"Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Those were the ringing words spoken by Joseph Welch, special counsel to the US Army, in the middle of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's effort to red-bait, and witch-hunt the US Army at Congressional hearings back in 1954. Welch's stinging question, broadcast on nationwide TV, rocked McCarthy, and sent his career on a tailspin--he was, in fact, dead in three years.
OK, now to 2010, as Keith Olbermann suggests, on nationwide TV last night, that elements within the US intelligence community might have withheld information about the Nigerian underwear bomber in order to make Barack Obama look bad. Olbermann took some encouraging words from his trusty sidekick, Richard Wolffe, and spun them into a vision of conspiracy so immense that, well, you'd better watch tomorrow night, just to learn what new deviltry conservatives have come up with.
And let's not forget the facilitating role of Wolffe, the journalist who doubled as an Obama flack during 2007-8, and then went "honest" for a while and did a turn as a Beltway p.r. flack, and, when that didn't work out, has now returned to "journalism," at least as far as MSNBC is concerned. Thus Wolffe plays the role for Olbermann that Roy Cohn played for McCarthy back then--facilitator, henchman, lackey, and who knows what else.
Olbermann's charge was so outrageous, so bereft of factual context, that it is properly being worked over here, here, and here.
It's lunacy, of course, what Olbermann is saying, but Olby doesn't care. Like McCarthy before him, he just needs the conspiracy theory to feed the beast of his popular support. If things aren't going well for the country, or for Obama, well, it can't be The One's fault. It has to be the fault of evil right-wingers and traitors, who would see Americans get killed just to make Obama look bad.
And, of course, to feed the beast within his Olbermann's own head. Which, like McCarthy a half-century ago, will explode soon enough.
For now, the shame of Olbermann's recklessness is a stain on GE. But soon enough, it will be a stain on Comcast.
That's Olbermann and Wolffe, above, PhotoShopped into their proper historical/hysterical context.
