Monday, October 23, 2006

Minced Garlic - New Keith Olbermann Special Comment - Advertising terrorism










Last Thursday, and/or Friday, numerous news programs, cable news programs, made note of the new Republican television commercial, the one depicting the images and words of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri (and I’m too tired right now to source all those references).


And the discussion around it was placed in the context of Midterm elections. How the GOP was, once again, framing the Democrats as soft on terrorism.

No one took the Republicans, the RNC, or the Bush White House to task for the moral implications of this advertisement.

Except Mr. Keith Olbermann

Olbermann also noticed the commercial, and how reprehensible it was. And he promised, which he delivered earlier this evening, a Special Comment on it.


And Mr. Olbermann wasted little time of the nearly 20-minute commentary. Within approximately the first 90-seconds, Olbermann drew the comparison of this heinous ad, with that of the reaction to the footage CNN recently ran, of Iraq insurgents, snipers, tracking and killing American soldiers.

How the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Duncan Hunter (R-CA; You know him. The man that wants to wall in America and the one who is such a fan of the cuisine at Gitmo) bellowed how CNN is “the publicist for an enemy propaganda film” and that CNN used it “to sell commercials.” (While one of Mr. Hunter’s colleagues, Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA) snorted that CNN’s video was “nothing short of a terrorist snuff film.”

Olbermann than quickly pointed out that, in fact, “The Republicans are paying to have the messages of bin Laden and the others broadcast into your home.” And also, how the party of the President, this majority-controlled Congress, has “adopted bin Laden and Zawahiri as spokesmen for the Republican National Committee!”

Ah, the irony.

Kind of like ... Well ... Banging your head against a podium and attempting to sell how a strategy is a strategy and how a strategy is not a tactic (But, it can be that there is a strategy inside of a tactic ... Or, if it can rewrite a position you’ve held for over four-years, well then it is a strategy and the tactic are just tactics.)

You can’t say we weren’t warned (or threatened) The great and powerful Decider decided long ago that “You’re either with us or against us.”

“Eleven Presidents ago, a chief executive reassured us that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself. His distant successor has wasted his administration insisting that there is nothing we can have but fear itself. This administration has derived benefit and power from terrorizing the very people it claims to be protecting from terror. It may be the oldest trick in the political book: scare people into believing they are in danger and that only you can save them.”

Links

Read, or watch the video of Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment: Advertising terrorism

And rather then post a long list of links, you can scroll down the right sidebar to the “Garlictorials” section and click on to read the other “Minced Garlic” posts on Keith Olbermann’s Special Comments.

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