Keith Olbermann Getting it from All Sides

Even though he didn’t mention him by name — he would never mention him by name — Bill O’Reilly’s blasting of GE chairman Jeff Immelt last night was, by corporate and competitive extension, a shot at Keith Olbermann.

And these days, Olbermann is taking plenty of heat from all sides. There’s this from Huffington Post on the “truce,” written before O’Reilly’s rant. Also last night, Jonathan Berr from Daily Finance got in on the action with a scathing critique of how “Countdown” handled the Richard Wolffe situation:

Ultimately, Olbermann’s protests ring hollow. Someone at his staff should have had a clue of what Wolffe was doing; under the circumstances, it would have been insane for the commentator to lie about his job. Moreover, even if he did, it is clear Public Strategies was far from subtle about the hiring. Ultimately, there is little question that Olbermann, his producers, and his corporate paymasters at the General Electric Co. (GE) knew exactly what was going on. The only question is how these prominent crusaders against corruption managed to miss their own moral failings.

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The lesson here is that wrong is wrong, even if it’s done by people you like.

Those comments, however, are tame compared to the feud that’s escalated between Olbermann and CNN’s Lou Dobbs who went after Olbermann yesterday on his radio show calling him a “punk” and saying that he’s “hallucinating, making up stories.” Tuesday night during the Worst Person in the World segment, Olbermann called Dobbs “soft-focus, birther-embracing former star, a man who during the week makes millions off bashing immigrants, especially Hispanics, even though his wife and kids are Hispanic.”

Apparently, that got Dobbs so fired up, he could barely keep his sentences together: “He got me so angry because he brought in–you know…part of it–he just–he’s such a…anyway–he’s a liar. He’s a psycho.” He continued, “To refer to my wife and my daughters and to lie about–uh…you know, I just…I want to throttle him, I’ll be really honest with you.” Later in the show, Dobbs added, “I know girls were beating him up when he was a child and I know he has to be mentally, psychologically scarred…”

Last night, Olbermann gave Dobbs the bronze WPITW for what he called a “full-fledged, on the air nervous breakdown.” Today, we await another volley from Dobbs.

Both of Olbermann’s segments after the jump.

> Update: Olbermann responds to TVNewser:

The bloggers are leaving one component out, unfairly so: In April, I knew vaguely that Richard Wolffe had gone to work for a non-news firm, and that’s about the last I heard of it. It was entirely concurrent with my mother’s fatal illness, and I turned it over entirely to my management team. My first awareness that this was more than just a non-news job, was this week.

If Jonathan Berr, whoever he is, does not like my prioritizing caring for my mother and dealing with her death, and then doing as many shows as I could, ahead of vetting the comments of our analysts and my management team, frankly, I feel sorry for him. Getting myself through those two months were, and are, more important than what is still being investigated about Richard.