Yousir

How much longer will Keith Olbermann be confined to MSNBC? I am ready to assert that his is the boldest, most admirable voice in television news and analysis. And it's not that he seems particularly liberal, it's that he has decided to call things as he sees them. We all know that reality has a liberal bias, but these days that has more to do with the fact that Republicans are being purposefully misleading (to put it charitably) than any inherent quality of the truth itself. No, Olbermann seems like a prime example of an enraged moderate, someone showing that you don't have to be a crazed communist hippie to think that eliminating a recent democratic innovation called habeas corpus (seems like 1215 was just yesterday) is a bad thing:



Since I like Olbermann's j'accuse tone, I think I am just going to start calling him Yousir. At any rate, former Salon editor Boehlert has come out with a recent book all about how cowed the American press has become, and it is supposedly very interesting. But you don't need to read the book to know what he's talking about - reading the newspaper with even a little skepticism over the past six years should have been enough to tip off just about anyone.

Yousir implies that there will always be an urgent threat that absolutely requires giving up some sort of freedom, just as demonstrates that there always has been. The powerful blog software we work with here at UC Dems can't predict the future, so we can't test whether there always will be an urgent threat. But my own investigation has turned up evidence that urgent threats existed at least as far back as 1947. Beware, the video below is long (I think a little over fifteen minutes), and it has some pacing and plot structure problems, but for an old news reel I found it to be pretty eye-opening.

And I am thrilled to be able to link to this incredibly good article by Corey Robin that touches on these very subjects. Just as it was hypocrital of J. Edgar Hoover to purge homosexuals from the State Department, it was also hypocritcal to claim you need to torture terror suspects when it has been shown that it is more useful to monitor them for longer before capturing them - and in any event torture doesn't work. This article sums it all up and puts the issue in perspective better than I can.

But Yousir makes a larger point, which does not actually break new ground: George W. Bush has been a criminally destructive force for our democracy and our country in the best case scenario. Things are definitely bad when Nixon's cronies start questioning your ethics and behavior. But you know how Bush has had a pretty bad year? It was well over a year ago that he had basically cemented his place in history as the WORST. PRESIDENT. EVER. This is not liberal hyperbole, this is academic consensus - much as some people like to whine about liberal bias in universities, they would do well to remember that academics study reality, so they can take up the liberal bias with that if they really don't like it. But despite the seeming obviousness of the President's shortcomings, not just to liberals but to anyone who values the very basis of democracy, Yousir is apparently the only member of the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM) who is on the BS Detector beat. Even supposed Democrat George Stephanopolous, host of ABC's This Week, failed to call Bush on his obvious, blatant, easily correctable lie (see link in first paragraph) about never being for "staying the course" when as late as a month ago he was using those precise words. Yousir is out there all the time proving that you don't have to be a partisan to appreciate the truth, and I hope that in the near future he gets a more prominent forum than MSNBC can provide.