A liberal's inner turmoil

New York Magazine profiles MSNBC talk show host Keith Olbermann and, possibly not so surprisingly, the story's focus settles on Olbermann's admitted inner psychological conflicts.

Keith Olbermann is pissed off. That’s nothing new. Keith Olbermann has been pissed off since he could lift the toilet seat.

As an employee, Olbermann was his own kind of Worst Person in the World. His sense of superiority and caustic vibe eventually cost him gigs and friends at three networks. How naughty was he? Olbermann was the only former ESPN star not invited back for the sports network’s 25th anniversary (he’s allowed to participate on Patrick’s radio show only because Patrick promised that Olbermann would never set foot on the network’s Bristol, Connecticut, campus). He was fired from his first stint at MSNBC after he denounced his own show in a commencement address at his alma mater. Fox hired him to host its major-league baseball Game of the Week and then sent him home with a year left on his contract simply for being a malcontent. [emphasis added]

"His sense of superiority" is a mask, as the article later explains:

By 2002, Olbermann was in full rebuild mode, penning a 3,000-word Salon piece, titled “Mea Culpa,” apologizing to ESPN for his years of churlish behavior. Olbermann wrote, “I have lived much of my life assuming much of the responsibility around me and developing a dread of being blamed for things going wrong. Moreover, deep down inside I’ve always believed that everybody around me was qualified and competent, and I wasn’t, and that some day I’d be found out.” [emphasis added]

His problems with life began early:

It probably won’t come as much of a surprise that when Keith Olbermann was a kid, he got the tar kicked out of him on a regular basis. And not by the football team. “I got beat up by girls all the time,” says Olbermann. [emphasis added]

Via BotW.