Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for Monday, April 25

Host: Keith Olbermann

Read the transcript to the 8 p.m. ET show
Updated: TRANSCRIPT PENDING
Guests: Craig Crawford, Robin Wright

OLBYWATCH GUIDE: The lead story on The Hour of Spin is no surprise: Bill Frist and the filibuster. Olby framed it in this fashion:

The task at hand: repainting Senate politics in black and white. No gray allowed.

Hmmm, sounds an awful lot like the reporting on Countdown. And if you doubt that statement, Keith gives a classic example when introducing clips of Senators Leahy and Graham:

Members on both sides of the aisle taking offense to Senator Frists's threats and tactics: [clip of Leahy]...[clip of Graham]:
GRAHAM: I would call on them, not to go down the road of saying that the Democratic Senators are not people of faith or questioning their religious, that they're religious bigots. I don't think that helps the country and I don't think that's fair.

What Olby doesn't tell you about this clip of Graham, snipped from Fox News Sunday, is that, contrary to KO's false introduction, Graham was not talking about Senator Frist, his tactics, or his "threats":

GRAHAM: Sen Frist is going to go, and I think he's going to say the right things. He's going to say these people have been treated unfair. He's not going to question Senators' motives. I think he's going to have a very balanced view of this and not going to ratchet up the rhetoric. But the groups that we're talking about have been friendly to me and other Republicans, I would call on them, not to go down the road of saying...

How could Olby claim Graham was "taking issue" with Sen Frist's "tactics and threats"? Simple: he cut out the part where Graham praised Frist's statement, and ran the part where Graham was talking about groups, claiming it referred to Sen Frist when it manifestly did not. In other words, Olbermann lied.

Olby went out of his way to repeat the claim that Frist filibustered a Clinton judicial nominee, and quoted a Family Research Council leader as favoring filibusters some years ago. But he was even-handed enough to mention that Senators Leiberman and Kennedy once sponsored a bill that would allow for 51 votes to break a filibuster--NOT! Had you going there. Olby only mentions this sort of thing against the hypocritical Republicans. When the Democrats do it, it somehow doesn't become one of those stories you'll be talking about tomorrow. Olby then asked some smart-aleck questions of Craig Crawford, where he had to concede that people like Sen Schummer did in fact oppose the filibuster at one time.

The Hour of Spin continued with features on Michael Jackson (puppets) and the Japanese train wreck--but we couldn't take any more. This is an imitation newscast, presided over by a pretend journalist, who smugly sits with his wig firmly in place, and nothing under it. This over-compensating egotist takes every opportunity to lecture his more successful competitors about the evils of bias, partisanship, and accuracy--while his recklessly unbalanced reporting has turned MSNBC's flagship newshour into a repellent repast of crypto-liberal palaver. No wonder viewers desert the channel in droves when this vomitous dreck hits the air.