's "gut feeling" terrorism story is a metaphor showing the incompetence of this Bush administration in fighting their Great War on Terror, and in making this country even less safe from a terrorist attack. We've seen how this administration uses terror threats as a political means to control the media and stifle either news stories critical of the administration, or to reduce the political and media influence of opponents and critics of the Bush administration. We have seen how this administration has decided to abandon the war on terrorism to engage in an opportunistic war in Iraq for control of oil and American imperialism. And now we're told that Chertoff's gut is warning us of an impending terrorist attack sometime this summer.

I'm thinking Chertoff's gut has some really bad indigestion. Instead of stocking up on duct tape to protect himself against the terrorists, maybe Chertoff should be stocking up on Pepto Bismol to protect himself from this possible terrorist attack?

So let's get into Olbermann's Special Comment. From YouTube:



And here is the transcript.

Olbermann's Special Comment--Bush, Cheney should resign

On July 3, 2007, Keith Olbermann presented his Special Comment on Countdown, asking for President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to resign from office. But before I get into Olbermann's Special Comment, I have a few words to say on the subject of impeachment of President Bush.

Going through the liberal blogs, I've seen a lot of commentary by Americans demanding that President Bush should be impeached. I never really supported the impeachment of Bush here. It is not that I don't believe that Bush should not be impeached--there is plenty of evidence supporting an investigation into impeachment proceedings of President Bush on a number of scandals--the Valerie Plame scandal, the intelligence failures, the Bush lies and propaganda run-up to the Iraq war, the illegal NSA domestic spying program, the suspension of habeas corpus and incarceration of prisoners without due process, the reports of torture of prisoners in American military prisons, the U.S. attorney firings--have I named all the scandals yet? The problem I had with impeachment is that I believed it could not be successfully pursued to a conviction. Once the Democrats gained control of Congress, there was not enough time to conduct the oversight investigations and gather evidence of this administration's wrongdoings to support impeachment--and remember that this administration would do everything it can to stall the congressional investigations, just as they are currently doing now. Any impeachment trial would take place in 2008--right in the middle of a presidential elections, making the issue political for the candidates such as Democratic Senators Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Republican Senator John McCain. Even more, I don't believe that the Senate has the two-thirds votes it needs for a conviction, and that the Senate is so closely divided between the Democrats and Republicans. And finally, looking at all these scandals on Valerie Plame, the intelligence failures, the domestic spying program, or even the U.S. attorney firings, they are all very complicated scandals which do not directly implicate President Bush in these scandals. There is a direct implication of the president's men in these scandals, which certainly calls for congressional demands for impeachments and removals of these "president's men," but not for the president himself.

That all changed two days ago, when President Bush directly implicated himself in the commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence. Bush directly implicated himself in the cover-up of the administration's involvement in the Valerie Plame outing, and the president himself obstructed justice with the scandal. Scooter Libby was tried by a jury of his peers, convicted, and sentenced to prison. Once Libby was sitting in that jail cell, federal prosecutors would have offered Libby a deal of reducing Libby's sentence in exchange for his cooperation in telling the prosecutors what he knows about the White House involvement in the Plame scandal. President Bush did not want Libby to sing to the feds here, so he abused the law in commuting a prison sentence of one of his own administration's staff members in order to keep him quiet on the scandals. President Bush obstructed justice here. He abused the law here for his own personal gain of covering up this administration's scandals. President Bush decided that he would act above the law in this sentence commutation to protect one of his own cronies who lied to the courts and the law in order to protect Bush. The Valerie Plame scandal has been simplified here, where President Bush has directly implicated himself into the scandal. That is an impeachable offense. It is why I now support the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. This is an issue that can be clearly explained where the president, and perhaps the vice president, have shown themselves to operate outside of, and with contempt, for the law. I still don't believe that there are enough votes in the Senate to convict Bush, or that there is enough time for a trial and conviction. But I feel that it is important for impeachment investigations to commence into this president's commutation of Libby's prison sentence, and evidence gathered to support the conviction of this president. Even if impeachment proceedings do not take place, the evidence gathered against Bush on this latest Libby scandal, may be enough to force the Republicans to abandon Bush, and perhaps force Bush and Cheney to resign from office. I know it is a long shot, considering how both Bush and Cheney will refuse to give up power, but it is another option to impose more pressure on this administration.

Now let's get into Olbermann's Special Comment. From YouTube:



And here is the transcript:

“I didn’t vote for him,” an American once said, “But he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

That—on this eve of the 4th of July—is the essence of this democracy, in 17 words. And that is what President Bush threw away yesterday in commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

The man who said those 17 words—improbably enough—was the actor John Wayne. And Wayne, an ultra-conservative, said them, when he learned of the hair’s-breadth election of John F. Kennedy instead of his personal favorite, Richard Nixon in 1960.

“I didn’t vote for him but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

The sentiment was doubtlessly expressed earlier, but there is something especially appropriate about hearing it, now, in Wayne’s voice: The crisp matter-of-fact acknowledgement that we have survived, even though for nearly two centuries now, our Commander-in-Chief has also served, simultaneously, as the head of one political party and often the scourge of all others.

We as citizens must, at some point, ignore a president’s partisanship. Not that we may prosper as a nation, not that we may achieve, not that we may lead the world—but merely that we may function.

But just as essential to the seventeen words of John Wayne, is an implicit trust—a sacred trust: That the president for whom so many did not vote, can in turn suspend his political self long enough, and for matters imperative enough, to conduct himself solely for the benefit of the entire Republic.

Our generation’s willingness to state “we didn’t vote for him, but he’s our president, and we hope he does a good job,” was tested in the crucible of history, and earlier than most.

And in circumstances more tragic and threatening. And we did that with which history tasked us.

We enveloped our President in 2001.And those who did not believe he should have been elected—indeed those who did not believe he had been elected—willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of non-partisanship.

And George W. Bush took our assent, and re-configured it, and honed it, and shaped it to a razor-sharp point and stabbed this nation in the back with it.

Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise, or any remaining lingering hope, it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers.

Did so even before the appeals process was complete; did so without as much as a courtesy consultation with the Department of Justice; did so despite what James Madison—at the Constitutional Convention—said about impeaching any president who pardoned or sheltered those who had committed crimes “advised by” that president; did so without the slightest concern that even the most detached of citizens must look at the chain of events and wonder: To what degree was Mr. Libby told: break the law however you wish—the President will keep you out of prison?

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental com-pact between yourself and the majority of this nation’s citizens—the ones who did not cast votes for you. In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the President of the United States. In that moment, Mr. Bush, you became merely the President of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party. And this is too important a time, Sir, to have a commander-in-chief who puts party over nation.

This has been, of course, the gathering legacy of this Administration. Few of its decisions have escaped the stain of politics. The extraordinary Karl Rove has spoken of “a permanent Republican majority,” as if such a thing—or a permanent Democratic majority—is not antithetical to that upon which rests: our country, our history, our revolution, our freedoms.

Yet our Democracy has survived shrewder men than Karl Rove. And it has survived the frequent stain of politics upon the fabric of government. But this administration, with ever-increasing insistence and almost theocratic zealotry, has turned that stain into a massive oil spill.

The protection of the environment is turned over to those of one political party, who will financially benefit from the rape of the environment. The protections of the Constitution are turned over to those of one political party, who believe those protections unnecessary and extravagant and quaint.

The enforcement of the laws is turned over to those of one political party, who will swear beforehand that they will not enforce those laws. The choice between war and peace is turned over to those of one political party, who stand to gain vast wealth by ensuring that there is never peace, but only war.

And now, when just one cooked book gets corrected by an honest auditor, when just one trampling of the inherent and inviolable fairness of government is rejected by an impartial judge, when just one wild-eyed partisan is stopped by the figure of blind justice, this President decides that he, and not the law, must prevail.

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war.

I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people, a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.

I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors.

I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent.

I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought.

I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents.

I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

When President Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20th, 1973, Cox initially responded tersely, and ominously.

“Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men, is now for Congress, and ultimately, the American people.”

President Nixon did not understand how he had crystallized the issue of Watergate for the American people.

It had been about the obscure meaning behind an attempt to break in to a rival party’s headquarters; and the labyrinthine effort to cover-up that break-in and the related crimes.

And in one night, Nixon transformed it.

Watergate—instantaneously—became a simpler issue: a President overruling the inexorable march of the law of insisting—in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood - that he was the law.

Not the Constitution. Not the Congress. Not the Courts. Just him.

Just - Mr. Bush - as you did, yesterday.

The twists and turns of Plame-Gate, of your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the “referee” of Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s analogy. These are complex and often painful to follow, and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.

But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush—and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal—the average citizen understands that, Sir.

It’s the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the pre-arranged lottery all rolled into one—and it stinks. And they know it.

Nixon’s mistake, the last and most fatal of them, the firing of Archibald Cox, was enough to cost him the presidency. And in the end, even Richard Nixon could say he could not put this nation through an impeachment.

It was far too late for it to matter then, but as the decades unfold, that single final gesture of non-partisanship, of acknowledged responsibility not to self, not to party, not to “base,” but to country, echoes loudly into history. Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign

Would that you could say that, Mr. Bush. And that you could say it for Mr. Cheney. You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday. Which one of you chose the route, no longer matters. Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is irrelevant.

But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics, is the only fact that remains relevant.

It is nearly July 4th, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a King who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them—or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them—we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms.

We of this time—and our leaders in Congress, of both parties—must now live up to those standards which echo through our history: Pressure, negotiate, impeach—get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our Democracy, away from its helm.

For you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed, on August 9th, 1974.

Resign.

And give us someone—anyone—about whom all of us might yet be able to quote John Wayne, and say, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

Olbermann's Special Comment: The entire government has failed us on Iraq

Keith Olbermann has written another strong Special Comment for his Countdown with Keith Olbermann show.

First, here is Olbermann's story of the Democrats' concession to President Bush on the Iraq war funding bill without the withdrawal timetable:



And now here is the YouTube video of Olbermann's Special Comment:



Olbermann makes a strong commentary here about how the entire government--both the congressional Democrats and President Bush--have failed in stopping this war in Iraq. And in one sense, I do agree with Olbermann. But then I look at my previous post here, and I see that the Democrats had no choice but to cave into the Bush demands for a blank check on the Iraq war funding. The Bush administration, and the Pentagon, needed until September to assess the success or failure of this Bush troop surge. If the Democrats pushed too hard for de-funding, then the Republicans could blame the Democrats for losing in Iraq, before the surge could be completed. Before the American public could assess the results of this latest Bush troop surge. In a sense, Olbermann is ahead of the curve here--he knows the war is a failure. I certainly know the war is a failure. I think that the good thing to come from Olbermann's Special Comment is that it continues to push public opinion and political pressure towards a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The danger of Olbermann's Special Commentary isn't just against the congressional Democrats, but even more against the congressional Republicans who continue to support this Bush war. If the war continues to deteriorate over the summer and into September, and if it is revealed that the Bush troop surge has failed, then you could start seeing Republicans crossing over to support a withdrawal timetable before the November elections as a means of saving their political careers. There is still a chance that the Democrats could get the two-thirds votes needed to override Bush's veto in September.

And here is the transcript:

This is, in fact, a comment about… betrayal.

Few men or women elected in our history—whether executive or legislative, state or national—have been sent into office with a mandate more obvious, nor instructions more clear:

Get us out of Iraq.

Yet after six months of preparation and execution—half a year gathering the strands of public support; translating into action, the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies, the Democrats have managed only this:

* The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president—if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history—who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats “give the troops their money”;

* The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans;

* The Democratic leadership has given Mr. Bush all that he wanted, with the only caveat being, not merely meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government, but optional meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government.

* The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.

You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions—Stop The War—have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you… for a handful of magic beans.

You may trot out every political cliché from the soft-soap, inside-the-beltway dictionary of boilerplate sound bites, about how this is the “beginning of the end” of Mr. Bush’s “carte blanche” in Iraq, about how this is a “first step.”

Well, Senator Reid, the only end at its beginning... is our collective hope that you and your colleagues would do what is right, what is essential, what you were each elected and re-elected to do.

Because this “first step”… is a step right off a cliff.

And this President!

How shameful it would be to watch an adult... hold his breath, and threaten to continue to do so, until he turned blue.
But how horrifying it is… to watch a President hold his breath and threaten to continue to do so, until innocent and patriotic Americans in harm’s way, are bled white.

You lead this country, sir?

You claim to defend it?

And yet when faced with the prospect of someone calling you on your stubbornness—your stubbornness which has cost 3,431 Americans their lives and thousands more their limbs—you, Mr. Bush, imply that if the Democrats don’t give you the money and give it to you entirely on your terms, the troops in Iraq will be stranded, or forced to serve longer, or have to throw bullets at the enemy with their bare hands.
How transcendentally, how historically, pathetic.

Any other president from any other moment in the panorama of our history would have, at the outset of this tawdry game of political chicken, declared that no matter what the other political side did, he would insure personally—first, last and always—that the troops would not suffer.

A President, Mr. Bush, uses the carte blanche he has already, not to manipulate an overlap of arriving and departing Brigades into a ‘second surge,’ but to say in unequivocal terms that if it takes every last dime of the monies already allocated, if it takes reneging on government contracts with Halliburton, he will make sure the troops are safe—even if the only safety to be found, is in getting them the hell out of there.

Well, any true President would have done that, Sir.

You instead, used our troops as political pawns, then blamed the Democrats when you did so.

Not that these Democrats, who had this country’s support and sympathy up until 48 hours ago, have not since earned all the blame they can carry home.

“We seem to be very near the bleak choice between war and shame,” Winston Churchill wrote to Lord Moyne in the days after the British signed the Munich accords with Germany in 1938. “My feeling is that we shall choose shame, and then have war thrown in, a little later…”

That’s what this is for the Democrats, isn’t it?

Their “Neville Chamberlain moment” before the Second World War.

All that’s missing is the landing at the airport, with the blinkered leader waving a piece of paper which he naively thought would guarantee “peace in our time,” but which his opponent would ignore with deceit.

The Democrats have merely streamlined the process.

Their piece of paper already says Mr. Bush can ignore it, with impugnity.

And where are the Democratic presidential hopefuls this evening?

See they not, that to which the Senate and House leadership has blinded itself?

Judging these candidates based on how they voted on the original Iraq authorization, or waiting for apologies for those votes, is ancient history now.

The Democratic nomination is likely to be decided... tomorrow.

The talk of practical politics, the buying into of the President’s dishonest construction “fund-the-troops-or-they-will-be-in-jeopardy,” the promise of tougher action in September, is falling not on deaf ears, but rather falling on Americans who already told you what to do, and now perceive your ears as closed to practical politics.

Those who seek the Democratic nomination need to—for their own political futures and, with a thousand times more solemnity and importance, for the individual futures of our troops—denounce this betrayal, vote against it, and, if need be, unseat Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi if they continue down this path of guilty, fatal acquiescence to the tragically misguided will of a monomaniacal president.

For, ultimately, at this hour, the entire government has failed us.

* Mr. Reid, Mr. Hoyer, and the other Democrats... have failed us....They negotiated away that which they did not own, but had only been entrusted by us to protect: our collective will as the citizens of this country, that this brazen War of Lies be ended as rapidly and safely as possible.

* Mr. Bush and his government... have failed us. They have behaved venomously and without dignity—of course. That is all at which Mr. Bush is gifted. We are the ones providing any element of surprise or shock here.

With the exception of Senator Dodd and Senator Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidates have (so far at least) failed us.

They must now speak, and make plain how they view what has been given away to Mr. Bush, and what is yet to be given away tomorrow, and in the thousand tomorrows to come.

Because for the next fourteen months, the Democratic nominating process—indeed the whole of our political discourse until further notice—has, with the stroke of a cursed pen, become about one thing, and one thing alone.

The electorate figured this out, six months ago.

The President and the Republicans have not—doubtless will not.

The Democrats will figure it out, during the Memorial Day recess, when they go home and many of those who elected them will politely suggest they stay there—and permanently.

Because, on the subject of Iraq...

The people have been ahead of the media....

Ahead of the government...

Ahead of the politicians...

For the last year, or two years, or maybe three.

Our politics... is now about the answer to one briefly-worded question.

Mr. Bush has failed.

Mr. Warner has failed.

Mr. Reid has failed.

So.

Who among us will stop this war—this War of Lies?

To he or she, fall the figurative keys to the nation.

To all the others—presidents and majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party—there is only blame… for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal.