Gone Daddy, Gone

Matthews and Olbermann have gotten the hook. MSNBC has booted them out of the anchor chairs for political coverage. It's about time. For all their good intentions they neither helped nor informed. It was tiresome and irked the hell out of me.

I've never been fond of Matthews. His interruptions and rudeness as well as, what always seemed to me to be, his moments of murkiness kept me from culling much that I deemed dependable. He was more personality; less intelligentsia. His reputation for hard questions proved undeserved during the conventions as he Zeliged his way through the coverage. Regardless of whom he interviewed he morphed into their best pal, lobbing softballs. When it was brought to his attention that Palin would be holing up and avoiding the media for a couple of days he said that seemed reasonable. Huh? If he wasn't getting shivers up his leg from Obama he was stroking the right like a eunuch. It was all a little icky.

Olbermann's shtick has become insane. Where once we had a voice in the MSM that functioned as a sane balance to Fox's parrotting of administration talking points, we now have another crazy partisan with an axe to grind. His Special Comments which once embodied the rage and utter disconnect we felt with Bushspeak, have devolved into gross overstatements and partisan shortcuts. He has become a Bill'O from the left, albeit considerably smarter.

Keith likes to imagine himself as a modern day incarnation of Edward R. Murrow - a worthy aspiration. He sees his Special Comments as not dissimilar to Murrow standing his ground against McCarthy. In the beginning they came close. But Olbermann lacks Murrow's measured and dispassionate arguments. He flogs dead horses. He berates that which requires subtle admonishment. He rails for ten minutes when a single line would do. It's easy to be a hero when you're only saying the things your audience wants to hear. In short he has gone nuts.

Olbermann, you, more than most, should know that the most intelligent discourse begins, not with similar points of view, but with divergent ones. Your guests do nothing more than embolden your own ideas and if they diverge you feed them questions that box and control their answers. You want to hear what you want to hear. For all Dana Milbank's purported failings, your ostracism and then banishment of him had less to do with his lack of context for an Obama quote than your desire to punish him for failing to follow the party line. It was a sad and wholly unpleasant chapter in Countdown's demise.

In spite of the humourous fodder provided, your feud with Bill O'Reilly has gone too far. O'Reilly is an easy target and quite tempting, but it is nightly and tired. It has degenerated into nonsense about ratings, for God's sake. This isn't your personal war with an idiot, Keith; this is our nation's future and you are acting like a punk. You have lost credibility with anyone other than the most partisan of viewers. You have made it personal and vicious. You have lowered your standards and we suffer for it.

You have shamelessly promoted your books and yourself. You have been a name-dropper. You have used bazookas on the gnats that have annoyed you when a simple swat would have done the trick. You have reminded us of the boy who took too much shit from the bullies in school for his nerdiness and opted for payback beyond all measures of fairness. In short, you have lost that which made you special and reasonable.

There is still time to save yourself; still time to wrench yourself back up into something far more worthy; still time to become our Murrow instead of our Beale. Take this sacking not personally, but as an opportunity for reflection on what you wanted to achieve and the best and most professional ways to do so. Remember that the best reporter fearlessly reports to us our own failings, rather than defensively dismissing those who would point out his own. Please Keith, do this not just for your career, but for all our sakes.

As for the rest of us, there is a light - a beacon that will be lit tonight. Rachel Maddow, the bright and far more measured Air America host and frequent guest host for Olbermann will get her own platform beginning this evening. It's to Olbermann's credit that she has her own show. He gave her an opportunity to shine and reportedly lobbied for her. Perhaps he sees in her that which he has lost. Let's hope he finds it once again in himself.