Who’s that Dutchman Anyway?

posted at 8:24 am on May 15, 2009 by Michael van der Galien

It took me a while to be allowed to write for the GreenRoom, but here I finally am: Michael van der Galien, a 24-year old American Studies and Languages and Cultures of the Middle East student from the Netherlands, blogger and occasional columnist. I run my own website PoliGazette, blog at Dagelijkse Standaard (a new conservative blog in Dutch), (try to) write a weekly round-up of Western European news for Real Clear World, and write columns for newspapers (formerly Turkish Daily News, now Hürriyet English and others) and (other) news websites. 

Writing for Hot Air’s GR is obviously a tremendous opportunity for me to reach more people, to communicate with them, and to learn from them (you!). I hope you’ll enjoy my posts here – if you do, be sure to check out my other gigs.

Now, we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk politics (or media actually); far more interesting food for thought, I’d say.

Word got out today that Keith Olbermann – yes, the radical progressive MSNBC rant show pundit – did not present his show for three days in a row at the end of April because he had a bizarre temper tantrum caused by… Ben Affleck. 

According to a source at the network, Olbermann was livid when he learned that Rachel Maddow had booked Ben Affleck as a guest on her show. Olbermann, it turns out, had been interested in having Affleck on his show, too, and when he heard that Maddow’s producers had secured the actor instead, he demanded that the interview be switched from Maddow’s nine o’clock broadcast to his own an hour earlier. Maddow and her staff have been known to politely give in to Olbermann’s whims in the past—it was Olbermann, after all, who helped bring Maddow to the network. This time, however, they didn’t budge. (With ratings for Maddow’s show a bit lackluster as of late, parting with an A-list celebrity guest isn’t a decision to be made lightly.) Olbermann took the matter to senior management at MSNBC and NBC Universal and asked that they step in and “correct” the situation. That didn’t happen, though, and Affleck went on Maddow’s show as scheduled on Thursday, April 16. And Olbermann’s three-day protest commenced the next day.

It is typical far-left and pundit behavior, of course. The man believes he is so important, that everybody else has to do what he says, and with a smile on their faces at that. 

Olbermann could not deal with the report quoted above either. No, he responded angrily, he did not take three days off because he went insane but to “mourn his mother, who passed away.” 

CityFile responded:

We were saddened to hear of Olbermann’s loss and found his tribute to his mother deeply moving. But if that was the reason Olbermann took time off two weeks later, we can’t imagine why Olbermann wouldn’t have simply said as much. Furthermore, we find it hard to believe one of his colleagues at MSNBC—a respected journalist, no less—would have attributed his absence to the “flu/allergy season” if Olbermann had made the perfectly understandable decision take a few days to mourn his mother’s passing. 

Now, I know that Olbermann would never, ever,* use his mother’s dead as an excuse to cover up his own emotional outbursts and arrogance – you will undoubtedly agree that he is probably above that – but strange it is indeed. 

*Yeah, I am sarcastic.

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