Said Dorothy, "Oh, my God! Keith Olbermann killed my straw man! You bastard!" (updated)

Summary: Kossack "loveendures" talked about this briefly yesterday.  Laura Ingraham, her staff, and her listeners freaked out over Keith Olbermann's latest Special Comment, where he attacked "the troops" as cold-blooded killers.

As you can imagine, all isn't as it seems.  Allow me to elaborate.

  The "straw man" logical fallacy explained:

The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of "reasoning" has the following pattern:

1. Person A has position X.

2. Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).

3. Person B attacks position Y.

4. Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.

  We now join Laura Ingraham's program, already in progress...

OLBERMANN: Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now created includes cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives?  They are those in or formerly in your employ, who may yet be charged someday with war crimes.
INGRAHAM: "Cold-blooded killers", I guess. Does that include the US military, MSNBC?
INGRAHAM'S COLLEAGUE: That's exactly who he's referring to.

  Really?  The entire US military is a bunch of cold-blooded killers slaughtering people for political objectives?
  As I've said in the past with people like Rush Limbaugh, it's often difficult to prove someone is lying.  So I'll take Ms. Ingraham at her word and assume she honestly believes that was how Mr. Olbermann meant his statement.
  Now to break down the interpretation.  I would imagine that the word "political" should have been a sign that Ms. Ingraham wasn't hearing things clearly.  I could be wrong, but I sincerely doubt that when a US soldier, cold or warm blooded, kills someone in Iraq or Afghanistan it's because of "political" objectives.  I've never been in the military, much less military combat, but I doubt that "Let's do this to make the Democrats look bad." goes through a single soldier's mind while bullets are flying around and adrenaline is flooding its system.
  And given Mr. Olbermann's history on Countdown, I think it's far likelier that he's talking about the Bush Administration than the military it sent into the Middle East.  He's repeatedly said that, "The reason for the war in Iraq is to have a war in Iraq.", and the mentality he's talking about would be a tad cold-blooded, in my opinion.  As for the war crimes the Administration's members could be charged with, I'll let Rawstory's Larisa Alexandrovna handle this (from her personal website):

The unprovoked attack on Poland by Germany was a war crime just as your attack against Iraq - based on lies - is a war crime. This is not my opinion. This is not a political attack. This is a fact. Consider the words of the esteemed former chief prosecutor in the Nuremburg trials, Benjamin Ferencz, regarding your war of aggression against Iraq:

"...Prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation."

  Now, Ms. Ingraham does bring up a point where I could understand, sort of, how she comes to her interpretation:

INGRAHAM: And I think any fair hearing of this indicates that, in fact, he was talking about the military presence of the United States of America as engineered by this President who, of course, people in his employ would be charged with war crimes later on.  But who's doing the killing?  Who are the cold-blooded killers he's talking about?  Or does NBC not require that level of specificity in these types of rants?  The people doing the cold-blooded killing against the cold-blooded soldiers in Iraq are our soldiers.  There's no one else fighting the other cold-blooded killers but our soldiers.

  Even if, Mr. Olbermann was talking about soldiers and not the people who ordered them into the Middle East, Mr. Olbermann's attacking the entire US military?  So when he has Paul Rieckhoff on his show, again and again, trying to draw attention to problems our soldiers in the field, as well as our veterans, are facing, it's for...what again?  Look, if you're going to watch Countdown, or The O'Reilly Factor, or anything where your sole purpose for being there is to find stuff to attack (done it myself, I might add), you really need your theories to be in sync with the entire program's content.
  I've said this before...if you really despise the US military, and want to see the worst things possible happen to its members, wouldn't you just cheerlead everything Mr. Bush wants to do in the Middle East?  Move the goalposts repeatedly so that "victory" is impossible (and soldiers need to be redeployed to, and sometimes past, the breaking point), start a war with Iran so that even more troops can die, that sort of thing?  That's what I'd do.
  And for the record, if you think that every US soldier in the Middle East is a saint, you might want to talk to the Iraq/Afghanistan veterans from Winter Soldier.  A quote from one of the links off their website:

Millard, like the other veterans at the gathering, linked the needless deaths of innocent civilians to a culture of racism and dehumanization of the enemy that’s part and parcel of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The former National Guard sergeant spoke about one incident he witnessed in the summer of 2005 when a machine gunner in his unit opened fire on an Iraqi vehicle that was driving quickly toward a U.S. military checkpoint and killed an entire Iraqi family.

"He killed a mother, a father and two children," Millard said. "The boy was four, and the daughter was three."

That evening, Millard said he was in a briefing where the chain of command was informed of the shooting.

"After the officer in charge briefed it to the general in a very calm manner, a commander turned in his chair to the entire division-level staff, and he said—and I quote—‘If these f------g hajis learned to drive, this s--t wouldn’t happen.’"

Millard said he looked around the room at the other officers and the other enlisted men, mostly higher ranking than himself. "I didn’t see one dissenting body language, one disagreeing head nod," he said. "Everyone was in agreement that it’s true, if these f-----g hajis learned to drive, this s--t wouldn’t happen. I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. That stayed with me the rest of my tour."

  I don't want to make this diary too long, so I'll just inform you that if you watch the video, other items of interest include:

(1) Ms. Ingraham's "theory" (I have to assume she's joking, though her tone of voice doesn't sound like it) that Mr. Olbermann's Special Comment was really set off by Conan O'Brien being replaced by Jimmy Kimmel.

(2) A rather tragic ending of the clip, with listeners connected to the military actually buying Ms. Ingraham's ill-informed routine since that's all she's offering them.

Update [2008-5-17 16:26:51 by Kevin Holsinger]: It seems that Ms. Ingraham's really steamed about this:

TELL GE WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT OLBERMANN "COLD-BLOODED KILLERS" COMMENT:
General Electric is MSNBC's parent company. Email them here.

Update [2008-5-20 6:30:29 by Kevin Holsinger]: Yup, he meant (1) the government and (2) Blackwater.