The odious political hack and professional circus clown Keith Olbermann has been removed from the in-studio team for NBC’s Sunday Night Football NFL telecasts.

Olbermann actually did a decent job of narrating highlight film, which any reasonably competent TV personality could do, but I simply couldn’t bear to see that repugnant individual every week and was thus forced to turn to another channel during his highlight segments and the discussion periods in which he was involved.

I’m sure that such was the case with many other viewers, though NBC denies that Olbermann’s unhinged political persona had anything to do with his removal. Given NBC’s status as the stupidest broadcast TV network—a title for which the competition is fierce—that might well be true. The network’s arrogant disdain for their non-radical NFL audience in putting Olbermann in such a prominent position in the first place is ample evidence of a stupidity of truly biblical proportions.

Nonetheless, I suspect that the second-by-second ratings numbers, focus group reactions, and Olbermann’s Q scores were persuasive even to the nitwits at NBC—and that perhaps the rise of the more levelheaded Jeff Gaspin to the net’s leadership is beginning to bear additional fruit. (Gaspin was reportedly the person behind NBC’s decision to pull the plug on the disastrous move of Jay Leno to 10 p.m. and Conan O’Brien to 11:30. When the initial decision to move Leno and O’Brien was announced, I forecast that it would not work.)

This move appears to me, in all, to be a salutary instance of common sense and marketing pressure overcoming the progressive aristocracy‘s ability to ignore reality in the continuous pursuit of its elitist agenda. Olbermann’s reassignment could be good news for more than just NFL football fans.

—S. T. Karnick