I Think I Know How to Bring Countdown With Keith Olbermann Back Through the Looking Glass [View All]

[McCamy Taylor]

I. Richard Wolffe in Sheep’s Clothing

Richard Wolffe is one of the sharper pundits at MSNBC. Richard Wolffe has also been spending a lot of time with the Obama campaign, as Keith Olbermann inadvertently revealed in a recent show. I realized this myself, when I went back to read some of the Countdown transcripts starting in January this year. Unfortunately, in the last couple of days, MSNBC cleaned out a lot of the old transcripts, but I have some cut and paste I did a while back.

I was trying to find out when KO caught Hillary Hatred, the disease that makes men’s eyes bug out of their heads and gives their faces that purplish flush that clashes with their ties. He did not have it yet around the first of the year, but Richard Wolffe was already spreading the anti-Hillary rhetoric way back then.

Wolffe is a smooth operator. With his gentle smile, his nerdy glasses and his international voice, nothing that he says gives offense---until you read it on the page. Then, the words of reasons become the words of political propaganda.

Richard Wolffe wears sheep’s clothing.

Today, when the good old boys of MSNBC were up to their usual tricks—pretending to help out the Democrats, not by praising Obama but by tearing down Hillary (what a fun and easy way to help John McCain while pretending not to be as biased as Fox News. Divide and Conquer is the RNC’s number one weapon against Democrats. I wonder if anyone every told Keith this while he was memorizing baseball stats?)---KO was on his best behavior. No more snark aimed at the possible Democratic VP nominee and definite general election campaigner. His guests were all on their best behavior, too. All except Richard Wolffe. He has it bad. That is what happens when you get embedded. Spend a lot of time with people who talk anti-Hillary the way that you and I breathe air, and you start thinking anti-Hillary. In the few minutes he was on the show, he said:

“I think there is going to be some blood”

“attacking”

That Hillary is thinking “’We want to be there when the guy flames out as he will.’”

“Obama company has trodden into this minefield before”

Hillary " played the victim card before”

Was Wolffe listening when his candidate gave his unity talk last night?


II. Tales from the Crypt

Jan4. Immediately after Iowa win, heading to New Hampshire at a time when Hillary had a tremendous double digit lead in the national polls.

OLBERMANN: And to that point, I saw an Obama staffer quoted on “Politico” today saying they‘re bracing for some kind of attack ad from Clinton in the next couple of days, before the vote in New Hampshire on Tuesday. Is that likely? Is it smart?

WOLFFE: You know, there is no pretty way to really come back for the Clinton campaign now. You know, the smart question is about where do they make their stand and what the tone is of this attack. You know, it‘s very difficult balance.

Since he all know from the “John Edwards is a loser” episode that KO does not keep up with the political news, I am going to make a wild guess and suggest that Wolffe made sure that KO read that issue of “Politico” in addition to his usual fare of the sports pages.

Jan 15 Remember the “Race Memo” Jan 12? The news media storm it precipitated lasted for several days. KO got caught up in that tsunami, too, thanks to you know who.

OLBERMANN: Congressman Rangel, was this all just an unfortunate timing issue? He was going on New York on about the same time that Senator Clinton had released her statement agreeing to the truce. Or might the Clinton campaign have a problem on its hands here if supporters and surrogates continue not to comply?
WOLFFE: Well, certainly unfortunate. I mean, at best, this is a huge blunder than treads all over the campaign‘s written message. But you know, you have to start wondering, if there is if not something concerted about this line of attack on Obama. At least something in the air, something in the conversations going around the Clinton campaign because you just have to look at the tone, the difference in tone between the statements coming out of the Clinton campaign and what we just heard from Senator Obama who went out of his way as you pointed out to praise the Clintons for their record on civil rights. Congressman Rangel talked about Obama behaving in a stupid and dumb fashion. And then Senator Clinton herself talk about her personal emotion. Well, I never heard Barack Obama say, I am personally hurt by this. So, you know, you have to kind of look at the differences here and I think it does say something about the way the campaigns are conducting themselves.

Very disingenuous of Wolffe who knew all about “The Race Memo” and about how Rep. Clyburn, Donna Brazile and media sources including CBS, Bob Herbert and MSNBC had been printing and airing things straight out of it for days, despite the Obama camp’s very quiet disavowal of its contents. He says, in effect, But Obama has always said only good things about the Clintons on race. Why are they saying such mean things about him? and now, at the tail end of the crisis, Wolffe gets KO caught up in the middle of it.

For anyone who missed the two seconds of MSM coverage of the “Race Memo” here it is. It was a misstep by someone in the Obama camp (which is allowed to have missteps like any other political campaign). However, if we are going to have unity, we need to come together and admit that the Clintons are not racists and the MSM is a liar, so that the GOP can not exploit this as a wedge issue in the GE.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/203

Could the feud with the Clintons have started here? Did Keith get blamed for taking a “position” that he did not know that he was taking? Did he get an angry response from Clinton supporters and decide that they are all crazy?

III. “Battle Not With Monsters Lest You Become One”

Since all the January and February shows are gone from the website, I will fast forward to...

March 5

KO:Senator Clinton is showing signs of staying in the race until Denver is the new Miami Beach, Circa 1972

OMG! KO actually knows about the 1972 election and CREEP and Pat Buchanan’s dirty tricks in which they divided and conquered the Democratic Party by playing tricks against one Democrat which were attributed to another in order to make Democrats hate each other. And he still thinks he is doing the Democrats a favor trying to make Democrats hate on another Democrat who has a very devoted following within the Democratic Party? He knows that Clinton is the designated Humphrey and that he is the designated Hunter S. Thompson whose job is to make her look like “a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack”? And since he is always quoting history, he knows what happened to Humphrey’s alliance of working class and African-American supporters in 1972? They stayed home in the fall or voted for Nixon, because they were so fed up with the way that McGovern and his surrogates (and CREEP) slimed their man.

No way! The transcriptionist at MSNBC must have made a mistake. I’ll bet in 1972, KO was following sports. And later, somebody told him a little bit about 1972 and left out all the best parts.

WOLFFE: “attacks”, “tactical” not “strategic”, “sabotage” (note that the Obama camp’s “communications operation really dropped the ball” on NAFTA by way of comparison of his word choices. It is war for Hillary but just fun and games for Obama.)

March 7 Someone said “Monster” and the press acted like it was a big fucking deal. You know what is a big fucking deal? When your president lies about the reasons for invading a country and then tortures its citizens. And your Congress ignores it so thirty years later it happens again. Give Ms. Powers her job back please.

Oh man, I have to relive this in a transcript. I think I need a drink.

KO: “Battle not with monsters,” warned the dark philosopher Nietzsche, “lest you become one.”

Does Keith know what this means? Someone who knows him want to tell him? I write these things about him and not about the O’Reillys of the world because KO is a good guy and he does good work, and I hope that someone will persuade him to take a few deep breaths and relax. Maybe investigate the Church of the Subgenius. I know he isn’t ever in a million years going to read something like this. The stuff I do is intended to help media consumers develop an ear and an eye for the tricks the MSM uses to suck us into their narrative—the fiction they call reality. When he quotes a line like that and yet acts the way he does, I have to assume there is a big disconnect that someone who is on his wavelength could fix.

Wolffe:” here you have a situation where is really looking like “Alice in Wonderland” politics.” “no pretense to running a positive effort”, “I lost count of the number of times she‘s done this and her allies and surrogates have done this” “this is an attempt to undercut him, to undercut Obama” “I think my head is about to explode on this story” “Here they are, actually, laying out the groundwork for the Republican attack machines.”

I think I’m going to cry over the death of American journalism.

IV. Things I Believe

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

You can go to the prisons of Georgia, and I don't know, it may be that poor people are the only ones who commit crimes, but I do know that they are the only ones who serve prison sentences. When Ellis MacDougall first went to Reidsville, he found people that had been in solitary confinement for 10 years. We now have 500 misdemeanants in the Georgia prison system.
Well, I don't know the theory of law, but there is one other point I want to make, just for your own consideration. I think we've made great progress in the Pardons and Paroles Board since I've been in office and since we've reorganized the government. We have five very enlightened people there now. And on occasion they go out to the prison system to interview the inmates,to decide whether or not they are worthy to be released after they serve one third of their sentence. I think most jurors and most judges feel that, when they give the sentence, they know that after a third of the sentence has gone by, they will be eligible for careful consideration. Just think for a moment about your own son or your own father or your own daughter being in prison, having served 7 years of a lifetime term and being considered for a release. Don't you think that they ought to be examined and that the Pardons and Paroles Board ought to look them in the eye and ask them a question and, if they are turned down, ought to give them some substantive reason why they are not released and what they can do to correct their defect?
I do.
Jimmy Carter Law Day Address

John Kerry believes in America. And he knows that it’s not enough for just some of us to prosper -- for alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we’re all connected as one people. If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.
It is that fundamental belief -- It is that fundamental belief: I am my brother’s keeper. I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.
Barack Obama 2004 Democratic National Convention

I know that Hillary Clinton is the keeper of her brother Keith Olbermann. Is Keith Olbermann the keeper of his sister Hillary Clinton? If he is not, what forces conspired to drive him, a decent man, into a position that is so opposed to his basic nature?

There is a companion phrase to the one from which this thread draws its title.

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

If Keith Olbermann took a little holiday from both Richard Wolffe and Pat Buchanan, he would be a much happier person. And the Democratic Party would be more united.

Namaste