Olbermann to Bush: "Your Hypocrisy Is So Vast"
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC "Countdown"
Thursday 20 September 2007
A reaction to Thursday's press conference:
the president was the one who interjected Gen. Petraeus into the political dialogue
in the first place.
So the President, behaving a little bit more than usual, like we would all
interrupt him while he was watching his favorite cartoons on the DVR, stepped
before the press conference microphone and after side-stepping most of the substantive
issues like the Israeli raid on Syria, in condescending and infuriating fashion,
produced a big political finish that indicates, certainly, that if it wasn't
already - the annual Republican witch-hunting season is underway.
"I thought the ad was disgusting. I felt like the ad was an attack not
only on General Petraeus, but on the U.S. Military."
"And I was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democrat party spoke
out strongly against that kind of ad.
"And that leads me to come to this conclusion: that most Democrats are
afraid of irritating a left-wing group like Moveon.org or more afraid of irritating
them, than they are of irritating the United States military."
"That was a sorry deal."
First off, it's "Democrat-ic" party.
You keep pretending you're not a politician, so stop using words your party
made up. Show a little respect.
Secondly, you could say this seriously after the advertising/mugging of Senator
Max Cleland? After the swift-boating of John Kerry?
But most importantly, making that the last question?
So that there was no chance at a follow-up?
So nobody could point out, as Chris Matthews so incisively did, a week ago
tonight, that you were the one who inappropriately interjected General Petraeus
into the political dialogue of this nation in the first place!
Deliberately, premeditatedly, and virtually without precedent, you shanghaied
a military man as your personal spokesman and now you're complaining about the
outcome, and then running away from the microphone?
Eleven months ago the President's own party, the Republican National Committee,
introduced this very different kind of advertisement, just nineteen days before
the mid-term elections.
Bin Laden.
Al-Zawahiri's rumored quote of six years ago about having bought "suitcase
bombs."
All set against a ticking clock, and finally a blinding explosion and the dire
announcement:
"These are the stakes - vote, November 7th."
That one was ok, Mr. Bush?
Terrorizing your own people in hopes of getting them to vote for your own party
has never brought as much as a public comment from you?
The Republican Hamstringing of Captain Max Cleland and lying about Lieutenant
John Kerry met with your approval?
But a shot at General Petraeus, about whom you conveniently ignore it, was
you who reduced him from four-star hero to a political hack, merits this pissy
juvenile blast at the Democrats on national television?
Your hypocrisy is so vast that if we could somehow use it to fill the ranks
in Iraq you could realize your dream and keep us fighting there until the year
3000.
The line between the military and the civilian government is not to be crossed.
When Douglas MacArthur attempted to make policy for the United States in Korea
half a century ago, President Truman moved quickly to fire him, even though
Truman knew it meant his own political suicide, and the deification of a General
who history suggests had begun to lose his mind.
When George McClellan tried to make policy for the Union in the Civil War,
President Lincoln finally fired his chief General, even though he knew McClellan
could galvanize political opposition which he did when McClellan ran as Lincoln's
presidential opponent in 1864, nearly defeating our greatest president.
Even when the conduit flowed the other way and Senator Joseph McCarthy tried
to smear the Army because it wouldn't defer the service of one of McCarthy's
staff aides, the entire civilian and Defense Department structures, after four
years of fearful servitude, rose up against McCarthy and said "enough"
and buried him.
The list is not endless but it is instructive.
Air Force General LeMay - who broke with Kennedy over the Cuban Missile
Crisis and was retired.
Army General Edwin Anderson Walker - who started passing out John Birch
Society leaflets to his soldiers.
Marine General Smedley Butler - who revealed to Congress the makings of
a plot to remove FDR as President and for merely being approached by the plotters,
was phased out of the military hierarchy.
These careers were ended because the line between the military and the civilian
is not to be crossed!
Mr. Bush, you had no right to order General Petraeus to become your front man.
And he obviously should have refused that order and resigned rather than ruin
his military career.
The upshot is and contrary it is, to the MoveOn advertisement he betrayed himself
more than he did us.
But there has been in his actions a sort of reflexive courage, some twisted
vision of duty at a time of crisis. That the man doesn't understand that serving
officers cannot double as serving political ops, is not so much his fault as
it is your good, exploitable, fortune.
But Mr. Bush, you have hidden behind the General's skirts, and today you have
hidden behind the skirts of 'the planted last question' at a news conference,
to indicate once again that your presidency has been about the tilted playing
field, about no rules for your party in terms of character assassination and
changing the fabric of our nation, and no right for your opponents or critics
to as much as respond.
That is not only un-American but it is dictatorial.
And in pimping General David Petraeus and in the violation of everything this
country has been assiduously and vigilantly against for 220 years, you have
tried to blur the gleaming radioactive demarcation between the military and
the political, and to portray your party as the one associated with the military,
and your opponents as the ones somehow antithetical to it.
You did it again today and you need to know how history will judge the line
you just crossed.
It is a line thankfully only the first of a series that makes the military
political, and the political, military.
It is a line which history shows is always the first one crossed when a democratic
government in some other country has started down the long, slippery, suicidal
slope towards a Military Junta.
Get back behind that line, Mr. Bush, before some of your supporters mistake
your dangerous transgression, for a call to further politicize our military.
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