During an eleven-minute Special Comment on his show Countdown, Keith Olbermann, with tongue placed firmly in cheek, forgives Sarah Palin for her comments linking Barack Obama to terrorists. Olbermann recounts the story of a 90-year-old woman who shot herself as police came to evict her from the home in which she had lived for 38 years. “They are both in situations that are beyond their ability to cope, they are both stuck in a crucible caused by forces they cannot comprehend, they are both unable to understand what they are doing,” Olbermann said. He then excoriated Palin for her hypocrisy in ignoring her past ties to the secessionist group the Alaskan Independence Party and to pastor Thomas Muthee. Palin credits Muthee — whom Olbermann suggests engaged in terrorist activities when he threatened and chased a woman out of her hometown in Kenya — with helping her political career. Obama’s “connections” to terrorists, on the other hand, involve a brief interaction with William Ayers on an anti-poverty committee in Chicago.

–Erica Landau

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