Friday, December 7, 2007

Keith Olbermann Commentary of December 6, 2007

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Keith Olbermann

I love Keith Olbermann! What an American Patriot! As a Political Scientist, writer, and speaker myself, I only wish that I could lay it all out and wax as eloquently as Keith. But then he has a staff and I don't.


But still, he focuses his show in a way that fills an incredible void that is otherwise lacking in mainstream media. I really should go back and gather up all of his older commentaries to post here. Some of his editorials are so potent and biting that it brings chills to your spine just listening to him lay it out. Keith is so on target, so sharp in his criticisms, so articulate in his presentation, and so very courageous in his willingness to speak truth to power, that it is amazing that he is still on MSNBC.

To say it another way, I know of no other journalist in main stream media that even comes close to presenting a perspective which is so balanced and fair, and yet it is the truth that you can't find elsewhere in the world of watered down reporting that passes for news today.

Keith is no only a first class journalist, he is the very definition of a true American Patriot. I want to thank Keith for all he does for this country which is no doubt, way more than he would ever be willing to take credit for but he has earned that appreciation many time over.

Thank You Keith!


Keith Olbermann
Commentary of December 6, 2007





Keith Olbermann
Transcript of Commentary
of December 6, 2007


Finally, as promised, a Special Comment about the President’s cataclysmic deception about Iran. There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr. Bush has left us with tonight.

We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole — or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked — at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so — whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself. After Ms Perino’s announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear now.

In August, the President was told by his hand-picked Major Domo of intelligence, Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what “everybody thought” about Iran might be, in essence, crap.

Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president, Ahmadinejad:

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.”

And as he said that, Mr. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.

Or was it, sir, to scare the Americans?

Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used to scare us about Iraq?

In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, sir, would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.

A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president, shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience.

Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr Bush.

The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, sir, that you see in the mirror.

And the mind reels at the thought of a Vice President fully briefed on the revised intel as long as two weeks ago — briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago — who never bothered to mention it to his boss.

It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, it was widely believed that he was little more than a front-man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes string-puller.

Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is inescapable, that Dick Cheney is either this president’s evil ventriloquist, or he thinks he is.

What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information of this urgency and this gravity, and wind up back at his desk the next morning, instead of winding up before a Congressional investigation — or a criminal one?

Mr Bush — if you can still hear us — if you did not previously agree to this scenario in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you’re the Remington Steele — you must disenthrall yourself: Mr Cheney has usurped your constitutional powers, cut you out of the information loop, and led you down the path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts have become optional, the intel is valued less than the hunch, and the assistant runs the store.

The problem is, sir, your assistant is robbing you — and your country — blind. Not merely in monetary terms, Mr. Bush, but more importantly, robbing you of the traditions and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk, for centuries: Honesty, Law, Moral Force.

Mr. Cheney has helped, sir, to make your administration into the kind our ancestors saw in the 1860’s and 1870’s and 1880’s — the ones that abandoned Reconstruction, and sent this country marching backwards into the pit of American Apartheid.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland…

Presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure, Mr. Bush.

Presidents who will be remembered as functions only of those who opposed them — the opponents whom history proved right.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland… Bush.

Would that we could let this President off the hook by seeing him only as marionette or moron.

But a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may not be very good at it, he is, himself, still a manipulative, Machiavellian, snake-oil salesman.

The Bushian etymology was tracked by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post’s website.

It is staggering.

March 31st: “Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon…”

June 5th: Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons…”

June 19th: “consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon…”

July 12th: “the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons…”

August 6th: “this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon…” Notice a pattern?

Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.

Then, sometime between August 6th and August 9th, those terms are suddenly swapped out, so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has warned the President, not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of terror — but there may not even be a tree there…

McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.

August 9th: “They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program…”

August 28th: “Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons…”

October 4th: “you should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon…”

October 17th: “until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren’t real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon.”

Before August 9th, it’s: “Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.”

After August 9th, it’s: “Desire, pursuit, want… knowledge, technology, know-how to enrich uranium.”

And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that the National Intelligence Estimate this week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003…And you talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on October 17th…

And that term suspending is just a coincidence?

And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last week?

Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be legally true — something like “what the definition of ‘is’ is” — but with the subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war.

Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial… but ethically, it is a lie.

It is indefensible.

You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy on the other end had already hung up.

You, Mr. Bush, are a bald-faced liar.

And more over, you must have realized that John Bolton, and Norman Podhoretz, and the Wall Street Journal Editorial board, are also bald-faced liars.

We are to believe that the Intel Community, or maybe the State Department, cooked the raw intelligence about Iran, falsely diminished the Iranian nuclear threat, to make you look bad?

And you proceeded to let them make you look bad?

You not only knew all of this about Iran, in early August, but you also knew it was all accurate.

And instead of sharing this good news with the people you have obviously forgotten you represent, you merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people, to legally cover your own backside, while you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of — as you phrased it on August 28th: a quote “nuclear holocaust” — and, as you phrased it on October 17th, quote: “World War III.”

My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase “George Bush has no business being president.”

Well, guess what?

Tonight: hanged by your own words and convicted by your own deliberate lies…

You, sir, have no business being president.

Good night, and good luck!



end

Monday, December 3, 2007

Senator "I'm not gay" Craig has sex with 8 men

From Buzzflash.com -FOR PROGRESSIVES, BY PROGRESSIVES

Larry Craig Gets Caught With His Pants Down, As Recalled by Four Men. Actually, He Often Had Gay Sex With His Pants On.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Mark Karlin, Editor and Publisher, BuzzFlash.com

December 2, 2007

Well, it looks like Larry "I am Not Gay" Craig -- who has remained a senator despite his initial promise to resign as of September 30 -- has been caught by Idaho's most influential paper, the Idaho Statesman, and left without a stall to stand on, so to speak.

In a December 2nd article, accompanied by graphic audio accounts of gay sexual encounters with Craig, the Idaho Statesman (owned by McClatchy Newspapers) provides the names and stories of four men who appear to undercut Senator Craig's claims that what happened in a Minnesota washroom was due to him being a victim of "profiling."

We're not familiar with older, tall white guys from Idaho being "profiled" a whole lot, and apparently the long-standing rumors about Craig are once again being confirmed. Craig has shunned and ridiculed the Idaho Statesman since it first began exploring Craig's hypocrisy on his sexual preferences (he has been a big anti-gay stalwart). But the newspaper has kept on the beat, so to speak, and documents its article about the post-Minneapolis revelations about Senator Craig with graphic audio clips.

As we noted in our BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite "award" to Senator Craig on August 31st of this year:

Here is an epicenter of GOP Hypocrisy: the pro-family, pro sanctity of marriage, NRA Board member, and point man in Congress who gets caught trying to arrange a gay sexual encounter in a Midwest airport washroom. This is not a case of alleged lascivious behavior: Craig pled guilty to the charge....

No doubt, Larry Craig was claiming to be technically correct when he welcomed reporters to his news conference with the sentence: "Thank you for coming out today" and then declared, after many pokes in his numb wife's backside, that "I am not gay." His escape hatch for that claim is that he is apparently bisexual, not exclusively gay.

Yes, the GOP, like many repressed priests, has a monstrously large hypocrisy and violation of the public trust problem. It's almost become an axiom that the more self-righteous the Republican or Fundamentalist, the more likely he or she is to be a hypocritical sinner of the flesh.

So it's not the gay sex that is the issue; it's the hypocrisy!

That's why BuzzFlash began GOPHypocrites.com in September of 2003. But, as we note every week, "So many Republican hypocrites, so little time."

We highly recommend not only reading the Idaho Statesman article, but also listening to some of the audiotapes online.

It's always informative to know about the extracurricular activities of a recently installed member of the Idaho Hall of Fame, "Idahoans on Loan to the World."

Oh, and apparently Senator "I am Not Gay" Craig apparently often had gay sex with his pants on.

Not very romantic of him.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG



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