Not that any of this is really relevant anymore, but...

It's all been kind of made moot by the fact that he's been kicked off the air altogether, but I had a thought last night about Keith Olbermann's segment "Worst Persons in the World." Specifically, my idea is that the title is not making the claim, even satirically, that the three people mentioned are the worst, second-to-worst, and third-to-worst people alive in the world on any given day. Rather, the claim is that those people would be the three worst people in the world if you only considered the previous approximately 24 hours' worth of news. So Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is still dictator of Iran (although it's really more the Ayatollah, but whatever), and Osama bin Laden is still a mass-murdering terrorist, and Dick Cheney is still a mass-murdering war profiteer, but they may each not have done anything particularly wicked today. Instead, some media personality or political figure said or did something so mind-bogglingly wrong that it makes you wonder how people like that exist. Another way to put it is that it's sort of the first derivative of the worst person in the world: not whose moral standing is the lowest, but whose moral standing deteriorated the most in the past news cycle. Because, think about it: the person who was the worst person in the world, in terms of total aggregate net wickedness, would not change on a day-to-day basis. You would not routinely expect for the three worst people in the world to completely change identities every day. You would, however, expect that the three people who had done the most to weaken their own moral stature that particular day would change daily.

None of this, of course, is really relevant anymore, and none of it answers the charge that a name like that is just a little too provocative, and a little too easy for the second-hand consumer to take the wrong way. But I think this is what the title was trying to get at: who were the worst persons in the world, specifically today?