The Top Five Rants of Keith Olbermann
Some people call him a smug blowhard, some call him the one true dissenter against the Bush administration. (In the new issue of Rolling Stone, we call him “The Most Honest Man in News.”) But whether you subscribe to his particular brand of angry liberal eloquence or despise it, there’s little denying the man, to borrow a line from Slim Pickens in Blazing Saddles, uses his tongue purtier than a twenty-dollar whore. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, here’s a purely subjective collection of five special comments where his words cut the deepest.
1. Was staging his Bush corrective in sight of the holy hole at Ground Zero gratuitous and heavy-handed? Sure. But perhaps no Olbermann comment was more powerful than this one, calling President Bush out for using September 11th as just another political gimmick (9/11/06):
2. Taking President Bush to task for soaking habeas corpus in gasoline and setting fire to it, Olbermann himself made the not-at-all-inflammatory statement that President Bush has done more to hurt America than the terrorists (10/18/06):
3. The night before election day, Olbermann did his part to get out the vote by showing how Bush had hypocritically started using oil as a campaign tool (11/6/06):
4. After controversial comments from Colin Powell, Bush spat that it was “unacceptable to think” that there could be any similarities between the terrorists and America, Olbermann demanded that President Bush apologize to the American people. (After careful consideration, Bush decided not to.) (9/18/06):
5. Think another speech attacking Republicans for compulsively lying about their Democratic opponents would be predictable and boring? Not from Olbermann. (10/5/06):
PART ONE
PART TWO