Olbermann Accuses Bush of 'Murderous Deceit,' Should 'Shut the Hell Up'
By Brad Wilmouth | May 15, 2008 - 07:58 ET
On Wednesday's Countdown, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann's latest "Special
Comment" attack on President Bush accused the President of "panoramic and
murderous deceit," and of "creating" an America that "includes
'cold-blooded
killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives,'"
contending that "they are those in, or formerly in, your employ, who may
yet
be charged some day with war crimes." He further accused Bush, whom he
referred to as having an "addled brain," of "laying waste to Iraq to
achieve
your political objectives" in an "insurance-scam, profiteering, morally
bankrupting war." Outraged by Bush's declaration that he had given up
playing golf out of respect for those killed in Iraq, Olbermann called on
the President to "Shut the hell up!" Video of Olbermann's rant can be seen
here. (Transcript follows)
The Countdown host was responding to comments the President made during an
interview with Politco.com. When asked what was the "worst that could
happen" if U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq, Bush argued that
extremists
could feel "emboldened" to engage in "another attack on the United
States,"
and referred to the "ideological struggle" in Iraq "against cold-blooded
killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives."
The MSNBC host thought it was insightful to take President Bush's words
about terrorists and apply them to the Bush administration. Olbermann:
"Mr.
Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now
created, includes 'cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve
their political objectives?' They are those in, or formerly in, your
employ,
who may yet be charged some day with war crimes."
Olbermann continued: "Through your haze of self-congratulation and
self-pity, do you still have no earthly clue that this nation has laid
waste
to Iraq to achieve your political objectives? 'This ideological struggle'
you speak of, Mr. Bush, is taking place within this country."
He soon accused the President of forming in Iraq "an American viceroyalty,
enforced by merciless mercenaries who shoot unarmed Iraqis and then evade
prosecution in any country by hiding behind your skirts, sir," and
charged:
"Terrorism inside Iraq is your creation, Mr. Bush!"
The MSNBC host referred to what he called Bush's "panoramic and murderous
deceit" as he recounted recent Republican losses in Congress:
And as a final crash of self-indulgent nonsense, when the
incontrovertible
truth of your panoramic and murderous deceit has even begun to cost your
political party seemingly perpetual congressional seats in places like
North
Carolina and last night Mississippi, you can actually say with a straight
face, sir, that the members of Congress, "the political heat gets on and
they start to run and try to hide from their votes," while you greet the
political heat and try to run and hide from your presidency, and your
legacy, 4,000 of the Americans you were supposed to protect are dead in
Iraq, with your only feeble, pathetic answer being, "I was told by people
that they had weapons of mass destruction."
Olbermann was most offended at the President's declaration that he had
given
up playing golf out of respect for those lost in Iraq, as the MSNBC host
thought Bush instead should have chosen to give up the war effort: "Sir,
to
show your solidarity with them you didn't give up your pursuit of this
insurance-scam, profiteering, morally and financially bankrupting war."
After accusing Bush of having an "addled brain," of "helping funnel
billions
of taxpayer dollars to lascivious and perennially thirsty cor****ations
like
Halliburton and Blackwater," and of "sending 4,000 Americans to their
deaths
for nothing," Olbermann concluded by advising President Bush to "Shut the
hell up!" Olbermann:
When somebody asks you, sir, about Democrats who must now pull this
country back from the abyss you have placed us at; when somebody asks you,
sir, about the cooked books and faked threats you foisted on a sincere and
frightened nation; when somebody asks you, sir, about your gallant, noble,
self-abdicating sacrifice of your golf game so as to soothe the families
of
the war dead; this advice, Mr. Bush: Shut the hell up! Good night and good
luck.
Below is a complete transcript of Olbermann's "Special Comment" from the
Wednesday, May 14 Countdown on MSNBC with critical ****tions in bold:
Finally tonight, as promised, a "Special Comment" on two topics a lot of
us had foolishly thought and naively hoped we would not again have to
address, and a third topic nobody thought a President would ever seriously
mention in public, unless perhaps he'd just been hit in the head with
something and was not in full possession of his faculties, how he
expressed
his empathy with families of the dead in Iraq by giving up golf.
President Bush has resorted anew to the sleaziest fear-mongering and
mass
manipulation of an administration of a public life dedicated to realizing
the lowest of our expectations. And he has now applied these poisons to
the
2008 presidential election, on behalf of the party at whose center he and
Mr. McCain lurk. Mr. Bush has predicted that the election of a Democratic
President could, quote, "eventually lead to another attack on the United
States." This ludicrous, infuriating, holier-than-thou and most
im****tantly
bone-headedly wrong statement came yesterday during an interview with
Politico.com and online users of Yahoo.
The question was phrased as follows: "If we were to pull out of Iraq
next
year, what's the worst that could happen, what's the doomsday scenario?"
And the President replied: "Doomsday scenario, of course, is that
extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would
eventually lead to another attack on the United States. The biggest issue
we
face is, it's bigger than Iraq, it's this ideological struggle against
cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political
objectives."
Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you
have
now created, includes "cold-blooded killers who will kill people to
achieve
their political objectives?" They are those in, or formerly in, your
employ,
who may yet be charged some day with war crimes.
Through your haze of self-congratulation and self-pity, do you still
have
no earthly clue that this nation has laid waste to Iraq to achieve your
political objectives? "This ideological struggle" you speak of, Mr. Bush,
is
taking place within this country. It is a struggle between Americans who
cherish freedom, ours and everybody else's, and Americans like you, sir,
to
whom freedom is just a brand name, just like "Patriot Act" is a brand name
or "Protect America" is a brand name.
But wait, there's more: You also have said "Iraq is the place where
al-Qaeda and other extremists have made their stand and they will be
defeated." They made no "stand" in Iraq, sir, you allowed them to assemble
there!
As certainly as if that were the plan, the borders were left wide open
by
your government's farcical post-invasion strategy of "they'll greet us as
liberators." And as certainly as if that were the plan, the inspiration
for
another generation of terrorists in another country was provided by your
government's farcical post-invasion strategy of letting the societal
infrastructure of Iraq dissolve, to be replaced by an American
viceroyalty,
enforced by merciless mercenaries who shoot unarmed Iraqis and then evade
prosecution in any country by hiding behind your skirts, sir. Terrorism
inside Iraq is your creation, Mr. Bush!
It was a Yahoo user who brought up the second topic upon whose
introduction Mr. Bush should have passed, or punted, or gotten up and left
the room claiming he heard Dick Cheney calling him. "Do you feel," asked
an
ordinary American, "that you were misled on Iraq?"
"I feel like, I felt like, there were weapons of mass destruction," the
President said. "You know, 'mislead' is a strong word, it almost connotes
some kind of intentional, I don't think so, I think there was a, not only
our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the
world shared the same *****sment. And so I was disappointed to see how
flawed our intelligence was."
Flawed. You, Mr. Bush, and your tragically know-it-all minions, threw
out
every piece of intelligence that suggested there were no such weapons.
You,
Mr. Bush, threw out every person who suggested that the sober,
contradictory, reality-based intelligence needed to be listened to, and
damned fast. You, Mr. Bush, are responsible for how "intelligence
communities all around the world shared the same *****sment." You and the
sycophants you dredged up and put behind the most im****tant steering wheel
in the world propagated palpable nonsense and shoved it down the throat of
every intelligence community across the world and punished everybody who
didn't agree it was really chicken salad.
And you, Mr. Bush, threw under the bus, all of the subsequent critics
who
bravely stepped forward later to point out just how much of a
self-fulfilling prophecy you had embraced, and adopted as this country's
policy in lieu of, say, common sense.
The fiasco of pre-war intelligence, sir, is your fiasco. You should
build
a great statue of yourself turning a deaf ear to the warnings of the
realists, while you are shown embracing the three-card monte dealers like
Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. That would be a far
more
fitting tribute to your legacy, Mr. Bush, than this presidential library
you
are constructing as a giant fable about your presidency, an edifice you
might as well claim was built from "Iraqi weapons of mass destruction"
because there will be just as many of those inside your presidential
library
as there were inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Of course, if there is one overriding theme to this President's
administration it is the utter, always-failing, inability to know when to
quit when it is behind. And so Mr. Bush answered yet another question
about
this layered, nuanced, wheels-within-wheels garbage heap that constituted
his excuse for war.
"And so you feel that you didn't have all the information you should
have
or the right spin on that information?"
"No, no," replied the President. "I was told by people, that they had
weapons of mass destruction."
People? What people? The insane informant "Curveball?" The Iraqi s****
oil
salesman Ahmed Chalabi? The American s**** oil salesman Dick Cheney?
"I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction, as were
members of Congress, who voted for the resolution to get rid of Saddam
Hussein.
"And, of course, the political heat gets on, and they start to run and
try
to hide from their votes."
Mr. Bush, you destroyed the evidence that contradicted the resolution
you
jammed down the Congress's throat, the way you jammed it down the nation's
throat. When required by law to verify that your evidence was accurate,
you
simply resubmitted it, with phrases amounting to "See, I done proved it,"
virtually written in the margins in crayon. You defied patriotic Americans
to say "The Emperor Has No Clothes," only this time with the stakes, as
you
and the mental dwarves in your employ put it, being a "mushroom cloud over
an American city."
And as a final crash of self-indulgent nonsense, when the
incontrovertible
truth of your panoramic and murderous deceit has even begun to cost your
political party seemingly perpetual congressional seats in places like
North
Carolina and last night Mississippi, you can actually say with a straight
face, sir, that the members of Congress, "the political heat gets on and
they start to run and try to hide from their votes," while you greet the
political heat and try to run and hide from your presidency, and your
legacy, 4,000 of the Americans you were supposed to protect are dead in
Iraq, with your only feeble, pathetic answer being, "I was told by people
that they had weapons of mass destruction."
Then came Mr. Bush's final blow to our nation's solar plexus, his last
reopening of our common wounds, his last remark that makes the rest of us
question not merely his leader****p or his judgement but his very
suitability
to remain in office. "Mr. President," he was asked, "you haven't been
golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?"
"Yes," began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight
on our lives as Americans in our history. "It really is. I don't want some
mom whose son may have recently died, to see the Commander in Chief
playing
golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as, to be in solidarity as
best
as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the
wrong signal."
Golf, sir? Golf sends the wrong signal to the grieving families of our
men
and women butchered in Iraq? Do you think these families, Mr. Bush, their
lives blighted forever, care about you playing golf? Do you think, sir,
they
care about you?
You, Mr. Bush, you who let their sons and daughters be killed. Sir, to
show your solidarity with them you gave up golf? Sir, to show your
solidarity with them you didn't give up your pursuit of this
insurance-scam,
profiteering, morally and financially bankrupting war. Sir, to show your
solidarity with them you didn't even give up talking about Iraq, a subject
about which you have incessantly proved without pause or backwards glance,
that you may literally be the least informed person in the world? Sir, to
show your solidarity with them, you didn't give up your presidency? In
your
own words "solidarity as best as I can" is to stop a game? That is the
"best" you can? Four thousand Americans give up their lives and your
sacrifice was to give up golf! Golf. Not "Gulf," golf.
And still it gets worse. Because it proves that the President's
unendurable sacrifice, his unbearable pain, the suspension of getting to
hit
a stick and a ball together, was not even his own damned idea.
"Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought
you
to that decision, or how did you come to that?"
"I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as
a
result of these murderers taking this good man's life. And I was playing
golf, I think I was in central Texas, and they pulled me off the golf
course, and I said, it's just not worth it any more to do."
Your one, tone-deaf, arrogant, pathetic, embarrassing gesture, and you
didn't even think of it yourself? The great Bu****an sacrifice - an Army
private loses a leg, a Marine loses half his skull, 4,000 of their
brothers
and sisters lose their lives - you lose golf, and they have to pull you
off
the golf course to get you to just do that?
If it's even true. Apart from your medical files, which dutifully record
your torn calf muscle and the knee pain which forced you to give up
running
at the same time - coincidence, no doubt - the bombing in Baghdad which
killed Sergio Vieira de Mello of the U.N. and interrupted your round of
golf
was on Aug. 19, 2003. And yet, there's an Associated Press account of you
and photographs playing golf as late as Columbus Day of that year, October
13, nearly two months later.
Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you 6 ½ years after you yoked this
nation
and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against
the
wrong people, but the war in Iraq is not about you. It is not, Mr. Bush,
about your grief when American after American comes home in a box. It is
not, Mr. Bush, about what your addled brain has produced in the way of
paranoid delusions of risks that do not exist, ready to be activated if
some
Democrat, and not your twin Mr. McCain, succeeds you.
The war in Iraq, your war, Mr. Bush, is about how you accomplished the
derangement of two nations, and how you helped funnel billions of taxpayer
dollars to lascivious and perennially thirsty cor****ations like
Halliburton
and Blackwater, and how you sent 4,000 Americans to their deaths for
nothing!
It is not, Mr. Bush, about your golf game! And, sir, if you have any
hopes
that next January 20 will not be celebrated as a day of soul-wrenching,
heart-felt thanksgiving, because your faithless steward****p of this
presidency will have finally come to a merciful end, this last piece of
advice:
When somebody asks you, sir, about Democrats who must now pull this
country back from the abyss you have placed us at; when somebody asks you,
sir, about the cooked books and faked threats you foisted on a sincere and
frightened nation; when somebody asks you, sir, about your gallant, noble,
self-abdicating sacrifice of your golf game so as to soothe the families
of
the war dead; this advice, Mr. Bush: Shut the hell up! Good night and good
luck.
--
"I understand MSNBC has suspended Mr. Imus," Obama told ABC News, "but I
would also say that there's nobody on my staff who would still be working
for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group.
And I would hope that NBC ends up having that same attitude."
April 11 2007 B.Hussein Obama
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