"COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN" (8:00 P.M.-9:00 P.M. ET)

Host: Keith "Czechoslovakia" Olbermann

Topics:

• BUSH IS A CRIMINAL CONSPIRATOR, UNLESS HE ISN'T
• NO CHENEY IS A CRIMINAL CONSPIRATOR, UNLESS HE ISN'T
• JOHN McCAIN ATTACK DU JOUR
• JOHN McCAIN ATTACK DU JOUR PART DEUX
• NIGHTLY O'REILLY ATTACK (#501)

Guests:

• Ron Susskind, invoker of anonymous sources
• John "Watergate" Dean, felon and disbarred lawyer
• Howard Fineman, Pundit for All Occasions
• Comedian Rachel Madcow, Err America failure

It's Tuesday: "Anything Can Happen Day" on OlbyPlanet. That means it's time for another round of speculation and one-sided reportage on the eeevil criminal conspiracies of the Bush/Cheney "Third Reich".

Philly:
Oh, a cable exclusive! Herr Olbytard hosts Ron Suskind, conspiracy theorist, to flog his book The Way of the World. He claims that CIA sources say the Bush White House issued a fake letter saying Saddam had ties to al Qaeda. Yawn.

Oh great - Olby and Our Favorite Felon are discussing Suskind's book. Olby cannot claim that any of Suskind's allegations are true, yet he is asking OFF (for short) to confirm that "if" they are true, do they constitute criminality. Why would one bother to speculate about heresay? Oh, this is Olby we're talking about, and as a notorious smear merchant, dealing in innuendo is his forte. Nice that Olby also does not explain what he means by "criminality".

The Factor:
Even Jon Stewart threw cold water on Keith's "racist ad" theory. That's pretty sad when one Olbermann's fellow propaganda providers can't even stomach one of his cockamamie conspiracy theories.

ktt:
KO is quick to note McCain's stumbling over his words at Sturgis but he really should check his own. This excerpt is from a recent Joel Keller interview, his idea of a complete paragraph:

Personally, I could not make it... I was supposed to go to the Clinton Foundation Christmas party last December. I mean, that I was (on the air) criticizing them, was deeply, personally painful to me. I'm sure they will say not as deeply personallly painful to you as it was to us, but I really agonized over it and in many respects, I held fire on it. A lot of the subjects that she did early on in the campaign did not strike me as particularly in concert with the rest of the Democratic feel, so, you know, it wasn't personal - it really wasn't.

Yeah, Shakespeare, you're quite the writer there.

By the way, was there any actual news on this show tonight? NBC should be ashamed to be associated with it. It's just a "he said, he said' of McCain and Obama.

Mike C:
It is reluctantly time for me to recap the #2 story on "Countdown": The Media Matters Minute, despite Friday's O'Reilly attack hitting so far below the belt, it hit me. Naturally, and as I predicted last night, he was the Worst tonight. First, the other two victims.

Worse: "The crack security team at Brisbane Airport." Sad face over random TSA agent. Skip.

Worser: Yet another McCain attack. Gotcha! McCain gets money from oil companies! (So does Obama, but considerably less.) Horrors! Okay, let's get to the Worst.

O'Reilly Attack #501. I predicted this would be over his criticism last night of The New York Times, Newsweek, and MSNBC. I was wrong. Instead, he was attacked for his plan in last night's Talking Points Memo (transcript, video). The plan BOR offered in T-Points sounds like a good plan to me...even though it'll never happen. But since it came from O'Reilly, and because he was critical of Obama's windfall profits tax plan, Keith "Man on Fan" Olbermann has to find something wrong with it. (sigh) Okay. Here I go. I'm pushing Play.

Billo the Clown! [ding!] Sheer lunkheadedness! Ted Baxter voice (even funnier the 243rd time!). Parsing of T-Points from a Blue Blog Source. Parsed words on right side of screen, big head/little body on left side. And now, time for me to transcribe the last minute and nine seconds.

OLBERMORONN: Obama's nuts for saying we need to get big oil [ding!] to foot the bill for an energy rebate of about 1,000 bucks per American family, but Billo's [ding!] a genius for saying...we need to get big oil [ding!] to foot the bill for an energy rebate of about 1,000 bucks per American family. And how did the Ex-rons...uh, Exxons and the Chevrons respond?

Back to Baxter and parsing, and I mean really parsing. He skipped two sentences to go right to "Not...much...enthusiasm...so far." Let's put it in context by going to the transcript:

O'REILLY: Now, we contacted the five big oil corporations, and to say the response to my idea was lukewarm is to be kind. Exxon and Chevron pointed out they pay a huge amount of taxes to the government, which is true. But what about directly helping those in need? Not much enthusiasm so far. If just one of the oil companies would establish such a charitable fund, the goodwill that corporation would receive would more than make up for the money spent, as millions of Americans would buy that company's oil over the others. So we encourage the oil companies to directly help out their fellow Americans who are struggling. No one--no one--in this country should be cold this winter, but it is going to happen.

Back on OlbyPlanet we go.

OLBERMORONN: Imagine Billo's [ding!] surprise. He has told us previously... [He didn't tell you anything, Olbermoronn. You just got quotes of what he said from a Blue Blog and took them to air.--MC] ...he has people at all the big oil [ding!] companies. That when he asked Americans to use less gas, they came through big time for him. He probably thought that in the board room at ExxonMobil, they were saying...[panicky voice, featuring hand gestures and pounding on desk, straight out of the Howard Beale playbook]: 'What are we gonna do?! What are we gonna do?! Bill O'Reilly just asked us to give up 2% of our profits! I can't breathe! I can't breathe! We can't let Bill down! We need to donate $150 million or he won't like us anymore! Stan! Stan, how much you got on ya?! Stan!"

And you know the sophomoric staff laughed at every Bealish move. "Bill 'The loofah [ding!] has left the tracks' O'Reilly, today's Worst...Person... 'Stan! Stan!' ...in the World!"

Can "Stan" pay me for these recaps? This is essentially volunteer work.

The Factor:
So let me get this straight? O'Reilly is Worst Person for suggesting that the Oil companies voluntarily donate needy families but Obamanation is a genius because he thinks he can use the government to force oil companies to hand over their profits and the oil companies won't raise prices? It is time for Olbermann to invest in a history book and look up the late 1970's. Windfall profit tax means more foreign oil at higher prices. Great Thanks.

dcmeyer:
One dog that didn't bark in olbyland:

Big donors are the key to Obama's record haul

But records show that a third of his record-breaking haul has come from donations of $1,000 or more - a total of $112 million, more than the total of contributions in that category taken in by either Senator John McCain, his Republican rival, or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his opponent in the Democratic primaries.

Behind those large donations is a phalanx of more than 500 Obama "bundlers," fund-raisers who have each collected contributions totaling $50,000 or more. Many of the bundlers come from industries with critical interests in Washington. Nearly three dozen of the bundlers have raised more than $500,000, including more than a half-dozen who have passed the $1 million mark and one or two who have exceeded $2 million, according to interviews with fund-raisers.

Katy Turic:
It's the same dumb routine every night
Parade of loons and nobody right
There's felon John Dean
Maddow's frequently seen
Because Keith is afraid of a fight

And that's The Hour of Spin for this, the 821st day since the declaration that "Karl Rove will in fact be indicted".

Great thanks to our OlbyWatch recappers who contributed!

5 Comments

By Cecelia on August 6, 2008 9:34 AM

Unnamed sources? "IF" it's true?

Well, hell, from the first five minutes of Countdown, I thought all the charges were undeniably true. I thought it was a done deal, a fait accompli, and that Susskind's book was chiseled on stone from Mt. Sinai.

I mean why else would a cable news show act as though no defense or answer to these charges was necessary?

By ramjet on August 6, 2008 11:53 AM

Jimmy Olsen:

Holy cow, Chief, stop the presses!

Whatzizname and Mz Mad speak truth!

Perry White:

Don't call me chief!

Whatzisname, "The Devil's Advocate question in this one , John, is..." and then the Devil's Advocate asks his question.

The demure, laughing Mz R-ay Mad, "...other than...these pictures are very distracting...," as video of two scantilly clad biker chicks writhe, grind, stoop and hump in the age-old tradition of the bikefest. Uhhh, what rhymes with "bikefest?"

By Mike C. on August 6, 2008 2:58 PM

Anybody hear Suskind on "The Radio Factor" today?

By Cecelia on August 6, 2008 4:24 PM

breakfast

By ramjet on August 6, 2008 10:53 PM

By Cecelia on August 6, 2008 4:24 PM
breakfast

Naaaaaah. What I'm thinking of rhymes perfectly with bikefest and is definitely not PC.

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