I Missed It; You Shouldn't: Keith Olbermann's Special Comment For Tuesday, January 30th

[Addition: Also check this out from Olbermann's latest special comment: I am indebted to David Swanson, press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, who has blogged about the dubious 96 words in Mr. Bush’s address this year and who has concluded that of the four counter-terror claims the president made, he went 0-for-4.]

Keith Olbermann truth-fact checked the president's SoTU address (specifically, things like the claim to have stopped four terror plots) and found Bush, as usual, just making it up as he goes along.

See it or read it all here, but I'm offering a big snip-snip:

“We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies have prevented,” Mr. Bush noted, “but here is some of what we do know: We stopped an al-Qaida plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast.”

This would, of course, sir, be the purported plot to knock down the 73-story building in Los Angeles, the one once known as the Library Tower — the one you personally revealed so breathlessly a year ago next month.

It was embarrassing enough that you mistakenly referred to the structure as the “Liberty Tower.”

But within hours it was also revealed that authorities in Los Angeles had had no idea you were going to make any of the details — whether serious or fanciful — public.

Who terrorized Southern California that day, Mr. Bush?

A year ago next month, the Los Angeles Times quoted a source — identified only by the labyrinthine description “a U.S. official familiar with the operational aspects of the war on terrorism” — who insisted that the purported “Library Tower plot” was one of many al-Qaida operations that had not gotten very far past the conceptual stage.

The former staff director of counter-terrorism for the National Security Council — now a news analyst for NBC News and MSNBC — Roger Cressey, puts it a little more bluntly.

In our conversation, he put the “Library Tower story” into a category he called the “What-Ifs” — as in the old “Saturday Night Live sketches that tested the range of comic absurdity:

What if ... Superman had worked for the Nazis?

[...]Your totally black-and-white conclusions in the State of the Union were based on one gray area, and on three palettes on which the experts can’t even see smudge, let alone gray.

It would all be laughable, Mr. Bush, were you not the president of the United States.

It would all be political hyperbole, Mr. Bush, if you had not, on this kind of “intelligence,” taken us to war, now sought to escalate that war, and are threatening new war in Iran and maybe even elsewhere.