Round 2 in the Lloyd Grove-Keith Olbermann fracas sees Grove call Keith "Krazy," with a "K," then defend Katherine Thomson, his "twentysomething" assistant.

From today's Lowdown:

[Olbermann] used his third-place Countdown show — which has one-sixth the audience of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly — to slime my assistant, Katherine Thomson, as the "Worst Person in the World." Viewers must have been scratching their heads as Krazy Keith made creepy insinuations about my twentysomething associate's long and rewarding service at MSNBC before I hired her away.

"The conflict of interest is as bad as anything I've seen in journalism," Olbermann claimed, weirdly, adding that "when she left, nobody cried." Not that any of his colleagues were sobbing when he left his last half a dozen jobs in broadcasting, including an earlier MSNBC stint when producers reportedly had to pry him from a fetal position under his desk to get him to go on the air.

We'll anxiously await Olbermann's counterpunches, if only so we have an excuse to run the Olbermann-Grove Smackdown icon we photoshopped for like 45 minutes.

Countdown: Gloves Come Off in Olbermann-Grove Showdown [FishbowlNY]