Keith Olbermann, one of MSNBC’s resident leftists posing as anchors, named Jim Robinson, the founder of FreeRepublic.com, as his runner-up on his “Worst Person in the World” feature on his Countdown program on Monday evening but twice called him “Jim Thompson.”

After first implying that “Thompson” and his site’s moderators were a bunch of juveniles, Olbermann explained that the reason why the Free Republic founder was so bad was because a few posters on one of the regular picture caption threads made “racist” comments, and that it took them supposedly “as long as three days before removing a comment thread devoted to the racist rage of a disturbingly large number of his posters, possibly some of the same people who had previously conducted polls on the site on how best to topple the freely-elected government of the United States” [audio clips from the segment are available here].

The MSNBC personality gave some examples from the caption thread, which involved the widely-circulated pictured of First Daughter Malia Obama wearing a t-shirt with a peace sign on it, and then poked fun of all of the posters on Free Republic, labeling them, “clowns.”

Mr. Olbermann, if you’re going to call a large group of people “clowns,” it might be helpful if you get the name of their site’s founder right, so you don’t get that label immediately thrown back at you.

The transcript of the relevant portion from the “Worst Person in the World” segment, which began 47 minutes into the 8 pm Eastern hour of Olbermann’s MSNBC program on Monday:

KEITH OLBERMANN:  The runner-up- Jim Thompson [sic], the owner of the right-wing website Free Republic, which has moderated comments, meaning a grownup is supposed to read them and delete the crazier ones- but Thompson’s [sic] folks waited as long as three days before removing a comment thread devoted to the racist rage of a disturbingly large number of his posters, possibly some of the same people who had previously conducted polls on the site on how best to topple the freely-elected government of the United States.

After President Obama’s daughter appeared in a t-shirt with a peace sign on it at the G-8, a thread at Free Republic was opened with another photo of the first lady captioned, ‘To entertain her daughter, Michelle Obama loves to make monkey sounds.’ Some of the posts describe the Obamas individually and collectively as, quote, ‘typical street whore;’ ‘bunch of ghetto thugs;’ ‘ghetto street trash;’ ‘dirt bags;’ ‘wonder when she’ll get her first abortion;’ ‘they make me sick- the whole family- mammy, pappy, the free loading mammy-in-law, the misguided chillin- children, I guess it is- and especially, ‘lil cuz.’ -no indication of how many of the racist attacks on Malia Obama were made by people who simultaneously were threatening anybody who even mentioned Sarah Palin’s children.

The most prominent response at Free Republic was not an apology, but rather the claim that the comments were planted. This was, in turn, greeted by more racist comment [sic] by veterans of the site, and a call to action to flood the e-mail accounts of a list of the mainstream media people- people like Don Imus of MSNBC;.the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather; and Paula Zahn and Bill Hemmer and Tucker Carlson and Robert Novak of CNN. Hey, let me know if Dan Rather still answers his CBS e-mails- clowns. 

—Matthew Balan is a news analyst at the Media Research Center.