Keith Olbermann Declares: Off With Dana Milbank’s Head
By Anita Finlay ("Ani") on August 5, 2008 at 9:35 AM in Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Current Affairs, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, Obamaisms, Washington Post
The arrogance. The perfidy. The cock of the walk puffed up rooster-ness of it all!
On The Big Orange, Commissar Keith Olbermann decided to whet the appetites of his rabid, but dwindling, fan base by offering “a little preview of an item on tonight’s Countdown” by ordering an EXECUTION:
The headline: Dana Milbank won’t be on the news hour any more.
Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, who notified us today that after four years appearing with us, he had accepted another television offer. This saved your crack Countdown staff an increasingly difficult decision.
Your “crack Countdown staff?”
And what decision was that, Keith? Dana must be brought to heel?
It seems the brouhaha stemmed from Dana Milbank’s article, President Obama Continues Hectic Victory Tour where Dana had the audacity to refer to Barack Obama as “the presumptuous nominee.” In other words, Dana finally woke up from his koolaid-induced stupor and called it like he saw it. And for this, the punishment was to be swift and sure from Herr Olbermann.
Since I covered Dana’s article last week, I thought it only fitting that I share the “reasons” for Keithie’s faux outrage. According to the pompous Olbermann:
For nearly a week we’d been waiting for [Dana] to offer a correction or an explanation for his column from last week in which he apparently reported an Obama quote without a full context turned the meaning of the quote inside-out.
Then he called criticisms of his column “whines” even though the dispute was over whether Obama said the self-deprecating: “It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign — that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions” — or only the part about “I have just become a symbol…”
All current evidence indicates that Senator Obama is about as capable of being self-deprecating as Olbermann is of having humility. Secondly, the article covers more of the quote than just the ‘symbol‘ part. Lastly, Keith is whining. That is something he has in common with most Obama surrogates on the receiving end of any criticism for their messiah: to whine.
We had decided not to have Dana on this news-hour again until this was cleared up, and, sadly after some very happy years, he’s apparently chosen to make that cloud permanent. Good luck, Dana.
…he took any further decision-making out of our hands. It was quite a surprise conclusion, obviously, and I’ll take it (before anybody tries to take it back).
So, Keith, what you are really telling us is that Dana Milbank basically told you to go stuff it before you had to make the “difficult decision” of telling him to go stuff it.
As you can see from reading Dana’s article linked above, he had the absolute audacity to criticize ‘the One’ and report honestly that some of the press corps started referring to Obama as a “prom queen.”
Considering Obama’s new supersized logo on his plane, his chair stitched with the word President on it, the usurping of the Presidential Seal, telling the press corps how to dress, not answering any real questions, negotiating with and giving his two cents to foreign leaders, overstepping the bounds of his overseas trip, the list goes on and on…why wouldn’t the press call Senator Obama a prom queen? Or perhaps we can use my favorite new name for him: Il Duce.
To summarize, Olbermann, who has been sipping his own koolaid for some time now and puffing out his chest higher and higher with every stinking broadcast, forbade Dana to come back on the show until Milbank basically bowed down and scraped his knees on the carpet begging Olbermann’s forgiveness.
You can manipulate Obama’s quote any way you want – there are several versions of it from different news sources. But in every single one, he refers to himself as ‘a symbol of returning to America best traditions.’ Obama and Puffy the Clown belong together. They have the same exaggerated sense of their own importance.
Why don’t they just go do a sweat lodge and sing songs around the campfire and smoke a doobie and get it over with.
Olbermann accusing Milbank of taking something out of context is a tad disingenuous considering he is the one who would go on nightly unjustified, self-righteous and outrageous diatribes against Hillary Clinton, mentioning the Clintons in the same sentence with the racist David Duke, and other disgusting rants. This is the man who said:
“A Super Delegate needs to take Hillary Clinton into a room and only he comes out. That kind of scenario.”
When viewers exploded with outrage, his big apology was that he “used the wrong pronoun.” That’s it.
MSNBC took the cake in terms of the worst misogynist slurs against Senator Clinton – the unforgivable remarks were compounded daily.
In addition to every other outrage from MSNBC, it appears they are practicing censorship. Because Dana Milbank finally decided to tell the truth about Senator Obama’s arrogant and unseemly behavior, Milbank was to be denied the opportunity to appear on the show and possibly express such dissent.
Olbermann was not worried about Dana offering an “explanation.” The threat was clear – either fall in line or you’re out of a job over here. Dana refused and took another offer instead.
I hope Keith Olbermann can enjoy his ever-lower ratings; currently around the rank of “the Butterfly Channel,” as I believe Bill O’Reilly so eloquently put it.
I see that freedom of speech and freedom of expression are not welcome on Countdown. I have long since written off this program, but more worrisome is the dread I have that dissent and honest expression are also being crushed in other parts of the news media. While Olbermann is arguably the worst offender, he is not alone.
I remember reading that Greta Van Susteren noted a reporter colleague of hers on another network could not file a report critical of Obama without it being watered down, whereas stories critical of Senators McCain and Clinton were left untouched. Highly disturbing to say the least.
There is no love lost for Dana Milbank, given most of his reporting this season. Like many in the media who complain about Obama now, they did so only after they spent many months unfairly kicking the far more qualified Senator Clinton in the teeth.
That stated, I am glad Dana had the good sense not to bow and scrape before Olbermann – a man whose character would be best served in a profession having nothing to do with disseminating ‘news’ to a public desperate for the truth.
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