Keith Olbermann (sorry)

By: Jennifer Foster | Opelika Auburn News
Published: August 19, 2008 | 0 Comments | Post a Comment

(I apologize in advance for defiling this blog with Keith Olbermann-related content. But some things just have to be said.)

I stumbled across Keith Olbermann's latest "special comment" today.

Trust me, it was accidental. As a matter of practice, I make it a point to avoid reading or listening to anything that is hyperpartisan, whether left or right. I don't listen to Rush, I won't watch Jon Stewart, I avoid Sean Hannity and -- as you know from yesterday -- I cannot stand Bill Maher.

So you can probably guess that I don't catch much of Olbermann's work.

But I have to admit that the headline of this article sucked me in: "Olbermann chastises McCain: Grow up! Senator is acting like a child, needs immediate attitude adjustment," it read.

If you know anything about post-SportsCenter Keith Olbermann, who has become but a caricature of the popular TV personality he once was, you know I could just leave it right there.

First of all, regardless of one's political disagreement with a candidate, it takes a special kind of arrogance for someone who's never served in the Armed Forces -- i.e., Olbermann -- to take this sort of tone with someone who spent five and a half years being tortured in a POW camp.

But that Olbermann, he's an overachiever. He's turned his special brand of arrogance into twisted, grotesque art.

I thought about dissecting this "special comment," as Olbermann so humbly calls his regular, vitriolic TV diatribe:

It's bombastic;

It's unnecessarily long winded;

It's punctuated as if it was left out on the porch and pelted with a hailstorm of commas;

The number of rhetorical questions makes readers wonder whether they've accidentally stumbled on to some bad Aristotle impressions written by flunked-out philosophy students; and

It's laced with a toxic, personal disdain for and derision of his subject that goes beyond Olbermann's political disagreements.

All these things typify Olbermann offerings, and they explain why he is among the least credible political commentators out there. But instead of wasting my time on anything Keith Olbermann has to say, I thought I'd just bottom-line it.

McCain could respond with an eerily familiar refrain:

"McCain chastises Olbermann: Shut up! Commentator is acting like a child, needs immediate attitude adjustment."

But I'm sure McCain's people are just going to ignore Olbermann. And they should. Unless he's talking about sports -- which he never should have stopped doing, by the way -- there's nothing "special" about his comments, anyway.