Welcome Back, Keith!

I have seen the face of God.

Well, this should get interesting — if it’s the kind of thing that interests you, as Keith Olbermann somewhat says on that Palin retrospective they’ve run on Countdown a half-dozen times.

If you watch Countdown (which we consider splendid West Coast dinner entertainment), you’ll recall that Keith declared a couple months back that he’ll no longer be lampooning Bill O’Reilly. The proximate cause was O’Reilly’s advocacy of physician executions. But by a curious coincidence, according to the New York Times, the ceasefire happened just after NBC’s Jeff Zucker and one of Rupert Murdoch’s henchmen negotiated a truce between their warring cable networks.

A truce brokered by — wait for it — Charlie Rose.

Seems that while Keith was firing at Bill, Bill was firing back — not only by sending agents provocateur to GE shareholder meetings, but also digging up dirt about GE’s business interests in Iran. Legal business interests, mind you, but still.

Keith tells the Times he wasn’t read the riot act by Ned Beatty, and we’d hate to think his grandstanding on George Tiller’s murder was conveniently timed to meet a corporate directive while saving face. But we’ll let him speak for himself when he returns from vacation tonight.

At which time he may also have to fess up about Richard Wolffe, because we’re not done dropping names here.

We’ve known for some time that Wolffe no longer works for Newsweek — that in fact he’s now a PR hack, although we didn’t learn that from Countdown. The apparent ground rule is that he doesn’t talk about issues that concern his clients, but that didn’t stop our one and only Wonkette love (and frequent Rachel Maddow guest) Ana Marie Cox from tweeting up a storm last week about Wolffe guest-hosting the show without full disclosure.

We understand her concerns, but since we regard Countdown as news entertainment, we were less bothered by apparent conflicts of interest than by Wolffe’s lame hosting performance. Although we did enjoy every mention of a con-TRUH-vuh-see afoot.

And knowing the unpleasant circumstances behind Wolffe leaving Newsweek — his former colleagues were none too happy about his special book-related Obama campaign access — we really liked the subtext of the “good friend” remarks between him and Howard Fineman.

Like we say, we enjoy the show. And if Keith decides to address any of this mess tonight, we’ll enjoy it even more.

Voices From Above Silence a Cable TV Feud [NYT]

GE’s silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC’s sleazy use of Richard Wolffe [Glenn Greenwald]

Update: MSNBC released this statement to TPM: “We should have disclosed Richard’s connection to [PR firm] public strategies. We will do so in the future.” Let’s play Oddball!

7 Comments

Wait. Charlie Rose = Jimmy Carter?

In a war between GE and Murdoch, I’d rather see them fight to the bitter end as I have no “dog” in this fight.

Charlie Rose, like Larry King, has never asked a penetrating question in his life. His mission is to suck the dicks of Tom Friedman and his ilk. And since he’s on PBS, we pay for that shit.

blogenfreude: What do you want? He’s on PBS at 11:00pm at night. If you’re watching PBS at that hour, you’re not looking for shouty, abrasive and pointed. (You’re also not looking for your kids, as they moved away twenty years ago.)

(Notably: viewers like us (thank us) also pay for Frontline and Bill Moyers. So it’s cool.)

How on earth did the latest poll miss out on “Pike Kilt-lifter Ale?”

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