Keith Olbermann NAILS IT!

Olbermann to Bush: ‘Your hypocrisy is so vast’
A reaction to Thursday’s press conference: the president was the one who interjected Gen. Petraeus into the political dialogue in the first place
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Updated: 9:59 p.m. ET Sept 20, 2007

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.

© 2007 MSNBC Interactive
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20896378/