Keith Olbermann returned to the airways tonight on Current TV and gave his first but brief Special Comment on what he intends to be doing with his new show now that he's free of any potential corporate censorship from his former employer, MSNBC.

OLBERMANN: It is fitting at this point I think to tell you in the briefest of Special Comments tonight, what we intend to be doing here. This is to be a newscast of contextualization, that is to be presented with a viewpoint, that the weakest citizen of this country is more important than the strongest corporation. That the nation is losing its independence through the maleficence of one political party and the timidity of another.

And that even though you and I should not have to be the last line of defense, apparently we are, so we damned well better start being it.

The words of another are suited to this moment, this is from, All Things, Harriet Beecher Stowe's magazine profile of Abraham Lincoln, written in 1863. It pertained to the actual Civil War then. It pertains to the silent Civil War being waged against us now.

She wrote:

The revolution through which the American nation is passing is not a mere local convulsion. It is a war for a principle which concerns all mankind. It is the war for the rights of the working classes of mankind, as against the usurpation of privileged aristocracies. You can make nothing else out of it. That is the reason why, like a shaft of light in the judgment-day, it has gone through all nations, dividing to the right and the left the multitudes. For us and our cause, all the common working classes of Europe – all that toil and sweat and are oppressed. Against us, all privileged classes, nobles, princes, bankers, and great manufacturers, and all who live at ease.

A silent instinct, piercing to the dividing of soul and spirit, joints and marrow, has gone through the earth, and sent every soul with instinctive certainty where it belongs. No sophistries could blind or deceive them; they knew that our cause was their cause, and they have suffered their part heroically, as if fighting by our side, because they knew that our victory was to be their victory. On the other side, all aristocrats and holders of exclusive privileges have felt the instinct of opposition, and the sympathy with a struggling aristocracy, for they, too, feel that our victory will be their doom.