The unforgiving minute: At least Keith Olbermann didn't get this following his latest employment difficulties

As the details of KO's departure from Current TV slowly reach the daylight, it's worth taking a moment to recall how one of his earlier employers handled the whole break-up thing.

As Oscar Wilde wrote, true friends stab you in the front.

Also, check out the punchline at the end of this post from January 2011.

Minute's up.

Saturday morning tunes: It took me by surprise, I must say -- KO's out at MSNBC (plus a Special Comment)

Here's music to listen to while we sift through the sure-to-follow rumors and leaks concerning Olbermann's abrupt departure from MSNBC. (Absent any other information Friday night, I'm guessing Comcast made this an unspoken part of their takeover deal, but time will tell.

Maybe.)

And now, as promised, a Special Comment:

Longtime p3 correspondent and master of the mystic media arts Doctor TV wrote me shortly after the word got out:

The point that I want to make now is how meaningless it is for a news organization to cover itself. One might think that the unfettered journalism taught in our journalism schools would mean that MSNBC would have the best coverage of why and what happened. My goodness -- it happened in their own offices. If you read their coverage, you'll discover nothing that isn't already on the other news sites.

The byline says that it was written in part by MSNBC staff and from wire copy. I wonder why an event that happened next to your desk needs wire service copy to help get the story? Even if they couldn't get more official information from the suits, the reporters at MSNBC couldn't find an anonymous source somewhere in their own newsroom?

There is an official MSNBC statement and I imagine there will be no other explanation reported until someone else breaks the story. How do company reporters go beyond what their own company's flacks tell them is the truth?

Not surprised by this but it drives home the schism between what journalists believe they are and do and what occurs in the corporate media world where the news story is about the company that not only pays you but controls access to only the stories they want covered.

It isn't just MSNBC but any news agency that has to do self reporting -- think how bad the New York Times has been with any number of stories concerning itself.

And as for that "official MSNBC statement," here it is in its entirety:

MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC's success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.

To appreciate fully the irony of that last highlighted bit, go here.

Good night and good luck.

Olbermann goes Peckinpah

(Updated below.)

Yesterday morning at a little before 10am, Pacific time, Keith Olbermann left a post at Daily Kos. The title really says it all: Send Me Everything You Can Find About Glenn Beck.

As of a quarter after nine this morning--twenty-three hours later--it had 1499 comments. (Actually, in the time it took to write that sentence, it jumped to 1501 comments.)

It's an amusing image, and it'll make entertaining television for MSNBC, but I have to say I don't really see the practical point.

First, what could Olbermann's oppo-research irregulars possibly dig up about Beck that is more fringy and incendiary than what he's already proudly on record saying and doing? You can't leverage someone with exposure when he's already cheerfully outed himself for worse.

Second, suppose that--against all odds--some land mine buried among those 1500-and-counting comments actually manages to be worse than what the weeping madman's already done for all to see anyway. So what? Glenn Beck reports to Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, not Barack Obama. He knows he'd never be hung out to dry. His job would be no more at risk than Bill O'Reilly's was after the murder of Dr. George Tiller.

Update: David Neiwert at C&L provides a thorough itemization of Beck's extremist resume. Toxic as it was before he moved to Fox News last winter, it's become many times worse since then. That's not because Beck has misread the expectations on him at his new job--just the opposite. Neiwwert asks, "When will he finally face the music?" If the point of the rhetorical question is When will he have his "Van Jones moment?", the answer is, he won't.

Proving, once again, that Paddy Chayefsky was miles ahead of the curve

I'm not aware of any evidence that, during their recent conversation, NBC-Universal CEO Jeff Zucker ever said to Keith Olbermann, "You have meddled with the primary forces of nature, Mr. Olbermann, and I won't have it! Is that clear?"

Nor is there report that Olbermann (or Bill O'Reilly, down the street at FOX, after a similar encounter with his corporate masters) came away convinced he'd seen the face of God. But that's probably because, by that point, real-time events were already working so hard to outdistance even the harshest satire that throwing in such obvious references would have been gilding the lily.

For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.

In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).

“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said.

The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.

“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”

The parent companies declined to comment directly on the details of the cease-fire, which was orchestrated in part by Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, and Gary Ginsberg, an executive vice president who oversees corporate affairs at the News Corporation. [...]

Over time, G.E. and the News Corporation concluded that the fighting “wasn’t good for either parent,” said an NBC employee with direct knowledge of the situation. But the session hosted by Mr. Rose provided an opportunity for a reconciliation, sealed with a handshake between Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch.

Olbermann has since insisted, "I am party to no deal," leaving us to wonder if the absence on "Countdown" of any mention of O'Reilly or FOX after the corporate detente is coincidence. I suppose, technically, he's right, since the deal was cut by Immelt and Murdoch, leaving Olbermann simply as someone tasked with carrying out its terms, rather than a party to the deal itself.

Here's an alternate version of the Olbermann visitation, as (p)retold by Oscar-winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky:

Seriously: Other than network executives ordering the on-air assassination of one of their own news personalities because he had lousy ratings, is there any major plot point from "Network" that hasn't been played out--without a trace of irony--by the American news media in the three decades since the film was released?

• Rendering the news and entertainment divisions virtually indistinguishable, if not formally merged? Check.


• Handing airtime over to spokespersons for fringe, often-violent political groups because their behavior draws big audiences? Check.


• Interfering from the highest corporate levels with programming content to protect business interests? Check. (Even Chayefsky didn't foresee rival networks cutting deals to protect each other's interests by toning down on-air content.)

By the way, Glenn Greenwald points out what a load of self-serving claptrap it is to describe Charlie Rose as someone "with a neutral perspective" in this situation.

Somerby's right

You know, I really don't want to hear what's in those emails between Gov. (for the time being) Sanford and his mistress in Argentina. Apart from the fact that it red-lines my personal yuck-meter, it's just cheap, smirky Starr Report-style voyeurism.

Okay, we get it--Sanford the Promise-Keeper had an affair and wasn't very smart to think he could keep it quiet for very long. But the emails' content adds nothing substantive to the real story, which is aberrant behavior by the state's chief executive (to say nothing of the question of dereliction of duty and possible misuse of public resources, which aren't proved yet). You want to see Sanford brought to heel, those are pretty good grounds right there. The rest--and Keith and Rachel, I'm looking at you--is just sheet-sniffing.

I'll also be interested to hear how the Charlotte Columbia SC paper that broke this story got their hands on the email, and more importantly why they decided to sit on them for six months.

But the content of those emails--now made slightly pathetic by events--will have plenty of opportunity to see the light of day in the probably forthcoming Sanford v. Sanford. For now, let it drop. "Sauce for the goose" is no excuse for sinking to the murky moral depths of Kenneth Starr (or then-Congressman Sanford, who argued that Clinton should resign over Monicagate on the grounds that the cover-up was as bad as the infidelity, if not worse).

For immediate release: p3 international headquarters makes bold infrastructure leap into early 2003

At Comcast's humorless insistence, my place is now wired for digital TV.

This change has been received around here as a mixed blessing. The worst part is that my beautiful new TV remote, not even 10 weeks old, now joins all my other remotes in the limbo of the cigar box on my coffee table, usurped by the new remote for the digital converter box.

The good news is that I have MSNBC back after Comcast moved it to digital last winter (along with Hallmark and Lifetime--aka The "Little House on the Prairie" Channel and The "He Had It Coming" Channel, respectively), so I'm no longer forced to get my shot of Olbermann online the following morning. (Hey, did anyone else know that Rachel Maddow has a show now? The things you can miss, wandering fog-shrouded streets in the Gaslight Age of analog.)

The cruelest irony: Comcast On Demand features 70 or 80 free movies each month, including only a handful that actually look interesting to me. (Roughly the same signal-to-noise ratio that the programming on the cable channels offers, I might add.) Springsteen had it right:

Except that now I'm not just watching whatever Nothing the broadcasters choose to shove at me, when they choose to shove it--I've got Nothing On Demand. I am Master of my own Nothing.

And that, my friends, is a little thing we like to call Progress.

When Republicans attack!

[This one's sort of a bandwidth pig, and for that I apologize. UPDATE: Video links fixed, too. -bn]

At some point recently, GOP strategists must have taken a breather from publicly airing their internecine disagreements with the verve of 1990s Democrats, to take a peek in their political armory . . . and found it all but empty. A few unused packs of the race card were piled on a dusty shelf to one side, and the remaining crates of Vote "No" On Everything had been dragged near the door for ready access. But other than that, not so much as a puppy biscuit in sight.

What to do? I suppose, with the benefit of hindsight, what happened next was almost inevitable: If they're taking their political philosophy from Rush Limbaugh, it was only a matter of time until they started taking their media strategy from Bill O'Reilly. (H/t to Doctor TV.)

This could be described as the "I know you are, but what am I?" schoolyard tactic raised to the level of national media politics--not really an exercise in subtlety and finesse.

The National Republican Congressional Committee is sending out video "trackers" to ask provocative questions of Democratic members of Congress. The trackers, who are congressional committee staffers, were earlier reported by Congress Daily, a specialty publication distributed largely on Capitol Hill.

NRCC spokesman Paul Lindsay told McClatchy that Democratic complaints were "whining," adding that "The modern-day world of campaign politics demands that we track our opponents' steps and missteps. We have nothing to hide when it comes to asking tough questions, but it appears that Democrats do when it comes to answering them."

The NRCC doesn't require its questioners to identify themselves as partisans on grounds that anyone has a right to approach a member of Congress and ask a question. It wouldn't say how many lawmakers have been questioned: A GOP statement said that, "Videos are posted on a case-by-case basis."

Republicans say they're simply trying to hold Democratic lawmakers accountable. Since the Internet became an important part of campaigns, it's not been unusual for candidates of any party to be tracked by their opponents.

"We've had trackers following us around before, but they were there to observe," said Andrew Stoddard, communications director for Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., who recently was ambushed by a GOP interviewer.

"What they're doing now," Stoddard said, "takes things to a whole new level." […]

"Nobody understands more clearly than Republicans how much an unscripted moment can hurt you," said Stephen Farnsworth, the author of "Spinner in Chief," a study of how presidents sell their policies to the public.

Clearly, there's a difference between trackers, who passively record a political figure's public behavior, and agents provocateurs like these, who hope to create something newsworthy--or better, viral-video worthy--out of nothing. George Allen's self-inflicted "Macaca moment" in 2006 was captured by a tracker; the only sense in which the Virginia-born videographer to whom the slur was directed could be said to have "provoked" Allen's remark was by having been born with a "provocative" skin color.

But the political lethality of that moment must make GOP strategists drool at a time when the best response they can come up with to Obama's budget is to announce they have no alternative to offer.

If you want provocation from the left, of course, you could do no better than reviewing the work of Michael Moore. In my favorite scene from "Fahrenheit 9/11," he positions himself and a camera crew on a street corner near the Capitol Building and invites members of Congress--none of whom had children serving in the then-fashionable Iraq War--to have their sons or daughters enlist. They avoided him like he was a leper.

Oddly, the right hates it when Moore does stuff like that--he makes them so self-destructively angry that they even created an unwatched and unwatchable feature film attempting unsuccessfully to satirize him. But when one of their own does it--well, that's another matter. Let's go to the tape:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Bill O'Reilly's Right to Privacy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Now, fortunately, we don't have to wonder what to do when O'Reilly's producers come after us in a parking lot with a camera. Keith Olbermann identified the definitive defense to that a couple of years ago: Forget about winning; forget about reasoning. Those concepts simply don't apply here. This isn't an attempt to win the battle of ideas; it's an attempt to get usable footage. Just follow a few simple steps to make sure that you don't give him a moment of tape that he can air:





I should add that, for the truly brave, there is a little-used strategy that can turn these video stalkers away:

Some experts doubt that Republicans will gain much political mileage from running these crudely-made video ambushes on YouTube; some suggested that the tactic could backfire if the party picks the wrong target.

Rep. Joseph Courtney, D-Conn., known as one of the more conscientious members of the House of Representatives, was one such GOP target, for example. When the interviewer asked Courtney if he'd read the stimulus bill, he answered quickly: "Yes I have, actually. It's good for Connecticut."

So yes, there is that possible tactic: being informed and telling the truth. But that, like nitroglycerin, is tricky stuff probably best left to madmen and terrorists.


I put it to you, readers: What are the universal interview-killing words or phrases that will guarantee that the footage from these GOP ambush videos will be unusable, no matter how cleverly it's edited down?

The guidelines are simple: Each one needs to be short, easily remembered in the heat of the moment, instantly recognizable by viewers, and--from the GOP's point of view--politically and rhetorically toxic.

Suggestions welcome.

Oppositional television in the age of Obama

After the defeat of McCain and Palin in November, a lot of folks wondered aloud if "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" could survive without a Republican in the White House.

I was never worried: The point of satire is to ridicule the excesses, vanities, hypocrisy, and dishonesty of those in power. It's true that Second Age of Bush provided an embarrassment of riches for the two shows' writers to work with. But to imagine that the Obama administration, or any administration, will give them nothing to work with--would be so transparent, modest, self-consistent, unerring, and uniformly benificent that there'll be nothing for satirists to sink their teeth into--is to have a fundamentalist's faith and trust in our government that is almost un-American.

And, of course, the armory of the contemporary American satirist is by no means limited to barbs about the executive branch of the government: There are the antedeluvian minds of the Senate Republicans. There is the endless jockeying of interests and agendas in the House. There's the Supreme Court--why, the continued existence on this earth of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas alone amounts to a Full Employment Program for Comedy Writers. There's Big Banking. Big Media. Big Pharma. And so on.

Anyone who sits at the far end of the gap of mystery and miracle that separates the power elite from the rest of us will always be fair game for satirists. Don't worry for them. If there's enough material out there to keep even Leno going in prime time five nights a week, certainly there's plenty of work for good purveyors of topical humor, too.

If you want to know the fellow whose future I'm more concerned about, it's Keith Olbermann.

He's not really a satirist, of course, although he gets in his share of snark and ridicule in. But when his "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" took off following the first of his "Special Reports" in August of 2006--Rumsfeld had compared opponents of the Iraq war with the "appeasers" of Hitler in the 1930s, and Olbermann went ballistic--he became one of the more highly-positioned voices of opposition in the mainstream media.

A lot of that clout got squandered over the next couple of years, I think. He's often mentioned his worry that airing his first Special Report might cost him his job; as time went on I think that worry was replaced by the worry that not airing Special Reports might cost him his ratings bump. By last spring his Special Reports were too often about ephemera like his objections to how Hillary was campaigning that week.

In part that's because the "Countdown" format and formula call for the rapid descent each night from the important (usually Story #5, presented first) to the silly (the remaining four stories of the evening). As Doctor Beyond pointed out to me last week, by the night before the Obama inauguration, KO was directing his trademark bombast toward the fact that . . . wait for it . . . Obama was going to leave the carpet (famously designed by Laura Bush) in the Oval Office. (In fairness, the Special Report that night was about prosecuting the Bush administration personnel involved in the practice of torture.)

That's why I was especially pleased last week to see "Countdown" break the two-part story of government whistleblower Russell Tice, who revealed that the NSA had been spying on American journalists and news agencies, plus "tens of thousands" of other Americans. (Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.)

While I'm not worried about the satirists on Comedy Central, I'm waiting to see what happens to Olbermann under a non-Bush administration. "Countdown" format notwithstanding, he's not as liberal (certainly not progressive) as suggested by those "Special Comment" segments; he was, like a lot of Americans, disgusted by the incompetence and dishonesty of Bush and his administration, and unlike the rest of us he had a platform. He was right, of course, but what now? On MSNBC, Maddow will lead the charge to keep Obama pushed to the left as much as possible--but will Olbermann do much more than kibbitz? Will the left be as fond of him when he doesn't have Bush to kick around anymore?

Time will tell. I'd like to see him continue to thrive, if only to keep pushing O'Reilly into gratifyingly foolish outbursts, but time will tell.

AFN: Actually bringing freedom of choice to Iraq and Afghanistan?

At least in its own modest way, it appears that Armed Forces Network (AFN) may be succeeding where the rest of the Defense and State Departments aren't.

AFN brings more cable programming to the US troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan than Comcast brings to my house. But not everyone's happy with the programming options that represents.

One disgruntled viewer stationed in Iraq took strong exception to Countdown with Keith Olbermann being shown at lunch time (Baghdad is GMT +3) and wrote what I'd guess was a pretty strong letter to AFN expressing his disapproval.

Here's the reply he got from AFN:

We’re sorry that you’re disappointed with Countdown, but AFN honestly does its best to offer our viewers a balanced choice of news and commentary featuring the best, most comprehensive stateside programming we can fit into the limited “broadcast real estate” we have available in our schedule. Because AFN is tasked with providing our audience with a fair representation of what they would have available if they were at home, our source decisions are based solely on stateside ratings, feed availability and AFN audience preference as indicated by individual input and worldwide survey. Here is a statistical breakdown of the news sources currently seen on AFN: 28% from FNC, 25% from CNN, 23% from the NBC family of channels (including MSNBC), 19.5% from ABC/CBS and the remaining from PBS, independents and military news sources. It should be noted that we occasionally break into our regular schedule with live news coverage, which might skew these numbers on any given day. In fact, the pairing of Countdown with Keith Olberman with The O’Reilly Factor was designed to provide balanced commentary during primetime in Asia and during lunch in Europe. AFN simply cannot take sides when it comes to political discourse. In the end, it really is all about freedom of choice. Hope this addresses your concerns.

Doctor TV, who passed this item along, notes with some surprise the (far less skewed toward FOX than he expected) selection of news sources available via AFN.

And of course, the AFN "simply cannot take sides when it comes to political discourse" policy stands in stark contrast to the Pentagon's "message force multipliers" program revealed last month. Allowing Olbermann and O'Reilly to go head-to-head doesn't negate the damage done by the so-called "independent military analysts" fed to the mainstream news media, but it's a start.

Corrections

(Updated: dead video link fixed.)

Stock analysts call it a "correction" when a stock or an index dips significantly after a prolonged, generally upward trend.

In December 2006, five weeks after widespread Republican losses in the 2006 general election and his own firing, Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, had his own sense of what a "correction" would be:

RUMSFELD: That's what I was just going to say. This President's pretty much a victim of success. We haven't had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it's not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing's in Europe, there's a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack.

(It's good to be reminded what a maimed soul Rumsfeld was, isn't it?)

Yes, Mr. Secretary, that's the problem with terrorists: You can't always count on them to attack us when it's politically useful for the Republican Party.

Fortunately, the Bush administration had the next best thing: The Homeland Security Advisory System, better known as the color-coded threat-level indicator. Let's review how that's worked out:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.

I offer another example of a "correction:"

As Americans became increasingly and rightly cynical about the "threat-level-orange" tactics between 2003 and mid-2006, it has become less useful to the Bush administration as a distraction from revelations of its own mistakes, deceptions, and incompetence, or from events which display the increasing support of Americans for Democratic candidates and policies. The result has been a "correction" in the Bush admnistration's reliance on conveniently-timed threat warnings, following a generally-upward trend for four years.

In fact, the last time Homeland Security announced that the threat level was being raised to "High" (Orange) or "Severe" (Red) was August 10-14, 2006, in the run-up to the 2006 mid-term elections.

We can't account for this by saying that our continuing military presence in Iraq has curbed terrorism, since the opposite appears to be true: The failed state of Iraq has become a breeding ground for terrorism.

And we can't say that the Bush administration has abandoned the tactic of trumped-up fear of terrorism to protect itself politically, since Bush, Cheney, and their various enablers continue to publicly link Saddam to al Qaeda, speculate about which Democratic candidate bin Laden prefers, and so on.

And I suppose some brave soul might even advance the case that, following electoral defeat after defeat and saddled with the strongest disapproval by the American people in memory, the Bush administration has finally learned its lesson and realized that it's morally wrong, that it's not worth winning if the only way you can do it is to corrupt the very form of government you claim to be defending--if that brave soul wanted to be laughed out of the room.

No, I think we have to conclude that the Bush administration has discontinued its attempts at fear-by-threat-level for the same reason--the only reason--it ever abandons such disreputable tactics: It no longer works.

Think of it as a correction.


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Keith Olbermann: The designated driver for MSNBC election coverage

Olbermann: Mr. Bush, "We're better than you"

Keith Olbermann's Special Comment Monday night dipped into the proscribed lexicon--the words that the Media Insiders are forbidden to use--in describing Bush and the end of Daniel Levin's career in the Justice Department.

The canon of impermissible journalistic language includes:

• "criminal conspiracy to save the ass of George W. Bush"
• "liar"
• "screwed"
• "wouldn't just mean impeachment"
• "going to prison"

The story, broken three years after the event by ABC News, has been unsurprisingly missing from the mainstream news media radar screen, but in two sentences, it's this:

1. In 2004, then Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, in order to form a judgment about whether waterboarding, among other interrogation techniques, constituted torture and was therefore illegal under American and international law, subjected himself under controlled conditions to waterboarding at a military base near Washington DC.


2. Even knowing that his ultimate safety was assured by the experts monitoring his condition, Levin found the experience of incrementally drowning so terrifying that he put his professional opinion--"torture is abhorrent"--in a Justice Department memorandum, shortly after the dissemination of which he was forced out of his job by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Here's Olbermann's comment:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Transcript here.

No wonder Olbermann has been deemed no longer safe for basic cable.

Olbermann: Bush is playing

Olbermann had a great Special Comment tonight:


Some, but not all, of the good stuff:

“I'm playing for October-November," Mr. Bush said to Draper. That, evidently, is the time during which, he thinks he can sell us the real plan, which is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence."

Comfortable, that is, with saying about Iraq, again quoting the President, “stay... longer."

And there it is. We've caught you. Your goal is not to bring some troops home, maybe, if we let you have your way now. Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal. You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.

Everything you said about Iraq yesterday, and everything you will say, is a deception, for the purpose of this one cynical, unacceptable, brutal goal: perpetuating this war indefinitely.

War today, war tomorrow, war forever!

And you are playing at it! Playing!

(Screen capture via Crooks & Liars.)

Olbermann's ultimate Harry Potter spoiler

Okay, just to come clean, I've been sitting out most of the Pottermania of the last several years. It was a battle I lost a little bit at a time.

After the first couple of books attracted a lot of attention, I thought about reading them, but then the movies started coming out. Much easier, I thought, and it's not like I was specifically interested in soaking up Rowlings' prose stylings.

But then I didn't get around to seeing the first movie, and pretty soon they were getting released on DVD, so I figured I'd just watch them on DVD. Much easier, much more convenient, much cheaper.

But having the freedom to watch them whenever I wanted meant I never had to make myself watch them at all. Convenience is a killer sometimes.

So that's where things stood until last night. I had a dim idea of what the stories were all about, from the relentless hype, odd bits of entertainment news, and the occasional SNL parody.

But last night on Countdown, Keith Olbermann--after outing himself as a serious Potterphile--laid out his theory for what happens in the newest and final book. And he did so in sufficient detail and apparent analytic rigor that I'm convinced.

Watch it--if you dare!

Of course, now I'm not sure I'll ever need even to rent the DVDs. Ah well.

Maybe some day I'll be channel surfing and hear the answer, in the form of a question, on Jeopardy! before I can switch channels.

Olbermann has his Emile Zola moment

Interestingly enough, Zola was also a former sportscaster with a reputation for feuding with every network he worked for* until he finally found his groove. Go figure, huh?

Just in time for Independence Day--celebrating the last time we took on a fellow named George for, among other things, corrupting our system of justice for his short-term partisan advantage--Keith Olbermann launched a historically-resonant attack on Bush's overt participation in an obstruction of justice scheme:

The enforcement of the laws is turned over to those of one political party, who will swear beforehand that they will not enforce those laws. The choice between war and peace is turned over to those of one political party, who stand to gain vast wealth by ensuring that there is never peace, but only war.

And now, when just one cooked book gets corrected by an honest auditor, when just one trampling of the inherent and inviolable fairness of government is rejected by an impartial judge, when just one wild-eyed partisan is stopped by the figure of blind justice, this President decides that he, and not the law, must prevail.

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war.

I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people, a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.

I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors.

I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent.

I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought.

I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents.

I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

_______________
*No, of course not.

Bush's week

At least by some measures, last week would have to be considered an on-again-off-again time to be George Bush.

On the one hand, you could argue that Gonzales's pounding before the Senate Judiciary Committee, while unpleasant to watch, served two important positive functions from Bush's point of view:

First, of course, better that anyone face the consequences of Bush's policies than Bush himself, even if it means a long-time friend and loyalist must be hung out to dry while the nation watches. Painful, yes, but from that angle Bush still probably counts it as a win. (And of course, since he doesn't watch or read the news and gets his information about the outside world from tiptoeing loyalists inside the White House, it's entirely possible that Bush doesn’t yet know, may never know, that the AG took a six-hour pounding for the team.)

Second, whatever civics-class pageantry might have seemed to play out during the hearings, there's certainly a reasonable case to be made that, because Gonzales got flogged but nothing essential changed after it was over, the hearings will have no significant effect on Bush's continued anti-Constitutional plans to expand executive branch power at the expense of the legislative (and the judicial, when not otherwise useful). Such exercises would, by that calculus, simply be silly dog-and-pony shows that he must occasionally allow in order to keep unchecked power--not unlike a feudal monarch condescending to attend some rustic harvest celebration in the village before returning to the castle and continuing his plans of war, land, and treasure.

But, on the other hand, Bush did take something of a vigorous cuffing about the head and upper body last week when it came to satirical multimedia lists:

From Olbermann: Top 10 Bush administration excuses for being unable to produce important paperwork.

From the Daily Background: Top 15 most embarrassing photos of George W. Bush.

From Letterman: Top 10 favorite George W. Bush moments.

And yet . . . and yet . . . . One is reminded of Tom Lehrer's ironic musical comment on the Spanish Civil War: "Though he may have won all the battles, we had all the good songs!"

Biting video compilations are nice, don't get me wrong. And these are all pretty amusing, even if a little well-worn. And I wouldn't have the satirists lower their weapons for a moment in the days to come.

But do I think it's about time to see the subpoenas get sent to the White House, move this all to Federal Court, and get down to business. Shall we?

The conservative satire gap (continued)

It's been the sort of week that militates against posting--apologies--but the up side is that I can follow up directly on my previous post about the Fox News Channel's oxymoronic right-wing satire show.

My original plan, early in the week, was to talk about its dreadfully over-the-top laugh track, comparing it to the punchline of an old joke about a kid who was so ugly his parents had to tie a pork chop around his neck so the family dog would play with him.

The passage of time has allowed me to go at it in a somewhat higher-toned manner.

In fact, I'm simply going to turn it straight over to Keith Olbermann, who takes the principle to its logical extreme: If bad satire can benefit from a heavy-handed laugh track, why wouldn't the same be true for ridiculously ideologically slanted "news?"

(h/t to Crooks and Liars)