On Bush, Olbermann accused him of "cowardice" and argued: “After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts -- that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton’s. Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly. As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy. Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.” Olbermann concluded his 10-minute plus diatribe: “Mr. Bush: Are yours the actions of a true American?”
Video (10:30, but worth watching for how Olbermann goes off the deep end): Real (7.9 MB at 100 kbps) or Windows Media (6.6 MB at 81 kbps) or MP3 audio (4.3 MB)
The MRC's Brad Wilmouth appended the following to my initial post:
Olbermann opened the segment contending that Clinton had been "sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster," and charged that the Bush Administration's "assault" on freedoms "can do as much damage as al-Qaeda." Olbermann preemptively rationalized his "crazed" rant by arguing that "our tone should be crazed." He also compared Fox News to the "propaganda" of Tokyo Rose.
Olbermann: "The headlines about it are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back. It is not important that the current President's portable public chorus has described his predecessor's tone as 'crazed.' Our tone should be crazed. The nation's freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al-Qaeda. The nation's marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would've quit."
Notably, about half an hour earlier on Olbermann's show, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, a liberal journalist who was appearing as a guest, had actually defended Wallace's decision to question Clinton about how he handled bin Laden. Alter: "I don't think there was any pre-ground rules breaking or anything like that, and I don't actually fault Chris Wallace at all. Look, when go into an interview like this, you want to ask good provocative questions. That's what we're paid to do. ... I don't think [Clinton] was right that somehow, you know, Fox was out to get him on this. As Wallace said, he was posing a question that a lot of Fox's admittedly very conservative viewers wanted to know."
And just a few minutes after Olbermann's show concluded, on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, liberal political analyst Lawrence O'Donnell similarly defended Wallace's interview as "perfectly sensible." O'Donnell: "Chris Wallace, by the way, I don't think did do a right-wing hit job. I think the interview was a perfectly sensible interview."
Returning to Olbermann's Countdown show, the MSNBC host praised Clinton's supposedly "courageous" truth-telling: "Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years."
After implying that President Bush is not a "grown-up," Olbermann went on to accuse Bush of attempting, without "conscience" or "shame," to "re-write history," as he labeled Bush's administration the "worst presidency since James Buchanan."
Olbermann: "But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now. Except for this: After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts, that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility entirely Mr. Clinton's. Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly. As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him by proxy."
Ever the conspiracy theorist with a substantial history of accusing the Bush administration of politically timing terror alerts to distract from embarrassing news, Olbermann moved on to make a similar charge of timing, as he compared the Bush Administration to "authoritarians" being helped by "hyenas" at Fox News, and contended that Clinton was "brave" to take the Bush Administration to task for "criminal negligence."
Olbermann: "Consider the timing: the very same weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is, not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it. The kind of proof of incompetence for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion in a scapegoat. It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired but a propagandist promoted: Promise to talk of charity and generosity, but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless. And don't even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself, blame your audience for e-mailing you the question. Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen. He told the great truth untold about this administration's negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about bin Laden. Mr. Clinton was brave."
Olbermann, who has fallaciously complained that the Bush administration has accused critics like him of not being patriotic, concluded his "Special Comment" accusing President Bush of not being a "true American."
Olbermann: "The free pass has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush. You did not act to prevent 9/11. We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11. You have failed us, then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11. You have failed us anew in Afghanistan. And you have now tried to hide your failures by blaming your predecessor. And now you exploit your failure to rationalize brazen torture which doesn't work anyway, which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding, which only humiliates our country further in the world, and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate. And there it is, sir: Are yours the actions of a true American? I'm Keith Olbermann. Good night and good luck."
Below is a complete transcript of Olbermann's "Special Comment" from the September 25 Countdown show:
Keith Olbermann: "Finally tonight, a 'Special Comment' about President Clinton's interview. The headlines about it are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back. It is not important that the current President's portable public chorus has described his predecessor's tone as 'crazed.' Our tone should be crazed. The nation's freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al-Qaeda. The nation's marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would've quit.
"Nonetheless, the headline is this: Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11 and the current presidential administration. 'At least I tried,' he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. 'That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.' Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years.
"The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11. The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors. The Bush Administration did not understand the daily briefing entitled 'Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.' The Bush Administration did not try. Moreover, for the last five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in particular the President, has been given the greatest pass for incompetence and malfeasance in American history.
"President Roosevelt was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signs, some of them 17 years old, before Pearl Harbor. President Hoover was correctly blamed for, if not the Great Depression itself, then the disastrous economic steps he took in the immediate aftermath of the Stock Market Crash. Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War, though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.
"But not this President. To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been President on September 11, 2001, or the nearly eight months that preceded it. That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the executive. But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now.
"Except for this: After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts, that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility entirely Mr. Clinton's. Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly. As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him by proxy. Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.
"Consider the timing: the very same weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is, not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it. The kind of proof of incompetence for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion in a scapegoat. It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired but a propagandist promoted: Promise to talk of charity and generosity, but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless. And don't even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself, blame your audience for e-mailing you the question.
"Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen. He told the great truth untold about this administration's negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about bin Laden. Mr. Clinton was brave. Then again, Chris Wallace might be braver still. Had I in one moment surrendered all my credibility as a journalist, and been irredeemably humiliated, as was he, I would have gone home and started a new career selling seeds by mail.
"The smearing by proxy, of course, did not begin Friday afternoon. Disney was the first to sell out its corporate reputation, with The Path to 9/11. Of that company's crimes against truth, one needs to say little. Simply put, someone there enabled an authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bush's new and improved history. The basic plotline was this: Because he was distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.
"The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of that slapdash theory is that the right-wingers who have advocated it, who try to sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews, have simply skipped past its most glaring flaw. Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin Laden in 1998 because of the Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on August 20 of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he did so? That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie Wag the Dog. Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton's judgement. Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri, the future Attorney General, echoed Coats. Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.
"And, of course, were it true Clinton had been distracted by the Lewinsky witch hunt, who on Earth conducted the Lewinsky witch hunt? Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years? Who corrupted the political media? Who made it impossible for us to even bring back on the air the counterterrorism analysts, like Dr. Richard Haass and James Dunegan, who had warned, at this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of the cells from the Middle East who sought to attack us here? Who preempted them in order to strangle us with the trivia that was 'All Monica All The Time'? Who distracted whom?
"This is, of course, where, as is inevitable, Mr. Bush and his henchmen prove not quite as smart as they think they are. The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by three administrations, possibly four. But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that it's all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you. The distractions of 1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed, not by Bill Clinton, but by the same people who got you elected President.
"Thus was it left for the previous President to say what so many of us have felt, what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack: You did not try. You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor. You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people. Then, you blamed your predecessor. That would be a textbook definition, sir, of cowardice.
"To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past. That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair, writing as George Orwell, gave us in the novel 1984. The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.
"'The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.' 'Power is not a means; it is an end.' 'One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. 'The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.'
"Earlier last Friday afternoon, before the Fox ambush, speaking in the far different context of the closing session of his remarkable Global Initiative, Mr. Clinton quoted Abraham Lincoln's State of the Union address from 1862: 'We must disenthrall ourselves.' Mr. Clinton did not quote the rest of Mr. Lincoln's sentence. He might well have. 'We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.' And so has Mr. Clinton helped us to disenthrall ourselves, and perhaps enabled us, even at this late and bleak date, to save our country.
"The free pass has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush. You did not act to prevent 9/11. We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11. You have failed us, then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11. You have failed us anew in Afghanistan. And you have now tried to hide your failures by blaming your predecessor. And now you exploit your failure to rationalize brazen torture which doesn't work anyway, which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding, which only humiliates our country further in the world, and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate. And there it is, sir: Are yours the actions of a true American? I'm Keith Olbermann. Good night and good luck."
