Damn Those Conservatives Award
— MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann to ex-Nixon White House lawyer John Dean, who claimed in his book that modern conservatives are moving the Republican Party toward "authoritarianism," July 10 Countdown.
"It [Dean’s book, Conservatives Without Conscience] deals with psychological principles that are frightening and that may have faced other nations at other times in — Germany and Italy in the ’30s coming to mind in particular. How does it apply now? And to what degree should it scare us?...This whole edifice requires an enemy — communism, al-Qaeda, Democrats, me, whoever — for the Two-Minute Hate....Are you actually saying here they [conservative Republicans] would set up, encourage, terrorism from other countries to set them up as a bogeyman to have again that group to hate here, that group to more importantly be afraid of here?...This all seems to require not merely venality or immorality, but a kind of amorality where morals don’t enter into it at all....You’ve been at one of the central moments of history in the 20th century. What kind of danger — are we facing a legitimate threat to the concept of democracy in this country?"
