By Keith
Olbermann
MSNBC Countdown
Monday 18 September
2006
The President of the United
States owes this country an apology.
It will not be offered, of
course.
He does not realize its
necessity.
There are now none around him
who would tell him or could.
The last of them, it appears,
was the very man whose letter provoked the President into the conduct, for
which the apology is essential.
An apology is this President's
only hope of regaining the slightest measure of confidence, of what has been,
for nearly two years, a clear majority of his people.
Not "confidence" in his
policies nor in his designs nor even in something as narrowly focused as which
vision of torture shall prevail - his, or that of the man who has sent him
into apoplexy, Colin Powell.
In a larger sense, the
President needs to regain our confidence, that he has some basic understanding
of what this country represents - of what it must maintain if we are to defeat
not only terrorists, but if we are also to defeat what is ever more
increasingly apparent, as an attempt to re-define the way we live here, and
what we mean, when we say the word "freedom."
Because it is evident now
that, if not its architect, this President intends to be the contractor, for
this narrowing of the definition of freedom.
The President revealed this
last Friday, as he fairly spat through his teeth, words of unrestrained fury
directed at the man who was once the very symbol of his administration, who
was once an ambassador from this administration to its critics, as he had once
been an ambassador from the military to its critics.
The former Secretary of State,
Mr. Powell, had written, simply and candidly and without anger, that "the
world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against
terrorism."
This President's response
included not merely what is apparently the Presidential equivalent of
threatening to hold one's breath, but within it contained one particularly
chilling phrase.
"Mr. President, former Secretary of State
Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight
against terrorism," he was asked by a reporter. "If a former chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff and former secretary of state feels this way, don't you
think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether
you're following a flawed strategy?"
"If there's any comparison
between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist
tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic," Bush said. "It's just - I simply
can't accept that. It's unacceptable
to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the
United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill
innocent women and children to achieve an objective.
Of course it's acceptable to
think that there's "any kind of comparison."
And in this particular debate,
it is not only acceptable, it is obviously necessary, even if Mr. Powell never
made the comparison in his letter.
Some will think that our actions at
Abu Ghraib, or in Guantanamo, or in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, are all
too comparable to the actions of the extremists.
Some will think that there is no
similarity, or, if there is one, it is to the slightest and most unavoidable
of degrees.
What all of us will agree on, is that we
have the right - we have the duty - to think about the
comparison.
And, most importantly, that the other guy,
whose opinion about this we cannot fathom, has exactly the same right as we
do: to think - and say - what his mind and his heart and his conscience tell
him, is right.
All of us agree about that.
Except, it seems, this
President.
With increasing rage, he and
his administration have begun to tell us, we are not permitted to disagree
with them, that we cannot be right, that Colin Powell cannot be
right.
And then there was that one,
most awful phrase.
In four simple words last
Friday, the President brought into sharp focus what has been only vaguely
clear these past five-and-a-half years - the way the terrain at night is
perceptible only during an angry flash of lightning, and then, a second later,
all again is dark.
"It's unacceptable to think," he
said.
It is never unacceptable to
think.
And when a President says
thinking is unacceptable, even on one topic, even in the heat of the moment,
even in the turning of a phrase extracted from its context, he takes us toward
a new and fearful path - one heretofore the realm of science fiction authors
and apocalyptic visionaries.
That flash of lightning freezes at the
distant horizon, and we can just make out a world in which authority can
actually suggest it has become unacceptable to think.
Thus the lightning flash reveals not
merely a President we have already seen, the one who believes he has a
monopoly on current truth.
It now shows us a President who has
decided that of all our commanders-in-chief, ever, he alone has had the
knowledge necessary to alter and re-shape our inalienable rights.
This is a frightening, and a dangerous,
delusion, Mr. President.
If Mr. Powell's letter -
cautionary, concerned, predominantly supportive - can induce from you such
wrath and such intolerance, what would you say were this statement to be
shouted to you by a reporter, or written to you by a colleague?
"Governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any
form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the
people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
government."
Those incendiary thoughts came, of
course, from a prior holder of your job, Mr. Bush.
They were the words of Thomas
Jefferson.
He put them in the Declaration of
Independence.
Mr. Bush, what would you say
to something that anti-thetical to the status quo just now?
Would you call it
"unacceptable" for Jefferson to think such things, or to write
them?
Between your confidence in
your infallibility, sir, and your demonizing of dissent, and now these rages
better suited to a thwarted three-year old, you have left the unnerving sense
of a White House coming unglued - a chilling suspicion that perhaps we have
not seen the peak of the anger; that we can no longer forecast what next will
be said to, or about, anyone who disagrees.
Or what will next be done to
them.
On this newscast last Friday
night, Constitiutional law Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington
University, suggested that at some point in the near future some of the
"detainees" transferred from secret CIA cells to Guantanamo, will finally get
to tell the Red Cross that they have indeed been tortured.
Thus the debate over the
Geneva Conventions, might not be about further interrogations of detainees,
but about those already conducted, and the possible liability of the
administration, for them.
That, certainly, could explain
Mr. Bush's fury.
That, at this point, is
speculative.
But at least it provides an
alternative possibility as to why the President's words were at such variance
from the entire history of this country.
For, there needs to be some
other explanation, Mr. Bush, than that you truly believe we should live in a
United States of America in which a thought is
unacceptable.
There needs to be a delegation of
responsible leaders - Republicans or otherwise - who can sit you down as Barry
Goldwater and Hugh Scott once sat Richard Nixon down - and explain the reality
of the situation you have created.
There needs to be an apology
from the President of the United States.
And more than
one.
But, Mr. Bush, the others -
for warnings unheeded five years ago, for war unjustified four years ago, for
battle unprepared three years ago - they are not weighted with the urgency and
necessity of this one.
We must know that, to you,
thought with which you disagree - and even voice with which you disagree and
even action with which you disagree - are still sacrosanct to
you.
The philosopher Voltaire once
insisted to another author, "I detest what you write, but I would give my life
to make it possible for you to continue to write." Since the nation's birth,
Mr. Bush, we have misquoted and even embellished that statement, but we have
served ourselves well, by subscribing to its essence.
Oddly, there are other words
of Voltaire's that are more pertinent still, just now.
"Think for yourselves," he
wrote, "and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."
Apologize, sir, for even
hinting at an America where a few have that privilege to think and the rest of
us get yelled at by the President.
Anything else, Mr. Bush, is
truly unacceptable.
"Television is altering the meaning of "being
informed" by creating a species of information that
might properly be
called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information.
It
means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or
superficial information -
information that creates the illusion of knowing
something, but which in fact leads one away from
knowing.": Neil
Postman
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