Update: Olbermann gives Stewart B- for smackdown

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart took on MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann Thursday night for what he dubbed as a devolution into petty name-calling — and offered his viewers a special comment of his own — replete with a dozen or so comical spectacles.

“For years, sir, your outrage was warranted, based in fact, saturated in reason, marinated in malice but tenderized with the cleaver of careful consideration once wielded so masterfully by the demigods of discourse those whose very chair you sit in,” Stewart quipped. “You fought your fight. And you fought it furiously and forthrightly but isn’t a fight, if ill-foughten, folly?

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“Fer-haps,” he added. “How far, sir? How far will you fall? Once, you toiled in the fields of the factual — equal parts punditry and profundity with prodigious prose as powerful as it was purple but now this, now this, sir — this, sir.

Stewart changes his glasses several times.

“This, sir — this, sir and no, sir. This teleprompter is not stuck. I am doing something called repetition for dramatic emphasis, you, sir, invented. I like it. ”

“But now you’re just kind of calling people names. To wit, you said this of Joseph Isidore lieberman, Democrat [sic], Connecticut, “a senatorial prostitute of Roger Ailes’ fat ass.” Chris Wallace, “a monkey posing as a newscaster,” Rush Limbaugh, a “big bag of mashed up jackass.” All right, all right, I’ll give you that one. That was a good one.”

“And of Michelle Malkin, you said a ‘mindlessly morally bankrupt knee-jerk, fascistic mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it” end quote. That sounds a lot more like violence against women than anything Scott Brown ever said… You ceded the high ground and now you wallow in the fetid swamp of baseless name calling. And as we both know, sir, that’s my thing. It is beneath you — it is next to me. A man of your intellect need not be me — petty, pompous, pusillanimous or poopyhead.”

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On Friday, Olbermann responded to Stewarts evisceration.

TV Newser’s Chris Ariens writes, “It was a little bit of a ripoff of the Affleck thing, but overall, I’d give it a B-.”

Olbermann was referring to a 2008 impression Oscar winner Ben Affleck performed on MSNBC’s sister network’s Saturday Night Live. (Video of Affleck’s impression can be seen below)

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This video is from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, broadcast Jan. 21, 2010. Affleck’s Olbermann impression from NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which originally aired in November of 2008 follows: