Skip to content
September 21, 2007 / Dusty

Keith Olbermann and his Special Comment


KO addresses the MoveOn controversy and Bushco’s bullshit remark.

Filed under politics

Leave a Comment

Leave a Comment
  1. earl bockenfeld / Sep 21 2007 11:13 am

    Stockholm Syndrome on the march!

    The only showdown that mattered happened months ago. Democrats passed a war appropriation that funded the phased withdrawal of troops. Bush vetoed that appropriation and said he would only sign an appropriation that funded open-ended war. Bush sought to portray a congressional refusal to appropriate money for an open-ended military involvement in Iraq as some kind of plot to leave the troops starving and without bullets in Iraq. The press largely bought into this frame, which was re-enforced by the fact that many leading Democrats immediately decided to buy into it as well. The party then decided not to try to fight to reframe the issue but, instead, to accept it. Given that framing of the question, the only thing to do was surrender and give Bush his money. And given that precedent, the only thing to do is to keep on surrendering any time Bush rhetorically holds the troops’ well-being hostage to his preference for perpetual war.

    That was a blunder — a decision that condemned hundreds of Americans to die in Iraq — and one that appears to have resulted from a total failure of the leadership to do any advance planning about their legislative tactics. All of September 2007 has been a meaningless sideshow. People find it comforting, I guess, to try to convince themselves that MoveOn is the reason our troops will be engaged in at least 18 more months of futile combat in Iraq, but it’s just not true — legislative defeat in September was inevitable, and the war is still very unpopular and still a very promising issue for 2008.

    These days, mock outrage is used by every side of every dispute. It’s fair enough to criticize something your opponent said while secretly thanking your lucky stars that he said it. The fuss over this MoveOn.org ad is something else: it is the result of a desperate scavenging for umbrage material. When so many people are clamoring for a chance to swoon that they each have to take a number and when the landscape is so littered with folks lying prostrate and pretending to be dead that it starts to look like the end of a Civil War battle re-enactment, this isn’t spontaneous mass outrage. This is choreography.

    Reply

Leave a comment