Comedy At Midnight

Drew was going to post about this, but gave up, I guess, because what can you say about Keith Olbermann in full froth?

The Murrow of the Modern Age begins his Very Special Comment on the Ground Zero Mosque by quoting First they came for the Communists, but I said nothing, for I was not a Communist... and it really just kind of gets more hyperbolic than that.

He warns, quite seriously, of a New Holocaust coming, based on objections to the Ground Zero Mosque (and he then goes on to explain it's not a mosque and there is no ground zero or something).

At Olbermann watch, they have a robot voice reading his script. It's a little better than Olby's histrionics.

Newsbusters has the script.

Look, you have to admit: The guy is funny. When he starts frothing it up, look, I laugh. He brings me pleasure. He brings me joy.

He will bring me more joy when he cries so hard in the bathtub on November 3rd that he calls out sick from work for the fiftieth time, but this is pretty good too.

Finally, tonight, as promised, a "Special Comment" on the inaccurately described "Ground Zero mosque."

I like how he says, "as promised," as if we were all sitting around wondering, "Gee, is he going to do it tonight? Is he going to do it tonight as promised?"

It's like when a friend who borrowed money pays you $3000 back. And he says, "There you go, as promised." And you say, "Thank you so much!" Because you really did want that $3000 back, and you're very happy your friend honored that promise to repay.

Except in this case it's not $3000, it's a broken-down fat-bodied old fool ranting and raving on the air because he's mixing medications again, and yeah, he promised you he would do it, but it was more akin to a threat than a promise you wanted honored, seriously, you're kind of upset he remembered, and yet here's this fat-assed old gray fairy telling you "I am reading to you this retarded script I stream-of-conscious brain-queefed out fifteen minutes ago, as promised," and you're like, "Um, thanks...? I guess...?"

I will attempt to indicate his Extended and Emphatic Nostril-Exhalations of Righteous Fury as they occur.

"They came first for the communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. And then they came for me and by that time, no one was left to speak up."

Nostril exhalation, then he looks up at the camera.

Pastor Martin Niemoller's words are well known, but their context is not well understood.

Yes, actually, it is. But whatever. I sort of doubt that's going to be my biggest objection to this idiot.

Niemoller was not speaking abstractly.

Yeah, Keith. I got that it wasn't a fucking metaphor or something. Yeah, I've heard stories about what went down in Germany in the late thirties.

But no, you put me straight and put me square, Keith. What on earth was he talking about?

He witnessed persecution; he acquiesced to it.

I know. That's sort of the whole point of the quotation.

He ultimately fell victim to it.

Really? I didn't know that. Even though he says that right at the end of the quote. "And then they came for me..."

See? He says it right there.

I think maybe the "context" is better understood than you're crediting us for.

He had been a German World War I hero, then a conservative who welcomed the fall of German democracy and the rise of Hitler, and he had few qualms about the beginning of the Holocaust until he himself was arrested for supporting it insufficiently.

Ah, he was a "conservative," by which Olbermann means, of course-- Nazi.

And yeah, again, the "few qualms" part? It's in the quote.

But listen to Keith, Conservatives/Nazis: This shit can happen to you. Keith's letting you know the context.

Niemoller’s confessional warning came first in a speech in Frankfurt in January 1946 – eight months after he had been liberated by American troops. He had been detained at Tyrol, Sachsen-hausen, and Dachau for seven years.

He survived the death camps.

I actually didn't know that in detail, but I did get that something bad happened to him from the quote, the part where he says "And then they [the Nazis] came for me..." I guessed that they were coming for a bad purpose, and not just to bring him to a hot dog roast or Maroon 5 concert or something.

So, again, most of this context? Check!

In quoting him, I make no direct comparison between the attempts to suppress the building of a Muslim religious center in downtown Manhattan and the unimaginable nightmare of the Holocaust.

Oh of course not.

Where could we have gotten that idea?

Such a comparison is ludicrous...

Thank you for admitting that. For a second, I thought you had really gone off the rails for real.

... at least, it is now.

Uh-oh. I spoke too soon.

So, the comparison is ludicrous -- but The New Holocaust is coming to getya, yo!

Saying it's going on now is ludicrous, but saying the New Holocaust will come inevitably in the near future if we reject an inappropriately placed mosque ins't ludicrous -- indeed, it's brilliant.

Nostril exhalation.

But Niemoller was not warning of the Holocaust, he was warning of the willingness of a seemingly rational society to condone the gradual stoking of enmity towards an ethnic or religious group or more than one...

Um, again, I got this context.

You know what makes this such a great quote? What makes it so quotable? What makes it so famous?

It's because it makes its points rather succinctly and clearly, Keith.

See, the reason this quote is immortal, whereas your explication of it will not last the week, is that this quote is powerful and full of meaning, whereas you are impotent and insensible.

I love that Keith thinks here he's going to improve on the quote.

Next up: A Very Special Annotated Reading of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol, featuring Keith's very special explanations of the clear words of one of the English language's greatest writers.

Let Keith Olbermann improve Charles Dickens for you. As promised.

Nostril exhalation. By the way, he's still in the middle of explaining something that is quoted to schoolchildren precisely because it stands so well without any explanation.

... warning of the building up of a collective pool of fear and hate, warning of the moment in which the need to purge outstrips the parameters of the original scapegoating, when new victims are needed because a country has begun to run on a horrible field of hatred – magnified, amplified and multiplied by politicians and zealots within government and without.

Let me add context to this part of Keith's Very Special Comment:

You know in a preview? Like for a movie? Like they spend the first minute of it explaining the situation to you in clear words and slow-moving pictures? So you get the basics?

And then, halfway through, they start showing fast-cuts of images scattered throughout the movie in an effort to convey action and excitement and quickening pace and heightening tension?

This is what Keith is doing. His words mean nothing here. He just starts jotting down synonyms for hate and fear and shit. And he doesn't even take care about sentence structure or clarity during this part, because none of these words is supposed to stand on its own, just like the quick-shots at the middle/end of a thriller trailer aren't supposed to stand on their own. They're supposed to blur by with Furious Speed and Great Importance so that you get the sense that Something Interesting Is Happening.

And that's all this shit is. It's Keith tossing out the verbal equivalents of a butcher knife coming through a door, a car speeding on a rainy country road, a mother crying and dropping to her knees at awful news, and a scientist shocked at what he finds in a specimen jar.

So, like the beginning of his very special comment is all, like:

Imagine a world...

and everyone you trusted -- wanted your brain...

Right? And then this part is when the staccato percussion starts and you start seeing quick-shots of people jolting and doors opening and tires squealing and people screaming at a black female judge who bangs her gavel and gives that "oh no you di'n't" face.

Nostril exhalation -- and boy has he fucking earned it by now.

Niemoller was not warning of the Holocaust.

Actually he was.

He was warning of the thousand steps before a holocaust became inevitable.

No he was warning of the Holocaust, I assure you. Yes, the Holocaust, with people being "come for" in the middle of the night. See, he says it. Right there.

See, the reason Keith is insisting this is not about the Holocaust but about a "thousand steps" before the Holocaust is that he wanted to lead with the quote, knew he would be (properly) mocked as overly-histrionic once again, and so he's trying to use the quote but claim, oh, the quote is talking about like Germany in, like, 1930. Or even earlier. Hell, maybe before the twentieth century.

Way before the Holocaust. Waaaayyy before the Nazis even came to power. So it's like perfectly analogous!

Except the quote is in fact about the Holocaust -- Google it. So Keith is just basically using a quote he knows he should be using and deliberately twisting its meaning by making up "context" just so he doesn't look like quite as demented a madman hack for using it than he otherwise would.

No sale, Keith. Doesn't work. You're a fucking sputtering old fat fool trying to amp up his ratings by selling political pornography to "progressive" perverts and you're trying to cling to some thin layer of plausible deniability by deliberately warping one of the world's most famous and most important quotes to your own sick schizophrenic paranoid partisan ends.

Nice try, though. Really.

If we are at merely the first of those steps again today, it is one step too close.

Because I don't want a Hamas-supporting, America-blaming, terrorist-excusing Imam to build a Saudi-funded super-mosque at the site of 3000 dead due to Islamic radicalism?

Um, I'm willing, like Barney Frank, to roll the dice a little.

Again, all this "early steps" shit is the thinnest hack pretense to use that quote and cry "Holocaust!" while claiming to his critics "I did no such thing."

You know how you can tell even he knows this is a lie? He begins with the quote, speaking plainly of Nazis "coming for" people, and then says "He was not speaking abstractly." In other words: He was speaking literally, of people literally, not metatphorically, being disappeared by Nazis in the night.

But three paragraphs later Keith is telling you he meant this all as a metaphor, that what he was really talking about were small steps of persecution way before the actual knocks at the door.

Yet in a country dedicated to freedom, forces have gathered to blow out of all proportion the construction of a minor community center to transform it into a training ground for terrorists and an insult to the victims of 9/11 and a tribute to Medieval Muslim subjugation of the West. There is no training ground for terrorists. There is no insult to the victims of 9/11. There is no tribute to Medieval Muslim subjugation of the West. There is, in fact, no "Ground Zero mosque."

At this point in the trailer, you'd now be out of the scary music part and now they'd show a man and woman embracing as violins sweetly rise (because they don't want to end on a downer) and the voice says...

New Line pictures invites you...

unexpected possiblities...

See, like, he's about to really sell you on the movie and give you the title.

It is not a mosque. A mosque, technically, is a Muslim holy place in which only worship can be conducted. What is planned for 45 Park Place, New York City, is a community center. It's supposed to include a basketball court and a culinary school.

At this point, like, Diane Lane is, like, chopping onions at a chef's school? And she starts to cry, but Gerald Butler sees her and makes a silly face, so she laughs? It's all cute, you know. They look good together. You want them together, and stuff?

Nostril exhalation bordering on a rude snort.

It is to be 13 stories tall, and the top two stories will be a Muslim prayer space.

Also called a mosque.

What a cauldron of terrorism that will be. Terrorist chefs and terrorist point guards. And truly those who will use the center have more to fear from us than us from them, for there has been terrorism connected to a mosque in this country, in this year.

Like I think this is supposed to be the funny part of the trailer, to let you know it's not all Diane Lane chopping onions and people yelling? So like at this point, Queen Latifa comes out and says, "Girl, you gots to get on that boy! He fine!" And she says it all "street" and stuff, even though she's dressed as a judge, so it's funny, right? And like it's a rule in Hollywood that whatever Queen Latifah is funny? Even though that's not, like, ever been remotely close to true?

Okay, I have to skip ahead. Jesus this is a windy motherfucker and I thought I was a windy motherfucker. Okay, here we go:

...

And is there not a logical extension to Mr. Gingrich’s conclusions about Cordoba and triumphalism? Virtually every church, virtually every synagogue, every mosque built on this continent stands where a Native American lived or died or was buried or saw his world – his religions included – wiped out, by us. What are we, then, Mr. Gingrich?

We're people who don't want that shit we pulled on the Indians happening to us.

You disagree with that, moron?

What, we killed the Indians in war, so we deserve whatever comes our way?

Okay, so now the title of the movie comes up, right? And it's a movie about a 50 year old, glasses-wearing, fat-assed-but-hides-it-on-tv broken down old man who probably has to take Viagra just to make it to second base?

And the man is, like, totally retarded? But he has a gift, or something, that only his sister Diane Lane can recognize? And she's dating a scientist played by Gerard Butler who wants to cut out his brain for being, like, too retarded?

And because it's a retard movie, the title of the movie is shown in crayon font, right, with some letters backwards? Because that's how retards write?

And the title of the movie is

K is for Keith

With the K's backwards? Like retarded?

So that's what I think about Keith Olbermann's very special comments -- they're like incredibly long, incredibly boring trailers for a low-budget movie about a demented retard in his mid-fifties who sets up a pretend tv studio in his mother's basement and does a "TV show" every night interviewing puppets and his pet mice Hugo and Hubert, while Gerald Butler wants to cut out and examine his brain because it's the Most Perfectly Retarded Brain Specimen in world history and his theory (for which he won the Nobel Prize) is that only a perfect retard-brain is the key to world peace and Diane Lane is his devoted sister trying to get a court order from Queen Latifah to stop him from seizing the brain but somehow they fall in love in a quickie montage set to September by Earth Wind & Fire and so Gerald Butler stops trying to steal Keef's moron-brain and they become friends and at the end of the movie Gerald Butler teaches Keef how to shoot basketballs and it's touching and funny but mostly funny because he's a fucking retard and keeps hitting himself in the face with the fucking ball like a fucking imbecile.

And then like, last shot, he's dancing in the middle of the street in the rain, turning in slow motion, holding a sparkler laughing with retard joy as September hits the chorus and we say the title again:

K... is for Keith

and then of course, the internet site for promotional material:

kisforkeithmovie.com

Oh, There's More: rdbrewer asked, "Does he have retard vision? Some special insight that makes the lives of normal people better?"

I haven't worked it all out, but I think like, Gerald Butler is wrong, he doesn't need the retard-brain for world peace, he just needs the retard to give a speech at the UN where he's all like "I like peanut butter... we all like peanut butter... no more war" and then like, everyone's like, "Fuck, that fat fuckin' retard makes a lot of fuckin' sense."

I think I forgot that part, the part at the UN. So imagine, near the end, he's at the UN, eating peanut butter with his hand out of a jar, exhaling through his nostrils, and there's like a cameo appearance by Dan Rather to say "Breaking newsss... a retard speaksss at the United Nationsss..." and we're all like so impressed to see a wannabe-celebrity news-prick do a cameo in a movie we're all like "ooooooh, Dan Rather, I guess this shit has the texture of reality to it," despite the fact that Dan Rather's in "news broadcasting business" as much as I fuckin' am.

posted by Ace at 12:12 AM

| Access Comments