Have Even 'Progresssives' Finally Had It With Keith Olbermann and MSNBC?

Well, the question is certainly worth posing, and here’s a guy named Rick Ungar posing it:

Last week, guest host Donny Duetsch was presenting a series of shows on MSNBC entitled “America the Angry”. In an early episode of what was scheduled to be a weeklong broadcast, Deutsch was showing a series of clips containing media figures going a little mad with anger while on the air. One of those media figures was MSNBC’s own Keith Olbermann.

After the offending show, Duetsch was pulled off the air and his producer sent home. “America the Angry” had been short-circuited by the anger of Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, and quite possibly – and with no shortage of irony – Keith Olbermann himself.

The reason? MSNBC has a policy of MSNBC anchors refraining from attacking other MSNBC anchors on the air – a policy that grew out of the pissing match that unfolded before the cameras between Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann during the 2008 presidential election.

While some sources indicate that Keith Olbermann was the man behind the curtain wielding the executioner’s blade, the official network position is that the cancellation was solely the decision of Mr. Griffin.

Okay, so he can’t spell Donny Deutsch’s name right, the point still stands: just who the hell is Keith Olbermann — besides the most famous graduate of Cornell Cow College — to dictate to MSNBC what is or is not acceptable content?

Whomever was responsible, the matter is made all the more unseemly when considering that this is precisely the sort of thing Olbermann would quickly take others to task for had it happened on FOX or another competitor.

This is really not the sort of behavior I would have expected from MSNBC – and it troubled me.

Ungar notes that always gracious Olbermann used part of his show to attack Laura Bush and her recent memoir, Spoken From the Heart, then observes:

MSNBC is the network of progressives and for progressives. Yet, there is nothing progressive about the network’s employees being terrified to speak up for fear of losing their jobs. Progressives also like to think of themselves as the people who ‘have a heart.’ Thus, there is nothing progressive about making fun of a difficult and terrible experience of youth acknowledged by one who has suffered from the event, even if she happens to be the wife of a former president you don’t like. It’s mean – and it contributes absolutely nothing to the political dialogue.

I don’t like ‘mean’. And I don’t like any company that puts its employees in fear for expressing their thoughts and opinions, on-air or off.

Hey Rick — we conservatives don’t either. Welcome to the club.

It’s only a matter of time before Olbermann gets the well-deserved canning that’s coming to him, so let the Countdown begin…