I just sent an email to Keith Olbermann saying:
I detest Sean Hannity too, but when you start throwing the word “treason” around in criticizing his analogies with the American Revolution, you come across like Joe McCarthy and make Hannity look good. Please leave the jingoistic nationalist rhetoric to the Republicans.
Kudos Dr. Long!
Now it’s the time for liberals to get to say, “America, love it or leave it.” But they just don’t do jingoism as well. Smugness, yes, which is what their jingoism comes to anyway.
Man, Keith Olbermann is the biggest douche in the universe (this year, anyway).
Well said. Olbermann is overalla positive force. But from time to time, he loses perspective. Nice of you to keep him balanced.
On top of just being dickish, Olbermann shows he either thinks the US has reached the end of history or that he knows squat about it. Practically speaking, it is impossible for a state to remain in one form very long, so dissolution is closer to the norm than he implies.
Rather than shout “TREASON!” at every instance of secessionist talk, it’d be more productive to analyze the reasoning behind it. Obviously Hannity’s reasoning is bullshit (after all, he’s part of the same people that were gloating when liberal celebrities were threatening to move to Europe. If you accept the pie-in-the-sky idea of elections as “the voice of the people”, you can’t back away just because your side lost), but that doesn’t mean there’s no argument that isn’t.
[...] Long spotted the McCarthyist tinge to this, but what I noticed also is a whiff of ahistorical arrogance. Considering the vast scope [...]
I lost all respect for Olbermann when he insinuated that the D.C. v. Heller’s finding that there is an individual right to armaments protected by the Second Amendment was EVIL because as we all know, weapons are bad and the founders were only talking about muskets anyway right?
What a douche.