Now Keith Olbermann is using his show to pick on Lloyd Grove's 20-something assistant, Katherine Thomson. Grove defends her in his New York Daily News Column, and fills us in on how Olbermann had to be pried out from a fetal position under his desk to go on the air:
Keith Olbermann should try the insanity defense.
That might explain — though hardly excuse — the MSNBC anchor's nutty response to a small item in Monday's column regarding his comments during a C-SPAN interview.
Olbermann was quoted accurately on the subject of his corporate bosses at GE and NBC — that "they do not like to see the current presidential administration criticized at all." And that MSNBC President Rick Kaplan — who spanked him last August for his repulsive account of spitting blood into a garbage can — "is a very emotional, very high-strung, gigantic man, also a very squeamish man."
As a service to readers, I omitted Olbermann's syrupy, soporific attempts at sucking up to his superiors — which he insists on calling "context."
So what did Krazy Keith do?
He used his third-place "Countdown" show — which has one-sixth the audience of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly — to slime my assistant, Katherine Thomson, as the "Worst Person in the World." Viewers must have been scratching their heads as Krazy Keith made creepy insinuations about my twentysomething associate's long and rewarding service at MSNBC before I hired her away.
"The conflict of interest is as bad as anything I've seen in journalism," Olbermann claimed, weirdly, adding that "when she left, nobody cried." Not that any of his colleagues were sobbing when he left his last half a dozen jobs in broadcasting, including an earlier MSNBC stint when producers reportedly had to pry him from a fetal position under his desk to get him to go on the air.
I'm not a clinician, so I won't pretend to understand Krazy Keith's behavior, including sometimes locking himself in his Secaucus, N.J., office and speaking to staffers only if they've put a written request in his mailbox. "He's a sad and pathetic figure," one of his former bosses mused yesterday. But my sympathy is limited.
Hey, Krazy Keith, why don't you pick on somebody your own size?
Note to readers: the photo above is not actually of Keith Olbermann. If it were, Rick Kaplan would be in the foreground with a bullhorn.
