September 6, 2005 @ 4:01 PM
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann Skewers the Bushies
Thanks to Mike Bryan, over at Blog for Arizona, for alerting us to Olbermann’s September 5th broadcast. Is Olbermann this generation’s Edward R. Murrow? God, I hope so. This reminds me very much of Murrow’s classic broadcast in which he took on Senator Joe McCarthy back in the communist witch-hunting days.
Here’s a short excerpt:
"No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.
"But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers."
The complete transcript of the broadcast is available here.
You can listen to it here…which I recommend.
