Seymour Hersh farts, Keith Olbermann craps himself

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I don't normally post crap about Keith Olbermann, but I have to do it this time, if for no other reason than to mark what may be the final death blow to this deluded, paranoid hack's alleged journalistic career. OK, so that's probably not gonna happen, but I can dream, right?

Anyway, Seymour Hersh, another notable deluded, paranoid hack, barfed up some deluded, paranoid nonsense during a speech about a secret team of assassins - a death squad, if you will - under the direct control of Dick Cheney for the past eight years. Watch the video to see Olbermann take Hersh's fantasy as if it were gospel and run like the wind. Anyone who's been in the military for any length of time will be brought up short early on when the ever-excitable Olbermann hyperventilates about "...a secret commando unit, offically called the Joint Special Operations Command."

As soon as I heard that, I quite literally laughed out loud. Here's how secret JSOC is:

The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is a component command of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and is charged to study special operations requirements and techniques to ensure interoperability and equipment standardization, plan and conduct special operations exercises and training, and develop Joint Special Operations Tactics. It was established on December 15, 1980, in the aftermath of the failure of Operation Eagle Claw, the unsuccessful attempt to rescue the 53 hostages from the American embassy in Tehran, Iran[1]. It is located at Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, USA.

They've been around for nearly 30 years, but in the minds of wankers like Hersh and Olbermann, they came and presumably went with the evil Dick Cheney. Just Google JSOC or Joint Special Operations Command and you'll find plenty of information on them. Are there units under control of JSOC or SOCOM that do some scary, spooky shit? Yeah, that's probably a pretty safe bet. But how one makes that leap to Dick Cheney's personal death squad is beyond me. But then again, unlike Olbermann and Hersh, I have a shred of sanity.

To make matters worse, Olbermann opens this segment intoning gravely on the 1976 executive order from Gerald Ford prohibiting political assassinations. Yet nowhere is it later even implied that Cheney's roving gang of killers did anything other than what special ops teams have done since their inception.

Finally, there's this, from where I heard about this in the first place (via AoSHQ):

"On the podium, Sy [Seymour "Sy" Hersh] is willing to tell a story that's not quite right, in order to convey a Larger Truth. ‘I can't fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say...I find that totally not inconsistent with anything I do professionally. I'm just communicating another reality that I know, that for a lot of reasons having to do with, basically, someone else's ass, I'm not writing about it...I get paid to do speeches...And I'm not there to be on straight I'm there to tell, you know, give somebody, exchange views with people."

And MSNBC and Keith Olbermann went for it, hook line and sinker.

Update: It occurs to me that this story is just outrageous enough to be a plant to make both Hersh and (especially) Olbermann look even more deranged than usual. Throw in the notion of using a military organization that actually exists but is obscure enough that a lazy "journalist" wouldn't know about it, and the theory has some merit. Rove, you magnificent bastard!