On Countdown last night, Keith Olbermann would not mention the scandal of Israeli racism–or, rather, what would be a scandal if people like him dared to talk about it.
First Maria Teresa Kumar (of VotoLatino.org) and then Jonathan Turley attacked the Republican plan to deprive children born to illegal immigrants of automatic U.S. citizenship, comparing such an injustice with that of "stateless people," as Turley said, in another country–Germany.
Neither Turley nor Kumar can make the leap from U.S. nativism to the crisis in Israel over the government’s plans to deport children of migrant workers.
Kumar commented, "That’s not what America is all about." Why not at least talk about both Germany and Israel? Of course, doing so would raise troubling questions about the identity between Israel’s agenda and the U.S.’s agenda in the Middle East.
Olbermann at least defended Christiane Amanpour against Tom Shales’s attack. Shales had walloped Amanpour for what he saw as her implied sympathy for the Taliban, when she spoke of mourning all the war dead. Shales exclaimed that, "If this were 1943, we would hardly think it appropriate to mourn Nazi casualties."
For once, an American corporate newsguy, Olbermann, had the guts to retort, "Well, it’s not 1943." And Olberman showed some grit when he accused Shales of having "gone to the mourn-Nazi-casualties-card."
