Instapundit linked this at Hot Air — MSNBC’s Hyperbole Czar reacting to Thursday’s Supreme Court decision — but neither Insty nor Allah mentioned what is arguably the most offensively extreme sentence (skip to 0:36 if you don’t want to watch the whole thing):
“This is a Supreme Court-sanctioned murder of what little actual democracy is left in this democracy. It is government of the people, by the corporations, for the corporations. It is the Dark Ages. It is our Dred Scott.”
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? The Court struck down part of the McCain-Feingold regulations that didn’t even become law until 2002 and Olbermann compares that decision to the 1857 declaration that blacks had no rights under the Constitution?
It’s nuttier than a Snickers bar, a rhetorical overreach so disastrously ill-considered as to automatically discredit whatever legitimate argument Olbermann was making — except, of course, that Olbermann doesn’t make arguments at all. What he does is to engage in dramatic denunciations based on unexamined assumptions — e.g., in this case, that corporations are inherently evil — and invite his viewers to share his exaggerated outrage.
Matt Welch of Reason magazine notes that defenders of McCain-Feingold don’t even pretend to take seriously the free-speech arguments of the law’s critics. Rather, the advocates of regulation begin with the same assumption that Olbermann employs, chiefly because the automatic conflation of Republicans and “Corporate America” is so fundamental to the progressive ideology that if liberals ever began to question it seriously, their entire worldview would collapse.
If “Corporate America” is such a malevolent force in American politics as liberals think it is, there is no reason for them to employ rational arguments on behalf of any measure intended to restrict or punish that malevolence — and nothing to restrain the lunatic rhetoric of Olbermann.
