No, I’m not talking about the 1986 hit song by Swedish rock band Europe. Neither am I talking about the 1980 movie. I’m talking about today being the last time I’ll ever intentionally watch the MSNBC show hosted by Keith Olbermann.
It’s hard to believe there are so many people out there with a national audience who can’t exactly seem to grasp human nature and it’s role in subjects as broad as religion, international relations, politics. And I thought Lou Dobbs was bad! Olbermann makes Dobbs look objective.
Today’s Countdown was even worse than most of the episodes I’ve seen. It was five minutes of news interspersed with forty-five minutes of anti-evangelical, anti-one-political-party, anti-this, anti-that. The only break was when Olbermann said "Let’s play Oddball" (an obvious and very wierd spoof on the more tolerable Chris Matthews’ opening "Let’s play Hardball"). He then brought out a series of short clips which I suppose he thought was funny. The penguin kidnapping clip almost was funny, but he ruined it at the end. There was absolutely no optimism in the whole hour that I can recall.
I only have time to comment on one of the travesties I witnessed this morning. The whole point of Christianity (evangelicals included) is that we humans are not perfect, we will often be tempted to sin and will fail the test. Through Christ we have the opportunity for forgiveness, but we know our sins will have temporal repurcussions, these are to be expected; it’s God’s way of disciplining us. Pastors of very large churches aren’t excepted from this fundamental truth, going all the way back to the Apostle Paul himself (see Romans 7:23 and Galatians 2:17). If the target of the news subject really is guilty of sin or lawbreaking, I wouldn’t be surprised, nor do I think he doesn’t deserve the treatment he’s receiving from the media. But Olbermann (and some of his interviews) are taking the attack one step further and claiming that because the Pastor wasn’t perfect, his teachings are not valid. Ultimately, assuming the message of scripture is untrue because of the imperfection of the messenger is a logical fallacy.
I’ll pass Mr Olbermann some classic fighter pilot advice (edited for my family-friendly weblog). Never pass up an opportunity to keep your mouth shut! I recommend applying that advice to the hour time slot your show normally shows up in.