Oh, olby! Keith Olbermann goes bananas on MSNBC.

SHORTLY before Countdown with Keith Olbermann debuted in the spring of 2003, its host told the Washington Post, "Our charge for the immediate future is to stay out of the way of the news.... News is the news. We will not be screwing around with it." When asked how he felt about competing nightly with Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, he answered, "I'm not looking to take down Bill. It will be a totally different program. It will not be a show in which opinion and facts are juxtaposed so as to appear to be the same thing."

But the man who pledged not to screw around with the news has--for the last two years--done little else. From his obsessive crusade to uncover supposed voting irregularities in the 2004 election, to the tabloid nature of much of his subject material, to his angry and increasingly bizarre attacks on the Bush administration, Keith Olbermann offers almost nothing in the way of hard news. Instead, he combines highly opinionated liberal journalism with offbeat "news of the weird" segments and a strategy of self-promotion built around picking fights with Bill O'Reilly. As a result, he is making modest but undeniable gains in the ratings.

Olbermann opens each Countdown with the question "Which of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow?" followed by teasers for the five stories he plans to feature that night. Typically the lead story is about how the Bush administration is either incompetent or dishonest--or sometimes both, as Olbermann demonstrated one night not long ago: "Mr. Bush at the Rose Garden [press conference]: no plan to attack North Korea, no plan to leave Iraq, no plan to stop lying about the Democrats. To summarize, no plan."

The lead story almost always features the reporting of David Shuster, the MSNBC correspondent who confidently but erroneously predicted that Karl Rove would be indicted in the Valerie Plame leak investigation. (Five weeks after Shuster's prediction, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald informed Rove that he would not face any charges.) Now covering the Mark Foley page scandal, Shuster soldiers on, undaunted. "Every lawmaker, every Republican lawmaker we've called has said that Dennis Hastert will not be the Speaker of the House this time next week," he told Olbermann. That was several weeks ago.

After Shuster's latest report on the GOP's coming demise, Olbermann customarily invites a Democratic strategist, Bush administration critic, or liberal journalist to join him for a chat. At this point, depending on the guest, Olbermann either wonders aloud with him whether Republicans even know how stupid and corrupt they are, or impatiently asks him why the Democrats aren't doing more to topple the despotic "Mr. Bush" and his Orwellian cohort.

Olbermann's insistence on calling the president "Mr. Bush" instead of "President Bush" is his way of saying that Bush holds office illegitimately. In the weeks following the 2004 election, Olbermann seized on scattered stories of voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida to suggest that Republicans had somehow rigged the election. He told a reporter for his alma mater's newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, "I don't think there is any question that Ohio messed up the election [in some way]. The question is: Was it deliberate or accidental?"

The 2004 presidential election marked the turning point between Olbermann's early ambitions to do a hard-news show and his more recent efforts to resemble, as much as possible, a left-wing blog. And the conservative bloggers have responded. Olbermann's obsession with the election-fraud conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet prompted Robert Cox to create Olbermann-Watch.com in order to document Olbermann's "careless reporting, reckless reliance on unreliable sources, and monomaniacal obsessions over lunatic fringe jihads." Olbermann Watch.com contributor Mark Koldys fact-checks Countdown each night, and tallies the references to "Mr. Bush" on his "MisterMeter."

About halfway through each show, Olbermann supplements his left-wing opinion journalism with a healthy dose of gossip and bizarre news. Countdown features a recurring segment called "Oddball" in which Olbermann presents a handful of stories on topics such as pig racing, tomato dodgeball, and drunk animals. Often this is followed by a separate report on celebrity news, such as Madonna's recent attempt to adopt a child in Malawi or the appearance of a sex tape starring the actor who played Screech on Saved By the Bell.

Next comes Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" segment. He uses it to try to pick fights with conservatives in the hope that the ensuing buzz will draw attention to his show and boost its ratings. His ongoing feud with Bill O'Reilly is the most prominent example of this tactic, but he also frequently attacks Robert Novak, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Brent Bozell, John Gibson, and Brit Hume. All of these writers and commentators have two things in common: They are conservative, and they have much larger audiences than Olbermann.

Olbermann just released a compilation of these "Worst Person" segments in a book that has O'Reilly, Coulter, and Donald Rumsfeld on the cover. About a week before it hit stores, Olbermann concluded a broadcast of Countdown with a "Special Comment" in which he called Rumsfled a "quack" and compared the Bush administration to the government of Neville Chamberlain while simultaneously accusing Bush of threatening America with "a new type of fascism." Olbermann's grandiloquent, over-the-top rant immediately became the toast of the left-wing blogs, and the next day his book shot from 98th to 19th on Amazon.com.

Since then, "Special Comment" has become a regular feature on Countdown, and each one has been more enraged and eccentric than the last. After Bush quoted an intercepted communication from Osama bin Laden in which the terrorist advocated using the media to turn the American people against their government, Olbermann accused Bush of trying "to get us to confuse the psychotic scheming of an international terrorist with that familiar bogeyman of the far Right, the quote media unquote." On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Olbermann blamed the president for failing to build a memorial at Ground Zero and suggested Bush had committed an "impeachable offense" when he "duped" the American people into supporting the Iraq War.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When Colin Powell recently criticized the administration's treatment of detainees, Bush said, "It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective." Olbermann went haywire, taking Bush's words out of context and accusing him of leading America "toward a new and fearful path--one heretofore the realm of science-fiction authors and apocalyptic visionaries ... a world in which authority can actually suggest it has become unacceptable to think."

But Olbermann's most incredible performance by far came after Bill Clinton's outburst during his interview with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. When Wallace asked Clinton why he hadn't done more to connect the dots and stop al-Qaeda, Clinton accused Wallace of doing "Fox's bidding ... your nice little conservative hit job on me." Olbermann took it a step farther. In his telling, Wallace was not only "a monkey posing as a newscaster," but also a "proxy" whose "sandbag effort" had been orchestrated by the Bush White House. What's more, Clinton was "brave" for standing up to this "smear by proxy," and he "told the great truth untold about [the Bush] administration's negligence." Naturally, Olbermann quoted "Eric Blair, writing as George Orwell," and elucidated the many parallels between America under the Bush administration and the totalitarian dystopia described in 1984.

It should surprise no one that Olbermann bristled at the way Wallace "bullied" Clinton. A few days earlier, Olbermann himself had interviewed Clinton and, during the interview, handed the former president a check for the Clinton Global Initiative. "Here's eight more schools in Kenya--from me," he said. In Olbermann's world, that apparently counts as real journalism--but tough questions are off limits.

It's hard to tell whether there is a correlation between Olbermann's increasingly erratic performances and his improvement in the ratings. Fox's O'Reilly still draws three or four times as many viewers on average, and CNN's Paula Zahn usually beats Olbermann by small margins. But O'Reilly's numbers are trending slightly downward, while Olbermann is making marginal gains. When asked recently whether his anti-Bush tirades had boosted his numbers, Olbermann told USA Today, "You can't really put on a '(r)traditional newscast' anymore, certainly not on cable. And to some degree a fervently expressed opinion is going to be good TV one way or another."

But perhaps it's for the best that, in the three and a half years since Olbermann took over as the host of Countdown, he has fully abandoned his stated goal of anchoring a sober news broadcast and become instead a shameless presenter of opinion as fact. It's always better to know where the crazy guy lives--that way, you can avoid his house.

Mr. Spruiell writes the Media Blog for National Review Online.