SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Countdown
Updated: 1:00 p.m. MT Oct 19, 2006
We have lived as if in a trance.
We have lived as people in fear.
And now—our rights and our freedoms in peril—we slowly awaken to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight have we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:
A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before—and we have been here before, led here by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.
We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail newspaper editors.
American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote about America.
We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as “Hyphenated Americans,” most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.
American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America.
And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen—he is still a Japanese.”
SPECIAL COMMENT By Keith Olbermann Anchor, 'Countdown' MSNBC
Updated: 6:33 p.m. MT Oct 5, 2006
While the leadership in Congress has self-destructed over the revelations of an unmatched, and unrelieved, march through a cesspool ...
While the leadership inside the White House has self-destructed over the revelations of a book with a glowing red cover ...
The president of the United States — unbowed, undeterred and unconnected to reality — has continued his extraordinary trek through our country rooting out the enemies of freedom: the Democrats.
Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, “177 of the opposition party said, ‘You know, we don’t think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.’”
The hell they did.
One hundred seventy-seven Democrats opposed the president’s seizure of another part of the Constitution.
How are we to compare seeking to screw a 16-year old with totally screwing the Constitution? How are we to compare secret email solicitations with a secret plot to attack a nation of 62 million that poses no immediate threat to the U.S.?
How are we to compare the Republican Party's cover-up of a member's efforts to corrupt young pages with the same party's conspiracy to cover up the Bush administration's ineptness and possible foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks, and of the campaign of lies and misinformation it used to drum up hysteria for an illegal and totally unwarranted invasion of Iraq?
How are we to compare the media feeding frenzy over the Foley scandal with the profound silence about Bush's Iran invasion planning, and with the deliberate brownout about information regarding a growing popular movement to impeach the president for his crimes?
And finally, how to we to compare the public revulsion over Foley's indiscretions with the widespread acceptance or, or even support for abuse of American captives in the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, and the so-called "War" on Terror, which has included rape, sodomy, sexual humiliation and torture of all kinds, and murder--especially when it is known that the vast majority of those captives were either guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or of simply being honest fighters for their respective countries, deserving of decent treatment under the Geneva Convention, and of a fair hearing into the propriety of their detention?
Wired.com compiled "a handy ranking of the various dangers confronting America, based on the number of mortalities in each category throughout the 11-year period spanning 1995 through 2005 (extrapolated from best available data)."
Propaganda 
