Either Relevant or True » "We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty"

In the first comment to today’s open thread, James reminded me of something I’d planned to post today but had slipped my mind.

Fifty-three years ago, on March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow broadcast his famous report on Joseph McCarthy:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

Read the entire transcript here.

I don’t buy in to the hype that keeps heralding Keith Olbermann as the “new” Murrow and making him the poster child of the Left. Don’t get me wrong - I’m very happy that KO is getting some long-overdue attention and has built a respectable audience. But every time I read another spate of comments about him in Left Blogsylvania it’s full of “I turn it off before Oddball” and “He could be so good if he didn’t do the silly stuff.” To borrow a phrase, they’re not happy to let Olbermann be Olbermann.

Just as Bruce Springsteen overcame being labeled as “the new Dylan,” becoming a great artist in his own right, KO will survive the hype. He’s made a habit of calling bullshit for a while now, and I don’t think he’ll be giving it up any time soon. May he always be like Murrow in that regard. However, I’m looking forward to the day when Keith is spoken of as the true original that he is. Maybe someday, 20 or 30 years hence, we’ll have a “new Olbermann.”

I’m glad I jogged your memory, Becky.

The problem we have here Becky is that those words, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” are now politicized, whereas they should not be (if you believe in the Constitution of this country).

Forgive me for bringing her name up, but Michelle Malkin sort of proves my point in her recent column:

Last week, I wrote about the Gathering of Eagles — veterans, active-duty troops, bikers, activists and ordinary citizens coming to Washington, D.C., on March 17 to hold a counter-protest against tens of thousands of anti-war extremists demanding immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

What has happened is the right has demonized dissent. By calling anti-war protesters extremists, she and all the other right-wing whack-jobs have taken something that is deeply American and made it not so.

Whether Keith, in his personal life, is a liberal or a conservative (or maybe even a Libertarian) matters not to me. What matters most is that someone is standing up for the ideal that dissent is an American institution.

I’m a pretty committed lefty and feminist, but there’s something wrong with people that can’t see the humor in Oddball. It’s easy to *think* it’s like those On the Lighter Side news clips with the skating squirrels that bedevil local newscasts, but KO actually has perspective so it’s not like Horrible House Fire and then “Oh, look, skating squirrels…” and when Keith writes quips they’re funny.

You wanna know how scary this is?

Cut and paste this picture link onto your browser:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v200/NozeNuggets/coultergeistmccarthy.jpg

Oh, james, I’ve seen that before. Yes, Ann Coulter worships at the grave of Joe McCarthy. Scary indeed!

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