Keith Olbermann's anti-Bush rant.

Can someone explain why Olbermann is going on and on blaming Bush for the fact that the World Trade Center site has not been rebuilt and that there is no memorial there yet?

I do understand that he wants to use what he crudely calls the "hole" as a metaphor for the "hole" "in the fabric of our nation," but it's an inaccurate set-up for what isn't exactly a brilliant literary device. There's video and text at the link. I watched the first quarter of the video -- the WTC site is visible behind him -- then had to switch to the text because his heavy-handed delivery was getting on my nerves. Why doesn't mainstream media find better people to put on the air?

Scrolling way down into the extended text, we find this:

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space… and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Now, class the lesson for today is alliteration. He's really trying hard to write well. Earlier in this peroration, he was quoting the Gettysburg Address, and it's easy to tell he thinks he's bringing us elevated text.

Here's something about "The Path to 9/11":

A mini-series, created, influenced — possibly financed by — the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

Does the average viewer even know who the hell he's talking about or does this just sound nutty? So... uh ... Disney?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded — are still succeeding — as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero…

So too have they succeeded, and are still succeeding — as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

A wedge to pit? Well, maybe someone who cranks out prose like this and doesn't seem to think any editing is necessary also thinks you can quickly sketch out a design for a series of buildings and get going. (The memorial at Gettysburg was dedicated only four months after the battle, he tells us.) There was, of course, an early design for the reconstruction -- and, of course, it had nothing to do with Bush -- but it went nowhere, because it wasn't very good. (I don't know what physical monument Lincoln stood near when he gave the Gettysburg Address, but I think I can fairly assume it was the sort of thing that would be met with cries of outrage today. That said, maybe we should have put up a simple slab of marble with a reverent inscription. But that's another matter, and it's got nothing to do with Bush.)

Olbermann's drivel ends this way:

When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…

When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

Should we forgive Olbermann for using the World Trade Center site as a backdrop and a metaphor for his (atrociously written) political speech?