Yesterday, when Charles Freeman pulled his National Intelligence Council nomination off the firing line, I thumbed off a hot-headed TPM comment that:

...There will be, in the national media, a brief flurry of dismissive, smirking denials of the existence of any such thing as an "Israeli lobby"; then some reports acknowledging it, but alleging its influence is overstated by "anti-Semites"; then a brief flurry of stories on anti-Semitism, with sonorous huffing and puffing by Abraham Foxman and Mark Potok (he of the self-actuated, semi-official authority on all things anti-racist and perilously white, the Southern Poverty Law Center); then... "Dancing With the Stars" is on!!!

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I'll admit: When first I wrote this, I was pretty dang steamed.

An open letter to Keith Olbermann:

You, SIR:

I've long enjoyed your MSNBC "Countdown" program. In an age of counterintuitive, Fox-News twaddle, it is an oasis of pertinent conversation in the deep-cable Vast Wasteland. You and your contributors, like Jonathan Alter and Richard Wolffe, are insightful and incisive, blah, blah blah. Your perspective is (for the networks), refreshingly left-of-center, if a bit dogmatic (i.e., illegal immigration is a high-fiver, and Gaza... what Gaza?) "Countdown" seems tailor-made for upscale, bi-coastal tapas-bar revolutionaries. N'est pas?

However, your chronic, unexplained coverage of Right-wing flotsam is increasingly nettlesome. I realize you're hanging them out to dry, pulling the pin on a little party sabotage, putting these bozos in the driver's seat of the smoking, rattling GOP junker so they can drive it off a cliff. But it's all become too much.

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