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Olbermann's Passionate Commentary on Rumseld

Crooks and Liars has the video of Keith Olbermann's commentary last night on Donald Rumsfeld.

Olbermann delivered this commentary with fire and passion while highlighting how Rumsfeld's comments echoes other times in our world's history when anyone who questioned the administration was coined as a traitor, unpatriotic, communist or any other colorful term. Luckily we pulled out of those times and we will pull out of these times.

From the transcript:

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet. We end the countdown where we began, our #1 story, with a special comment on Mr. Rumsfeld's remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday. It demands the deep analysis - and the sober contemplation - of every American.

For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence - indeed, the loyalty - of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land;

Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants - our employees - with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration's track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.

Dissent and disagreement with government is the life's blood of human freedom; And not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as "his" troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.

It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile... it is right - and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.

In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld's speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis.

For, in their time, there was another government faced with true peril - with a growing evil - powerful and remorseless.

That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld's, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the secret information. It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld's - questioning their intellect and their morality.

That government was England's, in the 1930's. It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone to England.

It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.

It knew that the hard evidence it had received, which contradicted it's own policies, it's own conclusions - it's own omniscience - needed to be dismissed.

The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth. Most relevant of all - it "knew" that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile - at best morally or intellectually confused.

That critic's name... was Winston Churchill.

Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.

History - and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England - had taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty - and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.

Thus did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy excepting the fact that he has the battery plugged in backwards. His government, absolute and exclusive in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis. It is the modern version of the government... of Neville Chamberlain.

But back to today's Omniscient Ones. That about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this:

This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely. And as such, all voices count - not just his. Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience - about Osama Bin Laden's plans five years ago - about Saddam Hussein's weapons four years ago - about Hurricane Katrina's impact one year ago - we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their omniscience as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages, to the entire "Fog of Fear" which continues to envelope this nation - he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have - inadvertently or intentionally - profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer's New Clothes.

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read?

On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused... the United States of America?

The confusion we - as its citizens - must now address, is stark and forbidding. But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note - with hope in your heart - that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light and we can too.

The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this Administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld's other main assertion, that this country faces a "new type of fascism." As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that - though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

This country faces a new type of fascism - indeed.

Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute... I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.

But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed, "confused" or "immoral."

Thus forgive me for reading Murrow in full:

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty," he said, in 1954. "We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

We will not walk in fear - one, of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of un-reason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men;

Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were - for the moment - unpopular."

And so, good night, and good luck.

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    Re: Olbermann's Passionate Commentary on Rumseld (none / 0) (#1)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Aug 31, 2006 at 10:15:23 AM EST
    One thing I haven't figured out from his impassioned speech is whether Bush is Hitler or Bush is Chamberlain. Some help please...

    Re: Olbermann's Passionate Commentary on Rumseld (none / 0) (#2)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Aug 31, 2006 at 10:30:18 AM EST
    Erm, it's pretty obvious from the commentary that he's saying the GOPresidency is like Chamberlain's government, in the sense that they both simply "knew" what was true, regardless of the actual facts in the real world.

    Re: Olbermann's Passionate Commentary on Rumseld (none / 0) (#3)
    by magin on Thu Aug 31, 2006 at 10:41:31 AM EST
    Olbermann is both smart and articulate. Kind of hard to believe he's still allowed to be on TV.

    Re: Olbermann's Passionate Commentary on Rumseld (none / 0) (#4)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Aug 31, 2006 at 11:03:26 AM EST
    Has anyone ever read J. Willaim Fulbright's "The Arrogance of Power?" I pulled out my dusty old copy of it recently and it's absolutely amazing how "some things never change" in the forty years since its publication. His take on the dehumanization of our "enemies"(making it so much easier to kill them)during the Viet Nam War paralells the rabid war-mongering going on in the Bush Administration today.

    Re: Olbermann's Passionate Commentary on Rumseld (none / 0) (#5)
    by Sumner on Thu Aug 31, 2006 at 11:33:12 AM EST
    Luckily we pulled out of those times and we will pull out of these times.
    Based on what strategy? Or based on idealism? On enlightenment? Nihilism? Democracy? Gestalt? Epiphany? That the Phoenix will rise from the ashes? Through a promachos? (- one who fights for others, in their behalf. A champion or defender.) Perhaps The Twilight Zone definition of a champion? (- imbued in equal parts with talent, work, luck and nerve.)
    [A]nyone who question[s] the administration [is] coined as a traitor, unpatriotic, communist or any other colorful term.
    Craignez honte (F.) - fear disgrace. In my long struggle against these usurpers, I have had to learn much about Psychology and Psychiatry, (in order to defend against a label of "nut case"), and have been on constant guard against other mostly-effective dismissive stereotype labels such as "organized crime", "gang-member/leader", "sex offender", "anti-Christ", "alien-from-outerspace", "anarchist, "terrorist", "drug pusher", (in 1981, a detractor called me "the largest drug dealer on the West Coast", despite my having never dealt drugs), kidnapper, etc. As a measure of the usurpers, Bush isn't even a "10" on my scale of 1-to-10. I would put him at "7". I would put Sensenbrenner at "9" and Hatch at "10". Parallels to Hitler are spot-on. The blogs are driving the resistance. In MSM, Olbermann is still an anomaly. And we haven't even come to the dichæologia yet. (Rhetoric - a defense of failure or disgrace, as by blaming extenuating circumstances, inadequate help, or betrayal by friends.)

    Re: Olbermann's Passionate Commentary on Rumseld (none / 0) (#6)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Aug 31, 2006 at 12:09:51 PM EST
    Comment by LWW:
    Has anyone ever read J. Willaim Fulbright's "The Arrogance of Power?" I pulled out my dusty old copy of it recently and it's absolutely amazing how "some things never change" in the forty years since its publication. His take on the dehumanization of our "enemies"(making it so much easier to kill them)during the Viet Nam War paralells the rabid war-mongering going on in the Bush Administration today.


    Re: Olbermann's Passionate Commentary on Rumseld (none / 0) (#7)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Fri Sep 01, 2006 at 03:32:15 AM EST
    Has the revolution FINALLY begun? Christ, what took so friggin long!!!???