Must-See TV

Keith Olbermann, from last night's Countdown, gives takes Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld to task for his "fascism" and moral and "intellectual confusion" comments (see previous post); you can also download QuickTime and WMA versions of this from Crooks and Liars.



[PS] Check out Rocky Anderson, mayor of Salt Lake City (who protested Dear Leader's visit to his town), take the Fox and Friends morning show hosts to task for their propagandistic ways in this video over at One Good Move. After getting constantly interrupted and harrassed by the hosts, he comes back with this:

Blank-eye male Fox host: But as the mayor of the city, is it one of your jobs to welcome the President of the United States? You can protest all you want later on.

Anderson: My job is not to just be a doormat. I wish you people would understand what Theodore Roosevelt so clearly understood when he said that to stand behind a President, right or wrong, is not only survile and unpatriotic but it is immoral, that it's something our country...

Blank-eyed female Fox host: Well, our time with you is finished...

[PS2] Chris Suellentrop over at the NYTimes Select Opinionator blog find's Olbermann's commentary as just a tired flame-war rant.

On his MSNBC show last night, Keith Olbermann outed himself as a 1938ist (someone who believes the current global situation resembles Europe on the eve of World War II) with a twist. In Olbermann’s telling, Donald Rumsfeld represents the modern-day Neville Chamberlain. This is an inversion of the usual argument, endorsed by Rumsfeld in a Tuesday speech, that Bush administration critics are neo-Chamberlains. Crooks and Liars posts the video and the text of Olbermann’s commentary. Watch the video to see Olbermann become red-faced with rage.

Depending on your political perspective, you will see Olbermann’s remarks as courageous truth-telling, tiresome Chomskyism or — my vote — as the latest example that the nation’s blog-driven political discourse has devolved to the level of a Usenet flame war in its late stages. It is, after all, a triple violation of Godwin’s Law to respond to a Nazi analogy with a Nazi counter-analogy, and then still later, as Olbermann does, say that Rumsfeld and the Bushies represent “a new type of fascism,” making them Chamberlain and Hitler rolled into a singular, fearsome NeoAppeasoFascism. (The Los Angeles Times editorial page has advice for Rumsfeld that could be directed at some administration critics as well: “There’s a reason why high school debaters are warned away from Nazi analogies: They’re almost always disproportionate.”)

How does this Rumsfeld-as-Chamberlain analogy work? As Olbermann sees it, the lesson to be learned from 1938 is not “don’t appease foreign aggression,” but rather “don’t stick to your foreign-policy theory when the facts contradict it.”