After losing some big posts earlier this week I'm posting in small chunks.

A few days ago Keith Olbermann questioned how freedom of speech was being applied. His blog reads:

Ward Churchill says some detestable things about 9/11 victims, so the Governor of Colorado wants to squeeze him out of the University there. Marine Corps Lieutenant General James Mattis tells an audience in San Diego “it’s fun to shoot some people,” particularly in Afghanistan, and his superior officers ask him to please not say stuff like that again. Eason Jordan makes a remarkable gaffe, implying that the U.S. military is hunting journalists. He backs off within moments of the remark, apologizes, and still gets forced to resign from CNN. Brit Hume and other political commentators twist Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words to make it look like he would’ve supported President Bush’s partial privatization of Social Security, and nobody corrects their journalistic blunders, let alone resigns.

This is an apples and oranges (and bananas) comparison. Now that Ward Churchill's ravings have become public he has become an embarrassment to the University of Colorado. Do they agree that office workers are as bad as murderous Nazis? Does the Governor support this sentiment?

Olbermann continues:

But universities and colleges — particularly public ones — are designed to collide popular, mainstream ideas, with contentious, contrarian ones (and unlike ballclubs, they are not private institutions, from which anybody can be fired for just about anything that embarrasses or harms said institution — also known as the ‘boomerang’ caveat to free speech). Hell, I had a professor at Cornell whose version of American history started with his explanation that the constitution was the elite’s successful attempt to co-opt the rights of the citizens. Students stood up in the lecture hall and swore at him. Now that was a marketplace of ideas.

The world has changed since Olbermann was in college. Universities are no longer havens of free speech. Most universities now have speech codes. Certainly the President of Harvard discovered that his speculations were not covered by free speech. This is much more relevant than any of the other incidents that Olbermann strings together but he ignored it.

Freedom of speech never existed in the military. Why was this even included in Olbermann's list.

Eason Jordan did not make a single misstatement that he quickly took back. He has been asserting that the military targets reporters for months. Now that this has gotten out the military might start revoking access to CNN. This sounds like a good reason for CNN to distance itself by firing Jordan.

This brings us to Brit Hume. This is a tempest in a teapot. If you follow the links you find that what Roosevelt described may not be what Hume implies but neither is it the modern Social Security. Roosevelt was suggesting that people should be able to pay extra amounts into Social Security in order to get a higher return after they retired.

Is this a fireable offence? Olbermann thinks so but he gives his motivations away here:

The Fox News folks, of course, specifically Brit Hume, squeezed the whole FDR thing. ‘Media Matters For America’ has done much of the legwork on breaking this down, and both on his radio show and at his website, Al Franken has done much of the publicizing.

Media Matters and Al Franken? Both Media Matters and Franken's Air America were founded as a left wing echo chamber to counter Fox News Rush Limbaugh. A so-called MSM reporter is quoting a left-wing propaganda machine.

The rest of Olbermann's column is just window dressing. The main thrust has been taken straight from Al Franken.

Good thing Olbermann's ratings are so bad. I'd hate to think that many people take him seriously.

UPDATE: Olbermann's post got picked up by Media Matters (who he cites as a source). This in turn was picked up by the Daily Kos. And they talk about the right-wing echo chamber.