MSNBC The Rachel Maddow Show - 16 Oct. 2009: Rachel interviews Keith Olbermann on George H. W. Bush's ridiculous comment, and also interviews Ron Suskind.
OLBERMANN: It's easy to miss the irony here. What he's complaining about in terms of personalized complaint about other politicians, this current era of it, name-calling - he's the father of it. And I don't mean he's the father of George W. Bush, I mean he's the father of the process that took us to the place where we are now. He is the man who employed Roger Ailes. He and Roger Ailes are the men who ran the Willie Horton ad against Mike Dukakis. He and Roger Ailes are the people who played the scam against Dan Rather. So it's very ironic to hear George H.W. Bush from this lofty perch, and with real, I thought, anger in his voice against you and me, and mispronouncing your name which adds to his credibility, you know, just sort of ignoring the fact, hey, you don't like this buddy? It's your responsibility. You fix it. You started it.
MADDOW: It was interesting to me, Keith, that he was eager to volunteer us by name. He actually said, if you would like to volunteer names, I've got them for you. I wonder if this is seen by the Bush family as some sort of, I guess, return fire against the current White House for sort of taking on Fox News recently.
Well... my assumption is, and this is where I give the former president something of a pass on this, that you'd have to, you'd have blind spot, if your son had been President of the United States you'd have a blind spot about how well or poorly he did. If your son happened to be George W. Bush, the blind spot would be the size of a galaxy. And you'd have to assume that criticism of him must necessarily be wrong and must necessarily be personal and vituperative as opposed to being predicated on what actually happened during that administration. I mean, you know, we've seen President Bush get weepy talking about Jeb in a Presidential context and the way thinks turned out. There's got to be some sort of weird mixture of psychology going on in there. I don't think it's necessarily retributative. I don't know that Mr. Bush is any more pleased with what Fox News became than anyone else is. But I don't know that's it's necessarily that, but it's so, so strange for him to assail name-calling and then call us names...
There's something about people who start a certain tenor or give a certain tenor to American political life - this is over the centuries, it isn't just recently, but there's something about this - when they take us down a path, if anyone else goes down that path who disagrees with them, they are startled, outraged, and take huge umbrage because only they are correct. And so this is what I think President Bush did and I think it's kind of a sad legacy to a sad Presidency.
MADDOW: Yeah, it's sort of... the only incivility they recognize is that of their (opponents).
OLBERMANN: At least they spelled my name right. Or something like that.
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