Keith Olbermann has promised a 20-minute long special comment on the Tea Party on Wednesday night’s “Countdown.” The Daily Caller was able to obtain a partial copy of it early:
And now — ladies and gentleman, girls and boys, soldiers and civilians, ebony and ivory, Mr. President and First Lady Obama — a very special comment.
Tonight, I give you the long-awaited, much-anticipated, sure to be highly debated special comment on the much ballyhooed but entirely misunderstood Tea Party.
No, I am not referencing the Boston Tea Party of seventeen hundred and seventy three from which the spirit of this Republic was born. Nor am I referring to the Tea Parties of many of our youths, full of little dolls and fake china and joyful imagination. No, the Tea Party of which I speak is the Tea Party of racists and homophobes, bigots and xenophobes.
A very dark cloud has fallen over America over the last 18 months if you haven’t noticed. A curtain, if you will, has descended over much of this country. Not necessarily Mr. Churchill’s Iron Curtain, but a blinding one no less.
Somehow the home of the brave and the land of the free, that was inspired by the hope that Mr. Obama ushered in on a November night two years ago, has been over taken by a rage and hate that has shaken the very firmament of this great land. Sure, these Teabaggers say they are merely protesting out-of-control spending and government growth. But there is something more insidious there. If you can’t intellectualize it, you can certainly feel it. In your bones. In the very core of your soul.
If Mr. Shakespeare doesn’t mind, let’s just say there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, err, I mean Nevada. And Delaware. And Kentucky. And Florida. And Colorado. And wherever the Tea Party flag flies.
I don’t know if I have ever mentioned this on the air, but at the very young age of 16 I entered Cornell University — an elite Ivy League school in the vast uplands of New York. There, I studied with the best and the brightest and under some of the greatest minds of our age.
Yes, I was a communications major — in a school meant for farmers. But there, nevertheless, I learned to discern fact from fiction in addition to Haricots Verts from traditional American green beans. So I think my Ivy League degree puts me in a position to say that the Tea Party, in addition to being fascistic and reactionary, is also phony.
Yes, phony, as one Holden Caulfield might say. The Teabaggers don’t care about America’s debt or the supposed increased power of the state. Their problem is the particular crayola color of the president’s skin. Or as the great political philosopher Janeane Garofalo put it on this very show: The Tea Party is nothing more than “a bunch of teabagging rednecks,” and the movement is nothing more than “about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.”
Yes, racism. Straight up. Mr. Nail meet Mr. Head.
[15 minutes later]
“If liberty means anything at all,” a great man once said, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
That someone was one Eric Arthur Blair, perhaps better known to you as George Orwell, and what I am saying is surely not something people want to hear — but it must be said.
Sixty-five years ago that same Mr. Blair published a book about a farm of animals — an “Animal Farm,” if you will. If the Teabaggers succeed in the upcoming election, I am afraid this country will be run by a farm of animals — rabid, reactionary animals.
[Olbermann now staring sternly into the camera]
The world may little note nor long remember what I say here, ladies and gentleman, but it will not forget what you do there – there, of course, being the election booth on Nov. 2.
On your shoulders may very well lie the fate of this Republic. Let it not be said you haven’t been warned. Paul Revere cometh again, but this time in the form of a 51-year-old cable news host on a network no one — and I mean, literally, no one — watches. But here I am, sounding the alarm: The Teabaggers are coming!