Olbermann: Truth and consequences

The problem was that whatever kind of three-card monte game President Bush was running in Iraq, and whether he was the shill or just another victim, David Bloom was still dead, and so were a lot of young men and women in helmets whose names weren’t David Bloom but who still counted every bit as much as he did.

The White House, of course, both fabricated and destroyed the rationale for the war, as well as the new American culture of fear first and ask questions later. It did the former through what has to be acknowledged as some very clever thinking, enabling the exploitation of 9/11 in endless ways: Watch the genuinely patriotic opposition voluntarily file in to the political equivalent of comedian Shelley Berman’s famous “lousy hotel room”—the one he discovers seems to be missing all windows or doors or other ways out; cover Saddam Hussein in 9/11 guilt by association for the vast majority of people who couldn’t tell al-Qaeda from Al Jarreau; grab all kinds of un-American powers over the American legal system the way President Adams tried to, or President Nixon, or Joe McCarthy, or anybody else who ever recognized inchoate fear in the public, who were as ever eager to protect their freedoms by surrendering them.

The problem for Messrs. Bush and Cheney and Rove, of course, was that having come up with a brilliant idea, they started to believe their own press clippings. Turns out they might not really have been that smart, or that good at execution.

Not a big deal, just the salvation of our democracy.

Just how bad this White House really was at the follow-through, I witnessed firsthand. At the height of the focused terrorism against Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson in the late spring and early summer of ’04, we booked Joe to come on the show. Inexplicably, somebody in the administration’s press office was working off an old script. They assumed I would be debunking Wilson, and decided to send me some helpful talking points by e-mail.

Only nobody there knew how to spell my name.

In the twenty-four hours prior to the interview, they must have sent a copy of the e-mail intended for me (Oberman, Olberman, Obermann, Obleman, Ohlbermen, Olderman, and Olberding, if I remember the permutations correctly) to seven different people at NBC whose names they could spell. These transmissions fell upon me like icicles on the first sunny day. Damned annoying. Damned stupid.

So of course, I showed the e-mail on Countdown and asked Joe Wilson about the talking points. And he laughed and I laughed and the audience ratings grew a little bit and I had an odd feeling that the show, and the country, would turn out all right after all.

With bitter irony, it wasn’t Iraq that did George Bush in—it was the weather.

Hurricane Katrina, provoking his governmental response of “Here’s a bucket; that’ll be a million dollars,” ultimately was The Decider. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff came on my television and declared “Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater,” and I turned and shouted back at him, “There’s your goddamned problem right there!” and switched on my computer and started spewing. We didn’t call it that at the time, but that venting would become the first “Special Comment.” And the attention it garnered dropped a few embers in the vast empty forests of my vast empty head, which would provide a lot of heat and a lot of light at the appropriate later date.

Oh, and parenthetically, prior to the attacks, had you ever heard the word “homeland” used in this country, except while somebody employed a cheesy German accent, and inwardly we were all glad anew that we’d beaten those bastards in 1945?

The Homeland?

Screw you, pally.

This is America.

Once again I’d learn a lot about this country on a baseball field.

I escaped to Florida at the start of March 2006, for my first trip to spring training in a decade. There are liberals and moderates and the enlightened and the skeptical within that sport, but they’re outnumbered by the conservatives. Generally these are the conservatives of the more malleable sort. My best friend in the game is one of them. We’ve argued politics since 1990 and eventually he calls me a communist and I call him a fascist and then we start giggling and he begins to reminisce about hitting batters he didn’t like with pitches.

And that day in ’06 when I stepped onto the Yankees’ practice field in Tampa, one of my other conservative baseball friends was waiting for me.

“What happened to my president?” he asked. “Was I not paying attention, or was he always like that?” I was stopped cold. He looked at me with angry eyes. “Katrina! What the hell did he do in New Orleans?” We had barely finished a conversation in which the political poles had so reversed themselves that I had partially defended Bush, when a second like-minded friend came over. “Am I nuts, or could you and I, just the two of us, have done a better job in the Gulf Coast than Bush and Chertoff and Mike ‘Heck of a Job Brownie’ Brown did? Just with paper towels.”

I had a feeling the Democrats were going to do okay in the midterms.

The actual phenomenon of the birth of the Special Comment has been recited so often by the barely contained egotist in me that I begin to feel like Ted Baxter explaining how it all started at a five-thousandwatt radio station in Fresno, California.

But the gist merits repetition (like you could stop me anyway). I was stuck on the tarmac at LAX, the late August thunderstorms in New York keeping us pinioned on the ground three thousand miles away with nothing to do but read the Associated Press stories on my ESPN-issued mobile phone.

And there it was: Don Rumsfeld calling me morally or intellectually confused, or the equivalent of a Nazi appeaser, or both. Not just me, mind you, but all of us—all of us who dared question Iraq, or the game of Simon Says that is the juvenile and ineffective new domestic counterterror rules, or the Bush administration itself.

And I searched the rest of that part of the Web offered me by the phone for the righteous indignation, for the atomic bombs of verbiage from the poets of the left, for the repudiation of this historically backward twisting of all that had happened since about 1933.

Nothing.

It was a moment, I gather, that some nonswimmers experience when a child falls into the deep water and nobody else makes a move. As time slowed, they invariably recall, they waited to see who else was going to dive in. Upon realizing nobody was, the thought formed, not of heroism or of urgency but of resignation. Oh, hell, I see how this is going. I’m diving in. I wonder if I can swim.

This does not always turn out well. Some drown, some don’t, some prevail and everyone lives. But in the moment, you understand that if you’re going to go down, at least you’re going to go down for something worthwhile.

I started scribbling the first “Comment,” by hand, on the back of my trip itinerary. We were somewhere over the Rockies by the time I finished.

The responses to the pieces you will read herein were varied, but they contained one common thread.

I got fake anthrax mailed to my home, and the New York Post mocked me for calling the cops (when it turned out those cops would subsequently arrest a domestic terrorist who had done the same thing to David Letterman, Jon Stewart, and Sumner Redstone—kinda makes the Post pro-terrorist, right?). The FBI came and did a wonderful job, although it cost me a night in isolation at the hospital, and the clothes I was wearing, and, in an irony I recognized even at the time, that ESPN mobile device on which I had read Rumsfeld’s remarks—burned in the irradiation of all I had on me when I opened the powder-filled letter.

They’ve threatened my relatives, printed phony stories about nonexistent skeletons in imaginary closets, guaranteed my imminent dismissal, and even whined when I started writing again for a memorabilia magazine about old baseball cards (“How can you let that lefty back in your page?” the editor quoted one complainant).

Baseball cards. Some people are dumb enough to see a political slant to frickin’ baseball cards.

But amid all the tumult and the threatening and the name-calling, I have yet to see serious refutations of either the facts or the conclusions in these Comments.

Which leads me to the tentative conclusion that I’m probably right, with the caveat that I wish the water-carriers would apply to themselves as I apply it to myself:

As Oliver Cromwell said to the Church of Scotland nearly 360 years ago: I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

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