(Via Hot Air Headlines) I don’t know if Mediaite deliberately omitted the reason for former President Bill Clinton’s refusal to attend a Keith Olbermann-boosted ‘free clinic event.’  It’s entirely possible that the actual reason (warning: FDL link) - that Clinton thinks that the event in question is a thinly-veiled primary campaign event against Senator Blanche Lincoln (D, AR) and for Democratic Senate hopeful Bill Halter - was simply uninteresting to Mediaite, which is of course that site’s privilege.

That being said, this kind of allegation is newsworthy.  A former President accusing a more-or-less prominent Leftist television commentator of playing internal Democratic party politics with people’s health care coverage?  This should have been front and center on the site.  Heck, it should be above the fold on the New York Times.

‘Should,’ not ‘will.’

Moe Lane

PS: Does MSNBC… approve of this?

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Last night on Countdown, Keith Olbermann covered the WCPAC confrontation between John Ziegler and David Keene. Amid the obligatory and well-worn “chuckling about the end of conservatives as we know them” routine Keith likes to trot out 9 or 10 times per episode, he suggests that perhaps Ziegler is just “defending his own crush.” You get that? See Palin is a woman. So people who support must want to bed her. If you think that is an unusual or out of character point of view for Keith, well … think again.

Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher asked Ziegler for a comment on the segment. His response is priceless. Well, not exactly “priceless” … here’s an excerpt (emphasis added):

This may shock people, but my defense of her is not even politically based. It is motivated purely by the level of unfairness of the coverage of her. I honestly believe that I would have reacted the same way if she were ugly and a Democrat (not that it would have ever happened to her if that was the case), but I can understand why Olbermann couldn’t possibly understand such principled consistency or being motivated by something other than one’s own self interest and/or what they feel in their pants.

I will make this offer to Olbermann. If he has me on the show to debate Palin-related issues, live, for a full hour, I will pay his favorite charity $100,000, which is more than any profit I am ever likely to make from my film “Media Malpractice.” This offer is 100% real.

Will Keith man up? Doubtful. But I’ll tell you one thing if he does, I’m cooking popcorn, setting the DVR, and wearing my three-wolf moon shirt because THAT, sir, is what you call must-see TV.

There has been no small amount of buzz on the right the last few days in the wake of Western CPAC. There were two dramas this weekend, one decidedly more dramatic than the other, which are both symptomatic of some deep problems with the conference and, generally, with the state of activism on the right.

The less dramatic of the two involved my friend Ed Morrissey of Hot Air. While participating in a “New Media” panel, Ed was ambushed by another panel member who accused him of “rudeness” for disagreeing with an earlier presentation in an article published at Hot Air. More bizarrely, the “New Media’ panel member proceeded to belittle the importance of new media, urging people to “pick up the phone.” It is certainly worth noting that the panel member, Christopher Carmouche, is in the fax blasting business. Yes. Really. A number of bloggers and attendees speculate that Carmouche “donated” his way onto the panel.

Which is a pretty good segue to the much bigger drama to come out of this weekend: Ziegler vs. Keene.

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Here’s the (very entertaining) timeline:

• Thursday, September 3rd, 11:18 PM: Glenn Beck calls for his Twitter followers to send him information on “CASS SUNSTEIN, MARK LLOYD AND CAROL BROWNER” (all caps in the original, which is honestly a bit much).
• Friday, September 4th, 3:36 PM: Dave Weigel reports on all of this.
• Sunday, September 6th, 12:05 AM: It becoming clear that Van Jones is a crazy 9/11 Troofer and a generally not-particularly-mainstream fellow, he resigns as Green Jobs Czar (via AoSHQ).
• Sunday, September 6th, 10:14 AM: Keith Olbermann declares a Crusade against Glenn Beck (via Verum Serum).  This is to be an epic war of battle between Olbermann and Beck, yadda yadda.
• Tuesday, September 8th, 8:21 AM: Media Decoder hesitantly points out that media-on-media wars may not be the smartest things in the world; and is treated to a righteous, stylized response from Olbermann himself.
• Tuesday, September 8th, 8:22 AM to 9:46 AM (time indeterminate): Somebody in either MSNBC or GE notices that Olbermann is calling for a Crusade.
• Tuesday, September 8th, 9:47 AM: Olbermann calls off the Crusade (via Newsbusters & Instapundit).

There is, of course, no evidence whatsoever that GE sent Olbermann was off to bed without his binky.  Personally, I’d have enforced a timeout and Olbermann being made to write out ten things that he liked about Glenn Beck, but that’s just because I’m a dad now.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Here is your laugh for the day.

Because of Glenn Beck’s success in forcing out Van Jones, Keith Olbermann has run crying to Daily Kos. He has decided he wants all the dirt he can get on not just Glenn Beck, but also Roger Ailes and Stu, Glenn’s producer. Keith is obsessed with Glenn. Why? Because he is jealous.

Keith, we can venture to say, also has some serious mom issues compounded by Glenn’s success. Why do you think he’s going after Stu? Clearly, Keith saw Stu dressed up as Linda Douglass. Like Norman keeping his skeletal mom in her rocking chair, seeing Stu in drag has done something to Keith’s already frail mental state.

So he’ll target Stu.

And Roger.

And Glenn.

There’s just one problem for Keith — no one watches his show. The ratings suck. It wouldn’t surprise me if more people hear about RedState and me each day than Olbermann. And he thinks he can take on Beck?

The fact is Glenn Beck has a large television and radio audience — vastly larger than Olbermann’s. And Beck has done something with his audience. He’s turned them into engaged activists, while Olbermann is dumbing down his audience and treating the rest of America like Janet Leigh in the shower.

Suck it up Keith.

A.W.R. Hawkins takes on Keith Olbermann at Human Events today.

When it comes to unabashed political vitriol, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, host of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” is without peer.

In the past few months alone, he referred to Sarah Palin as “a clear and present danger to the safety and security of this nation,” said Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly “voluntarily [associates] himself with and [encourages]” people who kill abortion providers, accused former Vice President Dick Cheney of doing “the primary job of a terrorist” by criticizing President Obama, and called Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) a “bald faced liar” when Thune pointed out the dangers of Obamacare.

Ironically, Olbermann has not admitted that he has been doing “the primary job of a terrorist” although he spent 2008 criticizing President George W. Bush for allegedly “allowing the 9/11 attacks to occur” and accused Bush of using “murderous deceit” to justify sending “4,000 Americans to their death [in the Iraq War] for nothing!”

Andrew Malcolm apparently felt obligated to make sure that the correction of the truly offensive thing that his host newspaper (the LA Times) did was made as public as possible.  I might normally raise an eyebrow at that, but in this particular case I can understand the impulse for damage control.  It’s way over the top.

FOR THE RECORD:
TV listings: The Prime-Time TV grid in Thursday’s Calendar section mistakenly listed MTV’s “Jackass” show on the MSNBC cable schedule at 7 and 10 p.m. where instead MSNBC’s “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” should have been listed.

If I was one of the owners of Jackass I would be seriously considering a libel suit right now: I am not a lawyer, but I imagine that the damage that the LA Times has just done to the brand by maliciously associating it with Keith Olbermann would easily justify one.  And then there’s the implied insult in the veiled suggestion that fans of Jackass might also like Olbermann…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

PS: Open thread.

I realize you are all very busy cashing enormous checks from health care lobbyists and engaging in mob activity at town halls (with your old people and your sandals and whatnot), but please allow me to interrupt briefly with a story far too delightful to allow its passing unremarked.

This is a tale of Keith Olbermann: sportscaster, eye-glasses wearer, living comedy routine and, according to multiple left wing sources of late, a blatant liar. Actually, I believe Keith’s favorite way of saying it is ‘bald-faced’ liar. Just what is it (this time) this bald face is lying about? Oh, this is so where it gets fun. It’s not even one of those, ‘get the popcorn’ moments. This is like, you write in to popcorn forum … “Dear Orville, I never thought these stories were true until it happened to me.”

Wait, before we go on, I just want to throw this out there. Clark Kent was the worst secret identity ever. Right? He looked just like Superman, they were never in the same place at the same time, and just like Supe, Clark was a goody-two-shoes boyscout. But with glasses. Right? Obvious. See, if I were a super-hero, I would make my secret identity like, the biggest douche in the world. Like, the hugest. So no one would EVER think to suspect him. Plus he’d wear glasses. See where I’m going? Hey, I’m just trying to find some kind of balance in the universe, you know what I mean?

Anyway, back to the story. It all starts with an article that ran in the New York Times a few weeks ago. In it, a supposed truce between MSNBC and Fox News, and in particular between O’Reilly and Olbermann, was said to have been arranged by the network bigwigs. You see, Keith had been accusing Bill of being responsible for the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, a sentiment cheered by the 23 people in Keith’s audience. In return, Bill led an effective campaign of boycotts and letter-writing against MSNBC parent, GE. I would say things got ugly, but considering the participants in this fiasco it should go without saying. Ergo, at last, the truce.

Not so fast, said Keith to three different cameras. No doubt out of fear of being seen as a “sell-out” by his kostituency, Olbermann went on the air with a worst persons in the world segment blasting the article, Bill O, and Fox News. He declared his independence, presumably from MSNBC not Kos, and then posted about it at, yes, DailyKos. Keith blogged that “there is no ‘deal’ between MSNBC and Fox over what we can and cannot cover. This is part of a continuing strategy of blackmail by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, that reaches back to 2004, and has as its goal the cancellation of ‘Countdown.’”

So. Definitive? Yes. Problem Solved? Not so much.

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I’m sorry to have to tell you folks at The Gawker this, but it’s over.  You’ve been tagged by the guy from the cow college as Outside the Pale, and you’re not coming back from that.

It’s like this: you were fine with this post, for a given value of fine: you took precisely the line that was expected of you with the Mancow narrative.  Right-wing shock-jock gets waterboarded, now thinks it’s torture, yadda yadda and the Online Left cheers while it reaches for the tis… well, I’ll be polite.  If you had left it there, nothing further would have gone on.  But then you made the mistake of actually deciding that the evidence that this was a publicity stunt was actually worth publicizing.  So you got yelled at for it, a little; but you just kept pushing. So now you got yelled at, for real - and it doesn’t matter in the slightest that it’s by a rampaging buffoon who believes that Cheney had secret death squads.  Or that you actually agree with him that waterboarding really is torture.  Or anything else, at this point.

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It is often useful to review the past to see how it affects the present and with the rise of The One, we can see revealed the basic hypocrisy of the left that is so blatant as to be nearly unbelievable. Well, unbelievable if anyone were to mistakenly imagine that liberals and leftists actually have any principles, that is. The hypocritical shift that attitudes on the left took between George W. Bush’s days in office and that of Barack “I won” Obama is stark, but revealing.

Let us start with the left’s unhinged reaction to the Tea Party movement.

Unprincipled showmen like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow pretended not to understand the protests and immediately turned any actual discussion of policy differences into some lowborn sex joke. Some Obama administration officials even began to call the protesters “dangerous” and unpatriotic. These unprincipled lefties were aghast at anyone that would have the temerity to protest “the government” and “our president.”

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I don’t like to encourage masochism, but if you were ever going to watch Keith Olbermann, tonight is probably the night. After all, given Olbermann’s tendency to quit his meds and start frothing at the mouth over corporate hypocrisy, he has a juicy target today. Who’s the latest fat-cat to get wealthy from taxpayer bailout money? Why, it’s the pride of Cownell - Keith Olbermann. If you feel inclined, go sign the petition.

While General Electric, the parent-company of your MSNBC network, was negotiating a $126 billion taxpayer-funded bailout, you signed a new contract raising your salary from $4 million to $7.5 million annually. You have used your show as a platform to call for the resignation of corporate executives accepting excessive bonuses on the backs of taxpayers who are picking up the tab for these atrocious bailouts, yet you yourself have no problem engaging in the same “class economic rape” that you accuse them of.

Please heed your own advice and stop accepting taxpayer money to subsidize your nightly diatribes. Resign or return the balance of your excessive raise to the U.S. Treasury.

To express this in terms even Olbermann might understand, how dare you sir!

Too bad for Olbermann - he can’t even use the defense that the AIG bonus recipients did. He can’t claim to have earned the money. Those bonuses were awarded pursuant to a prior contract; Olbermann’s was a new deal. And if you look at his track record, it’s hard to argue that Olbermann is doing anything right.

Olbermann has a lot of nerve taking taxpayer money while he rails against others for doing the same. If he has any integrity, he’ll follow the lesson set by the executives he has attacked. When the AIG bonuses approved by the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress caused public outrage, those execs by and large returned the money. Olbermann has to do the same. He’ll still be a joke, but at least he won’t be a conspicuously hypocritical joke.

In a case of entertainment imitating entertainment, Arron Sorkin — maker of the faux president series West Wing — has hinted that he is soon to start development of another one of those behind-the-scenes TV shows, this one to be the goings on with a TV pundit show ala Keith Olbermann’s Count Down spectacle on MSNBC. So says Entertainment Weekly this week at least.

So, what are we going to be subjected to? Another ponderous show where a lefty bleeding-heart host that is soooo “concerned” with the whole wide world? A salute to the “seriousness” of an Olbermann type? Or are we going to see the tale of a nearly insane, egomaniacal freak that terrorizes everyone with whom he works? If they are going for fantasy probably the former. Reality… who knows?

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Poor Keith! First the big kids refuse to invite him into their little club, and now they’re trashing him out in the open!

On cable news, I am a fan of Keith and Rachel. But he wastes too much time p***ing on Bush and his deposed cronies. She is smart and charming but her writers are dreadful and the less cutesy she is, the better. She did an excellent interview with Colin Powell recently. The next night, I missed that tougher, less avuncular Rachel. A while back, the idea of sitting down at another screen and getting my evening news seemed unappealing. Now I sit and watch Rachel and Keith while I do my e-mail and read Slate and HuffPo online.

But something has changed again. I’m back to buying the Times. I think others should get back to buying and reading a newspaper, too.

Well the news isn’t all bad for Keith and Rachel, right? Even if Olbermann is a one-trick pony whose act has gotten stale, at least the TV’s still on. It used to be that Baldwin couldn’t watch him at all, but now by the simple trick of doing several other things at the same time, he can! And Olbermann gets about the same level of attention that I give the classic rock station in the background while I’m working on the computer. I bet there are even times that Baldwin can recall what it was that Keith ranted about - Bush and his cronies.

As for Rachel, she’s really good - it’s just her writers that stink. If she had the skill to prepare her own material, or to hire skilled writers, or to recognize terrible copy when she saw it, she’d be good.

If this is what he thinks of Olbermann and Maddow, I can see why Baldwin prefers the New York Times. I wonder what he’ll read in a few months when the New York Times is gone.

I’ve previously written at length about Keith Olbermann smearing Twitter and Dan Cooper, suggesting that they, along with Fox News, conspired to defraud America by setting up a fake Twitter account in Keith’s name. As we all know by now, Keith couldn’t have done a worse job with that segment. Not only was the Twitter account legit, he actually had a second account for his show, which tweeted the very segment where he denied being a part of Twitter!! Well, Keith has finally decided to address the smear. I could explain this in detail, but I think I’ll let Keith speak for himself:

“Mr. Cooper has informed us he had nothing to do with the account.” Way to go Keith, way to man up. I asked Dan Cooper for his reaction to the segment. Here’s Dan’s reply:

“The damage has been done. Mr. Olbermann’s choked-out legalese has not undone it.” - Dan Cooper

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This weekend, three Pittsburgh police officers were gunned down in cold blood by a disturbed gunman during an hours long standoff in what is an otherwise quiet suburb. You probably wouldn’t normally think that’s a source for clever one liners, but then, you aren’t a DailyKos kid are you?

Tommy Christopher was reading his Twitter page last night and saw a disturbing tweet from Markos Moulitsas. It was a retweet (in other words, resending something another person posted) of a message on Dana Houle’s twitter feed. Houle is a front-pager at DailyKos. Here is the relevant series (from DailyDose.us):

DanaHoule With no Veep to shoot people, folks are taking things in to their own hands about 20 hours ago from TweetDeck

DanaHoule “He said he’ll be ready if there’s ever an invasion of the United States and that he had stockpiled foods and guns…” Wolverines!! about 19 hours ago from TweetDeck

markosmoulitsas RT @DanaHoule: With no Veep to shoot people, folks are taking things in to their own hands about 15 hours ago from TweetDeck

TommyXtopher What does this mean? RT @danahoule @markosmoulitsas With no Veep to shoot people, folks are taking things in to their own hands about 15 hours ago from TweetDeck

markosmoulitsas When we were out of power, we organized to win the next election. Conservatives, apparently, prefer to talk “revolution” and kill cops. about 15 hours ago from TweetDeck

Tommy Christopher is rightly offended by the Kos Kids turning a tragedy into a chance for one-liners. Sadly, though, this is only the latest in a long series of such commentary by Markos and his legions of like-minded liberal ghouls.

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They tell Hersh to do things. Things that he promised his mother that he’d never ever do, because he was a good boy:

Cheney has moles in Obama Administration, reporter says

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has moles in the Obama government which report back to him from the Pentagon, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told NPR and MSNBC on Tuesday.

Speaking with NPR’s Terri Gross, Hersh revealed that the former Vice President — who he characterized as “really smart” — has individuals that report back to him from key positions in government. He called these individuals “stay-behinds,” an intelligence term generally applied to insiders left behind in foreign governments after the occupying power is driven out.

But thank God that he’s got Keith Olbermann to listen to him talk about the moles. Hersh never believed any of those lies that the sinister-weasels said about Olbermann, by the way: he knows that Olbermann’s Magic Piece of Paper is everything that Olbermann says that it is. The weasels plot with the moles, you see. They’re all in league with each other! And it all goes back to Cheney*!

But he’s been good! He wants his mother to know that he’s been a good boy! No matter what the moles whisper.

Moe Lane

*The man has gone fishing, ye Leftists. He was also never really into you guys in the first place. Try to accept that, OK? It’s not healthy for you. I mean, look at Sy Hersh: he’s one mini-stroke away from starting to babble about Reptoids. Including, alas, all the bits about the Jews.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Today’s Ed Morrissey Show features special guest Congressman Eric Cantor.

Today, on the Ed Morrissey Show (3 pm ET), Andrew Malcolm returns in his new Tuesday slot to discuss media and politics. In the second half, Rep. Eric Cantor joins us to talk about Barack Obama’s economic policies. We’ll also have Tommy Christopher and Caleb Howe debate the videotape allegedly depicting Joe Biden’s adult daughter using drugs. Legitimate news story, or irrelevant political attack? We’ll go into bonus minutes to find out! We’ll also talk about Keith Olbermann and Twitter, Caleb’s exclusive look into the anchor’s hypocrisy on social networking.

You can find my Olbermann story here, Erick on Biden here, Ed on Biden here, and Tommy on Biden here. You can watch live and participate below the fold.

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On Thursday, Twitter was atwitter and blogs were abuzz about Keith Olbermann’s embarrassing “Worst Person” fail, following a post by Greg Pollowitz at National Review Online highlighting the hilarity. Olbermann named Twitter his “Worst Person in the World” because he mistakenly believed he wasn’t on Twitter. He was. So I thought I’d do something that Olbermann’s entire staff consistently fails to do: research.

The first lapse in research you already know about. Keith predicated his entire segment on the notion that he had no Twitter account, therefore the account in his name was fraudulent. Of course, it wasn’t true. MSNBC ran the Twitter account in Keith’s name. But believe me, this is only the beginning of an epic fail.

Did Olbermann Tweet His Anti-Twitter Screed?
I’m going to summarize up front. It’s too good to drag out. Not only is Olbermann wrong about being on Twitter, he’s twice wrong. His own show runs a very active Twitter feed. As in, in addition to the one Olbermann was on about. The person who he smeared as a fraud and a Fox News operative is not who Olbermann thinks he is. Even the email to Olbermann may not be what he thinks it is. In short, there was virtually no factual statement from Keith’s mouth when he named Twitter “Worst Person” and called the account a fraud. (I bet you wonder if any of Keith’s accounts were Tweeting on the day of the story aren’t you? Keep reading.)

Here’s the relevant portion of the transcript:

But our winner is Twitter. I told you this was trouble. I find out today that I have 13,900 some odd followers on Twitter. I‘m not on Twitter. I tried to sign up last summer and abandoned the project. I found this out when I got a piece of junk e-mail today, at my address, from some outfit trying to barnacle on to the Twitter process. Though it was my address, it had somebody else‘s name on it, possibly whoever was perpetuating the fraud. The subject line read “Dan Cooper Media, local Tweet request.” And the e-mail began, “hi Dan Cooper Media.”

Who is Dan Cooper and why would he be getting spam e-mail about my fake Twitter account? He is one of the five architects of Fox News.

Video is below the fold. Suffice it to say, the delivery and expression made it clear that Olbermann was suggesting a nefarious Fox News plot to defame him via Twitter. Yes, seriously. If you think it’s funny now, what until you hear what Dan Cooper has to say.

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Matthew Yglesias: I also read on TNR.com today that Jonah Goldberg, who believes that everyone on this list is a fascist, is “good-humored,” while Keith Olbermann’s work is best analogized to Glenn Beck or Michael Savage.

Ed Kilgore: To be fair, Cottle was writing about self-styled Pundit Types, not making comparative judgments of worth. I actually don’t think Olbermann much ever achieves the heights of hysteria routinely maintained by the well-named Savage, but the pretence [sic] by some of us admirers of Keith that he’s a paragon of reasoned discourse is a bit much, too.
[ed. snicker]

Jonathan Chait: Perhaps, if his work is going to be brought up here 2 or 3 times a week, he should be invited on the list. Or is the point of this to create a forum where certain people can be criticized (or, more precisely, called names) without the criticizer having to fear a response?

Jesse Singal: Everyone I know who likes Olbermann also acknowledge that he is egomaniacal [sic] and has a penchant for hysterical drama. The main difference, which is glaringly left out by anyone who conflates him with the Savages and O’Reillys of the world, is that Olbermann doesn’t tend to, you know, lie about stuff regularly.

[ed. hysterical chuckling]

Michael Cohen: Personally, I find Olbermann insufferable, but I’m not sure I buy the comparison.

Believe when I say it is painful cutting out all the other hilarious text. But I must leave them for others to mock. And still, sigh, where to begin?

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