I hate to be in the position of defending Bill O’Reilly, but Keith Olbermann’s rant against him last night was pretty shabby.
Olbermann thought he’d caught O’Reilly in a contradiction because in a recent interview O’Reilly called himself a supporter of the separation of church and state, while in an earlier statement O’Reilly had, in Olbermann’s words, “called the separation of church and state bogus.”
No, he didn’t. What O’Reilly actually said (as was clear from the excerpt Olbermann provided) was that he didn’t buy the “bogus separation-of-church-and-state argument” against the display of Christmas symbols and such on state property. In other words, it wasn’t the separation thesis itself that O’Reilly was calling bogus, it was the inference from that thesis to a specific policy conclusion.
Now as it happens I think O’Reilly was mistaken in calling that inference bogus. Still, it was clearly the inference and not the premise that O’Reilly was calling bogus, and so Olbermann’s triumphant crowing over O’Reilly’s supposed inconsistency was either dishonest or sloppy.
I still prefer Olbermann to O’Reilly, but at some point during the campaign he really jumped the shark for me.
I much preferred the first one…y’know, where Olbermann had to go back in time to find worthwhile material so that they wouldn’t move him to a worse time slot, and met those totally excellent babes from the first Bush presidency…
Olbermann “making fun” of O’Reilly has easily been the worst thing about Countdown for years. Even when he’s dead-on accurate, it’s awful, because who cares?
Both of them suck. I’d much rather listen to Walter Block. Can we get him
a time slot?
Travis
I get the feeling that Olbermann fancies himself a modern-day Edward R. Murrow. He’s really nothing but the Democrats’ version of Sean Hannity, except even Hannity’s not as pretentious and self-absorbed as Olbermann.
It kinda cracks me up whenever he does his “special comments,” and he goes for the profound, dramatic prose, but then trips over his lines. And then he always shakes his head when he does it.
It was funny a couple years ago, after his special comment, he would still have to introduce Joe Scarborough, so he’d go from his I’m-just-disgusted -with-this-administration voice “I’m Keith Olbermann, this has been countdown” to having to segway into “Scarborough Country.” Scarborough would always have a half-smirk on his face.
I think Keith must have asked if he could not do the segway after his special comments, so he could leave off with his I’m-so-disgusted mood and not ruin it having to make small-talk with Joe.