Olbermann Special Comment

C&L has the video from Keith Olbermann's newest Special Comment:

President Bush is a Liar and a Fascist

Logan Murphy also has the full transcript there...

I officially apologize to Keith Olbermann for doubting him recently...
Thank you Keith Olbermann- one of the few journalists left.

EXCERPT
Mr. Bush, you say that our ability to track terrorist threats will be weakened and our citizens will be in greater danger.
Yet you have weakened that ability!
You have subjected us, your citizens, to that greater danger!
This, Mr. Bush, is simple enough even for you to understand.
For the moment, at least, thanks to some true patriots in the House, and your own stubbornness, you have tabled telecom immunity, and the FISA act.

You.
By your own terms and your definitions — you have just sided with the terrorists.
You got to have this law or we’re all going to die.
But practically speaking, you vetoed this law.

It is bad enough, sir, that you were demanding an Ex Post Facto law, which could still clear the AT&Ts and the Verizons from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive, and blatant collaboration with your illegal and unjustified spying on Americans under this flimsy guise of looking for any terrorists who are stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass e-mail.
But when you demanded it again during the State of the Union address, you wouldn’t even confirm that they actually did anything for which they deserved to be cleared.
“The Congress must pass liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America.” Believed?

Don’t you know?
Don’t you even have the guts Dick Cheney showed in admitting they did collaborate with you?
Does this endless presidency of loopholes and fine print extend even here?
If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business — come out and say it!
There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend.
You’re a fascist — get them to print you a t-shirt with “fascist” on it!

What else is this but fascism?

Did you see Mark Klein on this newscast last November?
Mark Klein was the AT&T Whistleblower, the one who explained in the placid, dull terms of your local neighborhood I-T desk, how he personally attached all AT&T circuits — everything — carrying every one of your phone calls, every one of your e-mails, every bit of your web browsing into a secure room, room number 641-A at the Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, where it was all copied so the government could look at it.
Not some of it, not just the international part of it, certainly not just the stuff some spy — a spy both patriotic and telepathic — might able to divine had been sent or spoken by — or to — a terrorist.

Everything!

Every time you looked at a naked picture.
Every time you bid on eBay.
Every time you phoned in a donation to a Democrat.
“My thought was,” Mr. Klein told us last November, “George Orwell’s 1984. And here I am, forced to connect the big brother machine.”
And if there’s one thing we know about Big Brother, Mr. Bush, is that he is — you are — a liar.

“This Saturday at midnight,” you said today, “legislation authorizing intelligence professionals to quickly and effectively monitor terrorist communications will expire. If Congress does not act by that time, our ability to find out who the terrorists are talking to, what they are saying, and what they are planning, will be compromised…You said that “the lives of countless Americans depend” on you getting your way.

This is crap.
And you sling it, with an audacity and a speed unrivaled even by the greatest political felons of our history.
Richard Clarke — you might remember him, sir, he was one of the counter-terror pro’s you inherited from President Clinton, before you ran the professionals out of government in favor of your unreality-based reality —

Richard Clarke wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
“Let me be clear: Our ability to track and monitor terrorists overseas would not cease should the Protect America Act expire. If this were true, the president would not threaten to terminate any temporary extension with his veto pen. All surveillance currently occurring would continue even after legislative provisions lapsed because authorizations issued under the act are in effect up to a full year.”

You are a liar, Mr. Bush, and after showing some skill at it, you have ceased to even be a very good liar.
And your minions like John Boehner — your Republican congressional crash dummies who just happen to decide to walk out of Congress when a podium-full of microphones await them — they should just keep walking, out of Congress and if possible, out of the country.
For they — and you, sir — have no place in a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
The lot of you, are the symbolic descendants of the despotic middle managers of some banana republic, to whom “Freedom” is an ironic brand name, a word you reach for, when you want to get away with its opposite.
Thus, Mr. Bush, your panoramic invasion of privacy is dressed up as “protecting America.”
Thus, Mr. Bush, your indiscriminate domestic spying becomes the focused monitoring, only of “terrorist communications.”
Thus, Mr. Bush, what you and the telecom giants have done, isn’t unlawful, it’s just the kind of perfectly legal, passionately patriotic thing for which you happen to need immunity!
Richard Clarke is on the money, as usual.

That the President was willing to veto this eavesdropping, means there is no threat to the legitimate counter-terror efforts underway.

As Senator Kennedy reminded us in December:
“The President has said that American lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not change FISA. But he has also said that he will veto any FISA bill that does not grant retroactive immunity.

No immunity, no FISA bill. So if we take the President at his word, he’s willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies.”

And that literally cannot be.

Even Mr. Bush could not overtly take a step that actually aids the terrorists.
I am not talking about ethics here.
I am talking about blame.
If the President seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it means we can safely conclude… there is no baby.
Because if there were, sir, now that you have vetoed an extension of this eavesdropping, if some terrorist attack were to follow…

You would not merely be guilty of siding with the terrorists…

You would not merely be guilty of prioritizing the telecoms over the people…

You would not merely be guilty of stupidity…

You would not merely be guilty of treason, sir…

You would be personally, and eternally, responsible.

And if there is one thing we know about you, Mr. Bush, one thing that you have proved time and time again… it is that you are never responsible.

As recently ago as 2006, we spoke words like these with trepidation.
The idea that even the most cynical and untrustworthy of politicians in our history — George W. Bush — would use the literal form of terrorism against his own people — was dangerous territory. It seemed to tempt fate, to heighten fear.

We will not fear any longer.

We will not fear the international terrorists — we will thwart them.

We will not fear the recognition of the manipulation of our yearning for safety — we will call it what it is: terrorism.

We will not fear identifying the vulgar hypocrites in our government — we will name them.

And we will not fear George W. Bush.

Nor will we fear because George W. Bush wants us to fear.

Conspiracy to terrorize

Crooks and Liars has Keith Olbermann's latest special comment :
Bush's Criminal Conspiracy of Torture

C&L has the full video and the full transcript as well.

Here are the choicest speaking truth-to-power excerpts:

"The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush."
...
"All of it is now — after one revelation last week — transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the re-focusing of our entire nation, towards keeping this mock president, and this unstable vice president, and this departed wildly self-over-rating Attorney General — and the others — from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country."
...
"Instead, he was forced out as Acting Assistant Attorney General, nearly three years ago, because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn’t do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right."
...
"Water-boarding, he said, is torture.
Legally, it is torture!
Practically, it is torture!
Ethically, it is torture!

And he wrote it down.
Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country’s 43rd President: “The United States of America does not torture.”

Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.

Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.

Water-boarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a couple of other men none of us really care about — except, Sir, for the one detail you’d forgotten — that there are rules, and even if we just make up these rules, this country observes them anyway, because we’re Americans, sir, and we’re better than that.

We’re better than you.

And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or not water-boarding was torture, had decided, and not in some phony academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty poseur attire of flight-suit and helmet.

He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.

So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn’t black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a physician entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had ever bothered to set any rules or any guidelines…
And then when your people realized that even that was too dangerous, Daniel Levin was branded “too independent” and “someone who could (not) be counted on.”
In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn’t count on to lie for you."
...
"And they should look into their own committee’s history and recall that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even from Richard Nixon, a guarantee of a Special Prosecutor (ultimately a Special Prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange for their approval of his new Attorney General, Elliott Richardson.

If they could get that out of Nixon, you — before you confirm the President’s latest human echo tomorrow — you better be able to get a “yes” or a “no” out of Michael Mukasey.

Ideally, you should lock this government down financially until a special prosecutor is appointed — or fifty of them — but I’m not holding my breath. The “yes” or the “no” on water-boarding will have to suffice.

Because, remember if you can’t get it, or you won’t with the time between tonight and the next presidential election likely to be the longest year of our lives, you are leaving this country, and all of us, to the water-boards — symbolic and otherwise — of George W. Bush.
Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn’t who approved the water-boarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.

It is: why were they water-boarded?

Study after study for generation after generation, sir, has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn’t a problem if you don’t care if the terrorist plots they tell you about, are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a President simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared…

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn’t interrupt…

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a President pillage the Constitution…

Well, heck, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you… than an actual terrorist?

He’ll tell you every thing he ever fantasized doing, in his most horrific of daydreams — his equivalent of the day you “flew” onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you’d won in Iraq.
Now if that’s what this is all about — you tortured not because you’re so stupid you think torture produces confession — but you tortured because you’re smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction — well, then you’re going to need all the lawyers you can find because that crime wouldn’t just mean impeachment, would it, sir?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison. "
...
"But at last this frightful plan is ending with an unexpected crash, the shocking reality that no matter how thoroughly you might try to extinguish them, Mr. Bush, how thoroughly you tried to brand disagreement as disloyalty, Mr. Bush, there are still people like Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of America as true freedom, where we are better, not because of schemes and wars, but because of dreams and morals.

And ultimately, sir, these men, these patriots, will defeat you and they will return this country to its righteous standards, and to its rightful owners, the people."

Well, there's ONE real journalist out there, telling it like it is.

Other Olbermann Special Comments

And by the way, I'm done with my part of providing information on this blog.

You, the sons and daughters of America, have to rise to the occasion in your own homes. You have to stand up for what you believe this country is supposed to stand for. My house is not your retreat any longer. It's not your home for feeling as if you are rebelling against the status quo by arguing and bickering. All the information is out there. All the facts about this fascist terrorist in the white house have been laid bare for all to see.

It's time to stop leaning on excuses and pseudo-activism. You either cower in your own little homes, allowing them to herd you where they will - or you ACT.

It's up to all of us to prove that this is NOT A NATION OF SHEEP. It is up to us to save our country from these bloody handed bastards.

For make no mistake, these men are destroying the United States of America far faster and far more completely than any third world nutjob could ever hope to.

There's a thousand ways to stand up for your country and make it a better place. There's only ONE way to let it down and see it ruined forever - and that's by remaining locked into your see-no-evil stare, going about your daily business as if there is nothing wrong.

America needs you. Are you going to sit there and do nothing? If you do, you've got no one to blame but yourselves. In the end, it will take us all, to fix our corrupt government and our maimed democracy. Get out there and lend a hand to your fellow Americans. Speaking out is good, but actions speak louder than words. Vote, run for office, give your time and your money to worthy organizations and people who are out there right now fighting for our country while we let the battle pass us by because we don't want to trouble ourselves to get involved.

Our country is only as great as we make it. If we let the vermin and the corporate leeches and the fat rich ticks suck our country dry, then we don't deserve it.