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Here's to Dorks
Watch the whole shebang. The tenor it is striking. He's trying reeeal hard, but his ratings are up 69%. Must be doing something right. Four years too late, and better late than never. What a blowhard, God bless 'im.
Update: In other news (not that this be a news blog, for after all who could ever hope to compete with the mighty Huffington, or Digby):
(Right. This is worthy of investigation but the president of Diebold saying he was determined to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004 was just a figure of speech.) The fact that the government is investigating Hugo "sulphur" Chavez's alleged interest in election machines may very well be part of an emerging post-election GOP narrative. I have believed that Republicans might claim vote fraud in this election for some time.
I wrote back in June:
"The Republicans have figured out something that the Democrats refuse to understand. All political messages can be useful, no matter which side has created it. You use them all situationally. The Republicans have been adopting our slogans and memes for years. They get that the way people hear this stuff often is not in a particularly partisan sense. They just hear it, in a sort of disembodied way. Over time they become comfortable with it and it can be exploited for all sorts of different reasons...We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate --- and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections...."(do read the rest)
By Matt | October 26, 2006 in Politics, Television | Permalink
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That Olbermann, he's on a roll:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15321167/
MSNBC.com
'Beginning of the end of America'
Olbermann addresses the Military Commissions Act in a
special comment
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Updated: 12:00 p.m. PT Oct 19, 2006
We have lived as if in a trance.
We have lived as people in fear.
And now—our rights and our freedoms in peril—we slowly
awaken to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong
thing.
Therefore, tonight have we truly become the inheritors
of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military
Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our
ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis
and melodramatic fear-mongering:
A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is
the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before—and we have been here before,
led here by men better and wiser and nobler than
George W. Bush.
We have been here when President John Adams insisted
that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to
save American lives, only to watch him use those acts
to jail newspaper editors.
American newspaper editors, in American jails, for
things they wrote about America.
We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson
insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save
American lives, only to watch him use that Act to
prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he
disparaged as “Hyphenated Americans,” most of whom
were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.
American public speakers, in American jails, for
things they said about America.
And we have been here when President Franklin D.
Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was
necessary to save American lives, only to watch him
use that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000
Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt,
told Congress: “It makes no difference whether he is
an American citizen—he is still a Japanese.”
American citizens, in American camps, for something
they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the
choices they or their ancestors had made about coming
to America.
Each of these actions was undertaken for the most
vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of
reasons.
And each was a betrayal of that for which the
president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.
Adams and his party were swept from office, and the
Alien and Sedition Acts erased.
Many of the very people Wilson silenced survived him,
and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got
900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was
conducted entirely from his jail cell.
And Roosevelt’s internment of the Japanese was not
merely the worst blight on his record, but it would
necessitate a formal apology from the government of
the United States to the citizens of the United States
whose lives it ruined.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable
of reasons.
In times of fright, we have been only human.
We have let Roosevelt’s “fear of fear itself” overtake
us.
We have listened to the little voice inside that has
said, “the wolf is at the door; this will be
temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass.”
We have accepted that the only way to stop the
terrorists is to let the government become just a
little bit like the terrorists.
Just the way we once accepted that the only way to
stop the Soviets was to let the government become just
a little bit like the Soviets.
Or substitute the Japanese.
Or the Germans.
Or the Socialists.
Or the Anarchists.
Or the Immigrants.
Or the British.
Or the Aliens.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable
of reasons.
And, always, always wrong.
“With the distance of history, the questions will be
narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans
take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes
to defeat that threat?”
Wise words.
And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.
Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the
Military Commissions Act.
You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.
Sadly—of course—the distance of history will recognize
that the threat this generation of Americans needed to
take seriously was you.
We have a long and painful history of ignoring the
prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that “those
who would give up essential liberty to purchase a
little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor
safety.”
But even within this history we have not before
codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that
wellspring of protection from which all essential
liberties flow.
You, sir, have now befouled that spring.
You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.
You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it
freedom.
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most
inescapable of reasons.
And — again, Mr. Bush — all of them, wrong.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom
to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare
anything this country has ever done to anything the
terrorists have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom
to a man who has insisted again that “the United
States does not torture. It’s against our laws and
it’s against our values” and who has said it with a
straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib
Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively
fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom
to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not
merely any non-American citizens “unlawful enemy
combatants” and ship them somewhere—anywhere -- but
may now, if he so decides, declare you an “unlawful
enemy combatant” and ship you somewhere - anywhere.
And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the
newspaper editors when John Adams was president or the
pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the
Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was
president.
And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been
suspended for American citizens but only for everybody
else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the
street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an
undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy
combatant”—exactly how are you going to convince them
to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do
you think this attorney general is going to help you?
This President now has his blank check.
He lied to get it.
He lied as he received it.
Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about
how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it
against?
“These military commissions will provide a fair
trial,” you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush, “in which the
accused are presumed innocent, have access to an
attorney and can hear all the evidence against them.”
"Presumed innocent," Mr. Bush?
The very piece of paper you signed as you said that,
allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point
just before they sustain “serious mental and physical
trauma” in the hope of getting them to incriminate
themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva
Conventions in their own defense.
"Access to an attorney," Mr. Bush?
Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this
program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was
only granted access to his detainee defendant on the
promise that the detainee would plead guilty.
"Hearing all the evidence," Mr. Bush?
The Military Commissions Act specifically permits the
introduction of classified evidence not made available
to the defense.
Your words are lies, Sir.
They are lies that imperil us all.
“One of the terrorists believed to have planned the
9/11 attacks,” you told us yesterday, “said he hoped
the attacks would be the beginning of the end of
America.”
That terrorist, sir, could only hope.
Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line
of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to
what you have wrought.
Habeas corpus? Gone.
The Geneva Conventions? Optional.
The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an
eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal
protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be
“the beginning of the end of America.”
And did it even occur to you once, sir — somewhere in
amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional,
terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 -- that
with only a little further shift in this world we now
know—just a touch more repudiation of all of that for
which our patriots died --- did it ever occur to you
once that in just 27 months and two days from now when
you leave office, some irresponsible future president
and a “competent tribunal” of lackeys would be
entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare
the status of “unlawful enemy combatant” for -- and
convene a Military Commission to try -- not John
Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most
inescapable of reasons.
And doubtless, Sir, all of them—as always—wrong.
Posted by: CR | Oct 26, 2006 10:09:44 PM
I watch Olbermann a lot and if we manage to extricate outselves from the terrible situation we are currently in we will look back with a lot of appreciation at his efforts to hold the administration accountable and energize Americans. What's striking is the seeming passivity of the people -- across categories, social classes, etc. The only sign of life in the form of protest we've seen recently in the United States were the anti-immmigration 'reform' protests. I have heard that immigration is one of the few topics that breaks in favor of Republicans -- thus the signing of the new stupid fence law yesterday (102606). But the lack of noise concerning the war -- it almost seems like a successful tactic, where the Bush administration is condemned to a completely enabling political environment and culture that really allows him to do many of the things he wants, with the result that he is revealed to be even more thoroughly wrong than if he had confronted a more vocal opposition. Still, I think it would do more for our honor if there were greater explicit outrage of the kind Olbermann is encouraging. Maybe there is and it is being quite appropriately channeled into elections. Some writers have commented that the lack of a vocal antiwar movement has made it more difficult for Bush and company to demonize those who oppose the war.
The problem is that we are going to be held hostage to a Democratic center that conceives "the problem" in Iraq in terms of "not doing enough." "Rumsfeld mismanaged the war," Senator Clinton claims. Her idea then seems to be that we need to manage it better.
Not that anything is over yet. I predict a Republican surprise: Rumsfeld's resignation, say about five days before the election, the selection of someone who looks good to take his place, thus taking the wind out of the sails of those who say we should "get it right" in Iraq. It will be hailed as big news because Bush has never fired anyone before. It won't be liked the fourth cabinet reshuffle that everyone yawns at, because he never shuffled his cabinet before. That's why it will be "news."
Posted by: Swifty | Oct 27, 2006 6:47:37 PM
Posted by: | Oct 29, 2006 12:37:01 AM
and Michael J Fox making news for courage
Posted by: | Oct 29, 2006 12:52:24 AM
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