Keith Olbermann invoked the use of his ‘Special Comment’ segment Tuesday night to slam President Obama over his announcement of having settled a tax deal with Republicans. Olbermann harped on the president for “selling out a principal campaign pledge, and the people to whom and for whom it was made.”
While the notion that the president turned his back on his liberal base gained steam Tuesday, Olbermann clearly sought to capitalize on the growing frustration from the left. Spending the first half of the nearly 12-minute segment tongue-lashing the president’s willingness to compromise, Olbermann took a sudden, and ironically hypocritical tone against Tea Party contempt for the same:
“There is only one possible rational explanation for this irrational and childish transaction. There are Republicans and Tea Partiers who are still intent on cutting off their noses to spite their faces — the ‘Blind Rage Conservatives’ for whom any compromise is disaster, just as for this President, apparently no compromise is disaster.”
Olbermann’s sarcasm ran thick as the host then seemed to jump on board with a critique long-lobbed at the Obama White House by the right — that the administration thinks it has problems with communicating, not policy:
“Yesterday I had an exchange with a very Senior member of this Administration who wanted to sell me on this deal. I pointed out that that was fine, except that — as I phrased it to him — ‘frankly the base has just vanished.’ ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘then they must not have read the details.’ There, in a nutshell, is this Administration. They didn’t make a bad deal — we just don’t understand it.
“Just as it was our fault, Mr President, for not understanding your refusal of even the most perfunctory of investigations of rendition or domestic spying or the other crimes of the Bush Administration, or why you have now established for those future Administrations who want to repeat those crimes, that the punishment for them will be nothing.
“Just as it was our fault, Mr. President, for not understanding Afghanistan. Just as we didn’t correctly perceive, Sir, the necessity for the continuation of Gitmo. Or how we failed to intuit, President Obama, your preemptive abandonment of Single Payer and the Public Option. Or how we couldn’t have foreseen your foot-dragging on ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ Just as we shouldn’t have gotten you angry at your news conference today and made all the moderate Democrats wonder why in the hell you get publicly angry so often at the liberals who campaigned for you and whether you might save just a touch of that sarcasm and that self-martyrdom for the Republicans.”
Olbermann rounded off his screed by issuing a rallying cry to Democrats: “It is not disloyalty to the Democratic Party to tell a Democratic president he is wrong; it is not disloyalty to tell him he is goddamned wrong.”