'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for Tuesday, June 21st, 2011
video 'podcast'
screencaps
Special bonus podcast or YouTube (Late Show with David Letterman, Top Ten list)
Special Comment:
Why We Must Leave Afghanistan. Now.
Video:
via YouTube, ht cathyferkleheimer
via Current
ShowPlug1: The Newt-Iny, Round 2: now campaign fundraisers quit. W/Amanda @aTerkel of HuffPo. Huntsmann's in w/ Tim Dickinson of RStone
ShowPlug2: CREW calls for bribery investigation of Sen. Diapers-Vitter after he threatens Salazar. Chief Melanie Sloan guests.
ShowPlug3: What POTUS may say about Afghanistan tomorrow w/General Paul Eaton. What he SHOULD say in a brief Comment.
ShowPlug4: McCain AGAIN blames wildfires on spontaneously combusting illegal aliens. Commentary by Michael @MJMcKean
ShowPlugLast: Plus previewing a Top 10 list, Jon Stewart's editing complaint, and the shoplifter hid the mink coat in her WHAT?
Segments:
'So Long Newt?', Amanda Terkel and [segment on Huntsman], Tim Dickinson
YouTube
'Vitter Ethics Inquiry', Melanie Sloan
YouTube
Time Marches On!
YouTube
'Afghanistan Drawdown', Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton (Ret.)
YouTube
Special Comment: Why We Must Leave Afghanistan. Now.
Current.com
Worst Persons: Chris Wallace, Stephanie Moreland, David Flory
Current.com: part 1, part 2
'Republicans Feel Heat', Michael McKean
YouTube
Web Extra: Contradictionary: "CON-promise" and "Barack-naphobia"
Current.com, podcast
Special Comment:
And as promised a brief Comment about Afghanistan and our future there.
The analogy was apt when I first used it in November, 2009, and it is apt tonight.
Mr. President, you must take the advice that Republican Senator George Aiken gave to President Lyndon Johnson about Vietnam. You must declare victory, and get out.
As of the escalation more than a year-and-a-half ago, our men and women there were at risk from the Taliban, from the brigands who constituted the Afghan government, fromeda.
The only people we weren't fighting were the citizens of Afghanistan, yet all polling done there indicated that the only people those citizens thought we were fighting... were them.
We were, in their eyes, an occupying force.
That the whole thing has not blown up in our face is both providential, and testimonial to the bravery and moreover the common sense of our troops and leaders on the ground.
Mr. President -- don't press your luck. Do not take the proposal that lets you set the ultimate end date but lets the Pentagon control the echelons of drawing down.
Select the door with the easiest access that allows the most Americans to come home, the fastest. Anything less will still be that Joseph Heller or M.C. Escher version of an exit strategy -- the one that began with entering further and then becomes staying longer. As I said in 2009: Lose to win, sink to swim, escalate to disengage.
Because there is still, Sir, what President Eisenhower so insightfully called our Military Industrial Complex -- the Pentagon, and the ex-Pentagonners amid the Defense Contractors -- and for them, war is a business, and like all businessmen, they will do whatever is necessary to make a profit.
No one here, Mr. President, is accusing you of participating in this. But every day that we are still in Afghanistan and Iraq and now Libya, another piece of the certainty that you would never participate in it, breaks away.
Get the troops out, Sir.
To Senator Aiken's famous advice, you can in a very real way answer, we can declare victory. We got through a rainstorm without an umbrella without getting wet.
Don't press your luck, Mr. President.
Don't press ours.
Worst Persons:
It's time for Countdown's top three nominees for tonight's Worst Person In The World.
The bronze to Chris Wallace of Fixed News...
For the same reason as last night:
Jon Stewart goes on Fox Noise Sunday to discuss journalistic ethics with Chris Wallace - and they selectively edited out...the true part.
"The unedited version, which is on the web, had what I thought was the takeaway moment of the entire interview, where Chris Wallace, one of the more respected individuals at Fox, basically gives away the game. 'You believe that Fox News is exactly the ideological equivalent of NBC News'…'I think we're the counterweight.' 'You believe that' 'I think that they have a liberal agenda, and I think we tell the other side of the story.' The other side of the story! We don't tell both sides of the story! We tell one side, the other side, the one we perceive is never told: the conservative side. Because as you know, news only comes in two sides. And if the conservative side isn't being told, what's being told must be liberal."
Mr Stewart also said that Fox so heavily edited the interview that you have to watch that unedited version where his "...emotional states don't seem to change so arbitrarily. The arguments are a little clearer, and a little less like a scene from a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
The runner-up: Stephanie Moreland of Bloomington, Minnesota.
She was arrested on New Year's Eve after she visited the Alaskan Fur Company of that city...and they discovered they were missing one of their mink coats.
Yesterday she pleaded guilty to one felony theft count... That she stole a mink coat and left the store, with it hidden in her underwear.
What?
You need a bigger joke here?
She hid a mink coat... In her panties.
But our winner: Professor David Flory of the Physics Department at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
He has been arrested because of his hobby.
His hobby?
Operating a web-based prostitution ring.
Police say he told them he didn't make any money off it.
A hobby?
My hobby is sports memorabilia.
Jeez Louise.
What's the problem here?
I think it's where the guy has taught for 30 years.
Fairleigh Dickinson.
Professor David Flory of Fairleigh Dickinson University... Today's Worst Person In The World.