Note to self: don't ever, ever, ever piss off Keith Olbermann and then give him any ammunition he can use on the air with which to humiliate you.
I can only imagine the hapless Elizabeth Becton must have pissed off Keith Olbermann something fierce to have driven him to do what he did to her tonight on his show.
It's not often I cringe in defense of the person Olbermann decides to skewer to death; usually his targets deserve everything they get.
But tonight, the victim, while definitely a rude prig of an emailer (and Congressman Jim McDermott's incredibly uptight scheduler and officer manager, who may very well be looking for a new job after this debacle), really didn't seem to deserve her fate at Olbermann's gleeful and, frankly, cruel hands.
If you didn't see the show, my description will not do the final segment justice:
Olbermann had two actors re-enact what I assume have become a series of infamous emails between someone who was kept anonymous (the person who was not roasted alive) and the pitiful Elizabeth "Don't Call Me Liz" Becton, whose emails were, admittedly, terribly rude and histrionic in nature. But, honestly, those emails never rose to a level deserving of the national acid bath to which Olbermann subjected Ms. Becton.
I can only surmise that she must have deeply and mortally offended Mr. Olbermann at some other time or place. If not, then he is truly a very awful person to have done this to her.
He could simply have redacted her surname and the bit would have remained just as funny; actually, it would have been funnier still been funny, because the underlying meanness of it would have disappeared.
Sure, his excuse for keeping her name in the bit might be that "everyone" already knew her name because the emails were circulating all over Washington and the internets; but the fact is, lots and lots of people hadn't yet heard of this affair until he exposed her name to his national audience, and needn't have. A lot of his audience isn't privy to internet gossip.
This seemed just plain sophomoric and mean-spirited. By the end of it, when Rachel joined in with Keith's laughing at Elizabeth Becton's humiliation, I felt like I was back in junior high; and I wasn't laughing.
Not one bit.
UPDATE Looks like I'm in the minority. I'll defer to the louder voices and edit the title accordingly; I've said my bit.