the demagogue follies

I am heartbroken. Our very own Basil Fawlty ***has gone medieval on Anderson Cooper.

Get the gay-baiting details at ETP. Because that’s what this is. Keith Olbermann is a political hack and moral scumbag posing as a moral crusader. He is also a chickenshit. He never invites political opponents to his show to debate them. Instead, he rants and raves from his MSNBC bully pulpit—yes the same network that just got on its high horse about Don Imus. Capus said he got a lot of complaints from inside NBC about Imus’s racism and sexism. Let’s see how many complaints he gets from inside the network about Olbermann’s gay-baiting.

Meanwhile, I’m willing to bet good money that Cooper, who, admittedly is a big fave in my household so I’m waving my Team Cooper colors, is going to come out of this like the effortlessly classy guy he is.
Good breeding still has its merits (GWB notwithstanding). From a 1991 review of Richard Brookhiser’s Way of the WASP:

“The way of the WASP” consists of six closely related values or character traits–conscience, civic-mindedness, industry, success, use, and anti-sensuality. The most important is conscience–”the great legacy of Protestantism.” Conscience is not the modernist way of paradox and ambiguity; “it is the inner light that shows us self-evident truths … the source of whatever freedoms WASP society enjoys.” Civic-mindedness is the “operation of conscience in social relations.” Honor, family, group take a back seat to the good of society. Conscience mandates–and civic-mindedness sanctions–industry, which results in success. By “use,” Brookhiser means asking what things are good for, a kind of practical Aristotelianism. Finally, the WASP suspicion of sensual pleasure is not a morbid turning away from the body, but an application of the test of use: sport, food, even art, are valued because they’re “good for you.” It is the only WASP trait he seems to regret: “The Chinese work hard; so do the Italians. Yet they both know how to cook.”

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*** The last time I fulminated about Olbermann was in this post:

What is most objectionable about Olbermann is that he’s, as Olbermann Watch’s Robert Cox says,

a political hack posing as a journalist and abusing the trust implied in the NBC brand to get out a political message.