“Righteous wrath and smugness are not an ideal combo, and Olbermann’s delight in being Keith Olbermann has long since transformed anything genuine in his indignation into performance art. I prefer his politics to O’Reilly’s, and unlike Bill he’s genuinely droll. But when it comes to vanity getting its rocks off by posturing as moral outrage, I don’t see much daylight between them. That one is a bully and the other a scold is just a stylistic distinction that suits their constituencies…

“You can’t say Olbermann’s hubris aims low. He styles himself as the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow, even swiping Murrow’s ‘Good night and good luck’ as his sign-off. Quite aside from whether he earns the comparison (he doesn’t, but I don’t get too worked up about it: I never had much patience for the Murrow mystique to begin with), what’s most revealing isn’t the self-flattery involved but how anachronistic and even reactionary the aspiration is. Liberals who think of Murrow as a dragon slayer tend to forget he pretty much invented the patronizing gravitas that Roger Ailes had the genius decades later to convince Fox News viewers was the essence of TV’s liberal bias.

“So smart-ass Keith? He’s only pretending to be po-mo. Not so deep down, what he really pines for are the days when condescending dorks with high opinions of themselves were media heroes.”