Olbermann: Bush Either 'Pathological Liar or Idiot-in-Chief'

By Media Research Center
December 7, 2007

On Thursday's Countdown, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann used his latest "Special Comment" to denounce President Bush as a "pathological presidential liar or an idiot-in-chief" for continuing to talk about the potential danger of a nuclear Iran after receiving word in August of the possibility the newest national intelligence report would find that Iran no longer has an active nuclear weapons program, but had suspended such a program in 2003: "We have either a President who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War III about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole, or we have a President too transcendently stupid not to have asked, at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so, whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible. The pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief."

Olbermann also bizarrely compared Bush to failed presidents of the 19th century who "abandoned Reconstruction, and sent this country marching backwards into the pit of American Apartheid."

The Countdown host tagged Vice President Cheney as a "warmonger" and Bush as "an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a President, shooting his mouth off, backed up only by his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience." Referring to a conspiracy theory, which Olbermann described as "widely believed," that President Reagan was "little more than a front man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes, string-puller," the MSNBC host suggested that Cheney is President Bush's "evil ventriloquist." Olbermann: "Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historical malfeasance, it is inescapable that Dick Cheney is either this President's evil ventriloquist, or he thinks he is."

Olbermann soon blamed Cheney for making the Bush administration like those of the 19th century that brought about "American Apartheid." Olbermann: "Mr. Cheney has helped, sir, to make your administration into the kind our ancestors saw in the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s, the ones that abandoned Reconstruction, and sent this country marching backwards into the pit of American Apartheid."

After accusing President Bush of being "Machiavellian," rather than merely a "marionette or moron," contending that the President was tipped off about the upcoming national intelligence report on Iran and deliberately used different wording in discussing the potential for a nuclear Iran to fit the fresh intelligence, Olbermann continued his name-calling as he labeled the President a "bald-faced liar" who is "terrorizing" the American people "to legally cover your own backside."

Olbermann charged: "And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last week? Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be legally true, something like 'what the definition of is is,' but with the subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war. Legally, this might save you from some kind of war crimes trial, but ethically, it is a lie. It is indefensible. You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy on the other end had already hung up. You, Mr. Bush, are a bald-faced liar."

Olbermann soon continued his nearly ten-minute long rant: "You not only knew all of this about Iran in early August, but you also knew it was all accurate. And instead of sharing this good calming news with the people you have obviously forgotten you represent, you merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people to legally cover your own backside. While you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of, as you phrased it on August 28th, a quote, 'nuclear holocaust,' as you phrased it on October 17th, quote, 'World War III.'"

The MSNBC host concluded by charging that Bush has "no business being President." Olbermann: "My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase 'George Bush has no business being President.' Well, guess what? Tonight, hanged by your own words and convicted by your own deliberate lies, you, sir, have no business being President. Good night and good luck."