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A long time ago, when society was far happier and vastly more functional, a basic rule of etiquette dictated that one should “never discuss religion or politics in polite company.” But these days, the fact that hardly anyone can shut the fuck up about politics for five minutes means that there is no such thing as “polite company” anymore. Today, the only joy most people seem to get is from imagining their ideological opponents writhing in pain.

Look at any pop-culture artifact from a generation or two ago, and it becomes depressingly obvious how infrequently people used to talk about politics, much less cry or scream about politics.

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I recall a previous incarnation of someone called “Keith Olbermann” from the 1990s. He was a capable TV sports analyst who didn’t seem remotely unstable, unhappy, or unhinged.

Then, as he transubstantiated into yet another fire-breathing, holier-than-thou political sourpuss who branded others as “The Worst Person on Earth” merely because their stupid political ideas differed from his stupid political ideas, before our very eyes he morphed into The Unhappiest Person on Earth.

It’s an impressive accomplishment. He has a lot of competition. We live in deeply unhappy times. A recent study from Finland concludes that “woke” people tend to be unhappier than the non-woke, but I think political monomania has made everyone cranky. The unprecedented technological ability to constantly blast your half-cocked political opinions to the world — a world that everyone rightly senses is rapidly falling apart — makes online discourse resemble a primal-scream session in a loony bin.

While pivoting from sportscasting to political bloviating, Olbermann originally postured as an unbiased, nonpartisan journalist, but the mask didn’t take long to slip. He was calling Bush Jr. a “fascist,” referring to “Right-wing media” as a “reeking pile of manure,” and accusing the anodyne Michelle Malkin of being driven by “morally bankrupt, knee-jerk fascistic hatred.” He was constantly throwing hissy fits about the “Tea Klux Klan” and the “teabaggers” and said that “I believe prejudice and discrimination still sit defeated, dormant, or virulent somewhere in the soul of each white man in this country.”

Keith Olbermann, you see, is a deeply righteous man who is grievously affected way down to his sixth lumbar vertebra at all the damage that others — the ones who aren’t as righteous as he is — are wreaking upon this republic. He barfs up all the cornily sanctimonious platitudes about “democracy” and how the Bad People on The Other Side are subverting it. Behold him pouting on the floor while curled up in an American flag and looking totally mental. He found that pose to be so profoundly moving that he’s done it more than once.

Everyone except Keith is a stupid Nazi. A fascistic Nazi moron. Or a moronic Nazi fascist. The earliest example I could find of Olbermann sliming someone as a Nazi was in 1998, when he said that Clinton prosecutor Ken Starr looked like “Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses.” Since we all know how brave it is to criticize Nazis, especially in public, Olbermann has spent the last quarter-century boldly proving Godwin’s Law to be true. He took it so far over the top that even the freaking Anti-Defamation League castigated him in 2006 for sieg-heiling while wearing a mask of his arch-nemesis Bill O’Reilly. My personal favorite instance of Olbermann invoking the demon Führer was this carefully crafted word-shart he tweeted in 2017:

Fuck you @RealDonaldTrump Nazi Nazi fuck Nazi Nazi RACIST Nazi BIGOT go fuck yourself fucking Nazi fuckers.

You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.

Like so many others, Olbermann is perfectly happy to use Donald Trump as an excuse to never, ever be happy again. The sputtering lunatic even wrote a whole joke book called Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke).

He has confidently predicted Trump’s imminent downfall for years only to come back frothing and fulminating and vituperating when he is proved wrong yet again. Just this week, he implied that he hopes Trump will be assassinated.

As someone who spent years mocking Trump for the alleged “Pee Pee Tape” that magically never surfaced, it’s amusing that earlier this month Olbermann accidentally branded himself in perpetuity as The Man Who Cries Tears Made of Urine. After the Supreme Court voted 9-0 in favor of Donald Trump regarding his Colorado ballot case, Olbermann solemnly demanded that one of our democracy’s three pillars be abolished in the service of, uh, saving our democracy:

The Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the “court” has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate.

It must be dissolved.

When someone encouraged him to “Cry more,” Olbermann parried with a reply that was so mystifyingly impotent, urologists will be studying it for decades:

Those aren’t tears, Fascist. They’re urine. I’m sure you enjoy being bathed in it.

Excusez-moi? Tu pleures des larmes d’urine?

Marveling at the “stunning lack of self-awareness” that would lead someone to angrily imply that he’d just pissed all over his own face, a writer for the Daily Caller says that after “Olbermann’s long career of being stunningly and shockingly stupid on the internet, I am starting to wonder if he lost the part of his brain that processes shame in a snowmobiling accident or something.”

He might be on to something there. Diminished responsibility due to an idiotically-acquired head injury might help explain all this otherwise inexplicably nutty behavior. By Olbermann’s own account, he suffered a concussion and subsequent amnesia in 1980 after leaping “head first into the overhead of the doorway of a New York City subway car.”

No one can decide to be as unlikable as he is, can they? I’ll be merciful and allow the possibility that Olbermann is an emotionally incontinent, drooling mess due to a combo of that head injury and the poisonous cloud of hyper-politicization that we are all forced to breathe these days.

Still, I don’t feel sorry for him. There are countless brain-damaged people who lead fulfilling lives without needing to shit on others while peeing on themselves.

Like too many others, Olbermann is a guy who can’t even keep a job but knows how to run the world. Once you skim past unremittingly hysterical headlines such as “TRUMP DOUBLES DOWN ON ORGY OF ANTISEMITISM,” take a gander at the thumbnails for his current self-produced-from-the-bunker podcast series. Olbermann looks incurably miserable in every last photo. He winces and grimaces through one pained expression after the next. One gets the sense that his tormented soul has very little to do with “fascists” and everything to do with the fact that he’s stuck being Keith Olbermann.