Keith Olbermann Canned. Again. (This Time By AlGore)

From the Daily Beast (seems a fitting name for the situation...)

It’s hard to know whom to root for in the coming legal showdown between Keith Olbermann and Al Gore, the former a widely reviled liberal polemicist who cannot hold a job in cable TV and the latter a failed presidential candidate who launched a cable network in 2005 seemingly just for the fun of running it into the ground.

The ground got a lot closer on Thursday when Gore canned Olbermann, at once his worst nightmare and his foundering Current TV’s last real shot at success. The former vice president and his partner Joel Hyatt put out a statement “to viewers” in the pre-weekend news hole of Friday afternoon accusing Olbermann of breach of contract, meaning they have no plans to pay out the $50 million they reportedly owe him. A source suggests the figure is actually much lower, and in any event, it includes an equity stake in a television network no one watches.


But the real punchline comes at the end of the third paragraph--wait for it, wait for it...

Well, not no one: Around 177,000 viewers tuned in to watch Olbermann’s 8 p.m. “Countdown” broadcast at Current on the nights he turned up to work to host it. (Gore and Hyatt accuse him of breach for refusing to anchor many nights, including such important ones as the Iowa caucuses.) By contrast, Olbermann was pulling in around a million viewers from his old perch at MSNBC, from which he departed acrimoniously just 14 months ago. According to a statement from Current, Olbermann will be replaced by prostitute-aficionado Eliot Spitzer, who was fired in July from CNN.

 Eliot (caught banging teenaged hooker while Governor of New York) Spitzer! Yeah, baby, yeah!

On the one hand it is great fun to see the wheels come off the Al Gore clown car. On the other hand, it's pretty sobering to realize just how close we came to having this man as President of the United States.