Current TV has fired Keith Olbermann. Keith Olbermann has fired back.
The oft-terminated anchor claims that Current TV execs Al Gore and Joel Hyatt broke promises and violated obligations. “In due course,” Olbermann announced, “the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out.”
Gore and Hyatt counter that Olbermann missed 19 of 41 work days the first two months of 2011. The pair say that their network was “founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty,” which Olbermann doesn’t adhere to. Naturally, they replaced him with a man known for his character: Eliot Spitzer.
Was John Edwards unavailable?
Deceit, betrayal, ditching work—the “Countdown” meltdown just seems like liberals being liberals.
Conservatives cringe at overbearing do-gooders banning transfatscigaretteshappy mealsmerrychristmasgunsrushlimbaughincandescentlightbulbs. But at least right-wingers can usually retreat from such nuisances to their homes.
Imagine working for or waking up next to a liberal. That’s the fate of most liberals, who increasingly self-segregate in their professions, mates, and even neighborhoods.
To loosely paraphrase Sartre, hell is other liberals.
Mother Jones tolerated Michael Moore as its editor for four months in 1986. They fired him and he filed a $2 million lawsuit. As veteran leftist Bruce Dancis recalled, “Michael was impossible.” Moore then landed a job working for Ralph Nader, in which he was supposed to focus on a newsletter but concentrated instead on making 1989’s Roger & Me. Nader accused Moore of making the for-profit film as he drew a check from his nonprofit. Moore called Nader “jealous” and depicted him as an extortionist. On his ’90s show TV Nation, the ostensibly pro-union Moore allegedly pressured writers not to join the Writer’s Guild. A TV Nation scribe explained, “He’s just a huge a-hole.”
Hagiographer Ellen Chesler deemed Margaret Sanger “strangely indifferent to the responsibilities of mothering,” while fawning biographer Madeline Gray noted that the founder of Planned Parenthood “declared she was seized with a ‘nervous malady’ whenever she had to take care of” her children. One son recalled walking twenty miles from boarding school to a train station only to be stood up by his mom. A sickly small daughter, left behind when Sanger fled to Europe to dramatize a legal case against her, died shortly after her mother ended her self-imposed exile. A son blamed his sister’s death on his mother. Should it astonish anyone that the herald of separating sex from responsibility ditched her kids?
John Reed, who raised funds for Sanger’s legal defense and sold her his vacation home, propagandized for Soviet Russia. Then Hollywood propagandized for John Reed. Reds, 1981’s free love story starring Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton, whitewashed Reed as Reed had whitewashed the Communist coup in Ten Days That Shook the World. The dominant theme of the first couple of American radicalism’s extant correspondence—venereal disease—never made it into the film. “My whole left insides (ovaries, etc.) seem to be inflamed and infected,” Louise Bryant wrote Reed. “They think maybe I got it from your condition.” Reed countered that Bryant delaying treatment “wasn’t fair to me.” “I didn’t mind what you said about my infecting you—if it were true,” he wrote. “But honey, it’s awful to remove your ovaries, isn’t it? Doesn’t it make you incapable of having children and everything like that? I never heard of that being done to anybody but dogs, cats and horses.”
Cad extraordinaire Edward Aveling makes John Reed look like a gentleman. The British socialist sponged off Eleanor Marx for eight years before secretly marrying a younger actress. When his health failed, he returned to Marx. Since they couldn’t live together, they should die together—but Eleanor first. Aveling reconsidered, and he left Karl Marx’s daughter dead after leaving her heartbroken. Aveling, of course, denied this version of events and quickly deeded her belongings, save her ashes, to himself.
The Left is full of humanitarians who mistreat humans. Inveighing against injustice from afar is often penance for perpetrating injustice close to home. It’s harder to do good than it is to implore others to do good. The unrighteous self-righteous make for terrible bosses, spouses, parents, and friends.
Their biographies would be irrelevant to their beliefs if they weren’t so interwoven. A pro-union filmmaker documenting a horrible capitalist boss proves just another horrible capitalist boss. The founder of Planned Parenthood was big on the former but not the latter. A free-love evangelist spread the gospel according to gonorrhea. A world-class sponge sought to make a world of sponges through socialism.
And that pompous guy calling everybody else the “worst person in the world”? Keith Olbermann is the pot calling the kettle black.
