Weekly Jackass Number Eleven : Keith Olbermann

You know you've reached the height of jackassdom when you make so many boneheaded, outrageous, and just plain wrong statements that entire websites are devoted to watching your every move. Olbermann gained fame on ESPN's Sportscenter, where his droll delivery was actually pretty funny, for about ten minutes; then you grew to dread his visage from the depths of your being - but it got worse. He decided he was too smart for sports, and went into the pundit business, and the world has never been the same.

You can easily find a ton of crappy Olbermann material without searching too hard: his obsessions include Bill O'Reilly, who routinely pounds him in the ratings, the Ohio vote 'fraud', the 'myth' of liberal media bias, and of course, the totalitarian state America has become under the Bush administration. Keith's made it easy on us, though, by summing up his entire warped outlook in his reaction to the Eason Jordan affair. Let's go fisking with Keith:

Eason Jordan makes a remarkable gaffe, implying that the U.S. military is hunting journalists. He backs off within moments of the remark, apologizes, and still gets forced to resign from CNN.

Wow, Keith, you're off to a bad start. Eason Jordan hardly backed off within moments - what little backing he did was days later, after the blogstorm hit. Nor did he 'imply' the U.S. military was hunting journalists, anymore than I am implying you are our Weekly Jackass; he said it. Of course, no one will release the transcript or the videotape, but impeccable, liberal, Democratic sources have said it is so.

While some bloggers are parading his head around on a pike as another example of victory over the MSM, they � and the MSM � seem to have entirely forgotten, and excluded from their coverage, the fact that Eason Jordan had sealed his own doom as long ago as April, 2003. It is one thing to acknowledge that your news organization may have buried stories that would�ve illuminated the atrocities of Saddam Hussein, in order to preserve your access (and perhaps the lives of your staff) in Baghdad � it is another to have voluntarily written those facts up as an Op-Ed for The New York Times.

I'm truly laughing out loud as I write this. I know of NO ONE - no blogger, no mainstream journalist, absolutely no one, who excluded the coverage of Jordan's earlier idiotic admission that he shilled for Saddam Hussein. It's called context, Keith, and everyone provided it, college boy. I mentioned it, and all the bloggers before and after me, and all the newspaper articles - say, you don't get out much, do you, Keith?

Between the misguided idea to boast in The Times about what he called �The News We Kept To Ourselves,� and the stomach-churning, much-publicized news that he�d left his wife and family to take up with Daniel Pearl�s widow, Jordan had become a resignation waiting to happen. The irony of the right-wing bloggers� delight over Jordan�s resignation from what they perceive as the left-wing CNN, is that by publicizing his faux pas in Davos, they did CNN executives� dirty work for them. They enabled CNN to squeeze him out.

I'm still scratching my head over the Left's straw man of Jordan's affair with Marianne Pearl. Sour grapes, if you ask me; it can't be that those right-wing nutty bloggers had the truth on their side, so it had to be this affair. Why is Eason Jordan committing adultery with Daniel Pearl's widow more stomach-churning then, say, the President of the United States fooling around with a 20-year-old intern in the Oval Office? If we did CNN's dirty work for them and gave them a reason to force out a most egregious exemplar of bias (but wait, I thought it was the affair, not the bloggers - no fair changing your argument in mid-sentence), then so be it. I don't have a problem with that; do you? You kinda just threw this together at the last minute, didn't you, Keith? Come on, you can tell us...

Of course, Olbermann is playing to his ever-diminishing base of hard-core lefties, so he's gonna swallow their talking points; it's worth saying again, though of course no one on the 'progressive' side is listening, that part of apologizing for doing something stupid is admitting that you did the stupid thing you are apologizing for. Neither Rather nor Jordan (nor Clinton, until the devil in the Blue Dress forced him) made that crucial step, and that's what did them in.

Irony is in short supply in the Weekly Jackass world, but Olbermann, who at least looks kinda smart, might appreciate this: in automatically assuming the worst of the bloggers, mischaracterizing our arguments, and giving extra 'leeway' to those on his side of the aisle, Olbermann has become the very thing he claims to be against: a partisan hack. Oh, cruel life, why do you mock us so?

Enjoy it, Keith - it's yours for a week.