The Emergency That Cried Wolf--Keith Olbermann

This morning I was awoken from a peaceful slumber by an overzealous administration, told to evacuate far away due to a looming, all-too tangible threat. "Run for the hills," they told us. "Your lives are at stake! Surrender the right to sleep that you and your ancestors fought so long for and paid so dearly for!"

This sort of preemptive action without any foresight whatsoever eerily echoes the policies of the last administration. Have we not paid the price for our sleepwalking stumble into Iraq without a single No-Doz shot of truth and integrity, guiding our actions as we have relied on it to do for the history of our nation? These actions are premature. Nay, immature. And they are dangerously consequential to the health of our democracy.

I call out, in the most clarion of voices, for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to take a stand, to raise a bulwark of Democrats against this atrocity, so clearly perpetrated by the right-wing imperialist warmongers that would have us live in a state of perpetual fear. The injustice of these wakeup calls so clearly parallels the injustices of the Bush Administration's slow, methodological infringement of our civil rights. If we permit ourselves to be arisen unfairly with wakeup calls, it is a slippery yet inevitable slide back into the days of color-coded threat assessments, unconstitutional wire tapping, and human rights violations at Guantanamo. Is that, sir, something you willingly bloody your hands to accomplish? Do you find it just, sir?

Tonight, the 112th Simulated Congress begins with a Democratic majority, and for the first time after years of greed-driven darkness, as black as the precious oil the Right so willingly spills the blood of our soldiers in the covetous quest for wealth, there exists a ray of hope. But hope is not enough if those torchbearers refuse to act. (I learned this phrase from one of my professors at Cornell, which I attended, by the way.) Do something, by God, or be remembered by history as a party who stood by and did nothing.