SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, ‘Countdown’
msnbc.com
updated 9:24 p.m. ET, Mon., Aug 10, 2009
Finally as promised a Special Comment on this terrible moment in American
history, and those unfortunate and irresponsible Americans who have brought
us to it.
“The America I know and love,” the quitter governor of Alaska Sarah Palin
began, “is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will
have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can
decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in
society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright
evil.”
Of course it is, Ms. Palin, and that is why it does not exist, has not
existed, and would never, under this president, nor any other president,
ever exist, in this country.
There is no ‘death panel.’ There is no judgment based on societal
productivity. There is no worthiness test. But there is downright evil, and
Ms. Palin, you just served its cause. You shouted “fire” in a crowded
theater — a hot one — and then today tried to roll it back with “no, no,
sorry, not fire, I meant flashlights.”
Too little, too late, too obvious. Madam, you are a clear and present danger
to the safety and security of this nation. Whether the ‘death panel’ is
something you dreamed, or something you dreamed-up, whether it is the
product of a low intellect and a fevered imagination, or the product of a
high intelligence and a sober ability to exploit people, you should be
ashamed of yourself for having introduced it into the public discourse, and
it should debar you, for all time, from any position of responsibility or
trust in the governance of this nation or any of its states or
municipalities.
But it will not. Because a percentage of America does not want explanations
nor serious conversation. It wants panic and the guilty thrill of chaos and
an excuse to bash skulls and hang people in effigy. Or not in effigy. Ms.
Palin, what, in spirit, is the difference between this monstrous image of a
congressman hanged in effigy and the indefensible smile of pride on the
idiot’s face.
And this image with not one murderer in the mob even feeling the need to
hide his face for fear of justice that would never come? They are both, to
use your phrase, “Death Panels.” Ms. Palin, you might as well have declared
that the government is being run by a coven of witches with fake Kenyan
birth certificates.
And you might as well have told the vast unthinking throng that mistakes
your ability to wink for leadership, that they should start shooting at
Democrats. There would be no need to tell them to bring guns. Others have
done that. Somebody left his at an Arizona Town Hall.
And incidentally, Madam, you have forfeited your right to be taken seriously
the next time you claim offense at somebody mentioning your children. You
have just exploited your youngest child, dangled him in front of a mindless
mob as surely as if you were Michael Jackson. You have used this innocent
infant as an excuse to pander to the worst and least of us in this nation.
You have used him to create the false image of ‘death panels.’
The only ‘death panels,’ Ms. Palin, are the figurative ones you have
inspired with such irresponsible, dangerous, facile, vile, hate speech. The
death of common sense. The death of logic.The death, perhaps, of Democracy,
at the hands of mob rule. If someone is hurt at one of these Town Halls,
pro-Reform, anti-Reform, or, most likely, as these things tend to play out
in the real life you know so little about, Ms. Palin — if the hurt befalls
an innocent bystander —you will have contributed to the harm.
You might very well become, Ms. Palin, the very thing you have sought to
create in the lurid imaginations of those spoiling for a fight, waiting for
an excuse, looking for a rationalization of their own hatred, their own
racism, their own unwillingness to accept Democracy. You, Ms. Palin, may yet
become the de facto chairman of a Death Panel. Your higher calling, Ms.
Palin. God forgive you, Ms. Palin.
It is hardly all Sarah Palin. She is in fact a relative newcomer to the orgy
of fantasized violence and imagined revolution, whose fires have been
stoked, for weeks, for months, for years, by Conservatives — but more often
by mere mercenaries, men and women who believe nothing, who are in it for
the game, or the profit, or the sheer kick of bending masses to their will.
Glenn Beck, who recoils when somebody actually readies for an attack on one
of the “FEMA internment camps” he so cavalierly invented, who so cowers at
the thought that he might get blamed, or might lose his precious and
well-earned gold, that he actually has to plead with his viewers not to
become new Timothy McVeighs.
Glenn Beck, says that and then comes back three days later and jokes about —
poisoning the Speaker of the House. It is irresistible to you, isn’t it?
It’s the same thrill of irresponsibility, of caveman thought, of the drug
addict who suddenly and joyously cares nothing about self-restraint. Sobered
momentarily into realizing the prospective outline of the horrible shape on
the horizon — soldiers wounded, shooter says she was liberating FEMA camp,
says she saw Glenn Beck tell her to rise up and fight back’ — awakened to
the idea that words you say on television have consequences which you cannot
control, you plead, almost cry, for non-violence.
And yet within 72 hours the thrill again rises up in your blood and you
cannot resist it, you must fantasize about murder, and by the very action of
speaking it aloud, you enable others to join you in this neanderthalian
ritual of violence to overcome the enemy — whether the enemy is real, or
imagined, or whether the enemy really isn’t an enemy at all, just your
neighbor, with a different point of view, who wants to talk about it, who
wants to involve you in the decision even though it is his turn to steer and
not yours, and even though you both know that some day our system will give
you another turn to steer.
But ranting and crying and playing with toys on television, does not work,
if you are advocating compromise and dialogue and thought. It works only for
a mountebank making the promise of magic and power, with the underlying
inherent threat of carnage and chaos. And now you add you believe ‘death
panels’ are real. An idea so insane, which mainlines so directly back to the
mercenary fantasies of the pathetic Betsy McCoy, that even Sarah Palin
backed quickly away from them.
But what a scare tactic! The big lie in the flesh. Your dream come true.
Which is probably why, Mr. Beck, we have not lately heard much of your
“9/12″ groups. Because there you had the germ of an idea, exploitative
perhaps, but at its core, beneficial, calming, unifying, thoughtful: restore
the sense of September 12th, 2001 — not of dread or threat, but of
collaboration, of meeting in the middle, of standing together under one flag
and trying to improve the conditions of all Americans.
And then somebody from your 9/12 group told its members they should all go
to the Health Care Reform Town Hall in Tampa, and break it up, and shout
down anybody who disagreed with them, and scuffle with the police, and
demand not discourse but disaster. Your work, Mr. Beck.
Your contribution to this. God forgive you.
There are other instigators free in the land, nearly all of them, in effect,
un-true believers. Men intelligent enough to work their way up the political
ladder in this country into the Senate of this nation, and yet suddenly
foolish enough, or suddenly opportunistic enough like Mr. Cornyn of Texas,
to float conspiracy theories about the White House using Health Care Reform
to try to compile an enemies list, one e-mail address at a time, when four
years ago the same Senator was saying that the previous White House’s
pernicious, warrantless, illegal consumption of everybody’s e-mail address,
and everybody’s e-mail, and everybody’s websites, was defensible and
justifiable because, quote, “none of your civil liberties matter much after
you’re dead.”
And now pushing — is Mr. Cornyn — the supposedly independent analysis of the
proposed Health Care reform by “The Lewin Group” that 119 million people
would have to change their insurance — Mr. Cornyn not knowing, or being paid
not to know, that “The Lewin Group” is wholly owned by an Insurance Company,
the way the Lewin Group gave Mr. Boehner and Mr. Cantor 60-thousand dollars
apiece. Wholly owned!
Then there are the birthers, laughable from the moment they opened their
mouths, proffering a conspiracy that somehow began with the placement of
birth notices in two Hawaiian newspapers 48 years ago this month. But people
who do not want this president to be president will believe anything, and
that is meat for fading commentators like Lou Dobbs, whatever he actually
believes.
Because the birther movement touches another essential part of the defective
soul — the need for an excuse. For they need to convince themselves of an
immense conspiracy, and place that conviction as a barrier between their
actions, and the sad reality that they are not the victims of intricate
machinations against freedom, but are just garden-variety, ordinary,
racists — that they can handle the most limited of integration only in
theory.
They will take anything that will let them pretend that — when they burst
into tears and cry that they want their America back — they are not asking
for White Power, not asking that somebody make the black man in the White
House go away. There are other instigators, of course, so obvious, so
careless — knowing so well that anybody who desperately wants to believe
lies, will not even notice the truth standing next to them wearing a big red
sign.
Like the “just a Mom from a few blocks away” at the Wisconsin town hall, who
didn’t think anybody might google her name and find out she was really the
ex-vice-chairman of the county GOP and part of the campaign of the
Republican who lost to the Democrat whose town hall she was at that moment,
helping to disrupt. Like the smooth-talking hospital corporate titan,
spreading millions around to enable the hate, knowing that none of the
haters will ever realize that they have become prostitutes for the health
care industries.
Like the people who propagated this widely-cut-and-pasted quote “line by
line analysis” of the Health Care Reform Act —one that saves Right Wingers
the trouble of actually reading the bill.
This is where the fictions come from: that it’s funding ACORN, that it
guarantees free health care for illegal immigrants, mandates abortions,
demands euthanasia. If you read it without knowing the truth, you might
shove the right-wingers out of the way at the Town Halls and start screaming
yourself!
It seems to have been created by “The Liberty Counsel” — an off-shoot of
Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University — whose other big policy concern is the
attack on Christmas. And maybe the most brazen of them all. That man at the
Town Hall in Connecticut, carrying the “We don’t want government run health
care” sign, while still wearing his Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield shirt.
You might think it was because he was too stupid to wear something a little
less corporately-slavish. But given what those around him have read, they
not only wouldn’t care, they might even take comfort from the logo; that he
could boast, and that they could hate under the auspices of, an actual,
caring, friendly, ruthless insurance company. My words of course, are
nothing to Mr. Anthem, or Mr. Cornyn or Mr. Dobbs or Ms. Blish or Mr. Scott
or the others.
This is a job to them, and since we have placed a price tag on everything in
this country, there is no soul-searching involved. You have a job. If it
involves stirring up frightened people to defend the corporation against the
citizen, well, you have a salary to earn and a family to feed. The same
rationalization that enables mob hit men to sleep at night.
But somewhere in those crowds of genuinely angry people, people who listen
to Cornyn or Dobbs, or fantasize with Beck about poisoning their way to a
Democrat-free world, or salivate like Pavlovian dogs at the sound of the
shrill whistle from Sarah “Death Panel” Palin, somewhere in those crowds are
some actual people with some actual brains still working and thinking and
evaluating. For God’s sake, trust your instinct to think.
There are no death panels, there could never be. Were there steps taken
towards them, I, and 99.9 percent of the people in this country, from the
fiercest liberal to the most apolitical blob, would be standing next to you
preventing their creation. There are no plans to take your insurance away
from you. There will be no rationing of care. There will be no Health
Choices Commissioner and he will not be able to transfer money
electronically out of your bank account.
There will be nobody coming into your house and telling you what to eat.
There will be no euthanasia. And the people to whom you are listening with
half an ear, are telling you half the truth — on a good day! The euthanasia
scare comes from something as benign as a proposal to let you put in for
insurance if you have to consult a doctor about what to do if you or a loved
one are fatally ill.
If you are where I was last March — when I sat down with the doctors to talk
about my mother, fatally ill, not awake, not aware — the health care reform
will now pay you back for the doctor’s fee for that conversation. And it
will pay, whether you decide to let your loved one go, or you insist to the
doctor that they keep that dear one alive at all costs, to treat them for
months or years or decades more.
And this part of this bill was originally co-sponsored by a Republican
congressman. And from that caring bi-partisan starting point, through her
own paranoia or for her own political gain, Sarah Palin has invented the
boogeyman of “death panels.” Think, please. Think, before something horrible
happens. As you move to bellow that which you know not to be true. As you
try to shout down a Congressman who is there to answer your concerns. As,
God forbid, you think there has been enough talking and not enough of
something else.
Think of how Lincoln closed his first Inaugural address, and remember that
wise words stand the test of time.
If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the
dispute, there is still no single good reason for precipitate action.
Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has
never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the
best way, all our present difficulty. In your hands, my dissatisfied
fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue. The government
will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being you yourselves
the aggressors. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot
grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will
yet swell the chorus of the union, when again touched, as surely they will
be, by the better angels of our nature.
