Glenn Greenwald Takes Olbermann’s Recent Defense of Obama & FISA into a Back Room; Only Greenwald Comes Out

Glenn Greenwald has administered a swift and deadly kick to Olbermann’s credibility on the issue and to any lingering hope that Olbermann might recover sufficient detachment to be considered a reliable commenter on any issue relating to his Hero, Barack Obama.

Now that Obama has made his position on FISA crystal clear, Olbermann has apparently decided how he is going to spin the issue:  by being as disingenuous as Obama man.  When W was fighting for FISA, Olbermann called it "an ex post facto law, which would clear the phone giants from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive and blatant collaboration with [Bush's] illegal and unjustified spying on Americans under this flimsy guise of looking for any terrorists who are stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass email."’ (Salon)   

Now that Obama has changed his mind about telecom amnesty, so has Olbermann. Now people who disagree with him and his idol — including Obama supporters sufficiently candid to admit their disappointment — are ‘the far left’, silly pie in the sky idealists with impractical and impracticable notions about civil liberties and the constitution that Obama is bravely prepared to resist: Obama won’t cower to ‘the far left’, so called; no sir!

I suppose that the media figure who tried most diligently to sell Obama to the Dems might well feel that he can’t afford to turn on Obama now — now that Obama seems bent on demonstrating to voters just how progressive he isn’t. Now that he’s systematically reversing himself on every position that might make him look soft on terrorism, crime, etc, I suppose Olbermann must feel he’ll look a bit — well, gullible — if he admits that he was gulled, beguiled, not listening all that closely. 

Most progressives are dealing with their disappointment by simply acknowledging that they were misled by the rhetoric and their own issues.  Not Olbermann.

Now that Obama has refused to take a stand against a bill containing the same provision that Olbermann formerly saw as a fascist move by W’s regime, he’s bravely taking a centrist stand designed to make our country safe for democracy. 

And perhaps Obama really has succeeded in persuading Olbermann that if he’s elected, FISA won’t be the disastrous piece of legislation that it is.  Maybe Olbermann is even sincere in hailing the ‘compromise’ bill as a rejection of  ‘conventional thinking‘ — meaning, I guess, his own — about FISA and telecom amnesty.  If so, that’s just sad.  Maybe by bringing poor Jonathan Alter onto his show to praise Obama’s stance as a profile in courage, he was simply making a thoroughly disingenuous attempt to rationalize his own blatant 180 on the issues.

Whatever the case, thank God for Glenn Greenwald, who ruthlessly rips Olbermann to shreds for his unapologetic about-face on telecom amnesty and FISA. 

Olbermann uses Jonathan Alter to explain to viewers why this bill isn’t the same bill as the one Olbermann previously eviscerated.  Greenwald first tears apart Alter’s argument.

Leave aside the fact that Jonathan Alter, desperate to defend Obama, doesn’t have the slightest idea of what he’s talking about.

How can a bill which increases the President’s authority to eavesdrop with no warrants over the current FISA law possibly be described as a restoration of the Fourth Amendment? That would be like describing a new law banning anti-war speech as a restoration of the First Amendment.

As Jim Dempsey and Marty Lederman both note, not even the nation’s most foremost FISA experts really know the full extent to which this bill allows new warrantless spying. Obviously, Jonathan Alter has no idea what he’s saying, but nonetheless decrees that this bill — now that Obama supports it — restores the Fourth Amendment. Those are the Orwellian lengths to which people like Olbermann and Alter are apparently willing to go in order to offer their blind devotion to Barack Obama.

Moreover, Alter’s own explanation is self-contradictory. In the course of praising Obama’s FISA stance, he says that a politician looks "weak if you’re flip-flopping" and "you look weak if you don’t fight back against your political adversaries." But that’s exactly what Obama is doing here — completely reversing himself on telecom amnesty and warrantless eavesdropping, all in order to give the right-wing of the GOP everything it wants on national security issues in order to avoid a fight. By Alter’s own reasoning, what Obama’s doing is "weak" in the extreme, yet Alter bizarrely praises Obama for showing "strength."  (Salon; emphasis in original).

As Greenwald says, this is the same Orwellian doublespeak we’ve been hearing for eight years from defenders of W. and before that from defenders of, ahem, other Republican presidents and their supporting demagogues.

All of the decades-old, conventional Beltway mythologies are trotted out here to praise Obama. Democrats move to the "center" by embracing hard-core right-wing policies. Democrats will look "weak" unless they turn themselves into Republican clones on national security. A President becomes "strong" when he tramples on the Constitution and the rule of law in the name of keeping us safe. Democrats must embrace the Right and repudiate the base of their own party, and they must support Dick Cheney’s policies while "standing up to the ACLU." (Salon)

But there are broader and even more troubling ramfications of Olbermann’s spin of Obama’s stance which ought to be of concern to progressives and moderates alike. Greenwald points out the danger that of blind and uncritical support of Obama is the same danger as the far right’s formerly blind and uncritical support of George W. Bush.

What’s much more notable is Olbermann’s full-scale reversal on how he talks about these measures now that Obama — rather than George Bush — supports them. On an almost nightly basis, Olbermann mocks Congressional Democrats as being weak and complicit for failing to stand up to Bush lawbreaking; now that Obama does it, it’s proof that Obama won’t "cower." Grave warning on Olbermann’s show that telecom amnesty and FISA revisions were hallmarks of Bush Fascism instantaneously transformed into a celebration that Obama, by supporting the same things, was leading a courageous, centrist crusade in defense of our Constitution.

Is that really what anyone wants — transferring blind devotion from George Bush to Barack Obama?….

The real danger is that those who defend Obama the Candidate no matter what he does are likely to defend Obama the President no matter what he does, too. If we learn in 2009 that Obama has invoked his claimed Article II powers to spy on Americans outside of even the new FISA law, are we going to hear from certain factions that he was justified in doing so to protect us; how it’s a good, shrewd move to show he’s a centrist and keep his approval ratings high so he can do all the Good things he wants to do for us; how it’s different when Obama does it because we can trust him? It certainly looks that way. Those who spent the last five years mauling Bush for "shredding the Constitution" and approving of lawbreaking — only to then praise Obama for supporting a bill that endorses and protects all of that — are displaying exactly the type of blind reverence that is more dangerous than any one political leader could ever be.  (Salon; emphasis added)

Obama’s position on FISA doesn’t lose him my vote because it’s the same as John McCain’s, so — as Markos so rightly remarked when he appeared on Olbermann on Monday —  I don’t really have a choice.  And I am only a little disappointed in him because I never expected him to be progressive on the issue of civil liberties in any case. I always understood that by ‘Change’ and ‘Unity’, he meant bipartisan action that would pull toward the center.

But I have a different issue with Keith Olbermann, who did all he could to persuade his audience that Obama was a politiican who intended to repudiate the policies of George W. Bush and who is now betraying his own principles to follow his Hero to the center.  I don’t know whether he is lying to his viewers about what he thinks about Obama’s position on FISA or whether he is lying to himself about what this bill means. 

Either way, it shreds to pieces whatever credibility on this issue he Olbermann, might still have retained, and raises serious doubts about his ability in the future to give a sufficiently detached report on other issues affecting the nation.  Greenwald asks whether Olbermann intends to be Fox News for Obama.  As my colleague and others said months ago, he already pretty much was; his most recent stance simply confirms it.

BONUS:  For your reading enjoyment, an article at Daily Kos explaining why FISA doesn’t matter. The bill is ’sound and fury, signifying nothing’ because the 4th amendment is already dead.   So hey — don’t worry about further inroads on your Constitutional right under the fourth amendment to freedom from unreasonable searches!   As for Congress acting as a check on the executive…what’s the point, eh?  What’s the point?

CROSS-POSTED AT BUCK NAKED POLITICS, where my colleague has recently published a trenchant piece on the ‘rickety defenses’ constructed by those who are willing to defend Obama at the expense of reason and their own stated principles.