So, Mukasey hung a picture of George Orwell in his office. So what? Is the inference that Mukasey craves an Orwellian society? Maybe he does, but hanging a picture of Orwell certainly doesn't prove anything.
"Liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear."—from a preface to Animal Farm
Orwell was a great and important writer. To try and slime someone over their admiration of Orwell is, to be honest, Orwellian.
When civil war broke out, Blair and his wife both wanted to fight for the Spanish government against Francisco Franco’s Nationalist uprising. While on the front at Huesca in Aragon Blair was shot in the throat by "a Fascist sniper". In Barcelona he joined the anti-Stalinist Spanish Trotskyist ‘Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista’ or POUM, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. When the communists partly gained control and tried to purge the POUM, many of Blair's friends were arrested, shot, or disappeared. He and Eileen barely escaped with their lives in 1937. His autobiographical Homage to Catalonia is written in the first person, mere months after the events.
"Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later—some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come."—from his essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War"
I suppose people on the right could accuse Mukasey of being a communist sympathizer.
Bottom line, I think Olbermann has done some great work. This isn't among it.
hink