Olbermann Owes Us an Apology

Keith Olbermann has a post on his Bloggermann site that demands an apology from President Bush. He claims that President Bush said publicly that "it's unacceptable to think." Of course the President said no such thing.

What the President actually said, and this is from Olbermann's post, is: "If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic," Bush said. "It's just -- I simply can't accept that. It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective."

Bush said this in responding to a letter written by Colin Powell in which Powell said "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism." Powell wrote this letter to state his opinion about Bush and the Congress' efforts to clarify what constitutes acceptable interrogation techniques under Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.

Olbermann extracted the phrase, "it's unacceptable to think," from Bush's statement and made his claim that Bush had proclaimed to the world that he actually believes that thinking is unacceptable. Geez! How could this guy have an hour-long show on national television?

Aside from the fact that he took the phrase completely out of context, apparently he doesn't realize that there is more than one definition of the word 'think'. One definition is: to believe to be true of someone or something. So, using that definition, Bush's statement translates to: It's unacceptable to believe that there's any kind of comparison...

Any reasonably objective adult knows that Bush meant that he, himself, cannot accept that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective. No reasonably objective adult believes that, by Bush's statement, he believes that the act of thinking is unacceptable in general.

Using Olbermann's thought process I could take him to task for something he said in his post. He said "all of us agree." Obviously, Keith, all of us don't agree. And many of us especially don't agree with you.

Apologize, sir, for your egregious attack on the President. Anything else, Mr Olbermann, is truly unacceptable.

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