Keith Olbermann went after George W. Bush and the interview Rupert Murdoch's National Geographic Channel gave him with an opportunity to engage in a bit of revisionist history with his explanation with how he responded after the attacks on 9-11.
Keith hit Bush for changing the accounts of what happened on 9-11 such as saying that at first he thought a light aircraft hit one of the Twin Towers, and then later telling an Orlando town hall that he saw the first plane hit the first tower on television.
During his interview on Nat Geo, Bush tried to pretend that he was projecting “calm” when he was first notified of the attacks, and as Keith noted, “there are words to describe President Bush's expression at that moment. Calm is not one of them.” Confusion or panic would be better terms, as Keith noted, for what we saw from Bush that day.
During the Murdoch “documentary”, Bush claimed that he was the one who gave the order to shoot down commercial aircraft that refused to land. As Keith pointed out, maybe he did and maybe he didn't, and according to the 9-11 Commission it was Vice President Cheney who actually gave that order. And while Cheney said he spoke to President Bush first, there was never any confirmation of that.
Olbermann also slammed Bush for ignoring George Tenet's warning that Bin Laden was determined to strike in the U.S. and what his motivations might have been during his recent interview for not wanting to go after the intelligence community leading up to the attack. Bush apparently didn't want that “finger pointing” to be aimed at himself.
And last but not least, Bush pretended during his interview this week that after a meeting on September 15 at Camp David, the Bush administration decided they were going to “deal with Iraq later on”, when as Keith noted, according to former Treasury Sec. Paul O'Neill and Gen. Wesley Clark, Bush made the decision to invade Iraq well before then, and the Bush administration was ready to take that dictator out from their first day in office.
I think it's a shame we don't have more in our media doing that Keith did here and taking a look back at what words and actions came out of the Bush administration and calling them out for trying to revise history with these recent interviews by both Bush and Cheney. Instead we've got a bunch of Villager he said/she said and isn't it terribly controversial that this sociopath from the Bush administration Cheney is willing to throw the rest of them under the bus, but let's not bother to fact check the man while we've got him on the air.
Keith followed up with talking to John Dean about all of this, who knows a thing or two about working for a corrupt administration and who was pretty disgusted to say the least with the interviews given to both Bush and Cheney in today's friendly corporate media environment where they're allowed to have air time without being held accountable for their actions while in office.
