This is not a psychotic breakdown; it's a cleansing moment of clarity.

On the Olbermann/ MSNBC thing...

There are a number of theories be batted about as to why Tweety and Keith were dropped from political anchor duties by MSNBC. Personally I find the idea that took a lot of heat and was ultimately canned over apologizing for McCain's over the top 9-11 propaganda video to be offensive in the extreme.

During their convention the Republicans aired a film showing multiple images of the 9-11 attacks including images of people jumping to their deaths out of burning buildings in order to to gin up support for a political candidate. Any American, any human being that wasn't offended by that is simply a sociopath, as are so many conservative Republicans these days.

When they cut back from that video to Keith a visibly stunned Keith chided the Republicans for that garbage, rightly observed that anyone else using those images to sell a product would be cut to ribbons by the rest of the media and quickly went to commercial.

Here's the video with Keith's reaction if you missed it. The images of the people jumping from windows have been edited out but there are plenty more of offensive images contained therein. You may just want to skip to the end.



I'm sick of the media bowing to the whiny tantrums of the children that make up the conservative base of the Republican party. Some times it feels as if the ignoramuses in this country hold the rest of us hostage. This is one of those times.

And it isn't long before we're looking up, mighty anxiously, to be sure the flag's still waving over us.

Happy Fourth from me and Keith!

Look! I have one job on this lousy ship, it's *stupid*, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?

In the off chance you haven't seen this already - Olbermann is spot on is right; they were elected to one thing.

They've failed.

Devil's Snare hates sunlight! Lumos Solem!

Crooks and Liars has a great Olbermann bit in which he revists the recent demise of the right of habeas corpus.

And before we reduce the very term "habeas corpus" to something vaguely recalled as sounding kinda like the cornerstone of freedom, or maybe kinda like a character from "Harry Potter," we thought a Countdown Special Investigation was in order.

There will be no bargain, young Jedi. I shall enjoy watching you die.

In response to Keith Olbermann's excellent 911 speech Rush writes:

All right, folks. I think that is revisionist history. This idea that we were all unified on 9/11 is just bunk, and I am going to say it. I don't believe it for a moment. I think that when 9/11 happened, a lot of kooks on the left said, "A-ha! This is how we're going to get Bush. He's incompetent," or they were either saying, "Oh, no! The country is going to come together." You can't tell me that the people who hated Bush ten months earlier over the Florida aftermath, the Florida recount, all of a sudden came together and it was all kumbaya time. I do not believe it."

I'd make the observation that anyone who cannot imagine that those whose politics they disagree with would put country before party in a time of national crisis must themself be someone who consistently puts party before country and sees everything through this same lens.

Earn this.

"We are not descended from fearful men."

I won't bother to link to Keith Olbermann's takedown of Rumsfeld and this administration from last night. It's all over the net and I'm sure you've seen it. (What the hell. It's here. ) I just had a couple of thoughts while watching this barnburner.

The first is that Olbermann read one of the best speeches I've ever seen on broadcast television. Ever. He deftly turned Rumsfeld's proposition that the critics of the war in Iraq are appeasers of fascism, on it's head and effortlessly dovetailed that into the threat of American fascism as it's manifested itself through our history in names like Nixon and Joe McCarthy.

But more importantly it struck me for the first time as I watched Olbermann's speech that I've finally found something to be thankful of with regards to the Bush presidency. It's put me back in touch on a visceral level with what it truly means to be an American.

Over the course of the last couple of years I've read and re-read the constitution probably a dozen times. I've read the federalist papers for the first time since college. I've read supreme court decisions such as United States v. Butler and Griswold vs. Connecticut, even though I'm no lawyer. I just wanted to know what the constitution meant by "promote the general welfare" and what the Supreme Court saw as the limitations to our privacy.

I've read again that wonderful document that started it all: the declaration of independence. The words of which have blown past me without reflection every 4th of July. This time I thought about the words, about the frame of mind of the men who wrote that document telling the most powerful man in the world to "shove it." I thought about their stunning courage in that act. How they risked everything for an idea.

I've dug out my old high school civics textbooks and contemplated the seperation of powers. I can think of no other invention of the framers written into the constitution that meets the importance of that doctrine. Everything we are as a nation stems from that initial recognition by the framers of the constitution that even the best of men could be corrupted by power.

History's come alive for me. Particularly the middle part of the twentieth century. I have wondered for some time what the average German went through as the Weimar republic collapsed to the Nazi putsch. Why did so many good people just go along for the ride? Why were heroes so few and far between? I'm starting to better understand the answers to those questions.

My kids have come out for the better as well. They've participated in a civics lesson far more important than anything they could've read in books. They've learned by watching this president that leaders aren't infallible and that, in a democracy, the people are the ultimate check on the abuse of governmental power. That's why bad governments try and keep us afraid. They're afraid of the people.

So thank you President Bush for making me a better American. It may not have been your intention but that's the ultimate result. Through your ineptitude and disdain for the country you've actually done us a great service in forcing us to stop taking things for granted. I salute you for that.

We would not seek a battle as we are, yet as we are, we say we will not shun it.

Bill O'Reilly has a point.

I'll let that odd sentence sink in while I swear that I have NOT recently received a severe hammer blow to the head, been exposed to toxic fumes or found myself on a three day Peyote bender staggering through the desert in Eastern Oregon.

Progressives, from Randi Rhodes to Keith Olbermann to the guys at Crooks and Liars are jumping all over statements O'Reilly made during an interview of Gen. Wesley Clark a couple of days ago in which O'Reilly basically accused American forces in WW2 of committing atrocities similar to those recently revealed as having been perpertrated by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq.
Rhodes, whose father served as an infantryman in Europe during the war, seemed to take great offense to O'Reilly's remarks. During a prolonged rant on her national show she went out of her way to try draw a distinction between shooting S.S. soldiers who had been shooting at our troops moments before surrendering or burning Japanese soldiers to death who were dug into caves on Pacific islands and the cold-blooded execution of civilian men, women and children cowering in their homes in Iraq. Her definition of atrocity hinges on whether the person being executed by U.S. troops was a combatant (or recent combatant) or a civilian.

While there is no doubt that captured Axis troops sometimes faced summary execution (Eisenhower issued an infamous order near the end of the war basically instructing that no German sniper would be taken alive,) it's difficult to find a documented instance of Allied soldiers executing unarmed European civilians. Nevertheless; it would be the height of absurdity to assume such atrocities never took place by American forces in the Second World War.

I wonder if Rhodes has ever heard the cities Nagasaki or Hiroshima. Wrong theater of the war? Then how about Dresden? On the low end of estimates of civilian casualties 25,000 non-combatants were killed in the carpet-bombing of that strategically unimportant city alone. Shock and awe aren't simply modern neocon military constructs. Terror is not just a tactic of crazy islamic fanatics. Civilians are never "off limits" in a war the United States was involved in, even to U.S. troops and even a war as just and righteous as a war to stop the tyranny of fascism.

Of course none of that supports O'Reilly's larger argument that the atrocities of other U.S. soldiers in other wars somehow absolve this administration or the Marines at Haditha of atrocities in THIS war*. Quite the opposite is true. The reality that war is a horrible, bloody terrible thing that often moots moral questions by it's very nature should never be an act of choice. This President picked this unnecessary war and bears culpability for it's atrocities.



* As a side note - I'm to lazy to check it at this point but wasn't O'Reilly one of those clowns who just recently was jumping all over John Kerry's post-Vietnam war assertions that U.S. troops committed atrocities in THAT conflict? Hypocrite much? Ah, where would conservatives be without moral relativism and deliberate self-induced ADD?