Paper Tiger
Olbermann, Keith
BOOKS IN REVIEW Paper Tiger The Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders by Keith Olberrnann (WILEY, 267 PAGES, $22.95) Reviewed C EORGE M. COHAN USED TO SAY, explaining why...
...approach to Africa since Kennedy...
...They are usually among the most serious of the day's upheavals and he usually treats them with seriousness, but what Olbermann aficionados like best are the two features that no other serious newscaster would venture...
...Free markets will help Africa grow and a free press will help keep businesses and governments honest...
...By happy contrast, Olbermann takes the shortest route into personalities, displaying an inborn gift for human nature not unlike an ear for music, as when he psyches out Rush Limbaugh: Understand this about Limbaugh...
...This initial reference did not make it clear who shot whom, but in May 2006, with General Clark once again his guest and the subject now the alleged murders at Haditha, O'Reilly brought it up again, this time with stunning specificity: "In Malmedy, as you know, U.S...
...A later investigation suggested that those FBI lawyers were wrong and if they'd only gone to one of the FISA judges, the judge would've granted access to Moussaoui's computer...
...There are performers and there are writers and never the twain should meet...
...The thunderbolts fly fast and furious from the idealist's quiver, but the one aspect of the controversy that Olbermann ignores is why Gen...
...Rush lives by the Who- Struck-John so anyone who argues with him is bound to get into an even denser Who- Struck-John: He has now defended the president bypassing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts to authorize those NSA wiretaps by explaining to his audience that it was one of those FISA court judges...
...In October 2005, while railing against the release of photos from Abu Ghraib prison showingAmericans tormenting Iraqi prisoners, O'Reilly reminded his guest, Gen...
...If he is serious about tackling Third World poverty, Bush might wish to read a pair of recent books by former World Bank officials, both of which challenge the conventional wisdom on foreign aid...
...Joseph McCarthy when the events at Malmedy were first investigated after World War II...
...It won plaudits from some unlikely corners...
...One is "Let's Play Oddball," which begins with the recorded barking laugh of Chris Matthews and segues into the frantic rhythms of Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance," background music for such idiocies as the running of the bulls at Pamplona (with Olbermann cheering for the bulls), glassy-eyed people eating their way into the Guinness Book of World Records, or men carrying fat wives across obstacle courses...
...At his noholds-barred best he is a one-man "Beyond the Fringe," his mock solemnity is reminiscent of Alec Guinness in TheLadykillers, and he could rival John Cleese in an American version of Fawlty Towers...
...9 Mayor Troy Anderson of Waldron, Arkansas, who tried to pay a prostitute by offering her a discount on her water bill...
...Furthermore, he predicts that because Rush is such a case study in just about everything, if he ever decides to be psychoanalyzed the shrinks will fight over the rights to his case...
...NOVEME~ER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69 BOOKS IN REVIEW A grim Olbermann speculates whether O'Reilly is simply "a false patriot who would rather be loud than right," or if he is driven by something more insidious, like the ethno-political prejudices which allegedly motivated Sen...
...He goes on to warn us against falling victim to a logical fallacy: "Just because Event A occurs, and then Event B occurs, that does not automatically mean that Event A caused Event B." At least he did not feel compelled to tell us the Latin name of the fallacy-Post hoc ergopropter hoc-but we are left with that little tendril of suspicion that comes over us whenever someone explains too much...
...General," he said, "you need to look at the Malmedy Massacre in World War II in the 82nd airborne...
...No other continent has experienced such prolonged dictatorships...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Paper Tiger The Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders by Keith Olberrnann (WILEY, 267 PAGES, $22.95) Reviewed C EORGE M. COHAN USED TO SAY, explaining why he Talways refused to record his songs, "You gotta J s e e me to appreciate me...
...He gets into trouble when he has to summarize a story that worked on television but needs a shift in continuity to make sense in print...
...The other three are listed at the end of the main list, out of chronological order...
...He doesn't believe half the junk he spouts...
...Whenever the White House suffered a political downturn, Olbermann maintains, it was followed by a "terror 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW event," either a change in alert status, an arrest, or a warning...
...But they will not put young girls in school, provide clean water, and fight HIV/AIDS ruthlessly...
...But it was the other way around...
...Usually they don't because they are such different species that Nature herself keeps them apart...
...Olbermann has given him too much air time and now, too much ink, but he redeems himself with one magnificent O'Reilly passage that atones for the monomania and proves that Olbermann the writer can be in the ascendant when he wishes to be: The guilty pleasure offered by the existence of Bill O'Reilly is simple but understandable: 99 times out of 100, when we belly up to the Bill- O bar of bluster, we partake of the movable falafel feast-he serves us nothing but comedy, farce, slapstick, unconscious self-mutilation...
...One is the inexplicable treatment of Negro League star Buck O'Neil by Major League Baseball, whose awards committee refused to induct the 94year-old living legend into the Hall of Fame while inducting two white owners-one an organized-crime figure and the other a white woman who pretended to be a light-skinned blactc His other moment of righteous wrath is directed at his nemesis Bill O'Reilly, for slandering, not once but twice, 84 American soldiers taken prisoner and shot by the Germans at Malmedy, Belgium, in World War II...
...He is a quiet, almost colorless man who, if he could be guaranteed similar success in sportscasting, would sell out the sheep who follow his every word--and would do it before close of business today...
...He acknowledges a stylistic by Florence King debt to George Carlin, his favorite comedian, but fans of British comedy can trace him all the way across the Pond...
...The other feature, the inspiration for this book, is "Worst Persons in the World," conceived by Florence King~ collections &clude The Florence King Reader, STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope's Corner, 1991 to 2002, and, just out, Deja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again...
...Aid Is Not Enough I F THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL SECTION of George Bush's 2003 State of the Union address dealt with Iraq, surely the most surprising bit was his pledge to spend $15 billion fighting AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean...
...The contraction was made purely for the sake of television timing considerations and permitted us to get the live reaction of the former undersecretary of homeland security, Asa Hutchinson...
...That's on the record...
...The performer in him was in the ascendant...
...Nobody can follow Olbermann, including Olbermann, and especially not on mere paper...
...Bill O'Reilly is the biggest problem with this book, an obsession that nearly ruins it in several places and threatens to put a damper on the TV show as well...
...Wesley Clark, whom he puffs as "first in his class at West Point," was not knowledgeable enough, or courageous enough, to correct O'Reilly's Malmedy error in the first place...
...He suspects that Rush is trapped in "what novelist Robert Graves called a 'Golden Predicament'-overwhelming success in a field he really had no intention of pursuing-and he has to keep churning this stuff out every day...
...You'll think I'm off my trolley when I say this," Irish musician-activist Bob Geldof told the Guardian, "but the Bush administration is the most r a d i c a l - i n a positive s e n s e - i n its Duncan Currie is a reporter at the Weekly Standard...
...The Trouble With Africa, by Robert Calderisi, contends that the plight of sub-Saharan Africa can be blamed largely, though not exclusively, on African rulers...
...The Trouble With Africa: Why Foreign Aid isn't Working by Robert Calderisi (PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 249 PAGES, $24.95) The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much III and So Little Good by William Easterly (PENGUIN PRESS, 436 PAGES, $27.95) The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs (PENGUIN PRESS, 396 PAGES, $27.95) Reviewed by Duncan Currie It isn't just the lack of democratic regimes...
...The same thing happens when he tries to untangle one of Rush Limbaugh's assertions...
...Sometimes, however, they get together and commit an unnatural act...
...He didn't need to weaken his argument this way...
...He offers a new approach to Africa: Initially focus aid on five countries-Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Ghana, and Mall--whose leaders have proven responsible stewards...
...In fact, the FBI never even went to court...
...9 The Massachusetts Highway Authority whose signs for the Suicide Hotline contained the wrong phone number...
...The simple st way to explain Africa's problems is that it has never known good government," writes Calderisi...
...The Sideshow Bob of commentators forever stepping on the same rake, forever muttering the same grunted, inarticulate surrender, forever resuming the circle that will take him back to the same rake...
...The same might be said of Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC's Countdown...
...L IKE EVERY CYNIC, Olbermann is a disappointed idealist, and thus susceptible to sudden moods I _9 _9 of thunderbolt-hurhng outrage when humamty's displays of obtuseness and rancid dishonesty become unbearable to him...
...The Germans shot unarmed GIs dead, yet despite the corrections that poured in to the show, O'Reilly not only refused to admit his mistake but muddied the waters with dark hints about other war crimes committed byAmerican troops after Malmedy...
...And documented...
...Olbermann as a vehicle for exposing "the mortal enemies of honesty and dignity, of selflessness and class" There are three categories, starting with the bronze "Worse," followed by the silver "Worser," and climaxingwith the gold "Worst...
...The "little people" also make the cut, along with the dumb ones: _9 Paula Jones for complaining that she's been left out of the Clinton Presidential Library...
...Other countries-such as South Korea and Taiwan--"postponed political pluralism until their economies were strong.., but even they promoted basic health and education as an integral part of encouraging economic growth...
...forces captured SS forces who had their hands in the air and they were unarmed and they shot them down...
...The countdown of the show's title is a set of five standard news segments introduced with "Which of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow...
...We did so on the television program, with ten of these examples...
...Then Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter (Olbermann is betting on how long it will be before she loses her sanity hearing), and Nancy Grace, whose story that she became a prosecutor in memory of her fianc~ who was murdered by a mugger has lost its wrenching power: he was shot by a co-worker...
...Wesley Clark, that atrocities have always been committed in wars, even byAmericans...
...his list of 13 contradictions pans out, but he wasn't thinking like a writer when he put this story together...
...Calderisi is hardly a freemarket absolutist...
...One such story is the 13 "coincidences" in three years racked up by the Bush administration...
...9 The Sri Lankan Airlines flight attendant for phoning in a bomb threat because she wanted the day off...
...S ERIOUS MATERIAL CREATES another kind of problem...
...These 70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006...
...You know that...
...Without them it's like reading a joke book...
...The President met with Bono and agreed...
...Two such moments arise herein...
...9 The eBay entrepreneur who tried to sell the soul of a whale that, he claimed, handed it to him just before dying...
...Leading the list of winners is the book's 800-pound gorilla, Bill O'Reilly, who wins 34 times, including one triple crown...
...I most certainly will...
...Another Irish rock star with a passion for global good works, U2 frontman Bono, urged Bush to combat debt relief and crank up American largesse even more...
...The FBI's own lawyers decided the bureau didn't have the right...
...the Sisyphus of morons" is the freshest and wittiest bon mot I've read in years...
...When Olbermann is being serious he tends to be dead serious, which lands him in a thicket of over-explaining: We figured we'd better put that list of coincidences on the public record...
...In South America, the Pinochet junta brutally squelched dissent but also turned Chile into a marketbased engine of growth...
...Yet far too many African governments shook the chains of colonialism only to embrace deadend socialist economics (and, in some cases, Soviet-style police rule...
...The disappointment that the dedicated Olbermann fan experiences while reading this book is a testament to the offbeat brilliance of the performance it seeks to reproduce...
...9 FEMA for twice sending a planeful of injured Katrina victims to Charleston, West Virginia, instead of Charleston, South Carolina, where medical teams awaited them...
...The Sisyphus of morons, if you will...
...I do not believe in laissez-faire," he stresses...
...The awards are funny, but what is missing here is what made them hilarious on TV: Olbermann's masterful intonations, perfect timing, trenchant pauses, cocked eyebrows, and most of all, his unrivaled deadpan...
Vol. 39 • November 2006 • No. 9
