The Olbermann smackdown, and the lack of response to it
I don’t watch much TV news, having learned years ago that most of it is unintentionally superficial and unintentionally funny. (I prefer to watch things that are superficial and funny on purpose.) I do catch clips online now and then, however, when something is brought to my attention that’s worth noting.
Keith Olbermann’s 10-minute commentary on his MSNBC program “Countdown” earlier this week, which you can watch here, fits that description. I enjoyed Olbermann’s sense of humor when he was an L.A. sportscaster in the 1980s, and I’ve recently been entertained by his constant harassment of Bill O’Reilly on “Countdown.”
But I never would have expected the level of gravitas and incisive commentary that he displays here. He reminds me of Edward R. Murrow (whose commentaries were dramatized in “Good Night and Good Luck”) in that it’s not enough to read the transcript of his remarks. You have to watch his face and hear his delivery to get the full effect of the scathing things he’s saying.
(By the way, you can watch the Bill Clinton interview from two days earlier, which Olbermann’s piece is partly a response to, here.)
Having watched the Olbermann clip without much introduction and having been stirred by it, I poked around the Interwebs to see how the conservative blogs were responding. I don’t read many political blogs of any denomination, so I had to do some Googling to find conservative ones.
The few I found that mentioned it at all were depressingly predictable: They harp on Olbermann’s manner and delivery and don’t even try to rebut the things he actually SAID.
I guess the reasoning is that if you’re writing a conservative blog for conservative readers, you don’t need to explain why Olbermann is so wrong. Your readers already KNOW why. So I wish someone would explain it to me, a more-liberal-than-conservative person who doesn’t read the political blogs every day and doesn’t know why Olbermann’s commentary is so off-base. He seemed to me to be making excellent points and to be making them exceptionally well. He’s actually SAYING something, which is more than any of the bloggers (that I could find) did in response to him.
P.S. I know liberal bloggers do the same thing: A conservative says something, they automatically mock and ridicule him without regard for what he actually said. It’s the major reason I don’t read political blogs, because both sides are equally jackassish about it. The Olbermann thing is what happens to be on my mind at the moment, that’s all.
September 28th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
I wrote a response to this item and sent it to Eric, and I don’t want to reprint it here, but seeing how no one else has commented I did want to mention one thing now that I did not then. Olbermann mentions the National Intelligence Estimate:
“Consider the timing: the very weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it isâ€â€not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it.”
The National Intelligence Estimate was not released, but leaked, to the New York Times. Only after the leak were the key findings declassified (Pres. Bush explains his reasons very clearly- I have the transcript here http://rightwingpundit.blogspot.com/2006/09/bush-lays-it-down.html)
They do not show the conclusions that Olbermann claims. He is guilty of taking what the NYT tells him as gospel. Furtheremore, the NIE was prepared in February or March of this year. Hardly the breaking news release Olbermann and the Times imply.
Olbermann has a good speaking voice, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for gravitas.
September 28th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
I think the following quote, pulled from the NIE report, states exactly what Olbermann was saying, that the war is a fertilizer for terrorism.
While the NIE does have points that back up some of the Bush Administration’s objectives in the war on terrorism, I read the whole thing and do not see anything that makes Olbermann wrong on this or any other point he made.
September 28th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
Here’s a recent article on Slate regarding the NIE report…
Can Bush Read?: The National Intelligence Estimate says what the Times said it said.
“But Bush was clearly wrong to suggest that the Times mischaracterized the NIE. The document he released says what the New York Times reported. Hey, don’t take my word for it. Read it yourself, below and on the following three pages.”
Click above to read the full article.
September 29th, 2006 at 6:35 am
I’d be happy to point out where Olbermann was wrong.
I’m not going to engage in argument over the NIE and what it says. Nor am I going to defend Bush’s policy with regard to Iraq. However, Lowdoggy is right in that the NIE was not released but leaked illegally. One of the major points of Olbermann’s rant is that the supposed “hit job” by Chris Wallace was intentionally meant to draw attention away from the “release” of the NIE. As Lowdoggy said, since it wasn’t “released” but leaked to a publication that is anything but friendly to the Bush Administration, it’s hard to subscribe to Olbermann’s conspiracy theory without willfully ignoring your own sense of logic.
Regarding Chris Wallace’s “attack” of President Clinton in which Olbermann claims Wallace lost his all his journalistic credibility with one question, anyone has to but watch interview to see that Clinton overreacted. Wallace simply asked whether Clinton had done enough to prevent 9/11, a fair and topical question given both ABC’s 9/11 Movie and Clinton’s public response to it. How that amounts to an attack is beyond me. Any reasonable person watching the video can see that Clinton simply lost his composure after having been confronted with this issue far too often recently. Olbermann seems all too willing to annoint Clinton “Truth Teller” and condemn anyone who dare’s to question his administration’s anti-terror policies.
Finally, regarding Bush and 9/11, suddenly, five years later, people want to act like 8 months is this gargantuan amount of time. The fact is, anyone who knows anything about government knows that our intelligence and law enforcement communities are made up of long-entrenched bureaucracies that are made up of career bureaucrats that have no real loyalty or connection to the President. Any top-down changes in anti-terror or intelligence gathering policies would have taken a lot longer than 8 months, especially prior to 9/11 when there was lack of political will to engage in such bureaucratic wrangling. My point: Bush, as with all Presidents, inherited an anti-terror policy that had evolved over time. This policy, as has been noted by the 9/11 Commission and others, prevented effective intelligence gathering and enforcement. Given the fact that Clinton was President for 8 years directly prior to 9/11 (the years in which most aspects of the 9/11 attack were planned and coordinated) and oversaw the government’s response the Embassy Bombings and the first World Trade Center bombing, I don’t think it’s unfair to conclude that he had a greater opportunity in that time to reform the system than Bush had in first 8 months he had in office. I don’t think it’s fair to put all the blame at Clinton’s feet with regard to 9/11. However, to say that Bush is more to blame shows a grave misunderstanding on the part of Olbermann.
Finally, I love the complaints of Olbermann and other ultra-leftists who claim that our nation’s media is pro-Bush. Sure, Fox News panders to conservatives. However, to say that the power of fox outweighs CNN, MSNBC, all three major Networks, and the majority of major newspapers is ridiculous. Not that all those entities have it in for Republicans (some of them do…CNN, CBS, The New York Times, etc.), but one would have a hard time saying that all those organizations have a demonstrable pro-Bush bias. Olbermann pretty much justifies his existence by making Fox News out to be the end all of American media and himself the fearless propaganda slayer. In short, he’s a colossal tool.
How’s that?
September 29th, 2006 at 9:12 am
I disagree with a lot of Olbermann’s opinions, but I’m glad he’s there. I’d much rather watch him than listen to pretty much any other liberal commentator, because he is eloquent, and it seems like he would welcome a well-thought-out reply to his statements (that’s my impression anyway; he could be a total jerk, I guess)
Anyway, I wanted to make a quick observation. Olbermann counters the claim that Clinton was too caught up in the Lewinsky scandal to deal with OBL by asking
“Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?
Who corrupted the political media?”
Which is a good question, given that the answer indicates that republican lawmakers at the time weren’t too worked up over terrorism either. But, doesn’t the “political media” deserve a fair amount of blame for this shift in focus as well? Aren’t they the ones who let the republicans set the agenda firmly on the scandal, and the ones who ultimately determined to “strangle [the public] with the trivia that was, ‘All Monica All The Time’”?
And finally, the worst presidency since Buchannan? Seriously?
September 29th, 2006 at 9:41 am
Bryan Hickman said: “Wallace simply asked whether Clinton had done enough to prevent 9/11, a fair and topical question given both ABC’s 9/11 Movie and Clinton’s public response to it.”
Actually the question posed in the interview was “Why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and Al-Quaida out of business when you were president?”
Working under the assumption that Clinton did have a true emotional response to the question (since some have claimed that his response was completely calculated) that Wallace posed I would posit that if Chris Wallace had truly asked the question as you “summed it up” then Clinton probably wouldn’t have freaked out.
The actual question he asked is very accusatory. By it’s wording it assumes Clinton didn’t do enough. “How often do you beat your wife?” as opposed to “Have you ever beat your wife?”
If the question was “Do you feel like you did enough to put Bin Laden and Al-Quaida out of business when you were president?” I think there would’ve been a completely different response.
September 29th, 2006 at 9:58 am
if you liked that, did you catch Olbermann’s commentary on the five-year anniversary of 9/11? Pretty powerful stuff. You can see it here http://www.alternet.org/blogs/themix/41501/
September 29th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
The real problem with Olbermann, inapt comparisons to Murrow aside, is that he allows a disdain for Bush to overshadow everything else he says. He defends Clinton’s response to Wallace, which Wallace himself feels was not scripted. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t think any fairminded person believes Clinton laments missed opportunities to prevent 9/11. I certainly feel that Bush laments it. What I don’t see is why the Left hates Bush so much. I never liked Clinton, but I could see his redeeming qualities. He has many foibles, but he’s not EVIL. Why does the left think Bush is evil, hell-bent on “authoritarian” strategies designed to remove our freedoms? It is the most unproductive kind of argument, because Bush is not leaving, nor is he up for reelection. Why waste the energy. That is why Olbermann is such a poor commentator. His reliance on ad hominem aspersions and angry (though deep-voiced) rhetoric is why I can’t take him seriously, even as a liberal commentator. Eloquence does not equal persuasiveness. It just means he sounds smart when he says stupid things.
Now if you want to see where the focus should be place, listen to Rudy Giuliani, who spoke in defense of Bill Clinton (http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060928/D8KDJAPO0.html):
“The idea of trying to cast blame on President Clinton is just wrong for many, many reasons, not the least of which is I don’t think he deserves it,” Giuliani said in response to a question after an appearance with fellow Republican Charlie Crist, who is running for governor. “I don’t think President Bush deserves it. The people who deserve blame for Sept. 11, I think we should remind ourselves, are the terrorists - the Islamic fanatics - who came here and killed us and want to come here again and do it.”
That’s the answer. You can have different ideas of dealing with that threat, but Olbermann’s focus on blame is foolish.
October 1st, 2006 at 12:46 pm
“Why waste the energy?” Because American citizens have a responsibility to speak up when they believe that their leaders are behaving badly. The act of doing so may influence the current political leadership, or strengthen whatever minority oposition may exist. It may influence those who will be running for office in the future and those who vote for them.
To the extent that “different ideas of dealing with that threat” are more or less effective, the individuals responsible for dealing with it have responsibility for the result.
The gist of Olbermann’s rant was not that Bush was responsible for 9/11, rather that Bush has been unwilling to acknowledge any responsibility for 9/11 while allowing conservative interests to place full responsibility at the feet of Bill Clinton.