MSNBC: Olbermann: Truth and consequences
Special comments on the Bush administration's war on American values
BOOK EXCERPT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Mon., Dec. 17, 2007
In Truth and Consequences, Keith Olbermann collects the best of his Special Comments, presented with additional observations and other new material.
Below is an excerpt:
....The actual phenomenon of the birth of the Special Comment has been recited so often by the barely contained egotist in me that I begin to feel like Ted Baxter explaining how it all started at a five-thousandwatt radio station in Fresno, California. But the gist merits repetition (like you could stop me anyway). I was stuck on the tarmac at LAX, the late August thunderstorms in New York keeping us pinioned on the ground three thousand miles away with nothing to do but read the Associated Press stories on my ESPN-issued mobile phone.
And there it was: Don Rumsfeld calling me morally or intellectually confused, or the equivalent of a Nazi appeaser, or both. Not just me, mind you, but all of us—all of us who dared question Iraq, or the game of Simon Says that is the juvenile and ineffective new domestic counterterror rules, or the Bush administration itself. And I searched the rest of that part of the Web offered me by the phone for the righteous indignation, for the atomic bombs of verbiage from the poets of the left, for the repudiation of this historically backward twisting of all that had happened since about 1933.
Nothing.
It was a moment, I gather, that some nonswimmers experience when a child falls into the deep water and nobody else makes a move. As time slowed, they invariably recall, they waited to see who else was going to dive in. Upon realizing nobody was, the thought formed, not of heroism or of urgency but of resignation. Oh, hell, I see how this is going. I’m diving in. I wonder if I can swim. This does not always turn out well. Some drown, some don’t, some prevail and everyone lives. But in the moment, you understand that if you’re going to go down, at least you’re going to go down for something worthwhile.
I started scribbling the first “Comment,” by hand, on the back of my trip itinerary. We were somewhere over the Rockies by the time I finished.
The responses to the pieces you will read herein were varied, but they contained one common thread.
I got fake anthrax mailed to my home, and the New York Post mocked me for calling the cops (when it turned out those cops would subsequently arrest a domestic terrorist who had done the same thing to David Letterman, Jon Stewart, and Sumner Redstone—kinda makes the Post pro-terrorist, right?). The FBI came and did a wonderful job, although it cost me a night in isolation at the hospital, and the clothes I was wearing, and, in an irony I recognized even at the time, that ESPN mobile device on which I had read Rumsfeld’s remarks—burned in the irradiation of all I had on me when I opened the powder-filled letter.
They’ve threatened my relatives, printed phony stories about nonexistent skeletons in imaginary closets, guaranteed my imminent dismissal, and even whined when I started writing again for a memorabilia magazine about old baseball cards (“How can you let that lefty back in your page?” the editor quoted one complainant). Baseball cards. Some people are dumb enough to see a political slant to frickin’ baseball cards.
But amid all the tumult and the threatening and the name-calling, I have yet to see serious refutations of either the facts or the conclusions in these Comments....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22263664/ 
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