He just apologized for MSNBC airing the Republican convention 9/11 video. He said if a TV network had shown that much 9/11 imagery and in that way, they would be properly eviscerated for exploiting the memories of the 9/11 victims. And he apologized. He spoke as someone who had lost friends that day. He separated himself from others on the air, he just had to say it right then and there. "That was probably not appropriate to be shown."
Now I have to say it: THANK YOU KEITH OLBERMANN
As I was watching the 9/11 footage, I was screaming at the TV screen, or more specifically the narration and the audience who apparently were buying it as truth: "Assholes!" I was sick and furious.
All the losses of our civil liberties, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the countless dead and harmed-- literally we cannot count or know--and the damage to our heritage, our Constitution, our history, our future, our soul--unfathomable, unmeasureable, incalculable--all using 9/11 for legitimacy. And yet here the Republicans get to play that damn 9/11 card again and say it means what they say it means. And sheep buy it. And it goes without question.
Except for Keith.
And to Kos, who has banned 9/11 conspiracy theory diaries and said:
"This is a reality-based community. Those who wish to live outside it should find a new home. This isn't it."
If we can't check reality and ask questions about it, I don't think this IS a reality-based community.
I'd like to quote Madeleine L'Engle here, who I remember wrote something about facts just being the place we agree to stop asking questions. I can't find that quote right now*, so I'll use the one by her that I did find:
"Infinite questions are often destroyed by finite answers."
I know the thing on Daily Kos that says "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." But I haven't seen extraordinary proof that 9/11 happened the way the official reports say it did. Instead I've seen extraordinary questions raised, and confoundingly quashed. Until those questions are addressed I cannot accept without question the official story, and I hope that others here were as outraged as I was at the Republican video and may be as grateful as I am to Keith for what he just did.
This diary does not advance any conspiracy theory. This diary advances the idea that extraordinary questions have not been answered and--fantastically!--are being made unaskable, leaving the field open for Republicans to define reality as they did tonight. I think that's separate from Keith's reasons of taste for objecting to the video, but that we are in the same ballpark: 9/11 is a topic sickeningly USED by Republicans.
Keith Olbermann, you are my total hero. I know you post here and I hope you see this. I speak for myself.
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*UPDATE #1: Not Madeleine L'Engle?
"I often wish that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease."
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Attributed to Bliss Carman; in "On Having Known a Poet," "The Atlantic Monthly," p. 712, May 1906.
UPDATE #2: Political reality
Time Magazine, 9/03/06 - Why the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Won't Go Away
A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.
UPDATE #3: Three quotes from from Justice Louis Brandeis:
"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
"Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears."
"Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." in Other People's Money—and How Bankers Use It (1914)