Keith Olbermann awarded me the bronze medal in his “Worst Person in the World” segment tonight. I’m a little disappointed, but everyone who dreams of the gold has to start somewhere.

Olby cribbed his entire attack from Media Matters, the hackish Soros-funded outfit that provides almost all the material for “Worst Person in the World” (or “WPITW,” as we award-winners refer to it). The gist of their item on me is that, in my 1,500-word demolition of Olbermann’s loony nightly broadcast, I wrote:

After [MSNBC correspondent and left-wing blog all-star David] Shuster’s latest report on the GOP’s coming demise, Olbermann customarily invites a Democratic strategist, Bush administration critic, or liberal journalist to join him for a chat. At this point, depending on the guest, Olbermann either wonders aloud with him whether Republicans even know how stupid and corrupt they are, or impatiently asks him why the Democrats aren’t doing more to topple the despotic “Mr. Bush” and his Orwellian cohort.
Olbermann’s insistence on calling the president “Mr. Bush” instead of “President Bush” is his way of saying that Bush holds office illegitimately. In the weeks following the 2004 election, Olbermann seized on scattered stories of voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida to suggest that Republicans had somehow rigged the election. He told a reporter for his alma mater’s newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, “I don’t think there is any question that Ohio messed up the election [in some way]. The question is: Was it deliberate or accidental?”
The 2004 presidential election marked the turning point between Olbermann’s early ambitions to do a hard-news show and his more recent efforts to resemble, as much as possible, a left-wing blog. And the conservative bloggers have responded. Olbermann’s obsession with the election-fraud conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet prompted Robert Cox to create OlbermannWatch.com in order to document Olbermann’s “careless reporting, reckless reliance on unreliable sources, and monomaniacal obsessions over lunatic fringe jihads.” OlbermannWatch.com contributor Mark Koldys fact-checks Countdown each night, and tallies the references to “Mr. Bush” on his “MisterMeter.”

<a href=”http://www.olbermannwatch.com/archives/2006/10/countdown_with_151.html“> The MisterMeterMedia Matters’s unbelievably brilliant riposte was that National Review founder and living legend Bill Buckley has also referred to the president as “Mr. Bush,” so am I saying that Buckley also subscribes to Olbermann’s paranoid conspiracy theory that the GOP stole the election in Ohio?

Look, lots of people refer to the president as “Mr. Bush” sometimes, including myself. But one thing that I, Mr. Buckley, and many others have in common is that we did not spend weeks after the 2004 election delusionally recycling bizarre allegations of voter fraud that we found on left-wing web sites. That is, we did not give people good reason to think that we might express our anger over the results of that election by calling the president “mister” all the time.

Mr. Olbermann is highly deferential to some presidents. He just has no respect for the current one.