Countdown

On tonight's edition of Countdown, host Keith Olbermann took a brief moment to bash Laura Ingraham on account of her remark that reporters intentionally report only the negative news from Iraq:

OLBERMANN: A note about Laura Ingraham's comments: I've known her for a long time. I'll in fact give you the caveat that I've known her socially. But that hotel balcony crack was unforgivable. It was unforgivable to the memory of David Bloom, it was unforgivable in the consideration of Bob Woodruff and Doug Voigt, it was unforgivable in the light of what happened to Michael Kelly and what happened to Michael Weiskopf. It was unforgivable with Jill Carroll still a hostage in Iraq. It's not only unforgivable, it was desperate and it was stupid.

Keith Olbermann would know a lot about being desperate and stupid. His ongoing War on FOX on the O'Reilly front is absolutely disgusting and shows how desperate he is for ratings

However, the larger point here is the hypocrisy of challenging others. Olbermann's motto is "challenge everything Bush says", yet when it happens to his liberal media friends, he gets mad. It's now the game of the liberal elite to cry "the right is blaming the media" when anyone dares to question their reporting.

If anything is unforgivable, it's Olbermann's attack on Laura Ingraham.

Video link follows.

On his Monday March 20 Countdown show, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann disputed President Bush's recent contention that he had never claimed "that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein" by citing one awkward quote from the President, which stood in contrast to other public statements that more clearly communicated the point about the 9/11 attacks being a lesson that inspired a confrontation of Iraq, rather than Iraq actually being involved in the attacks. Olbermann rhetorically posed the question: "Who does the President think he's 'f'-ing kidding?" On the Tuesday March 21 show, Olbermann added that "any six-year-old would have recognized that his administration had deliberately left exactly that impression." Guest Craig Crawford labeled Bush's recent comments as "presidential prevarication" and compared it to Bill Clinton saying, "Depends on what the definition of 'is' is." Notably, as recounted by CyberAlert, the Countdown host once before used selectively edited statements by Dick Cheney to make it appear the Vice President had claimed a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, while omitting more of Cheney's words which clarified his meaning. (Transcripts follow.)

On Thursday night's Countdown show, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann characterized the logic of the White House's newly released National Security Strategy as insane by comparing its architects to individuals who fail the sanity test: "Does the individual continue to take action A and continue to get result B, while insisting that next time he will get result Z?" Referring to the Bush administration as "the forces that got us into Iraq," Olbermann declared that they are "still expecting to get result Z." After reading from the strategy, the Countdown host snidely quipped, "Actually finding WMD, result Z, is apparently beside the point."

Olbermann, who routinely signs off his Countdown show on an anti-war note by recounting the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq "since the declaration of mission accomplished," teased Thursday's show by summarizing the Bush policy of preemptive war as: "We can start it in order to keep somebody else from starting it." While showing footage of the aftermath of a bombing in Iraq, he sarcastically added, "Well, after all, it has worked so well in Iraq." Notably, while Olbermann later interviewed Time magazine's Michael Duffy, someone thought it was a good idea to display the words "The Empire Strikes Back" at the bottom of the screen, presumably referring to America's airstrikes in Iraq, during their discussion. (Transcript follows.)

Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert’s nightly conservative/O’Reilly-mocking show "The Colbert Report" invited on MSNBC host Keith Olbermann Tuesday night to double up on the O’Reilly bashing. It started predictably, before the word "Nazi" came out:

Colbert: "Why do you have a problem with my hero, papa bear Bill O'Reilly? You guys have been going at it, hammer and tongs."

Olbermann: "Well, Stephen, he's an idiot."

Colbert: "You say that like it's a bad thing. I think he sees the world simply, okay? Without all your complicated facts."

Olbermann: "We're both saying the same thing. He's an idiot."

Here's a little more from Brian Lamb's interview with Keith Olbermann on C-SPAN, in particular, more of his denying a liberal bias, lamely vowing he "goes after power," Republican or Democrat, and his explanations for why he has a regular "museum" of VHS tapes of his shows to preserve himself for posterity.

About halfway through the C-SPAN hour, Lamb played a typical "Countdown" clip, with Olbermann mocking Harry Whittington for suggesting the Cheney shooting accident happened on a "Friday" instead of a "Saturday." Lamb was a little blunt:

Lamb: "As you know, anybody watching this will see bias right there."

On C-SPAN’s Sunday night Brian Lamb interview show "Q & A," MSNBC "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann lit into Fox News Channel in an extended rant, suggesting that its demise was the "best hope of mankind." He could not believe their "fear"-based marketing strategy about being an oasis of balance in a liberal media world, was just agog at "the idea that there are vast [media] structures designed to foment liberal causes."

He also oddly claimed that while now he’s described as a "screaming liberal," no one called him that in his previous MSNBC stint during the Lewinsky scandal. Correction: the MRC gave him an award for outrageousness for comparing Clinton prosecutor Ken Starr to Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler.

On Friday's Countdown show, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann highlighted recent comments by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, delivered during a speech at Georgetown University, seemingly directed at such conservatives as Tom DeLay and President Bush for some of their criticisms of the judiciary, criticisms which O'Connor argued put America's government at risk of heading toward dictatorship. Olbermann, who has several times compared the state of post-9/11 civil liberties in America to George Orwell's novel 1984, began his show seeming to trumpet the boost in credibility afforded to this comparison when a Supreme Court justice raises similar concerns: "It's one thing for us to throw around references to what seemed to be details from George Orwell's novel 1984 springing to life, thanks to post-9/11 thinking. It's quite another when the same kind of comments come from a just-retired justice of the U.S. Supreme Court..." Olbermann also compared actions by Republicans to those in communist countries that had "allowed dictatorships to flourish." Guest Mike Allen of Time magazine later gushed with hope that Olbermann's attention to the matter would inspire greater coverage of O'Connor's comments and "launch a thousand op-eds." (Complete transcript follows.)

For the second consecutive night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, citing recently released videotape of Bush administration officials meeting before Hurricane Katrina struck, questioned the honesty of Bush's September statement that nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees," claiming that the possibility of a "breach" had been talked about during the videotaped meeting. But also on this second night, the Countdown host ran a story filed by NBC's Lisa Myers in which she torpedoed Olbermann's claim, citing meteorologist Max Mayfield's recollection that "nobody talked about the possibility of levee breach or failure until after it happened." Olbermann, evidently not noticing this, continued as if her report had supported his attack on Bush rather than disproved it. Guest Dana Milbank of the Washington Post even followed up by directly referring to Myers' report as evidence of Bush's "credibility" being undermined, even though Myers clearly argued in her piece that Bush's version of the story was supported by her investigation. Milbank: "It undermines the President's credibility, and now people are getting at this question of his honesty and his secrecy." (Complete transcripts follow)

Too often, the media operate on a sort of "gentlemen's agreement" not to criticize each other so it's sometimes entertaining to see reporters and commentators step out of the "objective" pose, no matter how bizarrely.

It all started last Thursday when FNC host Bill O'Reilly announced a petition drive to get MSNBC to bring back fired host Phil Donahue out of "concern" for the network since the replacement host, Keith Olbermann, has actually lost viewers in the timeslot compared to three years ago when he first took over:

Time now for "The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day." Bring back Phil Donahue. It was three years ago this month that MSNBC fired Mr. Donahue for low ratings. We felt bad for Phil. They didn't give him much of a chance.

Phil actually said his firing was a mistake, and he was right. His successor after three long years on the air actually has fewer viewers now than Donahue did when he left. That is a disaster.

So in the interest of fairness, we have a petition on BillOReilly.com to bring Phil back, and Marlo, too, if she wants. Kind of like that Maury- Connie thing. If enough of you sign the petition, we'll send it over to NBC and hopefully, Phil Donahue will get the chance he deserves. Let's go to bat for our friend Phil. To not do so would be ridiculous. Maybe we should get a bumper sticker.

Now you could say the feud started when Olbermann started making attacking O'Reilly a regular feature of his program, largely in an effort to pander to liberal viewers, but also partly out of a desire to get O'Reilly's goat. In any case, Olbermann was immensely pleased with the mention, responding on Friday's "Countdown" with an eight-minute-plus salvo, including a rehearsed signing of O'Reilly's petition, and a montage of MSNBC staffers doing the same.

On Monday night's Countdown, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann devoted a segment to Bryant Gumbel's race-baiting admonition on HBO, about the Winter Olympics, to “try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention." Olbermann aired a video clip of Gumbel playing "an unusual race card," and given its blurry nature and tinny sound, as well as how it exactly matched what was posted last week on NewsBusters, I'd bet the MSNBC producers lifted it from that Web-quality posting.

When the video ended, Olbermann reported that “as the transcript of that inched its way around the Internet, Gumbel was attacked by far-right bloggers.” Though the NewsBusters posting was quite critical of Gumbel, Olbermann cited how “a writer at the right-wing Web site NewsBusters noted Gumbel's remarks 'perfectly sums up my feelings regarding the Olympics.'” Olbermann also suggested Gumbel was either vindicated or somewhat undermined over the weekend when Shani Davis won “the gold in the men's thousand meter speed skating, the first African-American ever to win a gold in an individual Winter Olympic event.” (Transcript follows.)

Video excerpt of Olbermann (1:28): Real (2.5 MB) or Windows Media (2.9 MB). Plus MP3 audio (500 KB)

In her column today in the Sunday "Outlook" section, Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell expressed official dismay at Post reporter/columnist Dana Milbank's decision to wear hunter garb as a Dick Cheney gag on MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." The Post's AME for National News, Liz Spayd, apparently handed out some discipline:

Spayd said she felt Milbank "crossed the line" on his TV appearance. "What he intended as a playful joke was viewed by many as mocking and unprofessional, and understandably so." Suffice it to say that he has been taken to The Post's version of the woodshed and told not to do that again.

Keith Olbermann’s first question to his first guest on Tuesday’s Countdown: “Do the changes in his [Harry Whittington’s] health alter how the event is viewed legally and, under the worse case scenario, could negligent homicide actually come into play?" The guest, Texas Monthly magazine Executive Editor Paul Burka, rejected the supposition: “I would doubt it, because a hunting accidents are seldom treated as homicides.” Olbermann proceeded to suggest Vice President Cheney may have been drunk at the time of the accidental shooting. Olbermann pointed out how the local sheriff's office “issued a statement last night” and it “said no alcohol had been involved.” The MSNBC host ruminated: “But how would they know that? The sheriff's office did not interview the Vice President until 14 hours after all this happened. And the lower ranking sheriff's officers who did not know about the scheduling of that interview for Sunday morning, had been turned away when they tried to talk to Mr. Cheney on Saturday night." (Transcript follows)

On Thursday's "Countdown," we learned from Keith Olbermann that:

• The CIA leak investigation roars back to life. Scooter Libby claimed he had been authorized to reveal classified information, authorized by his boss, the vice president.


• Newly disclosed documents indicating that the vice president's former chief of staff already has testified that he was authorized by his superiors to disclose classified information to reporters in order to make the a case for war in Iraq...


• If he's defending himself by saying, Well, he did, and saying the vice president told him to, because that's not really germane to this case, did he just throw the vice president of the United States under the proverbial bus?

Note how the wording of these statements leaves the impression that the authorization claimed by Libby included the Plame leak. Did it? What is it that Olbermann isn't telling us this time?

After President Bush delivered his speech on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in April 2003 welcoming U.S. troops home from Iraq and declaring an end to major combat operations, the media for some time sought to embarrass Bush each time American soldiers were killed by recounting how many U.S. troops had died since that speech, and by referring to the "Mission Accomplished" sign displayed at the time. On Monday February 6, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann used his Countdown show to resurrect references to that speech with a new addition to his regular signoff, which he has repeated each day during the past week, in the form of recounting the number of days it has been "since the declaration of 'Mission Accomplished' in Iraq."

Olbermann, who has long used his Countdown show to criticize President Bush regarding the Iraq War, has typically ended each night's show with words similar to, "That's Countdown for tonight. Keep your knees loose. Good night and good luck," before balling up a piece of paper and tossing it toward the camera. On the February 6 show, Olbermann first inserted words into his signoff tallying the number of days since the display of the "Mission Accomplished" sign. After the final segment on Monday, the Countdown host ended his show: "That is Countdown for this, the 1,012th day since the declaration of 'Mission Accomplished' in Iraq. I'm Keith Olbermann. Good night and good luck." Olbermann repeated this recounting each night of the week. (Transcripts follow)

For two consecutive nights, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has ignored the recent report from AP detailing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's dealings with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. But on Friday, the MSNBC host devoted a segment on his Countdown show to discussing an email written by Abramoff that disputes President Bush's claim that he does not know Abramoff.

Olbermann compared Bush's memory to the excellent memory of Richard Nixon, recounting the story of Nixon's 1959 meeting with the Chicago White Sox in which the then-Vice President knew all of their names. After reading an email Abramoff wrote to Kim Eisler of Washingtonian magazine in which Abramoff claimed Bush "has one of the best memories of any politician I have ever met," Olbermann brought aboard correspondent David Shuster to discuss whether Bush has been honest in his denial of knowing Abramoff.

On tonight's Countdown, host Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's "moonbat in chief", spent 10 minutes of his show pondering if President Bush used the news of a thwarted terror plot for political gain. Olbermann, who often refers to President Bush as "Mr. Bush", had "investigative reporter" Gerald Posner on as a guest tonight. Posner is just as liberal, if not more, as Olbermann and agreed with the host word for word as Keith played puppet master and controlled his strings. At one point during the interview, Posner charged that President Bush is "using terror as a political weapon" and constantly does this in a time when he needs to justify certain policies, such as, according to him, the Patriot Act. The ironic thing in all of this is Keith agrees with him and thinks that no one should play politics with terror. Olbermann should have taken his own advice when he ran a piece called "The Nexus of Politics & Terror" late last year that was an attack on Bush's timing of "calling" terror alerts as if they weren't serious. If you are into liberal conspiracies, that segment was for you.

Citing liberal Republican Senator Arlen Specter as his authority on whether President Bush's actions were “illegal,” and with “Invoking the 'I' Word” on screen beneath a picture of Bush, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann opened his Monday night Countdown program: “So if the Republican Chairman of the Senate committee investigating the wiretaps says the wiretaps were illegal, and the President says he personally authorized the wiretaps, doesn't that mean the President should be impeached?"

Olbermann proceeded to fondly recall, without any notion that those hearings led to impairing intelligence agencies, how back in the 1970s, “Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho and other lawmakers became the first to lift the veil on the super-secret world of the National Security Agency. Our fifth story on the Countdown: Deja vu all over again. New President, new technology, same danger, perhaps. Today's re-make of the cautionary drama beginning with promise, Senate Judiciary Chair Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, repeating, in milder form, his Sunday talk show conclusions that the present-day spying program is or could be illegal." Olbermann soon cued up his guest, John Dean: “Not to put too fine a point on this, but if the authorization of wiretaps without warrants is indeed illegal, as its critics say it is, has the President committed an impeachable offense?” Dean agreed: “Well he certainly has.” (Transcript follows.)

Video excerpt (18 seconds) Real (500 KB) or Windows Media (600 KB)

On his Countdown show Thursday, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann attacked FNC host Bill O'Reilly for comments O'Reilly made on The O'Reilly Factor during a January 31 discussion of CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour's recent declaration, previously reported by NewsBusters (with video), that the Iraq War has been a "disaster." Presumably inspired once again by his frequent source, the far-left Media Matters for America, Olbermann quoted O'Reilly as saying, "You can draw by that that she has a rooting interest in it being a disaster."

However, after examining a larger portion of the discussion, which was omitted in the Media Matters article posted earlier in the day Thursday, this comment by O'Reilly appears to be taken out of context, as it makes it seem that O'Reilly was making a gratuitous attack on Amanpour. Although O'Reilly's precise meaning is debatable, it is arguable that he was making the point that because she has now publicly announced her opinion that the war is a disaster, it threatens the credibility of her future reporting on the war with CNN's audience because if the war turns out favorably, it could be an embarrassment to her. (Complete transcript follows.)

On his Countdown show Friday night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann delivered his latest attack on FNC host Bill O'Reilly during his show's regular "Worst Person in the World" segment for saying something the FNC host did not actually say. Referring to O'Reilly as a "joke," Olbermann accused O'Reilly of attacking MSNBC for not covering the case of a Vermont judge who initially sentenced a child rapist to only 60 days in jail. In fact, O'Reilly complained that the "network newscasts" had ignored the story, which would only include ABC, CBS and NBC newscasts.

During his regular "Worst Person in the World" segment, Olbermann normally chooses three nominees to be awarded the dishonor of that name. His three nominees are labeled as "Worse," "Worser," and "Worst." On Friday's show, after giving the second place distinction of "Worser" to conservative columnist Ann Coulter for joking that Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned, Olbermann moved on to dishonor O'Reilly with the label of "Worst": "Speaking of jokes, tonight's winner. [Photograph of O'Reilly displayed on-screen] Him again. He walked right into another propeller."

On his Countdown show Wednesday, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann attacked the right-leaning media watchdog group Accuracy in Media for a piece by Cliff Kincaid criticizing Fox News Channel's recent "drifting to the left." Olbermann mocked the suggestion that liberal bias could exist on FNC and suggested that Fox News ideologically is just to the left of Vlad the Impaler, an infamous mass-murderer from the 15th century who inspired the story of Dracula. He also took a shot at perennial target Bill O'Reilly by agreeing with the sentiment of one of AIM's e-mailers that "O'Reilly has really gone bonkers."

During his regular "Worst Person in the World" segment, Olbermann normally chooses three nominees to be awarded the dishonor of that name. His three nominees are labeled as "Worse," "Worser," and "Worst." On Wednesday's show, the Countdown host bestowed the dishonor of "Worst" upon Accuracy in Media for Kincaid's piece "directed at an outfit they claim gave Robert Kennedy, Jr. a platform for a, 'environmental propaganda' piece about global warning, against a network whose reporters let New Orleans get to them, against people 'drifting to the left.'"

Appearing on Keith Olbermann's Thursday January 26 Countdown show on MSNBC, while comparing President Bush's words on his NSA wiretapping program with Bill Clinton's "lying," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd made known her view that she found Bill Clinton's lying "poignant and endearing" because "when Bill Clinton would deceive, he would throw in a semantic clue that let you know he was deceiving." She further added that "He would let you know he was lying, and then the right wing would come down so hard on him and overpunish him." Regarding Bush's citation of Iraq's liberation as a major justification for the war in the absence of WMD, Dowd pontificated that "you cannot do things that start with a lie, and they just lead to trouble down the road."

The segment started as Olbermann brought aboard Dowd to discuss Oprah Winfrey's apology for pushing discredited author James Frey's fraudulent book. The Countdown host drew parallels between Oprah's apology on her show earlier in the day and Bush's almost simultaneous news conference to answer critics of his controversial NSA spying program. When Olbermann turned his attention to Bush's news conference, he implied that Bush should perhaps apologize for the NSA program: "Maureen, right now, we want to look at a televised event in which nothing close to an apology was even hinted at."

It’s become a cliche to note that the Golden Globe Awards voter pool is an extremely small clique for such a big-buzz awards show. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) boasts “about 90" members, many of them Europeans. But their influence over the Oscars, and then the culture, is enormous. And what they are asking us to celebrate, with increasing regularity, are standards that echo the decadent culture of Old Europe, in love with illicit sex, drugs, dysfunctionality – and even anti-Western political weirdness.

In addition to George Clooney’s supporting actor award for his conspiracy-theorizing, anti-war-for-oil flick “Syriana,” the Best Foreign Movie award went to “Paradise Now,” a lyrical German-funded film about “heroic,” yet conflicted....Palestinian terrorists blowing up buses. The HFPA even officially claimed the film was from “Palestine,” as if Israel had already been wiped off the map.

With an “Uncle Sam Is Watching You” graphic on screen, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann opened Friday night's Countdown by exaggerating the threat of the federal request for Google records to check the exposure of pornography to children and, of course, the NSA “spying”policy. “If you Googled it, the government wants to know about it,” Olbermann warned, “and if you made a phone call or sent an e-mail that was monitored by the NSA without court approval, the government wants you to know it feels its actions were plenty legal.” Olbermann reported: “President Bush starts taking his domestic spying defense tour on the road. How about we all Google the name George Orwell?” Olbermann proceeded to describe the public relations events as a “big brother PR blitz” with “President Bush heading back to the National Security Agency for another visit next week on Wednesday, all part of the administration's latest push to convince everybody else that the President has the constitutional power to order all the spying, with none of the bothersome warrants, that he wants.”

Citing the administration's contention that only those who had contact with terrorist-affiliated people were monitored, Olbermann charged, while interviewing Craig Crawford, that “there has been a lot of condescension from the administration over the years since the election, but honestly, do they think everybody here is a 6-year-old idiot?" Olbermann went on to complain about Karl Rove's “post 9/11 mindsets drivel." Olbermann also quoted the Justice Department's contention that the 9/11 congressional resolution “places the President at the zenith of his powers” and asked: “Is there is somebody in the White House saying, 'look, it's to our advantage to make the President look as much like either a Superhero or would-be dictator as possible?'” (Transcript follows.)

Leave it to Keith Olbermann to rationalize Hillary Clinton's comparison of the Republican-controlled Congress to a plantation, a comparison she made during what should have been a celebration of the civil rights movement. On his January 17 Countdown show, the MSNBC host argued that because former House Speaker Newt Gingrich once compared the Democratic-controlled Congress to a plantation, a comment that had nothing to do with any racial issue, that reaction from the GOP in criticizing Clinton was perhaps "too swift," as he implied that the Republicans live in a "glass house." Olbermann asked Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne if there was "a rush to be holier-than-thou" by Republicans.

NBC and ABC on Monday night gave time to short items on Al Gore's charge, leveled during a morning speech, that President Bush's “domestic surveillance” means he “has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently." And MSNBC's Countdown led with it as host Keith Olbermann showcased a clip of Gore with his allegation before Olbermann insisted: "Just more old-fashioned partisanship? Not when it's Bob Barr joining Gore in the same complaint about NSA spying. Not when it's Arlen Specter calling for a full investigation." Seeing great import in the Gore-Barr alliance, Olbermann ruminated about how “the creations of the last two serious third political parties in this country define the cliche politics makes strange bedfellows.” Seemingly suggesting a potential repeat scenario, Olbermann recalled how in 1854 Republicans “started as a third party with disaffected Democrats abandoning their own sitting President and the Whigs, who had been in office until a year earlier, deserting en masse, putting aside their personal hatreds to create a one-issue party against slavery.”

NBC anchor Brian Williams relayed how “Gore made some of the toughest charges yet from a prominent Democrat. He called for an independent investigation of the NSA spy program which he called a threat to the very structure of our government." After a clip of Gore's declaration, “What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law [rising applause] repeatedly and insistently," Williams offered no contrary view and then passed along how "Al Gore noted that he gave the speech on Martin Luther King Day because Dr. King himself had been a victim of illegal domestic spying by the FBI." But in holding the FBI accountable for the “spying,” Williams obscured who was behind it: Liberal heroes Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy. ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas at least pointed out that while “Gore called for an independent counsel to investigate the program,” it's a policy “which the administration has said is, in fact, legal." (Transcripts follow.)

On Friday's Countdown show, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann questioned whether the leaking of an FBI investigation of terror suspects who tried to buy untraceable cell phones from Target and Wal-Mart stores was timed to bolster the administration's case for its controversial NSA wiretapping program. The Countdown host, who has a history of questioning whether the Bush administration politically times terror alerts to distract attention from events embarassing to the administration (see NewsBusters postings covering his Oct. 11 and Oct. 12 shows for details), made known his latest suspicions: "Reassure me it only looks too convenient to be believed." While interviewing Time magazine's Mike Allen, Olbermann proclaimed that "the administration sure gets a lot of these breaks. Their position is challenged, and then suddenly there is a hazy story about something that seems to at least tangentially justify that position."

Olbermann relayed to the audience that the recent leak by FBI sources, first reported by ABC News, regarding the arrests of terror suspects who had bought mass quantities of untraceable, disposable cell phones coincides with the NSA whistleblower who "suggests the illicit tapping of American phones is thousands of times larger and thousands of times less focused than the President claims." Olbermann reasoned that the story, if true, "makes the wiretapping look like a good idea and its leakers look like they've already helped terrorists outsmart the eavesdropping."

On his Countdown show Thursday night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann delivered his latest attack on conservative commentators Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter by indirectly referring to them as "dogs" during a discussion of politicians who write children's books in the name of their pets.

The Countdown host brought aboard comedian Mo Rocca to discuss Senator Ted Kennedy's new children's book, The Senator and Me, about the Senator and his pet dog Splash. Although Olbermann rarely pokes fun at or attacks liberals, while going after conservatives habitually, even he could not resist the irony of the name Splash because of Kennedy's history at Chappaquiddick. But Olbermann couldn't get through the segment without taking a gratuitous shot at his two favorite conservative targets.

Keith Olbermann's MSNBC show drew its highest audience ever tonight, in a very unnatural way: Olbermann did a fictional cameo inside a new episode of the NBC sea-serpent sci-fi show "Surface." (Instead of drawing about one-third of a million viewers, Keith's cameo came in a show that draws ten million or more viewers.) The lead character, scientist Dr. Laura Daughtery, is interviewed for "Countdown" on MSNBC and questioned for her belief in a coming ecological catastrophe through the sea monsters, and she's then mocked by Keith as he ends his show in trademark fashion by throwing paper at the camera.