Just how totally out of touch is MSNBC's Chris Matthews?

At the beginning of Wednesday's "Hardball," he said the actor who famously rode the bomb at the end of the classic film "Dr. Strangelove" was "Sam" Pickens (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Good evening, I'm Chris Matthews in Washington. Leading off tonight: Republicans gone rogue. If this deficit crisis were a game of chicken, by now the Republicans would have tossed the steering wheel out the window, dumped a cinder block on the accelerator, and be yahooing like Sam Pickens riding the bomb at the end of "Dr. Strangelove.”

Nice job, Chris.

Try to keep this in mind the next time you devote an entire segment to a teleprompterless misstatement by Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, or any other conservative you despise.

Sam Pickens…sheesh!

HBO's Bill Maher on Friday perfectly demonstrated liberal hypocrisy concerning how Democrat and Republican presidents should be treated by the media.

In a lengthy segment on HBO's "Real Time" about how "disrespectful" Bill O'Reilly was during his Super Bowl interview with Barack Obama, Maher castigated the Fox News host for his "unpatriotic" behavior moments before debasing former President George W. Bush for not being "aware of s–t" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

BILL MAHER, HOST: Let me ask about the President and Bill O’Reilly, because of all the things that got to me this week, that really bothered me. If you saw the interview he did at the Super Bowl, I thought it was very disrespectful, literally unpatriotic. Oh. Show our, show our little thing. We built this, we might as well show it every week. There you go. Reclaiming patriotism. Arianna was talking about it. You know, we talk about getting guns off, you know, everybody having a gun would be patriotic. Giving people healthcare. This is patriotic. And so would this be: not belittling your President. I mean, some of things he said to them…

CORNEL WEST: I agree.

HOOMAN MAJD: It was worse than that. It was actually bigoted.

MAHER: Yes.

MAJD: When he asked if he knows football. I mean…

MAHER: Right.

MAJD: …if I was the president, I'd say, “Get the f–k out of my house.

MAHER: Right.

MAJD: Do I know football?

MAHER: Right. You're a basketball guy, wink, wink.

MAJD: Inner city basketball guy.

MAHER: Yeah, we know what that means.

MAJD: Muslims don’t play football.

MAHER: Right. And you also throw dice behind the Rose Garden, don't you?

MAJD: And you smoke.

WEST: You know what’s interesting about that? I was taken by Obama being so steady because he's such a nice brother.

MAHER: Yes.

MAJD: He showed anger there, though. If you look at…

WEST: But he was containing it, but the interesting thing for me is if that had been a left-wing person raising questions, he probably would have expressed his anger. Obama really does get upset about progressives. That's why Rahm talks about f-ing – I could say it but my Mother’s watching – f-ing progressives and f-ing retards. They're talking about people like ourselves. I mean, ourselves in terms of progressives.

MAHER: Yeah, but I cannot imagine George Bush giving a pre-Super Bowl interview to Keith Olbermann. Which would be, can you imagine if Keith Olbermann treated him like that? Interrupted him over and over, leaned over like it was a bar. I thought he was going to ask him to get some motherf—king iced tea. It was disrespectful, and listen to this. Here’s what a dick O’Reilly is. He says… [Audience laughter] He said to Obama at one point, “Mubarak knows a lot of bad things about the U.S. I’m sure you’re aware of that.”

"Yeah, I get to see the CIA briefing at 7:30 every morning, and I get the director of Homeland Security in my office every, I think I am aware of that, Bill. Do you get that briefing? Oh, you don’t? I get that briefing. Yes, I am aware of that."

You know who wasn’t aware of s—t? Bush.

If being patriotic means "not belittling your President," exactly what was that?

O'Reilly in Maher's view was "disrespectful" to Obama, but it was completely acceptable for the "Real Time" host to say Bush "wasn't aware of s–t." And nobody on Maher's production crew caught the glaring hypocrisy.

Boggles the mind, doesn't it?

In reality, this whole outrage of Maher's concerning O'Reilly's treatment of Obama is the height of hypocrisy.

Other than Keith Olbermann, likely no mainstream media member has shown more disrespect for George W. Bush than the "Real Time" host. For him to criticize anyone's treatment of an American President is the height of gall.

On Friday evening, Maher perfectly demonstrated that only Democrat presidents are deserving of respect.

A Republican?

He isn't "aware of s–t!"

Thanks for clearing that up, Bill

The folks at MSNBC – and new owners Comcast for that matter – must have been jumping for joy when they saw the Neilsen ratings for their first official night without Keith Olbermann.

As the New York Times reported Tuesday, "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" premiere in "Countdown's" regular 8PM time slot attracted almost 50 percent more viewers than Olbermann has averaged recently:

Lawrence O’Donnell clearly benefited, as he averaged 1.5 million total viewers for his first night as Mr. Olbermann’s replacement. That was up a little under 50 percent from Mr. Olbermann’s average number in that hour, just over 1 million viewers. And yes, Mr. O’Donnell did pay tribute to Mr. Olbermann, saying he owed his introduction to the network to him.

So did the 9 p.m. host Rachel Maddow, and her show was up by about the same amount to 1.4 million viewers for the hour. Both shows dwarfed the numbers for one competitor, CNN, though as usual, they trailed the leading news channel, Fox News.

The folks at TV By The Numbers reported a slightly higher figure than the Times claiming O'Donnell got a total of 1,533,00 viewers. This was larger than the 1,499,000 Olbermann got on November 9 after his brief suspension last year.

This deliciously means that more people tuned in to see Olbermann's replacement than his triumphant return.

The "good news" led Hot Air's Allahpundit to marvelously quip:

Two words, in honor of a guy who used to read the teleprompter on SportsCenter before discovering that he was the modern-day answer to Edward R. Murrow: Wally Pipp.

For those unfamiliar with the name, Wally Pipp was the star New York Yankee first baseman in the early part of the 20th century that not only recruited and talked long-time manager Miller Huggins into signing Lou Gehrig to the team, but also personally helped develop him as a rookie.

On June 2, 1925, Pipp was removed from the Yankee's lineup for a number of historically disputed reasons only to be replaced by – wait for it – Lou Gehrig who of course went on to become one of the greatest players in history competing in 2,130 consecutive games – a record unbroken until Cal Ripken did it in 1995.

For his part, Pipp ended up getting traded to the Cincinnati Reds the following season and retired two years later.

Nicely played, AP. Bravo!

 On Friday’s Countdown show on MSNBC, host Keith Olbermann announced that the episode would be his last, and spent a few minutes near the end of the show saying goodbye. He mentioned a number of infamous and pivotal points in his show’s history when he went after the Bush administration:

The show gradually established its position as anti-establishment from the stagecraft of "Mission Accomplished," to the exaggerated rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq, to the death of Pat Tillman to Hurricane Katrina, to the "Nexus of Politics and Terror," to the first "Special Comment."

As he listed a number of prominent supporters of his show, he ended up notably giving credit to the late Tim Russert of NBC for being "my greatest protector, and most indefatigable cheerleader."

Below the fold is the video and a complete transcript of Olbermann's announcement from the Friday, January 21, Countdown show on MSNBC, from about 8:53 p.m.:

I think the same fantasy has popped into the head of everybody in my business who has ever been told what I’ve been told, that this is going to be the last edition of your show. You go directly to the scene from the movie Network – complete with the pajamas and the rain coat – and you go off on an existential, other worldly verbal journey of unutterable profundity and vision, you damn the impediments, and you insist upon the insurrections, and then you emit Peter Finch's guttural resonant, "So." And you implore, you will the viewer to go to the window, open it, stick out his head and yell, well, you know the rest.

In the mundane world of television goodbyes, reality is laughably uncooperative. When I resigned from ESPN 13 1/2 years ago, I was literally given 30 seconds to say goodbye at the very end of my last edition of Sports Center. As God is my witness, in the commercial break just before the emotional moment, the producer got into my earpiece and he said, "Um, can you cut it down to 15 seconds so we can get in the tennis result from Stutgardt?"

So I'm grateful that I have a little more time to sign off here. Regardless, this is the last edition of Countdown. It is just under eight years since I returned to MSNBC. I was supposed to fill in for the late Jerry Nachman for exactly three days. Forty-nine days later, there was a four-year contract for me to return to this nightly 8 p.m. time slot which I had fled four years earlier. The show gradually established its position as anti-establishment from the stagecraft of "Mission Accomplished," to the exaggerated rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq, to the death of Pat Tillman to Hurricane Katrina, to the "Nexus of Politics and Terror," to the first "Special Comment."

The program grew and grew thanks entirely to your support, with great rewards for me, and, I hope, for you, too, though on many occasions, particularly in the last two and a half years, where all that surrounded the show – but never the show itself – was just too much for me. But your support and loyalty – and if I may use the word "insistence" – ultimately required that I keep going. My gratitude to you is boundless, and if you think I’ve done any good here, imagine how it looked from this end as you donated $2 million to the National Association of Free Clinics, and my dying father watched from his hospital bed, transcendentally comforted that his struggles were inspiring such overwhelming good for people, he and I and you would never meet, but would always know.

This may be the only television program wherein the host was much more in awe of the audience than vice versa. You will always be in my heart for that and for the donations to the Cranik family in Tennessee and these victims of governmental heartlessness in Arizona, to say nothing of every letter and email and Tweet and wave and handshake and online petition. Time ebbs here, and I want to close with one more Thurber story. It is still Friday.

So let me thank my gifted staff here and just a few of the many people here who fought with me and for me. Eric Sorensen, Phil Alangi, Neal Shapiro, Michael Weissman, the late David Bloom, John Palmer, Alana Russo, Monica Novotny, my dear friends Rachel Maddow and Bob Costas and my greatest protector, and most indefatigable cheerleader, the late Tim Russert. And now, let me finish by turning again to this ritual of reading Thurber stories to you.

On Monday, Keith Olbermann cherry-picked a Daily Kos/PPP poll to bash the Tea Party as a violent threat to America's elected officials.

On the following day's "Countdown," the MSNBCer misrepresented an Opinion Research/CNN poll to tie Sarah Palin to the Tucson shootings (video follows with transcript and commentary):

KEITH OLBERMANN: According to new polling out this week, nearly half of Americans think that harsh and violent political rhetoric was indeed to blame at least in part for the tragedy in Tucson, and more than half think it could easily cause a similar shooting in the future. In our third story, this puts a magnifying glass on the past rhetoric of several Republicans dipping their toes in the 2012 presidential pool. And if what we saw last night is any indication, it could take more than Sean Hannity to scrub the record.

Respondents to the Opinion Research/CNN poll were asked to assign degrees of blame to different factors leading up to the massacre. 35 percent thought Mrs. Palin’s infamous target map was a factor; 44 percent did not. A lack of resources for mental health care was identified as a big culprit, 70 percent said so. Asked about the use of harsh rhetoric and violent metaphors by politicians and commentators leading up to Tucson, the number was essentially split 48-49. But asked if harsh or violent discourse would quote “cause a future incident similar to the shootings in Arizona,” 54 percent said it was either very or somewhat likely.

Unlike Monday's disgraceful cherry-pick, what Olbermann and Company did Tuesday was play fast and loose with the data to make it seem that the number of folks that didn't feel Palin's map was a factor in the Tucson shootings was less than what the poll in question actually found.

Question 19 of the survey asked, "Overall, how much do you blame each of the following for the shooting in Arizona – a great deal, a moderate amount, not much, or not at all?"

Here were some of the responses:

What Olbermann and Company did for the Palin option was add the "Great deal" responses to the "Moderate amount" ones to come up with 35 percent.

However, the "44 percent did not" comprised only those that said "Not at all." The "Not much" category was completely ignored.

As those familiar with poll reporting are well aware, if you're going to include "Moderate amount" with the "Yes" answers, it is customary to include the "Not much" replies with the "Nos".

What this means is Olbermann, if he was trying to be honest – I know that's a real stretch for this shill! – should have reported this datum, "35 percent thought Mrs. Palin’s infamous target map was a factor; 59 percent did not."

If he wasn't going to include the in-between responses, he should have said, "19 percent thought Mrs. Palin’s infamous target map was a factor; 44 percent did not."

I guess Olbermann didn't want his audience to know just how much respondents to this poll disagreed with him and the rest of the liberal media, especially those on MSNBC.

As further evidence of the intentional duplicity here, in the result Olbermann cited concerning the use of harsh rhetoric and violent metaphors by politicians and commentators, "Great deal" and "Moderate amount" were added together as were "Not much" and "Not at all."

Olbermann also included the "Moderate amount" total in what he reported were the number of people that felt a lack of resources for mental health was the culprit for the shootings.

And, as the "Countdown" host noted in the datum concerning the possibility of violent rhetoric causing a future incident, "54 percent said it was either very or somewhat likely."

As such, and quite hypocritically, only Palin's "Not much" numbers were omitted from Olbermann's report.

Since this follows the "Countdown" host cherry-picking a different poll on Monday to bash the Tea Party as a violent threat to elected officials, one has to wonder whether MSNBC has any standards concerning the accurate reporting of data by its commentators.

Are folks like Olbermann free to cherry-pick and misrepresent anything they want with total impunity as long as it advances this network's political agenda?

Assuming the answer to this question is "No," one has to wonder if there are any disciplinary actions for offenders.

On the other hand, if the answer is "Yes," why does MSNBC get to refer to itself as a news network?

Keith Olbermann started his Special Comment Monday boasting that he was the only political commentator in America that has "expressed the slightest introspection, the slightest self-awareness, the slightest remorse, the slightest ownership of the existence" of violent rhetoric in the nation.

Roughly twelve minutes later, the "Countdown" host concluded his nonsensical blathering by stating, "In an actual open and shut slam dunk case in which a partisan of the Right attempted to kill one of the Left, the Right would blame the victim" (video follows with transcript and loads of commentary):

KEITH OLBERMANN: Finally tonight as promised a special comment on the nine days since Tucson. That awful night I said this: “We need to put the guns down. Just as importantly we need to put the gun metaphors away and permanently – left, right, middle, politicians, and citizens, sane and insane. This age in which this country would accept the quote ‘targeting' of political opponents and putting bull's eyes over their faces, and of the dangerous blurring between political rallies and gun shows ended.”

I cited seven examples of violent rhetoric from the Right, only one from the Left – my own, because the point of that comment and this one was not that the Right pulled the trigger in Tucson, but that we as citizens must stop the next Loughner, and the only way to potentially do this is to accept personal responsibility and to pledge, again as I said that night, that violence or the threat of violence have no place in our democracy, and I apologize for and repudiate any act or anything in my past that may have even inadvertently encouraged violence.

After quoting something former President Bill Clinton said Monday, Olbermann continued:

OLBERMANN: To date only one commentator or politician has expressed the slightest introspection, the slightest self-awareness, the slightest remorse, the slightest ownership of the existence of fantasy dream cloud of violent language by which we are now nearly blinded. “Our political discourse," John McCain wrote in an otherwise steaming serving of Washington Post op-ed partisan flab, “should be more civil than it currently is, and we all, myself included, bear some responsibility for it not being so.”

That's it. One individual, one assumed any personal responsibility for any of it besides me. John McCain. Not Palin, not Beck, not Limbaugh, not West, not Kanjorski, not Milloy, not O'Reilly, not Angle, not Jesse Kelly, not President Obama. It’s me and John McCain. I assume he's like me now, not sure whether to laugh, cry or be proud of that. So what did everybody else say? They said it was everybody else's fault and they often said it with more violence than before.

Notice first how Olbermann ridiculed everything else McCain wrote in that op-ed and then mocked possibly being like him.

Some civility, huh?

Then observe the conspicuous absence of any far-left media members in his list with the exception of Mike Milloy. No Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos. No MSNBCers such as Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, or Ed Schultz.

Such folks would be continually absent throughout his rant which next moved to listing conservative after conservative for their respective indiscretions in his view:

• Jim Hoft, Conservative blogger, Gateway Pundit
• Bob Durgin, Conservative radio host in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
• Rush Limbaugh
• Glenn Beck
• Rep. John Boehner (R-Oh.), Speaker of the House

Next up were conservative talk radio hosts Mark Levin and Michael Savage:

OLBERMANN: On Tuesday another radio announcer Mark Levin wrapped up the case for his audience. “We all know without question that the murderer in Tucson was mentally ill, a liberal pothead and all the rest of it. We know this for a fact.” On Tuesday after Mr. Levin and yet another radio announcer Michael Savage were decried for using violent rhetoric, Mr. Savage called this a quote “blood libel” and threatened to sue, seemingly as much for having been linked to Mr. Levin as for having been linked to violent rhetoric.

In every instance above, Olbermann mispronounced Levin's last name, placing the accent or emphasis on the first syllable rather than the second as Mark does. This leads one to believe that Olbermann likely has never heard Levin's program, and therefore got his information concerning what Mark said Tuesday from another source.

Regardless of his name being mispronounced, exactly what did Levin say Tuesday that was in any way inflammatory?

At this point, the consensus is that Loughner is certainly mental ill, a drug abuser, and seemingly left of center. As such, Levin's presence on this list was quite curious.

In reality, so was Savage's. Is there something wrong with threatening to sue someone? I'm sure the American Bar Association would beg to differ.

Odder still was that Olbermann chose to ignore the person Savage threatened with legal action.

As NewsBusters reported last Tuesday, MSNBC's Chris Matthews bashed Savage and Levin on "Hardball" saying, "Every time you listen to them are furious, furious at the left with anger that's just builds and builds in their voice and by the time they go to commercial, they're just in some rage, every night, with ugly talk."

I guess Olbermann didn't feel it was necessary to inform his audience who "decried" the conservative talkers for using violent rhetoric resulting in them threatening lawsuits.

Sadly, the list continued:

• Rep. Alan West (R-Fl.)
• Jim Hoft again
• John Hawkins, Conservative blogger
• Sarah Palin
• Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.)
• Jim Hoft again
• Jim Hoft again
• Bill Kelly, Washington Times columnist
• Lanny Davis, former Clinton special counsel, Fox News contributor

Next came another odd pairing:

OLBERMANN: On Tuesday Tucson Tea Party co-founder Trent Humphries explained the Giffords shooting to the English newspaper the Guardian. “It's political gamesmanship. The real case is that she had no security whatsoever at this event.” James Eric Fuller, one of those wounded at this event, himself a traumatized Vietnam vet who had also incredibly witnessed Kent State, referred to the quote “Tea Party crime syndicate,” and said he believed that in the Giffords shooting it had claimed its quote “first target.” On Saturday in a decision smacking of the tawdriness of the Maury Povich Show, Mr. Fuller was seated in the first row of an NBC News, ABC News town hall in Tucson with Mr. Humphries of the Tea Party on the stage. When Humphries suggested talk of gun control be deferred until after all the victims were buried, Mr. Fuller stood up and started to shout at Humphries, “You’re dead.” Mr. Fuller was quite appropriately arrested and removed for psychological evaluation. He has today apologized, and Mr. Humphries has said he does not feel threatened necessarily and wants Fuller to get mental help.

This one was strange for a number of reasons. First, was it really so intemperate of Humphries, a fellow Tucsonan, to say that Giffords didn't have enough security with her on the day of the shootings? 

More importantly, Olbermann conveniently omitted that on Friday, shortly after Fuller, during an interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, talked about Giffords being the Right's "first target," the "Countdown" host tweeted the transcript of that radio appearance to his almost 200,000 followers saying, "I think he of all of us has the right to say this."

So on Friday, Fuller had the right to blame conservatives for Giffords' shooting, but on Monday those words made Olbermann's hall of shame?

As I've said on many occasions, it takes a lot of rationalizations to be a liberal these days.

But Olbermann wasn't done naming names:

• State Assemblyman Michael Carroll (R-N.J.)
• Doug Giles of Townhall.com

Add it all up, and Olbermann cited 20 instances of what he viewed as actions not in accordance with his plea for civility, and only one was from what could be called a hard-core liberal. Mind you, Lanny Davis ceased being a friend to the Left the moment he became a Fox News contributor.

Even more hypocritically, the liberal Olbermann rebuked Monday was someone he praised on Friday.

And, once again, not one far-left-leaning media member – especially MSNBC employees – was named. To cite such an individual, Olbermann's staff wouldn't have had to look very far, for likely right down the hall in another studio, Ed Schultz had just two hours earlier told his viewers that he has no intention of changing his hostile tone until the Republicans stop blocking policies he's for.

But that shouldn't surprise anyone, for as NewsBusters and other conservative outlets have been reporting the past nine days, this call for civility is nothing of the sort. It is instead another attempt to silence and demonize the Right, and Olbermann marvelously proved this point with his conclusion:

OLBERMANN: Nine days have passed and the willful blindness hasn't slowed down yet. Besides the total absence of even the glimmer of personal responsibility that Senator McCain and I have evinced, we learned from all this that the Right lives in a perpetual state of victimhood. We learned that the Right does not even recognize the irony of its claim of being unfairly blamed for the violence of others when it has spent the last several years doing exactly that to Muslims, particularly American Muslims. We also learned that the Right can simultaneously insist that no political party or inclination can be blamed for Tucson while it itself blames the Democratic Party and the left for Tucson. We learned that the Right does not understand that if you, if we foment a political environment in which politics are to be settled by violence, or the threat of violence, or in a rhetorical tide of violent imagery, it no longer matters what those politics specifically are or if the hearer even understands your politics or agrees with your politics, he may hear only the permission to be violent. And ultimately we learned, especially from Mrs. Palin’s foolishness, this template of what the Right would do in an actual open and shut slam dunk case in which a partisan of the Right attempted to kill one of the Left, the Right would blame the victim, blame him or her for not having brought enough security or for not having brought a gun.

As is plainly seen, this entire commentary was another in a long line of commentaries by Olbermann exclusively designed to bash conservatives while pumping himself up as something more than this decade's version of a perilously liberal, vain, and egotistical Howard Beale.

That there are people who still don't get this is what's really disturbing.

 Appearing as a guest on Friday’s Countdown show on MSNBC, Washington Post staff writer and Newsweek columnist Ezra Klein defended Obamacare and warned Republicans against attempting to repeal the law as he contended that some provisions are popular with the public. After host Keith Olbermann asked if Democrats should "relish rejoining the fight over health care reform" because it could hurt Republicans, Klein urged Democrats to fight. Klein:

They should be going to war over it. It's an incredibly important achievement for them, and if Democrats cannot defend a deficit-reducing bill that brings health care insurance to 32 million people and allows folks with pre-existing conditions to get any insurance they want, if they can't defend that, frankly, they, on some level, don't really deserve to be a party. If you can't defend the best thing you've done in a generation, then you've got some political problems that are bigger than anything the Republicans are doing to you.

The Washington Post writer eventually predicted that Republicans would be embracing and defending Obamacare by the year 2050. Klein: "In 2050 Republicans will be saying, ‘How dare you cut Obamacare?’"

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 Appearing as a guest on Thursday’s Countdown show on MSNBC, Matt Taibbi – contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine - ridiculously accused Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Tea Party activists of racism in the form of using "coded language" to refer to "Mexican immigrants and non-white inner city, Democratic-leaning voters" as he responded to a soundbite of Boehner talking about having a social safety net for those unable to work, but that should perhaps exclude those who refuse to help themselves.

After host Keith Olbermann played a clip of the House Speaker contending, "But do we have a responsibility to help those who won't compete? I would have serious doubts about that," Taibbi found it "amazing" that Boehner "would say it so openly," and went on to suggest that the House Speaker was showing signs of racism, tying in Tea Party activists. Taibbi:

It's amazing that he would say it so openly, but I know when I go to cover Tea Party events, I almost inevitably end up talking to people who are on Medicare or collecting unemployment insurance or government pensions, but they're railing against government welfare. I say, "Well, do you see any contradiction there?" "No, I deserve this. I work hard. It's those other people."

And we know who they mean when they say "other people." It's Mexican immigrants and non-white, inner city, Democratic-leaning voters. So that's, it's coded language when he uses that kind of language.

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Fineman went on to predict that, because the Republican House next year will seek to undermine various pieces of legislation passed by Democrats – which he referred to as "historic" – that President Obama will be running against a "‘tear down’ Congress." Fineman:

The dynamic of the next two years is going to be to re-litigate and reargue all the legislation that Obama and the Democrats for the most part passed in the first two years. That means efforts to defund, to delegitimize, to get rid of, you know, all the historic legislation that was passed these first two years, and spending is going to be the way to do it. … So it's not that Obama's going to be running against the "do nothing Congress." The President is going to be running against the sort of "tear down Congress"because that's going to be the mode of the next two years.

Fineman also notably used the term "progressive" – the preferred term of liberals – instead of the word "liberal" as he referred to the left wing of the Democratic party, and contended that Republicans "went pedal to the metal on the fear strategy on immigration" as he explained why the Dream Act failed to pass the Senate.

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As NewsBusters previously reported, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann pathetically attacked Bristol Palin on Monday for being the Candie's Foundation's abstinence spokesperson.

On Thursday, Miss Palin struck back via Facebook:

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