Keith Olbermann Either Awful or Not Paying Attention

Oh, but it was a trick! He’s both apparently. So, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann kicked his voice back into the ring on Twitter today regarding #MooreandMe. He left an extra-long tweet which was so full of wrong, and I feel I have to address it. Below, his über-tweet with my comments interspersed.

I endorse, sympathize with, and empathize with, the rape consciousness goals of #mooreandme, and have already apologized accordingly. [Didn’t actually apologize for spreading one of the accuser’s names or for not challenging Moore’s lies when he was on your show last week.] But I cannot defend and will not accept their tactics which mirror so many of the attitudes and threats they fight. [Yeah, because our campaign is… like rape? Good to know!] I do not know of what Julian Assange is guilty, if anything, and neither does anybody else. [Sure, but you DO know what the accusations are and you SHOULD know that rape culture is fueled by people not believing rape victims, yeah?] But given the extraordinary efforts by Sweden to extradite him, to say he is benefiting from some form of rape apologism is not fact-based. [We’re not saying he’s benefiting in a legal way at least, we’re saying that misinformation and demeaning the accusers is DIRECTLY harmful to other women who may never report their assaults now, or blame themselves, etc. All of this doesn’t occur in a vacuum. This is just one example in a whole line of victim-blaming and rape apologism.] It is also unfair to condemn as anti-feminist those who merely address the juxtaposition of this prosecution to the fact that Assange threatens the secret and nefarious activities of dozens of governments. [I think literally everyone in the #MooreandMe protest agrees that the extent prosecutors have gone to get Assange to return for questioning is not what normally happens. That’s one of the reasons this whole thing hurts so much. IF ONLY all accused rapists got this treatment.] And I will not engage those who suggest that those who do not prioritize one issue to the exclusion of all others [“Why do you ladies keep talkin’ about all this LADY stuff… let’s get back to REAL politics!”] should succumb to forced financial contributions [suggestions that you donate to an anti-rape organization are just suggestions, and if you read what people were saying, you’d know that], or should ‘kill themselves’ (examples of each will be retweeted shortly, along with my previous apology). [Obviously it’s terrible that someone said you should kill yourself. Clearly not okay. Did you happen to see the 550+ tweets from just one person who called all the protesters ‘cunts’ and threatened us with rape as well? How about the other people who did that too?] The #mooreandme attacks do not help those who fight against rape, they hurt them. [Are you KIDDING me? The feminists and anti-rape folks who are participating are the ones who fight against rape culture ALL THE DAMN TIME. Lots of us are even survivors of sexual assault. WE ARE THOSE WHO FIGHT AGAINST RAPE. You have 5 hours worth of TV time every week, and you certainly haven’t made defeating rape culture a priority (until now, I watched your show every day). And indeed they feature something larger than anti-feminist. This is, to use a clunky phrase, anti-personism. [Oh, those feminists just hate EVERYBODY! Can’t please them, amirite?]

Really, dude? Really? You think that this campaign hurts those you fight against rape? That is just the biggest steaming pile o’ LOL I’ve seen lately. And now, a Special Comment.

*turns to camera two*

Who the hell are you, sir, to tell a bunch of sexual assault survivors and activists that we are the ones “hurting the cause”. A cause that you, sir, have disregarded as “prioritizing one issue to the exclusion of all others”.

This “one issue” by the way? It’s creating a world where women don’t have to face rape. A world where a woman who is raped can report it without being shamed or disbelieved. A world where supposed progressives don’t diminish the testimony of women who say they were raped, even if the accused rapist is a man whose organization you support.

This “one issue” is women’s rights, and I think you know that. You have to. You are not the first progressive man to suggest that progressive women should just pipe down a bit about “women’s issues” since it “hurts the cause”. Well, you are hurting the progressive cause. There is no room in a truly progressive, Leftist movement for persons who don’t consider women’s rights a top priority. We’re half the population, if you haven’t noticed.

If I may, I will now quote Sady Doyle quoting Robin Morgan. Forty years later, still relevant as hell.

And that’s what I wanted to write about—the friends, brothers, lovers in the counterfeit male-dominated Left. The good guys who think they know what Women’s Lib, as they so chummily call it, is all about—who then proceed to degrade and destroy women by almost everything they say and do: The cover on the last issue of Rat (front and back). The token pussy power orclit militancy articles. The snide descriptions of women staffers on the masthead. The little jokes, the personal ads, the smile, the snarl. No more, brothers. No more well-meaning ignorance, no more cooptation, no more assuming that this thing we’re all fighting for is the same; one revolution under one man, with liberty and justice for all. No more… A genuine Left doesn’t consider anyone’s suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or coin as well). Goodbye to all that.

Goodbye to me watching your show every day at 5 pm. Goodbye to me watching the repeated episodes or going online to catch what I missed. Goodbye to me defending you. Goodbye to me believing you were on our side to begin with.

There is something every woman wears around her neck on a thin chain of fear—an amulet of madness. For each of us, there exists somewhere a moment of insult so intense that she will reach up and rip the amulet off, even if the chain tears the flesh of her neck. And the last protection from seeing the truth will be gone. Do you think, tugging furtively every day at the chain and going nicely insane as I am, that I can be concerned with the peurile squabbles of a counterfeit Left that laughs at my pain? Do you think such a concern is noticeable when set alongside the suffering of more than half the human species for the past 5,000 years—due to a whim of the other half? No, no, no, goodbye to all that.