Truth And Consequences
Promo site | Amazon
by Keith Olbermann
(non-fiction)

Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 7/10

Full title: Truth and Consequences: Special Comments on the Bush Administration’s War on American Values

If you are a fan of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, you are familiar with these rants of his. He calls them “Special Comments”. I am definitely a fan of the special comments, since a YouTube video of his rant about the complete destruction of the Bill of Rights without Habeas Corpus. I enjoy the actual news portions of the show as well, but almost never the things which are supposedly humorous. I did not have high expectations for the book because I didn’t see how it could be anything other than transcripts of what I had already seen prefaced with the jocular style that coverage of American Idol demands.

I found the introductions to each rant to be interesting and somewhat self-effacing. I think they do a good job of describing the mindset of the author at the given point in time. I even enjoyed reading the rants again. I got a lot more out of them with the actual text compared to merely listening passively.

Whenever I read a new rant, I was much more surprised that Keith Olbermann seems to be the only person decrying the current state of America’s political affairs. (But that isn’t true. The Daily Show skewers the administration regularly. And Countdown only seems to get away with really skewering the administration on days when they have extra “humor” segments.)

Overall, I would not recommend buying this book because a lot of the rants lose emphasis with temporal delay and because many of them were replayed for a holiday show. There are transcripts available (possibly only temporarily) via the “News Hole” blog on MSNBC. The amount of new writing prefacing each rant is really minimal. However, should you run across the book at your library, or if you were not already a regular viewer, this book might be worth your time.