Keith Olberman Suspended Indefinitly by NBC

I agree, somewhat. The center is not necessarily one party or another. And certainly it contains followers of both parties.

Typically, however, I'd argue people in the center can find ideas on both sides of the spectrum and from both parties that they like. In similar fashion they can support pols in both parties, as indeed independents do. Olbermann pretty much fails that litmus, as I've never seen him praise one Republican or any idea that remotely could be classified as conservative.

And in general, classifying Olbermann as Centrist just does not pass the stupid test. The man is well to the Left of center on numerous issues. And was hired to be so. I have no problem with that. People of most persuasions should be on somewhere. But let's not allow Ice to pretend that his imaginary American political spectrum is real, that Olbermann is a Centrist and the Media right wing and so on and so forth. It's just bullshit.

 

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The Media is right wing. The Republicans control and dictate the political narrative. All the Republicans have to do is levy a baseless charge, and the so-called Liberal media will run with it and put the Liberals on the defensive. Example, there's been zero proof that Barack Obama wasn't born in America. However, every so-called liberal news outlet will give legitamacy to the charge by debating it as if it was a credible accusation.

Another example, Healthcare. The media focused more on death panels instead of the millions of people the bill was intended to help. It is short-sighted to assume that the corporate owned meida is left wing. These are the same people who were complicit in each and every lie that lead us to a war of choice. Nor did they ever bother to question the legality of the patriot act.

 

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Normally it would be against the law to do such, however as it was part of his employment contract the man is screwed. A employment contract can have all sorts of stipulations in it that are on the surface not kosher. You can be fired form some jobs by discussing what you do for a living, commiting misdemeanors or felonies that have nothing to do with working and so on. The consensus is that you agreed to it when you agreed to take the job.

 

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I think the Center primarily dislikes both parties. Both parties have some "ideas" that appeal to a majority and some ideas that lose them votes in a general election because they are opposed by the majority of Americans but are supported by the majority of their party.

But the party's public ideas are not how they govern. It is not what separates the parties that is making the majority reject both parties. It is what the two parties have in common that makes the center reject both parties.

Some of the stupidest actions like repealing Glass-Steagall had bi-partisan support.

I don't think the politicians and officials of either party represent their registered voters very well and I don't think bipartisanship represents the unaligned swing voter. The left to right of the voters with their center midpoint as parallel to but separate from the left to right line of congress. I think I am more concerned with congress's bipartisan adherence to an ideology that accepts corruption and favors short term corporate profits over the economic well being of the majority of future Americans than I am with the were congress falls on a left-right spectrum.

The left might see bailing out Wall Street as being something conservatives would do while the right might see bailing out Wall Street as being something liberals would do. Where does bailing out Wall Street fit on a left right spectrum? Libertarians might say bailing out Wall street fits on the Authoritarian side of the Authoritarian to Libertarian spectrum that some Libertarians created and you now see on all these find yourself on the political grid polls. I think this fits better on a populist anti-populist axis in which the populists oppose whatever the political insiders want and the anti-populists oppose whatever the political outsiders want.

 

No, it doesn't. There are no Republican centrists.

Typically, in some alternative universe, that would seem reasonable.

It is not in fact true of the current political situation in the US. There is nothing in the specifically Republican Party body of "ideas" (ideas not found on one of the several other political "sides") that a centrist can find to adopt or endorse. The entire Party has been captured by a rightwing, militaristic, authoritarian, lunatic fringe.

Any centrist with a bent toward bombast and polemic would be found almost entirely critical and accusatory and derisive of such of a Party.

Some did. So?

They didn't write it, organize it, execute it, or have the slightest say in how it was set up, staffed, or run. See the link and quotes above for the significance of not executing it, for example.

No public debate went into its creation. Very little went into its vote and approval, even.

That's almost irrelevant, given the nature of the two Parties.

The question is: did it have bipartisan opposition. Was there a significant body of Republicans that fought it? Did it have bipartisan origination - were the people who wrote the legislation and pushed it through a coalition of representative people from both Parties?

(No.)

The way it was done, far right. The government simply handed money to private corporate interests, without imposing public interest controls and government ownership or monitoring.

Uh, hello?

 

Both parties are extreme at the moment, which is why a Third Party has emerged and why so many voters are disenchanted with their respective parties. But there is a center out there. You might not like it or like where it is, but that does not mean it doesn't exist.

Sure, there are.

Plenty of people in the Center think the government is too big, taxes too high -- or at least, not spent as effectively as they could be. The Republicans, who themselves shoulder a huge responsibility for the current spending crisis, at least spoke about reducing spending in the latest election. Didn't hear the Dems talk about it too much.

So why in your would do responsible adults get to vote for things and then bear no responsibility for them?

Let's assume that's true (even though it's not).

Who's fucking fault is that? The Democrats were elected to debate and influence legislation. The fact you claim they failed to do so does not somehow absolve them from the responsibility of that legislation. If anything it makes them even more culpable, because it just says they failed to perform their elected duties. They were in the government, it emerged from the Congress. Again, in your world, elected officials seem to have no responsibility for what happens on their watch if they are in the minority -- or something? You tell me...

The Democrats were there. They could have been as obstructionist -- on Homeland Security, PATRIOT, etc. -- as you claim the Republicans were from 2008-2010, but the fact is they weren't. Because the fact is most of them supported those measures, then tried to pretend they didn't.

 

That's just goofy. The Democratic Party isn't extreme anything, except maybe waffling and dicking around.

So do plenty of people on the left and right, plenty of people in both Parties, etc. Libertarian leaners in general. You need something specifically Republican.

They spoke about spending reduction in every campaign cycle since Goldwater if not before. So? Ideas - we need ideas, Republican of today ones, not found elsewhere now, that centrists might see their way to adopt. Remarkably difficult to come up with any, obviously.

They bear the responsibility of voting. But that's not "the Democrats".

Meanwhile, the people who wrote, organized, staffed, executed, modified, ran, and in general made the DHS what it is today, bear the responsibility for that. Essentially all of those people were and are Republican, members of W&Co's administration and the Congress of that time.

W&Co's. Go back and review how that insane conglomeration of government boondoggle covering a bright core of fascist ambition was written and passed.

There weren't, and aren't, any body of "the Democrats" in that sense. The two Parties are not mirror images on the left and right. That is a fantasy world, created by partisan Republican campaign spinners to absolve and obscure the actual agenda and crimes of the people they are backing and serving.

 

Because it can't be that simple, can it?

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons offers his two cents on the Olbermann scandal, including his explanation at the outset that, "I don't buy Keith Olbermann's alibi that he didn't realize NBC News had a rule against reporters making political donations":

That said, in today's media climate, there was something almost quaint and touching about the network's vigorous slap on the "Countdown" host's well-tailored wrist. Ditto for fellow MSNBC personality Rachel Maddow's defense of the network's ethics:

"I know everybody likes to say, 'Oh, that's cable news, it's all the same," Maddow told her audience. "Fox and MSNBC, mirror images of each other .... Yes, Keith's a liberal, and so am I, and there are other people on this network whose political views are shared openly with you, our beloved viewers. But we are not a political operation. Fox is. We are a news operation. And the rules around here are part of how you know that."

Maddow may be less than the perfect spokeswoman for objectivity in the factual sense, but her point's well-taken. People absolutely do conflate Fox News with MSNBC. I don't believe I've ever criticized Fox's practices without receiving a barrage of e-mails essentially asking, "What about MSNBC?" like 8-year-olds whining that their little brother stole cookies, too ....

.... I personally quit watching regularly during the 2008 presidential primaries, when Olbermann waxed indignant over Hillary Clinton's alleged racism. Sarcasm I don't mind; snark I normally revel in. What put me off "Countdown" was my sense that Olbermann, an intelligent man with what Hemingway called an excellent "shit detector," couldn't possibly believe the things he was saying.

Meanwhile, it's been business as usual over on the Chicken Little Right, with the conservative noise machine breathlessly hyping a make-believe "news story" about President Obama's state visit to India costing taxpayers a cool $200 million a day — more per diem than the Afghan war. Supposedly 34 ships, roughly 10 percent of the Navy, had been dispatched to the Indian Ocean to guard the President, which a Pentagon spokesman dismissed as "absolutely absurd" and "comical."

The whole gang pitched in: Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report. As right-wing hoaxes go, it turned out to be short-lived; nothing like, say, the interminable Whitewater investigation, Saddam Hussein's WMDs, Obamacare's imaginary "death panels," or any of those.

Also unlike the preceding examples, the so-called "mainstream" media did its job for a change, with ABC News, CNN, even the Wall Street Journal debunking the bogus allegation so conclusively that even Fox was eventually shamed into reporting that the tale was "wildly exaggerated" ....

.... If Fox celebrities remained oddly quiet about Olbermann's predicament, that's because they not only donate to GOP candidates but make heavily promoted appearances at tea party rallies. As Maddow also pointed out, "There are multiple people being paid by Fox News now essentially to run as presidential candidates. (Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, etc.). If you count not just their hosts but their contributors, you are looking at a significant portion of the whole lineup of Republican presidential contenders for 2012."

Meanwhile, feckless Democrats continue to act as if they're waiting for the so-called "mainstream" media to save them: The same worthies that gave us eight years of bogus Clinton scandals, sold Saddam Hussein's imaginary WMDs like breakfast cereal, championed invading Iraq as if it were the world's biggest Boy Scout Jamboree, then reacted with horror last year when the Obama White House suggested that Fox News might not be a proper news organization.

Anyway, so Keith's back. Whoop-de-doo.​

Anyway, yeah, there's not a whole lot to add to that.

I mean, I could add a hallelujah chorus to the bit about the false equivalence of FOX News and MSNBC, or chuckle that nobody thinks Keith didn't know. To the one, Olbermann is playing this whole thing in a way we might suggest is predictable—

To wrap this up, I will say something utterly contrarian about this. I think we saw where the political contribution system is working for transparency in democracy and where it is failing transparency and democracy. I made legal political contributions, as a U.S. citizen, near Midnight eastern on Thursday, October 28th. By 10:00 p.m. Eastern on Thursday night, November 4th, those contributions were public knowledge.

That's the point. I gave and you found out and you judged me, for good or for ill, as you felt appropriate. If I had given the money through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, you would have never, ever known.

(November 9, 2010)​

—to the other, though, he's doing it very well.

OLBERMANN: That's the larger question, Howard. Because I'm technically—I am a small business. Should I have—the procedure I should have followed would have been to donate my money through my corporation, to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, so nobody would ever have known that I did that. Does that settle the ethics of the thing, in some way?

KURTZ: No, and you knew, as you said last night, that your donations would become public, because you made it in your name. You made no attempt to hide it. As a viewer, when I watch you on a COUNTDOWN interview, for example, Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva, I may think you're sympathetic to him. I may think you don't like his Republican opponent. But I shouldn't have to wonder, hey, I wonder if Keith gave money to this guy, as in this case you did.

So I just think you're in a different position. Legally, can you donate? Every American citizen has the right to donate. I think we as journalists and even as commentators give up certain rights in order to get the kind of platform that you enjoy. You can tell us what you think. You have a lot of influence. I don't think you need to take out your checkbook?

OLBERMANN: Again, what should I—or should somebody go the corporate route and keep it quiet? Is that the answer to this?

KURTZ: No, I'm not a fan of anonymous donations. And that I think that deepens the problem. At least we know about your donations. We didn't know about them in real time. We knew about them pretty quickly, however.

(November 10, 2010)​

For Lyons, it boils down to the basic argument that it just is not possible that Keith Olbermann didn't know damn well about the NBC News policy.

One of the risks of playing a performance art piece at this scale is that you cannot control all of the outcomes. Those determined to criticize Olbermann will always be able to criticize this part of his response to the scandal: Of course that's what you say now ....

Lyons might criticize Olbermann for being snarky, but in a world where Keith shares the network with Ed Schultz, I would remind that one man's snark is another man's feist.

Actually, the preceding sentence is just terrible. Apparently, "feist" refers to a small dog, and is etymologized to 1770, from fisting hound (?!) and the obsolete fist—to break wind. Great, feisty, like a small, farting hound.

But I digress. The reason what Keith Olbermann does is so significant is that he's not Ed Schultz. That is, some might find him passive aggressive, and snobby, but all of the calm jabs are snobby while all of the brash ones are from assholes. And I'll be damned if we don't see classism at play, there. Why do the rich and well-educated get to be snobs? Isn't snobbery just a form of assholery? You would think that the word for a rich asshole would be worse than "asshole". But, no.

Fucking rich assholes.

And yet again, I digress.

But think about it: Olbermann and Maddow made it into more fundraising letters than Schultz. Republicans despise them because they are the "respectable" ones. That is, they draw the ratings and are the public face of what people think when they hear "MSNBC". And why shouldn't they? The alternative, after all, is Chris Matthews, and who wants to imagine him? It's creepy.

Okay, okay, I said there wasn't much to add. There, now I've gone and proven it.
____________________

Notes:

Lyons, Gene. "Keith's Back. Whoop-de-doo." The Cagle Post. November 11, 2010. Blogs.Cagle.com. November 11, 2010. http://blog.cagle.com/2010/11/11/keiths-back-whoop-de-doo/

Olbermann, Keith. Countdown With Keith Olbermann. MSNBC, New York. November 9, 2010. Transcript. Today.MSNBC.com. November 11, 2010. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/40110408/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/

—————. Interview with Greg Mitchell and Howard Kurtz. Countdown With Keith Olbermann. MSNBC, New York. November 10, 2010. Transcript. Today.MSNBC.com. November 11, 2010. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/40132112/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/

Merriam-Webster. "feist". Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2010. Merriam-Webster.com. November 11, 2010. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feist

 

This smack down had more to do with KO's attitude towards his bosses than it did with anything He did politically.

 

Finally we agree. It was an inhouse powerfight, nothing more.

 

Well, Sen. Harry Reid was wrong on one of the most important FA decisions in the past 5 years -- the surge in Iraq. And in being so, adopted a pretty fringe Leftist position. Elsewhere, there are plenty of people who would argue attempting to nationalize part of the health care system is a position most Americans are uncomfortable with. Need we even address the progressive agenda, which most Americans would recoil at?

There are no ideas specific to any party, if the above is your bar. The parties adopt ideas that fit with their ideology. You could look at something like abortion, which is a fairly partisan issue, and still say there are plenty of non-Republicans who are pro-life, and you'd be right. But both parties aren't advocating that position. Only one is.

Sure, it is.

I mean, it's not all of them. But again, you're playing games with rhetoric (as usual). I never implied that I meant ALL of the Democrats when I used that term. Nor does anyone else when they use it.

So why haven't the Dems done anything about it? Why have they increased funding and increased DHS's mandate?

Meanwhile, you're a long way away from your initial bullshit point about FEMA.

I can't take you seriously when you write crap like this. It's just pathetic.

Uh huh

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With what Mr. Reid, Mizz. Pelsoi, and Obama did, with their screw the tax payer, shove it down out throats left wing agenda, the Democratic party has just taken a serious shift further to the left fringe, with the martial imposition of party discipline on the votes, they ran their own blue Dogs right out of Washington on a rail.

And wasn't it the Democrats who were screaming about keeping moderates in the party? that with out the moderates there would be no bipartisanship.

 

I only wish Obama crammed a left wing agenda through congress. Sadly, he caved in to corporate interests. The election reflected the displeasure of his base and independents to this strategy. They want real change, not the same old thing. Also sadly, the voters did not realize that they voted the same old thing back into power in the house. Democrats were not screaming about keeping the moderates, we want them out. Good riddance to the blue dogs and fuck bi-partisanship, the Republicans just spit in our face for our efforts.

 

Countzero, could ice be a writer of propaganda from the , Communist Chinese agit prop, or actually this sounds more like what came out of the old Soviet Union new speak propaganda.

 

And just what evidence do you and countezero have to make that claim? Please remember specifics are needed.

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Hey, it's been working for them since McCarthy, why stop now?

 

Ah, yes, and what do you think happened in the last 22 months?

The Cornhusker Kickback......Ben Nelson’s

$300 million increase for Medicaid in Louisiana....... Mary Landrieu.

$10 billion in new funding for community health centers.... Bernie Sanders

A carve out for an exemption for non-profit insurers in their states from a hefty excise tax..........Carl Levin

Exemptions for the Medicaid Programs of Pennsylvania, New York, Florida,Vermont and Massachusetts.

Especially with the Deemed to have passed maneuver Pelosi used to pass Obama Care.

Who was spitting in the face of the Tax Payer, and the Republicans in Congress.

 

His post, joe more evidence than you ever present.

 

Ok, prove it.

 

More baseless allegations mr. roam. How about some proof?