TBT: The Brutal Truth

The Falafel Djinn's Ace In The Piehole

As C&L continues to video-chronicle the war between O'Reilly and Olbermann, John gives us this morsel from The Countdown where Olbermann once again takes the Falafel Djinn to school:

We also have news of a small cottage industry creating petitions. Here's the original one on O'Reilly's Web site. You could read the names of who had signed it until they took that page down because some of the names seemed to be fictitious. "Mr. Keith is Great" from Faloofah, Montana, for instance, "Look at My from Ratings Drop", North Carolina, someone identified simply as "Falafel N" from The Shower, Wyoming and "Andrea Mackris" from How's Your Cash, PW.

Pretty hilarious stuff but ol' Bloggermann asks the burning question:

Why did they take those down?

That sums up this whole charade -- the Falafel Djinn concocted his petition to replace the mean old liberal Olbermann with the kinder and nicer liberal Phil Donahue for one purpose only: so that Olbermann and the left blogosphere would literally eat it up. That's right -- O'Reilly tossed Olbermann and the rest of us a bone knowing full well that Keith would go ballistic with it and, with C&L being the prominate video blogger, the footage of Olbermann having fun with the Falafel Djinn's mock petition would get pumped throughout the blogosphere. Between Keith's viewship and the blogs, it creates the very humorous shit we see above with all these psudonymous names and snarky messages appearing on O'Reilly's petition.

This plays right into O'Reilly's intentions with this gag -- by deleting these entries, he can then turn around and claim either on his radio or TV show that his online petition to replace Olbermann with Donahue was a failure "because of a vast conspiracy among the far left and their rabid partisan attack bloggers" spiked the petition with lies and false information to the point where he and his staff couldn't seperate a facticious entry from a fraudulent one.

Viola! It's the "Reverse Freeper Psychology" rightwing shills like O'Reilly use whenever their bullshit isn't sticking to the wall with the majority. By pulling this massive PR stunt masquerading as a serious petition for Donahue, O'Reilly doesn't lose or gain anything that he allready hasn't. Instead, he retains the loyal rightwing and DLC-type blue-hairs that comprive the remnants of his total audience. Since he's already lost a heaping majority of viewers and listeners and the President is quacking away in Lame Ducksville, he needs to pull a Leo Strauss by creating a boogie man with Olbermann and "his army of left wing BAH-LAWGS" in order to keep what's left of his senile, geriatric, Fundy Fristian/Lieberman Liberal base viewership while also giving them a conspiracy theory to rally behind.

So, keep your eyes peeled and your ears open, folks. It's only a matter of days until the Falafel Djinn pulls the ol' bait and switch, once again revealing more about himself than the people he's castigating. The question is when he does announce the "failure" of his petition because of Olbermann and the bloggers, will he hold up a print out of C&L's frontpage like he did with the "left-wing BAH-LAWG" NewsHounds in this vintage C&L "Kesterson" video ... or would that be just a little too much of a self-parody for him to self-parody?

posted by Sizemore at 6:10 PM

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