The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Olbermann: ‘My God, You’re a Buffoon’

Posted on | December 9, 2010 | 16 Comments

Last night, I got Tweeted by Keith Olbermann:

Of course, I wasn’t offended. It’s impossible to take Olbermann seriously. Who takes him seriously, besides Democrats and Olbermann himself?

He’s not a political commentator, he’s a performance artist — a Method actor starring in his own imaginary melodrama. Too bad I didn’t see Olbermann’s Tweet earlier, as I might have been able to incorporate it into my latest column for The American Spectator:

The key ingredients to any “Special Comment” include outrageous hyperbole and impressive-sounding adjectives of the sort one might find on an SAT-preparation vocabulary list, as well as a frequent resort to historic and literary references, all of which is permeated with Olbermann’s contempt for conservatives. Consider as a typical example how Olbermann responded in August, when New Yorkers were protesting against plans to build a Muslim cultural center two blocks from the site where the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by terrorists on September 11, 2001. Olbermann began by quoting the four sentences for which Pastor Martin Niemöller is best known (“They came first for the Communists . . .”) en route to accusing Newt Gingrich of having a “lurid imagination,” declaring that the Iraq war was an expression of America’s “naked vengeful blindness,” and condemning opponents of the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” for allegedly urging Americans “to sell our birth-right, to feed the maw of xenophobia and vengeance and mob rule.”
Listening to such overblown rhetoric delivered with all the well-rehearsed seriousness Olbermann can muster (which is quite a lot) serves to reinforce liberals’ sense of their own intellectual superiority, to confirm their belief that anyone who disagrees with them is not merely evil — on Countdown, the evilness of Republicans is indisputable — but also hopelessly stupid. You might think Olbermann’s audience, believing all this, would be at a loss to explain exactly how the party of evil stupidity managed to win an overwhelming victory on November 2. But if you watch Countdown regularly, you know that this result was made possible by the greedy rich, whose ill-gotten wealth was spent to help Republicans appeal to the intractable ignorance, racism and homophobia of the American electorate. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

In an entirely unrelated development, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bill Zwecker reports that Olbermann “was ‘called on the carpet’ by his bosses for declaring Bristol Palin ‘the worst person in the world’ on his show last week — calling it ‘tacky’ and ‘a cheap shot that was uncalled for.'”

Uncalled-for cheap shots from Keith Olbermann?

I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Related: Matt Schneider has compiled a brief history of Olbermann’s use of the Nazi meme.

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