Defending Olbermann

For those who've just read Maria's latest, here's the actual segment actually played on Olbermann's actual show.

There should be an offical MSNBC transcript by Monday afternoon.

Maria wrote:

This is about the program's #4 segment. On this Friday's show, the topic was how Sen. Hillary Clinton had appeared on FOX (Bill O'Reilly), had met with Richard Mellon Scaife (actually the full editorial board of one of Pittsburgh's two daily papers during the PA primary) and how Bill Clinton had gone on Rush Limbough's radio show (when Limbough was not hosting it). Olbermann pointed out how cruel the Right Wing media had been to the Clintons, but he went further. He spoke about how going on FOX was wallowing in filth, how it proves that She'll Do Anything to WinTM, and that (horrors of horrors!) demonstrates that she's trying to reach Reagan Democrats (you know, the folks that any presidential candidate will have to reach to actually win the White House).

He left out one thing:

Barack Obama was on FOX News less than a week ago.

But if you go back and actually watch the segment, you'll see what my friend Maria left out: the point.

Here it is - Clinton campaign advisor Sydney Blumenthal is now smearing the Obama campaign with some of the same tactics right wing media once employed to damage the Clinton administration.

Keith even mentions the source of the story calling it "the news of the day." It's by Peter Dreier and posted at the HuffingtonPost. In it Dreier says:

Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama's character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren't being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers -- including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers -- in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists. One of the recipients of the Blumenthal email blast, himself a Clinton supporter, forwards the material to me and perhaps to others.

Some of the stories Dreier says Blumenthal's been spreading. This one from the Scaife-funded Accuracy in Media about Obama's communist mentor in high school. It begins like this:

In his biography of Barack Obama, David Mendell writes about Obama's life as a "secret smoker" and how he "went to great lengths to conceal the habit." But what about Obama's secret political life? It turns out that Obama's childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist.

In his books, Obama admits attending "socialist conferences" and coming into contact with Marxist literature. But he ridicules the charge of being a "hard-core academic Marxist," which was made by his colorful and outspoken 2004 U.S. Senate opponent, Republican Alan Keyes.

However, through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relationship with someone who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his "poetry" and getting advice on his career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly as just "Frank."

A little fact-checking here. Senator Obama was born in 1961. So we're talking about the time between when he was 10 to 18. Davis was in his mid-60s, having been born in 1905. He died in 1987 - about a year before Obama even entered Harvard Law. That's the foundation of this "connection" between Obama and Communism. That's how AIM connects Obama to the Communist Party and there for the Soviet Union. And that's the story that Blumenthal is pushing.

It should make us all uncomfortable that Sydney Blumenthal, a senior Clinton Campaign advisor, is now trying to take some mud scraped from the "vast right wing conspiracy" (a term that he himself coined, by the way) and inject it into the mainstream media. That's how the right wing echo chamber worked a decade or so ago.

Remember?

Vince Foster was murdered by the Clintons for learning too much about Whitewater during his affair with the Hillary, they said. It's been published by the American Spectator (or the Washington Times or the Tribune Review or the Drudge Report), they said. The only reason the mainstream media won't publish it is because the media is liberal, they said. The mainstream media wanting to make sure it wasn't seen as liberal any more then wrote about "the controversy found in the rightwing media" and BAM! the story's found on the pages of the New York Times.

Remember how that worked?

It was a shameful episode in our nation's political life and it should not be resurrected by either party. That it's being resurrected by one of those victimized is beyond sad. It's pathetic.

That was the point of Olbermann's segment.