"Donald S. Rumsfeld is not a prophet."

Tonight on "Countdown," Keith Olbermann threw a once-in-a-generation gauntlet down before the Bush administration's despicable attempt to vilify its critics for the sake of its own dubious political survival.

Taking dead aim at the "transient occupants of the highest office of the land," Olbermann eviscerated Donald Rumsfeld and his laughable-if-it-weren't-serious attack on the majority of Americans who no longer trust the Bush administration or support its war aims, in Iraq or elsewhere.

In his speech to the American Legion yesterday, Rumsfeld compared those Americans who no longer (or never did) support Bush's war in Iraq--and who believe that it has left America less safe, not more so--to those who supported the "appeasement" policies of Neville Chamberlain against Hitler in the 1930s.

The terms are right, says Olbermann, but the relationship is backwards:

In a small irony […] 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.

This is just a piece of a much larger, and more carefully articulated argument. Watch the whole thing. Olbermann doesn't specifically tie Rumsfeld's disgraceful screed with Godwin's Law, but he might as well have: Resort to "Hitler" analogies and accusations is a pretty fair indication that the speaker's position is rhetorically, intellectually, historically, and morally bankrupt.

(What, by the way, is the American Legion's problem? Has an organization of men and women who placed their lives on the line to protect America totally lost sight of what it is they were defending? It looks like it--Cheney and Bush are each invited to address the Legion in the next day or two, and each will be doing his best to inject more poison into the American body politic. With Rumsfeld, those two have overseen the crippling of our military forces and have cheated and misused those who wear its uniform--does the Legion even care?)

Olbermann expressed his discomfort at the apparent presumption of closing with the words used in another time by broadcasting diety and patron saint of freedom of conscience Edward R. Murrow, but he needn't. He did well tonight.

Olbermann uber alles!

(And, although this clip doesn't show it, MSNBC went directly from Olbermann's commentary to Tucker Carlson guest-hosting "Scarborough Country," stoutly using his air time to argue that ritual statutory rape isn't as bad a thing as some people make it sound. Thanks, Tucker--you make all us white straight guys proud that of the hegemony we enjoy.)

[Update: No idea why, in the original published post, I mistakenly put someone else's name in place of Chamberlain's, above. Too much caffiene, perhaps. Anyway, it's fixed. p3 deeply, deeply regrets the error.]