http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/gallagher286.htmlBUSH REGAINS POWERS OF MONARCH
By Bill Gallagher
DETROIT -- The greatest shame is the scarcity of shame. The president of the United States and his toadies in Congress pulled off an unprecedented frontal assault on our most fundamental "unalienable rights," and most Americans snored through the event.
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Keith Olbermann has become the most outraged, eloquent and courageous voice of reason on our political landscape. The anchor of MSNBC's "Countdown" has spoken with more guts and sense this political season than the entire Democratic leadership in Congress combined. He's not afraid to say Bush has lied and done so repeatedly. In a brilliant commentary, following the signing of the Military Commissions Act, Olbermann lacerated Bush's lie that the law will make our nation safer.
He cited earlier presidents -- John Adams, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt -- who assaulted liberty in the name of safety in their administrations. Those excesses are now condemned, Olbermann noted, but "we have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that 'those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.'"
Olbermann argued, "But even within this history, we have not before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow."
Looking into the camera like a 21st-century Emile Zola, speaking right to Bush the accused, Olbermann tongue-lashed with righteous indignation: " You, sir, have now befouled that spring. You, sir, have given us chaos and called it order. You, sir, have imposed subjugation and called it freedom. For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons. And again, Mr. Bush, all of them wrong."
Olbermann declared, "Your words are lies," after reciting a litany of truths about what Bush has really done to our fundamental freedoms. In signing the habeas corpus nullification measure, Bush quoted one of the terrorists who planned the Sept. 11 attacks, saying, "He hoped the attacks would be 'the beginning of the end of America.'"
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