Olbermann Names General Petraeus 'Worser' Person in the World

Last night on the MSNBC program "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," the host gave the runner up position to his daily segment "World's Worst Persons in the World" to General David Petraeus. View video here. After the negative reaction the smear ad from MoveOn.org received last year it should be well-known by now that name calling Gen. Petraeus is not the way to go. Apparently Mr. Olbermann didn't get the memo. Hat tip: Greg Pollowitz.

Here's the partial transcript:

OLBERMANN: They‘ve already gone after “Newsweek,” the “New York Times” and this newscast, so no doubt the McCain campaign will shortly be threatening the latest journalists to ask him questions he deemed too tough, Ellen DeGeneres. That‘s next, but first time for COUNTDOWN‘s number two story, tonight‘s worst persons in the world.

The bronze to Comcast Cable. You remember them, pulling us off the basic tier in Portland, Oregon. As political as it might have seemed, it looked like a pure business deal from here. Until today, when Comcast‘s Boston outlet fired veteran news man Barry Nolan (ph) after a two-week suspension. Nolan‘s crime? He publicly protested the Boston area Emmy awards crowd for giving its annual governor‘s trophy to Bill O‘Reilly.

Tonight‘s runner-up, General David Petraeus. It turns out his role as a press flack for President Bush began long before his embarrassing testimony to Congress last September. Pentagon documents say that hoping to soften up the military panelists scheduled for “Meet The Press” on August 28, 2005, Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita had a deputy assistant secretary of defense contact Petraeus in Iraq and ask him to start shilling. Petraeus promptly got on the phone to each of the military analysts and gave them supposedly insider accounts of how well things were going in Iraq.

But our winner, Iran-contra star Ollie North, still posing as an expert on something on Fixed News. North and Sean Hannity were merely smearing a translator at Gitmo, the one who was falsely accused of helping detainees, against whom all charges were dismissed. The man had said some of the detainees told them they had seen desecration of the Koran. North promptly chimed in about alleged terrorists, quote, who we all know have made up lots of stories.

Consider this, North depends on the idea that the detainees at Gitmo make up stories about Koran desecration or about being abused. But he can‘t seem to understand the prospect that those same detainees could just as easily make up apocryphal terrorist plots or absurd confessions. Oliver North, today‘s Worst Person in the World!