| | View hosts chastise Olbermann for not voting
 When MSNBC's Keith Olbermann accepted an invitation to appear on ABC's The View on Monday, he may have felt he had ample reason to be nervous. "Wish me good luck," he told his own audience in announcing the upcoming inquisition.
"No wonder you're afraid," crowed Barbara Walters. "For years, Countdown with Keith Olbermann -- and MSNBC -- has been Republican-bashing headquarters. But what is the future of the show now, now that your people are in? What are you going to do, Keith Olbermann?"
"Welcome, by the way," Walters added more cordially. "Are you scared to death to be with us? We hope so."
"Then good, yes, I am," Olbermann replied obligingly.
The program's hosts then began to lay into Olbermann over everything from his on-air partisanship to his attempts to avoid partisanship by not voting.
Elisabeth Hasselbeck led off, asking "What do you say to critics who claim you've been particularly soft on Democrats?"
"I run that question past Senator Clinton, because she didn't think I was easy on her," Olbermann replied. "She's still kind of mad at me. ... They don't invite me to the parties any more," he added, hanging his head in mock-sorrow.
"Bill O'Reilly hates you," suggested Joy Behar.
"Who?" asked Olbermann.
"He doesn't hate you, he says you hate him," Behar amplified. "I said to him, 'Why does Keith Olbermann hate you,' and he said 'Because he's jealous of me.' How do you respond to that?"
"What was the name again?" Olbermann responded, causing the show's hosts to break up.
Hasselbeck, however, was quick to return to the attack. "I was watching a football game one time and you snuck in there this Palin comment," she noted, referring to an incident in October which was publicized by Michelle Malkin and widely repeated by conservative bloggers. "I thought, 'You know, even in my football game, Keith, why?' You just can't hold back at all?"
"I actually said, 'Would I say this if I was still just being a sportscaster?'" Olbermann replied. "Is it enough of a cultural reference? ... And I said, 'I think so.'" He added, "There was some restraint involved."
"You're going to have trouble now, aren't you?" Walters asked, as she had at the start of the show. "Now that the people you like most are in."
"They could easily screw up," Olbermann retorted, insisting that he will say so if they do. However, he readily admitted that he hopes Sarah Palin will stick around because "she's an unending font of material."
"I was reading that you don't vote," Behar stated. "Did you really mean that, and did you vote this time?"
"I don't vote," Olbermann confirmed. "It's the only thing I can do that suggests, even, that I don't have a horse in the race."
"Then how can you be angry and have a platform if you don't vote?" asked Sherri Shepherd.
"It's a symbolic gesture," Olbermann explained.
"It's a bad role model, I'm sorry" commented Behar tartly.
As the hosts began talking over one another, Walters shushed them to give Olbermann a concluding plug for his show. "Oh, forgive me, master," she begged. "I just don't want to be the Worst Person this week."
This video is from ABC's The View, broadcast November 10, 2008.
Download video via RawReplay.com
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