Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) was widely condemned by liberals last week after he sent out a fundraising letter which used the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing to promote his campaign for governor of Michigan. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has come in for his share of criticism as well since he uncritically endorsed Hoekstra’s approach in an appearance on Fox News.

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MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann took aim against both men in a special mini-comment on Thursday which suggested that President Obama “will have a far easier time correcting the flaws in our counter-terrorism efforts than he will have correcting the flaws in the souls of the American politicians who continue to exploit those flaws for their own insidious reasons.”

Hoekstra had written in his fundraising letter, “I understand the real and continuing threat radical jihadists pose to our great state of Michigan and our great Nation. … But I need your help. If you agree that we need a Governor who will stand up the Obama/Pelosi efforts to weaken our security please make a most generous contribution of $25, $50, $100 or even $250 to my campaign.”

Gingrich had nothing but praise for Hoekstra when he enthusiastically told Fox News, “Pete really is becoming a dominant figure in the state. I think that was part of why Lt. Governor Cherry probably dropped out. He’s faced with a president who clearly couldn’t have defended Detroit.”

“Newt Gingrich has not only applauded Michigan Congressman Pete Hoekstra’s hysterical holier-than-thou partisan reaction to the failed plot at Detroit,” Olbermann noted sarcastically, “but he has complimented Hoekstra’s nascent campaign for governor there and actually said that the Congressman ‘has gotten such a boost out of having been Intelligence Committee chairman now with the attempted attack on Detroit.’ A cross-agency intel system for which then-Chairman Hoekstra had Congressional oversight failed, so he gets a boost out of it.”

“When will this become evident to all of you seedy politicians?” concluded Olbermann. “You cannot claim that a terrorist attack, or an attempted terrorist attack, is a boost or an advantage for anybody or anything in this country without emboldening the terrorists.”

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“You are personally showing a terrorist somewhere the kind of havoc he can sow in this country whether or not his bomb goes off,” Olbermann explained. “You are personally instructing a terrorist somewhere on how to divide us and how to pick our leaders for us. You are personally encouraging a terrorist somewhere to go ahead with his plans. And any boost that any American politician gets from terrorism, he shares with that terrorist.”

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast Jan. 7, 2010.

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