3 Out Of 4 Of Keith Olbermann’s ‘Worst Persons’ Respond

On Monday night’s “Countdown,” Keith Olbermann granted the Worst Persons gold to a quartet of conservative figures for jumping the gun when tweeting about White House visitors on Friday. Mediaite has exclusive reactions from three of them: Amanda Carpenter, Mary Katherine Ham, and Ed Morrissey. Why? Mostly because we can.

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.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.