"COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN" (8:00-9:00 P.M. ET)
Host: Keith Olbermann
Topics/Guests:
SELIG SAYS "NO CELEBRATION FOR BONDS"; MINOR LEAGUE BASEBALL PLAYER THROWS A BAT AT AN UMPIRE; NEW YORK METS FAN WHO MADE A 'VIRAL VIDEO' OF THE 1986 WORLD SERIES: Conor Lastowka, the Mets fan
OLBERMANN-O'REILLY FEUD: Tom Breuer and Joseph Amann, co-authors of "Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O'Reilly"
"Olbermann Watch Makes Its Debut on Countdown!"
We were dreading Friday's Countdown, but among all the detritus of OlbySpin was an inadvertent nod to Olbermann Watch: so powerful and influential that Orange Man himself reads it, and even lifts from it! The hour began with comedian Keith Olbermann bellowing about Rush Limbaugh's settlement agreement with Florida prosecutors. Basically Limbaugh agreed to a diversion program, where a single charge is held in abeyance to be dropped after 18 months of following conditions. Mark Potter of NBC gave a factual report that contrasted mightily with Krazy Keith's hyperventilating. Then KO decided to up the innuendo ante:
Scandal, something of a cottage industry among Republicans these days...
Yeah, particularly when you don't bother reporting any of the Democratic scandals. Olby dredged up that election-day phone-jamming scheme again, and trumpeted a "financial connection" between that scandal and Haley Barbour. The connection? Barbour was "one of the original investors" in the company behind the scheme. Oh, and there is no evidence "that he played any role" in the scheme. Well, there's a headline. Since this involves speculation and innuendo, that's David Shuster's cue. The doubly discredited hack repeated old news from months ago about phone calls made to a general number at the White House. Olby thought there were "20 or 30 dots" to connect and wanted to know if maybe Jack Abramoff is involved. Slippery Shuster was happy to imply that he might be. But something was missing.
With all the talk of the Republican "cottage industry of scandal", we don't recall Krazy Keith or Slippery ever reporting on another election-day scheme. Three Democratic campaign workers and a Congresswoman's son (Look! A connection to high-ranked Democrats!) slashed the tires at a Bush-Cheney heaquarters on election day, 2004. They were sentenced on Wednesday and will be spending time in The House of Many Doors. How easy it is to paint scandal as a "Republican cottage industry", when you simply fail to report on Democrats, even when they have been convicted and sentenced to the pokey.
KO and DS engaged in more rehashing of Karl Rove's testimony (from two days ago!); no, there was no news on this front. This was just to keep the issue on the front burner so all six members of the Krazy Keith fan club will keep watching. When he got to the #4 story, Keith showed Dennis Hastert switching from a photo-op hydrogen car to an SUV, and a clip of Barbara Boxer who was also tooling around in a gas-guzzler. Dana Milbank wasn't wearing any Halloween garb, and he and KO chewed the fat about gas prices, $100 rebates, and all things oily. Olby took the President's request for authority to raise fuel economy standards as a ploy to "take the power away from Congress". Natch.
After oddball, it was another edition of ESPN on A-Mess-NBC, as talk turned to Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, thrown bats, etc. In the #2 slot, Monica Novotny reported on the secret code embedded in the ruling by the Judge on the DaVinci Code case, and a KO jab at Bill O'Reilly (not substantive enough to count as attack #83) led into celebrity news.
Finally came the segment the infamous, deplorable Keith Olbermann had been so tirelessly promoting since the top of the hour. And, much to our delight, it began with this audio clip lifted straight off Olbermann Watch! So great is our impact and prestige that we are required reading even for Krazy Keith himself. Though he is willing to credit blue blogs like Crooks & Liars when he appropriates their media clips, he didn't give any nod of acknowledgement Olbermann Watch tonight, even though he used our clip. Anyhow, KO was just warming up for a full segment bashing Mr Bill O'Reilly himself, and this definitely qualified as O'Reilly Attack #83.
Olby brought in a pair of hate-monger authors to participate in the bash-fest, and immediately wanted to know if O'Reilly was going to apologize for not knowing that the publisher of a paper had died a few months years ago. Actually, it turns out O'Reilly was right about the man's name; they just put the wrong picture up on screen (the publisher's deceased father, who has the same name), not too different from what KO did when he confused Neil Boortz with Max Cleland. Keith Olbermann talking about apologizing for mistakes? The irony is rich. The three chortled about O'Reilly "errors", but the only one cited, other than the dead guy, was when Mr Bill cited the "Paris Business Review", an apparently nonexistent publication.
KO got a good laugh out of that, but we wonder what he found so funny. Does he expect us to forget that he himself reported Big News from the "Hoosier Gazette", telling his audience about the findings of a "study" by one "Dr Lee"? The article was a fake; no such newspaper exists. KO lifted this "news" from a parody website, but the clueless Man-Tan Man never bothered to do even the most rudimentary fact-checking before he spouted this misinformation as fact to his 352,000 viewers. Keep laughing, Keith.
And that's The Hour of Spin for this, the 70th day of the Keith Olbermann CoverUp.
"COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN" (8:00-9:00 P.M. ET)
Guest Host: Brian Unger
Topics/Guests:
SENATE REPORT FINDS THAT FEMA IS BEYOND REPAIR: Richard Wolffe, Newsweek White House correspondent
PROTEST ROCK FROM BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, NEIL YOUNG, PINK, AND OTHERS: David Was, contributor to NPR's "Day to Day"
Does anyone really believe that Keith Olbermann writes his own copy for Countdown? How odd that even when he isn't there, the script sounds just like every other Hour of Spin. At least tonight, A-Mess-NBC had the honesty to admit the show is a joke by bringing in Brian Unger, formerly of Comedy Central and The Daily Show.
Slippery Shuster delivered another one of his Karl Rove specularamas, complete with weasel words like "might" and "could". Plus a special treat: more Shuster gossip from an unnamed single source. And Duke Cunningham's scandal may have involved prostitutes, according to the Wall Street Journal. A report on "protest rock", including a fawning interview with a leftist "expert", could have come straight from the Krazy Keith playbook. (If KO can incessantly cite the Nixon playbook, then we can cite his.) And loads of video regurgitated from the network mothership.
For the record, the stories were: #5: scandals (Republican only) and FEMA; #4: gas prices and oil profits; #3: protest songs; #2: the Hollywood Pellicano scandal and celebrity news; #1: EXCLUSIVE! Angelina Jolie interview.
And that's The Hour of Spin for this, the 69th day of the Keith Olbermann CoverUp.
We have posted at our other place a montage of audio clips from the first broadcast of the new Fox Radio show with Brian Kilmeade and Judge Andrew Napolitano. We pulled from that file this snippet that deals with our Olby [mp3 audio]:
COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN" (8:00-9:00 P.M. ET)
Host: Keith Olbermann
Topics/Guests:
KARL ROVE: David Shuster
TONY SNOW: Dana Milbank, Washington Post
UNITED 93: Devin Gordon, Newsweek
BRITTNEY SPEARS: Michael Musto
"Trial and Error"
You didn't have to be a member of the Psychic Friends Network to predict what the top story on tonight's Countdown would be. Rove testifies! And yes, Keith Olbermann dragged in the doubly discredited David Shuster to speculate about what it might mean, and to relay the opinions of numerous, unnamed "lawyers". Every negative inference was trumpeted, but what's the point of detailing the Niagara of innuendo from Shuster, when nothing an unreliable hack says can be taken at face value?
KO also had Tony Snow in his sights, snarking as early as his opening spiel about Snow really being on the White House payroll all along. Of course, that kind of conflicts with all the quotes Olby rattled off yesterday where Mr Snow was critical of Bush. Keith must have hit his head one too many times for his short-term memory loss to be this severe. "Snow Job", "Spin Doctor", and other predictable hilarities preceded that master of satorial flamboyance, Dana Milbank, who was egged on by KO to liken the hiring to the Armstrong Williams situation. Then Keith suddenly remembered those critical columns again. The twists and turns of OlbySpin are just too dizzying to contemplate.
Poll numbers kicked off the #4 story, which focused on Laura Bush as a campaigner. It was another piece of tape regurgitated from NBC. Oddball preceded a story about a 9/11 memorial that is being opposed by a Republican (surprise!) Congressman. Then the topic turned to the new film "United 93". Keith noted:
Critics have said it is too soon, not even five years after the tragedy, for a feature film on it.
"Critics"? All critics? Some critics? He could just as easily have said, "Critics raved about the film". So why did he phrase it as he did? Devin Gordon of Newsweek found the movie to be powerful, but suggested it's not something he wanted to see. He seemed disappointed that the movie stuck to the facts and didn't include some sort of "commentary" on the event.
Another rerun from the mothership dealt with technology in law enforcement, and the rest of the program was dedicated to celebrity news (Teri Hatcher! Michelle Rodriguez! Tom Cruise! Brittney Spears!). The creepy Michael Musto did his usual shtick, while Keith's pretend forced laughter sounded phonier than ever. Meanwhile, the Media Matters Minute brought us O'Reilly attack #82, for the crime of objecting to a newspaper that he says smeared him. Olby's lifting of this item from the Soros site comes exactly one day after Media Matters put up free PR video of KO's last O'Reilly attack. So this one should appear sometime Thursday.
It is useless to wonder when Keith will ever report on the scandals involving Mollohan and Jefferson (both Ds), but we had another silent pooch on our mind. It was just two weeks ago when Olby, eager to portray the administration as incompetent, made a screaming headline out of a terror trial in Lodi, California. He put a soundbite in his opening spiel about how innocent the accused was (as it turns out, it was from a hired witness for the defense). He bellowed that the case was weak, and claimed it was all but "irretrievably lost". It was a typical Olbermann propaganda piece in every respect.
We were reminded of it today when we read that a verdict against the chief suspect in the case had been rendered: Guilty! This trial was headline news when Keith thought he could spin it to make the government look bad. But on tonight's Countdown, Olby couldn't even bother to tell his viewers the verdict, let alone admit his error in dismissing the case as all but lost.
And that's The Hour of Spin for this, the 68th day of the Keith Olbermann CoverUp.
CIA LEAK POLITICS: Larry Johnson, fmr. CIA officer; Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher
GAS PRICES: Rick Klein
"Exhuming McCarthy"
It would take more than the efforts of one humble Olbermann Watcher to catalog all the spin, propaganda, and outrageous drivel that the infamous, deplorable Keith Olbermann regurgitated on Tuesday's night's Countdown. From the opening spiel, where he bellowed about scapegoats and "McCarthyism", to his interview guests--including the disreputable radical Larry Johnson--this was an Hour of Spin for the record books. The Man-Tan Man bellowed:
A witchhunt is still a witchhunt, and McCarthyism, whether named for proponent or victim, still sends shivers.
Adding to the surrealism of the world as seen on OlbyPlanet, all this frenzy was over yesterday's news: Mary McCarthy denying, through surrogates, that she was the criminal who leaked classified information. A standard Olby ploy, repeating and rehyping old stories for a disinformational purpose, was in full bloom tonight. He wanted to know how this leak was found so rapidly, when we "still don't know" who leaked Plame's name. KO has already forgotten that the government-appointed prosecutor in fact does know who leaked Plame's name; he just hasn't made it public. Didn't Olby himself discuss that with slippery Shuster just the other day? We realize Keith doesn't know who's in the President's cabinet, but shouldn't he know what's been on his own show?
Then we get to the unsavory Mr Johnson, the ex-CIA genius who told us, two months before 9/11, that we have "little to fear" from terrorists, because all these "fantasies" about a terrorist threat were just "fiction". This impartial "expert" has even delivered the DNC weekly radio address, just the sort of resume line that endears him to Krazy Keith. So again KO trots out a left-wing ideologue to parrot his spin and give exactly one side of the story: she's a "scapegoat", maybe she's being "framed", "political hacks" are trying to "intimidate the press". Johnson, with his great track record of keen analysis, vouched for the fact that the prisons leak did no intelligence damage. A journalist might have asked him to back that up, but a hack like Krazy Keith doesn't know the meaning of "follow-up".
For two nights in a row, Olby has foisted on his viewers ideological cronies of the fired ex-CIA liar, giving zero time to anyone with a different point of view. What leftist will KO drag out tomorrow night to continue his on-air crusade as Chairman of the Mary McCarthy Defense Committee?
There was more spin to come from Greg Mitchell, of Editor and Publisher. This brought a revival of Keith's Konvoluted Konspiracy, and tonight the "expert" guest was more than willing to buy into KO's fevered fantasies. Olby suggested that the administration was trying to "criminalize" reporting, and Greg was exactly the kind of subservient human ditto machine that Keith requires of his favored guests.
KO took a few shots at Tony Snow, but don't get the idea that it was anything clever or original. He just lifted a bunch of quotes, without verifying them, from the far-left Think Progress. As is typical of the "journalism" of Keith Olbermann, he didn't even credit his "source". Then the topic turned to energy and gas prices. Rick Klein, of the far-left Boston Globe was next in the Countdown Chair of Claptrap, but he broke precedent with the two simpletons who preceded him by being relatively sane. After "oddball", The Hour of Spin took its traditional voyage to the bottom of the barrel (which tonight, even more than usual, was a short trip). There followed a parade of "reports" that are certain to be future Peabody nominees: Paris Hilton, Charlie Sheen, internet videos, Cindy Margolis, and standing room areas for airplanes (abruptly cut off by a loss of satellite).
Dogs that didn't bark included the scandal surrounding Paul Mollohan (D), the Zarqawi video, governmental consensus in Iraq, new background checks on port workers, and anything else that doesn't comport with KO's biases. We wouldn't want him getting nauseous now, would we?
And that's The Hour of Spin for this, the 67th day of the Keith Olbermann CoverUp.
"COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN" (8:00-9:00 P.M. ET)
Host: Keith Olbermann
Topics/Guests:
RESIGNATION CALLS AND THE WHITE HOUSE: Howard Fineman, Newsweek chief political correspondent and MSNBC political analyst
CIA LEAK FOLLOW UP: Melissa Boyle Mahle, retired CIA officer
DEATH OF ELVIS IMPERSONATORS?: Stingray, an Elvis impersonator
"My Pet Scapegoat"
Monday's Countdown found Keith Olbermann with his own unique spin on the fired CIA operative: she's been railroaded! She really didn't leak, and she really didn't flunk the relevant portions of her polygraph. Of course, if she flunked any part of her polygraph, that's pretty strong evidence that she is a liar, but Olby chose not to follow that line of reasoning. All of this based on Mary McCarthy's denials? Umm, not exactly. It's predicated on the word of her attorney.
As per Andrea Mitchell's report, the slip-and-fall lawyer insists McCarthy "did not leak classified information". One suspects some fine parsing going on here, since there were no denials of her unauthorized contacts with the mainstream media. KO, of course, quickly suggested that she was being made a "scapegoat"--he instantly took the attorney's version as 100% truthful. Going even further:
This of course all reads like a page from the Richard Nixon playbook.
Olby's copy of that playbook must be in tatters by now, since he refers to it so often. And just to make sure tonight's Olbermann Talking Points are in no danger of being contradicted, he brought in Melissa Mahle, friend of Valerie Plame and (like the thief) John Kerry supporter. KO served up another of his patented leading questions:
Extrapolate for me, assuming that the CIA did not completely change in the time after you left it, what could have, what must have, these polygraphs done to morale and productivity?
Mahle described the search for the thief as a "witchhunt" that adds to "discontents". Keith found a way to bring up Valerie Plame, and raised the suggestion again that McCarthy is a "scapegoat"; Mahle refused to bite and basically said we'll have to "wait and see".
Poll numbers always get reported on The Hour of Spin when they are down, so the latest CNN poll was featured in the #4 slot. KO gleefully relayed the LA Times opinion that Cheney and Rumsfeld should be replaced, and ran a clip from 60 Minutes where yet another Kerry supporter was critical of the administration. Watching Countdown, you'd think everybody was a Kerry supporter, but that's because they're the only ones who get any attention from KO. Howard Fineman, the Chameleon of Pundits, nattered on about "credibility", but Olby immediately brought it back to tonight's talking point: the pseudo-denials by Mary McCarthy's mouthpiece. Howie did his bit: the CIA was "pressured": it was all the work of those "neocons".
At the tail end of the segment, KO mentioned what he apparently considered a trivial, unimportant story: the terrorist attacks in Egypt. It got all of 30 seconds.
After "oddball", the subject was gas prices, and the infamous, deplorable Keith Olbermann made sure to note that the White House has connections to "big oil". After a recycled NBC report from the impartial, ever-fair David Gregory, Ken Bazinet of the New York Daily News said the President will "try to change the subject", while Olby again brought up the "business background" (i.e. "big oil") of Bush and Cheney.
The Man with the Tan was beaming as he introduced the #2 story: Tom Cruise News! After still more celebrity palaver, the hour wrapped with a Pulitzer-worthy report on Elvis impersonators, complete with a rendition of "The Impossible Dream".
In the Media Matters Minute, Ben & Jerry's was "worst" for a bad choice of a new ice cream flavor. But fear not, Bill O'Reilly made it as a runner-up (attack #81) for saying he trusted what his military analysts told him about Iraq. KO dutifully lifted not only Bill's comment but also the selectively cherry-picked quotes from the analysts straight off the Soros website. Watch for Media Matters to put up its reciprocal Olby video clip within 24 hours.
With all the breaking Tom Cruise and Elvis Presley news, KO just didn't have time to report on the new consensus Prime Minister in Iraq. And despite his monomaniacal obsession with scandals that involve Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, or other Republicans, he still has yet to report on Alan Mollohan, who was pressured to resign from the House Ethics Committee and is the subject of a widening federal probe. Oh wait, he has a (D) after his name. 'Nuff said.
I am going to delete this post later but a heads up to all you loyal Olbermann Watch readers. I am heading to to the Radio & Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) Convention in Las Vegas to speak on a panel (Citizen Journalism: Embracing the New Power of Your Audience) on Tuesday morning so I don't expect to be too active here until I get back. If you saw Good Night and Good Luck this is the convention Edward R. Murrow addressed at the opening and closing of the film. And the Olbermann peg? They have awarded Keith two Edward R. Murrow Awards.
Details below...
Citizen Journalism: Embracing the New Power of Your Audience
From cell phone video to personal blogs, everyone’s becoming a reporter. And they all have suggestions on how we should run our newsrooms. Learn how to embrace the citizen journalist movement and integrate their perspectives into our newscasts and websites. Plus, hear the results of exclusive new research Discuss and debate the future of journalism with a distinguished panel of visionaries who will tell you what you need to know so you won’t be left behind.
Panelists:
Neil Budde, General Manager, Yahoo! News
Laura Ling, Supervising Producer, Current TV
Adrian Van Klaveren,Deputy Director of News, BBC News
Robert Cox, President, Media Bloggers Association
KO Hired Detective to Hunt Down Object of Schoolboy Crush
"I just wanted to find out what happened to her" - Keith Olbermann
On ESPN Radio, Keith Olbermann admitted to hiring a private investigator to track down his "ideal woman", Mrs. Rice, a former social studies teacher with whom Olbermann had become infatuated decades earlier. Listen below as his stunned broadcast partner Dan Patrick describes KO's behavior as "stalking":
Source: The Dan Patrick Show on ESPN Radio (note: segments of "The Big Show" portion of the broadcast are available for free at the iTunes Music Store, to listen to the entire show you must register here
Conservative blogger Robert Cox, who writes the National Debate blog, told me he was amazed at the quality of Wikipedia and thought it was a great resource. But there was something about the free online community-generated encyclopedia that was getting under his skin - what Cox believed was a liberal bias in many hot-button topic entries, despite Wikipedia's principle of giving a neutral point of view (NPOV).
Cox felt there was a liberal tilt to the entry on George W. Bush, Bill Clinton , and the partial-birth abortion entry, to name a few. Plus, at one point, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales invoked the dreaded WP:OFFICE command - basically a unilateral edit done only by Wales - to tone down a scathing liberal point-of-view entry on the conservative site NewsMax.com .
So I thought it might be a good idea to have a three-way email discussion between Cox (pictured at left) and Wikipedia founder Wales (pictured above) to find out what the project's effervescent leader thought about political bias and how Wikipedia deals with it.
The discussion quickly turns to my experience with the Keith Olbermann entry and gets a bit testy.
I have had my own direct experience with editors of the Keith Olbermann page which suggests this is the case. I edit a blog called Olbermann Watch . Not that it was ever my goal in life but I am now the leading blog critic of Keith Olbermann and a recognized authority on Keith Olbermann (citation: quoted in Washington Post, New York Observer, Hartford Courant, Online Journalism Review, etc.).
Not only do I know a great deal about Keith Olbermann, I also have a good deal of familiarity with some of the Wikipedia editors who have watch-listed his entry — liberal fans of Keith Olbermann. Some of these fan/editors have declared online that the Keith Olbermann page is their “pet project� and, not surprisingly, the entry reads more like a “fan site� than an encyclopedia entry. Some of these editors have openly sought to use that page to market their own fan sites and forums. Not surprisingly, the Keith Olbermann entry is massively non-NPOV.
UPDATE:
Mathew Ingram, technology writer with The Globe and Mail in Toronto, weighs in
"If journalism suffers from an institutional malaise, it's because we have too few journalists like Olbermann who are willing to speak truth to power."
"COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN" (8:00-9:00 P.M. ET)
Host: Keith Olbermann
Topics/Guests:
IS HARRIET MIERS THE NEXT TO GO AT THE WHITE HOUSE?: Mike Allen, TIME White House correspondent
COVER OF ROLLING STONE - "THE WORST PRESIDENT IN HISTORY": Sean Wilentz, author of the article and director of American Studies at Princeton University
"Whistling in the Dark"
We wondered how long it would take for Keith Olbermann to suggest that the woman fired for stealing classified secrets and giving them to a reporter was really just a "whistle-blower". Bingo! It happened as soon as the opening spiel was over, just 01:40 into the Hour of Spin. Andrea Mitchell was there to discuss the CIA's "unprecedented" action of firing a leaker. Olby quickly tried to suggest the thief could defend herself as a "whistle-blower", and Mitchell replied:
Well, sure.
Well NO, Andrea. And NO, Keith. There is no whistle-blower protection for people who give away government secrets. People within the CIA who have a problem with something internal or classified can take it to Congress. People who steal secrets and sell them, or give them away to reporters, are not whistle-blowers, and cannot be whistle-blowers. It's a little thing called the law.
You can always trust Krazy Keith's tin-foil instincts to come up with a conspiracy theory to fit any occasion, and he didn't fail us tonight:
Let's limit ourselves to three events that have occurred in the last week: Dana Priest gets the Pulitzer Prize; Bill Bennett, former Education Secretary, still tight with the administration, says she and the reporters of the New York Times who broke the domestic spy story should not be getting awards, they should be getting jail time; then this firing and the confrontation happens. Are those things coincidences of timing, or is there a line running through them that's something other than just chronology?
Ms Mitchell either didn't follow Keith's Konvoluted Konspiracy, or deliberately chose to vague up her answer so as not to embarrass KO by telling him: You're nuts! Olby wanted to know if a "brazen" action like this--firing a thief of classified secrets--is "something that goes through the White House". Yes, Keith. Karl Rove and Dick Cheney ordered it, because she was getting too close to the hidden agenda of Halliburton's helicopters.
Andrea didn't bite on KO's most preposterous lines, so it was time to call in Olbermann's most preposterous "expert", disbarred lawyer and leader of the impeach-Bush crowd, John Dean. This was a great opportunity for Keith to compare the firing of the thief to Richard Nixon and the Pentagon papers. For his part, the ex-con said firing the thief will not "sit well" with people in government. Krazy Keith peered into his crystal ball to divine the motive of the thief in one of his trademark run-on sentences:
We now understand, with the revelation of who Deep Throat was last year, in the person of Mark Felt from the FBI, that the leaking in 1972, 1973, 1974, was about getting information out that the system was trying to contain, that there were people who, at that bureau level, or at that organization, or agency, level, uh, were offended that the rule of law was being skirted with. Do we assume that's what we're seeing in this case, that that same sort of reaction is still there, is still present, is still a, a, uh, check or balance...
Sorry, we just couldn't type any more of this verbal diarrhea. (And yes, he really did say the rule of law "was being skirted with".) On OlbyPlanet, people who are upset with laws being skirted are perfectly entitled to register their concern by going out and brazenly breaking the law themselves! Surely, even felon Dean isn't going to buy this:
That typically is the whistle-blower motive.
AAIIEEEEE! "Whistle-blower" again! No wonder the ex-con was disbarred. He is obviously as much in the dark about the law as KO is, but that's probably why Keith asked him on. Anyone knowledgable would give the Krazy one's theories the horse laugh. But the spin wasn't over yet, as the infamous, deplorable Keith Olbermann came up with yet another gem:
It is clearly semantics, and only semantics, to say there is a difference in these two acts: a CIA officer decides to clue somebody in on these former Soviet Gulags which are now being used as detention centers by this country, and a President decides to declassify classified information so it can be then used to discredit a detractor.
Yes, it's just semantics that the President has the right to declassify and Mary McCarthy doesn't. If that's right, and there's no difference, then why did anyone bother to investigate the Plame leak? Is Keith Olbermann really this stupid, or does he think the viewers of A-Mess-NBC are? (We won't even go into the spin behind the notion that rebutting Joe Wilson's arguments means you are trying to "discredit" Joe Wilson.) Once again, Olby brought up Keith's Konvoluted Konspiracy, the one Andrea Mitchell tactfully avoided, but even the disbarred lawyer thought it was dubious, to say the least. And all of this, before the first commerial break! But fear not, there was more to come on the Friday night cavalcade of Bush-bashers.
The #4 segment began with another snipe at a cable news station that actually has viewers. Olby snarked that Brit Hume was skeptical of a CBS poll that had Bush at 34% because it oversampled Democrats, but now Fox's own poll shows Bush at 33%. Of course these polls were months apart, so Krazy's point was...? Don't try to make sense of it. All Olbermann has going for him are the snickers and giggles of the moonbat crowd he programs for, so what he says really doesn't have to make any sense.
This was a lead-in for the next Bush-basher, Sean Wilentz, writer for the academic journal, Rolling Stone. Keith helpfully ticked off all the reasons this far-leftist cited, then bragged to Wilentz:
I'm a student of Presidential history...
Yes we know, and you're a legal expert, and you're the smartest man on television, and you won two Edward R Murrow Awards. Or was it three? wilentz is a hero to the gang at "TruthOut" and "American Prospect", and he didn't disappoint Countdown's target demographic. A poll of historians was "lopsided". Bush is "dividing" the country. Olby compared Bush to George Orwell, and that was that.
Has Keith Olbermann ever interviewed anyone who wrote an article about why Bush is a good President? Even one? Or is this just like the NSA coverage: one "expert" after another, all offering the same point of view, with never a syllable from any other perspective? Note: these are rhetorical questions. We all know the answers.
After a half-hour of unrelenting DNC talking points, it was actually a relief to watch cow video on "oddball". After that, the #3 story was about the teenage plot to shoot up a school (video report regurgitated from NBC), while #2 was a generous helping of celebrity fluff. The Big #1 dealt with "anti-terror wasps" and other unusual counter-terrorism measures, courtesy of Monica Novotny.
In the Media Matters Minute, Keith Olbermann turned 80 tonight. Well, that is, he reached a milestone: O'Reilly Attack #80. Bill was a runner-up because he advocated permitting police to remove homeless people sleeping and urinating on public streets. KO objected because according to him, Mr Bill said these people were abusing drugs or alcohol, or lazy.
But O'Reilly's description was not applied to the homeless in question. It came later in his discussion, when he opined that the ACLU would like the government to support and house people who are drug users or lazy. This is too subtle for Media Matters, or for Krazy Keith, but there are homeless who are drug users and/or lazy. There are also those who are not. O'Reilly's objection was to handouts for those who are. He did not say that all homeless are lazy, drug users, as KO would have you believe. Keith Olbermann mispresenting something Bill O'Reilly said? We're probably pretty close to #80 on that score as well.
As always, when Olby doesn't like the news, he simply refuses to report it; some of the canines that did not woof tonight:
Tom DeLay Conspiracy Charge Dismissed by Texas Court
New Consensus Government Formed in Iraq
FBI Investigation into Democrat Member of Ethics Committee
And that's The Hour of Spin for this, the 63rd day of the Keith Olbermann CoverUp.
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