Olbermania: Is he Edward or Max?

I hate to admit it, but it's been fun to watch the on-air nervous breakdown of Keith Olbermann the past few months.

Olbermann, the obscure self-absorbed pundit who started as a twitchy loud-mouthed sports commentator and then slowly evolved into a chimpanzee, has been engaged in a long-running performance as a newsman on MSNBC.

He is witty in a smug, superior demeaning sort of way, and if you enjoy watching a 5-year-old child rip the legs off of spiders, then you might get a kick out of watching Olbermann make his nightly announcement of who the worst person in the world is for the day.

It's also entertaining to watch him trot out his sycophantic corps of Olbermann lickers for their nightly analysis of the news from a far-out left viewpoint. The scary thing is that half of these left-wing advocates are masquerading as even-handed journalists by day - people like Howard Fineman of Newsweek and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. But there they are like those bobblehead puppies nodding in silent ascent in the back window of the car up ahead that's veering leftward into oncoming traffic - yes Keith, yes Keith, whatever you say Keith.

But lately Olbermann has fallen into the delusion that he is a serious newsman, or worse yet the conscience of the nation - apparently in the mistaken belief that he is channeling the spirit of the dear, departed newsman Edward R. Murrow. We should have known that Olbermann was a little close to the edge when he started signing off his nightly program with Murrow's trademark "Good night and good luck," but it seemed like a harmless homage until K.O., as he is known, decided to go for the knockout.

Apparently, he decided that if Murrow had brought down Sen. Joe McCarthy with his television reporting, then it was fair game for Olbermann to go after even bigger game - President Bush. So he has unleashed his churlish snarling grin on the Bush White House and delivers a nightly rebuke of Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Snow, Dick Cheney or President Bush himself for daring to carry out policies offensive to Citizen Olbermeister.

Here's how Olbermann, who was anointed "the best news anchor on television" by The Nation magazine, introduced his story about Sen. John Kerry apologizing for his tasteless joke last week about the military forces in Iraq:

"Thus does Senator John Kerry apologize, and the White House says he did the right thing, and presumably it's case closed. And presumably, now the president will apologize to the troops for creating a war with no plan, no exit strategy, and no hope, for mocking them in a tuxedo while they died in Iraq."

We hope that simple straightforward, um, "not fair" and "not balanced" reporting by Olbermann will convince all good Americans that if this is what "the best news anchor on television" sounds like, then we had all better follow the advice of John Prine and blow up our TVs.

But the daily harangues and harumphs from Olbermann were just appetizers for those who enjoy watching a man at the end of his tether. It was not until August when Olbermann launched the first of his "special commentaries" that we were able to appreciate the grandiosity of Olbermann's dementia in full.

First was his attack on Donald Rumsfeld, in which Olbermann miraculously turned Rumsfeld into Neville Chamberlain and himself into Winston Churchill, and then went a step further and accused the government of the United States of being fascists. He cutely cited his hero, Edward R. Murrow, at the end of the piece, and quoted this passage from Murrow, "We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason…," without showing the slightest awareness that he himself was the poster boy for the Age of Unreason.

His second "special commentary" blamed the president for the fact that there is no memorial or building yet in place at the site of the World Trade Center, notwithstanding the fact that the building project and memorial are in the hands of others. The commentary lasts about 15 minutes and is worth seeing in its entirety for its shrill polemic and its false dichotomies," but I can boil it down to about eight sentences: "Five years later this space… is still empty.

"Five years later there is no Memorial to the dead.

"Five years later… this is still… just a background for a photo-op.

"It is beyond shameful…

"Who has left this hole in the ground?

"We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

"You have.

"May this country forgive you."

Camera pulls back from Olbermann's quivering lip to look out over Ground Zero and then Olbermann turns it over to President Bush as he is about to address the nation on the solemn occasion of the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11. "The best news anchor on television" has just introduced the president of the United States to the nation with the words, "May this country forgive you."

Clearly anyone who has the audacity to say that Fox News is biased has never had the stomach-churning opportunity to watch MSNBC.

The most recent "special commentary" came just this past Wednesday, in which Olbermann managed to call the president dishonest, stupid, and evil: "There is no line this president has not crossed, nor will not cross to keep one political party in power. He has spread any and every fear among us in a desperate effort to avoid that which he most fears - some check, some balance against what has become not an imperial, but a unilateral presidency."

Thus K.O. continues his assault on the mantle of Edward R. Murrow. By God, he will wear that thing sooner or later, no matter how much bigger it is than his shoulders, not matter how unseemly it is to posture for personal advantage when the fate of the nation is in play.

"Good night and good luck," says Olbermann, but he might be modeling himself after the wrong TV predecessor.

If you examine closely those shifty eyes of his, the nervous tics, the staccato stentorian self-adulating speech patterns, you may be surprised to find that Olbermann is not channeling Edward R. Murrow at all, but rather another famous TV personality - Max Headroom.

Do you remember the computer-generated out-of-control quip-loving punster of the 1980s television show? Max was the on-air alter ego of a legitimate news reporter named Edison Carter who got killed, sort of, and wound up having his memory turned into plasma electrons, sort of, which found a way to hijack a television network known as Network 23 and to become the "conscience of the nation," sort of, when he is not engaged in lurid self-obsession.

"…This is Max Headroom on Network 23. And I - and I - and I know right now you're looking at me and you're thinking Wow, Wow, he could become a star. So, so, before you get the wrong idea about me, let me just say very humbly… you're right. I could."

Yes, there is a strong family resemblance between Headroom and Olbermann, and there is also a similarity between the abysmal ratings of MSNBC and Max's Network 23:

"Hel-Hel-Hello, and welcome to N-Network 23. Live and direct, it's Network 23 - the network where t-t-two's company and three's an audience."

I suppose there is just a slim possibility that Keith Olbermann is in fact some sort of computer-generated reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow created by feeding all of Murrow's television shows and writings into a computer and spitting out the nasty Max version.

Or perhaps Olbermann is just a smarmy, self-absorbed overgrown baby who is the "best news anchor on television." But if he is, then "good night and good luck."

We are going to need it.