AS WINGNUT YEAR ZERO DAWNS, WHY DO THIS UNILATERALLY?

I don't approve of this, especially now:

... MSNBC host Keith Olbermann made a surprise announcement on his show tonight, saying that he was suspending his popular "Wost Persons in the World" segment in response to the message from Saturday's Rally to Restore Sanity:

First, the overall message that the tone needs to change, that the volume needs to change, was not lost on any of us....

[The segment's] satire and whimsy have gradually gotten lost in some anger, so in the spirit of the thing, as of right now, I am unilaterally suspending that segment with an eye towards discontinuing it....

It's just that today, given the serious stuff we have to start covering tomorrow, we think it's the right time to do it short-term and then we'll see what happens. And we'll also see if anybody else on TV or radio will do something similar.

I have to assume that Olbermann knows that Fox -- i.e., "anybody else on TV" -- will bloody well not "do something similar."

Olbermann's now taken the rally way too seriously twice, in two conflicting directions. First, he snapped at Stewart for conflating MSNBC and Fox. But if that's how he feels -- and last night he reiterated that point -- why do this unilaterally?

Isn't this a bit like what the president of the United States did two years ago -- laying down a weapon and waiting for a similar response from the enemy (yes, I'm using that word) that's never going to come?

Of course, in Olbermann's case, it's a tiny weapon. Look, our side simply doesn't have the power. A couple of hours of prime time talk on MSNBC every weeknight is not the same as 24/7 Fox -- wake me when angry mobs storm the town meetings of GOP members of Congress shouting, "Worst person in the world!"

Wingnut Year Zero begins today -- although, really, we've been living in a world defined by wingnut ideas since January 20, 1981, with no breaks. Still, it's an ongoing war, and Fox's noise is a serious weapon of that war; Olbermann's Worst Person segment is just a guy in the crowd giving a furtive finger to the Generalissimo for the amusement of a few friends as the Generalissimo and his private militia prepare to finish the coup. But if that's all you've got, why give it up?

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UPDATE: Mediaite's Tommy Christopher also wants Worst Persons back. He's right about this:

First of all, the very premise of "Worst Persons" is, on most nights, to satirize the very hyperbole against which Stewart rallied.

Exactly -- much of the time, it's calling right-wingers evil who are calling liberals and moderates Antichrists.

And if it's fighting fire with fire, if an eye for an eye makes everyone blind, yadda yadda yadda, well, what the hell's the alternative? Just keep getting hit by the right?

I donm't think there are very many people on the left who want to stay in a state of permanent war with the right. I don't -- I'd happily give this blog up if the lunatics and haters lost control of the GOP and conservative-media asylums. We've been demonized as elitists since Nixon, as (horrors!) believers that sometimes government does good things since Reagan, and as liberals-therefore-monsters since the '88 Poppy Bush campaign. What's going to stop it if not an angry response? Total surrender?

(Oh, and whatever high-minded words Jon Stewart may have uttered on Saturday, he was back attacking Republicans and Fox last night. I don't think that's hypocrisy. I think the need for "sanity" is just a premise he partly believes and mostly saw that he could mine for a lot of material. But his main premise -- that the most malign demagogues and abusers of the public trust deserve the sharpest rebukes -- lead him to Fox and the GOP last night for a simple reason: they are the worst people out there, and so they're inevitably his most frequent targets.)