Olbermann: Rudy Giuliani Exploits Fear for Power and Personal Gain

This is the text of Keith Olbermann's special comment about Rudolph Giuliani's remarks at a Lincoln Day dinner in New Hampshire, where Giuliani said that if a Democrat were elected president in 2008, America would be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001.

Since some indeterminable hour between the final dousing of the pyre at The World Trade Center, and the breaking of what Sen. Barack Obama has aptly termed "9/11 fever," it has been profoundly and disturbingly evident that we are at the center of one of history's great ironies.

Only in this America of the early 21st century could it be true that the man who was president during the worst attack on our nation and the man who was the mayor of the city in which that attack principally unfolded would not only be absolved of any and all blame for the unreadiness of their own governments, but, moreover, would thereafter be branded heroes of those attacks.

And now, that mayor -- whose most profound municipal act in the wake of that nightmare was to suggest the postponement of the election to select his own successor -- has gone even a step beyond these M.C. Escher constructions of history.

"If any Republican is elected president -- and I think obviously I would be best at this -- we will remain on offense and will anticipate what (the terrorists) will do and try to stop them before they do it."

Insisting that the election of any Democrat would mean the country was "back ... on defense," Mr. Giuliani continued: "But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have. If we are on defense, we will have more losses and it will go on longer."

He said this with no sense of irony, no sense of any personal shortcomings, no sense whatsoever.

And if you somehow missed what he was really saying, somehow didn't hear the none-too-subtle subtext of "vote Democratic and die," Mr. Giuliani then stripped away any barrier of courtesy, telling Roger Simon of politico.com:

"America will be safer with a Republican president."

At least that Republican president under which we have not been safer has, even at his worst, maintained some microscopic distance between himself and a campaign platform that blithely threatened the American people with "casualties" if they, next year, elect a Democratic president -- or, inferring from Mr. Giuliani's flights of grandeur in New Hampshire -- even if they elect a different Republican.

How ... dare ... you, sir?

"How many casualties will we have?" -- this is the language of Osama bin Laden.

Yours, Mr. Giuliani, is the same chilling nonchalance of the madman, of the proselytizer who has moved even from some crude framework of politics and society, into a virtual Roman Colosseum of carnage, and a conceit over your own ability -- and worthiness -- to decide who lives and who dies.

Rather than a reasoned discussion -- rather than a political campaign advocating your own causes and extolling your own qualifications -- you have bypassed all the intermediate steps and moved directly to trying to terrorize the electorate into viewing a vote for a Democrat, not as a reasonable alternative and an inalienable right ... but as an act of suicide.

This is not the mere politicizing of Iraq, nor the vague mumbled epithets about Democratic "softness" from a delusional vice president.

This is casualties on a partisan basis -- of the naked assertion that Mr. Giuliani's party knows all and will save those who have voted for it -- and to hell with everybody else.

And that he, with no foreign policy experience whatsoever, is somehow the messiah-of-the-moment.

Even to grant that that formula -- whether posed by Republican or Democrat -- is somehow not the most base, the most indefensible, the most un-American electioneering in our history -- even if it is somehow acceptable to assign "casualties" to one party and "safety" to the other -- even if we have become so profane in our thinking that it is part of our political vocabulary to view counter-terror as one party's property and the other's liability ... on what imaginary track record does Mr. Giuliani base his boast?