Noted TV personality and political donor Keith Olbermann says that Oakland Mayor Jean Quan needs to resign. Now. Why? Because of her mishandling of Tuesday night's Occupy Oakland assault care of OPD. In part of a passionate diatribe on CurrentTV, Olberman says:
"There is no excuse, there is no justification, there is no rationalization for being the mayor who may have begun the great march back in this country to the days when mayors like Sam Yorty of Los Angeles and Hugh Addonizio in Newark and Richard Daley of Chicago stood back as their police incited, bullied, overreacted and brutally assaulted protesters at the height of the civil rights and antiVietnam movements," Olbermann fumes. "Those protests began nonviolently, positively, with singing and marches and cooperation with the authorities."
"But the police, like the police in Oakland, California, this week, they injected the violence, and it escalated and echoed and soon there just wasn’t one Iraq vet in a hospital with a fractured skull, but there were dead men and women on the streets of this country and no one wants to see it again today."
With his temperature slwoing simmering in classic Olbermannian style, the host calls the mayor "a bully," stating, "She is endorsing and assuming for herself the responsibility for whatever havoc the out-of-control police officers have wrought."
For her part, and much to her detriment, Quan didn't take much responsibility for Tuesday's melee. She said at a news conference on Wednesday, "I only asked the chief to do one thing: to do it when it was the safest for both the police and the demonstrators."
Watch Olbermann's resignation request to Quan below: