Olbermann, and others--miss the point

I had a bit of a Eureka! moment while watching Keith on MSNBC the other night.

If you are not familiar with his shtick, he gets all furious, “speaks truth to power,” lectures everyone on what it is that we are doing wrong in Iraq, and then calls for Bush to be impeached, or ashamed. He finds the “worst person in the world,” and remarkably, it is almost always a conservative pundit, very rarely a person actually responsible for death and destruction. He concedes this point, that he isn’t actually naming the worst person in the world, and then goes on to claim that John Gibson, or Bill O’Reily are the WPITW. Example, it is much more likely to be Bill O’Reily instead of someone like Robert Mugabe, or Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, or Kim Jong-Il. While Bill is an info-tainer that tries to produce a radio and TV show that is popular enough to get high ratings to sell advertising and--as an aside--convince people to embrace what he claims to be his opinions about current events. (He also tries to sell copies of his latest book—clearly the man is evil incarnate.) Mugabe, Ahmadenijad, and Jong-Il are each responsible for death, destruction, torture, economic collapse, mass starvation, etc so you can see how it would be a close race but the conservative pundit wins out….

So anyway, back to my point (you had a point?--) He was ranting and raving about Bush and the RNC campaign commercials that try to paint Democrats as weak on defense or weak in the War on Terror. So he excoriates the Republicans, saying that they are “doing the terrorists’ work for them by trying to terrify Americans.”

And here’s the Eureka! point: Terrorists aren’t trying to scare Americans, or the west—that is not their primary objective. It is not a campaign to spook people---they are trying to kill us, anywhere they find us---and the by-product is general terror, thus the name terrorists. That this is a confusing concept to a talking head on MSNBC is really beyond my comprehension, but to say that the Republicans are doing the terrorists work is exactly the kind of rhetoric that shows why many Americans are not willing to hand over the national security issues that we face to those that would confuse this issue—regardless of their party.