FRAMESHOP:FRAMESHOP: OLBERMANN DEFINES "COWARDICE"

Last night I watched MSNBC's Keith Olbermann deliver a five minute broadcast essay that made me stand up and say out loud--this is not a metaphor, I literally said this--"Oh, my, god."

The subject of the essay was Bill Clinton's interview with Chris Wallace--a fiasco that unfolded the other day on FOX News where Wallace tried to fault Clinton for causing 9/11. Wallace is just one small (and not very smart) link in a long chain of right wing events trying to blame Clinton for 9/11 in order to shield Bush from blame for the disasters of...well...everything over the past 5.5 years.

But Olbermann reached for a very big and very important point, last night. He framed the Wallace smear on Clinton in terms of Bush's cowardice: the interview demonstrated not that Clinton was to blame or was not to blame, but that Bush is a coward--the "textbook" definition of a coward.

Frameshop will discuss this piece more, but for now--we should all take a minute to be inspired by Keith Olbermann's writing.

A Textbook Definition of Cowardice
Keith Olbermann comments on Bill Clinton's Fox News interview
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
MSNBC

Updated: 10:28 p.m. ET Sept 25, 2006


The headlines about them are, of course, entirely wrong.

It is not essential that a past president, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back.

It is not important that the current President’s portable public chorus has described his predecessor’s tone as “crazed.”

Our tone should be crazed. The nation’s freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al Qaida; the nation’s marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would’ve quit.

Nonetheless. The headline is this:

Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years.

He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration.

"At least I tried," he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. "That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they did not try. I tried."

Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years.

The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors.

The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S."

The Bush Administration did not try.

Moreover, for the last five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in particular the President, has been given the greatest “pass” for incompetence and malfeasance in American history!

President Roosevelt was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signs—some of them, 17 years old—before Pearl Harbor.

President Hoover was correctly blamed for—if not the Great Depression itself—then the disastrous economic steps he took in the immediate aftermath of the Stock Market Crash.

Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War—though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.

But not this president.

To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been president on September 11th, 2001 -- or the nearly eight months that preceded it.

That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the executive.

But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed, until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now.

Except for this.

After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts—that he was president on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton’s.

Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly.

As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy.

Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.

Consider the timing: the very weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is—not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it.

The kind of proof of incompetence, for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion, in a scapegoat.

"Cowardice" in Olbermann's definition is: (1) dodging responsibility for one's actions, and (2) using others to pin the blame elsewhere.

Check out the rest of the piece by clicking the link at the top of this post.

Indeed, Olbermann is correct to see that this entire episode with Clinton is an effort to reframe the discussion of Bush's failure on Iraq into a discussion of Clinton's failures.

Instead of listening to experts and making the choices that can save lives, President Bush is attempting to cloud the people's judgement by kicking up lots of sand on past events.

On top of Olbermann's masterful rhetoric, we should also see that ongoing strategy of the Bush administration has been to focus attention on the past or the future whenever the American people get angry about what is happening in their name right now, in the present.

Frameshop tips its hat to Keith Olbermann--and to President Clinton--for leading this debate back onto the road of sanity, in response to a huge effort by FOX news and President Bush to drive us all over a cliff of lies and distraction.

© 2006 Jeffrey Feldman, Frameshop