It’s also a bit strange to see him doing “Worst Persons” without Toccata and Fugue playing in the background, as you would think the song would be public domain by now. Maybe he doesn’t have any friends who own a Casio.

In Monday’s “Worsts,” Olbermann awarded the Bronze to ESPN for hiring Bobby Valentine (and for referring to Texas Rangers manager Ron Washington as the “Head Coach”), and the Gold to the woman who sent the racist Obama monkey email (a worthy recipient indeed), but in between was a strange submission for the Silver.

National Review‘s Jack Fowler earned the honor, not for asking his readers to support the publication in a fundraising solicitation, and not even for including a good-natured shot at Olbermann (Fowler entreated “I no more want to beg from you than I want my daughter to introduce me to her new boyfriend, Keith Olbermann”), but for saying that there’s no money in opinion journalism.

“No money in opinion journalism?!?” Olbermann repeated, incredulously, “The head of NRO is either saying that Fox News isn’t journalism, or it isn’t profitable?”

Having given Fox News as perhaps the most profitable example of opinion journalism, Olbermann then assesses the metric as a barometer of quality. “No money in opinion journalism? Maybe if your opinions blow!”

By that logic, of course, Pat Sajak is the wisest political pundit on TV. His ratings dwarf anything on cable news. Maybe Fowler should give him a call, and Olbermann should be a little nicer. Sajak gave Olbermann his career, and he can take it away, too.

Here’s the clip, from FOKNewsChannel:

The third “staple?” It may ring a bell, especially if you ever watched the show Olbermann hosted for awhile on MSNBC. The show was called Countdown, if memory serves:

“And then something experimental and atypical… “The Worst Persons of the Day.”

Olbermann, who reminds fans he “started (his) career on manual typewriters,” promises “video components will be added” to the site in a few weeks, but the main elements as described will be in place tonight.

The victim of said “racism” was a presidential nominee for surgeon general Regina Benjamin, who Cavuto then described as “not a lot fat, but fat enough fat for my next guest to say ‘fat chance,’” in an old segment Olbermann dug up. For this Cavuto won his runner-up spot on Olbermann’s “Worsts” segment today, where he railed against Cavuto’s “hypocrisy.” “When there are fat jokes about a Republican, that’s racism;” Olbermann mocked, “[and] when there is a fat joke about a presidential nominee for surgeon general, that’s a segment.” He also pointed out that Cavuto made a “Depends joke” during Sen. Bernie Sanders’ filibuster last week, but did not give any background as to what set Cavuto off initially– namely, colleague Chris Matthews’ comments about Governor Christie’s weight. Instead of arguing on the weight discrimination front, Olbermann goes straight for the hypocrisy angle– leaving Cavuto ample space to argue past him should he wish to respond. Given the amount of passion in Cavuto’s original excoriation of Matthews, it will be fun to see how he reacts to this new runner-up title for sticking up for New Jersey’s big man.

The segment from tonight’s Countdown via MSNBC below:

Olbermann chastised ABC News for hiring “comically dishonest propagandist” Breitbart for their election coverage Tuesday night, in a way. Bringing up the Shirley Sherrod affair as reason enough not to hire him, Olbermann explains that he asked his staff, “what could a Breitbart do during an actual news organization’s coverage of an election? The answer: fart.”

Granted, Olbermann must have known when he called Breitbart a “pornographer of propaganda” that the comically melodramatic insults could only go down from there, but a modicum of effort to avoid a rhyming “fart” joke may have given his argument against ABC News a bit more of a backbone.

The clip from last night’s “Worst” via MSNBC below:

Laura Schlessinger, of course, took home to gold in last night’s “Worst Persons”– not even Bill O’Reilly could take this prize away from her– for her “genuine blind ignorant racism.” Not that Olbermann didn’t expect bad things to happen on her program– “her show’s crap, we know that”– but none of said racism, had much to do with her use of words, the thing she apologized for. That to Olbermann was tame compared to her sentiments about President Obama which, in sum, were that she didn’t expect people to complain of racism after his election. Olbermann broke it down:

Translation: We elected one of you president, so stop claiming there’s any racism left in this country. It is virtually the same thing said after the Civil Rights Acts of the ’60s: Haven’t we done enough for you people? It is the same thing said after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954: Haven’t we done enough for you people? It is the same thing said after emancipation: Haven’t we done enough for you people? Any buffoon can get on the radio and shout the n-word 11 times; that doesn’t make them racist. The other part – ‘I really thought that once we had a black president, this would stop’– that makes them a racist.

The video from MSNBC last night below:

What did Limbaugh say to cause such distress? The short version is that, according to Olbermann, he believes it is easier to succeed in America as a black person than a white person. His actual comment was that “if [President] Obama weren’t black, he’d be a tour guide in Honolulu or he’d be teaching Saul Alinsky Constitutional Law, or lecturing on it in Chicago.” He then attacked Oprah along the same lines; Olbermann fleshed out the argument:

“The United States is tilted in favor of black people. We have made it so easy that human beings inferior to the great Rush Limbaugh… inferior creatures like Obama and Oprah Winfrey have been made wealthy and big and famous and so forth… Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama and presumably every other black person in this country has not succeeded despite the fact they are black… they have succeeded because they are black, and only because they are black.”

Olbermann then concludes with a plea: “Oprah, please, crush this schmuck.”

Video from last night’s Countdown below:

The video, dug up by the website RaceWire and, after being taken down from YouTube, finding a home here on Mediaite, includes all sorts of not-very-funny ethnic stereotypes. Nesenoff’s most egregious one is that of what seems to be a Latin American, though he accent is terrible enough that only his use of the word “gringo” gives away what he’s getting at.

Keith Olbermann found a double standard in the fact that, while doing something offensive to an ethnicity left Thomas without a job, Rabbi Nesenoff is still a rabbi:

“If an opinion writer had to retire from opinion writing because she gave an opinion, shouldn’t a man of God have to retire from being a man of God when he starts insulting some of God’s children?”

There isn’t much defending the rabbi’s racist weather video because, as has been noted many times before, it’s not even funny, but Olbermann is being a bit generous to Thomas here by virtue of the level of his attack on Nesenoff. His repeated description of him as “the man who brought down Helen Thomas” seems to imply that it was his work that ended her career, as if Thomas’ comments were a product of his actions, and not her thoughts. It’s also a bit of a stretch to equate a private citizen donning a bad Mexican accent for a laugh or two with the woman who held the front-and-center seat at White House press briefings making extremely offensive comments for the purpose of sparking controversy.

Video from tonight’s “Worsts” below:

Said Olbermann: “Apparently an intervention helped you at some point in the past, maybe it’s time to ask your friends for that help again.”

Now, you don’t have to take Glenn Beck seriously, and you don’t even have to have any compassion for him if you don’t want, but to joke about his recovery is to belittle the struggles of all alcoholics. I’m pretty sure that was not Keith’s intention, but that’s what happens when partisan rancor crowds out the rest of your field of vision.

As a liberal who is friends with all 3 of them, this would seem to put me in an awkward position. Far from it. I’m not going to tarnish the pride they must all be feeling by trying to mount some kind of defense. Ed Morrissey, in particular, really needed this to clear his name after he was named Olbermann’s Best Person in the World a few months ago.

Instead. let’s let them speak for themselves. First up is Redeye and Factor regular (“the condescending”) Mary Katherine Ham, who’s collecting her 3rd “Worsts” medal:

I’m glad to see MSNBC has at least moved beyond awarding them for typos, which I think was my last transgression. Ha. Perhaps the “Tweets I Read on Friday Night” segment will get better ratings than the “Check Out My Copy of Strunk & White” segment. Plenty of room to move up!

Zing! However, as our next contestant points out, Keith wasn’t actually the one sitting home on Friday night, forlornly scanning the Tweetdeck. The Washington Times’ Amanda Carpenter (“a modest woman with much to be modest about?”) says:

I just hope Olby gave Think Progress credit for ripping off their cheap shot post. We all acknowledged the “false positive” note from the White House. I asked Think Progress several times on Twitter to update their post, they didn’t and Countdown proceeded with a nothing story.

Amanda, you’ll be glad to know that Keith did credit Think Progress for gathering those Friday night Tweets.

Finally, there’s my good friend Ed Morrissey (“super genius”), whose conservative street cred just went back to 11:

While I’m honored that Keith Olbermann has now made me his Worst Person in the World just a few weeks after being his Best Person in the World, perhaps Keith might do better to simply get a sense of humor and lay off the hyperbole. Maybe the next time his boss Jeffrey Immelt goes to visit Barack Obama after four such visits already, he’ll give Keith a night off and bring him along for a beer and a little perspective.

I know I said I wasn’t going to do this, but I can’t help it. While Goldfarb referenced “Rev. Wright” in his ThinkProgress-snipped Tweet, none of the other 3 actually intimates more than the visitors’ names in their Tweets. While they admirably ‘fess up to being fooled, they technically did not tweet anything that was inaccurate. That makes them all better than me, since I would have definitely played it off as an object lesson to those who re-tweeted me.

At the risk of stealing back some of Ed’s cred, not only did he acknowledge the “false positives,” he even gave President Obama a hat tip for transparency. (Sorry, Ed)

While this trio has a point about the fact that they did correct the offending tweets, it should be noted that Keith is an avowed non-twitterer, so the blame for this omission rests mainly with Think Progress. They took the time to update their post with a link to a Daily Kos pile-on, but not to note the corrections.

Here’s how we got to this point.

Mediaite, managing editor Colby Hall and associate editor Robert Quigley joined the group “Change Congress” and one of its founders, Prof. Lawrence Lessig, for a crowded bronze medal on “Worst Persons” last night. The crux of the story related to this post from yesterday morning about an Olbermann segment appearing in a Change Congress ad. Here’s Olbermann:

Professor Lessig and his group apparently put together a minute-long video criticizing blue dog Arkansas Democrat Mike Ross and about half of it is taken from my Special Comment of August 3rd. Change Congress never contacted me or us at the network for our permission to use the video, permission they do not have. We’ll be asking them to remove the video. Just as importantly, Mediaite or Mr. Quigley never contacted me or us for comment, in fact their post was the first anybody here had heard about the video. Yet the site had the audacity to write, “It’s not clear if Olbermann explicitly volunteered to be in the ad, he almost certainly could put the kibosh on it if he wanted.” How exactly would I have done that if I didn’t know anything about it? I’ll wait. (long pause)

The post raised questions about the ad and Olbermann’s involvement in it – questions that were answered quickly in an update, with comment from an MSNBC spokesperson. The updated post reflected all the information Olbermann says here. By 1:30pmET, an entirely new post, headlined “MSNBC Demands Political Group Stop Running Unauthorized Olbermann Ad,” was up as the top story of Mediaite. This was more than six hours before Countdown went on-air with old, outdated information. There wasn’t one more “worst” thing occurring in the world?

The argument could be made that Olbermann and his staff didn’t go and check Mediaite after the first ‘audacious’ post…except for what happened on his show just six minutes earlier. In a segment about his favorite topic, Fox News, Olbermann extensively cited an email from Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon. An email that was obtained by Mediaite only, and published here exclusively. Other sites had no problem citing the source as Mediaite when discussing the email – but apparently Olbermann didn’t feel the need to give proper credit, or any credit at all. If Countdown were a blog, it would be chastised for the move. Why should a cable news show be held to a different standard?

Olbermann closed with:

Also, you guys should explain how you think you’re a journalism-based website if you close the piece with “we’ve reached out to MSNBC for comment and are awaiting their feedback.” That’s not the way it works, you’re supposed to get the comment first, before you write. Thank you.

Also, if you consider yourself host of a journalism-based cable news show, you’re supposed to cite where you get information. Thank you.

Here’s the “Worst” segment:

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