One Pill Makes You Small: Counting Pills On The Couch With Keith Olbermann

Whenever I watch MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," I do find myself counting down the minutes before I shoot myself. If I were not so bad with numbers, distracted as I am by commercials, I would be undoubtedly dead by the end of that show.

Last Wednesday night, August 30, 2o06, Mr. Olbermann suffered a bout of restrained apoplexy in light of two radical events: a speech given by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and reports that the "leaker" of the name of Valerie Plame to the press was not, as the press suspected, Karl Rove or Dick Cheney, but a "moderate" and moderately high-level official, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

But it is the latter story that interests me. Here is an excerpt of Olbermann's comments about this rippingly good news item:

Our No. 3 story in the COUNTDOWN tonight is a threesome, actually. Lies, damned lies, and one truth. But we‘ll start with the truth. The truth revealed, possibly lost somewhat in the frenzy over a guy who did not kill JonBenet Ramsey. It is the revelation by “Newsweek” magazine that Richard Armitage, then the No. 2 man at the State Department was indeed the first source behind Robert Novak‘s column, outing the CIA operative, Valerie Plame, the wife of Joseph Wilson. You will recall Wilson, of course, revealed that President Bush was quoting bogus information, the infamous 16-words about an Iraqi bid to obtain yellow cake uranium from Niger. “Newsweek‘s” accounts suggests, quoting a lawyer familiar with the whole thing, that Armitage was not part of an orchestrated plan to discredit Wilson, however the “New York Times” today reporting that Armitage only knew about Plame from a department memo about here that had been compiled at the request of the office of Vice President Cheney.

I might dismiss Mr. Olbermann if he were not so despicably cunning in his telling of the tale. Shrewd readers know that this is not how it all happened; absent from Mr. Olbermann's commentary is the blinding fact that Mr. Wilson was indeed found to be wrong on a number of serious counts, counts on which he claimed to be right. Mr. Olbermann must be a news commentator with none of the news and all the comment. Wilson has lost his round in the limelight; he will lose if he enters the limelight again. We all know this; or at least we all should.

Here is what the September 1, 2006 Washington Post editorialized ("End of an Affair") about the whole happy fiasco:

...it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

Unfortunate indeed! Similarly unfortunate is the fact that Mr. Olbermann will continue to get it wrong and thus will never offer us an apology for his sin of presumption. Ironically, most of Mr. Olbermann's apoplexy was inspired by what he called the hubris of the Bush administration, that its penchant for believing its knowledge of all affairs -- domestic or foreign -- is omniscient and inerrant. That Mr. Olbermann believes HIS understanding of all things domestic and foreign -- and all things Bush -- is total and inerrant is lost on no one but him. We chuckle at seeing him denounce certitude with certitude; we countdown the number of days that we'll soon enjoy without Keith Olbermann as he pontificates himself into self-righteous oblivion.

(If you want to see how a propagandist inverts a concept, and then mallets it into a shape he himself does not recognize that he does not recognize; in other words, if you want to see a contradiction produced by a man who cannot see his art from his hands, then read Olbermann's blog entry, "Feeling morally, intellectually confused?" I promise that you will not read anywhere a better man who, with such clarity, reveals that he cannot see a thing.)

***

Another interesting related tidbit is this from The New York Times:

An enduring mystery of the C.I.A. leak case has been solved in recent days, but with a new twist: Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, knew the identity of the leaker from his very first day in the special counsel's chair, but kept the inquiry open for nearly two more years before indicting I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, on obstruction charges.

Now, the question of whether Mr. Fitzgerald properly exercised his prosecutorial discretion in continuing to pursue possible wrongdoing in the case has become the subject of rich debate on editorial pages and in legal and political circles.

And then there is this overview, from a conservative vantage, at this interesting site. For balance, of course (as if there really can be in a story that has been so wrong), I send you here, though I warn you that you will hear a large city newspaper sound utterly void of discernment.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Bush, Plamegate, Keith Olbermann, Joe Wilson, Countdown, Washington Post, Richard Armitage, Armitage