Wow Olbermann blasts Bush

[R0cketer]

A textbook definition of cowardice
Keith Olbermann comments on Bill Clinton's Fox News
interview

SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
MSNBC

Updated: 6:01 a.m. PT Sept 26, 2006

The headlines about them 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 Qaida; 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 11th, 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 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.

He 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 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 plot-line 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 this 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 Monica
Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same people not
applaud him for having bombed bin Laden's camps in
Afghanistan and Sudan on Aug. 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 judgment.

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 counter-terrorism analysts like Dr.
Richard Haass, and James Dunegan, who had warned, at
this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998,
of 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, instead of some commendable acknowledgment that
you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months
before it, we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of
history, designed by somebody who evidently read the
Orwell playbook too quickly.

Thus, instead of some explanation for the inertia of
your first eight months in office, we are told that
you have kept us "safe" ever since"?a statement that
might range anywhere from zero, to 100 percent, true.

We have nothing but your word, and your word has long
since ceased to mean anything.

And, of course, the one time you have ever given us
specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr.
Bush, you got the name of the supposedly targeted
Tower in Los Angeles wrong.


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, Mr. Bush, 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 book
"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, Mr. Bush:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

[friedtaters]

AGREED

[imported_biggamesjames]

As a non-partisan observer do you buy any of that stuff Rock?

[R0cketer]

Yes, some of it is true and valid.

I've said before that its funny that they complain that Clinton was distracted by Monica, when the Republicans were the ones that kept hounding on it. I mean it was painfully obvious to watch Clinton drug over coals on his mistakes, and no question he made mistakes, yet it seems like Bush is almost above it.

I read part of the text of the Clinton-Fox thing, going to try to watch the video but Clinton definitely knew an ambush was coming and prepared. Look we've seen Clinton having everything but his [censored] drug out in public and he didn't get mad, but he was definitely mad during this.

I think Olbermann was right, no way you can blame one administration, or one party, there is plenty of blame to go around to all, both sides of the fence. Both sides are horrible for putting extra language or tossing unrelated things onto bills, knowing that the other side will vote against it, and then down them for voting against it.

It would be like the VHSL putting up a solution for size disparities, and then on the main end saying that nobody under a 2.0 GPA could play. Both things of themselves may be good, and you may have people who would support one thing and not the other, but the two shouldn't be attached. (This is all just an example, the numbers etc are completely random)

I give Clinton credit, he says they tried and they failed. Now maybe they didn't try enough, thats up to obvious debate, but at least he does take some blame. We really don't get Bush taking blame, or haven't. As much as we hear Clinton didn't get him, it almost gets forgotten that Bush had reports and did nothing either, its 'well we didn't know when or where'. I guess Clinton did or knew that several years later that things would be worse? That's like in 4 or 6 years from now, a guy from Kansas blows up the Indianapolis Speedway and whomever is president then blaming it on George Bush for not knowing that he was going to do this.

I remember the Blackhawk Down thing, that they did want them out of there the day after, and truthfully its similar to what the Democrats or such do now wanting us out of Iraq everytime there is a death. We have to remain strong is said now, but it didn't apply then?

Like I said, there is plenty of blame to go around...

[imported_burrhead]

If you have known Rocketer as long as I have, well if it is against a Republican, it's the gospel. Clinton did have Bin Laden for sure one time, and called it off. Open your eyes and tiny brain for once Freddy. You are not home listening to all the propaganda.!!!!!!!!!!!! [img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/007.gif[/img]

[R0cketer]

LOL you're so full of crap you're eyes are brown and your hair is turning back brown.

I said blame for all. I'm not blaming Clinton or Bush, both sides. More than enough for both, and not just them, the first Bush and probably more. There is definitely some truth in it.

Obviously you can't dare to see the your boy Dubya could be *gasp* wrong. How many times have we bombed places that Bin Laden was at, yet, we didn't get him? Knowing where he is and knowing where he is don't always seem to be the case, do they?

You can't have it both ways Burrhead. If we leave Iraq now, it shows weakness to the middle East or to the terrorists and like Clinton said, the same ones who say that now were the very ones wanting out after Blackhawk Down. So it didn't show weakness to want to leave then but it does now? Come on answer and don't spout off your typical rhetoric.

Now then, if you want to insult me again....I'll be more than happy to match wits against you with 'my tiny brain' anytime.

Its funny, I can say blame both sides, yet if something is said against a Democrat, no matter who says it, according to you, its gospel. If something is said against a Republican, its propaganda. Heck Burrhead, I've not voted a straight ticket that I can recall (outside of maybe when there was like 1 vote, kind of difficult to vote both sides on a 1 vote election). Like I said, when you're around both sides, you realize both sides are full of it, not just one side as you like to believe.

It's funny, Clinton was so bad that he could keep a Republican in his cabinet, and heck Bush can't even keep half the Republicans on his side.

If Clinton could have had him, and didn't, then that's his bad.

How long as Bush been after him, with actual forces in the area and not gotten him?

Go ahead answer without rhetoric...

[Merlin]

Sounds like he's pretty much calling a spade a spade, imho.

If you have the time, go back to the "I Lied" thread, I put part of this up yesterday. The stuff is on VIDEO tape, if you want to watch the intewviews I'll hunt the web site for ya, "Geee- get out the tin hat George, somebody is talking-
Quote:
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BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, February 27, 2001)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Taliban in Afghanistan, they have offered that they are ready to hand over Osama bin Laden to Saudi Arabia if the United States drops its sanctions, and the"?they have a kind of deal that they want to make with the United States. Do you have any comments (INAUDIBLE)?




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Countdown with Keith Olberman.
Quote:
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SANDY BERGER, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: With survivors of the U.S.S. Cole reinforced the reality that America is in a deadly struggle with a new breed of anti-Western jihadists. Nothing less than a war, I think, is fair to describe this.
Eight days later, Clarke sent Rice the strategy Clinton had developed for retaliating in the event that al Qaeda was found to have been behind the previous October's attack on the U.S.S. Cole. The next day, the FBI conclusively pinned the Cole attack on al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush ordered no military strike, no escalation of existing Clinton measures. Instead, he repeated Clinton's previous diplomatic efforts, writing a letter to Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf in February and another on August 4.

Until September 11, even when Mr. Bush was asked about the Cole, an attack carried out on water by men in a boat, he offered a consistent prescription for keeping America safe, one he reiterated upon taking office.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)



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(I really like this game)" There is the storyline they have the tapes. It is kinda hard to argue with that, isn't it? What I said all along. Clinton did better with business, Bush did well the first 6 weeks in Iraq, but I knew he was playing cowboy and would drag this out forever. Most of those statements are based on filmed interviews, but if you can't get the other party to respond , you just sorta make a statement. Guess they shoulda left dumb ole Bill alone.

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[imported_burrhead]

Please, you and Rock just stop and breathe in and breathe out. Don't you think for one minute Bush would put a bullet in Bin Laden's head himself if he could? The man has taken more criticism than slick Willie ever did, and by his interviews it has taken its toll. I've said countless times that Bush wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but the man has his agenda and he's sticking to it.

[R0cketer]

Notice you didn't answer the question there Burrhead. Maybe you should breath in/breath out and take a reading class or something.