Olbermann Appeals to Tea Partiers to Admit Racism, Real Socialists Would Support ‘Stupid Tax Cuts’

On Monday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann delivered a "Special Comment" aimed at Tea Party activists in which, rather than rhetorically bludgeoning them with his usual name calling, he came across as trying to reason with Tea Partiers, appealing to them to admit to having racist motivations against President Obama as the Countdown host suggested that he felt sorry for them. Before a commercial break, he plugged the segment, relaying that he would ask questions to Tea Party activists "sincerely and with sympathy." At one point, Olbermann even seemed as if he were on the verge of expressing remorse for his history of using terms like "Tea Klux Klan" and "tea baggers," which he referred to as "incendiary."

As he encouraged Tea Party members to be honest about feeling racism against Obama, he characterized racism as a normal human instinct, but for some reason singled out white men as all feeling some level of racism: "And I think, having now been one for 51 years, I am permitted to say I believe prejudice and discrimination still sit defeated, dormant, or virulent somewhere in the soul of each white man in this country."

After theorizing that the Tea Parties are a "backlash" against having a black President – analogous to the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws in post-Civil War America – Olbermann ended his show by asking Tea Party activists: "Why are you surrounded by the largest crowd you will ever again see in your life that consists of nothing but people who look exactly like you?"

And, as Olbermann suggested that some of the anti-government political complaints voiced by Tea Party activists are really "code" for racism against President Obama, he ludicrously claimed that a real socialist would support "stupid tax cuts," and, ignoring the massive economic stimulus package passed by the Democratic Congress during the Obama administration, he blamed the current budget deficit’s size on the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. Olbermann:

The whole of the anger at government movement is predicated on this. Times are tough, the future is confusing, the threat from those who would dismantle our way of life is real, as if we weren’t to some extent doing it for them now. And the President’s black. But you can’t come out and say that’s why you’re scared. ... And so, this is where the euphemisms come in. But taxes haven’t gone up, the budget deficit is from the last administration’s adventurous war, grandma is much more likely to be death-paneled by your insurance company, and a socialist President would be the one who tried to buy as many voters as possible with stupid tax cuts.

He then added: "But facts don't matter when you're looking for an excuse to say you hate this President – (STARTS WHISPERING) but not because he's black."

Olbermann suggested that he has perhaps been too hard on Tea Party activists and should take pity on them instead as if their fears about the government were a disorder:

I'm now taking a lot of heat for emphasizing a particular phrase which originated at a freerepublic.com rally a year ago this month, originated with a Tea Partier. And I know phrases like "Tea Klux Klan" are incendiary, and I know I use them in part because I am angry that at so late a date, we still have to back back that racial uneasiness which has to envelop us all. And I know if I could only listen to Lincoln on this of all days about the better angels of our nature, I'd know that what we're seeing at the Tea Parties is, at its base, people who are afraid – terribly, painfully, cripplingly, blindingly afraid.

Between plugs and the "Special Comment," Olbermann several times asked questions like: "Where at the rallies are the black people?" and, after invoking the Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klan backlash after the Civil War, he concluded:

If you believe there is merit to your political argument, fine. But ask yourself, when you next go to a Tea Party rally, or watch one on television or listen to a politician or a commentator praise these things or merely treat them as if it was just a coincidence that they are virtually segregated. Ask yourself: Where are the black faces? Who am I marching with? What are we afraid of? And if it really is only a President’s policy and not his skin, ask yourself one final question: Why are you surrounded by the largest crowd you will ever again see in your life that consists of nothing but people who look exactly like you? Good night and good luck.

Below is a complete transcript of Olbermann’s "Special Comment" from the Monday, February 15, Countdown show on MSNBC:

KEITH OLBERMANN, IN OPENING TEASER: And on Presidents Day of Washington and Founding Fathers, and Lincoln and freedom, and a "Special Comment,’ a question for the Tea Partiers. Where at your rallies are the black people?

OLBERMANN, BEFORE COMMERCIAL BREAK AT 8:24 P.M.: And a Presidents Day "Special Comment," questions to the Tea Partiers asked sincerely and with sympathy.

OLBERMANN, BEFORE COMMERCIAL BEAK AT 8:40 P.M.: A "Special Comment" on Presidents Day, a question for the Tea Party: Where are all of your minority members?

OLBERMANN: A "Special Comment" on Presidents Day: Of Washington and Lincoln and racism and Tea Parties.

OLBERMANN: Finally tonight, as promised, a "Special Comment" on this Presidents Day celebrating George Washington and the Founding Fathers he represents, and Abraham Lincoln and the emancipation he represents. And I think, having now been one for 51 years, I am permitted to say I believe prejudice and discrimination still sit defeated, dormant, or virulent somewhere in the soul of each white man in this country. Sixty-three years after Jack E. Robinson and 56 after Brown V. Board of Education and 46 after the Civil Rights Act and a year and a half after the presidential election, this is not a popular thing to say. This is also not a thing that should be true, even as a vestige of our sad past on this topic. But it is. Discrimination is still all around us, in so many ways, openly redirected towards immigrants who are doing nothing more than following the path that brought my recent ancestors here and probably yours, too, or focused on gays predicated on a mumbo jumbo of biblical misinterpretations, or leaching out still against black people in things like the Tea Party movement. I think the progress we have made in the last 60 years in this country has been measurable and good, but I think discrimination has been tamed perhaps, not eradicated. For our society still emphasizes our differences as much as our similarities. We may be 63 years from Jack E. Robinson, but we’re not yet 63 days from a man going on national radio and telling us the President of the United States was elected only because of the color of his skin.

Discrimination, I’ve always thought, is a perversion of one of the most necessary instincts of survival. As a child, put your hand on a red hot stove, and you’ll quickly learn to discriminate against red hot stoves. But at that age, you’re also told you need to beware of, say, black people, and you will forever have to spend your life having to fight against wiring created in your brain for no reason other than to reflect someone else’s prejudice.

And it need not be even that related to trauma. The other night in the hospital, my father was telling me about seeing Satchell Page pitch. At Yankees Stadium, this was. The time was about 1941, and the team was the New York Black Yankees. And my father shook his head in amazement as he told me this. "It never occurred to me," he said, "it never occurred to anybody I knew that he couldn’t play for the other Yankees," my dad said. "We just assumed he didn’t want to, that none of them wanted to."

These thoughts still linger in our lives, still actively passed to some of us by people who are not like my father, who never question their own upbringing or parents or school or world. That older, brutal, prejudiced with impunity world which reappears somewhere every day like Brigadoon. Sometimes with virulence, as in Don Imus’s infamous remarks; sometimes with utter arrogant tone deafness, as in John Mayer’s Playboy interview; sometimes with a kind of poorly informed benign phrase like Harry Reid’s comment about dialect; sometimes with the lunkheadedness of surprise that nobody is screaming, "M Fer, I want more iced tea," at a Harlem restaurant. (SHOWS PHOTOGRAPHS OF DON IMUS, JOHN MAYER, HARRY REID AND BILL O’REILLY AS HE SPEAKS OF EACH) But it’s still there.

I’m not black, so I can’t say for sure, but my guess is the reverse feeling still exists, too, and the same doubt and nagging distrust, only with the arrow pointing the opposite way. And I guess it’s still there, too, among Hispanics and Asians and every other self-identifying group because this country, since the Civil War, has not only become ever increasingly great, not merely for dismantling the formalized racism of our first 200 years on this continent, but because we have been dismantling a million years of not fully trusting the guys in the next cave because they are somehow different. This all still lingers about us, all of us, whether we see it or not. And since it’s no longer fashionable – indeed, no longer acceptable – it oozes out around the edges, and usually those who speak it don’t even realize that, as good as their intention might be, as improved as their attitudes might be from where they used to be or where their parents or grandparents used to be, or where America used to be, it’s still racism. Thus it has become fashionable, sometimes psychologically necessary, that when some of us express it, we have to put it in code or dress it up or provide a rationalization to ourselves for it.

That this has nothing to do with race or prejudice, the man’s a socialist and he’s bent on destroying the country, and he was only elected by people who can’t speak English, or was it, he was only elected by guilty whites? The rationalizations of the racists are too many and too contradictory for the rest of us to keep them straight.

The whole of the anger at government movement is predicated on this. Times are tough, the future is confusing, the threat from those who would dismantle our way of life is real, as if we weren’t to some extent doing it for them now. And the President’s black. But you can’t come out and say that’s why you’re scared. Say that, and in all but the lifeless fringes of our society, you are an outcast. And so, this is where the euphemisms come in. But taxes haven’t gone up, the budget deficit is from the last administration’s adventurous war, grandma is much more likely to be death-paneled by your insurance company, and a socialist President would be the one who tried to buy as many voters as possible with stupid tax cuts.

But facts don’t matter when you’re looking for an excuse to say you hate this President – (STARTS WHISPERING) but not because he’s black. (STOPS WHISPERING) Anything you can say out loud without your family and friends bursting into laughter at you, you’ll do

I’m now taking a lot of heat for emphasizing a particular phrase which originated at a freerepublic.com rally a year ago this month, originated with a Tea Partier. And I know phrases like "Tea Klux Klan" are incendiary, and I know I use them in part because I am angry that at so late a date, we still have to back back that racial uneasiness which has to envelop us all. And I know if I could only listen to Lincoln on this of all days about the better angels of our nature, I’d know that what we’re seeing at the Tea Parties is, at its base, people who are afraid – terribly, painfully, cripplingly, blindingly afraid.

But let me ask all of you who attend these things: How many black faces do you see at these events? How many Hispanics, Asians, gays? Where are these people? Surely, there must be blacks who think they’re being bled by taxation. Surely there must be Hispanics who think the government should have let the auto industry fail. Surely there must be people of all colors and creeds who believe in cultural literacy tests and speaking English. Where are they? Where are they?

Do you suppose they agree with you that they’ve just chosen to attend their own separate meetings, that they’re not at your Tea Party because they have a Tea Party of their own to go to? Are you thinking like my father did about Satchell Page and the Black Yankees that they want this? My father had an excuse for that: He was 12 years old; it was 1941. Are you of the Tea Party 12 years old? For you, is it 1941?

You’re scared and you’re in a world that has changed in a million ways, and the most obvious one of them is something unforeseeable not a decade ago – a black President. And yet, you are also in an world, inherited, installed by generations that knew only fear and brutality and prejudice and difference and suspicion. The generations have gone, but the suspicion lingers on.

Not all of our heritage is honorable. Not all the decisions of the Founding Fathers were noble. Not very many of the Founding Fathers were evolved enough to believe that black people were actually people. The Founding Fathers thought they were and fought hard to make sure they would always remain slaves.

Fear is a terrible thing – so is prejudice, so is racism. And progress towards the removal of any evil produces an inevitable backlash. The Civil War was not followed by desegregation, but by Jim Crow and the Klan. The Civil Rights legislation of the 60s was not followed by peace, but by George Wallace and anti-busing overt racism. Why should the election of a black President be without a backlash?

But recognize what this backlash is and maybe you can free yourself of this movement built of inherited fears and of echoes of 1963 or 1873. Look at who is leading you and why. And look past the blustery self-justifications and see the fear – this unspoken, inchoate, unnecessary fear of those who are different.

You are right of course, the nihilism and intellectual corruption of the left extends far beyond the cynical exploitation of race. I believe that its roots are to be found in The Frankfurt School, about which more below, which passed the baton to Alinsky and ultimately to Obama. Along the way Ted Kennedy kept the flame burning and the reply which I reproduce below has reference to his traitorous opening to the KGB to undermine American security so he could use it in a bid to become president. In my view that is beyond cynicism, that was treason.

Today we have the influence of George Soros who exerts some unknown and unmeasurable influence over the Democrat party by controlling its finances and much of its propaganda outlets on the Internet etc. Incidentally, Soros is a remarkably similar figure to the European millionaire who founded The Frankfurt School in 1923.

My thesis is that the Frankfurt School has found its outworking in the condition of the modern Democrat party. I think that this is the real reason the Evyn Bayh announced at the 11th hour that he would not run for reelection. He could not fight the party because of the chokehold held by George Soros and Obama and the nihilism and corruption in which he found he had to operate. There is no resistance to the Fascism of the Democrat party for a dissident representative or senator. He will simply be destroyed. I think Senator Evan Bayh saw the futility of bucking the system as it is presently controlled.

But the control comes from the cultural and intellectual bondage, the psychic cage in which the left in the party are trapped. Here is the reply, old and lengthy:

The contemporary Democratic Party has corrupted itself so far in its American self-loathing that it is in every sense at odds with the Constitution its elected members have sworn not only to abide by, but to protect.

I judge this observation to be very true but there is an underlying explanation which is very revealing of the psychic state of the Democrat party which offers us equally hope for it’s eventual healing and considerable alarm that it could ultimately be our nation's undoing. First a stipulation, I'm about to charge the Democrat party with a psychic state of mind which a critic might parallel to those open letters printed in mainstream newspapers just before our presidential elections which declare - no, which diagnose -the Republican candidate to be somehow mentally lacking. I confess I have absolutely no credentials to diagnose anyone's mental condition, much less the state of an entire political party. So I concede that what follows is my own prejudice.

Why has the modern Democratic Party "corrupted itself so far in its American self-loathing"? The author claims that the loathing has proceeded so far that members of the party act contrary to their sworn oaths. I'm not here to argue the truth of this proposition, I assume it to be so as do virtually all of the posters on these threads because the evidence, especially arising out of the war on terror, has become so pervasive that it can no longer be dismissed. Why do Democrats loathe America so much? Are they aware that they loathe America? Are they aware that they are violating their oaths to the Constitution because of their loathing?

If you are not a poster on these threads and you do not share our virtually universal opinion about Democrats, I invite you to read this thread which alleges that a former Democrat speaker of the House, a former Democrat president of the United States of America, and a sitting Democrat Senator have all, singly or as part of a conspiracy, treacherously undermined the national security of the United States to advance their party's electoral chances!

Kennedy-KGB collaboration

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1727448/posts

I have no doubt that these three Democrats at the very same time they were undermining their country's national security actually believed they were behaving patriotically. The author cites Hillary Clinton's earsplitting screech as evidence of this. For them, white had become black, up had become down, evil had become good and good, evil. The author describes this process of rationalization and ultimate distortion of reality as it occurred in Russia until every human instinct was perverted into its exact opposite meaning. I can recall writing notes to myself on a flight homeward from Moscow in which the single overwhelming reaction that I drew from what I saw was the utter, debased, cynicism of the Russians.

How ironic that the author cites the perverse cynicism of the Russians as part of his description, although not necessarily an explanation, of the debased state of the Democratic Party. But the Democrat party is more than debased, worse than merely cynical, it is in a psychic state in which it can do no other. The Democrats are entrapped and they can't get out. Rare are the David Horowitzs of the world who can break free. One author has described this syndrome as being in a "psychic cage."

That's author's thesis is that this psychic cage did not settle upon the psyches of Democrats by accident but was the deliberate, calculated contrivance of THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL which was established in Germany in 1923 with the funding of a millionaire, a George Soros like figure, to create the conditions to bring the Russian Revolution to Germany. He assembled a group of brilliant Jewish intellectuals and established what became known as The School for Social Research which identified those parts of society which acted to retard the coming of the glorious socialist Revolution. These intellectuals then set out systematically to "deconstruct" those impediments to communism: the family, the church, the school, the nation, capitalism, Western civilization. Coming to power in 1933, Hitler, who if nothing else could always recognize an enemy, suppressed the group as much for their Jewishness is for their philosophy which caused a kind of modern Frankfurt School diaspora into the rest of the Western world, primarily the United States and Britain. Here the refugees found remarkable influence, becoming associated with the OAS, Columbia school of journalism, Harvard, the State Department and etc. The cancer metastasized.

They took their ambitions to make the world ready for communism with them and by now they had invented some formidable weapons. To deconstruct the first impediment to communist revolution, the family, they attacked patriarchal authority and sought to substitute matriarchal authority. From there it is an easy jump to attack all authority. That was handy for the next cultural institution they wished to undermine, the church. We all know what happened here. Together, our church and our school construct for us our epistemology, what we know and how we know it. If we can destroy that, we have destroyed everything and left man soulless. The author quotes Dostoevsky:

Well, the fact is precisely that Russian liberalism is not an attack on the existing order of things, but an attack on the very essence of things, on the things themselves, not merely on their order, on the established order in Russia, but on Russia herself.

We are now very nearly at nihilism. So we see today in our universities, for example, abnignation of their whole purpose and the abandonment of the scientific method, logic, or historical actuality for a so-called "critical theory." Reality means nothing, everything is relative, utterly disposable. The author of the psychic cage describes how the universities were seduced and converted before they even realized what had happened to them. One might say the same for the National Council of Churches, for example.

This phenomenon has been described with many terms besides the critical theory such as, cultural Marxism, feminism, multiculturalism etc. and they all seem to fall under the rubric of "political correctness."

I think it is important to understand how insidious is the brainwashing which found its roots in The Frankfurt School and blossomed with the boomer generation. We in the West are beginning to understand, at least intellectually, a phenomenon of Islam, it's fanatical, anti-rational, murderous-suicidal tendencies. We're beginning to see that the phenomenon is not a matter of rational choice. Interestingly, the Germans make the same argument as they outlaw Scientology claiming that it is a cult which disarms the rational powers of its victims. The Germans ought to know about these things for they learned from the masters, Hitler and Goebbels. When you succeed in tearing away every prop that lets man know what he knows and believe what he believes, you have achieved what Dostoevsky has described-a psychic cage.

So this is how the modern Democratic Party got itself into its present fix, a soulless zombie? Contemporary political scientists might describe them more prosaically, a party without a core message and possessed only of a methodology and a very destructive methodology at that. I do not know whether this means that it is unlikely to get a message or that it's likely to take on any message. Is it likely in its cynicism and nihilism to turn upon itself and destroy itself or is it likely to become dangerous and aggressive? At least we know what we are dealing with and why. We know that we cannot persuade these people with logic. We must "un--deconstruct" the psychic cage, bolt by bolt and nut by nut so that the cult-mentality becomes open to human discourse.

By way of illustration, those of us who abhor abortion often scratch our heads at the obduracy of its defenders. We have even described it as a sacramental act in some perverse religion in an effort to explain the otherwise inexplicable. We can make no logic in the face of its ghastliness. The left is untroubled by this even to the point of condoning partial-birth abortion or screaming hysterically at the apparition of posters bearing images of aborted fetuses. We are on different planets. We must understand that these people have not just smashed the order of things, they have smashed the things themselves-as Dostoevsky said. If abortion is not the destruction of the thing itself, what is it?

And so we now understand why Senator Kennedy could sell out his country's national security to advance his own march to the presidency.

The scary part of all this is that we are immersed in a war of survival against mindless, fundamentalist Islam while a political party which represents nearly half the electorate is dysfunctional.

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