“Let me just say, he [Paul Krugman] is influential because if you’re a blogger, and you’re still living in your mom’s basement, and you got Cheetos all over the keyboard, you type in your underwear, unlike Alex Trebek, then yes, you look at Paul Krugman and you think yes, he is my hero.”

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The Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who said he had been “banned” from MSNBC for a year, will also be a contributor to the new “Countdown.” (Mr. Griffin sidelined Mr. Moulitsas for spreading innuendo about Joe Scarborough.) While MSNBC “has pretended to be the progressive network,” Mr. Moulitsas said, “they are conservative in terms of who they have on and what they can say.” Referring to Mr. Olbermann’s new show, he said, “I think that Current recognizes that there is a real opportunity here for a network that has a real diversity of opinions and voices.”

Mr. Olbermann, always pleased to pick a fight, clearly wants to foster competition. To Rolling Stone this month, he said “we’re going to take MSNBC’s business away from them,” a comment that Mr. Griffin chalked up to strategic posturing.

“Look,” he said in an interview on Friday, “everybody has a strategy, and that is purely a strategy. I’m talking about reality, and the reality is that we’ve never been stronger.”

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Those of you who don’t know about Joe Scarborough’s dead intern problem probably didn’t start reading the internet regularly until after 2002. Certainly the mainstream press didn’t cover it. You see at the time the entire village was hysterical over the disappearance of [Democratic] congressman Gary Condit’s mistress, a woman who happened to work in his office… The media, with the help of the family, pretty much convicted Condit of murder in one of the most revolting displays of railroading ever seen in American politics. Even when the actual murderer was revealed years later, the worst of the perpetrators refused to back down.

Meanwhile, that same summer, star up-and-coming Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, recently divorced under charges of infidelity, had unexpectedly decided to resign from office six months after being re-elected. Shortly thereafter an intern on his Florida staff was found dead — in the office — under mysterious circumstances with allegations of cover-ups by the local authorities and the quack medical examiner. And nobody in DC even raised an eyebrow. The story went largely unremarked upon and he soon found himself a lucrative perch as a highly paid celebrity gasbag.

Now I have to assume that Scarborough is either brain damaged or must want people to look at that story again because otherwise he would have let some innocuous, snarky tweet pass by. Now we all have no choice but to rehash the whole thing in order to explain why Markos has been banned from the network.