STARTING SOMETHING?

To my parents and other family members: I promise I'll go back to posting baby pictures and cute anecdotes later this week. But tonight, it's time to rant.

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave a pretty appalling speech in Salt Lake City where he compared the War on Terror (and, by inference, the War in Iraq) to World War Two. He went on to imply that people who oppose the war in Iraq are the types of people who would have taken Hitler out to lunch and kindly asked him to stop oppressing the Jews before handing Poland over to him. There were all kinds of problems with the speech, many of which were dealt with in a Slate article on the subject.

But something else happened on MSNBC this week. I don't watch MSNBC, I don't know anybody who does, but my friend Jon posted a clip from Keith Olbermann's show on his site, and I think it's worth passing on to the paltry (yet ever growing) audience that passes through this site.

For those not too net savvy (and you know who you are--Patti), just click on the picture below and the video should launch. Be warned, the audio is crap.

As a journalist, I do have a few problems with this clip. First, it's a bit overwritten. It's clear Olbermann believes he's writing for posterity, perhaps even hoping to follow in the footsteps of his hero Edward R. Murrow. In the process, he stretches a bit too hard to reach Murrow's level of eloquence. (Murrow may have been the best writer the news business has ever seen, so it's a bit unfair to compare the two, but Olbermann brought it up. So there.)

But these are but minor trifles when you realize that Olbermann is right. Since the September 11th attacks, the Bush Administration has used patriotism as a battering ram to silence critics. I'll never forget how angry I felt when then-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told the president's critics that they needed to "watch what they said" in this new era of terrorism. As a school kid learning about the US form of government, and all the freedoms we had here, I could have never imagined that I would one day hear the spokesman for the president say such things. I consider myself patriotic, but I was deeply disappointed in my nation that day.

In his speech, Rumsfeld rails against the outrages of our era, an era where journalists have the gall to report on troop misconduct abroad, an era where a respected human rights organization like Amnesty International calls into question our indefinite detentions of so-called "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay. How dare they?

He failed to mention outrages like this. A newspaper catches the president flagrantly breaking the law, violating his oath of office, and ignoring the Constitution from which his powers derive (in this case, it was warrantless wire tapping). The people who uncovered these violations were branded "traitors" by the administration. It was par for the course, really. If you oppose the administration, you clearly must love terrorism or hate freedom or want to french kiss Osama bin Laden by candlelight in some Pakistan cave.

More remarkable than this bullying is how long it has been allowed to go on. We're five years into this now and it often seems line no one is even raising an eyebrow. That's why I'm proud of what Olbermann did. I get a little nervous when journalists veer into commentary (like on this post, for instance). I think people in the news business spend way too much time spewing opinion rather than gathering and broadcasting facts. But every once in a great while, someone needs to speak truth to power. Olbermann was the first person to really take a stab at it, even if he did engage in some substantial mental acrobatics to sell his Neville Chamberlain analogy.

I understand that every blogger with a clean set of pajamas is bent out of shape, one way or another, over Rumsfeld's speech. What's written in this tiny little backwater of the internet will likely have no effect on the current debate in our country. It will be viewed, likely with some bemusement, by my friends and family, and by the small handful of people who have stumbled upon this site and return on occasion.

But maybe, if thousands of small voices start speaking up, it will add up to a larger voice, something that will be listened to. And maybe that will affect some kind of change that means that the two little boys who just puked on me tonight won't have to grow up in a country where they have to "watch what they say" if they don't agree with their government.

Dissent is patriotic. So there.