The Olbermann Essays

The fifth essay in this series is now available at YouTube. Thanks to FLJerseyBoy for the link

Someday, I hope, pray and expect, we will be able to collect the
current series of essays, dubbed “special comments,” of Keith
Olbermann, into a short book. We will be able to admire them, study them, and teach them to our children.

Each one has been finely crafted. They are great, courageous
writing. And as the series has gone on, I’ve noticed that Olbermann
has slowed in his reading of  them, as though he knows this as we do,
despite his occasional fits of modesty.

The essays will not only be his legacy, but an ultimate legacy of
our time, a time when the stain of McCarthyism crept right into the
Oval Office, where a President became unglued from all civilized
norms and we wondered if, perhaps, he might not just unleash nuclear
holocaust.

As of this writing, he still might.

Update: And if you doubt Olbermann’s courage, someone sent him some imitation anthrax in the mail last week. Could have easily been the real thing.

The best way to savor this extraordinary set of documents, I
think, is in sequence.

1. First, his dissecting of Secretary Rumsfeld,
   the brilliant jiu jitsu of turning his “Munich” warning into the
   bleatings of the man he thought he was attacking, Neville
   Chamberlain.
2. Next, his comparison of Bush himself to Joe McCarthy , (go up from the link, which currently leads back to the top of
   his Bloggerman column) using the words of Joseph Welch at the
   Army-McCarthy Hearings, a TV event that marked the fall of the
   Senator’s reign of fear.
3. Then, This Hole in the Ground,
   his angry denunciation of Bush’s 9/11 address, turning Ground Zero
   into a metaphor for everything that has gone wrong with this
   Administration, ending with the harrowing recounting of a 1960
   “Twilight Zone” episode, in which aliens take over the Earth by
   simply setting men and their fear against one another.
4. Tonight, his ode to Colin Powell
   in which he forced the audience to contemplate an angry Bush saying
   “it is unacceptable to think” at a recent news conference, and
   stated quite clearly how un-American that is.

Olbermann himself feels, I suspect, that he is  undeserving of
this moment, and the praise he will get from history for it. He
should remember that Murrow himself was hired by CBS, not to run its
news division, but its “education” division.

Murrow was not really a
working journalist, but by nature an essayist, a student of history
and a bureaucratic infighter, thrust onto the stage mainly to
entertain, to give “I Love Lucy” and similar shows a high-class
gloss, the way a serious actor might do a scene in vaudeville. Murrow
also felt wholly inadequate to his time, hiding it behind a wall of
intensity, cigarette smoke, and a typewriter, seeking courage in the
words he wrote, knowing those words were good, but (sometimes) hardly
believing they were his, or that they could become as important as
they would later turn out to be.

Olbermann has gone his own rocky way. He came up through the
sports department – the home of Runyon and Rice and Breslin and Jim
Murray – but surrounded by non-writers whose best work was done
with combs in front of their mirrors. He fled ESPN for the "real news" of  MSNBC , then fled there when
he became disgusted with covering Monica Lewinsky. His next
leaving of Fox Sports Net cemented his reputation for being
“difficult.” He was thrown into his current job because his
writing was often funny. He was meant to make a vaudeville of the
daily news, to laugh with us at squirrels on water skis.

Olbermann never would have survived in Murrow’s time. Murrow knew that to quit once was to leave the stage forever, and he put up with nonsense. Olbermann, owing to his talent, has gone from cable net to cable net, somehow always landing on his feet, usually closer to the goal of what he is doing today.

Networks seldom honor writers, although all great shows depend
entirely upon them. Olbermann is a writer who was made for this
medium, for the small screen, and for this moment, when he became
unafraid to say, with feeling and brilliance, the things most of us
felt but were afraid to state publicly.

The Emperor has no clothes. The Emperor has gone mad. The
President of the United States has become the enemy of everything
this country stands for.

Such things seldom need to be said. But they have not been said up
until now, not on television. MSNBC let Olbermann say them only
because its ratings were in the toilet, its survival in doubt, and it
had nothing to lose. Now, with each “special comment,” his
ratings rise. They are still far behind those of Bill O’Reilly at
Fox, who sniffs dismissively at him, but they’re ahead of CNN’s
numbers in the same time slot.
And when you add in the YouTube and Internet numbers, his audience
now numbers many millions.

Stay tuned.