• October 11, 2005 | 9:02 a.m. ET

Angels win -- and lose (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK -- Since the third game of the regular season, when Mariano Rivera blew a save against the Boston Red Sox, the New York Yankees have been walking across a figurative tightrope -- on their hands. Last night, even with the Los Angeles Angels repeatedly offering them safety nets, guide dogs, and training wheels, the Yankees finally fell off.

The Angels' 20-game winner had to come out in the second inning; their nervous rookie replacement gave up two quick runs; they were willing to end their first rally with a sharply-hit but manageable fly to right field; their Gold Glove catcher was nice enough to drop a third out, third strike with two men on in the 5th; their unhittable closer helped out by putting the tying runs on in the 9th.

And the Yankees took advantage of none of it.

Their valiant season will be memorialized by the sight of outfielders Bubba Crosby and Gary Sheffield -- unable to hear each other over the din of the crowd as that sharply-hit but manageable fly headed their way in the 2nd -- nearly running head first into each other. Two Los Angeles runs scored, and the game went on for another seven innings, but it had all ended when (and this is a joke for the three British Football fans reading this) Crosby and Sheffield united.

Unfortunately for the Angels, while the Yankees' season literally came to a crashing end, theirs may have done so figuratively. Bartolo Colon was the 20-game winner who exited stage right, his shoulder barking after just 23 pitches. Jarrod Washburn, scheduled to start Game Four for the Angels, had to be scratched with a throat infection so serious that before last night's game the Angels admitted there was a good chance he would not pitch again this season. The club's emergency starter, Ervin Santana, had to come in for Colon and acquitted himself marvelously.

But unless manager Mike Scioscia has dreams of returning reliever Kelvim Escobar to the rotation, he suddenly finds himself at least two pitchers short of a rotation in the A.L. Championship Series against the Chicago White Sox. Paul Byrd -- the Game Three starter against the Yanks in the Friday night rain -- will presumably start Game One against the White Sox, and then it's anybody's guess. Scioscia -- who in the post-game news conference said he'd spend much of the three-hour flight to Chicago trying to figure out who'll start that first game -- may wind up dropping Washburn from the active roster (and maybe even Colon) and giving a spot to one of two youngsters -- Chris Bootcheck or Joe Saunders -- who between them made four starts for the Angels this season and combined to go 0-1.

The Angels showed enough flaws (the bullpen is not infallible, Vladimir Guerrero is not unstoppable, Chone Figgins is not an automatic base runner) that weakness in the rotation will be enough to guarantee a Chicago victory, probably in short order - five or six games.

The White Sox will meet the Astros in a World Series that will pit two teams that between them have gone a nice even 130 years without winning one. The "schedule flip" to which I referred here yesterday did not occur and Houston thus gets enough time to recover from its marathon win over the Braves on Sunday. It will be next spring, however, before the lynchpin of the Cardinals' bullpen -- Al Reyes -- returns from his late-season injury, and the statistics we pointed out previously here (8.1 innings in relief versus San Diego, 16 hits, eight runs) will only be amplified by the greater strength of Houston's offense compared to that of the Padres.

If these two series end at the right time, the 2005 World Series could easily begin with ex-Yankee Jose Contreras of the White Sox starting Game One against ex-Yankee Andy Pettitte or ex-Yankee Roger Clemens of the Astros. That will not please He Who Makes Ex-Yankees, George Steinbrenner.

And back on the news beat, a special report on the coincidences of timing between political developments and terrorism developments -- "The Nexus of Politics and Terror" -- is scheduled to air Wednesday night on Countdown.

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• October 10, 2005 | 9 30 a.m. ET

Playoff Schedule may flip; so may Astros (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK - Several New York Yankees players were told last night that Major League Baseball would “flip” the schedules of the next round of the playoffs, giving them, or the Los Angeles Angels, an additional a day to recover from about 5,000 miles of air travel in under 30 hours.

Unless those players misheard or misunderstood - or unless common sense makes an unlikely comeback - the American League Championship Series would thus open Wednesday and not tomorrow, and the National League event would open tomorrow and not Wednesday.

Some sources insisted the switch was part of an informal deal among the players' union, management, and the television networks. The Yankees and Angels players agreed to play last night's game in primetime (and not in the afternoon), thus denying themselves the chance of an early evening flight to the West Coast and a slight chance of getting to bed before midnight Pacific Time. As the quid pro quo for that, the survivors of the team's decisive fifth game would be rewarded with a full travel day on Tuesday. Those sources' information could not be confirmed as of early this mornng.

This would come as something of an unhappy surprise to Manager Phil Garner of the Houston Astros, some of whose strategy in yesterday’s epic 18-inning win over the Atlanta Braves was probably predicated on a seemingly ironclad assumption that his team would have two days to recover from the Sunday marathon, and not just one.

The manager of the Chicago White Sox, Ozzie Guillen, would probably be none too pleased either. His team efficiently swept the Boston Red Sox in three games and had earned the advantage of facing a road-weary opponent that a Tuesday opener would provide.

Instead - if those Yankee players are correct - baseball is to justify the “flip” as a merciful gesture to whoever wins the Yankees-Angels series tonight. The teams were rained out in New York Saturday and were thus forced to play here last night, then take red-eye flights to Southern California for the decisive game of their series tonight, with the winner then being forced to again fly overnight for the opener in Chicago Tuesday.

This would be baseball’s way to give either the Yankees or Angels a fighting chance against jet lag and exhaustion, but of course it would be seen merely as a sop to the Yankees (some of whom, even before they had earned the right to the all-night flight to Anaheim, were complaining about it), and a disservice to the Astros and White Sox.

As of the end of last night’s game in the Bronx, a baseball spokesperson insisted no “flip” decision had yet been made, but confirmed it was still being considered. The correct route, of course, would have been to make the decision or at least announce its possibility before Sunday’s games and not wait until after the Astros and Braves had finished up.

And how they finished up!

Last April, in the freezing dugout at Shea Stadium here, a Houston player I didn’t recognize sidled up to me and said, simply, “The other team’s quarterback must go down, and he must go down hard.” When I looked at him blankly, he gently scolded me. “Remember? You used to say that on SportsCenter?” I told him I remembered but he must’ve been pretty young the last time he actually heard it. “High school,” he finally calculated.

Kid’s name - and he was a 25-year old rookie who would hit just .248 with only five homers for the Astros this year - was Chris Burke, and he’s now a lot more famous than he was in that dugout last April. It was Burke’s homer with one out in the bottom of the 18^th inning that let Houston prevail in the longest post-season game in baseball history, 7-6, over Atlanta (for the obsessive, like myself, the teams did not shatter the record for most innings played by two teams in one post-season series in one day - the Detroit Wolverines and St. Louis Browns played two full games of the marathon 1887 World Series on one day that year - October 21^st).

The number of epic moments in “The Burke/Clemens Game” may well be uncountable. The key might’ve been Atlanta’s Adam LaRoche - who had earlier hit a seemingly cinching Grand Slam - watching the ball, the fielders, and everything but his own third base coach’s wildly windmilling arms, and getting himself thrown out of the plate in the 7^th inning, instead of scoring what would’ve been Atlanta’s 7^th run.

Part of the mystery of the Braves’ perennial post-season failures may be contained in an awful anniversary. It is now just about a decade since Manager Bobby Cox has gotten away with pitching a starter on three days’ rest in the playoffs. Since Greg Maddux won Game Four of the 1995 World Series on short rest, the Braves have now lost on all six occasions when Cox has tried to sneak a starter back early. He often has not had many other options, and often (as in this game) it wasn’t even the starter’s fault, but it still reflects Atlanta’s often fatal - and fatally-timed - pitching weaknesses.

So my predictions here are now one-for-three with one still outstanding.

YANKEES, ANGELS, TIED AT TWO APIECE

Atlanta - whom I had picked here to beat the Astros - left 18 men on base. 18! By contrast, last night in New York, the Los Angeles Angels stranded exactly one. They had blown their few chances against the Yankees by bad base-running and throws (one example of each from Vladimir Guerrero). The Yankees won 3-2, and considering that in their Game Three loss they overcame one five-run Angels’ lead and nearly erased another, there is nothing in the Angels that suggests they are unbeatable in a Game Five at home.

The two teams played incredibly crisp baseball - as if they had a plane to catch (which they did, as it proved). Their first three games were not particularly enthralling - in fact, clearly the strongest part of the series had been the radio work of my friends Dan Shulman and Dave Campbell, who are, simply, the best announcing team in baseball.

WHITE SOX ELIMINATE RED SOX, 3-0

Got this one pretty good (Boston didn’t even take the two gratuitous victories I forecast for them). Chicago manager Ozzie Guillen was on the radio with Dan Patrick and me the day before the decisive game, and I asked him how he’d succeeded in stifling Boston’s big bats, David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez. He said he told his pitchers to focus not on them, but on the guys batting ahead of them, Johnny Damon and Edgar Renteria. Those Boston batters came to the plate 28 times in the three games and reached based exactly four times each. Thus, even though Ramirez homered twice and Ortiz once in the series, the Boston hitting machine never got started.

This outcome - and the holes throughout the Boston pitching staff - should underscore what a terrific job Terry Francona did in managing the Red Sox into the playoffs in the first place.

CARDINALS ELIMINATE PADRES, 3-0

The Cards’ domination of San Diego, and the Jake Peavy fiasco in Game One, obscured some very ominous data for St. Louis. Not only did Larry Walker go hitless in the series and get banged up going for a fly ball in the finale, but the Cards scored 21 runs - 10 driven in by Reggie Sanders, and 11 by everybody else.

Worse even than the offensive inconsistency was one of the worst imaginable performances by a bullpen in a sweep. Five Cardinals’ relievers pitched a total of eight-and-a-third innings - and gave up 16 hits and eight runs. If they perform similarly while the Astros  are close, the Cards are going to get smoked.

I’ll wait to give you a formal prediction here until the American League Series is settled.

NOTES

This is why I love baseball - and periodically still write about it: It will always surprise you, even if you’re sitting on the bench, waiting for the monsoons to stop long enough for them to get in the ballgame.

Pedro Gomez, the ESPN reporter, was passing the time with me when his old friend Felix Rodriguez passed in front of the dugout. In the last year-and-a-half, Rodriguez had gone from being a very good relief pitcher with the San Francisco Giants to a not-very-good relief pitcher with the New York Yankees, but he had remained one of the sport’s most popular people.

Pedro went out to greet him and they conversed in Spanish. When he returned to the bench, he had a smile on his face. “One of your viewers,” Gomez said. “He said to me ‘Is that the guy who used to be on ESPN? Who does the news for NBC on cable? I watch him all the time. He’s great.’” I don’t know who was more surprised - Pedro or me.

This is not a gratuitous means of getting Rodriguez’s compliment into a blog. It’s designed to underscore the variety of people who’ve identified themselves to me or my staff as regular viewers of Countdown - the people I’m thinking of as we’re putting together special items like the upcoming report on the coincidences of the last four years in which bad news for the Bush Administration has been followed within days by a terror alert or similar terror-related news story.

It also emphasizes that the typical depiction of sports figures as self-absorbed and detached from reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Among the Countdown “baseball” audience are big league managers Bobby Cox (Atlanta), John Gibbons (Toronto), and Ned Yost (Milwaukee), and Jack McKeon, who just left the same post with Florida. Among the players, we have Todd Jones of the Marlins and Jeromy Burnitz of the Cubs, and among retired stars: Tommy John, Jerry Coleman, and, to my eternal surprise, Phil Rizzuto (“maybe some day you’ll actually hit the camera with that crumpled-up piece of paper.”)

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• October 6, 2005 | 10: 30 a.m. ET

Exes and Errors (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK - White Sox fans saw utility infielder Tony Graffanino make 31 errors in just 273 defensive games over three-and-a-half years in Chicago. Last night, they watched him - as the new second baseman of the Boston Red Sox - kick an ordinary Juan Uribe groundball and turn a two-run rally into a five-run death knell, and give Chicago a 5-4 win and a two games to none lead in the American League Division Series.

New York Yankees fans suffered through two largely frustrating years from outfielder Juan Rivera. Last night, they watched him - as the rightfielder of the Los Angeles Angels - homer leading off the bottom of the fifth, to break Chien-Ming Wang’s magic leading off the bottom of the fifth. Two innings later, Rivera led off again by beating out an impossibly high chopper, touching off the Angels’ decisive rally in a 5-3 win that evened their Division Series.

So, it’s all pretty much as I forecast here the other day. Except that the Yankees, Braves, and Padres aren’t winning their series, and the Angels, Astros, and Cardinals aren’t losing theirs.

WHITE SOX LEAD RED SOX, 2-0

The immortal humorist and sometimes Chicagoan Jean Shepherd put it best: Chicago White Sox fans “have known death every day of their lives, and it holds no terror for them.” The Sox “represented not just Chicago, but the South Side. Do you know what it feels like to be a South Sider in a world of North Siders?”

These are fans of the team that won its last World Series the year before the Boston Red Sox had won what had been their last, until last season. Worse still, they have in their collective consciousness the awareness that either their greatest team - the 1919 squad starring Shoeless Joe Jackson - deliberately lost the World Series to the longshot Cincinnati Reds that year, or, probably worse yet, they lost while not trying to.

Thus for a true South Sider, is a 2-0 lead over the Red Sox in a three-game playoff series nothing to write home about (as it isn’t, for anybody who remembers last year’s 3-0 Yankee lead over said same Sox). In Chicago’s only World Series appearance since the infamous 1919 clash, the 1959 “Go-Go” Sox eviscerated the Dodgers 11-0 in the Series opener, and dropped four of the next five.

Still, the White Sox have underscored three ugly truths about the Red Sox. Like the Yankees, Boston has an intemperate bullpen. But it also has an unreliable rotation. Boomer Wells might have been 10-3 in the post-season before last night’s loss, but he’s also the same guy who during the 2003 Series didn’t tell the Yankees his back was killing him until it was too late for them to do anything about it.

Secondly, Boston’s defense is a roller-coaster - ask Graffanino.

The final harsh truth is: teams that stifle David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez really don’t have much to fear from the Boston line-up. And through two games, Ortiz and Ramirez are a harmless 4/15 with two RBI between them.

YANKEES AND ANGELS TIED, 1-1

There is comfort and concern for the Angels as they head to New York to face the Yankees and a Randy Johnson on a six-game winning streak. They rallied from down 2-zip to even the series last night in the home city that dare not speak its name.

But they did it largely because the Yankees handed it to them. Other than Rivera’s fifth-inning homer, the Angels didn’t score a meaningful run that wasn’t enabled by Alex Rodriguez losing the proverbial groundball in the lights, or pitcher Wang panicking on a bunt Steve Finley caromed off the very edge of home plate an inning later. In two games at home against the Yankees’ shakier two starters, the Angels still managed to get nothing (0-for-8) from leadoff man Chone Figgins and nearly nothing (1-for-7) from clean-up man Vladimir Guerrero. These are not strong augurs.

Neither is this. Baseball is actually suing a scholarship pre-school, for four and five year olds, on a copyright claim. The school logo is the interlocking initials "CA" - and baseball is worried that objects bearing that logo might infringe on its rights to the logo the then-California Angels used until 1996 - before they renamed themselves the Anaheim Angels (and redesigned the logo) and then re-renamed themselves the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (and re-redesigned the logo).

Baseball helped overshadow part of its post-season by suing a bunch of kids.

ASTROS LEADING BRAVES, 1-0

Good grief! You're trailing in the 7^th inning of the playoff opener and your first guy out of the bullpen was the closer at North Carolina State until four months ago, had pitched in five previous big league games, and had a 12.60 ERA?

Bobby Cox - who is not merely one of the best managers in baseball but also one of its gentlemen - must've had his judgment clouded by those off-red uniform tops the Braves were wearing. Not only don't they match the team's caps and batting helmets, but they are so bright that - especially when you see Brian Jordan or Julio Franco in them - they look like they belong to a second-place club in an Over-50 Park Softball League.

My pro-Braves prediction may not have survived its first test here, but the 10-5 victory (with closer Brad Lidge warming up as it ended) at least erases the presumption by the cognoscenti that the Astros were going to close down Atlanta with infallible pitching.

CARDINALS OVER PADRES, 1-0

All those who predicted a San Diego upset are hereby given Mulligans.

Starting with me.

I cannot be expected to telephone each member of the Padres' pitching staff to ask them how many ribs they broke last week and didn't tell anybody - especially when it's their pitching ace, Jake Peavy.

It was remarkable how readily commentators were willing to assume Peavy had been hurt during San Diego's first-game loss at San Diego. Readily, that is, until Peavy explained that he'd crunched himself as the Pods celebrated clinching the National League Western title a week ago.

"We were jumping around on the field," Peavy said. "The next day I thought I had some bruised ribs, that I caught an elbow or something. But I never would've imagined it would have been this."

Thanks for mentioning it, Jake. Nice to know David Wells is your role model.

NOTES

Which veteran slugger appearing in one of Wednesday's games looked so thin and non-muscular, compared to his old self, that it seemed as if he'd had a Siamese twin removed?

A classic case of "What have you done for me lately?" in Oakland. As of May 29^th, the A's were 17-32 and had lost 20 of their last 25. They finished with 88 wins, seven games out of first place, despite a late rash of injuries. So, of course, Manager Ken Macha won't be back next year. "We offered a three-year deal with a club option," said General Manager Billy Beane, "and they countered with a three-year deal without a club option. I don't think we were ever going to be able to bridge the gap. It was a significant gap." Just because Beane says it was a significant gap doesn't mean it was - not if you wanted to keep a man as your manager.

And for the interested, Dan Patrick and I are doing our weekly radio hour today (Thursday) this week - 2 PM Eastern. I'd explain why, but this rescheduling happens so often that I'm just exhausted from the re-telling.

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• October 3, 2005 | 7:47 p.m. ET

Yankees, White Sox, Braves, Padres (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — "What," my friend the CBS Sports producer asked, as we stood there in the field-level runway between the two clubhouses, just as the bottom of the ninth inning of Game One of the 1988 World Series began, "are we going to ask Dennis Eckersley after this game?"

"We’re going to ask him," I replied, "how he feels about giving up that game-losing home run to Kirk Gibson."

She laughed. "No, seriously."

I laughed back. "I am serious. It’s too obvious! Can’t you see it coming down the hallway? The guy is too hurt to play, the Dodgers have no business being here without him, he’s a football player who learned to play baseball — it’s obvious."

Ten minutes later Gibson was hobbling around the bases with his game-winning homer off Eckersley and my colleague from CBS was looking at me real funny. "I also called the Bucky Dent home run in the Yankees-Red Sox playoff game in ’78," I said as we scrambled towards the Dodger clubhouse.

All this is mentioned: a) because it makes me look good, and more importantly, b) because it underscores that the best baseball forecasting is a combination of hunch work, history, and instinct. On this eve of the 2005 playoffs, I have tried to keep my research to a minimum and gone more with my considerable gut.

I saw a list of the predictions of fifteen baseball experts today — six of whom are friends and/or colleagues. Six of them think the Angels will win the World Series; five pick the Astros; two choose the Cardinals, one each the Red Sox and Yankees, and, significantly, none the Braves, White Sox, or Padres. This alone should almost guarantee that the Angels and Astros won’t even make it to the Series.

Yankees-Angels: An extraordinary Yankee team that has been teetering on the edge of extinction since the third day of the season and Mariano Rivera’s first blown save against the Red Sox. No other Yankee first-place finisher has ever spent such little time actually in first place. Yet the Yanks finished by winning 20 of their last 29, and the back-up rotation cobbled together by Joe Torre and Brian Cashman, Of Chien-Ming Wang, Shawn Chacon, and Aaron Small merely combined for a 25-8 season. Neither Torre nor Cashman has ever done a better job, and unless the Yankees are exhausted by their season-long travails, they should be razor-sharp, even against that well-built Angels’ club. Dismiss what you’ve heard about a slumping closer in Francisco Rodriguez - he was flawless down the stretch. The key to this series is the number of times you hear the "other" F. Rodriguez (Felix, of the Yankee arson squad), or the name Scott Proctor. If it’s less than five, the Yankees will win in five.

White Sox-Red Sox: A season of vomiting managers, vomiting fans, and a nearly vomited 15-game lead. What a lovely image! The White Sox are the poster boys for underachievement, but a funny thing happened on their annual way to oblivion: they not only halted their own skid, but also knocked the upstart Indians out of the post-season. In the season’s last thirty games, Chicago managed the second-best pitching in the league, and if the Yankees’ turbulent staff could stave off David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez, there’s no reason the more reliable White Sox pitchers can’t. Terry Francona did nearly as much of a smoke-and-mirrors job in Boston as Torre did in New York, but when the smoke clears, Torre has Mariano Rivera and four behemoths in the middle of his line-up, while Francona barely has a back end of his bullpen. The White Sox in five.

Astros-Braves: Talk about fickle. Six weeks ago Bobby Cox was a genius again and the Braves’ New World was a triumph of regional scouting, focused player development, and the flawless swing of Jeff Francoeur. Now, the Astros come within a loss of coughing up the Wild Card to the Phillies — the Phillies! — and because the Braves went 13-13 down the stretch, the Astros are the hip pick to win it all. I don’t believe a word of it. I love Phil Garner as a manager, but the Braves are a mix of guys who have grown old waiting for a second World’s Championship, and a bunch of kids who have grown up waiting for it. Waves of talent and decades of frustration take this one for the Braves, also in five.

Cardinals-Padres: Ah, poor Padres. In the playoffs only because you have to have a National League West team in there - like the obligatory Tampa Bay Devil Ray at the All-Star Game. No one seems to recall the three-over-.500 1973 New York Mets, who not only surged out of a sagging East to beat the Reds in the playoffs, but should’ve gone on to win the World Series. And no one seems to have noticed that in the last month, the Padres and Cards have fashioned almost virtually identical pitching stats (in the last week, the Padres were 5-2, 1.94; the Cardinals 3-2, 4.60). St. Louis barely has a player - pitcher or fielder - without a ding or a slump. Do not dismiss the prospects for a major shocker here: the Padres, perhaps quicker than five.

By the way, if you're at either of the far ends of the spectrum — fanatics and people who don't care at all about the sport — the just-concluded season was probably summed up for you in one word: "Steroids."

For everybody else, it was a stunningly successful year. Total attendance went up again; the New York Yankees became the first team in twelve years to draw 4,000,000 spectators; the Los Angeles Dodgers had their biggest audiences in 23 years; and the new team in Washington drew 2,700,000 fans — more than the old team in Washington drew in its last three seasons combined.

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• September 26, 2005 | 7:19 p.m. ET

Brownie's got a heckuva new job (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — Even his staunchest defenders had long since admitted that whatever else the President did or didn't do, or was or wasn't supposed to do, his supposedly solid political sense let him down completely at the beginning of the month of the hurricanes.     

It had seemed to rebound lately. Until today, anyway.

That's when a protestor was arrested on a technicality, not far from the White House. You might recognize her name: Cindy Sheehan.
      
And, that's when it was revealed that FEMA had apparently rehired a former employee as a consultant. You might recognize his name, too — Mike Brown.

At a meeting with staff of the special House committee looking into Katrina preparations today, the disgraced and displaced former FEMA director said he had rejoined the agency as a consultant to "provide a review" of how the agency functioned before, during, and after the storm. This according to two congressional sources.
      
A congressional aide told NBC News nobody's sure — but it is assumed Brown is being paid by FEMA. He is to testify tomorrow before that House committee, prompting our colleague Howard Fineman to joke that only in Washington would a man on his way to the electric chair be paid to belt himself in.

But the timing — Brown’s announcement to the staffers came just hours after the arrest of Sheehan in Washington for not having a permit to sit down rather than just march — suggests that the political tin ear is back in control at The White House.

The President doesn’t run The District of Columbia police, of course — not even Karl Rove can claim that responsibility. But one would think, what with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita proving to the administration the wisdom of the old saw that it’s truly an ill wind that blows no one any good, a message would’ve gone out. Something along the lines of: ‘don’t touch Cindy Sheehan even if she self-immolates’ — we finally just ended her publicity streak.

And one would’ve thought the FEMA folks would have been smarter than to let the face of the Katrina disaster, Mike Brown, back on to the public stage.

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• September 12, 2005 | 7:16 p.m. ET

New FEMA boss is 'Duct Tape Man'  (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — If Michael Brown’s resignation this afternoon as the head of FEMA was supposed to end the political controversy over the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, it probably won't.

In another gesture symbolizing the continued confusion of the federal response, the man President Bush immediately named to succeed “Brownie,” proves to have been the same FEMA official who, two-and-a-half years ago, suggested that Americans stock up on duct tape to protect against a biological or chemical terrorist attack.

David Paulison, then the government's Fire Administrator, joined with the then-head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, on February 10th, 2003, to say that duct tape and plastic sheeting should be part of any home's "survival kit" in preparation for a terrorist attack. That set off a run on duct tape at stores, and widespread criticism of the administration. It might have been the first time after 9/11 that a large number of Americans wondered if the government really knew what it was talking about when it came to disaster preparedness.

And the man behind that politically explosive proposal, has just been named to succeed the man who had been the face of the politically explosive response to Hurricane Katrina.

Paulison brings an extensive resume to the post. He ran fire operations for Miami-Dade County in Florida, and was past president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs. But in light of the response to this hurricane, another comment he made at the time of the Duct Tape announcements rings especially loudly. Paulison said in February, 2003, that in the first 48 to 72 hours of an emergency, many Americans would likely have to look after themselves.

As to the exit of Mr. Brown, who knows how many of the millions of Americans directly or indirectly touched by Hurricane Katrina probably had the identical thought when he quit his post this afternoon: Namely, that he was no doubt already updating his padded resume.
       
And his departure was not even unattended by confusion. In Brown’s statement, he wrote, “As I told the President, it is important that I leave now.” But when first asked about it during his tour of Mississippi, Mr. Bush said he had no details, hadn’t talked to Brown or Homeland Security chief Chertoff, and, “maybe you know something I don’t know.” Later, press secretary Scott McClellan said that the President had already known about the resignation — he just hadn't known that it had been made public.

And he was already just minutes away from naming Brown’s successor: Duct Tape Man.
       
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• September 8, 2005 | 4:41 p.m. ET

With friends like these (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — It should be no surprise that criticism of the president, or the federal response, in the wake of the disaster that followed Hurricane Katrina, has been portrayed as partisan pot-shooting. That is the default setting of our world, after all. We take sides on everything.

Well, except for 9/11, when Mr. Bush's approval rating was 90% and his disapproval, 6%.

And also, except for right now, when the idea that only Liberals or political opportunists are being critical, is not just intuitively nuts — it's factually ludicrous. Read this:

The language is, to say the least, uncategorical. "Democrats have seized on the administration's performance in handling Katrina to bash George W. Bush," the nationally-syndicated columnist writes. "But Republicans are not much happier with him... When Republican House members participated in a telephone conference call September 1, the air was blue with complaints about the handling of Katrina... the GOP lawmakers were unhappy with their administration's performance."
     
That's from today's column from Robert Novak — not exactly known as a thorn in the administration's side.
      
For the President, it actually gets worse. Many editorials in major newspapers have been almost venomous towards Mr. Bush and the federal response. An excerpt from one this morning: "Mayor Nagin's responses to this crisis, while flawed, have shown better leadership than both Governor Blanco's and President Bush's."
      
That's from today's official editorial in The Union-Leader of Manchester, New Hampshire. That's the newspaper that has previously identified itself as the most conservative in the country. It has six national columnists: Novak, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, Michelle Malkin, Deroy Murdock, and George Will. Not exactly a hotbed of commies.
      
And what it wrote about Mr. Bush today is nothing compared to what it wrote about him last Wednesday — decrying his decision to continue with his ordinary schedule, "...as if nothing important had happened the day before."
     
"A better leader," the paper continued on August 31st, "would have flown straight to the disaster zone and announced the immediate mobilization of every available resource to rescue the stranded, find and bury the dead, and keep the survivors fed, clothed, sheltered and free of disease.
     
"The cool, confident, intuitive leadership Bush exhibited in his first term, particularly in the months following September 11, 2001, has vanished. In its place is a diffident detachment unsuitable for the leader of a nation facing war, natural disaster, and economic uncertainty."

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• September 5, 2005 | 8:58 p.m. ET

The "city" of Louisiana (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater..."

Well there's your problem right there.

If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government's response to a crisis, this was it.

The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might’ve saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could’ve brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they’re being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.

But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called “The Department of Homeland Security”: “Louisiana is a city…”

Politician after politician — Republican and Democrat alike — has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the "I-Me" switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were — congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.
     
And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded — even the internet's meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural... and government-made.

But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.
      
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.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.
     
It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which "we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the administration, although we still don't know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?
     
I don't know which 'we' Mr. Bush meant.

For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — "New Orleans."

For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."
      
In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.

As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government's credibility.

Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.

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• September 1, 2005 | 5:21 p.m. ET

Desperate pleas for help (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — If you have not yet seen the desperate pleas from people at the New Orleans Convention Center to NBC cameraman Tony Zumbado, they will run in full on Countdown tonight at 8 p.m. ET, and Tony is scheduled to join us.

We don't often 'pitch' you on specific items in the program but what Tony captured constitute transcendant images and comments from Americans who followed the rules and saw the system break down around them.

We will also tonight face up to the scientific practacalities of what happens after they get the people — and the water — out of New Orleans. The national intuition suggests it'll be months before the place is inhabitable. The realities may be that it'll be years.

And we'll premiere tonight a segment called "I'm Okay" — a small public service, suggested by a viewer, for victims who have not been able to contact relatives and friends in other cities, at the end of the hour.

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• September 1, 2005 | 8:25 a.m. ET

Are we being realistic about New Orleans? (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — We are not acknowledging much besides the best-case scenario in New Orleans.

The city may not be back in six weeks. Or six months. Or six years.

That’s kind of shocking to say, given the trauma and dislocation of the last five days. But it’s true nonetheless. We have to be hopeful, for the 23,000 now getting a tour of the sports domes of the southwest, for the million or more feeling far away and lost, for the people still trapped, for the unknown hundreds or thousands dead.

But long-term we may be doing them — and ourselves — more harm than good.

Consider two pieces in this morning’s papers from separate fields — science and sports — in which relying on the best-case scenario can be fatal or financially disastrous. While we instinctively shake our heads at Mayor Ray Nagin’s revision of his recovery timetable from 10-12 weeks, to 14-16, while we wonder why he should be so dour when our modern world can put the Stock Exchange back on line on 9/17/01, when we have technological capability undreamed of even when we were rebuilding Europe after the Second World War — it may prove that even Mr. Nagin may be wearing rose-colored glasses.

Look at what Howard Beck and Pete Thamel are writing in The New York Times about the National Basketball Association moving the New Orleans Hornets franchise out — not just for a few weeks, or the first half of the season, but until October, 2006. The NBA is about people and money, and when it senses a lack of either in one of its franchise cities, it bails. Yesterday, an e-mail went out from the league to each of the 30 teams instructing them to make provisions for playing the Hornets somewhere else this season.

There’s only one reason for that. The NBA has examined the situation and has serious doubts that there will be people in New Orleans to go see basketball any time this winter, or roads for them to travel in, or public health conditions permitting 15,000 people to gather in one space.

When I interviewed FEMA Director Mike Brown on Countdown last night, I took him into the future and asked him if, when New Orleans was “reopened,” he would look back at the greatest step in that process, the decontamination of the water now drowning the city. He agreed completely. It’s not just water — it’s water with decomposing people and animals in it. And it’s water full of chemicals and solvents and battery acid and anything else dangerous in a city. And it’s water destroying homes and foundations and roads. And it’s water ruining, of all things, the water system.

And the remedy might even be worse than the cure. Guy Gugliotta and Peter Whoriskey writes in The Washington Post this morning that scientists are afraid of what happens after they drain the floodwaters back into Lake Pontchartrain. It’s not just water any more, they say, it’s a toxic soup now being dumped into the delta surrounding the city. Getting it out of people’s houses is one thing. Getting it out of the ecosystem is — in the worst-case scenario — more expensive than the Gross National Product of this country.

If that isn’t enough to make you wonder when the concept of “New Orleans” will be operative again, there’s a nauseatingly prescient article in the files of U.S. News And World Report. Posted exactly six weeks ago, the piece posited a hurricane-delivered flood that “could take months to drain,” and quotes an LSU expert as forecasting somebody “creating a refugee camp for a million homeless residents.”

When Chicago burned in 1871 it was widely predicted that the city would return to being prairie brush by the spring of 1872. No one would ever live in San Francisco again after 1906. Europe would never stand upright after the way everybody bombed each other from 1939 to 1945.

Those were all pinheaded predictions. And this piece here is not going to suggest the place is finished. I’m just suggesting that realism is as important as optimism right now. The danger to the immediate future of New Orleans wasn’t the hurricane, and it isn’t the looting, and it isn’t lack of resolve nor skill. The danger? The city is still soaking in it.

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• August 30, 2005 | 7:37 p.m. ET

The evacuation of New Orleans (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — The remarkable news is almost buried as the Gulf Coast continues to reel from a disaster so pervasive that we not only don’t yet have an official death count, we don’t even have a reliable estimate.

Yet after the news conference of Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco this afternoon, it seems inevitable that this country will — for the first time in living memory — try to complete a mandatory evacuation of one of its major cities.

New Orleans proper is usually listed as the 35th biggest city — the 30th or 31st largest Metropolitan area. If a million people left before or during Hurricane Katrina’s arrival, that still means getting 300,000 out of the area — with the causeways that lead to the northeast, knocked down like pieces of a child’s toy car racing track.

How are we going to do this?

Eight years ago, flooding and fires led to the evacuation of Grand Forks, North Dakota. That was just 50,000 people, and it was a logistical tour de force (here’s a first person account).

But we probably haven’t seen something like this — a forced depopulation of a major American residential center — since the Civil War. And even those examples are up for semantical debate: did the Confederacy evacuate Atlanta and Richmond, or did the residents just flee?

As we watch this story unfold, it is imperative to consider the history being made. Even when San Francisco was flattened and burned in 1906, large sections of the city were untouched. There were relocations across the bay to Oakland. Nobody said “everybody’s leaving San Francisco.”

What happens when that message is delivered in a New Orleans, devoid of power, food, passable roads — and personal vehicles?

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• August 30, 2005 | 9:25 a.m. ET

Why I don’t believe Lance Armstrong (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK — Did cycling hero Lance Armstrong use the performance-enhancing drug “EPO” in 1999? As he’s rewritten the record book at the Tour de France, has he been doping? Is he a friend to doctors of dubious repute, and a patient of one? We’ll never officially know.

There were no medically reliable tests for EPO in 1999, and there can be no official results of any retroactive testing. Legally, those results reported in the French sports paper L’Equipe last week exist in the same kind of twilight zone as the leaked grand jury testimony of baseball’s Jason Giambi about his own steroid use: they’re probably true, but they’re legally invisible.

And finding guilt within the current climate of uncleanliness in sports — Rafael Palmeiro’s test, Barry Bonds’ absence, Mark McGwire’s deafening silence, even the positive test of Ben Johnson in 1988 — is not enough. You can’t say: this guy cheated, this other guy won’t deny he cheated, these other guys look like they’ve cheated, therefore Armstrong should be presumed to have cheated.

No — you have to call this one on personal integrity. And if you asked a million people about Lance Armstrong’s personal integrity prior to the French report, all but about five of them would’ve said it was his strongest asset, well ahead of his cycling skill.

But I’m afraid they were mistaking a combination of extremely good publicity and the panacea for public reputations — cancer survivorship — for genuinely good character.

Five years ago, the people who make television commercials — much of the membership of the SAG and AFTRA unions — went out on strike. What Lance Armstrong did then has always made me doubt him.

ARMSTRONG RETIRES Armstrong makes it clear he's not returning Celizic: Stick it to France, Lance! VOTE: Should he have made a comeback? Olbermann: Armstrong doped at Tour

The whys and wherefores are probably irrelevant to you. Suffice to say that about 40,000 people appear in television commercials every year, and The Los Angeles Times concluded that barely 5,000 of them get enough work to call it their “living.” The strike was to protect the guy who stands behind the counter in the fast-food ad and doesn’t say anything and you see him for three seconds and he wanted $429 for his trouble instead of $419 (the average income of a member of SAG is less than $7,000 a year. You read that right).

Anyway, before the strike started, the leaders at SAG and AFTRA sat down and looked at the very realistic problem of celebrities in commercials. They were very realistic about it: Michael Jordan was not taking away very many opportunities from rank-and-file members. And very few ads for Staples would suddenly go from 23 striking actors to Michael Jordan pitching post-it notes. They weren’t happy about it, but they realized that to try to enforce the strike on the Michael Jordans of this world was self-defeating. So, they said, to the sports stars and the other non-actor celebrities, if you want to honor our strike — thanks. We appreciate it. If you don’t — well, we’re not pleased, but what can we do? Please just don’t make a stink about it.

Immediately, three prominent athletes said they would honor the commercial actors’ strike. They would not make commercials. They knew they didn’t have to go out with the rest of the crowd making $4,768 a year, but they felt honor-bound.

They were Andre Agassi, Lance Armstrong, and Tiger Woods.

Guess which one actually didn’t make a commercial?

Agassi.

Woods explained that he’d made his commercial out of the country, so he didn’t think he was crossing the picket line. This suggested that Mr. Woods didn’t spend a great deal of time in class while majoring in business at Stanford (or maybe he’d spent too much time).

Armstrong’s explanation was more direct, but no less shabby. He was a cancer survivor, after all, and had a family to feed. That he had been diagnosed in 1996 and had recovered sufficiently to win his first Tour de France in 1999, and lock in his first multi-million dollar ad campaign earlier than that, and that those striking commercial actors making $7,000 a year probably included a few cancer survivors and a lot of families to feed, didn’t seem a factor to him.

Ever since then, I have had my doubts about Lance Armstrong.

This is not a piece of pro-union dogma here. This is not a question of a guy crossing a picket line. This is a millionaire, being given a pass to work by a union full of guys making $7,000 a year, saying no, he wouldn’t do it — and then going and doing it anyway. Even greed and self-interest here was acceptable — but a pretense of self-sacrifice followed by greed, was not.

And that’s what Lance Armstrong did.

In point of fact, had he and Rafael Palmeiro wagged their fingers simultaneously before Congress last St. Patrick’s Day, and I had had to choose one and only one of them to believe, I would have taken Palmeiro.

I hope I’m damned wrong about Armstrong. I hope he’s just a louse, not a juiced louse. But since I already know he’s tested positive for lousehood, I’m afraid I have to prepare for the probability that he’s also tested positive for juicedhood.

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• August 22, 2005 | 9:45 a.m. ET

Limbaugh runs away from Limbaugh (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK - There is nothing wrong with an unpopular opinion.

Nor is there anything wrong with a subversive one, nor a crazy one. This country was founded on opinions that were deemed by the powers-that-were to be unpopular, subversive, and crazy. Dissent - even when that dissent strays from logic or humanity - is our life’s blood. But if you have one of those opinions, and you express it in public, honesty and self-respect require you to own up to it.

Unless you’re Rush Limbaugh.

On his daily radio soap opera, on August 15, Limbaugh said “Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents, there's nothing about it that's real…” The complete transcript of the 860 words that surround those quotes can be found at the bottom of this entry.

Yet, apparently there was something so unpopular, so subversive, and so crazy about those remarks that he has found it necessary to deny he said them - even when there are recordings and transcripts of them - and to brand those who’ve claimed he said them as crackpots and distorters. More over, that amazing temple to himself, his website, has been scrubbed clean of all evidence of these particular remarks, and to ‘prove’ his claim that he never made the remarks in question on August 15, he has misdirected visitors to that site to transcripts and recordings of remarks he made on August 12.

Limbaugh is terrified. And he has reason to be.

Understand this about Limbaugh. He doesn’t believe half the junk he spouts. I’ve met him, and had pleasant enough conversations with him, twice - at the 1980 World Series when he was still a mid-level baseball flunky with a funny name, and once in the mid ‘90s at ESPN when he was just beginning his campaign to get a toehold there. He is a quiet, almost colorless man who, if he could be guaranteed similar success in sportscasting, would sell out the sheep who follow his every word - and would do it before close of business today.

But with that ESPN bid having gone up in flames just under two years ago, and sports forever closed off to him, he’s gotten into what the novelist Robert Graves called a “Golden Predicament” - overwhelming success in a field he really had no intention of pursuing - and he has to keep churning this stuff out every day. And when you’re just free associating to kill time and keep the ditto-heads happy, you sometimes drive right off the end of the pier.

Like on August 15^th.

Since we declared Limbaugh “The Worst Person In The World” two nights later for the remarks about Sheehan, he has had the transcript of his pier-drive expunged (even though he initially thought so much of it, that it was posted as a “featured quote” for paying subscribers to his website). Simultaneously, the hapless Brent Bozell, who runs that scam called The Media Research Center, declared that I was guilty of “distortion” in quoting the Sheehan remarks.

Well, as you’ll see below, the only distortion here, is that which lingers in Limbaugh’s ears. His remarks about Sheehan were so embraced by at least one of his fans that they were preserved on another website, and we can present them in full here. You will notice that nothing has been taken out of context, nothing in the minutes before nor the minutes afterwards mitigates against the utter callousness and infamy of his comments about Sheehan.

A reminder that that’s Cindy Sheehan, Gold Star Mother, who when I asked her bluntly if President Bush wasn’t serving her purposes more by not seeing her, was honest enough to answer “yes” without hesitation. And it’s Rush Limbaugh, who so believes in his case against her that he’s too afraid to admit he said this (and who, by the way, has since said of her that, "I'm weary of even having to express sympathy... we all lose things” - as if her son had been a misplaced, er, prescription).

The long preface concluded, here is what Rush Limbaugh said, crazily weaving in and out of the topic of Cindy Sheehan, in his broadcast of August 15. He even wanders back into football, and the very topic that proved his end at ESPN, Donovan McNabb of the Philadelphia Eagles (honestly, if he ever wanted to be analyzed, he would be such a juicy case that psychiatrists would bid for Limbaugh’s rights). So, as you get deeper into the thicket, you can find the relevant portions about Sheehan, I’ve italicized them. Limbaugh had wandered into this via the news of the withdrawal of the anti-John Roberts advertisement from NARAL:

“They pulled this ad because it wasn't working. They didn't pull this ad because of a bite of conscience or, ooh, this is wrong. And their mistake was they're telling themselves they came out of the barn too soon with it. If they'd have come out of this say a week before September 6th. Well, stop and think about it. If they would have run this ad, if this would have started a week before September 6th, CNN carrying it, and none of the Democrats denouncing it, and without a whole lot of time to gin up, it would have probably had more effect. So I think they're going to learn from this that they didn't keep their powder dry, they just were too eager.

“But the fact that they are too eager -- I mean, Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents, there's nothing about it that's real, including the mainstream media's glomming onto it, it's not real. It's nothing more than an attempt, it's the latest effort made by the coordinated left. And all of these efforts are bombing; they're all failing miserably, in and of themselves.

“Now, this is not to say that all is rosy. I don't want you to misunderstand. But I don't get that worked up about it. I have an attitude about it. I've been sharing this with you for the longest time. So I think we're in a new era. The left doesn't get away with this stuff anymore. They're not getting away with it now. I know it's irritating, I know it's frustrating, I know it makes you mad, does me, too, but it's not helpful to the people who are doing this, it is not assisting them.

“They are going to try to claim that Cindy Sheehan is responsible for the Bush poll numbers on Iraq being down, but those numbers were falling before Cindy Sheehan did this. I'm not saying the mainstream press isn't effective in certain areas anymore, I'm not saying the mainstream press doesn't have the ability to shape opinion. Just saying on this, this is not the thing everybody should be worried about. I don't have one in my mind that is, something everybody ought to be worried about, but if you're going to be angry at this, and I understand the anger, and I share some of it, too, the anger here, to me, is how the left and the media are trying to make this bigger than it is.

“But that still takes me back to the fact that they know they're losing, they know they're losing big time. These people are throwing it up against the wall. It's the fourth quarter and all they're doing is throwing long bombs and their quarterback's gotten too tired to finish the game and their wide receiver is out there making all kinds of disparaging comments about the quarterback and getting kicked out of camp.

“The situation with the Philadelphia Eagles pretty much dovetails what's going on with the Democratic Party right now if you ask me. It does. I don't think that we're looking at people who have a posture of confidence. This is not the kind of thing that winners do. It's all done in total desperation, as is the mainstream press's ability to prop it up.

“What's she got? A hundred stragglers have showed up down there, a hundred peaceniks, a hundred long-haired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking FM types, essentially, are down there joining her. And if this were genuine, if this were like it was back in Vietnam -- remember, that's what they're trying to turn this into. They're just reliving the old halcyon days of the anti-war movement in the sixties. They would have had hundreds of thousands of people down there. They would have had mass marches. There would have been the need for riot cops outside Bush's ranch down there. This is so obviously a desperation move.

“Now, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the woman. I think she's taken the grieving process here to lengths that most people don't, and she's being fueled by all of this attention. But this is just a long way of saying I'm not -- you can call about it and you can talk about it but I just am not that worked up about it because, to me, it's sort of like -- I got an e-mail today from a guy said, "Rush, why aren't you talking about that radio scandal going on?" Why should I talk about it? Why should I talk about that, folks? There's a cardinal rule, when your enemy is destroying themselves, you shut up and you get out of the way and let them do it. And it's happening in countless areas and times on the left. Certain things you do need to give a little nudge, other things you just get out of the way.

“But the longer the Sheehan thing goes on and the longer she's treated as some sort of super-celebrity by the press and the more outrageous things she says, trust me on this, the more people are going to get fed up with it. She's going to become the next Natalee Holloway before it's all said and done.”

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• August 8, 2005 | 9:41 p.m. ET

Flush the butts (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — I wrote here yesterday of Peter Jennings’ death from lung cancer. The entry yesterday — as nearly all the talk - was, suitably and appropriately, about the man.

Now, about the disease — and you.

The statistics are staggering. By the time this day is over, just in this country, 447 people will have died of lung cancer — 1,562 from all forms of cancer. Nobody did a better job of remembering the part of this sadness that we are trying to forget than Tom Brokaw, yesterday morning, on the Today show: "To go through this difficult time seemed particularly cruel to me. But I know Peter would want us to say, this happens to families every day, and we can't forget about them either."

To that point, the story now of somebody who quite probably should've been in Peter Jennings' shoes, except for dumb, undeserved luck.

Me.

‘So,’ I thought, as I was hunched over, spitting blood into the garbage can in my office, half an hour before the newscast, ‘this is it — this is cancer.’ It gets uglier, I understood that — so ugly that those who've survived can't even describe how much uglier it gets.

Still, that imagery that I want to have stick in your mind, is pretty good: They've just had to

FREE VIDEO Lung cancer & you Aug. 8: With the death of Peter Jennings, Countdown has already talked about him. Now, the show needs to talk about you. And cancer. MSNBC

cut something out, from inside your body because they think it's cancer. And because it doesn't heal up right away, every couple of hours the coagulation breaks and your mouth fills up with blood — and all of a sudden, hunching over a garbage can, spitting it out, is the best available option.

I'm not doing some sort of bad taste ‘what-if’ on the passing of Peter Jennings — I have had a tumor removed from the roof of my mouth.

It was benign — that makes all the difference in the world, of course.

Except for the part — where it doesn't make any difference. Because, I was in that position — spitting globs of myself into a garbage can in Secaucus, New Jersey, entirely through my own doing, my own fault.

And maybe there's the chance that if the loss of Peter Jennings hasn't impacted you, that maybe if you listen to my story you might get smart enough in a hurry — or scared enough in a hurry — so that you don't wind up spitting blood into the garbage can, and spending five days like me, thinking you had cancer — or actually having it.

There are some things in life you don't have much control over — terrorism, lightning, and even cancer when it runs in your family or when you just get it.

But that's not what this tumor was — the one that for five very long days had me convinced I had cancer. This is from me smoking pipes and cigars for 27 years. And if you work for a company that produces or sells pipes and cigars and you are recoiling defensively and saying ‘you don't know that’... well, let me quote Robert Novak — "bull" — I do too know that.

Courtesy Of Dr. Andrei Mark Keith Olbermann, up close and very personal.

The place where this thing grew on the roof of my mouth, is precisely above the spot where the end of the cigar, or the tip of the pipe, would sit, nearly every time I've smoked. I've been smoking — with the first place the smoke connects with my tissue, right in this one spot in my mouth — since Jimmy Carter was President.

So, yes, biologically speaking, smoking caused that tumor. Behaviorally speaking, I caused that tumor — period.

It's not like this thing that they cut out of me a week ago last Friday just appeared overnight, either. It was there no later than 1991, and a dentist told me then: either quit smoking or keep an eye on this — or both — because that could be pre-cancerous.

But no — until my current dentist Bob Schwartz said "this has changed, go see an oral surgeon" — I knew better. Both my grandfathers, I liked to say, lived into their 80s and in the last weeks of their lives, both of them walked into town to get a haircut and some cigars — and that would be good enough for me.

Well, maybe that would have been good for me. Except, the point is this: they cut something out of your mouth; it's a benign fibrous tumor; they have to cauterize it with a laser; you wind up spitting blood like Rocky Balboa in front of Burgess Meredith; you spend five days thinking about the radiation and the chemo to come; and — by the way — ten days later, your mouth still hurts and it'll probably be all healed in six weeks.

And that's if you're lucky — so lucky that you start jumping up and down and singing "Happy Days Are Here Again."

Imagine… if it were bad news.

My oral surgeon, Andrei Mark, admits now he feared the worst. And worse still, the last guy in to see him, before me, the last smoker with a tumor in his mouth — his was Lymphoma "B" — Cancer. No unexpected good luck for him.

Maybe, if you're sitting there smoking right now, it'll make you think.

And even if you sense there's already something wrong, don't wait. Oral cancers are survivable at a rate of 80 to 90 percent — get your dentist to give you a simple screening. Even lung cancer, you can do something about — if you do something about it.

Since that lovely evening I spent hunched over my garbage can, I have changed in a couple of ways, but most notably this way: when I see somebody smoking, I want to smack the cigarette or the cigar or the pipe out of their mouth. And then I want to smack them. I understand about the addiction and how they hook you and all of that. I'm a smoker — remember?

But consider something - I had to consider this, last week. It would be terrible enough to have cancer. But on top of it, you'd have cancer and you'd have to stop smoking. Guess what? It's easier to stop smoking while you don't have cancer. Ever thought of that before?

Anyway. We're all sad about Peter Jennings. Me, I feel sad and guilty. But if his death has saddened you, and you smoke, and you want to do something about it, something for him — stop smoking. Or get somebody else to stop.

Break the pipe or throw away the chaw, or flush the butts, or leave the cigar in the cigar store. Buy the gum, buy the patch, get them to tie your arms behind your back until you stop smoking. Do whatever you have to do to stop smoking — now. While it's easier.

So you don't have to stop smoking while you have cancer. Or while you're sitting there, spitting into a garbage can, praying that you don't.

American Lung Association - Quit Smoking site

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• August 8, 2005 | 9:00 a.m. ET

Peter Jennings, 1938 - 2005 (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK — The calm, seasoned, assuring voice has been stilled.

We may remember him for his work on 9/11, or for any of a dozen other crises, from Vietnam to the Munich Olympics to the Challenger disaster. But the real story of Peter Jennings is not to be found in a kaleidoscope of unconnected moments of history.

It is, instead, contained in literally a half century of perseverance, growth; even redemption: He was the only enduring anchorman to return to the desk from which he had been fired. He was the only of America’s great newscasters, to have come from another nation. He was the anchorman who, having concurred with his early critics that he was “simply unqualified,” went out and did something about it. He was a man of whom a colleague would say in the early 1980s — with pride and affection — “He is now as good as he used to think he was.”

But for much of his life, the question for Peter Jennings seemed to be: would he ever think himself as good as the man with whom he was seemingly forever in competition — his own father. Charles Jennings was already Canada’s first famous radio newscaster (and would later become a symbol of the public service orientation of its national broadcasting service), when Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings was born in 1938.

FREE VIDEO Jennings remembered Aug. 8: Countdown pays tribute to ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings, 1938-2005. MSNBC

Son followed father — but haltingly. He’d had his own radio show at age 10, but dropped out of high school, and drifted into working as a bank teller. Biographers disagree if the family was trying to give him a dose of reality, or if he was truly adrift in the mid-1950s. Regardless, how ever it came to pass, when he returned to broadcasting as a disc jockey — “P.J. the D.J.” — it was, in essence, starting at or near the bottom, the advantage of the Jennings “name” having been dissipated.

It would not be the last time he would overcome such an inauspicious career move.

Jennings’ music show happened to include reading the news. And he was so good at it, and so inspired by it, that by the mid-'60s, he was the CBC’s Parliamentary correspondent, and frequent anchor of its national newscasts, and of some of the first commercial network newscasts in Canada.

At the same time in America, meanwhile, ABC barely had a national newscast.

While Walter Cronkite at CBS and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley at NBC set standards which the industry still strains to match, ABC was a revolving door of anchormen — 11 in the preceding five years alone. Its latest news president, Elmer Lower, desperately needed something, and thought that something would be found in the host of ABC’s latest new newscast — “Peter Jennings and the News.”

Even the confident Jennings could see the trap. He was 26 years old; he was Canadian; he was taking over a ship that wasn’t sinking - it had never left port. But, he deferred to the advice of a new colleague, the venerable Howard K. Smith. “It’s like being nominated for President,” Smith told him. “You can’t turn it down.”

To borrow the famous 19^th Century phrase of General Sherman, Jennings was not elected and he did not serve. He would not change his Canadian inflections and pronunciations. Schedule became “shedule” and Lieutenant, “lieftenant.” Having not grown up versed in American history, when time came to commemorate the 100^th Anniversary of the end of the Civil War, he butchered the word “Appomattox.”

And if he would not change the way he talked, he could not change the way he looked.  Critics - and, behind his back, colleagues — called him “Anchorboy” and “Peter Pretty.” “We could never improve his image,” said his boss, Lower. “Not as long as he looked that young.”

At the end of 1967, from the top of his profession - perhaps the most-publicized, most-scrutinized anchor appointment in American television before or since, he was out — out in an industry that rarely offers second chances. He was not yet 30 years old. Once again, as he had as a teenager, he would have to try to climb the hill again, from nearly all the way at its bottom.

But to Jennings, his reporting experience in Canada, and of the American Civil Rights movement, had not been a mere stepping stone. There was a dimension to actually reporting the news that even his famous father had not tasted. He enthusiastically accepted ABC’s offer to become an international correspondent, thriving in Vietnam, in Rome, in the Middle East.

It was as ABC’s Beirut correspondent that he was offered what was to be a break from the chaos of the Middle East — a chance to do feature news reporting at the Olympic games. These were the 1972 Olympic games, in Munich — the ones which introduced terrorism to the world stage. Crouched in hiding outside the infamous Building 31, Jennings was the world’s eyes and ears as the Black September terrorists took hostage, and ultimately murdered, 11 members of the Israeli team.

There he cemented his reputation. No “Peter Pretty” now, but a familiar, analytical, calm but not dispassionate translator of world events to an American audience.

It earned him, another chance at the anchor desk — on ABC’s embryonic challenge to the “Today” show -- a program called “A.M. America” — five minutes of news, from Washington. But if he had aspirations of returning to the evening news, they were soon dashed. He was quickly back in Europe, and a new man was in charge of ABC News — a man who would proclaim: “I think the old concept of the anchor position is outdated and outmoded.”

The man was named Roone Arledge.

With mercurial speed, Arledge pronounced the anchorman dead, then tried to hire Robert MacNeil away from PBS, then whipped up a gaudy, crowded newscast with no less than three anchormen. Jennings was a part — but with Frank Reynolds based in Washington and Max Robinson based in Chicago, his London perch seemed merely a place from which to introduce the reports of other foreign correspondents. Meantime, Arledge, the man who had called the anchorman outdated, tried to hire away first Dan Rather from CBS, then Tom Brokaw from NBC.

Even when World News Tonight morphed back into a one-anchorman program, that one anchorman was not to be Peter Jennings — it would be Frank Reynolds. Jennings, now not quite an anchor and no longer fully a correspondent, seemed a quaint appendage.

And then Frank Reynolds got sick. In a shock that in retrospect seemed to foretell Jennings’ own demise, Reynolds, thought to be recovering from persistent hepatitis, suddenly died in July, 1983. He had had multiple myeloma — a rare cancer — for four years. He had told almost no one.

Even then, Roone Arledge, who had bypassed Jennings for Reynolds, and who would have bypassed Jennings for Robert MacNeil, and who would have bypassed Jennings for Dan Rather, and who would have bypassed Jennings for Tom Brokaw, sought to bypass Jennings yet again. Ted Koppel, who had almost single-handedly established ABC’s news credentials with the still-novel “Nightline,” was offered the anchor job first.

But Koppel turned it down. And then, so too did a wary Peter Jennings. The scars of the 1965-67 experiment were deep. The satisfactions of reporting ran, perhaps, deeper. But now ABC had no other options — and neither did Jennings. At best, he was ABC’s sixth choice. He acquiesced.

And unexpectedly, the years abroad had not merely rid him of the “anchorboy” patina — they had given him a unique perspective, and an intense work ethic. American history still did not flow naturally from him  but world history did.

And so, when the Challenger shuttle exploded on January 28^th, 1986, he could ad lib for five hours of special coverage. “The picture is now etched in our minds, but still horrifying,” he concluded, “The disastrous end of the 25^th shuttle mission, the sudden death of seven astronauts, America once again reaching for the stars and this time — for the first time, not making it.”

When the opportunity came to join the panel for the first presidential debate in 1988, he could compose hundreds of questions, domestic and international, and cull from them the dozen best.

When war broke out in Iraq in 1991, he could anchor most of ABC’s first special report — 42 hours in length.

In 1993, his experiences at Munich and in the Middle East, could provide a sad, but compelling, context, for his coverage of the first attack on the World Trade Center.

Four years earlier, Peter Jennings had achieved a seemingly impossible milestone. He was the “newer rival” to Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather. Yet he had occupied his anchor desk 16 years before either one of them. And he had been fired 14 years before either one of them had been hired. But somehow, in a career — a life — of perseverance, he had, in 1989, vaulted over them both, into first place in the audience ratings — the first time ABC had ever beaten CBS and NBC for a full year.

By the start of this year, the world that surrounded Peter Jennings was barely recognizable as the same world he had tried to cover from the ABC anchor chair in 1965. And so too was his craft. News had become intensely politicized. Even his Canadian birth became reason for criticism - no longer because he said “shedule” — but just because he wasn’t a native.

Cable abounded, and forecasts of the end of nightly network newscasts seemed as frequent as the newscasts themselves. And Peter Jennings was suddenly the last remaining mandarin. Perseverance had suddenly become survival — Tom Brokaw retired in November, 2004. Dan Rather, in March, 2005. Unexpectedly, Jennings was the senior network news anchor — by a margin of 21 years.

But something was wrong. When the tsunami hit the nations of the Indian Ocean last December, this most international of national newscasters wasn’t there. When Pope John Paul II began his final journey, the only network anchorman who had once been a correspondent in Rome stayed in New York. It was severe bronchitis, he told ABC, and ABC told the country.

Then on April 5^th — four months ago last Friday — he told the country something else. Something terrible. He had lung cancer. It was his intent, he said, forcing the words out with a physical strain that any broadcaster or singer recognized as a complete loss of breath, to return to the anchor chair “on the good days.” At ABC, there could be only optimism — no talk of a successor, not even a solo replacement, but rather a rotation, and, constantly, a reminder, right through to last Friday, that the newscast was “World News Tonight With Peter Jennings.”

It was, in the end, the kind of blow that the calm, seasoned, assuring voice had always softened for us, always relieved of its sharp edges and its tragedy — the kind of mitigation with which the years abroad had gifted him. But the perseverance of 57 years in front of a microphone could not restore the calm, seasoned, assuring voice. There was now, it seemed, no one to soften and relieve this shock.

“He is now as good,” that ‘80s colleague had said, “as he used to think he was.” Those who sit in the chairs of his rival networks, or other chairs like them, know that all too well at this hour.

The calm, seasoned, assuring voice has been stilled.

And for now, at least, there are no others.

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Watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann each weeknight at 8:00 p.m. ET

• August 4, 2005 | 11:15 a.m. ET

Congress needs to control its 'roid rage (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK - When it comes to sporting competitions, politicians do not know when to leave well enough alone.     

This was true in 1804 - consider the famous Aaron Burr/Alexander Hamilton clash, the first major game of skill to be held in New Jersey (and the possible origin of the cliché “He won the whole shooting match”).     

So it is true in 2005 - Congress is not going to be able to prosecute baseball’s Rafael Palmeiro on perjury charges. And simply because he wagged his finger at them just like Bill Clinton, they’re not going to impeach him, either - let’s get that straight right off the bat.     

It’s a truly simple proposition, one that should have been simple enough even for the otherwise unemployable people who we keep solvent in Washington thanks to the generosity of taxpayers like you and me.     

Palmeiro testified before Congress on March 17^th that he never used steroids.     

Palmeiro tested positive for steroids some time after March 17^th.     

Grotesque and self-destructive as Palmeiro’s testimony appears in retrospect, unless there is a stack of paperwork somewhere proving that he tested positive in 2003 or 2004, he’s in the clear. In March, he only told them “I have never used steroids. Period.” He did not add, ‘And I never ever will. Exclamation point!’     

If Congress really wants to further investigate steroids, it can do so, productively, in three other areas.      

Firstly, there is the very real prospect that Palmeiro is one of those athletes who has let himself be conned into using the drug, while convincing (or pretending to convince) himself that he’s really been ingesting Malted Milk Balls. They are probably very rare. Not more than 97 out of 100 pro athletes could talk themselves into drinking Drano and calling it Orange Juice.     

You may think this is foolish, but rationalization about health and what one puts in one’s body is commonplace not just among athletes, but among civilians, too. One need only read the leaked version of Barry Bonds’ Grand Jury testimony in the BALCO case (‘Gee whiz, I thought that stuff was Flaxseed Oil’) to understand the former, and to seriously analyze the eating, drinking, medicating and smoking habits of one’s friends (or one’s self), to understand the latter.

Without rationalizations, we’d all be living on distilled water, food we grew personally, and, for pain - relying exclusively on deep tissue massage.      

The House Government Reform Committee might more productively waste our tax money pursuing this line of inquiry (“What did Mr. Palmeiro not know he was taking, and when did he not know it?”).      

Or it can broaden its net and establish just how much baseball manipulated the entire Palmeiro testing process to cover its own corporate butt, as it planned to celebrate Palmeiro’s milestone 3000^th career base hit, and its annual Hall of Fame inductions last weekend.      

This past Sunday morning at Yankee Stadium in New York, one of my oldest baseball friends took me aside in the press box and asked me a question. “You’ve heard the rumor? That a high-profile player failed his steroid test? But that they’re holding it back so as not to ruin Hall of Fame weekend?”

Pretty good rumor, huh?      

Just to show you we media types sometimes get it just as wrong as Congress, my baseball friend and I immediately nominated two “high-profile” players, neither of whom was Rafael Palmeiro. We figured that if it was one of our guesses, he’d gone on the stuff after a terrible start to his 2005 season, and had rallied to near a milestone of his own, after which, on the verge of being caught, he might very well stride proudly to the center of his team’s clubhouse and light himself ablaze in a kind of Viking Suicide.

But the point here is that baseball as a whole might be more productively mined. When did Palmeiro fail his test? Was his appeal of the verdict as slow and drawn-out as it seemed? Was it longer than the appeals of less prominent players? Was the information deliberately withheld from the public (well, really, how long was it withheld? Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner, now a New York Mets’ announcer, said on-the-air the other night that he and many of his fellow ‘immortals’ were told last Sunday by Commissioner Bud Selig of a very serious event that had occurred and would be revealed the next day - but that Selig gave them no other details).     

The third area the Subcommittee might find more productive than sweeping up the remains of Rafael Palmeiro and grilling them (don’t kid yourself - he’s finished), is to examine the curious case of the health of Steroidal Suspect #1, Barry Bonds. As the steroid story broke back in March, I suggested on "Countdown" that it would be an amazing coincidence if Bonds just never happened to play again, either this season or permanently, either because of - or on the pretext of - the after-effects of off-season knee surgery.     

After repeated and contradictory announcements reminiscent of Johnny Carson’s old gag about the frequent absences of bandleader Doc Severinsen (“Barry is here? Barry isn’t here? Barry is here. Barry isn’t here”), the latest of Bonds’ 144 different public comments on the health of his knees indicates he won’t play until next year - if then. Of course, as I write this, it’s still early in the morning on the Pacific Coast so Bonds may have revised this forecast two or three times today.     

The entire Bonds saga - the injury, and the tabling (or eliminating) of his pursuit of the career home run plateaus of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron - has amounted to a de facto suspension, and Congress might productively look into that.

If you’re looking into why I’m spending so much time on this, I have to advertise for myself, as Mr. Mailer once wrote. Tomorrow (Friday the 5^th), I am sticking my steroid-free toe back into the sports waters. My old ESPN SportsCenter partner Dan Patrick and I are resuming our collaboration for one hour a week, co-hosting his ESPN Radio Show (Fridays, 2-3 PM ET, 11 AM-Noon PT, etc).      

Dan is coming all the way down from World Headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, to do the show with me here in New York. The least you could do is listen.

Finally, as mentioned above, Palmeiro’s done. Whether he self-medicated or self-deluded or both, his credibility was destroyed beyond repair. It’s sad, too, because a statement this week along the lines of ‘I honestly didn’t believe I was taking steroids, I must have been wrong, I ask the fans’ forgiveness, I am willing to testify against my personal trainer’ probably would have preserved much of his reputation.

And it’s interesting to note that very little attention has been paid this week to the fact that Palmeiro was traded away by the Chicago Cubs in 1988 because they were convinced he would never develop any significant power - at age 24, he’d hit a career total of only 25 home runs (in the ensuing sixteen seasons, he’s hit a further 544 of them). And of course - ironic because of the grief President Bush has gotten over the years for trading away Sammy “Well My Translator Is Steroid-Free” Sosa - the Cubs traded Palmeiro to Bush’s then-team, the Texas Rangers (if, by the way, you'd like to read a tortured defense on this ultimate irrelevancy, check out the archives of one of the President's cheerleader papers, The Washington Times ).     

Maybe there’s a fourth line of inquiry Congress could investigate instead of wasting time on Palmeiro’s purported perjury. It’s one based on the theorem supported by Sosa, Palmeiro, and the personnel history of the Rangers’ team: that the individual players may come and go, but the performance-enhancing drugs last forever.

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• July 22, 2005 | 10:02 p.m. ET

Wilson revealed (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — Call it the CIA Leak Investigation, or the Valerie Plame follow-up, or the Karl Rove Case.  By whichever name, it may have just turned from the difficult-to-follow, and legally subtle, pursuit of someone who could’ve violated a complicated law about not deliberately revealing the identity of covert agents into something much simpler.

The special prosecutor may be going after Karl Rove — and Scooter Libby — for making false statements to the prosecutors.

In other words: lying.

Bloomberg News quoting ‘people familiar with the case’ says that while Rove told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned Agent Plame’s name from columnist Robert Novak, the news service reports Novak “has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor.”

Rove also told prosecutors a version of his conversation with Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper that doesn’t match up to Cooper’s testimony.

Several news organizations noted that Rove testified that Cooper had called him on July 11, 2003 to, at least nominally, talk about welfare reform.  Cooper reportedly switched topics quickly to Wilson and the uranium from Niger mentioned in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address.

But Cooper reportedly testified that he never talked about welfare reform in that conversation with Rove.

As to Libby — the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney — Bloomberg reports that he told prosecutors he first learned Plame’s identity from Tim Russert of NBC News.  The organization also says Russert testified to the grand jury that Libby’s testimony is not true.

The New York Times, meanwhile, reports that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald is simultaneously also investigating how Rove and Libby drafted a statement for CIA Director George Tenet to make on the Joe Wilson Op-Ed — specifically to see if that and other “damage control” by Rove and Libby might have led to the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s work.

And to see what information or documents Rove and Libby might have had access to as they prepared the Tenet statement.

And that main-lines back to the Wall Street Journal story that John Harwood broke on this newscast Thursday night...

An internal State Department document, prepared for an under-secretary of state, and seen by the then Secretary of State Colin Powell, mentioned Valerie Plame’s CIA work — and to remind readers that her work was classified.  The portions pertaining to her were marked “T.S.” for Top Secret and “S/NF,” a designation meaning in essence ‘classified — do not share with foreign intelligence services, even friendly ones.’

I sat down with the husband of the outed CIA agent tonight.  The following is a rush transcript

FREE VIDEO Wilson responds Jul. 22: Valerie Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, joins Countdown for an exclusive interview.  His wife's name was leaked to press. MSNBC

of my interview with Joseph C. Wilson IV, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq:

AMB. JOSEPH C. WILSON, WIFE’S IDENTITY LEAKED TO THE PRESS: Keith, nice to be with you.

OLBERMANN: There’s a lot of new and seemingly small details in this story in the past week or so.  Obviously, you have a vested interest in following this story.  What part isn’t really small?  What part arched your eyebrows?

WILSON: Well, certainly, the conflicting testimony between Mr. Russert and Mr. Novak and Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove.  I think that’s of some interest.

But I would go back to what I’ve tried to say all along, and that is, is that this is really a national security issue.  And what’s been dismaying the last couple of weeks, of course, is the extent to which the Republican National Committee has tried to turn this into a partisan issue.  In 1999, former President Bush said those who would expose the identities of covert sources are the most insidious of traitors.  Here we are, just six years later, and not a single Republican of national stature has even stood up to say that what Mr. Rove now it’s documented he has done was wrong.

OLBERMANN: There is an irony related to that in the newest developments, that the memo that pertained to your wife’s CIA work was marked, in essence, Top secret, shut up about this, yet the prosecutor is reportedly more focused on the prospects of a perjury case or perhaps a conspiracy case.

In terms of the prosecution here, do the particulars matter to you, do they matter to your wife, what, if any, charges are filed here?

WILSON:  Well, I think Mr. Fitzgerald is going to obviously have the last word on that, and I haven’t spoken to him in almost a year-and-a-half, so I have no idea where he’s headed in his investigation.  But irrespective of whether he — he indicts or declines to indict, we know have, thanks to Mr. Cooper and his notes, documentary evidence that Karl Rove gave him — gave up my wife’s identity.  He can call her “Wilson’s wife,” but when you say, “Wilson’s wife,” I have only one wife, and that is Valerie Wilson.

OLBERMANN: Having watched the entirety of the investigation move slowly over the year-and-a-half, or slightly more, with details leaking out here and there, do you have a sense of specifically a chain of events of what happened and who made it happen, who actually ruined your wife’s usefulness in the war on terror?

WILSON:  Well, I’ve been told — and I did not do any sleuthing myself, but I’ve been told by people who were looking into this last year or the year before last that there was a meeting held in the middle of March in the White House, in the vice president’s offices, possibly chaired by Scooter Libby, in which it was decided to do a, quote, “work-up” on me.  That’s what I was told then.

Now, obviously, there’s this State Department memorandum of June 7, which was then updated for the secretary’s trip to Africa, and people are talking about the possibility that the name leaked out of that particular memo.

It would be appropriate, I would think, for the secretary of state to want to know how this trip came about and what happened, so that he wouldn’t be blind-sided by questions about it.  What was not appropriate, I don’t believe, was putting Valerie’s name in the memo, since, as I’ve said repeatedly, and as the CIA has said repeatedly, she was not part of the decision process that led to my going out there.

OLBERMANN: So you think perhaps the mentioning of her name in that memo was leaving — leaving a door unlocked or leaving a trail opened up to somebody or leaving the prospect of something accidentally leaking out that wasn’t quite so much of an accident?

WILSON: Well, I don’t think there’s any question that it was not an accident.  When you’ve got a memorandum that says “Top secret, no foreign” — that’s “NF,” not for foreign distribution—then people with those clearances know precisely what it means, and they all sign non-disclosure agreements with the government when they go to work for the government.  It means that you don’t share this information with anybody who doesn’t have a need to know.

OLBERMANN: On another matter related to this, on Monday, the president said that if anybody in his administration was guilty of a crime in revealing your wife’s work, they would no longer be working in his administration.  What do you make, what did you make of that statement in the context of Mr. Bush’s previous statements and his press secretary’s previous statements about people who might have been involved in the government and might have been involved in leaking your wife’s identity?

WILSON: When the compromise of Valerie’s identity first took place and it was traced back to the senior administration officials, that was a breach of trust between the White House and our clandestine service. When the president changes his tune on this — and in June of 2004, he said that he would fire anybody who was involved in the leak, and he backtracks on that, I think it’s a breach of trust with the American people.

This president has said that he’s a man of his word, his word is his bond, he’s a straight shooter.  And now — now it appears that he’s not.  It appears that he’s willing to go back on that word.  And I think that compounds the breach of trust with the clandestine services, as well as with the American people.

OLBERMANN: Do you and your wife, or either one of you, ultimately hold the president responsible for what happened here?

WILSON:  Well, I think the president had a responsibility to enforce his own orders that people cooperate fully with the Justice Department.  Remember now, it’s almost — it’s been two years, two years in September.  The president gave an order that everybody should cooperate fully with the Justice Department.  This issue had to be litigated up to the Supreme Court, Matt Cooper and his family had to be put through agony, Judy Miller, “The New York Times” reporter, is languishing in jail, and all because the president has apparently been unable or unwilling to enforce his edict that people cooperate fully.

OLBERMANN:  Do you believe his responsibility goes back further than that statement?  Does it go back to the — in some way — to the leak itself?  Is he responsible for the leak?

WILSON:  I would hope not.  When the president assembles his senior staff, part of the responsibility of the senior staff is to protect — protection of the office of the presidency.  This is bigger than just the man, this is the office.  And I would certainly hope that he was not in any way knowledgeable of—of a tawdry leak from his political hatchet men.

OLBERMANN:  That’s largely the big picture.  Give me the more focused one.  Have you and your wife gotten your lives back in the last two years?

WILSON: Well, it’s not very easy when you hear the likes of Ken Mehlman ranting, just spouting lies on news programs, or the likes of our distinguished congresspeople, such as Peter King, saying that Valerie got what she deserved.  After all, she served this country for 20 years.

Without telling you where she served, I can tell you that she was in some of the areas of real high priority to the United States.  I myself served my country for 23 years, including as charge in Baghdad during the first Gulf war for the first President Bush.  First President Bush made me an ambassador to African countries.  President Clinton asked me to be his special assistant on African affairs.

It’s hard for us to see why our good names are besmirched the way they are by Republicans, headed by the RNC, when, after all, my opinion piece said nothing but the truth.  There was no evidence of uranium sales from Niger to Iraq.  There was no evidence of an interest that had been pursued by either party.  There are no — there was no evidence turned up by the Iraq Survey Group.  It didn’t happen.  It wasn’t going to happen.  It would not have happened.

OLBERMANN:  Regardless of what the special prosecutor chooses to do or not do, have the two of you considered civil suits against anybody who might have been involved in the leak of your wife’s name and work?

WILSON: Well, we’re keeping all of our options open.  We’ve decided that we would not do anything until the special prosecutor finished his work.  We’re not big believers in frivolous suits.  We didn’t like what happened with Judicial Watch and all the various attempts that were made to get at the Clinton administration through the use of civil suits.  We have absolute faith—and I admit our prejudice as former — as government employees.  My wife is still a government employee, and I’m a retired government employee.  We admit our prejudice in having full faith in the institutions that have made this country great for 229 years.

OLBERMANN: My last question.  Obviously, the people who have pooh-poohed this whole thing — and you mentioned some of the — some of the politics involved in this — they tend to dismiss the whole thing by saying, Wilson has been proven wrong.  Dick Cheney didn’t send him to Niger.  He was sent there because his wife suggested it.  It struck me the other day — let’s just assume for the moment that those premises are correct.  How would they have changed the facts of what you did or did not find in Niger, even if your wife had made the — had the responsibility of making the decision to send you there?

WILSON:  Well, first of all, the premise is not correct.  If you go back and you look at the original article, it says very clearly it was the office of the vice president that expressed an interest, that led to the CIA sending me there.  So that was the first lie in these RNC talking points.  And if you can’t believe that, why should you believe everything else?

In actual fact, it wouldn’t make any difference at all whether my wife was  involved in a trip that was essentially pro bono.  But the fact is, as the CIA has said repeatedly since June 22 of 2003, she was not involved in the decision-making process.

OLBERMANN:  The former acting U.S. ambassador to Iraq, author of “The Politics of Truth” and the man who inadvertently started the special prosecutor’s investigations of Karl Rove and others, Joe Wilson.  Great.  Thanks for your time, sir.

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• July 21, 2005 | 10:38 p.m. ET

Terrorists hoist on their own petard (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK — In the eerie weeks here, immediately following the 9/11 attacks, as the pyre still burned where the World Trade Center had stood, and the city could not shake its sense not merely of what had happened, but more over of what must certainly be yet to come, one question grew louder and louder.

Why on earth hadn’t the terrorists pulled off a follow-up?

We weren’t talking about the anthrax letters, which were at one extreme — too isolated to really further frighten an entire city. Nor were we talking about the other extreme — another horrible ‘spectacular.’

We were all wondering when there’d be a smoke bomb at Penn Station, or just a bomb scare phone call to Grand Central’s station-master. Low risk, high yield — just enough to reverse the sense that every day that passed without incident made us a little safer and a little less prone to panic.

“That’s the question we were asking ourselves every day in the Situation Room at the White House,” Roger Cressey — the former coordinator of counter-terror policy on the National Security Council staff — told me on tonight’s show.

Thursday’s events in London may have given all of us an answer.

If terrorists choose to follow up a painful, heart-rending attack in a city not steeled to such inhumanity, it turns out they are running a risk that those whose minds cannot conceive or countenance terror, will not see at first glance. That risk is this: follow a “success” with a botch job like the one in London, and the perpetrators necessarily leave a trail a mile wide — and remind us that even blind, uncomprehending religious fanaticism isn’t enough, if your damn bomb doesn’t blow up when it’s supposed to.

It’s easy to write this from New York when it’s the people of London who have to get on the “tube” in the morning. But there’s still enough of that late-2001 sense of informed foreboding here that it’s not meant callously. July 7^th was a nightmare. But July 21^st may turn out to be the day the terrorists began to blow themselves up — hoist themselves, as the Middle English phrase goes, “on their own petard.”

Consider what London bought with its panic and tears — and apparently not a single civilian injury — during this second terror attack. Though the information is unconfirmed, London police sources and U.S. officials told NBC News that two of the four bombers have already been arrested. Certainly police got detailed descriptions of all of them. At least one of the bombs fell, unexploded, to the street, as the cowardly terrorist realized he wasn’t amid the nubile residents of his imaginary Valhalla, but rather, about to be beaten senseless by angry Londoners, and ran away.

These creatures — and one has to assume they were considered the best four agents left available to carry out the follow-up attack — left the proverbial trail a mile wide. By nightfall in London, investigators had enough forensic evidence to match the explosives to the 7/7 blasts, to indicate why the bombs didn’t explode, to identify the backpacks, to secure fingerprints on the devices, and to pursue a suspect seen running into a hospital with wires still sticking out of his shirt.

Even if the reported arrests are premature, investigators will, as Cressey pointed out, get names and neighborhoods and relatives and supporters and travel records. They will have the explosive material to study, and trace to its origins.

These attacks, right now, look like a hurricane hitting a drought area, injuring no one and filling up the reservoirs.

And perhaps just importantly, these attacks prove the fallibility of the terrorists and of their conspiracies. Ironically enough, it was the British cold war spy turned novelist, John LeCarre, who may have explained the ultimate meaning of the day’s events, in words he put in the mouth of his protagonist George Smiley in the novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Smiley, explaining to a protégée of the wiles of the Soviet spymaster ‘Karla,’ hears his junior colleague sigh, “So Karla’s fireproof.” Smiley snaps at him. “He’s not fireproof. He’s a fanatic.”

And fanatics, Smiley goes on to reassure him — and, unintentionally, reassure us — will inevitably make mistakes because they assume their cause is so just and their destiny so preordained that fate will make the mistakes magically disappear.

Fate makes no such deals.

Nobody knows that better right now, than the fanatic who tried to blow up Shepherd’s Bush Underground station and managed only to knock himself unconscious — and to awaken in the hands of people who live in the real world.

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• July 20, 2005 | 11:41 a.m. ET

Welcome aboard, Mr. Roberts (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK — Who knows if President Bush really did rush his nomination of Judge John G. Roberts to the Supreme Court in order to knock the Karl Rove story off the front page. But if he did — he did a poor job of it.

Unfortunately for the conspiracy theory and/or the conspiracy, the first 18 hours of Democratic reaction to the Roberts candidacy seems to be almost benign.

No hair-on-fire, “Save America!” response means no controversy.

No controversy means no headlines.

No headlines means — we rejoin the Karl Rove story already in progress.

Given the nominee’s ambiguity on Roe v. Wade, and the limited paper trail that just two years at the bench provides, one might have expected a little more hand-wringing. But merely on Countdown last night, we heard former Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta virtually endorse Roberts, Al Gore’s 2000 attorney Kendall Coffey fairly gush about him, Senator Schumer meekly remind the opposition party that the Supreme Court nominee is supposed to justify himself to the Senate, and Craig Crawford suggest that the Democrats may actually be smart enough to hold fire on this one and keep the good thing they’ve got going on Rove.

Everything I’ve heard since suggests the party leadership wants very much to give Roberts no more than a black-and-blue mark, and take no more than five minutes doing so.

The most relevant fact — one that got lost in last night’s attempt to present a new high court nominee the way that NBC presents the winner of The Apprentice — is that just because the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings of three and four presidencies ago were knock-down, drag-out fights, that doesn’t mean the Supreme Court is inherently interesting to people.

Mr. Bush did not drag a superstar in front of the cameras last night. Not a woman, not a Hispanic, not a Political Hack. He brought out someone with almost a generic name and identity, complete with a generic wife, standing in just the right position so we could see her generic smile.

Contrast this to those ABC poll numbers from Monday. 53 percent of the country is supposedly following the Rove case very closely. Only 47 percent of Republicans think the White House is being fully cooperative with the Special Prosecutor (only 25 percent of the country, overall).

Karl Rove is the Natalee Holloway of non-tabloid journalism. His story will stick around, whether or not politicians or reporters want it to, because people will watch.

Hell, we even did Karl Rove Puppet Theatre last night.

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