Keith Olbermann of MSNBC is an avatar of much that's wrong with our political discourse today. His tirades against anyone with whom he disagrees are often laced with vitriol, artery-popping anger, and sheer spittle-spewing meanness. His persona is humorless and strident. He rarely smiles except to sneer, and the only thing that elicits anything close to a laugh is the misfortune of his ideological opponents.
I mention all this because of what I heard him say on his Countdown show last night (Don't ask me why I had him on. It's a long story). Talking about Michelle Malkin, a columnist who also manages one of the best blogs on the internet and whom Olbermann awarded his nightly "Worse Person in the World" prize, the gentleman opined that without Malkin's "total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred," she would "just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it."
Set aside the fact that anyone who's at all familiar with Malkin would be repelled by the obscene misrepresentation in the first part of Olbermann's characterization, and ask yourself how ugly and twisted must be the mind that would come up with the second part (What exactly is a "mashed-up bag of meat" anyway?). Sadly, this is not the first time Olbermann has sought to dehumanize a woman with whom he disagrees. A few months ago he had on his show a guest named Michael Musto who launched a distasteful, unfunny rant against Carrie Prejean simply because Ms Prejean had answered a question in a beauty contest in a way approved of by neither Musto nor Olbermann. Olbermann snickered in sympathy throughout Musto's entire embarrassingly stupid revilement:
Mr. Olbermann has also favorably quoted Geraldo Rivera, another fine gentleman who once hosted a television show in which guests threw chairs at each other, and who said of Malkin that he'd spit on her if ever the two should cross paths. Such a statement tells us far more about Rivera, and Olbermann, than it does about Malkin, of course, but Malkin's response to Olbermann's sophomoric name-calling, tells us quite a lot about her. It certainly answers the question of who, between the two of them, has the most class:
"In case you were wondering what kind of lipstick we big mashed-up bags of meat wear, I prefer M.A.C. Lustreglass in Ornamental or Lipglass in Spite. Because nothing goes better with fascistic hatred!"
Mr. Olbermann is a hero to the MoveOn.org crowd because of his relentlessly ill-natured attacks on anyone who doubts the wisdom of progressive political nostrums. If the left ever had the power to launch an inquisition against its opponents, Olbermann would bid fair to be its Torquemada. He's a man for whom no blow is too low, no insult too hurtful. He seems to delight more in humiliating people than in criticizing their ideas. Indeed, for such as Mr. Olbermann, one achieves the latter by doing the former.
Its a shame that a corporation like NBC would continue to pay this man to say the things he does, but perhaps the NBC bigwigs kind of like it. Thankfully, hardly anyone ever watches.
RLC