Olberman Changes His Tune About Perjury and Obstruction of Justice

Keith Olberman was in high dungeon last night about the Libby commutation. He even suggested that a good model for us to follow in the wake of this final indignity by Bush would be the dictator Oliver Cromwell's dismissal of the Rump Parliament. Apparently he can not stand Bush to the degree that he no longer can tolerate our silly democratic processes and he wants to disenfranchise the rubes who reelected Bush and forced Olberman to tolerate another year and a half of the man.

Well, the last time Olberman was covering acts of perjury and obstruction of justice the alleged perpetrator was William Jefferson Clinton. Was Keith equally outraged at such dishonesty in the White House? No he was not.

Here are some quotes from NewsBusters:

Regarding Olbermann's denial that he was ever accused of "being a liberal" during the 1998 Monica Lewinsky scandal, while he was hosting MSNBC's Big Show, the MRC at that time documented several instances of hostility to Kenneth Starr, impeachment, Newt Gingrich and Republicans in general. On August 18, 1998, in the aftermath of President Clinton's speech admitting to his affair with Lewinsky, Olbermann thought it insightful to remark that Starr reminded him facially of Heinrich Himmler, and suggested some might compare Starr to a "persecutor opposed to a prosecutor."

Olbermann, from August 18, 1998: "Can Ken Starr ignore the apparent breadth of the sympathetic response to the President’s speech? Facially, it finally dawned on me that the person Ken Starr has reminded me of facially all this time was Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses. If he now pursues the President of the United States, who, however flawed his apology was, came out and invoked God, family, his daughter, a political conspiracy and everything but the kitchen sink, would not there be some sort of comparison to a persecutor as opposed to a prosecutor for Mr. Starr?"

Or this:

"It worked in Stalingrad. To some degree, it worked in the foreign compound during the Boxer Rebellion in Peking in 1900. It certainly seems to have worked for Bill Clinton. When there’s no capability of offense, no escape, and especially if you’re lucky enough to have an overconfident opponent -- just batten down the hatches and wait for the idiots to defeat themselves. Impeachment, once spoken gravely by presidential defenders and opponents alike, now engenders giggles and arguments about it carry all the weight of arguments about who is the rightful Czar of all the Russias."
-- MSNBC Big Show host Keith Olbermann, November 23, 1998

Apparently Olberman views consistency as the hobgoblin of small minds, at least when there are Republicans to be assaulted .

Rebuilding The World Trade Center Site

On September 11 of last year Keith Olberman took his one note anti-Bush screed to new depths when he told his viewers that Bush was to blame for the continuing failure to rebuild on the hole in the ground that is still the site of the former World Trade Center in Manhattan. That was when, for me, he lost all credibility and became simply another posturing media fame seeker.

Anyone who has lived in the New York area understands, in a exquisitely painful way, that the fiasco at ground zero is the result of battles between the owners of the land, the Port Authority of NY and NJ, a quasi-public agency run by appointees of the Governors of New York and New Jersey, (who today are two different men than held those offices in 2001), the private owner of the destroyed buildings, his insurance companies, the demands of the families of those lost on 9/11 and a host of community interests in NY representing public safety, anti-terrorism, architecture aesthetics, and neighborhood businesses and residents. Oh yes, and the army of lawyers representing all those parties. The only entity with virtually zero say in the outcome in lower Manhattan is the Federal Government. Olberman should have known better.

My point here is not to rehash the details and arguments of the sorry history of that tragic site, but rather to point out yet another latecomer's bitching about the now planned resolution about to be constructed. The latest kvetch to emerge is the NY Times' erstwhile architecture critic du jour, Nicolai Ouroussoff, who continues to find fault with the design of the so called Freedom Tower to be built on the site.

Nowhere is that failure of ambition more evident than in the tower’s base. In a society where the social contract that binds us together is fraying, the most incisive architects have found ways to create a more fluid relationship between private and public realms. The lobby of Thom Mayne’s Phare Tower in Paris, for example, is conceived as an extension of the public realm, drawing in the surrounding streetscape and tunneling deep into the ground to connect to a network of underground trains.

By comparison the Freedom Tower is conceived as a barricaded fortress. Its base, a 20-story-high windowless concrete bunker that houses the lobby as well as many of the structure’s mechanical systems, is clad in laminated glass panels to give it visual allure, but the message is the same. It speaks less of resilience and tolerance than of paranoia. It’s a building armored against an outside world that we no longer trust.

Someone, and I elect myself, needs to point out to Mr. Ouroussoff, that it is only paranoia if no one is in fact trying to get you. In the present case, as amply evidenced by the rubble still being cleared from the area five and a half years later, someone has, and still would like to do spectacular killing in America. If Mr. Ouroussoff stopped looking up at buildings all day and read a newspaper occasionally he might understand that security concerns must sadly be a necessary part of all new building designs.