Get the straight jacket and meds ready. The network that is the last place joke melts down once again. Cry, cry, cry libs. Just cry, cry, cry....


MSNBC‘s Lawrence O’Donnell — and MSNBC in general — loves to talk about three things: Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, and Glenn Beck. Take for example the “Rewrite” section of O‘Donnell’s show last night. In an attempt to belittle Fox, those who are on it, and those who watch it, O’Donnell went on an almost five-minute rant trying to tear down the network and everyone affiliated with it. He paid special attention to O’Reilly, O‘Reilly’s apparent lies, and especially O‘Reilly’s ethnicity:

When I look at O’Reilly, I also see dozens of guys I grew up with just like him: overbearing, argumentative Irish guys who think they know everything and can back up nothing. Those guys have always been a joke to me, which is why O’Reilly almost never has the capacity to outrage me. Because he is just a joke to me most of the time. But when he blares homicidal encouragement for killing physicians who perform abortions he deserves all the serious minded condemnation he has received.

One can only imagine what might happen if Beck, O’Reilly, or anyone on Fox refers to someone as an “overbearing, argumentative Muslim, black, or Asian guy.” But I digress.

UPDATE:

Noel Sheppard over at NewsBusters has some interesting statistics about O‘Donnell’s viewership. Sheppard points out that O‘Donnell’s viewership numbers have declined by 45 percent since his premiere in the 8PM time slot.

“When O‘Donnell premiered at 8PM the first Monday after Olbermann’s departure, he garnered over 1.5 million viewers,” Sheppard writes. “By last Thursday, that had plummeted to 843,000.”

He also notes that fellow MSNBC host Christ Matthews has mentioned Glenn Beck on 17 of his last 20 shows. That leads Sheppard to conclude that MSNBC‘s ratings strategy consists of simply attacking the network’s competitors — “How pathetic.”