Shock: Man Who Once Railed Against Iraq War for Diverting Us from the Real War in Afghanistan Now Says It's Time to Abandon the War in Afghanistan for a Real War To Be Determined Later

And remember what they say, as they once said of Walter Cronkite: When you'e lost Keith Olbermann, you've lost Keith Olbermann. Plus whatever desperate fan he's finger-banging in a hotel room this week.

And of course he can't just call for defeat. No, there has to be a bad guy here, and that bad guy can't be Keith Olbermann. The bad guy is... Pentagon officials who just want to fight unending wars because dat's how deys gets paid:

The Pentagon, often to our eternal relief, but just as often to our eternal regret is in the War business. You were right, Mr. President, to slow the process down, once a series of exit strategies was offered to you by men whose power and in some case livelihoods are predicated on making sure all exit strategies, everywhere, forever, don't really result in any service-man or woman actually exiting.

These men are still in the belly of what President Eisenhower so rightly, so prophetically, christened the military-industrial complex. Now and later as the civilian gray eminences with "retired" next to their names, formally lobbying the House and Senate and informally lobbying the nation through television and the printed word, to "engage" here, or "serve" there, or "invest" everywhere, they are, in many cases, just glorified hardware salesmen.

And of course Bush planned this all, too:

....

Mr. President, last fall, you were elected. Not General McChrystal, not Secretary Gates, not another Bushian Drone of a politician. You. On the Change Ticket. On the pitch that all politicians are not created equal.

And upon arrival you were greeted by a Three Mile Island of an economy, so bad that in the most paranoid recesses of the mind one could wonder if the Republicans didn't plan it that way...

Keith Olbermann just admitted that his "Special Comments" come straight from "the most paranoid recesses of the mind."

Not that it matters much, but this graduate of Cow College, I think, shops for his literary allusions in a Bluffer's Guide to the Classics. In his rant he references something he thinks is in Catch 22, in "minder-binder lingo" -- that's the character Milo Minderbinder he means -- but what he references is not a Minderbinder catchphrase at all. Minderbinder's catchphrase was "What's good for the [Minderbinder Trading] Syndicate, is good for you," a parody of the old saying "What's good for GM is good for America."

I have no idea on earth what the hell Olbermann is referencing. I've read Catch 22 about 20 times. I think he probably got it from some dolt's mistaken entry in Wikipedia.

Thanks to DrewM.

posted by Ace at 10:07 PM

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