This is easily the smartest political leader I have ever seen, as good a political public speaker as I've heard, + last October I was privileged along with 11 other newspeople to spend 2 hours with him as he showed extemporaneous mastery of every one of two dozen topics fired at him by us in random order. I left the room wondering if we had ever before actually elected a president who was one of the 1,000 smartest people in the country (or maybe 100, or 10) as we had now.

Barack Hussein Obama has an IQ of 125, it says on the internet. I imagine Mr. Olberman believes that makes Mr. Obama one of the smartest people in the U.S.... although in fairness to Mr. Olberman, from where he's sitting, an IQ of 125 is much closer to the 5th standard deviation from the mean than it is to him.

I believe in him and in his presidency and he has frequently achieved success (in health care reform, particularly) by doing that for which I criticized him. I hope that is again the case now because the Gulf Speech was not up to his standards nor did it express his mastery of policy. And if you will stop watching because I said this, I'll be very sorry, but you will have been watching for the wrong reason. I am not, have not been, and will not be, any politician's, nor any president's, spokesman.

Personally, I don't care what Keith Olbermann had to say. I'm an adult with a brain. I watched the speech, thought it was a thoughtful speech and TURNED THE CHANNEL. I don't need a bunch of overpaid television entertainers to tell me what I just heard, how I was supposed to interpret it and what my opinion should be. I did see a part of the Olbermann/Matthews screed and wondered what speech that they had been listening to . . . then I watched some real entertainment television.

Someone of unremarkable intelligence like Olbermann
Ouch!
is really not in a good position to assess the intelligence of those much brighter than he is,
Ouch!
so it's not surprising that he fawns over Obama as one of the most intelligent 1,000 (or even fewer) people in the country. In fact, while Obama is certainly bright, he's nothing like THAT bright;
Double ouch!
however, he works hard at keeping abreast of the issues and is also extremely slick (and better at pulling it off convincingly even than Bill Clinton was) in spinning them, so the combination makes for an image of extreme competence....

An image? Triple ouch!

To see what Obama truly is, you have to look at what he DOES and ignore what he SAYS, beguiling as the latter may be. What he DOES is serve corporate America. Sure, he's happy to give a nod to social conscience as long as the corporations benefit (as happened with health-care 'reform' and seems about to happen with carbon trading), but when a conflict arises the people come last (e.g., 18 months with no notable financial reform)....

The speech had to be simplified and dumbed down for the idol viewing masses. Can't you all see that?

Ahhhhhhh Keith. The Pontificating-est member of the All-White MSNBC crew.

I have NEVER trusted Keith. Ever since he delivered his fallacious and shameful "special comment" denouncing Hillary Clinton during the primaries, I realized that he is basically a sniveling, hysterical Sean Hannity wannabe, who wants to be for the left what Sean Hannity is for the right. He is basically hungry for ratings, and will go whichever way to get ratings. During the primaries when momentum was shifting from Clinton to Obama, he got on the Obama bandwagon. And, now, when criticism of Obama is mounting, he is jumping on that bandwagon as well. He has no principles beyond sticking his finger in the air to find out which way the wind is blowing. If you really want to see intelligent commentary, skip Keith and wait for Rachel Maddow at 9.