Over at Salon Alex Koppelman interviews MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, who is pretty much the sole reason I watch teevee these days.

Keith’s recent string of stellar commentaries has made waves everywhere, not just in the reality-based half of the blogosphere:

In the past two weeks, as the Bush administration launched its pre-election anti-terror public relations blitz, Olbermann upped the ante and cemented his hero status in Left Blogistan with two especially acid speeches. On Aug. 30, he blistered Donald Rumsfeld with a breathtaking on-air screed that called the defense secretary a quack, explicitly compared him to Neville Chamberlain, and implicitly accused him of fascism and McCarthyism. President Bush himself for an “awful,” “cynical” and “un-American” equation of dissent and disloyalty. Olbermann, who usually ends his commentaries with a quote that pays tribute to Edward R. Murrow — “Good night and good luck” — instead closed with a different, and much angrier, echo of the McCarthy era. He asked the president, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

On his commentaries’ effect on “Countdown”’s ratings:

I think we’re up about 9 percent in that demographic [25-54], and CNN is down 30 and Fox is off 23 percent. I don’t think you can say, “Hey, we did this commentary and the ratings doubled the next night.” It doesn’t usually work that way. But overall we’ve had a very steady climb, a climb from third place in the ratings to essentially second place in the ratings, and I think you can attribute it to the approach, if not the specifics, of the commentaries.

On Katrina as precipitator of tumbling ratings for Bush and for Fox News:

It’s ironic that a natural disaster would serve to be the tipping point, but I think there was just no convincing even the people who wanted to be convinced that everything was great after what people saw in the United States of America in New Orleans. It was overwhelming. And it had, although it was not given credit for it at the time, or blame, the kind of visceral impact that 9/11 didn’t in a different sense, that it woke people up to the idea that a government that was reelected on the premise that it was going to protect everyone from everything, and that the other guys probably couldn’t — did not get the job done. And I think a lot of people at that point began to say, to use that classic and most overwrought of clichés, that the kid in the front there is right: The emperor is not wearing anything except new clothes that only he can see. He’s naked, and much of what he’d told us besides that is probably not true.

I think that the news operations that were willing to address that, to approach it in any kind of analytical way, even by means of commentary, could benefit in a situation where people are looking for the truth. And an organization that is beholden to a political party and to a point of view — entirely beholden to that — is going to lose, as they have.

The salesmanship techniques and the production techniques that they are expert at have not suddenly slipped, which is I believe their conclusion. It’s not their guys who’ve suddenly seemed implausible, except the ones who have stuck to the party line, but it’s the message. “Gee whiz, everything’s great, everything’s great, it’s the media’s fault.” I don’t think that’s what most of America feels anymore, and I think that has been reflected particularly in the ratings at Fox News.

Berating Bill O’Reilly Naah, actually he’s dismissing poor old increasingly-irrelevant Bill-O for not holding up his end of their long-running feud:

He [O'Reilly] attacked MSNBC [on his show] along with a plethora of usual suspects for, in his opinion, misreporting the Valerie Plame story, and demanded that we say that we’re sorry that Karl Rove was not indicted. And I said, “All right, Bill, you’re right. We are sorry Karl Rove wasn’t indicted. But please, I can’t play with you now. I have bigger fish to fry.”

From, let’s see, a year, year and a half ago, the whole tenor of this thing changed. It had essentially been me pointing out what kind of crap he was putting on the air, and then it became anything that was said about Bill merited some sort of brilliant overreaction, like an on-air petition to get me fired. Or this thing — and it would be really funny in a different context — where he thought he could call up Fox security and local police and get them to somehow go to the house of someone who called his radio show and mentioned my name. I just wait for his overreactions and respond to them now. It’s really, it’s almost a passive feud from my end. Also, the level of the fight from him has dropped off appreciably. His stuff is getting very old, and we’ve had to raise the bar a little bit higher because his answers get a little lower. So we devote less and less time to him. I wouldn’t say a truce, but I don’t think there’s very much fight left in him at this point.

On courting the favors of liberals:

I had gathered for a while that [liberals] had felt themselves very underserved in the media, and a reasonable analysis would suggest that’s true overall. But you can go out and, I think, find a certain kind of person who wants to sit there and be told what to think by the television. These tend to be authoritarian personalities, as John Dean has suggested in his book. I don’t know if it’s true for other political people. I don’t think you can get a bunch of liberals to watch one television network, because they’d be sitting there arguing the nuance of it. So I’m not courting the liberals.

I also, I don’t think in these issues that I’m a liberal; I think that I’m an American. I think I’m acting almost as a historian on these particular things, with the Rumsfeld commentary and now the Bush commentary. I get nauseated when I see someone perpetually wrap themselves in the flag — which is the logo that appears on Fox, that’s what they’re doing, and many other people do it.

You know, every once in a while you should bring the flag out and say, “What does our country stand for?” The first thing that I think of is the statement that I disagree with your beliefs, but I will fight to the death for your right to express them. When the secretary of defense and the president of the United States make statements that indicate those statements are no longer operative, then you have to say something. It’s no longer liberal versus conservative at that point. It’s American versus truly un-American. So I’m not courting anybody with these things, I’m saying these things because I think they need to be said. I think they need to be underlined and underscored in the public discourse.

Yep, I think it would definitely be fair to say that I heart Keith. He’s our Edward R Murrow:  just as articulate, but with more falafel jokes.

Posted: September 11th, 2006 under General, Keith Olbermann.
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In 1954 we had Edward R. Murrow. In 2006 we have Keith Olbermann, a fact for which I, for one, am endlessly thankful.

Yesterday Keith’s Countdown essay was truly one for the ages.

See the video clip at Crooks & Liars , but do yourself a favor and read the text first.

This is a must-read.

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.

Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday demands the deep analysis—and the sober contemplation—of every American.

For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence — indeed, the loyalty — of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants — our employees — with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.

Dissent and disagreement with government is the life’s blood of human freedom; and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as “his” troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.

It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.

In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld’s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For in their time, there was another government faced with true peril—with a growing evil—powerful and remorseless.

That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the “secret information.” It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld’s — questioning their intellect and their morality.

That government was England’s, in the 1930’s.

It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England.

It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.

It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted its own policies, its own conclusions — its own omniscience — needed to be dismissed.

The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.

Most relevant of all — it “knew” that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.

That critic’s name was Winston Churchill.

Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.

History — and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England — have taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty — and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.

Thus, did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy.

Excepting the fact, that he has the battery plugged in backwards.

His government, absolute — and exclusive — in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis.

It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.

But back to today’s Omniscient ones.

That, about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.

And, as such, all voices count — not just his.

Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their “omniscience” as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer’s New Clothes?

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

The confusion we — as its citizens— must now address, is stark and forbidding.

But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note — with hope in your heart — that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light, and we can, too.

The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a “new type of fascism.”

As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that — though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

This country faces a new type of fascism - indeed.

Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.

But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed: “confused” or “immoral.”

Thus, forgive me, for reading Murrow, in full:

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” he said, in 1954. “We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.”

And so good night, and good luck.

 

Posted: August 31st, 2006 under General, Keith Olbermann.
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