I couldn’t make this up:
“No voice came to me and told me to do this,” Olbermann says. “It’s simply the eruption of the need to say something. If this country was founded on anything, it’s the fight to the death to protect the right of someone to say that which you disagree with. I just think maybe I’m first in voicing skepticism of the administration that’s been irrationally muted.”
He’s referring, of course, to his recent string of “special comments,” each more ridiculous than the last. Johnny Dollar at Olbermann Watch summed up Olbermann’s style thusly:
Smugness (“Mister” Bush), phony outrage (“frightening”, “dangerous”), and stale guilt-by-association smears (“Richard Nixon”) do not make for heroic journalism. They are the tools of demagogues, tricksters, and propagandists.
Not to mention the cheese factor, like this passage from last night:
That flash of lightning freezes at the distant horizon, and we can just make out a world in which authority can actually suggest it has become unacceptable to think. Thus the lightning flash reveals not merely a President we have already seen, the one who believes he has a monopoly on current truth. It now shows us a President who has decided that of all our commanders-in-chief, ever, he alone has had the knowledge necessary to alter and re-shape our inalienable rights.
This kind of overheated rhetoric about how the Bush administration is mad with the desire to ”re-shape our inalienable rights” is just so corny.
It would be laughable if Olbermann did not represent a growing number of Americans who believe that President Bush really is a bigger threat to the country than Islamic terrorism. And in case I’m accused of attacking a straw man, this is exactly what the Boston Globe editorial board actually wrote on the anniversary of 9/11: “In the long run, the reaction of the Bush administration may prove more harmful to the national interest than even these horrific attacks.”
I could go on, but Sam Harris said everything yesterday. Read it all.
UPDATE: Ian from Hot Air has the video clip of last night’s “special comment,” and adds: “Let’s just say if this was a Tom Jones concert and Olbermann was Jones and the left-wing blogs were fans in the audience, they would be throwing their underwear at him.”