Olbermann overplays his outrage

As anyone who reads this blog knows, or might guess, I am a fan of Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” — especially his special comments.

But tonight’s comentary (transcript) missed the mark, or the second half of it did.

Olbermann went off on the Republican Party and its misappropriation of the images of 9/11 during its convention in a video billed by the party as a tribute.

As Olbermann said,

What we got was not a tribute to the dead of 9/11, nor even a tribute to the responders, or the singularity of purpose we all felt.

The Republicans gave us sociological pornography… a virtual snuff film.

He called it a branding of a national tragedy, an effort to lay claim to the events of that day to create a climate of fear,

To open again the horrible wounds, to brand the skin of this nation with the message — as hateful as the terrorists’ own — that you must vote Republican or this will happen again and you will die.

The deconstruction was a tour de force. But what followed, an attempt by Olbermann to blow the standard boasting of a candidate into something more, dulled his blade.

The quotation:

“Look,” he said. “I know the area, I’ve been there, I know wars, I know how to win wars, and I know how to improve our capabilities so that we will capture Osama bin Laden — or put it this way, bring him to justice. We will do it. I know how to do it.”

Olbermann’s read on it is that

we must take him at his word, that this is no mere ludicrous campaign boast.

We must assume Senator McCain truly believes he is capable of doing this, and has been capable of doing this, since last January.

But why? How is this different than any other campaign boast? He’s not saying he has a secret plan, but that he has the know-how, the temperment and the commitment to find and capture the elusive Bin Laden.

I think he’s full of you know what, but that’s not the point. Olbermann in tonight’s special comment unfortunately crashes on the shoals of logic and partisanism, playing loose with McCain’s words in nearly the same way as he accuses — rightly — Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity of doing.

He doesn’t make is own “Worst Persons” list, but I do expect better of him than this. There is enough to be outraged about in McCain and his party’s behavior during this campaign season so that he shouldn’t have to go down this road.

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Republicans unleash their code words

Jonathan Capehart’s blog item on The Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog is one of the better dismantlings of Sarah Palin’s — and the GOP’s — attack on community organizers that I’ve seen. Palin (who gave her speech immediately following Rudy Giuliani, who also dissed community organizers) compared organizers and small-town mayors, using a dismissive tone that made the delivery of the punchline — “except that you have actual responsibilities” — a painful bite.

Capehart points out, however, that the remark shows an incredible ignorance of what community organizers do and betrays her ignorance of the kind of difficulties faced by people in distressed urban areas. Community organizers, as he says, are the ones who fight the placement of incinerators in poor areas, who help rally the community to take back the streets from drug dealers and violent criminals, who work with residents to help them navigate government bureaucracies that often are designed to keep them at a distance.

One would think that the up-by-the-boot-straps Republican Party would celebrate the work of community organizers like Torres-Fleming and Shepard. They are doing work that government can’t or won’t do. They are helping people in a world that might seem stacked against them.

Palin was mayor of a town of about 9,000 people. It’s a safe bet she didn’t encounter the grinding issues that urban communities deal with daily. Shepard and Torres-Fleming have faced down more challenges and have been responsible for more people than Palin could possibly imagine. They deserve to be celebrated not dissed.

The key to understanding the community organizer line, I think, is to understand the larger dynamic that the Palin speech attempted to create. The idea was to create a idyllic small-town past that can serve as a kind of racial code when juxtaposed with the unstated connotations that urban conjure. Basically, small towns are filled with hard-working whites who have tradional American values; cities are filled with the other — blacks, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, the poor, crime, homosexuality. Take your pick.

This is the argument that New York Gov. David Paterson made Monday:

“I think the Republican Party is too smart to call Barack Obama ‘black’ in a sense that it would be a negative. But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican Convention – a ‘community organizer.’ They kept saying it, they kept laughing,” he said.

Paterson referred to McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin who compared her work experience to Obama’s.

“So I suppose a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities,” she said at the convention.

Paterson sees the repeated use of the words “community organizer” as
Republican code for “black”. “I think where there are overtones is when there
are uses of language that are designed to inhibit other people’s progress with a
subtle reference to their race,” he said.

He’s not the only one who views the GOP attempts to turn “community organizer” into an insult. Even Chris Matthews saw the comment in this light — and no one has ever accused him of being the deepest of thinkers.

Chris Matthews, on Monday night’s “Hardball,” speculated that Republicans were playing the race card, when they made fun of Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer, even going as far to say they’re using the phrase like a “bullwhip.” In a segment with NBC’s Chuck Todd and pollster Stuart Rothenberg, Matthews suspiciously noted that Republicans like Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani, at last week’s GOP convention, were “giggling” over the “community organizer” title as he pondered: “Is this the new ‘welfare queen?'”

Then a little later in the program, in a segment with the Financial Times’ Chrystia Freeland and the Independent Women’s Forum’s Michelle Bernard, Matthews returned to the subject as he declared: “It seems to me that the use of the word, ‘community organizer,’ is almost like a bullwhip.”

“Bullwhip” is a perfect word, given the racial undertones and it is time that the GOP be called on their willingness once again to take us down this ugly road.

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No credit where it isn’t due

The Washington Independent raises the question of why the presidential candidates are ignoring the credit crunch:

But, based on the contest so far, don’t look for either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain to take on the biggest, most troublesome economic problem facing many American families and financial institutions — the credit crunch.

Like the budget deficit and rising Medicare costs, the credit crunch seems to be well on its way to earning the honor of the Issue Candidates Want to Ignore.

There are a number of reasons for this, the story says, including its complicated nature and the connections between campaign money and policy:
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says he does not expect either side to raise the issue:

“The Republicans don’t have much to say, and it’s not high on their agenda. The Democrats aren’t much different. Obama’s taken a lot of money from Wall Street, and the Republicans are tied to those people too. There’s just a real reticence to get into this.”

And that is to our detriment. As William Poole, the former president of the St. Louise Federal Reserve, points out the longterm costs of the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are likely to be high.

In Poole’s view, the bailout could wind up with a tab as high as $300 billion, or $1,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. That should be enough to get people’s attention, he said. So might figuring out who to blame for the mess, with suspects on both sides failing to rein in the mortgage giants as the firms lobbied Congress during the past decade. Poole, however, is not optimistic the candidates will take the bait.

Without a discussion of the credit crunch, real solutions are unlikely, as are mechanisms likely to prevent future meltdowns.

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