Olbermann said former Vice President Al Gore contacted him directly about Current TV, which seemed to fit the template he desired.
You know what? I believe him. Is Olbermann really going to randomly call the former VP up and beg for a job, or is it more likely that an avid fan like Gore would want to jump on a property like Countdown Keith to help his own struggling (and that's me being polite) cable channel?
Gore should look to Jimmy Carter. Not for inspiration, God forbid, but as a cautionary tale. The ex-prez is an international laughingstock, now left holding on as a member of a self-involved, self-anointed group of similar vagabonds named The Elders, who are routinely snubbed by world leaders from North Korea to Washington D.C. in their pathetic attempts to prove their names still have value Dismissed by all save cranks and haters, Jimmy Carter's poisonous post-presidential travails have left no possibility of a positive re-assessment of his disastrous presidency at some (very) distant date in the future.
Gore is heading down the same road. Shilling for "Global Warming", now "Climate Change", he ignores pointed challenges about his personal hypocrisy and refuses to debate honest opponents of his views. Chugging around the world carrying a slide projector and an ever-expanding waistline, Gore too is becoming less of a serious national figure, and more of a serious national joke.
Now he has tied himself to Keith Olbermann, and his judgement will be inexorably bound to a man who has made such well-thought out statements as:
"[The Tea Party-backed Republicans are] a group of unqualified, unstable individuals who will do what they are told, in exchange for money and power, and march this nation as far backward as they can get, backward to Jim Crow, or backward to the breadlines of the '30s, or backward to hanging union organizers, or backward to the trusts and the robber barons...
— MSNBC's Keith Olbermann in a 21-minute "Special Comment" on Countdown, October 27, 2010.
"In Scott Brown, we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees. In any other time in our history, this man would have been laughed off the stage as unqualified and a disaster in the making by the most conservative of conservatives.”
“So, besides urinating on the Constitution and the rights and freedoms every American soldier has ever fought to win and protect, the Bush administration has now decided that when its victims have actually served their sentences, doled out under its own medieval, quote, ‘justice,’ unquote, system, it still might not choose to set them free....
— MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, August 7, 2008 Countdown.
"Good evening. A President who lied us into a war and, in so doing, needlessly killed 3,584 of our family and friends and neighbors; a President whose administration initially tried to destroy the first man to nail that lie; a President whose henchmen then ruined the career of the intelligence asset that was his wife when intelligence assets were never more essential to the viability of the Republic; a President like that has tonight freed from the prospect of prison the only man ever to come to trial for one of the component felonies in what may be the greatest crime of this young century."
— Keith Olbermann on Bush commuting Lewis Libby's prison sentence, MSNBC's Countdown, July 2, 2007.
"A past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back....The nation’s marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would’ve quit....
— Keith Olbermann referring to Bill Clinton’s interview with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, MSNBC’s Countdown, September 25, 2006.
This, Al Gore, is your new public face. Let's hope Countdown Keith doesn't urinate on it....