NP: Elvis Costello, When I Was Cruel

With the massive exodus of national network news anchors, the whimsical point everybody keeps making is that one of the nets should hire Jon Stewart.

On the one hand, it's an intriguing idea, but I think the better plan would be to rescue Keith Olbermann from MSNBC, where he's pretty much the only reason to watch the network at all.

In two recent blog posts, he cuts right to the heart of the whole flap about hyperbolic political invective on both sides of the aisle. The first one that caught my eye was this passage, with regard to Nazi-invoking politicians of the recent past:

They are at best, carrying the disease of branding other American leaders - no matter how wrong-headed some of those "others" might seem to you - with the same kind of vitriol that enabled the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

This is something that's been bothering me a lot lately. The attempts to suppress the opposing view by discrediting it as unpatriotic, un-American, or whatever has become so pervasive that I fear it could lead down a really nasty and really slippery slope. Particularly when coupled with the deterioration of civil rights and privacy and whatnot.

Olbermann uses a Twilight Zone episode to reach one possible end of that slope, and it strikes me as a pretty solid analogy. At some point, the two sides aren't going to be able to co-exist if this keeps up, and again, it's not going to matter who started it.

Stewart approaches the news with sarcasm and derision. Olbermann, on the other hand, comes from what, to me, seems like common sense more than anything else. And that's exactly what's missing from the mainstream media that makes it so ripe for Stewart's picking.