Rick Moran of RightWing Nuthouse rises from his sickbed to take on Keith Olbermann, the sanctimonious unhinged commentator on MSNBC who has been drawing viewers to MSNBC and a lot of flak lately for the extremely abusive tone of his denunciations of President Bush. Olbermann is now charging that the far more widely—view FNC is in cahoots with president Bush to rewrite history.

It wasn't until he realized that his bread was buttered by liberal bloggers did he begin to demonstrate some traction with his show. In fact, it is eerie how like a liberal blog his show has become; wildly accusatory with no evidence to back up outrageous charges; sophomoric flights of logic and reason; an unhinged whining that causes the viewer to actually recoil in disgust at some of the self—pitying 'woe is us' rhetoric; and a breathtaking shallowness that outlaws context and substitutes emotion for rational thought.

In this respect, Olberman's shtick is reminiscent of the high school know—it—all who used to drive everyone nuts by trying to prove he was smart by using a large vocabulary — invariably misusing terms willy nilly — while taking on a professorial air of superiority that attracted every bully in the school like flies to rotting meat. Loud, insufferable, and laughably incoherent at times, the know—it—all was able to gather around him the witless, the woebegone, and the wasted where he would hold forth every day in the lunchroom, his sycophants hanging on every word.

Reading this transcript of his remarks last night, it is clear that Olberman has slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of idiocy. To call a fellow journalist [FNC's Chris Wallace] a 'monkey' is so far beyond what passes for rational discourse that even a lefty blog should find such rhetoric disturbing.

I never watch Olbermann, but from the snippets I have seen of his rants, he strikes me as a man with a highly inflated view of his own intelligence and importance.

Thomas Lifson   9 26 06