Countdown: Lawrence O'Donnell Discusses With Keith Why He Went Ballistic On Marc Thiessen

[Turborama]

Run time: 07:13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU_WDz3gc7s   Posted on YouTube: February 13, 2010 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: February 13, 2010 By DU Member: Turborama Views on DU: 6289

 
"Washing Their Hands" AKA "Terror of Their Ways" - As Keith so eloquently pointed out, too many people let former GWB toadies claim President Obama is inviting another terrorist attack without reminding said toadies that 3000 Americans died on American soil during GWB’s watch because he ignored a briefing on Aug. 6, 2001. Marc Thiessen was the latest toady on MSNBC this morning to do this; Lawrence O’Donnell didn’t let him get away with it. GWB knew the afternoon of the attacks who was responsible & would’ve even known where OBL was if he’d read a newspaper. Mr. Thiessen thinks the Obama Administration is killing too many terrorists with drones before we have a chance to torture them. Mr. Thiessen wasn’t even in the situation room on 9/11 to REALLY know what GWB knew & what GWB didn’t know.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/2/12/121213/878

Check here for the transcript: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/

[napi21]

1. The one thing they said that really pisses me off is that any

of them can slam Obama for doing the wrong thing, inviting terrorists to attack, and now, KILLING TOO MANY TERRORISTS, but if a Dem says Shrub was at least partially responsible for 911 because he ignored his advisors, WE are unamerican! Those kind of words make my blood boil! And my temper too!!!!

[aquart]

4. Yeah, but I say it anyway.

And then I remind tham that instead of ASKING ABOUT CASUALTIES Bush sat reading a book while Americans were murdered. And then he quickly got on a plane and saved his own ass.

[wildbilln864]

29. He didn't ask about anything!

Very strange! And then he didn't immediately leave. He had a photo op and a meeting after reading "Pet Goat". A surprise attack!? Not hardly IMO. I've often wondered how he and the SS knew there wasn't a hijacked plane heading straight for them at that very moment. :shrug:

[SusanaMontana41]

33. Bush knew about the attacks before he reached the school.

Watch the re-run of NBC'S news coverage that day. David Gregory was with Bush in Florida and said the president had been told about the attacks before leaving his hotel room.

[AtheistCrusader]

2. Excellent interview.

[mfcorey1]

3. O'Donnell held his ground despite the fact

that Moaning Joe and Mimic Me Mika tried to portray him as angry and out of control.:spank:

[rasputin1952]

5. That was the most despicable part...

to listen to them trying to "defend" the clod.

O'Donnell did a service to the nation by holding this cretin to a higher standard. Another bush flunky soundly called out for his overt lying and obfuscation.

[JoePhilly]

13. I won't watch Morning Dope ... if I wanted endless right wing talking points, I'd watch Fox ...

[Cha]

19. Morning joe email contact.

Morning Joe - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28437928 /

[democracy1st]

6. K & R

[wroberts189]

7. knr

[ScottLand]

8. Well, I'm gonna say it too. Bush wasn't just ANY president.

He was, if I may borrow a phrase from him, "the worst of the worst". He is the bottom of the barrel, the worst president in this nation's history. And that's what I will tell anyone who mentions him to me.

WTF was he doing in a classroom at that particular time anyway? How many times did you see him read to schoolchildren before or after 9/11?

[activa8tr]

9. Bush read to school children, (instead of doing Presidential things) and

we hear all sorts of criticism of Michelle Obama from the right wing idiots for her efforts to involve kids in healthy lifestyles?

It boggles the mind.

[ScottLand]

11. Just something else to criticize. Being a right wing pundit

must be the easiest job in the world. All you gotta know is "liberal bad, conservative good" and apply it to everything. I've always said if Hillary Clinton said we should save baby kittens, Sean Hannity would promote drowning them on his next show.

[pundaint]

28. It's time we stop conceding the term "Conservative" to these Right win Loonies.

Barry Goldwater was a conservative, and he wold be decried as a leftist in today's media. There may be a conservative Democrat or two among the dogs. Every time a politician is glossed conservative, their records should be challenged for fiscal recklessness. But that's just a small start. Liberal is hopelessly defamed, we need to build up some warm fuzzy responses to "Progressive," and own that label as a Party. The first criticism of any stupid Republican initiative should be "that's not Progressive, that's going backwards!"

Progressives need more media war-fighting skills. Our meme technology is non-existent. We are defeated by NLP tactics at every turn, and it's like a mystery weapon to us. The largest corporations have been using it, the Republicans have been using it, and we've been losing to it, for over 4 decades.

[Jackpine Radical]

30. They have Luntz, and we have Lakoff.

Time we start listening to Lakoff, I say.

[duhneece]

32. They have Lunz & top dollar advertising, marketing

experts who can analyze & evaluate what 'sells'...apparently fear & sex sell a lot.

[Jackpine Radical]

35. You're right on all counts.

The odds are certainly stacked against us in getting out our views--so let's not further handicap ourselves with clumsy language.

[The Wizard]

10. Republicans get away with lying

because they own the major media (propaganda) outlets.
Bush knew well on advance of the 9-11 attacks and chose to stay in Crawford clearing brush. The August 6, 2001 PDP is the smoking gun, and whenever right wing butt plugs start their bullshit about Democrats being weak on the nation's defense they have to be reminded that the Bush cartel chose to ignore real intelligence that warned of 9-11 and instead cherry picked false intelligence that gave them an excuse to invade and occupy a sovereign nation that never harmed us, kill innocent Iraqi men women and children, and pilfer their resources.
The excuses for defending the Bush cartel are old and proven false. All they can do now is divert negative attention from themselves and use their media handmaidens to point the finger at Democrats.
Enough is enough. These scumbags have to be called out and exposed at every turn. They must be held accountable for their crimes against this nation and humanity.

[ScottLand]

12. You couldn't be more correct. Your last sentence says it all.

Who are we? What do we stand for? Is there anyone above the laws we live by? We have to address these things honestly or we're no better than any other nation.

[AlbertCat]

22. Who are we? What do we stand for?

Why are unknown speech writers from a totally failed administration being interviewed and asked questions anyway?




Don't forget that question!



Take this fool and loopy Peggy Noonan, chain them together and throw them overboard. They are not sources of any kind of information. They come from the worst administrations we've ever had.

[ScottLand]

24. Exactly! As well as the fact that they presented him as

if he was an insider with complete knowledge of what was going on in both administrations when in truth, he wasn't even privy to the one he actually served.

[Cha]

18. THis is exactly right and you wouldn't think it

would be anything but obvious after all these years.

[sulphurdunn]

25. Correct. Corporate Media's

fictional misinformation narrative is why every discredited, disgraced, high or low level operative and hack in the conservative political universe is repeatedly rehabilitated and permitted to lie through his or her ass in front of millions of people without censure. I think former president Chimpy MacSmirk called it "catapulting the propaganda."

[DrZeeLit]

14. I love O'Donnell!

What always frosts me is..... the Republicans have the balls to keep saying: "We kept America safe" while conveniently (con veeeeeen eeee ent ly) forgetting that 9/11 happened ON THEIR WATCH.
It's as if we start counting AFTER 9/11.
Well, not even "as if" -- they just do it.

Bush had been president for 9 months.
When Obama was president for 9 months, trust me... they were counting every little movement as "under his watch" -- several of which were truly NOT: TARP, Unemployment, Deficits, Housing, Auto industry bankruptcy, Iraq, and Afghanistan...

So, if Obama has to take the Afghanistan War as "his" --- then 9/11 is Bush. All Bush. 24/7 Bush.

[Overseas]

15. Revisionist historians have been emboldened by the lack of prosecutions or even

Truth & Reconciliation hearings.

The Bush Gang ignored serious, detailed warnings about Al Qaeda's plans to attack the USA in 2001 in order to push their war of choice on Iraq and were not impeached.

We didn't even hold serious prosecutions.

We didn't even hold a Truth & Reconciliation Commission to expose how far the Bush Gang had led this country off some long standing moral and ethical cliffs.

So the Revisionist Historians of the Right have been out in force pretending they didn't brush aside serious warnings and let our country be attacked.

The Revisionist Historians are quite comfy doing that because they know most of our mass media have been conglomerated into right wing hands.

[Uncle Joe]

16. I disagree with O'Donnell's conclusions regarding a blanket not going there because you take an oath

You take an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, so why wouldn't you go there if you believed the enemy was domestic, this might be painful but I believe it's necessary.

Having said that I don't believe Thiessen has a leg to stand on in regards to President Obama but if anything warrants "going there" it would be Bush and Cheney's behavior prior to and after 9/11.

I wonder if Thiessen and the Republicans are coming out with this blame Obama shit now in order to have a blanket statement frame of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, "not going there" meme pushed?

Thanks for the thread, Turborama.

[LaPera]

17. Olbermann & O'Donnell always expose republican lies & kick their ass.

[Cha]

20. "The end of the Bush/Cheney era, alas, does not mean the end of loyal Bushies misleading the country

THE MEDIA LOVES THOSE LOYAL BUSHIES.... When Scott Lemieux noted yesterday that the Washington Post had hired Marc Thiessen as a columnist, I thought there had to be some kind of mistake.

There are, of course, a limited number of slots for paid columnists at the Post, and it seemed hard to believe that the paper would hire George W. Bush's former chief speechwriter and then hire George W. Bush's other chief speechwriter. Fox News, maybe. But the Washington Post is supposed to have standards. We know better.

Alas, Lemieux's report was accurate. At the bottom of a Thiessen piece yesterday, there was text explaining that he "will be writing a weekly column for The Post."

This strikes me as noteworthy for two reasons. The first is that Thiessen is a truly awful choice. As Adam Serwer explained:

Thiessen ... has spent the entirety of his post-Bush administration career attempting to defend the use of torture by his former boss. I'd have to say the highlight would be the time he argued that torturing Muslim terrorist suspects was necessary because of their religion -- and since that column appeared in the Post, I'm guessing Hiatt thinks there's something to this. Clearly, Hiatt felt that between Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol and Richard Cohen he still didn't have the whole "I heart torture" contingent covered.

Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt said Thiessen deserves to be a paid columnist because he "makes some strong arguments" and "argues them forcefully." And which arguments would those be? His love of torture? His insistence, two days after the president's inauguration, that Obama is "proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office"?

I can appreciate "strong" and "forceful" voices as much as the next reader, but isn't there something to be said for morally defensible voices who also tell the truth?

The other thing to keep in mind here is that there's a remarkable revolving door between the mainstream media and the staff of the Bush White House.

It's been tough to keep up with all of them, but the list is getting pretty long: Dana Perino (Fox News), Michael Gerson (Washington Post), Mary Matalin (CNN), Sara Taylor (MSNBC), Tony Snow (CNN), Frances Fragos Townsend (CNN), Nicole Wallace (CBS News), Dan Bartlett (CBS News), Jeff Ballabon (CBS News), Tony Fratto (CNBC), Juan Carlos Zarate (CBS News), Karl Rove (Fox News, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal), and now Thiessen.

The revolving door is so intense, NBC News hired one of the former president's daughters, despite her not having any background in journalism at all.

Given the previous administrations' spectacular failures, it's tempting to think these former officials would stay out of the public eye. After all, haven't they done enough damage to the country already? Do we need to be reminded of their comical ineptitude while trying to keep up on current events?

Remember, conservatives are convinced that major news outlets were not only deliberately unfair to the Bush administration, but also hate conservatives. The media outlets presumably, then, keep hiring leading Bush administration officials as part of an elaborate ruse to throw us off their liberal trail.

The end of the Bush/Cheney era, alas, does not mean the end of loyal Bushies misleading the country. If there's a rational explanation for these bizarre media decisions, I'd love to hear it.

—Steve Benen 11:00 AM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (28)

Fuck the washedout post.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/

[Turborama]

31. Thanks for that article, Cha

Looks like a post Busch regime surge of disinformants have been deployed in a concerted effort to rewrite history. Or, more precisely, to continue propagandizing their version of history.

:hi:

[secondwind]

21. OF COURSE Bush knew! He flew out all of Bin Laden's family out of the country

the very same day! What a crock of BS. Bush knew, and because Bin Laden is a Saudi, Bush protected his family. Bush was always in bed with the Saudis.

[AlbertCat]

23. Bush was always in bed with the Saudis.

Which is exactly why Bin Laden waited til Bush and Cheney were in charge before taking 9 months to get his ducks in order and lauching the most successful (it's still working today!) terrorist attack on the USA EVER!....with box cutters!

[howmad1]

26. Yea, yea, so Bush knew.

So how come he lives in a gated community in Texass and gets called on by Obama to help with Haiti relief? So how come this MF is still walking around a free idiot? Isn't it terrible that bushit knew we were going to get attacked? BFD. So how many more years do we have to be convinced that he and Cheney were indeed the worst of the worst? Unless they go to jail, I could not give a shit how bad they were.

[elleng]

27. In addition,

'Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general who is one of 10 candidates for the Democratic nomination for president, has written a new book that is just arriving on bookstore shelves. Called Winning Modern Wars, it’s mostly about the Iraq war and terrorism—and it is laced with powerful new information.

For example, he says he learned from military sources at the Pentagon in November 2001, just two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, that serious planning for the war on Iraq had already begun and that, in addition to Iraq, the administration had drawn up a list of six other nations to be targeted over a period of five years.

Here’s what he writes on page 130:

"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan." Clark adds, "I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned."'

http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-09-30/news/the-secrets-clark-kept/1

[Shining Jack]

34. It hapened on Chimpy's "watch"...

Period.And I'm sure that they helped grease the wheels.:(