If you missed this when it aired on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, you owe it to yourself to read the transcript. AWESOME commentary.
Excerpted from 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' Sept. 29 transcript
Complete transcript at:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/973847.asp?cp1=1 <snip>
OLBERMANN: Before we get to the top of tonight's COUNTDOWN, a story that kind of sets it up.
The lawsuit against Al Franken has popped back into the news tonight. Commentator Bill O'Reilly told "TIME" magazine that he now doesn't regret pushing Fox to sue Franken, which is interesting, because, right after the lawsuit failed, O'Reilly has denied pushing Fox to sue Franken and because the title of Franken's book is "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them."
O'Reilly went a little further, though, than merely doing a 180 on his responsibility for clogging America's courts with another frivolous suit. He said that Franken-quote-"is being run by some very powerful forces in this country and we need to confront it" and "President Andrew Jackson would have put a bullet between his eyes."
We'll skip for the moment the topic heading paranoia and the entire subject of just how Mr. O'Reilly knows what Andrew Jackson would have done and whether Andrew Jackson would have put a bullet through Mr. Franken's head or Mr. O'Reilly's.
Let's skip all that and talk instead about dissent. This has been a year in which dissent, especially taking an unpopular or minority political opinion, has been attacked by people like Mr. O'Reilly. In the last year, it has not been enough just to disagree with dissenters. Many of us have decided it is necessary to silence them, which is really kind of ironic, since it is political dissent that created this country and sustained it and improved it.
But ask the Dixie Chicks about how well, this year, we Americans kept our pledge to be tolerant of dissent, our delight in disagreeing with your opinion, but being willing to fight to the death to protect your right to express it. Or ask the Janeane Garofalos of this world, who are being told to shut up because their political opinions have no merit because they're merely on television, told to shut up by people who express their own political opinions merely to try to get ratings on television.
Or the Al Frankens, who wind up getting sued by the Bill O'Reilly's of this world. And when the suit gets literally laughed out of court, the Bill O'Reilly's of this world decide Al Franken is the tip of some conspiracy to get them and, in some other era, would have been shot through the head by the president. Earth to Bill. Come on home. Your porridge is getting cold.
I've done this long preamble to the No. 1 story as a way of letting recent history remind us of not-so-recent history; 2003 was not the first time dissent, the American virtue, the unique right of us Americans, suddenly became an ugly word. It happens every few decades, like when they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts around 1800s. Hell, in a way, the Civil War was about stifling dissent. The law said slavery was just fine. The people who changed that were dissenters.
And you have your Palmer raids in the '20s and your communist blacklist in the '40s and '50s, and there's the tip of tonight's No. 1 story.
All the witch-hunts against political contrarians in our history have ended the same way. The American political system was strong enough to prevail against mistaken ideologies. When the dissenters were wrong, the country got stronger. When the dissenters were right, the country got stronger. And everybody who ever tried to shut the dissenters up wound up hated and reviled, their accomplishments overshadowed by their lack of faith in freedom of speech, the people who arrested them, trashed them, sued them, testified against them.
There's the No. 1 story. We should be talking about the accomplishments of a 94-year-old moviemaker of "Streetcar Named Desire" and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." Instead, when we talk about the death of Elia Kazan, overshadowing his work was the time he unreluctantly and unremorsefully identified eight of his personal friends as communists during his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
<snip>
more:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/973847.asp?cp1=1 
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