Saturday, July 7, 2007

Olbermann has his Emile Zola moment

Interestingly enough, Zola was also a former sportscaster with a reputation for feuding with every network he worked for* until he finally found his groove. Go figure, huh?

Just in time for Independence Day--celebrating the last time we took on a fellow named George for, among other things, corrupting our system of justice for his short-term partisan advantage--Keith Olbermann launched a historically-resonant attack on Bush's overt participation in an obstruction of justice scheme:


The enforcement of the laws is turned over to those of one political party, who will swear beforehand that they will not enforce those laws. The choice between war and peace is turned over to those of one political party, who stand to gain vast wealth by ensuring that there is never peace, but only war.

And now, when just one cooked book gets corrected by an honest auditor, when just one trampling of the inherent and inviolable fairness of government is rejected by an impartial judge, when just one wild-eyed partisan is stopped by the figure of blind justice, this President decides that he, and not the law, must prevail.

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war.

I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people, a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.

I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors.

I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent.

I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought.

I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents.

I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.
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*No, of course not.

2 comments:

Samuel John Klein said...

How very coincidental. Just yesterday I became intrigued as to why people wanting to make an emphatic point tended to say "J'Accuse!" and started reading about the Dreyfus affair and Zola.

Maybe Jung was right about synchoncity.

Anonymous said...

Hey, check out this hilarious Nixon Webisode I found on Cincinnati Opera's website. http://cincinnatiopera.org/content.jsp?articleId=483