"Olbermann: Special comment about ‘sacrifice’" by Keith Olbermann, "Countdown" MSNBC
Here are some excerpts...
If in your presence an individual tried to sacrifice an American serviceman or woman, would you intervene?
Would you at least protest?
What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them — and was then to announce his intention to sacrifice hundreds, maybe thousands, more?
This is where we stand tonight with the BBC report of President Bush’s “new Iraq strategy,” and his impending speech to the nation, which, according to a quoted senior American official, will be about troop increases and “sacrifice.”
The additional men and women you have sentenced to go there, sir, will serve only as targets.
They will not be there “short-term,” Mr. Bush; for many it will mean a year or more in death’s shadow.
This is not temporary, Mr. Bush.
For the Americans who will die because of you, it will be as permanent as it gets.
The Iraq Study Group told you it would be a mistake.
Perhaps dozens more have told you it would be a mistake.
And you threw their wisdom back, until you finally heard what you wanted to hear, like some child drawing straws and then saying “best two out of three … best three out of five … hundredth one counts.”
Your citizens, the people for whom you work, have told you they do not want this, and moreover, they do not want you to do this.
Yet once again, sir, you have ignored all of us.
This senseless, endless war.
But — it has not been senseless in two ways.
It has succeeded, Mr. Bush, in enabling you to deaden the collective mind of this country to the pointlessness of endless war, against the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
It has gotten many of us used to the idea — the virtual “white noise” — of conflict far away, of the deaths of young Americans, of vague “sacrifice” for some fluid cause, too complicated to be interpreted except in terms of the very important-sounding but ultimately meaningless phrase “the war on terror.”
And the war’s second accomplishment — your second accomplishment, sir — is to have taken money out of the pockets of every American, even out of the pockets of the dead soldiers on the battlefield, and their families, and to have given that money to the war profiteers.
We ... will have to live with what — of the fabric of our nation — you have already “sacrificed.”
The only object still admissible in this debate is the quickest and safest exit for our people there.
But you — and soon, Mr. Bush, it will be you and you alone — still insist otherwise.
And our sons and daughters and fathers and mothers will be sacrificed there tonight, sir, so that you can say you did not “lose in Iraq.”
Sacrifice, Mr. Bush?
No, sir, this is not “sacrifice.” This has now become “human sacrifice.”
Our meaningless sacrifice in Iraq must stop.
Amen
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