Keith Olbermann to Bush

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on September 12, 2006). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

I avoided saying much of anything yesterday, preferring to spend a quiet day wandering the local zoo with Prairie, rather than participating in either a maudlin celebration memorial of the 9/11 attacks or yet another caustic condemnation of the Bush regime and their conduct in the last five years. For us, it was the perfect way to spend the day: gorgeous weather that was neither too hot nor too cool, the animals were nice and active, and the zoo wasn’t very crowded at all.

Today I’ve been working on uploading the rest of the photos from the zoo, sending them up in small batches, and bouncing around the ‘net while photos upload. I checked out Apple‘s new announcements (the ‘Cover Flow‘ eyecandy in iTunes 7 is slick, and the newer, smaller iPod Shuffle is incredible), started a silly little group on Flickr called the Googly Eyes Project, and other random oddments.

While skimming over my LiveJournal Friends Page, sirriamnis led me to this ‘Special Comment’ by Keith Olbermann. It’s one of the few things I’ve found worth using YouTube‘s embed feature for — this is good. For the bandwidth challenged, the transcript is under the jump (courtesy of Crooks and Liars).

And lastly tonight a Special Comment on why we are here. Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space behind me, and for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

And all the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my own friends, two in the planes and as I discovered from those “missing posters” seared still into my soul, two more in the Towers.

And I knew as well, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be personal. And anyone who claims that I and others like me are “soft”, or have forgotten the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic dilettante; and at worst, an idiot — whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast, of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds, none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty. Five years later there is no Memorial to the dead. Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals. Five years later this country’s wound is still open. Five years later this country’s mass grave is still unmarked. Five years later, this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial, barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field, Mr. Lincoln said, “We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice. Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their own reprehensible inaction. “We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. So we won’t.”

Instead they bicker and buck-pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they’re doing, instead of doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir — on these 16 empty acres, the terrorists are clearly still winning. And in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed, but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism: of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support. Those who did not belong to his party, tabled that. Those who doubted the mechanics of his election, ignored that. Those who wondered of his qualifications, forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation’s wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people. The President, and those around him, did that.

They promised bi-partisanship and then showed that to them, “bi-partisanship” meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused; as appeasers; as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, “validate the strategy of the terrorists.”

They promised protection, and then showed that to them “protection” meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken. A despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated Al-Qaeda as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ’something to do with 9/11′, is “lying by implication.”

The impolite phrase, is “impeachable offense.”

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this: the current, and curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11. Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night? A mini-series, created, influenced, possibly financed by the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes. The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting both into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections, how dare you or those around you ever “spin” 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded — are still succeeding — as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero, so too have they succeeded, and are still succeeding, as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney’s continuing sell-out of the truth (and of this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things. Long ago, a series called “The Twilight Zone” broadcast a riveting episode entitled “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.”

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An “alien” is shot, but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help.

The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen finally, manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there is no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, “they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it is themselves.”

And then in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight.

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own, for the children, and the children yet unborn.

When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of that freedom we are somehow un-American; when we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have “forgotten the lessons of 9/11”; look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me this:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

iTunesAlways Look On The Bright Side Of Life” by Monty Python’s Spamalot from the album Original Cast Recording (2005, 4:31).

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