Murdoch and his Fox News Channel monsters like Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly love to frame their fight with Olbermann and his network MSNBC as petty personal bickering. Of course they do; that creates a false equivalency between the two sides. Here's what Murdoch said on a conference call for Fox parent News Corp. the other day, according to the New York Times' Brian Stelter:

Mr. Murdoch pointed a finger at MSNBC, saying "we did not start this abuse." But he said the fighting became "personal" and "finally we had to allow people to retaliate... The moment they stop, we'll stop... We don't believe in it. We don't think it's good business."

So, let's review this supposedly "personal" fighting.

Olbermann has:

• Built a profitable career on taunting Fox News for various falsehoods spread by the right-leaning cable network, in statements made by Fox News staffers on actual television broadcasts;
• Sometimes, in the course of doing this, labeled people "The Worst Person in the World" on his show.

Fox and its corporate siblings have, as part of this feud:

• Suddenly accused the CEO of MSNBC parent GE of being personally at fault for the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, since GE sold medical equipment to Iran (legally), and Iran later supplied Iraqi insurgents;
• Ambushed said CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, for an interview over this invented issue, in Fox's infamous, stalkery manner;
• Ran stale and obviously retaliatory gossip stories that Olbermann mistreats his colleagues and might leave his network;
• Gossiped that Olbermann disrespected his dead colleague's funeral;
• Wrote that people in gyms throughout New York City have complained that "TVs tuned to... Keith Olbemrann" are as disgusting as "pooping in the pool" and "sex in the showers."

Having responded to a debate about the quality of its television news broadcast with trumped up and/or utterly petty unrelated personal assertions, Fox News is now trying to make the narrative about how the whole fight is about petty personal bickering by TV anchors with overgrown egos. And it's actually succeeding, on days when said anchors don't carefully document, with pictures, that they have no personal beef. It doesn't help Olbermann's case that he does in fact, have a hugely overgrown ego, regularly put on display. So he might just end up getting muzzled by his GE overlords, for the terrible "personal" fight he started.

Sure, it was for a good cause, but the fact that Olbermann believed that an hour-long monologue worthy of Fidel Castro was something that people wanted or needed to see, and that his bosses actually let him get away with it, brought to mind Ben Affleck's flawless SNL caricature of Olbermann's mammoth self-regard. It seemed at times last night that he actually took some pointers from Affleck's performance — Olbermann's ego is expansive enough to take such jabs as loving tribute, and incorporate them into his self-image like some ravenous blob that from a sci-fi movie. Watch them both below, and you be the judge.

If you really want to change the course of the health care debate and change minds, Keith—hell, if you even just want to inform people about the world around them, like your sainted Edward R. Murrow, now and again—try pointing the camera at something other than yourself. And let us know when you conquer death.

Ben Affleck doing Keith Olbermann:

Keith Olbermann unwittingly doing Ben Affleck doing Keith Olbermann:

The last time Olbermann took a sudden, unexplained absence from the show, it turned out to have been a hissy-fit work stoppage after Rachel Maddow booked Ben Affleck and MSNBC brass refused to back Olbermann's attempt to bigfoot her and steal the interview. After CityFile reported on the flap, Olbermann blamed the absence on his mother's death, which had occurred two weeks prior.

We asked an MSNBC publicist where Olbermann has been and, she responded: "He's going to discuss it on the show tonight, he's back tonight."

There could obviously be a variety of interesting and non-interesting explanations for the days off, which he took on the 11th, 14th, 18th, 22nd, 23rd, 25th, 28th, and 29th of September, and we're just wondering, is all.

UPDATE: A tipster sent in the screengrab below from Saturday's Red Sox game at Yankee Stadium. We posted it, saying Olbermann was at the game, because that looks exactly like Keith Olbermann. But we have it on good authority that it is not, in fact, Keith Olbermann. Our corporate brothers at Deadspin got the same image from the same tipster earlier this week, and didn't use it. We knew that. What we didn't know was that Deadspin checked with Olbermann to confirm that it was him, and found that it was not. We should have checked, too, although we didn't think to because doesn't that look exactly like Keith Olbermann? Down to the glasses?

At first glance you'd think that this utterly hilarious compilation, featuring the music of a black man renowned for on-camera golden showers and statutory rape, was a parody made by Keith Olbermann or Bill Maher's staffs, but it was actually put together and posted to the web this morning by the delusional wingnuts who run the Conservatives4Palin website. Prepare to be mesmerized.

As you may recall, back in May Keith Olbermann lashed out at Cityfile, Wonkette and Gawker for reporting that he'd angrily walked out on MSNBC after losing a Ben Affleck booking to Rachel Maddow. Olbermann claimed that the reports of his hissy-fit were greatly exaggerated and that he'd actually taken a few days off to mourn the death of his mother, which had occurred two weeks prior.

Now he's taking all kinds of heat from foe and friend alike over this whole Richard Wolffe situation, and on Monday he claimed that he was too busy in June and July fighting with Bill O'Reilly or something to pull Wolffe aside off camera for five minutes to ask a few questions about any potential conflicts of interest with the lobbying job he started in April. This led us to wonder, "Were Olbermann and his producers too bogged down dealing with other things' in April and May as well?" Well, tonight Olbermann offered up a familiar excuse to TVNewser in regards to why he didn't question Wolffe during the April/May time frame:

The bloggers are leaving one component out, unfairly so: In April, I knew vaguely that Richard Wolffe had gone to work for a non-news firm, and that's about the last I heard of it. It was entirely concurrent with my mother's fatal illness, and I turned it over entirely to my management team. My first awareness that this was more than just a non-news job, was this week.

If Jonathan Berr, whoever he is, does not like my prioritizing caring for my mother and dealing with her death, and then doing as many shows as I could, ahead of vetting the comments of our analysts and my management team, frankly, I feel sorry for him. Getting myself through those two months were, and are, more important than what is still being investigated about Richard.

Now, besides the obvious, there are a number of disturbing things about this statement, the first being Olbermann's dismissive "whoever he is" tone towards Jonathan Berr. Who is Jonathan Berr and what did he do to spark Olbermann's ire? Well, he's a writer for Daily Finance who happened to write a eminently reasonable piece critical of Olbermann's recent actions from the perspective of an Olbermann fan. The points he brought up and the questions he asked in his piece were not irrational or inflammatory in any way and deserve consideration. As such, the "whoever he is" condescension is way out of line, and frankly it's quite ugly, seeing as how Berr was nothing less than respectful in his Olbermann article.

Another disturbing thing about Olbermann's statement is the ease with which he seems willing to throw his staff under the bus for failing to do what he should have done in regards to a simple quizzing of Richard Wolffe. The title of the show is Countdown with Keith Olbermann, is it not? Does the old, tired Harry Truman adage "the buck stops here" not apply to cable news anchors whose names appear prominently in the titles of their shows?

Then there's this, an apparent blatant contradiction in the statement separated only by a few words — "In April, I knew vaguely that Richard Wolffe had gone to work for a non-news firm...My first awareness that this was more than just a non-news job, was this week." Um, say what? Which is it Keith? Please clarify.

Finally, I personally can't even begin to imagine the pain involved with losing a mother. My mom's mortality does cross my mind occasionally and the mere thought of it shakes me in places I never knew I was capable of being shaken, someplace deep down where the body meets the soul. But with that said, Olbermann was in the building and working after his mother's death, and if he was able to go on the air and host a show each night, how could he have not taken the time to question Wolffe's lobbying side gig? Again, how much more than a, "Richard, tell me about this new job of yours," would it have taken? And fuck, a simple Google search or two would've raised a number of red flags, but apparently even that would've been too much an effort.

The bottom line here, and everybody knows this, is that this is all a bunch of horseshit, and sadly it didn't have to be that way. If Olbermann would've just stepped up in the beginning and said something along of the lines of, "I know this looks bad, but I became too bogged down by other things, not to mention too trusting of another human being, and let this one slip by me...I'm truly sorry," this might have all gone away quietly (Notice that most of the heat he's been taking on this hasn't come from Fox News, but from Olbermann allies on the internet!). Instead, he's offered up nothing but lame excuses and angry diatribes all week, flailing about madly in the quicksand all the while, and frankly he's looked nothing less than pathetic in doing so.

While Olbermann used his "Worst Persons" segment to call out O'Reilly, Rupert Murdoch and Brian Stelter, the Times media reporter who broke the story about the truce, O'Reilly tonight returned to flogging NBC's parent company, General Electric, for corporate corruption, as has long been his proclivity.

Since news of the secret arrangement broke last Friday night, O'Reilly has made no direct mention of Stelter's story, instead choosing to flaunt his independence tonight by chastising GE for polluting the Hudson River, among other things, and implicating Barack Obama as an accomplice in the process. O'Reilly then brought out noted corruption expert Dick Morris to lament about how truly revolting NBC and GE are because of the GE's corporate influence on its news organization.

So yeah, it's looks as though things are returning to normal in the Olbermann vs. O'Reilly cable news death feud, and really, isn't the world better off for it?

The New Republic's Gabriel Sherman has learned about Wolffe's proposal for 30 Days: A Portrait of the White House at Work, which would be an insider-y, behind the scenes account of the Obama White House. Wolffe, whose book Renegade, The Making of a President chronicled the Obama campaign, and his now-revealed proposal present an ethical dilemma for the White House. Would it be acceptable for them to grant special access to the presidency to a man working on behalf of corporate interests in his side gig?

In the proposal, Wolffe writes that he has personal relationships with Obama officials at "the highest level" who have already "expressed support informally" for the project. Wolffe envisions a fly-on-the-wall account of a month inside the White House, where he'll be "capturing group dynamics and people in action."

Meanwhile the White House claims that Wolffe has yet to "formally present" his plans:

"Mr. Wolffe has not formally presented the White House with a book proposal," a White House spokesperson wrote in a statement to TNR this afternoon. "When and if he does we will evaluate it as we evaluate numerous others, taking account of all relevant factors."

And of course, Richard Wolffe doesn't see any problem with any of the things he's presently doing:

Wolffe doesn't see his corporate ties as a potential conflict. "The idea that journalists are somehow not engaged in corporate activities is not really in touch with what's going on," he told Politico's Ben Smith in June. "You tell me where the line is between business and journalism."

Sherman goes on to detail an interesting encounter between Wolffe and Ben Smith that took place in an airport lounge after Wolffe read something critical Smith had written about him, a story that only adds to the avalanche of unflattering information to come out about Wolffe in the last few days.

Olbermann kicked off his "Worst Persons" segment by lashing out at Brian Stelter, the Times media reporter who broke the story that on June 1st Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly were told to stop taking each other to the woodshed on the air because their bloody feud had become detrimental to the corporate interests of the parent corporations running MSNBC and Fox News. Olbermann said tonight that he spoke to Stelter twice last week, both on and off the record, and denied to him that anyone had attempted to silence his stinging criticisms of O'Reilly and Fox News. Olbermann claims that the whole thing is all just a "misinterpretation" of an on-air proclamation he made on June 1 of this year following the murder of George Tiller, the subject of frequent inflammatory attacks by O'Reilly. Here's what Olbermann said at the time:

Fox News Channel will never restrain itself from incitement to murder and terrorism, not until its profits begin to decline, when its growth stops. So not so much a boycott here as a quarantine, because this has got to stop.

That I have a commercial conflict of interest here is obvious. So I‘ll make the first symbolic contribution to this quarantine. One of my pleasures, obviously, is constantly criticizing him in that Ted Baxter voice. It is the idea of laughter as a social sanction against inflexible behavior.

But this is no time for laughter. This is serious. Serious as death. As serious as George Tiller‘s death. So as of this show‘s end, I will retire the name, the photograph, and the caricature. The words may still be quoted in the future as developments dictate. The goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air.

So it's all a "misinterpretation," you see, though Stelter reported over the weekend that MSNBC and Fox News "lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal." Someone, either Olbermann or a reporter for the New York Times, is lying. Who do you believe?

From there, Olbermann, likely inspired by a burning urge to squash any notion that he'd been put on a leash with an exclamation point, turned his attention to O'Reilly, who he affectionately called a "racist clown," and O'Reilly's boss, "corporate jackal" Rupert Murdoch. Here's the complete video of the segment:

Glenn Greenwald, Talking Points Memo, and others have taken MSNBC to task for giving Wolffe a platform as a regular "analyst"—and on Friday as guest host—when his day job is as a paid shill for Public Strategies, a lobbying and public relations firm run by former Bush flack Dan Bartlett that "manages public perceptions" for corporate clients.

But the complaints are vague unless you can catch Wolffe talking about issues—and therefore managing perceptions—on MSNBC's air that Public Strategies' clients are actually invested in. And it looks to us like he did just that on Friday, when he opened his guest-host gig with a segment on healthcare reform that included a softball interview with White House senior adviser David Axelrod and a segment with the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson. Here's a sample question Wolffe lobbed at Robinson:

"[I]f more Americans understood that Medicare was government-run, government-sponsored, socialized, quote-unquote, "health care," could the whole debate look pretty different about now?

Wolffe's tenor during the whole segment was pro-reform. Which is fine, and to be expected from Countdown. We know Olbermann supports reform. Hell, we support reform. But nobody is paying us to support reform. Is anybody paying Wolffe?

Public Strategies doesn't disclose its clients. But it does have to disclose any clients that it's lobbied the Senate on behalf of, and a check with the Senate's lobbying disclosure database shows that a number of companies and organizations invested in healthcare reform have paid Public Strategies to lobby for them.

The Federation of American Hospitals, for instance, paid Public Strategies $20,000 to lobby the Senate in 2003. And lo and behold, the Federation of American Hospitals came out in support of the Senate Finance Committee's proposal last month [pdf]:

As a nation, we know we can and must do better. That's why we support today's agreement with Chairman Baucus and the Obama Administration to move comprehensive health reform forward.

More recently, a company called Health Integrated paid Public Strategies $40,000 last year to lobby on health care issues—mostly related to Veteran's Affairs and substance abuse funding. Health Integrated markets itself to health plans and insurers as a "cost-containment" firm that sells programs to identify unhealthy individuals and offer wellness services to keep their healthcare costs down. That idea is central to Obama's cost-cutting proposals, and Health Integrated could stand to benefit enormously from reforms mandating the sorts of services it provides. In this May radio interview, the company's president laid out the cost issues facing healthcare and said, "These are things we're going to have to deal with. I think these are powerful reasons why we'll get reform, but I'm somewhat sanguine that there are a lot of forces at play that aren't going to readily" agree.

Public Strategies has also been paid $280,000 by Christus Health, a network of hospitals in the South whose CEO is on record supporting "Obama's strategy."

Are these firms currently paying Public Strategies to send people like Richard Wolffe out there to advocate for health care reform? We don't know, but it's important to note that these are specific disclosures that apply only to Public Strategies' Senate lobbying—the company could have been, and could still, be doing all sorts of work for these companies on healthcare that we don't know about. We called Public Strategies to ask, but they haven't called back.

Wolffe opened his Countdown appearance by referencing a story about conservatives' concerted efforts to drum up opposition to reform, and offered this advice to legislators:

To all Democrats in Congress who are planning to spend their part of the August recess talking about health care reform at town hall-style meetings back home, we offer this friendly COUNTDOWN public service announcement in our fifth story: Those angry protestors who will disrupt your attempts to talk with your voters-and trust us they will-are being coordinated and coached by industry funded, right-wing operatives. Their stated goal will be to rattle you, not to have an intelligent debate.

Throughout the show, he brought up right-wing "front groups," the "step-by-step instructions to the right-wing rabble-rousers," and the "scare tactics and the fake protests" conservatives are unleashing across the nation to defeat reform.

Wolffe seems to have a problem with fake protests and ginned up "grassroots" campaigns. He should know: It's what Public Strategies does. In a "case study" on the company's web site, it laid out how Public Strategies helped a hospital chain get state approval to build a new hospital by generating a fake grassroots campaign:

Public Strategies...develop[ed] a set of messages that would resonate with the public, address common concerns, and make a compelling case for a new hospital.

The messages became the basis of a comprehensive strategy for a grassroots campaign that included an advocacy Web site, a petition drive and letter-writing campaign, advertising and direct mail campaigns, and a media outreach initiative. The media outreach included publishing op-ed articles and letters to the editor by respected community leaders in daily and weekly newspapers, as well as earned-media events to build momentum and create a sense of inevitability for the project.

So were Wolffe's complaints about the "fake protesters" genuine, or merely another attempt by Public Strategies to create a "sense of inevitability" for the outcome that its clients want? We e-mailed Wolffe but haven't heard back. An NBC News spokeswoman says, "We should have disclosed Richard's connection to Public Strategies and we will do so in the future."

When the Pentagon was revealed to have been coordinating its PR strategy with network military analysts and dangling military contracts with those analysts' employers as a sweetener, it was a scandal that earned the New York Times a Pulitzer Prize and lit up the left-wing blogosphere. Some even criticized Olbermann for not devoting enough attention to it. Now MSNBC, Wolffe, and Olbermann have handed the right-wing its own analogue—NBC News is putting on paid shills for Obamacare! Idiots.

To summarize: Greenwald goes over the New York Times' revelation of a Charlie Rose-officiated summit between News Corp and GE chiefs that ended the battle between their respective professional blowhards, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. The battle embarrassed their corporate parents, and that's why the beef was squashed. He notes that the Times' Brian Stelter, who penned the piece, missed the big picture in all of this: that we now shamelessly live in an age where corporations can control their news divisions simply by getting a few guys in a room, and ordering them to stop fighting. Which is absolutely true, but we already knew that. He's right, however, in its absolute shamelessness. Even Charlie Rose, who brought the corporate titans together, is dirty. Even better, Greenwald pulls from an old interview of Charlie Rose's. In conversation with reporter and columnist Amy Goodman, Rose noted:

I promise you, CBS News and ABC News and NBC News are not influenced by the corporations that may own those companies. Since I know one of them very well and worked for one of them.

Which is great, coming from the guy who just moderated a meeting of two corporate giants who need to reign in their news networks.

But when not pointing out the long-kvetched, now manifest complaints of anarchists everywhere, he gets to something even more insidious: former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe's guest stint on MSNBC, filling in for Keith Olbermann. Wolffe is noted as a "political analyst" when he appears on MSNBC. Which is funny, because his day job is for a corporate strategies firm run by the former Bush White House Comm Director Dan Bartlett:

Wolffe left Newsweek last March in order to join "Public Strategies, Inc.," the corporate communications firm run by (Bartlett), its President and CEO...

...Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program — or serving as an almost daily "political analyst" — is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist

Hot damn. He also goes on to note those who've previously written about MSNBC and Wolffe's lack of disclosure over this (Ana Marie Cox), and links to Public Strategies' website. Want to know what one of their divisions is? This is neat:

Media Intelligence™

The Situation

A leading media company faced negative public perception and sagging stock prices resulting from a personal legal situation involving its CEO. Senior Management engaged Public Strategies to reposition the company as a trusted, respected, and innovative leader in its industry, and to help mitigate the crisis and restore confidence in the brand.

Public Strategies' solution

In addition to providing strategic counsel, Public Strategies immediately responded by enacting its Media Intelligence™ service providing the client with a 360-degree perspective of public opinion around the globe

A "360-degree perspective," and a four-dimensional one, too, like A CALL THAT COMES FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE. Furthermore: he points out how Wolffe has gone on the record to a Newsweek reporter after announcing his departure from the weekly as not giving a shit about the line between corporate interests and news. And get ready to walk away from your computer, because you might want to break something:

"The idea that journalists are somehow not engaged in corporate activities is not really in touch with what's going on. Every conversation with journalists is about business models and advertisers," he said, recalling that, on the day after the 2008 election, Newsweek sent him to Detroit to deliver a speech to advertisers. "You tell me where the line is between business and journalism," he said.

Jesus.

At least former MSNBC correspondent, the (potentially) conflict-of-interest-happy Dan Abrams, tries to run interference on the inherent conflicts between owning a media strategies firm Abrams Research and owning a media reporting website Mediaite (or at least: has henchpeople furiously sending emails, telling everyone writing about them to get their facts right).

The kicker, however, is when Greenwald points out Wolffe's bio on the Public Strategies website, where they actually tout him as a news source: "In addition, Wolffe is an NBC political analyst. He provides political commentary on several MSNBC programs, Meet The Press, and TODAY."

As in, in addition to being our employee, we can send him into the field to say whatever you want him to say! For a price, of course. There's clearly a very small difference in being able to pay to put something in someone's mouth, and being able to pay to get something out of someone's mouth in front of a bunch of other people. Richard Wolffe is about as dirty and shameless a media whore as you can get, taking money from corporations, going on the news with his pockets lined by said interests, and being framed in a context as an objective, righteous news commentator. Richard Wolffe, and by extension, MSNBC, are completely - and I guess, at this point - unexpectedly dirty, and pretty much nothing they claim to be and everything they don't.

Glenn Greenwald, on the other hand? You deserve something. I don't know. A steak dinner. A stiff drink. But mostly, lots of people to read your column. It's nice to see someone who's not answering to the interest of brass somewhere, which, apparently, is becoming more and more rare as we move forward in this great new era of news, or whatever we're eventually going to call it.

GE's silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC's sleazy use of Richard Wolffe [Salon]

Such an agreement would mitigate the most high-profile battle within contemporary media, a feud that hearkened back to the newspaper wars of the early 20th century and which offered heartening — ever so slightly heartening — evidence that, in an era of 500 channel television sets, corporate media didn't have to be toothless or dull media.

But it's last chapter is all too predictable: A powerful, suited overlord got embarrassed by all the boat-rocking and called things to a halt. The suit, in this case, would be GE's Jeffrey Immelt, a frequent target of Fox shouting head Bill O'Reilly and his professional stalker Jesse Waters; according to the Times, Immelt sealed a deal with News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch this past May, "with a handshake" at Microsoft headquarters.

Details were left to underlings Jeff Zucker, at NBC, and Gary Ginsberg, at News Corp:

[They] agreed that hosts on Fox and MSNBC would resist lobbing mortars at each
other or their parent companies, according to an employee with direct knowledge of the agreement.... "For this war to stop, it meant fewer headaches on the corporate side," the employee said...

Then the orders went out to the troops — meaning, to journalists, now being told what true things they should avoid saying or investigating, because it was not in the interests of their corporate parent companies. Or at least that's what the Times' sources say:

Phil Griffin, said on a daily conference call with producers that he wanted the channel's other programs to follow Mr. Olbermann's lead and restrain from criticizing Fox directly, according to two employees. At Fox News, some staff members were told to "be fair" to G.E.

The feud between the two corporations dates back at least five years, to the first of MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann's relentless attacks on O'Reilly, who uses his highly-rated Fox News show to attack various lefty targets, including an abortion doctor, "Tiller the Baby-Killer," who O'Reilly railed against some 28 times on his show, until someone finally murdered the guy.

O'Reilly attacks ginned up Olbermann's ratings, but the feud spread; O'Reilly, who refused to utter Olbermann's name, lashed out at General Electric and NBC News; News Corp.'s New York Post was enlisted to repeatedly jab at Olbermann.

Olbermann can be an insufferable blowhard, and there was no small amount of ego and self-interest behind his O'Reilly slams, a point emphasized in the Times' story. His attacks could go too far; Olbermann once wore an O'Reilly mask and gave a Nazi salute, on air. "It was time to grow up," a source told the Times.

But it's out of a swamp of impure motives and foolish mistakes than good journalism must arise, and for those who distrusted Fox News there was something comforting in the idea that MSNBC was ready to jump on the network's misstatements, tasteless moments and overreaches. Fox-lovers no doubt relished monitoring of the liberal media housed at 30 Rock.'

Olbermann protests to the Times that "I am party to no deal," but the paper documents how he appears to have led the way on this one. Our jaded hearts twinge only slightly for those NBC News staff who consider themselves journalists but swallow these sorts of orders from above; far more upset is our id, at the prospect of relinquishing the great fun of a vigorous — and vigorously cleansing — media feud.

Haha, douchebag Donny Deutsch is now an MSNBC anchor. Related(???): Howard Dean is guest-hosting Keith Olbermann's MSNBC show tonight and tomorrow. What is brewing over at MSNBC? Ayahuasca is our guess.


Yo check out how awesome this Pulitzer prize-winning former Copley News Service dude named Jerry Kammer is: "When Gannett bought the paper, they turned Arizona into a colony. As history shows, the purpose of a colony is not to provide for the well-being of the natives; it is to generate profits for the home country, which in this case was Gannett corporate headquarters." Preach! "The Gannettoids aren't uniquely guilty. They're just part of the steady ascendancy of buccaneer capitalism in our country. Look at Wall Street, where the bastards went wild with the smiling benediction of Alan Greenspan, whose every non-move was directed by the Gospel of Ayn Rand...I used to think my politics were moderate or slightly left-of-center. But the perversions of capitalism that I've seen during my career as a reporter (including several years covering Charlie Keating and the plundering of the S&Ls) have persuaded me that Karl Marx was right when he said capitalism would be destroyed by its own excesses." This cat is off the hook. Nuff respect, Jerry Kammer.


Now, contrast Mr. Kammer—a former journalist—with John Fund, who wrote this on the august editorial page of the WSJ just yesterday: "Ms. Palin appeared liberated by leaving office and used blunt words to take her media critics down a peg. 'You represent what could and should be a respected, honest profession that could and should be a cornerstone of our democracy,' she said. 'Democracy depends on you, and that is why — that's why our troops are willing to die for you. So how about in honor of the American soldier, you quit makin' things up.'...
Ms. Palin will no doubt have a future as a stump speaker and political commentator in the lower 48, and her media critique certainly will find receptive audiences."
The lesson: former journalists are far wiser than current ones. Or maybe it's just: John Fund is stupid.


New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg's teenage daughter was quarantined in China with suspected swine flu. Who will be next? And will they be able to parlay their swine flu experience into a New York Times story? The answers are "Thomas Friedman's second cousin" and "you betcha."


The LA Times is all fucked up: somebody clicked on the "Print edition" version online and got this screenshot this morning. Here's hoping this is not the actual print edition!

Here's what he said:

...our Kenyan-Muslim president who's destroying this country, you know, seriously, you can polish a turd, you can polish a turd, it's still a turd...

The Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn has the audio. Nice work, Keith.

Last month we reported that Muller's publicist, Linda Shafran, sent an e-mail to a friend before Muller's waterboarding stunt last month clearly stating that the affair would be a "hoax" and would "only look real" with Mancow "acting like he is drowning." We also got in touch with the guy who "waterboarded" Mancow, who said he literally had no idea what he was doing.

And then Keith Olbermann got very angry at us and had Muller on Countdown for a second time to rebut out reporting where he said, before he started talking about the Book of Revelations, that he had to pretend that his fake waterboarding would be a hoax because the "the Chicago cops came and said, 'You can't waterboard.'"

That's not true.

See, he only pretended that it would be fake, the story goes, but was planning on actually getting waterboarded all along. Since Shafran had been told—falsely—that the whole thing would be a hoax, it would make sense that she wrote that it would be a hoax.

The notion that the Chicago Police Department actually contacted Muller to tell him that he couldn't voluntarily undergo a waterboarding is preposterous, but Mancow's former producer Midge Ripoli (who went on the air by the rather unfortunate name "DJ Luv Cheez" and was fired by Muller after spending 17 years on the show) says he knows what Muller was talking about: Muller had originally asked a close friend of his who is on the Chicago SWAT team to conduct the waterboarding, but he backed out. Which, Ripoli says, Muller translated into "the Chicago cops came and said, 'You can't waterboard."

In one of the e-mails obtained and published by Gawker, Shafran wrote, "The swat guy he had to do the waterboarding now can't do it."

"When he said he was going to have a SWAT guy do it, but he backed out the last minute," Ripoli told Gawker, "I knew right away what this was. He has a really good friend on the Chicago SWAT team. I'm sure that when he thought about this, he said, 'I don't want to be involved.'" That withdrawal from the project by his SWAT-team friend, Ripoli says, is probably what Muller meant by "the cops told me I can't do it."

"We called it the 'Mancow factor,'" Ripoli says of his former boss' penchant for spinning innocuous details into elaborate stories. "He used to call me, back in the '90s, and say there were black helicopters flying outside his house—he said he actually saw them. For him to try to be a serious pundit now is crazy."

We'll never know for sure what Muller meant, because when we called to ask him, he said "goodbye" and hung up. And the Chicago Police Department, despite repeated requests, said they didn't have enough information to conduct an inquiry into whether or not a representative of the department spoke to Muller prior to the "waterboarding."

Still, we called Lock E. Bowman, the legal director of the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University—which deals in police misconduct cases in Illinois, including torture cases—to ask him whether any Illinois or Chicago laws would prohibit a voluntary waterboarding. He said that Illinois' laws on assault and bodily harm all depend on the victim not granting his or her consent.

"I think that's not correct," he said. "If he consents—and you'd have to set up a clear process where he agrees to it and signs off—then there's no crime. There might be a civil issue if he was accidentally injured in the course of this, but as far as assault, or battery, or any criminal liability is concerned, his consent would be a complete defense."

So either an actual Chicago police officer contacted Muller out of the blue to tell him—falsely—that he couldn't undergo a voluntary waterboarding, thereby causing Muller to say—falsely—that it would only be for pretend, thereby causing his publicist to tell a friend—falsely—that it would be a "hoax," thereby causing us to report—falsely—that it was a hoax. Or Muller's friend who was a cop backed out of the fake waterboarding and, after he was caught in his hoax, Muller spun this fact into an excuse for his publicist's e-mail. We'll take No. 2.

It's so awesome when the media take a regular old term you use every day like "empathy" and decides it's Important. All of a sudden one innocuous word launches a million articles, blogs,etc. Sort of like when the Obamas said "yay" with their hands closed and knuckles touching, and everyone dropped their jaw in amazement. Fast forward a year: National Fistbump Day! For those interested, I've got my fingers crossed hoping "canoodle" is next to receive the treatment. Canoodling has important socio-political ethnocultural implications and demands exploring! (Immigrants are canoodling, sources say.) Next week!

Anyword, we present the Political Empathy Matrix with a sprinkling of this week's stories. This "Us" vs "Them" axis is the true litmus of an empathetic worldview. "Us" is inclusive, an invitation to all: Yes, Sonia, from the Bronx, be a justice on the high court with us! In contrast, Keith Olbermann, for example, champions an exclusive kind of liberalism. Not fit for the likes of the people who toil here in the tubes of this very website.

So there you go. Please connect the rest of my dots in the comments.

Muller is a shock jock who made his name by pulling stunts like shutting down traffic on San Francisco's Bay Bridge with his station's news van and having his sidekick get a haircut on the asphalt, making prank calls to Chinese restaurants and asking whether they make their Egg Foo Yung with dog or cat meat, saying "nigger" on the air, and making repeated calls to the hair salon next to his studio and insinuating that the male owner is a gay.

Seven days ago, after a week of on air hype, Muller—who has always denied that waterboarding was torture—purported to undergo the procedure on the air, after which he dramatically announced that he had changed his mind about it. This would have probably gone largely unnoticed except for the fact that Keith Olbermann designated him as the leading critic of torture.

So irresistable was the idea of a nominal conservative coming over to Olbermann's side of the torture debate (the right side, we might add) that even after we reported that Muller's stunt was at best a half-assed spectacle that didn't come close to the actual conditions that waterboard victims experience and at worst a deliberate con job designed to get publicity, Olbermann double-downed and blamed us for ruining his fun. Based on the evidence we've gathered, and Olbermann and Muller's confusing and contradictory responses, we're increasingly convinced that Muller's waterboarding escapade was a purposeful fabrication—that he set out to engineer a publicity event based on the reversal of his position. But even if you take the most charitable view of the evidence from Muller's perspective, all that emerges is a fake waterboarding that frightened a callow radio host.

Olbermann brought Muller—with his wife and daughter wandering around aimlessly and confusingly behind him in the studio—back to his show tonight to rebut our stories. He said that "the only actual evidence" that Muller's supposed waterboarding was not, in fact, a waterboarding was "the use of the word 'hoax' in an e-mail." Well, we'd say that's something, considering the e-mail in question was from Muller's publicist, Linda Shafran, who wrote outright that the event was indeed a hoax. Muller explained it away, as he did earlier today, by claiming that he would not have been permitted to do the stunt by his bosses if he let people know that he was actually planning on going through with it. He wasn't clear, but the implication was that Shafran wasn't in the loop—she thought it would be a bullshit stunt: "I didn't think it was a big deal, she didn't think it was a big deal. We were going to prove that it was nothing."

Shafran wrote the e-mail on the afternoon before the stunt, as part of a frantic attempt to find someone to conduct the waterboarding. Here's what she wrote:

It is going to have to look "real" but of course would be simulated with Mancow acting like he is drowning. It will be a hoax but have to look real.

No one disputes that the e-mail is genuine. Note that it contains other words than "hoax"—words like "look real" and "simulated." And—most importantly—"with Mancow acting like he is drowning."

Here's what Olbermann's paranoid rebuttals fail to explain: If Muller was planning on proving that waterboarding was no big deal, and if Shafran thought Muller was planning on proving that waterboarding was no big deal, and if Shafran also thought—wrongly—that it was going to be a hoax: Why would she write that Muller would be "acting like he is drowning"? Wouldn't he act like he wasn't drowning? Like waterboarding isn't a "big deal"? According to Muller's story, when Shafran wrote that e-mail, she was under the mistaken impression that Muller was going to fake a waterboarding to prove that it's no big deal. It makes no sense. Nor does Muller's line about trying to keep the bosses out of the loop: "You have to understand something," he said. "The Chicago cops came and said, 'You can't waterboard.'" Really? The Chicago Police Department came to you, Muller, and told you not to waterboard? We're going to call them and ask them on Monday!

Even if Muller is telling the truth about Shafran being out of the loop, her e-mail makes fairly clear that Muller knew how his waterboarding was going to end before it started.

Olbermann says it's absurd that Muller would deliberately fake a waterboarding so that he could publicly reverse his position. What's the motive? Well, how many times has he been on Countdown since he did it? How much publicity has he reaped from this episode? What's more newsworthy: A waterboarding supporter undergoes the procedure and confirms his beliefs, or a waterboarding advocate undergoes the procedure and changes his tune?

Gawker is, according to Olbermann, a part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to discredit his hero Muller: "It did occur to you," he asked us, "that the person who sent you the e-mails probably wanted to see Mancow's conversion discredited because the far right can't have somebody it considered its own dramatically saying he was wrong, and so somebody played your web site like a three dollar banjo for political purposes?"

Well, the e-mails are undisputed and they speak for themselves, so the motive of the leaker doesn't really have an impact in this instance. But Keith: The person who leaked them to us also leaked them to you—before you interviewed Muller. If they wanted to discredit him, why would they try to warn you off interviewing him? He can't be discredited until someone gives credit to what he's done in the first place—and you are the the most prominent person that he's convinced into giving him airtime. Someone who was interested in making Muller look like a clown would have wanted him to go on your show before leaking the e-mails. This leaker tried to stop him.

Olbermann acknowledged that his staff had received the e-mails, and did "due diligence and then some" in verifying Muller's story, which in this case consisted of talking to Muller, talking to Shafran, and leaving telephone messages for Klay South, the marine who did the waterboarding. Had Olbermann or his staff actually talked to South, as we did, they would have learned that he "didn't know what [he] was doing" and that he "just did what [he] was told—poured water on [Mancow's] face." Still, Olbermann says that his attempts to verify the story by talking to the guy who is telling it and believing the woman who said it was a hoax when she changed her story and said it wasn't a hoax were better than what Gawker did. "If our perspective here had been political or sloppy," he said, "we wouldn't have checked anything—you know, the way the web site did it."

That's a lie. Our night editor verified Shafran's e-mail with her directly and included her response in the story. We called Muller to get his side of the story and published it. We called South to get his story, and published it. We e-mailed Olbermann for his comment, and we called his MSNBC publicist for hers. Olbermann is living in a fantasy world where malicious bloggers spread lies about him without doing any legwork. We did more reporting on Muller's alleged waterboarding than he or his staff did.

What's more, Olbermann says that the explanation Shafran gave to his staff for her use of the words "hoax," "simulated," and "acting" in the e-mail was this that "it was just a bad choice of words in the heat of trying to find somebody, at the last minute, to participate." That was what she told them on the evening of the interview with Muller. But tonight, on Olbermann's show, Muller said that Shafran wrote that because that's what she thought it was going to be—a hoax. Which is it, Keith? Did Shafran think it was a hoax or did she just make a "bad choice of words"? If Muller's story is true, why would Shafran tell your producers that she just chose the wrong words?

In the end, there are two incontrovertible data points here: That Muller's publicist called the thing a hoax and said Muller intended to pretend he was drowning, and that the guy doing the waterboarding was by his own admission as unqualified to perform the procedure as one could possibly be. Muller's attempts to explain away the first one consist of little more than dubious rhetorical loop-de-loops from a professional provocateur and publicity-hound who has provided, over the years, innumerable reasons why he doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. And nobody disputes the second. Even if Muller didn't deliberately orchestrate this whole stunt from the beginning, it's clear that whatever happened to him doesn't qualify as waterboarding in any recognizable sense of the word. His waterboarder had no training and says he's "the last person" they should have asked to do it. He wasn't subjected to anything close to the conditions that actual waterboarding victims suffer, or, for that matter, that journalists like Christopher Hitchens who undertook the procedure suffered. He decided to get waterboarded, so he asked his publicist to find someone who knew nothing about it to look it up on the internet and do it to him. We say it all adds up to a fake—either by orchestration or half-assed laziness. The only reason that Olbermann—or anyone else for that matter—could come to a different conclusion is ideological fervor. This, according to Olbermann, is "changing the debate" on torture.

After repeatedly claiming—falsely—that Gawker was alleging some kind of conspiracy when all we are alleging is that a notorious radio faker faked another thing, Olbermann and Muller got into some really heavy stuff, speculating that Gawker is doing Dick Cheney's dirty work. "Telling the truth, even accidentally even in a small way, can be very dangerous stuff," Olbermann said.

"There's dark forces behind this," Muller said. "I really believe this."

Jesus.

Also, Muller compared himself to Mike Tyson's dead daughter and said this was all predicted in Revelations. Seriously. He signed off by admitting that he "plays pranks all the time—that's the irony here."

This is the star that Olbermann decided to hitch his wagon to tonight. Bad move.

P.S. For the record: We know that waterboarding is torture, and that torture is illegal, immoral, and unacceptable. We just don't want lying buffoons making the case on our behalf.

Muller came to the right conclusion about waterboarding. He just did it in the wrongest way possible. Which is fine for a Chicago radio host with an audience of prank-calling 12-year-olds. But Keith Olbermann and others are holding up this charlatan's stunt as a game-changer in a very important debate. What's the point of judging the merits of what we have been doing to terrorist detainees by doing it to ourselves if we're not actually doing to ourselves what we are in fact doing to terrorist detainees? In the end it just muddles the debate, and more importantly, is fake.

Muller was free to do what others have, and actually undertake to learn about what we are doing and how we are doing it, and try it out to see how it feels. Instead he lazily and loudly called a press conference, had someone pour water on his face, called it torture, and got on Countdown. (And, TV Newser says, will be going back on tonight.) And now that the charade has been called out for what it was, he's flailing about with claims that whatever was done to him was close enough to waterboarding and, really, if it wasn't he still changed his mind that it's torture, which he's still in favor of in certain situations. Got all that?

Klay South, the founder of Veterans of Valor who poured the pitcher over Muller's mouth, was as clear as he could be when he went on Muller's show today, repeating what he told us: he knows nothing about waterboarding. "I have to let people know right off the bat, I've had no formal training, I've never been waterboarded myself. The only thing I know is what I've seen off YouTube and the internet."

South, whose nonprofit has been promised a $10,000 donation from Olbermann (which he deserves just for being dragged into this whole affair) and is getting loads of publicity out of this whole spectacle (also a good thing), went on to say that "it was as real as it gets." Then he ended his segment with this ringing exchange:

Muller: So soldier [Ed.—South is a marine], so was it real or fake?

South: It was as real as I could re-enact, as best as I could.

Muller also issued an incoherent press release, penned by him and reproduced below, introducing a new argument for his case that the waterboarding that his publicist called a "hoax" and insisted wouldn't be "real" and which was conducted by someone who knew "nothing" about waterboarding was not at all fake in any way: "We kept telling management, the insurance companies, and the local Chicago cops we weren't really going to do it - until we did. Otherwise, they weren't gonna let us do it!" So the talk of hoaxes and faking it was just a ruse to fool management into letting them really do it.

He also says, "We never claimed it was an exact recreation," a point on which we will, against all better judgment, take him at his word. Here's the release. You can read a copy-edited version here, but we think you'll prefer Muller's eloquent consideration of "wanterboarding":

I am not a magician. Many news cameras were there!

Obviously, it was on the radio and I wasn't in prison. I'm also not a radicalized Muslim terrorist. But it was not a hoax! I repeat: NOT A HOAX.

We kept telling management, the insurance companies, and the local Chicago cops we weren't really going to do it - until we did. Otherwise, they weren't gonna let us do it! We got a U.S. Marine that told us he had studied how to do it and he volunteered to waterboard me in return for a mention of his charity.

I was on a decline and I was waterboarded. Was I in chains? No. Does that make it less real? I am failing to get the point attempted by my detractors. We never claimed it was an exact recreation.

The CIA technique is exactly what we did:

1. Keep the chest elevated above the head and neck to keep the lungs "above the waterline."

2. Incline the head, both to keep the throat open and to present the nostrils for easier filling.

3. Force the mouth open so that water can be poured into both the nose and mouth.

Sorry, I thought for years it wasn't torture and now I do. The video is there for all to see.

The left has taken my message and distorted it as well. Would I wanterboard to save my daughters (or any American children)? Yes!

The three terrorists that were waterboarded at Guantanamo were done so by military professionals. And it was done to save lives with America's best interests at heart. Mine was a silly radio time filler in comparison. Its apples & hand grenades!

It would be insane to equate what I did with anything that happens in prison. I am simply a free man in a radio studio that always tries to get inside the big issues. This is an ugly issue with no easy answers. But I now see it's easier for some to dismiss me than to do any real soul searching on this very heady issue.

[Update: The marine who "waterboarded" Mancow told us this morning that he had "no idea what he was doing" and that everything he knows about waterboarding, he read on the internet. Mancow told us that "hoax isn't the right word," but that the whole thing was supposed to be "simulated."]

The information provided to Gawker by our tipster came in a series of emails and is somewhat layered, so we'll try to lay it all out as unconfusingly as possible. Where the story begins is last Thursday afternoon, the day before Mancow was scheduled to be waterboarded, when the person slated to do the waterboarding suddenly backed out, sending Mancow's publicity team into a mild frenzy to find someone to replace him. A chain of emails followed, emails that were subsequently forwarded to Gawker by our tipster.

There are three main players in the following sequence of events:

-The first is a Chicago-based publicist named Linda Shafran whose clients include the Jerry Springer and Steve Wilkos shows, in addition to Erich "Mancow" Muller. In describing Shafran our tipster added:

"Linda Shafran is Springer's current publicist until the show starts shooting in CT. Since Springer is her primary source of income, she's now trying to help promote Mancow nationally as a shock jock alternative to Howard Stern."

-The second person involved in this is a man named David Kupcinet. He runs a Chicago-based foundation for veterans called Kup's Purple Heart Foundation. He is the grandson of Irv Kupcinet, a somewhat legendary Chicago gossip columnist who wrote a column for the Chicago Sun Times for over 60 years. At the behest of a friend, Linda Shafran contacted Kupcinet on Thursday hoping that his relationships with Chicago-area veterans and military personnel could help her find a replacement waterboarder.

-The third person involved here, to a much lesser degree, is another Chicago-based publicist named Kathy Posner. According to our tipster, Posner is Jerry Springer's former flack and a friend of both Linda Shafran and Erich "Mancow" Muller. According to one of the emails we were forwarded, it was Posner who suggested that Shafran contact David Kupcinet to find a replacement waterboarder.

Now, with all of that background established, here are some of the emails that followed between Shafran and Kupcinet, the first being the initial contact between the two on the matter:

From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:15 PM
To: [redacted]
Subject: URGENT

Don't shoot the messenger

Mancow has been promoting all week that he is getting waterboarded tomorrow between 8-9am on-air. We have camera crew shooting it for WGN

The swat guy he had to do the waterboarding now can't do it. Do you know any military guy that might come down to WLS radio tomorrow (190 N. State Street) to waterboard Mancow????

Kathy said you know lots of military guys that might do it...or a policeman or fireman or EMT.

HELP

Linda Shafran
Jerry Springer Show
454 N. Columbus Dr.
Chicago, IL 60611
PH: [redacted]
cell: [redacted]
Email: [redacted]

Kupcinet, or "Kuppy," responded a few minutes later:

From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:28 PM
To: [redacted]
Subject: Re: URGENT

What exactly do you mean? You mean really tortured? What exactly would it consist of and do they need to bring gear or does Cow have what he needs or what?

Get back to me quick an ill find u a guy.

Kuppy

(P.S. Love you)

Sent from my iPhone

Now, here's the key email in the exchange, with Shafran saying in no uncertain terms that the whole thing is being staged as a hoax:

From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:38 PM
To: [redacted]
Cc: [redacted]
Subject: Re: URGENT

You are a ROCK STAR!!!

It is going to have to look "real" but of course would be simulated with Mancow acting like he is drowning. It will be a hoax but have to look real. Would be great if they could dress in fatigues and bring whatever is needed. We will supply the water

xxxx

Linda Shafran
Jerry Springer Show
454 N. Columbus Dr.
Chicago, IL 60611
PH: [redacted]
cell: [redacted]
Email: [redacted]

After getting this email from Shafran, David Kupcinet suggested she contact Marine Sgt. Clay South, the person who eventually carried out Mancow's waterboarding. We include this next email only because we find the compensation offer extended to South from Mancow via Shafran to be somewhat amusing:

From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 2:02 PM
To: [redacted]
Subject: MANCOW WAS ALL OVER IT

I tried to call you but got voicemail. I talked to Mancow and he said "Are you kidding - of course he can mention the charity and talk about his experiences over there"

I am going to call Klay now. Mancow will pay gas and parking.

Linda Shafran
Jerry Springer Show
454 N. Columbus Dr.
Chicago, IL 60611
PH: [redacted]
FX: [redacted]
Email: [redacted]

We contacted Linda Shafran last night for a statement about this and she emailed us back with an emphatic denial that anything was faked:

It was NOT a hoax. Early on when we were looking for someone to waterboard, an email was sent out looking for someone to do it and I mistakenly said it would be staged. That was my mistake and a misunderstanding.

But that was early and NOT TRUE AT ALL. It was not staged. NOT AT ALL. When it happened several days later, it was real, honest, actual, not staged.

Any info you have was my mistake. THE WATERBOARDING OF MANCOW WAS REAL!!!!!!

The glaring discrepancy in Shafran's statement to us is that her emails to Kupcinet are dated Thursday, May 21st, the day prior to Mancow's waterboarding, while she now claims that these emails were sent out "early on" and that the waterboarding took place "several days later." Additionally, she even mentions that Mancow "is getting waterboarded tomorrow" in her first note to Kupcinet.

Regarding the emails between Safran and Kupcinet, our tipster also informed us that they were shared with Keith Olbermann's producers prior to Mancow's appearance on his show. We were told that they were beyond livid when they found out about them and expressed their extreme displeasure for the whole situation with Linda Shafran over the phone, but went ahead with the planned segment anyway, making no mention of the fact that they'd received advance word that the whole thing may have been staged. However, we were unable to confirm this with anyone at MSNBC.

Now, we're obviously no experts on the art of waterboarding, but we've done a bit of research on it and also went back and watched the video of Christopher Hitchens' waterboarding in 2008 to compare and contrast his waterboarding against Mancow's, and we couldn't help but notice some rather striking differences.

In the Hitchens video, everything is carried out pretty much according to universal waterboarding protocol as we've come to understand it. His limbs and torso are tightly bound by restraints. The platform on which he lays appears to be tilted slightly downward so that his head is positioned below his heart. His head is also completely covered and the water used looks as though it's poured directly into his breathing passages.

In contrast, Mancow isn't bound by restraints at all, he doesn't appear to have his body positioned at a decline, only a portion of his face from the nose up is covered, and the water is being poured on him inappropriately.

In short, when we watched the Mancow video for the first time it struck us in a "well that doesn't look TOO awful" sort of way. For a brief moment it even made us want to call some friends over so we could all waterboard each other and see what all the fuss is about. On the other hand, the Hitchens video is somewhat nightmarish, making us want to never have anything to do with a waterboarding, ever.

We suggest you watch them both and decide for yourself.

We suppose it'd be easy to mock and ridicule "Mancow" here, as he does seem to be an extraordinarily massive tool, not even taking into consideration that he was one of the main guys spreading the "Obama is a closet Muslim" rumors during the election, but there's something truly admirable in a) being sufficiently curious and willing to undergo the procedure personally to truly see what it was like to be on the receiving end of a waterboarding, and b) appearing on the air with arguably the most unabashedly liberal host on television to profess how horribly wrong he'd been previously. So yeah, despite being a tool, "Mancow" deserves a tip of the cap, as does Olbermann for donating $10,000 to a support group for veterans in return for Muller going through with the waterboarding and then appearing on his show to discuss it.

During his appearance Muller said that his good friend Sean Hannity called him recently to hold fast to his belief that waterboarding is "still not torture," despite Muller's argument that it was "absolutely torture" and that he "would have confessed to anything to make it stop." He added, "I was willing to prove, and ready to prove, that this was a joke, and I was wrong. It was horrific. It was instantaneous. And look, I felt the effects for two days."

Again, we admire Muller for being a man and doing what he did, something his buddy Hannity promised to do a few weeks back but has yet to follow through on. And sadly we doubt he ever will.

The story that CityFile originally reported was that Olbermann was so upset about the decision by Ben Affleck — who had mercilessly mocked Olbermann on SNL — to appear on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show that Olbermann wouldn't go back to his Countdown set until the mandarins of NBC News sufficiently kissed his ass.

Earlier today, Olbermann put out a statement that said his sudden vacation was instead due to his mother's death, a subject which, nearly two weeks prior, he very emotionally addressed on his show.

So, here we are. We maintain that Olbermann threw a hissy fit because he felt upstaged by his hand-picked protege; he says we're heartless assholes because he's been in a state of mourning. That would be a fair enough argument, except ... except, it wasn't just CityFile that claimed Olbermann took his unexpected leave of absence. A Gawker source, with intimate involvement with the situation, maintains our version of the story. Olbermann — who, by the way, would be entirely within his rights to say he was taking some time off to attend to his mother's funeral — didn't bring up his mother's death until today.

We sought out MSNBC today to get Olbermann's side, but a spokeswoman offered nothing for the record beyond a previously released statement before he went on his show to slam Gawker and the horrible, horrible blogosphere in his new WTF segment. So much for the journalistic cred of the MSM.

P.S. We've been a fan of you, Keith O. Just please don't be such a touchy jerk. Our condolences for your loss.

Olbermann's entire seven minute speech can be viewed on MSNBC's website.