Fare well, Keith

Amazing what you can read into a face. Exhibit 1:

Exhibit 2:

Think about this: if you had to work for, or with, either Keith Olbermann or Lawrence O’Donnell, or if you had to manage one or the other of them, who would you choose?

The answer’s pretty easy. What made Keith so dynamic is also what would have made him insufferable, if you had to work with him.

And I feel slightly guilty for admitting this, but I don’t miss him all that much. Lawrence O’Donnell is a very decent, smart human being, and he doesn’t have all those irritating Keith mannerisms. Plus, it was so sweet what he said about his mother being able to watch his show now without falling asleep because he used to be on so late (a little scary, my compatibility with Lawrence O’Donnell’s mother*).

I do feel bad for Olbermann sitting at home (do I remember that he lives all by himself in some Manhattan apartment?), not even able to make a Special Comment about what on earth happened there; and watching O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow handling his absence just fine, thank you.

*But if I had been Lawrence O’Donnell’s mother, I would have taped his show, as I did for both him and Rachel Maddow last night, so I guess I needn’t feel as old as Lawrence O’Donnell’s mother.

Breitbart the Fox

Only Rachel Maddow got it right. Be afraid, white people, be very afraid.

No one had ever heard of poor Shirley Sherrod until Andrew Breitbart (who has replaced his former mentor Matt Drudge as the prime bottom-feeder for Fox News) got ahold of her. He twisted her story to fit his narrative: ACORN, the NAACP, black people in the Obama administration – they’re all racist, and they’re coming to get you, white people. They’re going to take all the things you’ve pulled yourselves up by your bootstraps to get, and give them away to black people.

And it all starts with Obama, of course, which is why Breitbart’s timing is so calculated. Check it out: ACORN and health care reform. Shirley Sherrod and financial reform. Create a media firestorm; eclipse Obama.

How did the latest storm start? When the NAACP dared criticize the Tea Party for racism. Have you ever seen their signs? “Obama’s Plan: White Slavery.” “Save White America.”

It takes a clever man, doing the Atwater-Rove school one better, to take this criticism and throw it back, using a phony tape and Fox News. And it takes a very clever man to somehow escape criticism of his own role, by turning the whole dirty story into a criticism of the Obama administration, even from the likes of Keith Olbermann.

Be afraid, America, be very afraid, of the Breitbart/Fox/Murdoch media empire.

Keith’s puppet

Craig Crawford is apparently leaving MSNBC because he’s tired of being “a cartoon player for lefty games,” whatever that means. Whatever it means, it’s given the right-wing hot-air blogs a lot of ammunition.

Now, just in case you were worrying about my prosopagnosia, I know this isn’t Craig Crawford. But the cartoon character reference brought David Shuster to mind, so I put him here. Look at his square mouth. I can barely stand to watch him, especially when he’s subbing for Keith Olbermann. When he reads Olbermann’s script he looks, and sounds, just like a ventriloquist’s puppet (or, more correctly with apologies, dummie).

I hardly ever watch cable news anymore, and until March 18, or Easter, or whenever they finally figure out if we’re going to have a healthcare system that works, I don’t intend to watch it at all. I’m going to hole up here and keep trying to find God in the Large Hadron Collider.

The way it was

I have a very liberal friend whose co-workers are all Republicans. One day she happened to mention the word torture, apropos of the Bush administration, and one of them said, “Torture? Where’d you read that – in one of your lefty blogs?”

“No,” she replied, “In the New York Times.”

That didn’t help much.

Back in the golden days of Walter Cronkite, it seemed that news was news, without slant or spin; and the day he turned against the Vietnam War the difference between fact and opinion was very clear.

Now we have “fair and balanced” Fox News and Keith Olbermann, and if what’s reported doesn’t agree with your politics you can just blame the source.

He said after he retired (and maybe after he died) he was going to go to some perch somewhere and hope people would ask him, “Didn’t you used to be Walter Cronkite?”

I hope he’s found that perch.