During Tuesday’s airing of “Olbermann” on ESPN2, host Keith Olbermann reacted to Chipper Jones’ tweet saying that the Sandy Hook incident was a hoax, which he later apologized for.
According to Olbermann, Chipper should use his fame and reach out to the families.
Transcript as follows:
Sports figures repeat on Twitter, on Facebook, in public all kinds of nonsense from 9/11 to evolution and rarely ever do they do what Chipper Jones then did, which is admit they were utterly wrong and hurtful. Jones, who is convinced that someday somebody is going to come to his mansion and take away his guns and that he won’t be able to go out and kill animals anymore and all he’ll have left is what I talked about the last time I did a commentary about Chipper Jones’ tweets- taking selfies during the college football championship game; even though nobody’s really taken away guns in this country for like half a century, he saw the world entirely through that prism until he sent out those tweets. When somebody’s screwing up, there are only two options since he can’t go back in time and prevent himself from screwing up there are only A- he can continue to screw up or B- he can apologize and stop screwing up. We really need to do everything we can in this country right now to always and encourage and reward B. I spent nine of the last 18 years covering politics full time.
A politician who sent tweets like that would have blamed a staffer or claimed he had been hacked. A rabidly political citizen would have doubled down and started tweeting profanities at anybody that disagreed with them. But Chipper Jones did B. ‘It was irresponsible of me to do that and will not happen again. Please accept my heartfelt apology to those who were hurt or offended.’ If everybody in this country, me included, you included, needed to do that at some point in the last 18 years, if we had just done that, we would all be living in something approaching the Garden of Eden. One last sentimental thing; this particular conspiracy theory, unlike all of the others, contains within it a kernel of what little good there is in mankind. No matter at whose feet you lay that tragedy, in your heart which would you rather find out is true right now?
That we let these children and teachers be murdered in their school or that for whatever impenetrable reason there is an impossibly complex conspiracy involving the government forming everything you hate, but those 20 kids are alive and well somewhere. In my heart I’ll take that conspiracy every time. And since that’s not true and there’s no conspiracy, my heart now demands of my mind to insist that, whatever the solutions are, we never let that happen again and I would like to welcome Chipper Jones into that group of us who feel that way. You did the tough part already, CJ. You apologized, most of us forgave you. Now go further; contribute to the dialogue. And by the way, use your fame. Reach out to those families. Got to be some Mets fans there whose lives you can improve for a minute or two by letting them yell at you about baseball.”
As Olbermann pointed out in that monologue, Jones later apologized via Twitter.
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent