It was only days ago that Keith Olbermann was mumbling about how George Bush was insulated, living "in a bubble". On Tuesday night's Hour of Spin, with the prospect of a State of the Union speech minutes away, Olby's spin suddenly careened upside down and backwards:
Is this speech really necessary? Since his last State of the Union, Mr Bush has held seven televised news conferences, and made at least six televised addresses, the last just 45 days ago.
Note the absence of the honorific "President" Bush. We're probably lucky to get "Mister". Talking to Dana Milbank (again!), KO played an old Bush clip about wiretaps and court orders, and asked: "Is that going to be problematic?" Milbank basically said not really, and explained how it was not the same things as the NSA program. We heard Bush the oil-man, Cheney the Halliburton-man, complaints about why the Democrats aren't wearing anti-Bush T-shirts, and so forth. Then came a wish-fulfillment piece about the purported six-year curse for second-term Presidents.
A recycled tape from NBC covered the death of Coretta Scott King. After a few words about Woodruff and Alan Greenspan, Keith brought us a shooting "caught on tape". Then KO violated all the laws of nutrition, and decided to go for dessert before he was half way through the meal.
The "worst person" segment was pushed up to the first half hour, with Olby objecting to Bill O'Reilly's Monday talking points memo. Keith did his translation shtick again, going line by line over Mr Bill's points and making the snark. This would have been an ideal time for KO to fess up and admit to his false story from Friday, but Keith don't need no stinkin' corrections. An obsessed Olby (aka The Liar) teased this segment with a banner reading "Factor Fiction". That's the banner he should have used on Friday, but The Liar still has that beam in his eye.
State of the Union speeches of the past, via another NBC rerun, preceded another giggly session with Craig Crawford. Olbermann's Brain was his usual lickspittle self, immediately congratulating The Liar on O'Reilly attack #59. Olby hardly needed him at all, declaring that the Bush proposals are "bland", he's probably going to leave "a bad taste in the mouth", and his last year was "bad". How bad?
The worst year of the Presidency.
Not the worst of his Presidency. The worst of the Presidency. Then for the second time Keith brought up his new spin, that George Bush is on tv too much. Brain fell right into line. And because he just isn't getting enough time on MSNBC tonight, Chris Matthews shows up. What, you thought Olby would bring on A-Mess-NBC's token conservative, Joe Scarborough? Once more KO complained about the President holding too many news conferences, and Chris ingratiated himself by referencing Bill O'Reilly. The Liar brought up Cindy Sheehan (for the umpteenth time), whom Matthews seems to view as "a sort of burlesque of antiwar people".
Then the good news: the Hour of Spin ended ten minutes early. For us it was like an early parole. As we settle back for the big speech, we wonder: just what will be in O'Reilly's talking points memo on Wednesday?
Keith Olbermann began The Hour of Spin on Monday by suggesting another conspiracy. He sarcastically said that the release of the Zawahiri tape with the President's low poll numbers, and just before the State of the Union, was, "like everything else, just a huge coincidence". Roger Cressey provided something often lacking on Countdown: a voice of reason. Olby asked about his SotU conspiracy theory, and Cressey shot it down, adding that Bush's low poll numbers work in Al Qaeda's favor. Quick, somebody start a boycott!
Next Keith salivated over those latest numbers, bringing in John Harwood again. KO was back on more comfortable turf with his ideological bud, who ticked off all the bad news for Bush in the polls. Here Olby was in form again, delivering one of his patented mega-run-on questions:
Does that [the Alito nomination] help, hurt, or have no impact on the President heading into the speech, because the fight over the judge seemed to be as polarizing and split down the middle as everything else, on the other hand, it did not seem to be an A-1 priority for the voters either?
#4 brought us an NBC piece on hurricane relief. Next was a series of stories on Bob Woodruff. Keith said, "We have four reports for you tonight", but should have added, "all of them taped, none of them live". There was an interesting piece on past ABC anchors, with footage of Max Robinson and the greatly missed Frank Reynolds. True crime and celebrities filled the #2 slot, and then a segment on a female author who posed as a man.
This being Monday, the pickings at Media Matters are slim, so there were no "worst persons" named from the worlds of politics or broadcasting. Something else that the segment did not include: Keith Olbermann apologizing for Friday's attack on Bill O'Reilly for something the man never said. The best Olby's defenders have come up with is to claim he just made a mistake. If so, why doesn't he correct the record and tell the truth? Just last week Keith was bloviating about how important fact-checking is, adding:
We are so not used to straightforward apologies in this country that we're gushing over somebody just doing the right thing for a change.
But Olby won't do the right thing. If he made a mistake, it demonstrates carelessness, shoddy reporting, and a whole lot of arrogance. Still, it is just a mistake. But the refusal to rectify a mistake, knowing that you are letting a false story stand uncorrected, is more than a mistake. It is a lie.
On Friday, OlbermannWatch caught Keith using a phony quote to make a false charge against Bill O'Reilly. Now that we have exposed his latest bit of treachery, Olby has a decision to make. Will he stonewall, ignore the truth, and let his false story stand? Or will he admit his mistake, apologize to O'Reilly, and take it like a man?
To help Keith decide, we offer these words of advice from the one person he has the highest regard for:
What happens now to...credibility?
Is this the way to apologize for something in public, take a big club, beat up the person you trusted, and then hit yourself in the head a couple of times as well?
We are so not used to straightforward apologies in this country that we're gushing over somebody just doing the right thing for a change.
Should the publisher not at least have verified something of this story on the public benefit angle, at least?
It fits into what humorist Stephen Colbert has defined as "truthiness" in American society.
It was never fact-checked, which is pretty much par for the course...
And one more, our favorite [QuickTime video clip]:
Keith Olbermann, who imagines himself to be oh-so-hip and funny, can dish it out but he can't take it. When Scott McClellan joked about John Kerry calling for a filibuster from the slopes of Switzerland (and it clearly was a joke--even the newswolves of the DC press corps laughed), Olby instead characterized it as a "cheap shot":
The White House showed it was not above mischaracterizing the nature of his presence in the Alps.
As the Friday Countdown continued, KO showed why he's worth the big bucks in reporting results of a New York Times poll:
For the first time Mr Bush heading into a State of the Union address with a majority of Americans disapproving of the job he is doing.
Compare and contrast with this:
The public also divided on Mr Bush's domestic spying program.
Presidential disapproval rating (described as "a majority"): 51%.
People approving of NSA wiretaps (described as a "divided public") 53%.
Do you think there is any chance in the metaphysical universe that Olby would have said it the other way around: the public is divided on the President's job approval, and a majority of the American people approve of the NSA surveillance? Based on the numbers, that would have been a more accurate description. But on The Hour of Spin, propaganda takes precedence over precision.
An interview with John Harwood devolved into an OlbyWhine about why the Democrats aren't being more effective, with Our Hero claiming again that Bush is "Clintonesque". A taped piece from David Gregory included some soundbites from Fred Barnes. Yes, the man who comments on the eeeevil, loathsome Fox News Channel. A recycled NBC report is the closest Fred will ever get to actually appearing with Olby.
The #4 story proved to be another rerun from the mothership: Norah O'Donnell on lobbyists. In the #3 slot Countdown assumed the Rita Cosby mantle with a series of taped reports on the latest tabloid crimes. Then another taped piece on car chases, followed by the ever-popular "Keeping Tabs". And because it has been so shamefully neglected on The Hour of Spin, Oprah was the #1 story.
Poor Ann Coulter must feel snubbed. She was only a runner-up for "worst person" based on a joke about feeding rat poison to Justice John Paul Stevens. The winner? Hey, do you have to ask? It's attack #58, and this one's a pip:
[O'Reilly] has now ripped us here at MSNBC on the air, for supposedly not covering the case of Judge Edward Cashman in Vermont...
Stop the tivo! Before we go any further, suppose we look at what Mr O actually said:
Americans should also remember that the big liberal newspapers like The New York Times and the network newscasts totally ignored the story.
Hmm. No mention of MSNBC yet. Let's read down a little further:
Outlets like MSNBC, a true ratings disaster, continue to cheap-shot FOX News on a daily basis. The boss over there, far-left martinet Rick Kaplan, has virtually destroyed that network as a credible source of information. Kaplan badly damaged CNN as well before he was fired there.
Aha! So he did mention MSNBC. But where is the part where Mr Bill claims MSNBC was "not covering" the Cashman story? Read the whole thing. All of it. Be warned, it will hurt your eyes. How so? You'll hurt your eyes trying to find where Bill O'Reilly claimed MSNBC didn't cover the story. But back to the tivo:
Here's the thing, Bill. The Judge Cashman story? We covered it here on Countdown on January 6th of this year. You didn't start covering it until January 9th.
Shall we check the record? The transcript for January 6 shows that Coundtown's coverage of the story consisted of making Cashman a runner-up for "worst person" (fitting the pattern, since Cashman was a Republican appointee). That was it. That was Countdown's "coverage". And as for Bill not covering it until January 9th? That's because on January 6th, Bill O'Reilly wasn't on. He had the day off! Olby doesn't bother to mention that little detail. And January 9th just happened to be the following Monday, the next day Mr Bill was on the air.
Although he can make snarky insults about Scott McClellan, obviously Keith Olbermann is not above mischaracterizing the nature of Bill O'Reilly's broadcast, when he was on, when he wasn't, what he said, what he didn't say... Hypocrisy, bias, arrogance, and a new O'Reilly attack based on a lie. What more fitting way to conclude another week of The Hour of Spin, than with a hopelessly deranged Olby tilting at those invisible O'Reilly windmills that are out to poison his precious bodily fluids? He's certifiable.
You may recall that back in November, Keith Olbermann named Fox News Channel "worst persons in the world", because they paid Tom DeLay's expenses so he could appear on Fox News Sunday. We noted at the time that Meet the Press has done the exact same thing.
NBC's "Meet the Press" occasionally digs deep, paying $9,550 in travel costs to interview Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., in 2000 and $9,000 to question Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., in person in 2001. "Face the Nation" and "This Week" also have chartered flights, spokeswomen said.
Tom Cruise. Michael Jackson. Howard Stern. We've been wondering why so much of Countdown is taken up by these people, turning at least part of the show into a clone of Entertainment Tonight. Thursday, as Olby took the ultimate step and made Oprah Winfrey his top story, it dawned on us. If it works for Rita Cosby, why shouldn't it work for him? More tabloid means more ratings. Looks like Keith is after a bigger share of those 800 billion flies.
But it's still The Hour of Spin, so after running what seemed like endless clips from Oprah, KO dragged in the one the most far-left, rabidly anti-Bush columnists in the country, Ms Maureen Dowd. Her face looking like an animatronic wax figure, she opined on the Oprah controversy. But the real reason for her appearance was to give her "reaction" to the President's press conference. What exactly will she say? That has to be the least mysterious query since Groucho asked, Who's buried in Grant's Tomb? Olby teed up one of his famous leading, run-on questions:
On several occasions in the last few years this White House has seemingly defied this idea that a lot of, uh, societies have been held together by, that no man can hold back the tide. They're gonna stand there, they're gonna try to do exactly that, if it doesn't really work they'll say, well yeah, it did work, uh, you're wrong, and if you question them about that they'll get you in a semantical discussion. Is not the whole idea of the, this definition, international vs domestrick, domestic, it this not, by itself, a red herring--I mean, you could call it intergalactic spying and the issue is the legality, not the name? Right?
Always leave it to Keith to ask the tough questions.
The Dowd hit Olby's softball out of the park:
Dick Cheney wants to throw off all of these rules. He wants to go to war without permission. He wants to torture without permission. He wants to snoop without permission. Because he and Rummy were Ford officials at a time when Presidential power shrank. They felt emasculated.
Then KO said to Dr. Dowd that George Bush is conducting a "fingers-in-ears, shout 'la-la-la-la-la' presidency". And it went downhill from there. Bush is in a bubble, Bush is a liar, you know the drill.
In the #4 slot, we got more clips from Oprah and another interview on the subject, this time with writer Seth Mnookin. He passed KO's litmus test because he not only does he write for Vanity Fair, but Salon.com too. Olby opened the #3 segment with another of his patented literary references, this time to the novel 1984:
The White House could not have created more parallels to that book if they'd named George Orwell Chief of Staff.
After clips from the President's press conference, Dana Milbank was back yet again! By now he must have his own parking spot right next to Keith in that Seacaucus strip mall. More loaded questions, more predictable responses. These two have gone down this road so many times that it felt like the Countdown version of Groundhog Day.
In the #2 slot: a recycled NBC report about a wrong photo on a CIA website. No mention was made of the time Olby put up a photo of Max Cleland and claimed it was talk show host Neil Boortz. More celebrity news followed, including a bit on George Galloway getting kicked off British Big Brother. No mention was made of the tape that just surfaced showing Galloway meeting Uday Hussein and promising that he would support him to the end.
After giving a local Young Republicans chapter runner-up status, The Obsessed One named Bill O'Reilly "worst person in the world" for doing an interview about dominatrixes whose clients die. KO wrapped it up by screaming, "Loofah!" After O'Reilly attack #57, Olby ended the hour with a scintillating discussion of a newly discovered planet. No, not OlbyPlanet. That's the one Keith lives on.
Right off the bat on Wednesday night, Keith gave us an Olby News Alert:
The White House charges taxpayers for this, an actual press release...
Can you believe it? Press releases cost money! And what's more the government actually uses tax revenues to pay for them. As opposed to, say, a donation cup outside the White House? Keith went on to dismiss the notion that the NSA phone calls were "international" rather than "domestic" as Clintonesque word parsing. Then he ran a clip of the President's speech (less than 30 seconds), adding:
A trick question. He did not say what those predecessors authorized...
A trick question? What question? Bush didn't ask a question. Nobody asked a question. But KO describes "it" (what?) as a "trick question". Maybe that's the trick: there was no question at all. Don't try to understand it. It's OlbyLogic.
There were the usual clips from Scott McClellan's press conference, featuring David Gregory who, according to Olby, "brought his A-game". And since the Democrat talking point of the day is the Katrina investigation, Olby stuck to the script and referred to White House "stonewalling" over and over. He claimed there were complaints from "members of Congress in both parties", but other than one Democrat, he didn't name any names.
Ken Bazinet, of the New York Daily News, offered the speculation that the administration is trying to cover up the fact that people were on vacation when the hurricane hit. Then KO shifted gears and asked him why Rumsfeld hadn't read a report commissioned by the Pentagon, Bazinet had to correct him, pointing out that the report wasn't out yet, only an early draft. But the newshawk made amends by delivering the money quote that Olby was waiting for:
[This administration] is trying to turn really stonewalling into an Olympic sport, and really going for the gold.
He'll be back.
Then yet another reporters-vs-McClellan clip about the difference between "domestic" and "international" (we thought Olby had covered this earlier, but there's nothing like repetition to make a spin point). KO took the press release referenced earlier and then picked it apart, line by line. It was one of those painful, supposed-to-be funny bits that makes anyone to the right of Hugo Chavez wince. Even dragging Jack Abramoff into it didn't help.
In the #4 slot was a taped piece on the dangers of mining, courtesy of NBC. #3 dealt with a family tragedy story lifted from ITV, and a strange your-son-is-dead hoax via a report by an NBC local station. Then we got a segment on iPod piracy recycled from NBC, and one on Richard Hatch going off to the pokey.
The "worst person" winners were the people at that "special interest group" Accuracy in Media. (Has KO ever referred to Media Matters as a "special interest group"?) Their offense was suggesting that Fox News may be drifting to the left. Of course Keith couldn't resist feeding his Olbsession:
One of AIM's emailers did, however, observe, "O'Reilly has really gone bonkers". So anyway, that's unanimous.
#56 and counting.
There was a dog that did not bark. A large dog. A big, big dog. So big that MSNBC was plugging it endlessly just yesterday:
Keith shows you the facts, shows you the law, so you can decide if warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is a crime. Countdown, MSNBC tomorrow at eight.
Somehow, with all the Big News about iPods, Richard Hatch, and Michael Jackson, the Great Olbermann Legal Seminar never took place. False advertising? Bait and switch? We report, you decide.
Did you know that The Great Leak Case today "roared back into the headlines"? That's what Olby claimed on Tuesday night. How many papers made it their big headline? How many news programs led with the story? We know of only one: The Hour of Spin. The Big News? Scooter Libby wants to use classified information during the trial, and therefore some of the proceeding may not be made public. Wow. Can't you just hear those headlines roaring from coast to coast?
Countdown Crony Dana Milbank showed up to play along with Keith's hyping of the Great Leak Case, along with those yet-unseen purported photos of Abramoff with the President. Plus he worked in a mention of Halliburton. You can be sure Milbank will get a return invite. Then Olby went back to yesterday's news: Gen Hayden's speech about the NSA surveillance program. In fact, he showed more of the General's appearance on Tuesday than he did on Monday. Why would he do that? Can you guess?
Time's up. Keith claimed to have caught the General in a mistake. So he played the footage to embarrass him! If Olby were any more transparent, he would be cellophane. The General was asked if the 4th Amendment required "probable cause" to search and/or seize. The questioner claimed it did; the General said no, the standard for search and seizure in the constitution was reasonableness. Keith arrogantly stated "maybe they have a different constitution at the NSA" when he read this:
The right of the people to be secure...against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated; no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause...
Note to Mr Humility: the General wasn't asked what the constitutional standards are for issuing a warrant (probable cause). He was asked what the standards are for search and seizure (reasonableness). There have been gazillions of warrantless searches that were legal because they were found to be...reasonable! In other words, the General was right, Olby was wrong. But that's no more Big News than KO's Libby scoop.
Those were not the only painted ponies Olby was riding. Another major spin point of the evening dealt with Katrina. A pre-landfall report said that the levees could fail. KO repeated, over and over, the President's statement that "no one anticipated" that the levees would fail. Now the President has explained, more than once, that his comment was regarding the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, when headlines were claiming New Orleans "dodged a bullet" and it appeared the city would escape serious damage. But KO saw no need to offer any of that context. Telling just one side of a story is bias. Doing so five times in 20 minutes escalates it to propaganda.
The Bad News from Iraq was covered with a recycled NBC piece. In the #3 slot was another slam at Oprah and her embarrassing book club gaffe. (We're not sure why Olby thinks this merits updates week after week. Is there a photo somewhere of Oprah with Jack Abramoff?) Some free PR for Howard Stern followed touting Sirius Satellite Radio's 3 million subscribers. XM's subscription base (nearly twice that number) was not mentioned. Then: penguin eggs, celebrities, and TomKat with the eerie Michael Musto. Slim pickings at Media Matters, so KO had to settle for worst person Barry Bonds.
The most frightening moment of the hour came during an MSNBC promo:
Keith shows you the facts, shows you the law, so you can decide if warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is a crime. Countdown, MSNBC tomorrow at eight.
That should send the spinning wheel into overdrive.
It's Monday. The Hour of Spin is back, and Olby was off and running:
[the Bush administration] is deadly serious about relaunching as its campaign theme: Only we can save you and anyone who disagrees with us is unpatriotic and maybe a terrorist sympathizer.
After linking Usama Bin Laden and Karl Rove (because both "emerged from the shadows" last week--a subliminal nod to the tin-foilers who are convinced one is doing the bidding of the other), Keith made much out of the fact that Bush and his allies are now calling the NSA program "terrorist surveillance". He played clips of Dan Bartlett saying it over and over. KO didn't display an ounce of irony, despite how often, and repetitively, Olby himself pounds home the phrases "domestic spying" and "spying on Americans" (nearly a half-dozen times in just the first 8 minutes of Monday's show). Richard Wolffe stopped by to comment on Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff, and other favorite topics of Keith.
Olby showed a brief clip (maybe ten seconds, and that's being generous) of Gen Hayden's defense of the NSA program, and then he brought in rabidly leftist Kate Martin. As Keith put it, she was there for a reason:
For a reality check on that claim [from Gen Hayden] and everything we heard from the Bush administration today...
This encapsulates the modus operandi of Countdown and its host Keith Olbermann. Run a 30-second clip from the President (because the news of the day forces you to) and then devote several minutes to ridiculing it. Play ten seconds of Gen Hayden and bring in a notorious anti-administration radical for five minutes of Bush administration bashing.
Olby's other big story turned out to be about water quality and Halliburton. [snicker "He said Halliburton!" snicker] Of all the pollution stories in the country, this is the most important? Well it is if Keith wants to bring in a lefty Senator to chant the usual anti-Halliburton mantra. And to no one's utter surprise, that's just what he did: a lengthy interview with a partisan Democrat, and no Republican or Halliburton defender allowed to state a case. And people wonder why we call The Hour of Spin the most biased news hour on television.
Friday night, Keith Olbermann managed to make NSA surveillance again the lead story on the Hour of Spin. Tossing off references to "Big Brother", "George Orwell", and the NSA "spying on you", Olby was in rare form:
...the administration's latest push to convince everybody else that the President has the constitutional power to order all the spying, with none of the bothersome warrants, that he wants.
Just saying it does not make it so.
Just to make this a little bit more divisive, Karl Rove addressed all this in a speech today and associated it with the pre-9/11, post-9/11 mindset drivel.
There has been a lot of condescension from the administration over the years since the election but, honestly, do they, do they think everybody here is a six-year old idiot?
The way Craig Crawford cackled at that last barb would lead any rational viewer to think, yes, everybody there is a six-year-old idiot. Otherwise, Olbermann's Brain added nothing to KO's rants except to serve in his usual capacity as a living, breathing rubber stamp.
Then Olby moved on to the Google subpoenas, painting the issue in the broadest, vaguest possible terms. Despite his conspiratorial concerns about what the government is going to "do" with all that data, Keith never mentioned that the Justice Department wants statistics, not the identities of the people searching. No matter, according to Olby, it means "more is being sought here than meets the eye".
As the #4 story, Keith took up ethics in the House again. Aha, finally he gets to the bribery scandal surrounding William Jefferson (D). Um, no. Instead he came up with something about Bill Frist, asbestos, and stock traders getting tipped off about upcoming legislation. For an impartial look at this manufactured issue, in came Brian Baird (D):
Apparently Tony Rudy, one of Majority Leader Tom DeLay's top staffers, was actually making day trades while in the service of Tom DeLay. Now we don't have necessarily solid evidence yet...
Well done, Mr Baird. Joe McCarthy couldn't have said it better. When Keith brought up--who else?--Jack Abramoff, Baird went straight to the talking points: Duke Cunningham, Tom Delay, and the Culture of Corruption. He didn't mention William Jefferson (D), and of course neither did Olby.
After a recycled NBC report on the kidnapped journalist, KO decided it was time to do some PR work for Usama Bin Laden. In his latest tape, the terrorist recommended an anti-American book, and eager to give UBL a helping hand, Keith gave the far-left author (William Blum) some free PR by doing a live interview with him! We couldn't make this stuff up if we tried. According to Blum, you have to understand the terrorists, because they have "a very clear and good motivation". They're only terrorists because of "the things we do to them"--the bombings, the torture, all under the command of that Great Satan in the White House.
Whales, celebrities, and dating consumed the rest of the program, except for the "worst person" segment. One of Olby's choices was Frank Abramoff, for, if you can believe it, criticizing George Clooney's crude remarks at the Golden Globes. You see, everyone is allowed to criticize Abramoff: Clooney, Olbermann's Brain, and Keith himself. But if anybody says one word against George Clooney--even a 78-year-old man defending his son--he is an evil swine, and will be ridiculed on national tv by a hypocritical sports guy with a bad wig. just when you think Olby couldn't get any more loathsome and repellent.
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