Welcome back to the Great Ivy League Snob Off. Let’s meet the contestants:

In the first corner: Cornell grad and MSNBC gravitas junkie Keith Olbermann, who says conserva-pundit Rush Limbaugh is a know-nothing plebe who couldn’t tell the Constitution from his left foot. He’s so dumb, he flunked ballroom dance! (True story. Check his Wikipedia.)

In the second corner: Cornell grad and journeyman blowhard Ann Coulter, who jumps to Limbaugh’s defense with an astonishingly baffling 900-word diatribe about how Olbermann is not the “scary smart” messiah his fans think he is, but an Ivy League fraud:

Keith didn’t go to the Ivy League Cornell; he went to the Old MacDonald Cornell. … Keith went to an affiliated state college at Cornell, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (average SAT: about that of pulling guards at the University of South Carolina; acceptance rate: 1 of every 1 applicants).

Touché, Coulter. You hit us East Coast intelligentsia right where it hurts– the threat of farm dirt, and athletes! This is even worse than the time we realized Obama went to some weensy school in LA* before transferring to Columbia. Her opponent reeling, the skeletor in the right wing’s closet delivers a bony little knock-out punch:

Olbermann’s incessant lying about having an “Ivy League education” when he went to the non-Ivy League ag school at Cornell would be like a graduate of the Yale locksmithing school boasting about being a “Yale man.”

A metaphor involving blue collar labor? Low blow.

But wait! Olbermann’s still got some fight in him. After the jump: The response that may require us to banish Keither Olbermann from the Ivy League forever.

Olbermann rolls up his sleeves and starts punching in his daily “World’s Worst” segment, where he whips out his big, shiny diploma and morphs into a belligerently insecure teenager trying out for the debate team:

This induces an inward cringe so severe as to cause us to shed our external shells and molt. Most amazingly, Olbermann comes out of the diploma-brandishing and statistics-rattling segment with a persuasive argument against his status as an Ivy Leaguer:

In my four years as a student at Cornell and nearly 30 years as an alumnus I have never before heard one graduate of one of the university’s colleges belittling all its other colleges as not counting. We always considered each other equals.

Sir, the whole point of attending an Ivy League university is earning the right to belittle your peers. In fact, it is a time-honored Ivy League pursuit second only to incessant defensiveness and the perpetual need to justify one’s intellectual validit–

Oh. Right. Congrats, Keith. Looks like you’re back in.

* To find out about Obama’s life pre-Columbia, I visited Occidental’s Wikipedia page, where the gravest of my fears was confirmed.

Olbermann’s incessant lying about having an “Ivy League education” when he went to the non-Ivy League ag school at Cornell would be like a graduate of the Yale locksmithing school boasting about being a “Yale man.”

As Coulter further muddles her own understanding of the Ivy League—originally and still just a sports conference—she raps about how alums of the “Ivy League Cornell” go on to become Supreme Court justices and stuff while the Ag School grads are basically all hicks and hockey players. So does this mean that Cornell is full of imposters playing Ivy League sports but who will eventually fail in becoming the next Paul Wolfowitz?

Not if the author of the Daily Sun’s Shameless Commerce has anything to do with it. Read all about it after the jump.

The Sun keeps up the classic Ivy League illusion of all the fine things in the right places. In the same way that Coulter builds an argument—to use a generous word—about the “plastic Ivy,” Shameless Commerce’s Leigha Kemmett writes weekly product reviews that ask the question, “Does a higher price tag really mean a better product?” Now given the tough economy and all this might be a relatively useful little snippet, especially for Ann Coulter’s going-nowhere sect of Cornellians.

Let’s remember that word: plastic. Sure, the honest comparison between some everyday goods like notebooks holds up for college kids. But comparing a $25 steak to a $66 one isn’t really helping students out is it? How about those $860 stilettos? (They look slutty, btw.) Oh, cheers for the review on $45 macaroni and cheese that went along with those shoes. The credit crisis is for poor people after all.

While IvyGate is here to stroke the snobbery tradition for all it’s worth, there’s a certain amount of elitist masturbation that even we don’t want to watch. Here’s to you Ag School students and alums. May you continue to play hockey like gods and figure out ways better ways to feed the poor—and the rich. And do overcharge the latter for the “highest grade” beef and cheese.