Moonbats gone wild! Iraq War protesters interrupt McCain's speech in Denver. McCain uses humor and firm talk to take control of the situation.

"I will never surrender in Iraq," he says. Our troops will come home with victory and honor, he continued.

More moonbats interrupt McCain's speech. The Dems know how to lose friends and alienate people, don't they? MSDLC probably will hail the protesters as heroes.

Meanwhile, on the topic of this post, I hope it won't be long before Keith is gone from all things NBC.

"I hope it won't be long before Keith is gone from all things NBC."

And why do you wish such a thing MikeC?

1) - Unless I'm mistaken, you aren't forced to watch Countdown, ..... just as I am not forced to watch The O'Reilly Factor.

2) - You said something on another thread about KO being a "national nightmare". What is it that makes a show you don't even have to watch a "nightmare" for you?

3) - What is it about your own pysche that actively yearns for an opposition voice to be silenced?

4) - Could it be that what you really want is only one media viewpoint expressed that also just happens to be YOUR viewpoint?

5) - What is it that makes you wish that a voice that folks such as myself appreciate and support be forced off the air?

6) - Finally, why do you wish to return to the media milktoast days of 2001 - 2004 when the media utterly failed to do their job of providing due dilligence in which the comepletely un-necessary Iraq War became a probable direct result of that rather pathetic lack of media oversight?

Think about it.

And Bob, your perception of Keith's "sudden lurch into the bizarro world of the lunatic fringe of the far-left of the democratic party" remains as silly as it was originally:

If Keith was really as "far left" as you and your's keep asserting on this blog, we would be hearing about 911 being "an inside job", along with similar beliefs associated with the "lunatic fringe".

The fact remains that Keith Olbermann is no more "lunatic fringe far left" than Bill O'Reilly is "lunatic fringe far right".

MikeH,

I've been watching Countdown since it originally aired. Before that I was a regular viewer of Keith's original show on MSNBC. I was watching his show because I was a FAN. So, I don't think I will be taking any lectures from YOU on the evolution of Keith and Countdown over the past five years.

I begin to notice a change in Keith and the show in the summer of 2004. This change, in my opinion, reflected the FACT that "no one" was watching his show. He had nights when he has below 200,000 viewers (I can recall specifically one night he had 177,000 total viewers) - he basically had an audience the same size as John McEnroe had before Mac's show was cancelled. In other words what Keith was doing with his show was not working. Recall that the "angle" of the show was that Keith would "count down" the Top 5 stories of the day. They no longer do that although they do continue to number the stories - #1 is now the "water cooler" story with the hard news up front. That "angle" did not work. Neither did Keith's idea of having more "thoughtful" discussions ala Tom Snyder or Bill Moyers. If you back to 2003 and early 2004 you will see a very different show.

It is my view that Keith does not actually believe a lot of the garbage he spouts but hit upon a formula (described in my post) the represented his personality - an angry, venal, misogynistic, psuedo-liberal. This became the new "angle" for the show - not about the news, or counting down backwards, or thoughtful discussions but Keith as "mad prophet of the airwaves" - bringing on guests to allow Keith to express "righteous anger". To a certain extent that was intended to be an anti-Bill O'Reilly but whereas O'Reilly fashions himself as a "populist", Keith was expressing a "leftist" point of view (although he repeatedly lied about this in press interviews - also part of the anti-O'Reilly schtick where Bill O'Reilly denies being a right-winger with the difference that O'Reilly is NOT a right-winger whereas Olbermann is a left-winger).

I say psuedo-liberal because Keith likes to think of himself as a "man of the people". For example, at ESPN he was actively involved in attempting to bring union representation to the sports network (he failed, ESPN today still does not have union workers). To that extent there is a comparison between O'Reilly and Olbermann as they both affect a "man of the people" POV with O'Reilly representing a sort of cloth-coat Republicanism (old fashioned 1950's type values, hawkish on foreign policy, liberal on SOME domestic issues) and Olbermann spouting a socialist-marxist POV (as an indication does not actually BELIEVE this line, see Olbermann's criticism of Hugo Chavez in a previous post)

By the fall Keith was booking exactly the type of "conspiracy theorist" guests (.e.g. the "black box" crowd) you seem to be referencing with your 911-truthers comment and doing stories lifted from kook sources (e.g. Kathy Dopp) that had been discredited even before Keith ran the story. Even Keith eventually distanced himself from some of these guests. So when you say that my observation in 2004 was "silly" it simply reflects your ignorance. As it is not my job to educate you, try going back and reading the show transcripts from late 2004 to see what I was referencing in my November 2004 post.

As it typical of an OlbyLoon, you cannot deal with valid criticism of Olbermann and instead try to justify Keith by way of an entirely irrelevant comparison to Bill O'Reilly. If you believe that Bill O'Reilly is "lunatic fringe far right" then either you do not actually watch The O'Reilly Factor or do not understand what "lunatic fringe far right" means. O'Reilly is not a mouthpiece for the "lunatic fringe far right". He does not source his stories from Free Republic or the John Birch Society. He is to the LEFT of people like Hannity and Limbaugh and Mark Levin. That said, O'Reilly is virulently anti-left, anti-secularist, anti-marxist which lefties confuse with being a right-winger.

In my opinion, Keith IS a mouthpiece for the "lunatic fringe far left". You can say he is not but that is just talk. I would prefer to deal in facts. I believe what I do about Keith because Keith is actively engaged in soliciting stories and promoting his stories through outlets such as Daily Kos and working with organizations like Media Matters for America, Air America Radio and MoveOn.org. These activities are documented facts, beyond dispute.

The question then is whether or not a person believes that Daily Kos or MoveOn represents people who are on "lunatic fringe far left". Obviously, I do believe that. I see little difference between American socialists, marxists and communists and the people who support Daily Kos, MoveOn, etc. Does that mean that ONLY socialists, marxists and communists support them? No. I believe they are supported by a wide variety of people who take their anti-war, anti-globalization, pro-green stance at face value and do not understand that these are "wedge" issues used by the fringe left to initiate a program of indoctrination intended to move more and more Americans to their far-left position. For example, a communist front group (International ANSWER) organizes anti-war rallies as a cover to legitimize their other activities and attract new members.

So, to keep this exchange focused, I put the question to you MikeH:

Where you believe Daily Kos falls on the political spectrum (please use a likert-scale, 1 being the farthest possible left; 10 being farthest possible right)?

I would like to answer the question, Mr. Cox with ONE example from kos today.....

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/27/2297/47015

This diarist claims that the USA is no longer a humane nation....We no longer possess the values we possessed in WWII that even the "f*cking Nazi's" saw....

The person responsible for our collective loss of humanity....who else but George Bush....

Alrighty then.....The decades old radical leftist view of "blame Amercian first" is the mantra of the kos kiddies and their media shill, Keith Olbermann....Sorry, I have thousands of examples of Americans, including one George Bush, showing greater humanity than any of those leftist ideologues have ever displayed.

It is a shame that blind hatred of America and the arm-chair dismissal of the HARD struggle for freedom against totalitarianism has become "mainstream" in the minds of many Democrats, like our resident Olbermann defender, MikeH.....The claim of the kos diarist is a slam against all Americans who contribute daily to the collective compassion and love that eminates from The United States and IS NOT an imperialist or greedy horde striving for world domination.....

Like usual, the radical left has picked the wrong enemy.

Cee,

While I don't agree with MikeH I do not agree with you either.

While I agree that the post by "Living in Gin" at Daily Kos is idiotic the reason is that the PREMISE is wrong. The problem is not that the USA is "no longer" a humane nation and that George W. Bush is responsible for our "collective loss of humanity" but that the U.S. was NEVER a "humane nation" in the first place. The diarists dopey and arbitrary timeline from WWII to the Presidency of George W. Bush is meaningless.

To argue that the U.S. has ever been a "humane" nation one would have to ignore the subjugation of an entire race into slavery, the buying and selling of human beings, laws that made it legal to murder a slave, the indian "removal" policies of Andrew Jackson and the eventual extermination of most indian tribes east of the Mississippi as well as California, waging an unjust war in Mexico for the purpose of seizing Alta California (present day California, Nevada, Utah and parts of Arizona and Wyoming), and New Mexico (present day Arizona and New Mexico, Jim Crow laws and the denying of civil rights to African-Americans, a military policy of using atrocities and terror tactics to end popular resistance to American colonial ambitions in the far east during the Philippines-American War, killing tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I can cite many other examples but this gets up to the supposed "golden age" of American humanity that this kooky Kossack says George W. Bush has betrayed.

Throughout American history there has always been a popular notion of American exceptionalism. This has not been universally accepted within the country but it has been pervasive. The Founders clearly had the sense that what they were doing would serve as a model for the rest of the world - and many saw validation of that in the early days of the French revolution. But those same founders new that slavery would always be a stain on their work and the history of the country (it was for this reason that Washington freed his slaves upon his death).

That notion of exceptionalism was tied to the notion of manifest destiny which led to things like Indian Removal, the Annexation of Texas, the invasion of Mexico, the taking of over half of Mexican territory which in turn led to the incredibly bloody U.S. Civil War. The intentional death of over a million people was justified on the grounds of American exceptionalism.

The Indian Removal policies were clearly illegal - in fact, Andrew Jackson participated in the wholesale theft of Indian lands in George, secured by treaty, after gold was discovered going so far as to ignore a ruling the U.S. Supreme Court in a lawsuit brought by local tribes. What followed was a sixty year of deliberate extermination of Indian tribes - genocide is the right word.

Despite all these horrible actions by the U.S. government the notion of exceptionalism persisted because it was basically a notion of exceptionalism for white protestant males. That women could not vote, blacks were slaves, Roman Catholic hispanics in Mexico, Indians, Asians in the Philippines were being killed was somehow OK because they were less than full human beings - same with Irish Roman Catholic immigrants and their treatment at that hands of nativists groups.

Ironically, this is the flaw in the "Blame America" attitude of the far left. They imagine some primeval golden age when everyone loved America and America only did good. Their problem is that they can ONLY see the bad and the "good" is in some mythical past.

The antidote is not "America Love It Or Leave It". The real answer is far more complex and does lend itself to trite answers from either side of the current political divide.

I see the drive by shooter was here to tell us we're wrong w/no proof. Newsflash, mikie. Olbermahn is the poster boy for the 'lunatic fringe left.'

Bob:

I find myself at quite a disadvantage when asked to rate the fringe factor of an organization like Daily Kos because I have never paid much attention to it, and tend to find it a little on the extreme side myself. However, I find some of the other entities you mentioned, such as Air America Radio slightly left, but still fairly close to mainstream.

That said, I found myself agreeing with much of your post about American exceptionalism. In my view, the Iraq War was just another negative and regrettable manifestation of American Exceptionalism, and history will certainly portray it as such.

If you really believe that the war is really just another "wedge issue" being used by the fringe left to "herd" people like myself in their direction shows little respect for just how strongly we feel about this one issue, and the harm it has done to America.

To me, it speaks volumes about how self centered and inward looking most Americans have become if they see this as simply 'another' issue, rather than THE issue. My wife keeps telling me that people pretty much care only about what affects them directly....but I refuse to accept this, .... however, if she is right, I don't accept it has always been this way.

People like Cee label people like me as "fringe left" almost exclusively on my war stand, but the reality is that he knows little about my core beliefs or values. The reality is that the Iraq War seems to have become a "conservative" issue by virtue of circumstance and evolution rather than by ideology. There was never anything "conservative" about the notion of occupying Iraq and there never will be. I remain convinced that many on both sides would be reversed on this issue had the original shoe been placed on the other foot.....Meanwhile people like myself would still be speaking out against the occupation, regardless of which party 'owned' the blunder.

To me, sayings like "Blame America First" talking points are used as excuses for complacency, as well as a wedges to marginalize those of us who believe that true patriotism means that we should never stop striving to improve on the country we love.....and painfully, that often means confronting our own mistakes head on.