MSNBC Dogs: Mika Brezinski, Dan Abrams, and Keith Olbermann

Pinch-faced Keith Olbermann has this lame segment on his “show” where he runs down a ranking list of the “worst people in the world.” You will find there anyone who’s ever been positioned even slightly to the right of Chairman Mao, which includes most people in the Bush administration. So you get this tired parade of the same characters, with Olbermann trying desperately to dredge up what is positively a moribund sense of humor, and you imagine all these people of low intellect with superior attitudes guffawing at his lame “humor” while eating TV dinners. I’ll admit I’m perverse in watching it, but I don’t really. I just switch over to the MSNBC (The Obama Channel) for laughs because I wonder that the MSNBC general manager, Dan Abrams, let’s the carnage go on.

Abram’s has his own version of “Ten Worst List” and he calls it “Beat the Press” or something like that. Dan Abrams is a self-harmer, you know, and his chief contributions as GM has been to add these tasteless cartoon graphics intended to attract a “young audience.” I volunteer with a “young audience” two nights a week at a boxing gym, and I can tell you they’re not watching Keith Olbermann nor Dan Abrams. I suppose the “young audience” they’re looking for are “disaffected” dopers, dunces, and dropouts from society driving from one Starbuck’s to another in the Volvos they received as high school graduation gifts.

But I’d like to produce Oberman’s show for just one day. I could do the entire “Ten Worst” list just from watching the “Morning Joe” show while head honcho Joe Scarborough is out on a protracted family leave. The show has two good points. Point One is Joe Scarborough but he’s been gone for a long time and the ratings are dropping through the floor. Point Two is Pat Buchanan, who is always good for some realpolitik insight and some laughs. It’s a good paid gig for Buchanan, and he and Scarborough are there to buttress the stations “fairness” doctrines. But Mika Brezinski is the Ten Worst all rolled into one. Her timing is bad and her attempts are humor are so inept as to force pal Willie Geist to frown against his will. They trot out Boston Globe editor Mike Barnacle to give us the outlook from one of the two Gay Marriage States (should that be capitalized?). Barnacle’s jowly face smiles too much, shoving the knife into the Republicans with a gleeful Brutus’ treachery.

Brezinski’s father is the former Jimmy Carter security advisor (contradiction in terms, I know) and now shills for Obama. Without Scarborough at the lead, the show is preposterously confusing, rudderless, directionless, humorless, feckless, and consistently dull. Mika and Willie Geist dully read the newspaper headlines to you. Mika’s not bad looking but any positive benefit derived from that is still-born as she peevishly attacks Hillary Clinton or any Republican. She seems a hurting person, and her quips are ill-timed and inane, as if she were copying one of those television shows broadcast on the internet from someone’s cluttered basement.

Oh, it’s bad without Scarborough. Abrams should be fired and the station sold to Murdoch. Mika Brezinski should take her bony ass out of there to join daddy on the Obama campaign trail.