Glenn Greenwald savaged Keith Olbermann because he is endorsing Obama’s sellout as clever politics, when earlier he had one of his vaunted “special comments” denounced telco immunity as textbook Fascism.

Olbermann promptly went on Kos, and called Glenn Greenwald names, and asserted that John Dean said that a President Obama could prosecute the telcos criminally.

There are two problems with this assertion:

1. Nothing prevents a Bush pardon on this, and given the language Bush is using on the civil immunity, such a pardon is almost certain.
2. John Dean did not say that a President Obama could president the telcos criminally. I saw the interview. What he said was that the had not yet seen anything that would prevent this in the bill.

In fact, we now know that :

I said that when I read the bill, and talked to the folks at the ACLU who had been following it, that it was not clear. I raised it when appearing on Countdown with the hope that someone might figure it out. But that is the nature of this badly drafted bill that it is not clear what it does and does not do, and the drafters are not saying.

But even if the bill is unclear there is no question the Bush Administration is not going to do anything to the telecoms, so the question is whether a future DOJ could — and here there is case law protecting the telecoms. But there may be language buried in the bill that protects them as well but it can only be found by reading the bill with a half dozen other laws which I have not yet done.

I made no declarative statements rather I only raised questions that jumped at me when reading the 114 page monster.

(emphasis mine)

For Keith Olbermann to laud Obama’s decision to sell out, and to suggest that Dean supports this action, when on his own show, Dean called telco immunity a, “grave assault on the Constitution”.

It’s not OK when Bush does it, and it’s not OK when Obama goes along with, Mr. Olbermann.