Keith Olbermann's Commentary

Crooks and Liars
August 30, 2006

Looks like Keith Olbermann has gone and upset the applecart in a recent commentary, which is good for MSNBC; their ratings are up 12 percent overall, 13 percent among viewers 25 to 54 and Keith Olbernmann's ratings are up 37 percent. Olbermann was responding to Rumsfeld's claim in a speech before American Legion that dissent over the US invasion of Iraq is equivalent to appeasing Adolf Hitler.

An excerpt from Olbermann's commentary:

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.