Oh, For God's Sake, Shut Up.
I love the show. It's quick, well-constructed, witty. And much of the time Keith Olbermann is all those things, too. But at some point -- I think it was around the third time he did it -- I simply stopped listening to his "special comments." They weren't quick. They weren't well-constructed. They weren't witty. They were long, long, long and boring, boring, boring and so tiresomely, forcedly angry, angry, angry.
So very long. And boring. And angry.
And now, Olbermann is letting his "special" persona bleed more and more into the rest of the show. Witty Keith is being slowly absorbed by angry Keith. And the result is a liberal Limbaugh.
It's a shame. I miss witty Keith. I liked witty Keith. But angry Keith is just Markos Moulitsas. And that's just boring. Not as boring as CNN -- what could be? Nor is it quite as stupid -- yet -- as Fox News. What could be? But it's not good anymore. And the guy who made it good is the guy who is now making it suck.
This entry was posted by Michael Reynolds, on
Monday, March 24, 2008.
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10:39 AM
About a year and a half ago, I told people on a moderate blog (who were Olbermann fans) that he was a liberal Limbaugh. Though hardly anyone saw it then, now many of them recognize it. What you have to realize is that Limbaugh wasn't Limbaugh until a couple of years into his schtick, so those of us who'd witnessed that with Limbaugh saw this coming. A little bit of righteous anger gradually becomes fanned into incendiary nonsense, and I suppose also that it's impossible to consistently churn out intelligently witty commentary to meet the demand so that an inferior product has to be substituted.
3:39 PM
Sideways: I believe I called this back in September 2006 (complete with equating him with talk radio), on a post on which, coincidentally, you commented as M.Takhallus.
See this post at Done With Mirrors.
3:44 PM
And I noted, in this post, that Alan Stewart Carl had picked up on another example in early November of the same year.
3:52 PM
I still follow the show, however.
I'm funny that way.
Or something like that.