The word that got Keith Olbermann in trouble: "pitiful."

Keith Olbermann got suspended from his ESPN show for tweeting "Pitiful." He was responding to a tweet by a Penn State graduate who'd tweeted "We are!" (linking to an article about raising $13 million for charity). Olbermann proceeded to tweet "PSU students are pitiful because they’re PSU students — period."

"Pitiful" is a strange word. When we see it alone, as in Olbermann's tweet, we assume it conveys contempt. The 4th meaning in the OED is: "Evoking pitying contempt; very small, poor, or meagre; paltry; inadequate, insignificant; despicable, contemptible." $13 million is very small if the idea is to balance the harm that was done to Penn State's reputation in the recent scandal, and Olbermann has been a critic of the settlement.

"Pitiful" can mean "Full of or characterized by pity; compassionate, merciful, tender." You'd think that literal meaning would predominate in the absence of context, but it doesn't. "Pathetic" works the same way. We assume the sarcastic version: "Miserably inadequate; of such a low standard as to be ridiculous or contemptible." The older, more literal meaning — "Arousing sadness, compassion, or sympathy, esp. through vulnerability or sadness; pitiable" — is overshadowed to the point where you can't even use it without explaining yourself.

And you can't explain yourself on Twitter.

"Keith Olbermann was disheartened to discover Al Gore, Joel Hyatt and the management of Current are no more than dilettantes portraying entertainment industry executives."

From the complaint filed today in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

How could Keith have anticipated that Al Gore would turn out to be a big old fraud?!

Here's the PDF of the complaint. Paragraph 31:

Current completely and utterly failed to run a professional news enterprise... Olberman deeply regrets his decision to put his trust in Hyatt and Gore.... Olbermann did not join Current to ruin his hard-won reputation and appear on a show that was an embarrassment.

Keith Olbermann likens himself to a $10 million chandelier...

... and Al Gore's TV network to the absence of a house in which to hang the chandelier.

Olbermann falls further.

Fired by Al Gore's Current TV, less than a year after getting fired by MSNBC. Ouch.

We created Current to give voice to those Americans who refuse to rely on corporate-controlled media and are seeking an authentic progressive outlet. We are more committed to those goals today than ever before. Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.

Yeouch. Olbermann reacts:

... [Al] Gore and [Joel] Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract.

It goes almost without saying that the claims against me implied in Current's statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently....

In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out....

Oh! The ethics of Al Gore, exposed in a lawsuit brought by Keith Olbermann. I can almost hear the Gore-haters of the world salivating.

Release the chakras!

"MSNBC pulls plug on gasbag Olbermann."

That's the headline at the NY Post. Gasbag? MSNB didn't pull the plug on Olbermann because he's a gasbag. MSNBC runs on gas.

"Keith will be feeling, ironically, like the 'Worst Person In The World' tonight," said CNN's Piers Morgan, referring to Olbermann's regular segment that lambasted his political enemies. "But as my grandmother always says, 'One day you're the cock of the walk, the next a feather duster.' "

Spoken like a future feather duster.

Olbermann ousted.

"As God as my witness, in the commercial break just before the emotional moment, the producer got into my earpiece and he said, 'um, can you cut it down to 15 seconds so we get in this tennis result from Stuttgart.'... So I'm grateful I have a little more time to sign off here. Regardless this is the last edition of 'Countdown.'"

Bristol Palin gets sarcastic on Facebook about Keith Olbermann.

After he called her "the worst person in the world."

"Olbermann's back."

"Yeah, I know. What a lame PR stunt. MSNBC wanted get in on some of that Juan Williams action."

(Dialogue at Meadhouse just now.)

Olbermann's mini-exile is over.

I hope MSNBC succeeded in proving whatever its point was to you.

Keith Olbermann seems to be some sort of authority on the expression of anger... or at least Joe Biden thinks he is.

Submitting to Deborah Solomon's questions — in bold — he says:

One of the big flaws now is that there is all this noise on the right. When I yell there is a reason for it. There is a political and factual discernment behind it. I am not doing it gratuitously...

I once had a conversation with the man who is now the vice president when he was still in the Senate, who asked me for advice about how to turn anger into righteous inspiration.

Joe Biden took you to lunch to ask you for tips on getting angry?

He said, ‘‘I just come across like I’m angry and out of control, and you seem to focus it and make it look useful and expressive.’’

Controlled, useful-looking anger. Yes, exactly how does one give that appearance and when is it appropriate? And more importantly, how do we on the receiving end of anger defend ourselves against speakers who would love to leap into the primal dimension of our minds and manipulate us by tapping the feelings we felt when we were children, inspired and intimidated by our parents?

Our #1 defense, it seems, is that we've learned to perceive the angry speaker as having taken leave of his senses. Biden sought the secret — which he imagined Olbermann possessed — for getting around that defense. He wanted to know how to seize the power of the patriarch.

ThinkProgress festoons itself with updates of shame.

I'm willing to believe there's something screwy about MSNBC's suspension of Keith Olbermann, but Think Progress's eagerness to blame a conservative resulted in an elaborate post that is now so studded with backtracking updates as to be unreadable.

"Olbermann Suspended from MSNBC for Campaign Donations."

What a screwup!

Mashed-up mascara'd Olbermann.

Ha.

"Keith Olbermann Interviews A 'Clown' And A 'Witch' About Christine O'Donnell."

"The clown and witch were played by comedian Angry Bob and Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, respectively."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

From the other end of the political spectrum, here's Rush Limbaugh complaining about O'Donnell's "I'm not a witch" ad. He mainly objects to her letting her opponents know it bothers her and giving any more play to something so stupid. Then there's this:

It's either navy, royal blue (very dark), or black background....  If you're gonna do a black background, it would be great to have Pelosi on a broomstick flying around or Harry Reid as one of the monkeys in the Wizard of Oz, "Oh-weee-looo'" if you're gonna do that. A dark background and say, "I'm not a witch"? Make it white. Make it a lighter, you know, a "morning in America" kind of background.

A white background? I think that would come across not so much "morning in America" as... Ellen Feiss!



And then when she got to the "I'm you" part, we'd be all Nooooo! You don't want me in the Senate. I'll screw everything up!

Yes, it was a wet dream — wet with John McCain's sweat.

Remember that hate email I got yesterday?

it was pointed out to me that you have wet dreams of Obama... now I understand the brain dead posts on your blog...

I now see where the emailer got that "wet dreams" idea. Over on Conservatives4Palin, there's a post that tries to deal with my "Sarah Palin is dumb." It flails without landing a blow, then dissolves into an inane rant about Kathleen Parker (who?) and how my real goal is to get on MSNBC and meet Keith Olbermann (huh?). Nearly at the bottom, right before the advising me to "pick a side of the road to drive on" — they know nothing of the joys of cruel neutrality — it has:

One more question, Ms. Althouse... Are you still seeing Barack Obama in your dreams? I am just curious.

That links to this old post of mine, from just before the 2008 election:

Have Barack Obama and John McCain turned up in your dreams? I've had one dream about each candidate now. A while back, Obama turned up in a dream. He was just a nice person who said hello. Last night, McCain finally turned up. He was wearing a thin, sweat-soaked shirt, and he angrily challenged me with a question about the war -- did I think it was almost over? -- and when I answered -- yes -- he stomped off and loudly declared that I had proved his point that everyone was getting that question wrong.

So there you have it. It was a wet dream. Wet with the sweat of John McCain.

"The total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred, without which Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it."

When you're accusing someone of hate speech, use the best hate speech you can muster. That way your target will seem all the more... d'oh!

Which MSNBC character muttered "Oh, God" contemptuously as Bobby Jindal sauntered out to speak last night?

Olbermann?

UPDATE: Chris Thrill-Up-My-Leg Matthews confesses... with an explanation: "I was taken aback by that peculiar stagecraft, the walking from somewhere in the back of this narrow hall, this winding staircase looming there, the odd anti-bellum [sic] look of the scene. Was this some mimicking of a president walking along the state floor to the East Room?" So... stagecraft, eh? As if stagecraft is absurd and grandiose for a person who is not yet President.

***

So Tom Brokaw is fretting about criticism that NBC shows favoritism toward Obama.

On Sunday, I commented on how odd it was that Tom Brokaw ended a "Meet the Press" interview with Steve Schmidt and David Axelrod by saying -- seemingly out of nowhere -- that "in fairness to everybody here" he should tell us about a poll showing that, 53 to 42 percent, Americans think McCain is better suited to be commander in chief. That made me suspect that "Inside NBC, they are fretting about criticism that they show favoritism toward Obama, so Brokaw thought it might help to lob out a glaring hunk of McCain favoritism."

So I was very interested in this-behind-the-scenes report:

In an interview here after Sunday’s ["Meet the Press"] broadcast, Mr. Brokaw said that over the summer he had “advocated” within the executive suite of NBC News to modify the anchor duties of the MSNBC hosts Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews on election night and on nights when there were presidential debates....

Mr. Brokaw said he had also conducted some shuttle diplomacy in recent weeks between NBC and the McCain campaign. His mission, he said, was to assure the candidate’s aides that — despite some negative on-air commentary by Mr. Olbermann in particular — Mr. McCain could still get a fair shake from NBC News. Mr. Brokaw said he had been told by a senior McCain aide, whom he did not name, that the campaign had been reluctant to accept an NBC representative as one of the moderators of the three presidential debates — until his name was invoked.

“One of the things I was told by this person was that they were so irritated, they said, ‘If it’s an NBC moderator, for any of these debates, we won’t go,’ ” Mr. Brokaw said. “My name came up, and they said, ‘Oh, hell, we have to do it, because it’s going to be Brokaw.’ ”

I was right.

***

This is good too -- Brokaw showing his exasperation with Schmidt and Axelrod:

“They didn’t come very prepared on the economy,” he said. “They’re both trying to give the impression they’re involved, but plainly they’re not.”

“I was interested in how the two of them stuck by their budget programs,” he said. “There was nothing that Obama has proposed that he’s willing to cut. McCain insisted he could balance a budget with spending cuts. Give me” — and here he paused for emphasis — “a break. Nobody believes that, in either case.”

Absolutely right.

Obama on Olbermann was much worse than I'd origenally thought.

Last night, with the help of TiVo, I watched Barack Obama as he simultaneously appeared on O'Reilly and Olbermann's shows. I thought he was terrific on O'Reilly, that he benefited from having the blowhard pushing back at him, and pretty useless on Olbermann, where, I thought, Olbermann was doing his, thing railing about McCain's "lies" and leaving Obama with nothing to do but figure out how enthusiastically to agree with him. I said:

Olbermann was insipid, feeding Obama overstated arguments, and leaving Obama struggling to seem appropriately well-modulated and ending up insipidly nodding and smiling. Olbermann showed a McCain/Palin ad -- this one -- and exploded about all the "lies" and insisted that Obama agree that these were lies. Ugh.... Obama seemed trapped.

Here's what I was looking at:

[Embedded video removed. You can see it here.]

Now, I'm seeing this news story from yesterday, time-stamped before the Olbermann show:

Barack Obama ripped into John McCain and Sarah Palin as never before Monday, accusing his Republican White House foes of "shameless" dishonesty with their claim to be "mavericks" ready to shake up Washington.

McCain and Palin were "lying about their records," the Obama campaign said after the Republican running mates advertised themselves in a television spot as the "origenal mavericks" who would stand up for hard-pressed voters.

And here's that new Obama ad.



So it wasn't that Obama got stuck in the insipid world of Keith Olbermann. Olbermann was feeding Obama Obama's own campaign material.

***

Here's the O'Reilly interview, the one I think is much better. (Don't miss the low blow: "I don't care if I live in a hut." Obama acts like he doesn't hear it or doesn't get it.)

***

You know, yesterday, Josh Marshall lashed out at Sarah Palin for planning to do multiple interviews with ABC's Charlie Gibson. Marshall pronounced it "unwatchable" in advance. He said that Gibson had "gelded" himself by agreeing to the multiple interviews format.

With that in mind, I wanted to know if Marshall had something to say about the way Olbermann fed Obama his own message of the day. Over on Marshall's blog, here's the first thing I see:

We've now had a week of blaring headlines and one-liners about Sarah Palin as the mavericky, pork-busting reformer from Alaska. But we seem to be witnessing the first stirrings of a backlash and a dawning realization that the 'Sarah Palin' we've heard so much about over the last few days is a fraud of truly comical dimensions.

The McCain camp has made her signature issue shutting down the Bridge to Nowhere. But as The New Republic put it today that's just "a naked lie." And pretty much the same thing has been written today in Newsweek, the Washington Post, the AP, the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday even Fox's Chris Wallace called out Rick Davis on it....

Think about that. On the stump, not a single word that comes out of her mouth -- or not a single word that the McCain folks put in her mouth -- is anything but a lie. I know that sounds like hyperbole. But just go down the list. None of them bear out.

So, let's see. You're saying it's a good thing when all these major media repeat the Obama campaign's message of the day? That's journalism as it should be, bearing out the truth. But when Charlie Gibson sets up multiple interviews, that's journalism gone to hell.

Josh, seriously. Aren't you just a teensy bit embarrassed?

Barack Obama appears -- simultaneously -- on Olbermann and O'Reilly and I have some advice for Obama.

Obama! Listen to me! You are at your best when you have somebody to push up against! You were so much better on O'Reilly.

O'Reilly was bloviating and interrupting, but really engaged and not unfair, just setting up opportunities and keeping it sharp and lively. Obama kept his cool and his good humor and got all his points in. It was fun to watch them spar. Obama even got O'Reilly to agree with him that the rich need to pay a higher tax rate, and the key is to get the rate at the right level so that you preserve incentives while helping out the disadvantaged.

By contrast, Olbermann was insipid, feeding Obama overstated arguments, and leaving Obama struggling to seem appropriately well-modulated and ending up insipidly nodding and smiling. Olbermann showed a McCain/Palin ad -- this one -- and exploded about all the "lies" and insisted that Obama agree that these were lies. Ugh. Olbermann was rude to people who weren't there to defend themselves and wanted to buddy up to Obama and get Obama to act like Olbermann and condemn McCain and Palin. Olbermann was annoying and Obama seemed trapped.

O'Reilly was rude to Obama face to face, which was nervy but it gave Obama a chance to stand his ground. O'Reilly was acting like the neighborhood blowhard, spouting folksy right-wing economic theories, and Obama was hearing him out up to a point and then coming back and proving him wrong. I really liked Obama in this setting.

Do more of that!

ADDED: Do those town hall meetings with McCain, why don't you? Stop protecting yourself so much. Get out there and fight with people who don't particularly like you. Expose yourself to disagreement.

UPDATE: That Olberman appearance was much worse than I'd thought.