August 21, 2023 • 49 mins
SEASON 2 EPISODE 17: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trumpland Trumpland Uber Alles
It is the most terrifying poll result I have seen in 25 years of doing this:
“Where (do) you feel you get information that is true?
Trump Voters polled by CBS answer…
“Friends and family: 63 percent.”
“Conservative Media Figures: 56 percent.”
“Religious Leaders: 42 percent.”
“Trump: SEVENTY-ONE percent.”
Not “Only 71% of them think Trump is telling the truth” or “Trump only tells the truth 71% of the time." 71% of them think Trump is the most reliable source of truth in their lives. It’s a cult: a cult so bad that a Trumpist Georgia State Senator is saying, in public, on a streaming show, that the reason he’s trying to defund Fonni Willis’s prosecution of Trump is: That if she convicts him, Trump will be executed. By lethal injection. I don’t know HOW we get out of this cult. I only know all these cults end the same way. Ask Jim Jones. Or Hitler. Plus: Trump drops out of the debates because he’s a big… pusillanimous fella. Mark Meadows DID Flip. And a UFC fighter tells Laura Ingraham Trump could beat Biden in a cage match.
Trust me: Ingraham could beat Trump easily. And the U-F-C fighter.
B-Bock (24:38) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: The murder of Lauri Carleton for supporting LGBTQ, Sage Steele boasts that a woman 43 years older and seven inches shorter than her body-slammed her into a garbage can, Dennis Prager doesn't think masturbating to animated child porn is evil and is astonished normal people do. (30:58) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Block or be blocked with Elon Musk, Catturd and James Woods. Jeanine Pirro posts photos of herself in orange shorts, and what do you call somebody like Virginia Republican committeeman Ron Hedlund who takes a 12-foot long banner of a penis to a baseball game and records video of 16-year old boys holding it?
C-Block (36:30) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Thursday is the 43rd anniversary of the day I proved what the phrases "Mom always said don't run for a train there'll always be another one" and "breakneck speed" actually mean.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. The
new whole question was simple. It had to be. It was,
(00:25):
after all, meant for Trump voters. We're interested in how
you describe where you feel you get information that is
true for each of these general sources. Do you feel
what they tell you generally is true? Trump voters answers,
sixty three percent said they felt what friends and family
told them is true. Fifty six percent said conservative media
(00:47):
figures tell them what's true, forty two percent said religious
leaders do, and seventy one percent said Trump tells them
what's true. It's a cult. It's an unambiguous, inescapable stranglehold cult.
(01:09):
They believe Trump more than they believe their own families
or believe Tucker Carlson or those nice pastors Robert Jefferson,
PAULA White Trump seventy one percent. And that doesn't mean
only seventy one percent of them believe Trump is telling
them the truth, or that they think Trump is only
telling the truth seventy one percent of the time, those
(01:30):
answers could easily approach one hundred percent. This is who
they trust most for the truth. You don't want to
know where medical scientists and corporate leaders and social media influencers.
Finished it is some comfort I suppose that among not
the Trump voters in this new CBS poll, but in
(01:52):
the likely Republican primary voters, President Biden is still slightly
ahead of the last place liberal media figures ten percent
to eight. It's a cult. It is a cult, as
surely as Jim Jones and Johnstown were a cult, and
Marshall Applewhite and Heaven's Gate were a cult, and Hitler
(02:15):
and his Nazis and Sodom Hussein and the Bath Party
Up is down and lying is truth, and the leader
is the oracle, and in a time of uncontrolled conspiracy theories,
it's all that much worse. And it is not a
coincidence that even in a time when religion and I
mean religion incorporated as opposed to spirituality or faith, when
(02:35):
religion is more intertwined than ever with politics, Trump is
still trusted for truth forty eight percent more often than
those religious leaders. He is the religious leader in this cult.
And the key ingredient to accepting a cult leader or
a religious leader, or both is to pretend he has
absolved himself of his sins and therefore will and can
(02:57):
absolve you too. And I think I think this madness
is actually made up of a series of smaller madnesses,
neatly welded together by happenstance, and opportunity. If you believe
your life has been a failure, or you do not
have the money you deserve because it was given to
the minorities, Trump is your man. If you believe the
(03:20):
gays are taking over and making your kids do gay things,
Trump is your man. If you believe the Democrats are
communists who are going to communize you whatever that is.
Trump is your man. If you believe it's all a
movie and Q is pulling the strings on your behalf,
Trump is also your man because people living these lies
(03:43):
to themselves are obsessed only with those lies, those specific lies.
They are immune to being interested up or down with
any of the other lies. You live your life within
the Q fantasy, But you really aren't a white supremacist.
What do you care if Trump is? What do you
care if his other supporters are That's irrelevant. He's the
(04:06):
Q guy. He has a coalition here, coalition of hate.
I don't know how we get out of it. That's
seventy one percent number next to Trump's name is the
single most frightening political poll result I have seen in
twenty five years of doing this, and the parallel number
(04:27):
just among those Republican primary voters, including the thirty to
forty percent who are not supporting Trump, in that he
slips to second place in the list behind friends and family,
but he's still at fifty three percent, and another twenty
seven percent of them think he's mistaken but not lying.
Only twenty two percent actually think he is lying. Spoiler alert.
(04:51):
I know him forty years. He's lying.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
He's always lying.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
I don't know how we get out of this cult
because the rest of us can't just disenfranchise the lot
of them, and we can't educate them, and we can't
correct them. And God knows, if there were a vaccine
for this illness, they not only would not take it,
but would reaffir most of their paranoia, and the seventy
one percent would probably push up to eighty percent or more.
(05:19):
But I do know all cults end the same way.
There are wars and bloodshed and disruption and chaos, or
in the small cults, there's just death, and at the end,
the human god is dead in a bunker or a pile,
(05:40):
and if you're lucky, after a sentence of death from
a court somewhere, all cults end the same. And oh,
by the way, this thought has already occurred to them,
to inside their crazy world, which really has begun to
look like bad fan fiction based off the real world.
Perhaps it's years of reading those Q posts about military
(06:04):
tribunals and Democrats being hanged and then replaced by body doubles,
and I just want to ask one of them, why
would you bother to do that? And then they could
look at me and go body doubles, Millennia Trump, then
I'd be stuck for an answer. And more practically, perhaps
it is years of Trump demanding the execution of spies
(06:25):
and traders and drug dealers and anybody else he doesn't
happen to like at the moment. But whatever is in
that soup, here's what it does to you. You may
recall that freshman Georgia state senator who wrote to the
governor last week demanding a special session of the Senate
in Georgia so he can start a vote to defund
the office of Fannie Willis. He's the new state senator
(06:49):
and bulldozer owner and world class auctioneer. And he's the
one with the eyes on the opposite sides of his head.
His name is Colton Moore, and reality be damned. Senator
Moore is convinced that all nineteen of those indicted in
the Fulton County case face death by lethal injection. You
(07:12):
heard me, death by lethal injection.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
We have a district attorney here who's taking my tax dollars,
my constituents tax dollars, my fellow Georgian's tax dollars, and
is using it for political persecution and to an extreme
that these eighteen plus Donald Trump that are indicted could
potentially face the lethal injection here in Georgia. And I mean, John,
(07:37):
I'm twenty nine years old. I'm not going to live
the rest of my life worried about this Gestapo tactic
tyranny going on in my stay.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
I don't know how to bring Colton back into this universe.
I don't and I don't know what to do with
all the other Coultons. Or when you see some of
Colton in say Senator Mike Lee of Utah or Marge
Green where goos are from Arizona, or when it's convenient
(08:06):
for him, Kevin McCarthy I do know that even when
Trump is dead, many of them, most of them, won't
believe he's dead, or they will believe he will soon
rise from the dead. I mean, the Returning Jesus Trick
is now in its one thousandth, nine hundredth and ninetieth year,
which is a long time for the band to make
(08:27):
the audience hang around for the encore. Where do you
feel you get information that is true? Religious leaders forty
two percent, Conservative media figures fifty six percent, Friends and
family sixty three percent, Trump seventy one percent. Back in
this matrix, Trump has bailed out of the Republican hate
(08:49):
debate Wednesday. He's apparently bailed out of the additional Republican
debates going forward. He's even bailed out of his own
scheduled news conference today. And we know why that is.
He reveals his cowardice only occasionally, but always unmistakably. You
can do anything, grab him by the pusillanimous. We now
also know with virtual certainty that Trump also whimped out
(09:10):
in his opportunity to upstage Wednesday's debate. After days if
rumors about this, The Guardian reported late yesterday that Trump's
people are in negotiations to have him surrender for his
booking at the Rice Street Jail in Atlanta on Thursday
or Friday, rather than try to have it go head
to head with the debate on Wednesday night. Might have
been a stretch to show up at exactly the hour
(09:32):
they are throwing out the first Russian talking point in
the Milwaukee debate nine pm Eastern, But as a jail
spokesperson noted, quote, the jails open twenty four to seven.
I'll add, just like the waffle house, I will confess
I think Trump missed his chance here. To wait until
(09:53):
Thursday gives at least Chris Christy and hell at this point, DeSantis,
what has he got to lose? After calling Trump's cultists
empty vessels. It gives Christy and and DeSantis the chance
to address Trump's latest indictment during the debate. There are
many imponderables about whether the air is coming out of
(10:14):
Trump's palloon yet, but there can be no question that
after he and Eric Bowling finished fourth in the cable
news ratings week before last, it is clear that a
Trump interview, especially one on tape, is no longer guaranteed
to control the narrative, Even if it does include Tucker
Carlson's comeback attempt. Hey remember Tucker Carlson. Trump is assuming
(10:37):
that his tired act will not wind up giving his
rivals full reign over the news cycle Wednesday night, and
depending on whether or not Trump waits until Friday to
get booked in Atlanta, all or part of Thursday as well. Besides,
Trump is really making two long bets on Wednesday. What
if his interview with Carlson is an audience washout compared
(10:58):
to the debate, or it just doesn't dominate the debate.
They have already recorded this interview. I realized that trump
Ists are always the least sharp tools in the shed.
In fact, they're the ones that have been out in
the rain for six years. But how often does a
political interview of any kind for any viewer stay fresh
(11:18):
in the can for four or five days. I mean,
this thing was recorded long before they had any clue
where they were going to try to air or stream
the thing, and Fox's willingness to sue Carlson to get
him to stick to their still active contract could really
screw it up for Trump. Plus, it has now become
(11:39):
so commonplace and routine that this other thing is etched
into our psyches, like the local street signs and the
way the sunsets come sooner every August night. Trump getting
booked for crimes just ain't what it used to be
in the good old days of last April. What the
(12:00):
hell does he do if the Republicans without him get
an audience number that beats his inn with Carlson in
real time on Wednesday, and then also beats coverage of
his Purp walk on Thursday or Friday. Trump will have
enough trouble purp walking the tightrope that is the subject
of the debates as it is, and with the website
(12:20):
bet online placing the over under for his way in
at the Atlanta jail at two hundred and seventy three
and a half pounds, any tightrope will be huge trouble
for him. Just last October, his nas Feraud, who like
advisor Stephen Miller, insisted, if you're too afraid to have
a moderated political debate, then you are definitely too weak
to take on the drug cartels laying siege to Arizona.
(12:43):
And in September twenty twenty, the other Miller, Jason, the
one with the perfectly symmetrically round Head wrote, if Joe
Biden is too scared to debate, he's too scared to
run the country. Although all of the fascists, not just Trump,
all of them exists solely for programming, for stunts and
publicity grabs, there's also something practical here. Any are the
(13:04):
gimm Trump gives for not debating the other Republicans this
week or later will be draped around his neck this
time next year as the real debates loom and he
cannot beat Biden without them, and Biden would risk almost
nothing by not doing them. Still zooming out for a moment,
you do get the feeling that the other Republicans will
(13:25):
be fortunate to get through the Wednesday debate without at
least three of them falling off the stage. I have
no metaphor here. I'm saying I'm expecting at least three
of them to fall off the stage. DeSantis has another
devastating leak out of his campaign now. First was the
debate prep paperwork story, which might as well have consisted
(13:49):
of seven hundred and thirty seven different pages of the
instruction stare daggers at them. Now comes some stuff handed
to the Washington Post, in which campaign fundraisers have literally
written down how they had planned to sell access to
The Post has an email from his top fundraiser, Heather Barker,
in twenty nineteen, reading quote, I could sell golf for
(14:12):
fifty k this morning a Florida lobbyist and his wife
wanted to play around with the then new governor, and
Barker was explicit about how the donation could be arranged.
All it was missing from the email was the subject matter,
I'm going to go pedal influence now wink emoji. Meanwhile,
(14:33):
last night, Vivek Ramaswami may have gotten his naive Ta
caught in the door or his Vivek. The website Semaphore
quoted two sources who said Ramaswami had complained to Newsmac's
boss Chris Ruddy that he wasn't getting enough coverage on
the Newsmax channel network stream. Whatever Ruddy quote suggested a solution,
(14:56):
Ramaswami told associates buy more television ads on the network. Unquote,
the way Semaphore positioned this story, they do not have
Ramaswami saying that he was promised more news coverage if
he bought more commercial time. But that was the implication
that he Ramaswami made I am the last guy on
(15:17):
earth here to defend Newsmas. But it responded to this
story with a flat, angry denial, hinting at legal action
and Ramaswami's tone deafness about everything would seem to include
things like the fact that candidates due by ad time
on television outlets, whether they are shiny or sketchy. As
(15:42):
a spokesman told Semaphore, quote, if candidates want to reach
our audience outside of our programming, then of course advertising
would be a good way for them to do this.
This is the basis of all political advertising. Unquote. I
think Newsmax is right here. Ah. Another tooth just popped
(16:04):
out out of my mouth. Back to the prosecutions, and
this is hardly a shock, but it seems to confirm
the operating assumption of the last few weeks. ABC News
reports Mark Meadows told Jack Smith's office that quote, he
could not recall Trump ever ordering or even discussing declassifying
broad sets of classified materials before leaving the White House,
nor was he aware of any standing order from Trump
(16:27):
authorizing the automatic declassification of materials taken out of the
Oval Office. It also reports that in an early draft
of the prologue to the Meadows book. And remember it
was Meadows's ghostwriter and his publisher to whom Trump is
heard showing off Mark Milly's Iran war plan. There was
a description in the first version of Trump having a
(16:49):
classified battle plan quote on the couch in his office
at Bedminster. Meadows apparently told investigators he took it out
and on his own impetus because it would have been
quote problematic to reveal Trump had possession of that document.
But an audio tape of him, possibly supplied by Mark
(17:10):
Meadow's people, brandishing that document around like he was showing
off a nineteen fifty two Mickey Mantle baseball card, that
would not have been problematic. I guess. Mike Pence told
ABC in response to this on the record that he
wasn't aware quote of any broad based effort to declassified documents,
and said if there had been anything like that, Meadows
(17:32):
would have known. And as an aside, Trump's spokesperson, the
one who wrote the Georgia report he was supposed to
reveal today but pusillanimous out. Liz Harrington says Trump is
ready to primary any congressman who will not vote to
defund Jack Smith's office. Frankly, I don't know if this
(17:53):
is true or if it's just aspirational to borrow a
recently popular word. Trump's record on primarying people is dismal,
and a bunch more losses could do him more harm
than Smith can. Can't let the cult see you fail.
On Friday, something even more fascinating and clearly less clear
(18:14):
had emerged from all the prosecutions. Relative to January sixth.
CNN's k file found repeated instances of one of the
architects of the fake elector's scheme, the Trump attorney, Nneth Cheeseboro,
indicted in Atlanta but not and just an unindicted co
conspirator in Washington. Kenneth Cheesebro marching two and around the
(18:36):
Capitol on January sixth with Alex Jones, crazy Alx Jones
and being photographed with Ali Alexander. I've posited previously here
that a direct link between Trump and the Proud Boys
or the Oathkeepers would be lethal to him. I don't
think Cheesebro is it. He's close, but he's not even
(18:59):
as close as Ronnie Jackson knowing to call the Oathkeepers
for help. During the violence at the Capitol or Roger
Stone ubiquitous presence alongside the scum of the earth that
whole month, I mean, the other whole scum of the
earth besides him, which brings us back to the cult.
There is a UFC fighter that's mixed martial arts and
(19:19):
his name is Colby Covington, and he is fully a
member of this cult. And he went on Ingram's show
for some reason, and she asked him, possibly as a
result of the last date we went out on in
nineteen ninety eight when she had I believe ten Cosmopolitans,
just as the Nightcap, and then her head started bobbing
like a nodding dog statue. Ingram asked him who would
(19:44):
win in an MMA fight between Trump and Joe Biden. Well, now,
I don't think you would be expecting any taped interview
with a fighter to appear on Ingram's show and him say, oh,
Biden absolutely, But still, Covington said Trump quote would drop
a magabomb on Biden. The thing with Biden is, you
know he can't even ride a bike. Okay, look at Trump.
(20:07):
He's going out to three rallies a day, flying across
the country, Laura added, he hats Damnina, She's helpful like that,
stammin it for days. Covington resumed, he's a cardio king.
You've seen his hands. Those things are lunchboxes snackems. Maybe
(20:28):
if he hits you with these hands, you're going to sleep.
It's night night. He said this out loud. Then they
put it on television. Even though Covington believes the exact
opposite of the truth about Biden and bicycles, and there's
the whole lunchboxes snack ems thing. And even though Trump
(20:49):
is not exercised since playing college baseball, and he can
barely lift his hands above his chest, then he can't
walk down and incline without a hands on guide. And
most imperatively, Trump would get the crap beaten out of
him by Laura Ingram. Now you're just gonna have to
(21:14):
trust me on that one. Also of interest here, stochastic
terrorism against random members of the public is here now
in southern California. She had a Pride flag hanging from
her store. So now she is dead. That's next. This
is countdown.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
This is Countdown with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Postscripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snark
some predictions. Date Line, Lake, Arrowhead, California. If you think
I overworked that phrase stochastic terrorism, think again. Think of
the libs of TikTok, psychos, and everybody who has encouraged
hatred and distrust of the lgbt Q community like Ron DeSantis.
(22:07):
Friday night, and as yet identified assailant went to fashion
designer Lorie Carlton's clothing store in southern California, ripped down
the Pride flag she had hanging outside, and when she
confronted him about it, he shot her to death. She
was the mother of nine. The murderer fled, was confronted
by police, and killed. This is a hate crime. It
is hate encouraged by and often directed stochastically by the
(22:31):
Republican Party. The sooner we start recognizing this, the sooner
we can begin to do things to remove the threat
that party and its cult members represent represent, just to
letting everybody not get killed. Dateline, Connecticut, Sage Steel steps
out of the worst Person's list. My former SportsCenter co host,
it has to have been less than ten shows. I'm
(22:53):
guessing that by counting my scars really stepped up and
stepped into it by announcing that she was a guest
on the view, and while waiting in the green room
with Whipop Be Goldberg and Barbara Walters, this happened quote
Barbara was standing over here in front of me. She
just started to back up toward me and looked at
me and got close and elbowed me, and it pushed
(23:15):
me back into the wall and the trash can. I
was like, what did she just do to me? This
one hundred and forty year old woman just tried to
tackle me. Unquote. Everything there is to know about Sage
Steel is in that quote. First, she slimed a woman
who cannot defend herself because she's dead. Secondly, she tried
(23:37):
to tear down the rep of somebody who did something
for other women in media, unlike Sage Steel. And maybe
worst of all, or best of all, Sage Steel just
revealed that a five foot four inch woman who was
forty three years older than she was was able, with
just her elbow to knock a five foot eleven inch
(24:00):
woman in a garbage can. As the kids say, Sage
weird flex, But you do you dateline, Los Angeles, fresh
off the rather remarkable development that Dennis Prager the last
time I saw him was a graveyard talk show host
on local radio in Los Angeles has managed to get
his prager You videos starring such educators as Adam Carolla
(24:22):
and Michael Knowles into the school system in Florida. Dennis
Prager may have actually managed to now get them removed
just as quickly. Prager continues to bail water after a
glorious decade or so in which he would speak this
or that given prejudice or hatred, and his audience would say,
you're right every time he voiced one of them. This
(24:43):
makes one a little sloppy, I guess. Prager went on
another conservative streaming show and insisted that while say, masturbating
to child pornography was evil, no, he didn't think the
other thing was masturbating to animated child pornography. No, that
was not evil. Would you use the word evil of
animated child pornography? That's all I said?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
No, I would use evil only with behavior. That's where
we might differ forgetting the sex issue. You can't be evil.
You didn't do evil. If you thought evil, you did evild.
Mastimating to animated pictures of pornography. I'm not doing something evil,
That's correct. Yeah, I think that's I think that's despicable. Yeah,
really yes.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Of course, Ever since, Dennis Prager has been appearing on
other conservative programming, trying all at once to make this
seem like no big deal and not at all like
a mental illness, while explaining it's not what he really meant,
while refusing to just come out and say no, I
was wrong. It is evil. This might be a good
moment to explain something A psychologist's friend of mine once
(25:45):
explained to me. The they are more guilty than I
am explanation. Every time you see a fervent anti groomer
arrested for child molestation, or a homophobe caught with a
male sex worker, or or you know four of them.
Every time you see a fervent anti abortionist who turned
out to have paid for his mate's abortion, herschel Walker,
(26:08):
Congressman James Comer, etc. It's the they are more guilty
than I am explanation in progress. The crusader who gets
caught doing the very thing they are crusading so loudly against,
my friend explained, is doing something they think is wrong
or evil or whatever, usually in private, usually in secret,
usually with great shame. They can't or won't stop usually
(26:32):
can't so to rationalize it, to live with it. They
become as completely opposed to whatever it is as possible
in their minds. This hypocrisy takes on a kind of
numerical value. If they're personal guilt at say, you know,
just to pick something at random masturbating to animated child pornography,
(26:54):
if their internal sense of guilt about that is, sayas
seventy five on a scale of one to one hundred,
they think that if they fight and ruin and even
kill others who do the same thing, if they do
that so much and so fervently that their opposition to
animated child pornography becomes a ninety, they're no longer actually
guilty of it, because their fight against it is twenty
(27:18):
points more than is their partaking in it. Nothing to
do with this prager guy, mind you just mentioning it
(27:41):
still ahead, Oh it is that time of year again.
Thursday is the anniversary forty three years Did your mom
ever say don't run for a train there will always
be another one. Came the day when I demonstrated what
mom meant. Teith catches the number seven subway train with
(28:02):
his forehead. Next in things, I promised not to tell
first time for the daily roundup of the misgrants, morons, undunning,
Kruger Effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world,
the Bronze Well, that's a tie, Elon Musk, James Wood
in this clown Buchanan aka cat Turd again. Democracy survives
(28:25):
not by the efforts of those of us trying to
preserve it, but by the idiocy of those seeking to
destroy it. In December, Woods, who used to be an
actor thirty thirty five years ago, suggested that in buying Twitter,
Musk might have saved democracy. Not long after, Musk began
to amplify the racist crap of this guy Buchanan Cat Turd,
(28:47):
and Buchanan began to praise him on a daily basis.
Then last week, Musk announced that he would be eliminating
the block feature. He didn't say this, but he did
this to stop users from blocking advertisers. Woods complained in
defense of the block and against the advertise. Musk replied,
then delete your account. Cat died. Buchanan promptly criticized Musk
(29:10):
for eliminating the block and Musk, who says he is
remember eliminating blocks promptly blocked James Wood and cat turd
I mean, honestly, at this point, it's like the plot
of a telenovela. The runner up Fox's Janine Page ten
is missing Piero. If you need Fox and the Fascists
(29:33):
in Microcosm. She authored a series of angry posts over
the weekend about her Jaguar breaking down and Jaguar repair
leaving her stranded in the parking lot of a Duncan
Doughnuts in the Bronx with pictures Miss Piro, who is
(29:54):
seventy two years old, seventy two years old, seventy two
age and IQ. She's shown in these photos dressed in
a light white top and orange shorts, like like she
works at Hooters, if there's a Hooters in the village's
retirement home for nazis near Orlando. We haven't heard anything
(30:18):
from her since the last post. She may still be
in that parking lot. But our winner Ron Hedland, who
has identified as a seventh District representative of the Virginia
GOP Central Committee and you know who else had central committees.
Headland posted supportive selfies with Trump in the past, so
(30:38):
we think we know where he's coming from. And by
his own admission, Headland has taken a banner to a
high school baseball field in Glen Allen, Virginia. Lots people
do that. What's the problem there? Well, this banner Headland
boasted was sixteen feet long and displayed a penis with
the words Biden sucks on it. And Headland then took
(31:01):
video of some of the sixteen year old boys holding
the penis banner. And he uploaded the video of the
sixteen year old boys holding the giant penis banner to
social media sites. And I forget, what do you call
people who like to take photos of teenaged boys holding
giant phallic images? What are those people called? Again? I'll
(31:27):
remember it later. Virginia's seventh District GOP Central Committee rep
run make America. Wait, that's what the g in MAGA
stands for. Headland two days worst Parson and the world.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Over the.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
So finally to our number one story on the countdown
on my favorite topic, Me and things I promised not
to tell, although truth be told, I have been telling
this story now for forty two years. On Sunday, the
twenty fourth of August nineteen eighty I learned what mom
meant when she had said, never run for a train,
(32:21):
There'll always be another one. Because I didn't know what
it meant, I nearly killed myself. I permanently altered my health,
and I put myself on a path towards meeting the
great doctor Renee Richards. I was sleeping late in my
relatively new and tiny studio apartment on fifty fifth Street
in Manhattan, Apartment ten F, when above me, eleven F
(32:41):
started making noise like pounding on the floor. And now
it's eight thirty Sunday morning, and I'm awake, and I'm
not doing my job as a radio sportscaster until about two,
and I think, well, I'm up. All the Dodgers are
playing the Mets at Shay. I can go to my
other job as a semi professional photographer and go shoot
the Dodgers and still make it to work on time.
(33:02):
So I packed my semi professional on the semi photographer's
bag and drag myself out on the subway and get
to Shase Stadium around eleven thirty am. And there's nobody there,
No Dodgers players, no Mets players, nobody but the grounds keepers.
And as the minutes pass, I'm beginning to calculate when
I have to leave in order to not be late
(33:23):
to my job back in Manhattan. Weekend life in New
York City in nineteen eighty might as well have been
nineteen ten. I tell people this. They do not believe me.
But when I worked weekends the next year in Times Square,
I used to call into my newsroom from a payphone
on Fifth Avenue and say, Okay, I'm going to Rby's today.
(33:44):
Who wants what? Or McDonald's or Burger King or wherever.
Because our office was in Times Square and on weekends
there were no restaurants open in Times Square. You could
not get food in Times Square on weekends. Today, the
same four square block area probably has fifty restaurants and
(34:04):
as food places. So the train back to Manhattan from
Shaye Stadium in Queens ran once every half an hour
on that Sunday in August of nineteen eighty, and as
I looked at my watch, I realized I should have
left the field three or four minutes ago. If you
went out the press entrance and exit at Shaye Stadium,
you could see the train approaching the elevated station out
(34:26):
behind right field, and if you had just seen it,
if it had just become visible. And if you then
ran your fastest, you could make it to the viaduct
that crossed the parking lot and led you up towards
the station platform. And if you could get your subway
token out and into the turnstile slot with one fluid
overhead motion, and if you kept running all the time,
you could just make the train. If you didn't, you
(34:50):
would be waiting half an hour, unless maybe the next
train was late or on fire somewhere. Sure enough, as
I got out of the ballpark, I could see the
Manhattan bound train just appearing at the horizon. I was
twenty one. My knees still worked, and I ran, and
I got into the viaduct, and I got the token
(35:11):
out of my pocket, and I got into the slot
like Darryl Dawkins doing a tomahawk slam. And I not
only made the train, but I made it by so
much that I styled, I celebrated, I congratulated myself. I
was guilty of premature jocularity. I could have just slowed
to a triumphant jog and gotten a seat, huffing and sweaty,
(35:34):
but eminently satisfied and on time for work. But no,
I decided to make an exultant, joyful leap. The next
thing I registered was the loudest sound I had ever
or have since ever heard, as if six hundred gongs
had gone off simultaneously, or a dozen church bells, or
(35:55):
every alarm clock that had ever awakened me from the
deepest of sleeps. Something like this, but inside your head,
bum YEA. When it happened was forgetting that I was
no longer six feet tall as I had been even
two years before, but was now just under six ' four.
My leap had ended with me slamming my forehead on
(36:17):
the flat metal bar just above the train doorway an
inch higher, I might have blinded myself. The bar an
inch above the doorway is, in fact, as I found
out later, the thickest piece of metal on a New
York City subway train. As it was, my momentum carried
me safely into the train. I hit the floor. I
(36:38):
saw my sunglasses go flying off and rattling down towards
the back of the train like a plastic rat. I
heard the train doors close, I felt the blood on
my head and in my hair, and I crawled up
onto the plastic bench seating behind me. The mass gong
sound continued in my head, and my first coachin thought
was to see the blood on the train floor and think, oh,
(37:00):
I have spilled blood all over their train, and I
don't have anything to clean it up with. Similar nonsense
continued to bounce around my concussed size eight noggin for seconds,
maybe minutes. It was beginning to really hurt, and of
more practical import the bleeding had not really stopped. At
this point. An older woman sitting more or less across
(37:22):
from me handed me a small packet. It was a
wet wipe. I mumbled thanks, opened it, dabbed it on
my forehead for a second, and was surprised to find
it instantly inundated with blood. This was the first time
it occurred to me that I might be in real
trouble on the Number seven local train to Grand Central
and Times Square. Apparently this thought occurred simultaneously to the
(37:44):
woman with the wet wipes and to her friend, I
think you're kind of hurt. One of them said to me,
let's get you to the hospital. There's one a couple
blocks from the next stop. Now understand this situation. The
New York of nineteen eighty and particularly the subways of
nineteen eighty were not nice places. Two years later, I
took a rush hour train to my job at CNN
(38:06):
at the World Trade Center and was annoyed to find
one guy who had sprawled himself over three seats with
a newspaper covering his face. Nine hours later, when I
went home, I got onto a train and saw the
same guy with the same newspaper on the same seats,
because it was the same train, and more importantly, because
he was dead. Anyway, it was now around twelve forty
(38:29):
five of a Sunday afternoon. If it had been night,
or indeed certain other times of the day or on
other train lines, I would have simply been the easiest
mugging victim in New York history. Somebody could have knocked
me over and taken my wallet with next to no effort. Hell,
they could have asked me for my wallet, and I
was so dazed I probably would have said, sure, have
a nice day, got any wet wipes. Instead, I met
(38:51):
not one, but two good Samaritans who knew where the
hospitals were in a part of town I could barely
find on a map. Sure enough, they helped me to
my feet walked me down the steps and to the
two blocks or so that separated us from Elmhurst Hospital,
And when I reassured them I was clear headed enough
to get into the emergency room by myself, they wished
(39:12):
me luck, and they would not even accept my offer
of two tokens to get them back on the subway.
There should be a monument to these two women somewhere.
If the New York City subways of nineteen eighty were scary,
the emergency rooms of its hospitals were something out of
a Brian de Palma film. I think there were a
couple of dozen people in the er. I remember one
(39:35):
of them asking me how I got so bloody, and
I explained, and he said you should go ahead of me,
and he opened his windbreaker to show a blood covered shirt,
and he added the bullet only crazed me. I know.
I waited about two hours. During that time, I had
a singular experience which has informed my understanding of concussions
(39:55):
and traumatic brain injury ever since. The desk nurse asked
me for the name of a contact, preferably a family member.
I gave my father's name, Theodore. Then she asked me
for my full name, and when I went to say it,
I could not remember my middle name. Could not remember
my middle name Keith, I got Olderman, I got that
(40:16):
was it. My middle name is also Theodore. I could
remember Theodore my dad, but not Theodore my middle name.
That is how fragile your brain really is. Think of
that the next time you see somebody get clocked in
a sporting event. There was some comic relief. I called
(40:39):
into my office at United Press International's Audio network and
explained to the news editor a veteran named Ed Kerns,
the most dapperman in radio history, who looked like the
actor Ray Collins from Citizen Kane. I told Ed, I
had just sort of almost, you know, killed myself on
the subway coming in from Queen's and I really didn't
know when or if I would be at work. About
(41:01):
forty five minutes after that conversation, the desk nurse started
shouting my name, and I thought, Okay, I'm finally going
to be brought in to see a doctor. No, it
was Ed Caron's calling from UPI. My bosses were all
very sorry that I was wounded, he said, but there
was nobody available to fill in for me. So when
could they expect me to be in the office. I
explained I did not know that since I was technically
(41:22):
still bleeding to death. Forty five minutes more passed, and
again the nurse summoned me and said there was a
phone call, and this time I was sure it was
my dad, Keith ed Karin's again at UPI. He explained
that my boss now said that they would bring in
the guy who was supposed to do the next morning
sports cast, my college friend Peter shack Now, but they
(41:44):
expected me to do his shift starting at four point
thirty in the morning. I explained to Ed that I
would trye and that honestly I didn't know where I
was or what time it was. Now two nice ladies
had mentioned the name of the hospital, but I really
wasn't remembering too well. Plus I was still bleeding to death.
Needless to say, I did not bleed to day. I survived.
(42:05):
It was a severe concussion, but it only took a
stitch and a half to actually close that wound, and
the er doctor and the nurses were outstanding and they
gave me easy to remember instructions, plus a note indicating
that I should rest for at least forty eight hours,
just in case Ed Caarn showed up at my apartment.
No offense to Ed. They told me what symptoms to expect,
(42:26):
how to prepare for them, and when they would stop.
And they stopped like one day earlier. It was a
potential disaster that turned into a nothing burger, or so
I thought. Two years later, I was at the original
Louis Armstrong Stadium covering the nineteen eighty two US Tennis Open,
on the other side of the same elevated subway station
(42:47):
where I had run into the train going there. Always
actually made me laugh until the afternoon of Saturday, September eleventh,
nineteen eighty two. I was watching the women's final, covering
it for CNN Chris Evertt, ob Hannah Mandlakova and swinging
my head from side to side as one does to
follow the tennis action from over here, two over there,
(43:08):
two over here, two over there, as I had swung
my head from side to side for the preceding twelve
days of the tournament. Then I swung to the right,
but my left eye kept looking to the left, the
old Marty Feldman thing reversed crossed eyes that hurt worse
than hitting the train. Had I could barely stand any light.
(43:31):
I often had to keep my hand in front of
my eyes. I rushed to my optometrist Monday morning and
he started to laugh. This happened to you during the
US Open. I said, yes, Why are you laughing at me?
He said, I'm going to send you to the best
muscle ophthalmologist I've ever met. I said, so, why are
you laughing at me? He said, you don't know who
that is. I said, no, I let my knowledge of
(43:53):
the muscle ophthalmology ranking slip. Why are you laughing at me?
He said, The best muscle ophthalmologist I've ever met is
doctor Renee Richards, the transsexual tennis player. I said, I
don't care who you're sending me too. I'm in trouble here.
If they can fix this, I don't care who you're
sending me. My train accident was so far in my
past that when I got in to see doctor Richards
(44:13):
the next morning, I didn't even think to mention it
in my patient history. It didn't matter. Thirty seconds of
staring into my eyes through a wall sized feropter and
Renee Richards said, when exactly did you hit your head?
August or September of nineteen eighty. I was stunned. I
did hit my head in nineteen eighty. August twenty fourth,
(44:35):
she made a clicking noise of satisfaction. I've heard of
this before, but I've never seen it. You couldn't do
this again in a million years. The good news is
that muscle problem with the eyes, that's just muscle exhaustion.
We can fix that with a thing that costs to
buck ninety eight. The bad news is when you hit
your head, most of the damage must have been absorbed
by your inner ear. If you want to fix that,
(44:56):
you'll need brain surgery. I don't recommend brain surgery. Doctor
Renee Richards showed me the muscle exercise is that cost
a dollar ninety eight. That fixed my reverse cross eyes.
They felt better immediately. I still do the exercises. I
did them earlier today. Then Renee Richards said, so you're
a sports reporter. It says here, listen, my next patient
(45:20):
isn't due for half an hour. You should rest anyway
after my exam. Let's talk about sports reporting. Renee Richards
was an expert. Her transition had been outed by a sportscaster,
Tucker Carlson's father. If you can believe that. I can
believe it because she had been a man when she
(45:42):
played in the US Open. As a woman, she had
become almost instantaneously the most famous tennis player in the world.
Then she became Martina Navratilova's coach. I learned more from
her in that first half hour of conversation about the
ethics of reporting than I had in all of my
previous life experiences come by. Plus, she was gas Renee
(46:08):
Richards was hilarious, She was self effacing, She was a
great doctor, and to me, she was the definition of courage.
And she I am proud to say, is still my friend.
All because I did not know what Mom meant when
she said, don't run for a train. There'll always be
another one. The other phrase I never really understood till
then was break neck speed. Oh, when there is one
(46:31):
more punchline here. If the name of that hospital that
the two good Samaritans took me to, Elmhurst Hospital sounds
vaguely familiar, it should. It was ground zero when COVID
nineteen hit. When the pandemic had its hand around New
York City's throat, the worst hit community was Elmhurst in
Queen's and The worst hit hospital was Elmhurst Hospital. They
(46:53):
were in desperate need at that point of ventilators, so
I knew what I had to do. You could buy
them for cash legally, so I got two ventilators. I
had them delivered, one for each of the ladies who
helped me to get off the damn train that day.
(47:21):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Hey, sometime yesterday or maybe late Saturday night,
we crossed the two million audience plateau for August. With
your help, we have an excellent chance at three million
for the month. Tell the others. Countdown has come to
you from our studios hi ontop the Sports Capsule Building
(47:44):
in New York. Here are the credits. Most of the
music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and
John Phillip Schanel. They are the Countdown musical directors, of course.
All orchestration and keyboards by John Phillip Schanel, Guitars, bass
and drums by Brian Ray, produced by Tko Brothers. Other
Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the group
(48:04):
No Horn's Allowed. The sports music is the Olderman theme
from ESPN two and it was written by Mitch Warren
Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical comments by Nancy Fauss,
the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was
my crazy friend Tony Kornheiser. Everything else is pretty much
my fault. So that's countdown for this, the nine hundred
and fifty seventh day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup
(48:27):
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest
him again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown
is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm
Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, then good luck.
(48:57):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. The
new whole question was simple. It had to be. It was,
(00:25):
after all, meant for Trump voters. We're interested in how
you describe where you feel you get information that is
true for each of these general sources. Do you feel
what they tell you generally is true? Trump voters answers,
sixty three percent said they felt what friends and family
told them is true. Fifty six percent said conservative media
(00:47):
figures tell them what's true, forty two percent said religious
leaders do, and seventy one percent said Trump tells them
what's true. It's a cult. It's an unambiguous, inescapable stranglehold cult.
(01:09):
They believe Trump more than they believe their own families
or believe Tucker Carlson or those nice pastors Robert Jefferson,
PAULA White Trump seventy one percent. And that doesn't mean
only seventy one percent of them believe Trump is telling
them the truth, or that they think Trump is only
telling the truth seventy one percent of the time, those
(01:30):
answers could easily approach one hundred percent. This is who
they trust most for the truth. You don't want to
know where medical scientists and corporate leaders and social media influencers.
Finished it is some comfort I suppose that among not
the Trump voters in this new CBS poll, but in
(01:52):
the likely Republican primary voters, President Biden is still slightly
ahead of the last place liberal media figures ten percent
to eight. It's a cult. It is a cult, as
surely as Jim Jones and Johnstown were a cult, and
Marshall Applewhite and Heaven's Gate were a cult, and Hitler
(02:15):
and his Nazis and Sodom Hussein and the Bath Party
Up is down and lying is truth, and the leader
is the oracle, and in a time of uncontrolled conspiracy theories,
it's all that much worse. And it is not a
coincidence that even in a time when religion and I
mean religion incorporated as opposed to spirituality or faith, when
(02:35):
religion is more intertwined than ever with politics, Trump is
still trusted for truth forty eight percent more often than
those religious leaders. He is the religious leader in this cult.
And the key ingredient to accepting a cult leader or
a religious leader, or both is to pretend he has
absolved himself of his sins and therefore will and can
(02:57):
absolve you too. And I think I think this madness
is actually made up of a series of smaller madnesses,
neatly welded together by happenstance, and opportunity. If you believe
your life has been a failure, or you do not
have the money you deserve because it was given to
the minorities, Trump is your man. If you believe the
(03:20):
gays are taking over and making your kids do gay things,
Trump is your man. If you believe the Democrats are
communists who are going to communize you whatever that is.
Trump is your man. If you believe it's all a
movie and Q is pulling the strings on your behalf,
Trump is also your man because people living these lies
(03:43):
to themselves are obsessed only with those lies, those specific lies.
They are immune to being interested up or down with
any of the other lies. You live your life within
the Q fantasy, But you really aren't a white supremacist.
What do you care if Trump is? What do you
care if his other supporters are That's irrelevant. He's the
(04:06):
Q guy. He has a coalition here, coalition of hate.
I don't know how we get out of it. That's
seventy one percent number next to Trump's name is the
single most frightening political poll result I have seen in
twenty five years of doing this, and the parallel number
(04:27):
just among those Republican primary voters, including the thirty to
forty percent who are not supporting Trump, in that he
slips to second place in the list behind friends and family,
but he's still at fifty three percent, and another twenty
seven percent of them think he's mistaken but not lying.
Only twenty two percent actually think he is lying. Spoiler alert.
(04:51):
I know him forty years. He's lying.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
He's always lying.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
I don't know how we get out of this cult
because the rest of us can't just disenfranchise the lot
of them, and we can't educate them, and we can't
correct them. And God knows, if there were a vaccine
for this illness, they not only would not take it,
but would reaffir most of their paranoia, and the seventy
one percent would probably push up to eighty percent or more.
(05:19):
But I do know all cults end the same way.
There are wars and bloodshed and disruption and chaos, or
in the small cults, there's just death, and at the end,
the human god is dead in a bunker or a pile,
(05:40):
and if you're lucky, after a sentence of death from
a court somewhere, all cults end the same. And oh,
by the way, this thought has already occurred to them,
to inside their crazy world, which really has begun to
look like bad fan fiction based off the real world.
Perhaps it's years of reading those Q posts about military
(06:04):
tribunals and Democrats being hanged and then replaced by body doubles,
and I just want to ask one of them, why
would you bother to do that? And then they could
look at me and go body doubles, Millennia Trump, then
I'd be stuck for an answer. And more practically, perhaps
it is years of Trump demanding the execution of spies
(06:25):
and traders and drug dealers and anybody else he doesn't
happen to like at the moment. But whatever is in
that soup, here's what it does to you. You may
recall that freshman Georgia state senator who wrote to the
governor last week demanding a special session of the Senate
in Georgia so he can start a vote to defund
the office of Fannie Willis. He's the new state senator
(06:49):
and bulldozer owner and world class auctioneer. And he's the
one with the eyes on the opposite sides of his head.
His name is Colton Moore, and reality be damned. Senator
Moore is convinced that all nineteen of those indicted in
the Fulton County case face death by lethal injection. You
(07:12):
heard me, death by lethal injection.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
We have a district attorney here who's taking my tax dollars,
my constituents tax dollars, my fellow Georgian's tax dollars, and
is using it for political persecution and to an extreme
that these eighteen plus Donald Trump that are indicted could
potentially face the lethal injection here in Georgia. And I mean, John,
(07:37):
I'm twenty nine years old. I'm not going to live
the rest of my life worried about this Gestapo tactic
tyranny going on in my stay.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
I don't know how to bring Colton back into this universe.
I don't and I don't know what to do with
all the other Coultons. Or when you see some of
Colton in say Senator Mike Lee of Utah or Marge
Green where goos are from Arizona, or when it's convenient
(08:06):
for him, Kevin McCarthy I do know that even when
Trump is dead, many of them, most of them, won't
believe he's dead, or they will believe he will soon
rise from the dead. I mean, the Returning Jesus Trick
is now in its one thousandth, nine hundredth and ninetieth year,
which is a long time for the band to make
(08:27):
the audience hang around for the encore. Where do you
feel you get information that is true? Religious leaders forty
two percent, Conservative media figures fifty six percent, Friends and
family sixty three percent, Trump seventy one percent. Back in
this matrix, Trump has bailed out of the Republican hate
(08:49):
debate Wednesday. He's apparently bailed out of the additional Republican
debates going forward. He's even bailed out of his own
scheduled news conference today. And we know why that is.
He reveals his cowardice only occasionally, but always unmistakably. You
can do anything, grab him by the pusillanimous. We now
also know with virtual certainty that Trump also whimped out
(09:10):
in his opportunity to upstage Wednesday's debate. After days if
rumors about this, The Guardian reported late yesterday that Trump's
people are in negotiations to have him surrender for his
booking at the Rice Street Jail in Atlanta on Thursday
or Friday, rather than try to have it go head
to head with the debate on Wednesday night. Might have
been a stretch to show up at exactly the hour
(09:32):
they are throwing out the first Russian talking point in
the Milwaukee debate nine pm Eastern, But as a jail
spokesperson noted, quote, the jails open twenty four to seven.
I'll add, just like the waffle house, I will confess
I think Trump missed his chance here. To wait until
(09:53):
Thursday gives at least Chris Christy and hell at this point, DeSantis,
what has he got to lose? After calling Trump's cultists
empty vessels. It gives Christy and and DeSantis the chance
to address Trump's latest indictment during the debate. There are
many imponderables about whether the air is coming out of
(10:14):
Trump's palloon yet, but there can be no question that
after he and Eric Bowling finished fourth in the cable
news ratings week before last, it is clear that a
Trump interview, especially one on tape, is no longer guaranteed
to control the narrative, Even if it does include Tucker
Carlson's comeback attempt. Hey remember Tucker Carlson. Trump is assuming
(10:37):
that his tired act will not wind up giving his
rivals full reign over the news cycle Wednesday night, and
depending on whether or not Trump waits until Friday to
get booked in Atlanta, all or part of Thursday as well. Besides,
Trump is really making two long bets on Wednesday. What
if his interview with Carlson is an audience washout compared
(10:58):
to the debate, or it just doesn't dominate the debate.
They have already recorded this interview. I realized that trump
Ists are always the least sharp tools in the shed.
In fact, they're the ones that have been out in
the rain for six years. But how often does a
political interview of any kind for any viewer stay fresh
(11:18):
in the can for four or five days. I mean,
this thing was recorded long before they had any clue
where they were going to try to air or stream
the thing, and Fox's willingness to sue Carlson to get
him to stick to their still active contract could really
screw it up for Trump. Plus, it has now become
(11:39):
so commonplace and routine that this other thing is etched
into our psyches, like the local street signs and the
way the sunsets come sooner every August night. Trump getting
booked for crimes just ain't what it used to be
in the good old days of last April. What the
(12:00):
hell does he do if the Republicans without him get
an audience number that beats his inn with Carlson in
real time on Wednesday, and then also beats coverage of
his Purp walk on Thursday or Friday. Trump will have
enough trouble purp walking the tightrope that is the subject
of the debates as it is, and with the website
(12:20):
bet online placing the over under for his way in
at the Atlanta jail at two hundred and seventy three
and a half pounds, any tightrope will be huge trouble
for him. Just last October, his nas Feraud, who like
advisor Stephen Miller, insisted, if you're too afraid to have
a moderated political debate, then you are definitely too weak
to take on the drug cartels laying siege to Arizona.
(12:43):
And in September twenty twenty, the other Miller, Jason, the
one with the perfectly symmetrically round Head wrote, if Joe
Biden is too scared to debate, he's too scared to
run the country. Although all of the fascists, not just Trump,
all of them exists solely for programming, for stunts and
publicity grabs, there's also something practical here. Any are the
(13:04):
gimm Trump gives for not debating the other Republicans this
week or later will be draped around his neck this
time next year as the real debates loom and he
cannot beat Biden without them, and Biden would risk almost
nothing by not doing them. Still zooming out for a moment,
you do get the feeling that the other Republicans will
(13:25):
be fortunate to get through the Wednesday debate without at
least three of them falling off the stage. I have
no metaphor here. I'm saying I'm expecting at least three
of them to fall off the stage. DeSantis has another
devastating leak out of his campaign now. First was the
debate prep paperwork story, which might as well have consisted
(13:49):
of seven hundred and thirty seven different pages of the
instruction stare daggers at them. Now comes some stuff handed
to the Washington Post, in which campaign fundraisers have literally
written down how they had planned to sell access to
The Post has an email from his top fundraiser, Heather Barker,
in twenty nineteen, reading quote, I could sell golf for
(14:12):
fifty k this morning a Florida lobbyist and his wife
wanted to play around with the then new governor, and
Barker was explicit about how the donation could be arranged.
All it was missing from the email was the subject matter,
I'm going to go pedal influence now wink emoji. Meanwhile,
(14:33):
last night, Vivek Ramaswami may have gotten his naive Ta
caught in the door or his Vivek. The website Semaphore
quoted two sources who said Ramaswami had complained to Newsmac's
boss Chris Ruddy that he wasn't getting enough coverage on
the Newsmax channel network stream. Whatever Ruddy quote suggested a solution,
(14:56):
Ramaswami told associates buy more television ads on the network. Unquote,
the way Semaphore positioned this story, they do not have
Ramaswami saying that he was promised more news coverage if
he bought more commercial time. But that was the implication
that he Ramaswami made I am the last guy on
(15:17):
earth here to defend Newsmas. But it responded to this
story with a flat, angry denial, hinting at legal action
and Ramaswami's tone deafness about everything would seem to include
things like the fact that candidates due by ad time
on television outlets, whether they are shiny or sketchy. As
(15:42):
a spokesman told Semaphore, quote, if candidates want to reach
our audience outside of our programming, then of course advertising
would be a good way for them to do this.
This is the basis of all political advertising. Unquote. I
think Newsmax is right here. Ah. Another tooth just popped
(16:04):
out out of my mouth. Back to the prosecutions, and
this is hardly a shock, but it seems to confirm
the operating assumption of the last few weeks. ABC News
reports Mark Meadows told Jack Smith's office that quote, he
could not recall Trump ever ordering or even discussing declassifying
broad sets of classified materials before leaving the White House,
nor was he aware of any standing order from Trump
(16:27):
authorizing the automatic declassification of materials taken out of the
Oval Office. It also reports that in an early draft
of the prologue to the Meadows book. And remember it
was Meadows's ghostwriter and his publisher to whom Trump is
heard showing off Mark Milly's Iran war plan. There was
a description in the first version of Trump having a
(16:49):
classified battle plan quote on the couch in his office
at Bedminster. Meadows apparently told investigators he took it out
and on his own impetus because it would have been
quote problematic to reveal Trump had possession of that document.
But an audio tape of him, possibly supplied by Mark
(17:10):
Meadow's people, brandishing that document around like he was showing
off a nineteen fifty two Mickey Mantle baseball card, that
would not have been problematic. I guess. Mike Pence told
ABC in response to this on the record that he
wasn't aware quote of any broad based effort to declassified documents,
and said if there had been anything like that, Meadows
(17:32):
would have known. And as an aside, Trump's spokesperson, the
one who wrote the Georgia report he was supposed to
reveal today but pusillanimous out. Liz Harrington says Trump is
ready to primary any congressman who will not vote to
defund Jack Smith's office. Frankly, I don't know if this
(17:53):
is true or if it's just aspirational to borrow a
recently popular word. Trump's record on primarying people is dismal,
and a bunch more losses could do him more harm
than Smith can. Can't let the cult see you fail.
On Friday, something even more fascinating and clearly less clear
(18:14):
had emerged from all the prosecutions. Relative to January sixth.
CNN's k file found repeated instances of one of the
architects of the fake elector's scheme, the Trump attorney, Nneth Cheeseboro,
indicted in Atlanta but not and just an unindicted co
conspirator in Washington. Kenneth Cheesebro marching two and around the
(18:36):
Capitol on January sixth with Alex Jones, crazy Alx Jones
and being photographed with Ali Alexander. I've posited previously here
that a direct link between Trump and the Proud Boys
or the Oathkeepers would be lethal to him. I don't
think Cheesebro is it. He's close, but he's not even
(18:59):
as close as Ronnie Jackson knowing to call the Oathkeepers
for help. During the violence at the Capitol or Roger
Stone ubiquitous presence alongside the scum of the earth that
whole month, I mean, the other whole scum of the
earth besides him, which brings us back to the cult.
There is a UFC fighter that's mixed martial arts and
(19:19):
his name is Colby Covington, and he is fully a
member of this cult. And he went on Ingram's show
for some reason, and she asked him, possibly as a
result of the last date we went out on in
nineteen ninety eight when she had I believe ten Cosmopolitans,
just as the Nightcap, and then her head started bobbing
like a nodding dog statue. Ingram asked him who would
(19:44):
win in an MMA fight between Trump and Joe Biden. Well, now,
I don't think you would be expecting any taped interview
with a fighter to appear on Ingram's show and him say, oh,
Biden absolutely, But still, Covington said Trump quote would drop
a magabomb on Biden. The thing with Biden is, you
know he can't even ride a bike. Okay, look at Trump.
(20:07):
He's going out to three rallies a day, flying across
the country, Laura added, he hats Damnina, She's helpful like that,
stammin it for days. Covington resumed, he's a cardio king.
You've seen his hands. Those things are lunchboxes snackems. Maybe
(20:28):
if he hits you with these hands, you're going to sleep.
It's night night. He said this out loud. Then they
put it on television. Even though Covington believes the exact
opposite of the truth about Biden and bicycles, and there's
the whole lunchboxes snack ems thing. And even though Trump
(20:49):
is not exercised since playing college baseball, and he can
barely lift his hands above his chest, then he can't
walk down and incline without a hands on guide. And
most imperatively, Trump would get the crap beaten out of
him by Laura Ingram. Now you're just gonna have to
(21:14):
trust me on that one. Also of interest here, stochastic
terrorism against random members of the public is here now
in southern California. She had a Pride flag hanging from
her store. So now she is dead. That's next. This
is countdown.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
This is Countdown with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Postscripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snark
some predictions. Date Line, Lake, Arrowhead, California. If you think
I overworked that phrase stochastic terrorism, think again. Think of
the libs of TikTok, psychos, and everybody who has encouraged
hatred and distrust of the lgbt Q community like Ron DeSantis.
(22:07):
Friday night, and as yet identified assailant went to fashion
designer Lorie Carlton's clothing store in southern California, ripped down
the Pride flag she had hanging outside, and when she
confronted him about it, he shot her to death. She
was the mother of nine. The murderer fled, was confronted
by police, and killed. This is a hate crime. It
is hate encouraged by and often directed stochastically by the
(22:31):
Republican Party. The sooner we start recognizing this, the sooner
we can begin to do things to remove the threat
that party and its cult members represent represent, just to
letting everybody not get killed. Dateline, Connecticut, Sage Steel steps
out of the worst Person's list. My former SportsCenter co host,
it has to have been less than ten shows. I'm
(22:53):
guessing that by counting my scars really stepped up and
stepped into it by announcing that she was a guest
on the view, and while waiting in the green room
with Whipop Be Goldberg and Barbara Walters, this happened quote
Barbara was standing over here in front of me. She
just started to back up toward me and looked at
me and got close and elbowed me, and it pushed
(23:15):
me back into the wall and the trash can. I
was like, what did she just do to me? This
one hundred and forty year old woman just tried to
tackle me. Unquote. Everything there is to know about Sage
Steel is in that quote. First, she slimed a woman
who cannot defend herself because she's dead. Secondly, she tried
(23:37):
to tear down the rep of somebody who did something
for other women in media, unlike Sage Steel. And maybe
worst of all, or best of all, Sage Steel just
revealed that a five foot four inch woman who was
forty three years older than she was was able, with
just her elbow to knock a five foot eleven inch
(24:00):
woman in a garbage can. As the kids say, Sage
weird flex, But you do you dateline, Los Angeles, fresh
off the rather remarkable development that Dennis Prager the last
time I saw him was a graveyard talk show host
on local radio in Los Angeles has managed to get
his prager You videos starring such educators as Adam Carolla
(24:22):
and Michael Knowles into the school system in Florida. Dennis
Prager may have actually managed to now get them removed
just as quickly. Prager continues to bail water after a
glorious decade or so in which he would speak this
or that given prejudice or hatred, and his audience would say,
you're right every time he voiced one of them. This
(24:43):
makes one a little sloppy, I guess. Prager went on
another conservative streaming show and insisted that while say, masturbating
to child pornography was evil, no, he didn't think the
other thing was masturbating to animated child pornography. No, that
was not evil. Would you use the word evil of
animated child pornography? That's all I said?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
No, I would use evil only with behavior. That's where
we might differ forgetting the sex issue. You can't be evil.
You didn't do evil. If you thought evil, you did evild.
Mastimating to animated pictures of pornography. I'm not doing something evil,
That's correct. Yeah, I think that's I think that's despicable. Yeah,
really yes.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Of course, Ever since, Dennis Prager has been appearing on
other conservative programming, trying all at once to make this
seem like no big deal and not at all like
a mental illness, while explaining it's not what he really meant,
while refusing to just come out and say no, I
was wrong. It is evil. This might be a good
moment to explain something A psychologist's friend of mine once
(25:45):
explained to me. The they are more guilty than I
am explanation. Every time you see a fervent anti groomer
arrested for child molestation, or a homophobe caught with a
male sex worker, or or you know four of them.
Every time you see a fervent anti abortionist who turned
out to have paid for his mate's abortion, herschel Walker,
(26:08):
Congressman James Comer, etc. It's the they are more guilty
than I am explanation in progress. The crusader who gets
caught doing the very thing they are crusading so loudly against,
my friend explained, is doing something they think is wrong
or evil or whatever, usually in private, usually in secret,
usually with great shame. They can't or won't stop usually
(26:32):
can't so to rationalize it, to live with it. They
become as completely opposed to whatever it is as possible
in their minds. This hypocrisy takes on a kind of
numerical value. If they're personal guilt at say, you know,
just to pick something at random masturbating to animated child pornography,
(26:54):
if their internal sense of guilt about that is, sayas
seventy five on a scale of one to one hundred,
they think that if they fight and ruin and even
kill others who do the same thing, if they do
that so much and so fervently that their opposition to
animated child pornography becomes a ninety, they're no longer actually
guilty of it, because their fight against it is twenty
(27:18):
points more than is their partaking in it. Nothing to
do with this prager guy, mind you just mentioning it
(27:41):
still ahead, Oh it is that time of year again.
Thursday is the anniversary forty three years Did your mom
ever say don't run for a train there will always
be another one. Came the day when I demonstrated what
mom meant. Teith catches the number seven subway train with
(28:02):
his forehead. Next in things, I promised not to tell
first time for the daily roundup of the misgrants, morons, undunning,
Kruger Effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world,
the Bronze Well, that's a tie, Elon Musk, James Wood
in this clown Buchanan aka cat Turd again. Democracy survives
(28:25):
not by the efforts of those of us trying to
preserve it, but by the idiocy of those seeking to
destroy it. In December, Woods, who used to be an
actor thirty thirty five years ago, suggested that in buying Twitter,
Musk might have saved democracy. Not long after, Musk began
to amplify the racist crap of this guy Buchanan Cat Turd,
(28:47):
and Buchanan began to praise him on a daily basis.
Then last week, Musk announced that he would be eliminating
the block feature. He didn't say this, but he did
this to stop users from blocking advertisers. Woods complained in
defense of the block and against the advertise. Musk replied,
then delete your account. Cat died. Buchanan promptly criticized Musk
(29:10):
for eliminating the block and Musk, who says he is
remember eliminating blocks promptly blocked James Wood and cat turd
I mean, honestly, at this point, it's like the plot
of a telenovela. The runner up Fox's Janine Page ten
is missing Piero. If you need Fox and the Fascists
(29:33):
in Microcosm. She authored a series of angry posts over
the weekend about her Jaguar breaking down and Jaguar repair
leaving her stranded in the parking lot of a Duncan
Doughnuts in the Bronx with pictures Miss Piro, who is
(29:54):
seventy two years old, seventy two years old, seventy two
age and IQ. She's shown in these photos dressed in
a light white top and orange shorts, like like she
works at Hooters, if there's a Hooters in the village's
retirement home for nazis near Orlando. We haven't heard anything
(30:18):
from her since the last post. She may still be
in that parking lot. But our winner Ron Hedland, who
has identified as a seventh District representative of the Virginia
GOP Central Committee and you know who else had central committees.
Headland posted supportive selfies with Trump in the past, so
(30:38):
we think we know where he's coming from. And by
his own admission, Headland has taken a banner to a
high school baseball field in Glen Allen, Virginia. Lots people
do that. What's the problem there? Well, this banner Headland
boasted was sixteen feet long and displayed a penis with
the words Biden sucks on it. And Headland then took
(31:01):
video of some of the sixteen year old boys holding
the penis banner. And he uploaded the video of the
sixteen year old boys holding the giant penis banner to
social media sites. And I forget, what do you call
people who like to take photos of teenaged boys holding
giant phallic images? What are those people called? Again? I'll
(31:27):
remember it later. Virginia's seventh District GOP Central Committee rep
run make America. Wait, that's what the g in MAGA
stands for. Headland two days worst Parson and the world.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Over the.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
So finally to our number one story on the countdown
on my favorite topic, Me and things I promised not
to tell, although truth be told, I have been telling
this story now for forty two years. On Sunday, the
twenty fourth of August nineteen eighty I learned what mom
meant when she had said, never run for a train,
(32:21):
There'll always be another one. Because I didn't know what
it meant, I nearly killed myself. I permanently altered my health,
and I put myself on a path towards meeting the
great doctor Renee Richards. I was sleeping late in my
relatively new and tiny studio apartment on fifty fifth Street
in Manhattan, Apartment ten F, when above me, eleven F
(32:41):
started making noise like pounding on the floor. And now
it's eight thirty Sunday morning, and I'm awake, and I'm
not doing my job as a radio sportscaster until about two,
and I think, well, I'm up. All the Dodgers are
playing the Mets at Shay. I can go to my
other job as a semi professional photographer and go shoot
the Dodgers and still make it to work on time.
(33:02):
So I packed my semi professional on the semi photographer's
bag and drag myself out on the subway and get
to Shase Stadium around eleven thirty am. And there's nobody there,
No Dodgers players, no Mets players, nobody but the grounds keepers.
And as the minutes pass, I'm beginning to calculate when
I have to leave in order to not be late
(33:23):
to my job back in Manhattan. Weekend life in New
York City in nineteen eighty might as well have been
nineteen ten. I tell people this. They do not believe me.
But when I worked weekends the next year in Times Square,
I used to call into my newsroom from a payphone
on Fifth Avenue and say, Okay, I'm going to Rby's today.
(33:44):
Who wants what? Or McDonald's or Burger King or wherever.
Because our office was in Times Square and on weekends
there were no restaurants open in Times Square. You could
not get food in Times Square on weekends. Today, the
same four square block area probably has fifty restaurants and
(34:04):
as food places. So the train back to Manhattan from
Shaye Stadium in Queens ran once every half an hour
on that Sunday in August of nineteen eighty, and as
I looked at my watch, I realized I should have
left the field three or four minutes ago. If you
went out the press entrance and exit at Shaye Stadium,
you could see the train approaching the elevated station out
(34:26):
behind right field, and if you had just seen it,
if it had just become visible. And if you then
ran your fastest, you could make it to the viaduct
that crossed the parking lot and led you up towards
the station platform. And if you could get your subway
token out and into the turnstile slot with one fluid
overhead motion, and if you kept running all the time,
you could just make the train. If you didn't, you
(34:50):
would be waiting half an hour, unless maybe the next
train was late or on fire somewhere. Sure enough, as
I got out of the ballpark, I could see the
Manhattan bound train just appearing at the horizon. I was
twenty one. My knees still worked, and I ran, and
I got into the viaduct, and I got the token
(35:11):
out of my pocket, and I got into the slot
like Darryl Dawkins doing a tomahawk slam. And I not
only made the train, but I made it by so
much that I styled, I celebrated, I congratulated myself. I
was guilty of premature jocularity. I could have just slowed
to a triumphant jog and gotten a seat, huffing and sweaty,
(35:34):
but eminently satisfied and on time for work. But no,
I decided to make an exultant, joyful leap. The next
thing I registered was the loudest sound I had ever
or have since ever heard, as if six hundred gongs
had gone off simultaneously, or a dozen church bells, or
(35:55):
every alarm clock that had ever awakened me from the
deepest of sleeps. Something like this, but inside your head,
bum YEA. When it happened was forgetting that I was
no longer six feet tall as I had been even
two years before, but was now just under six ' four.
My leap had ended with me slamming my forehead on
(36:17):
the flat metal bar just above the train doorway an
inch higher, I might have blinded myself. The bar an
inch above the doorway is, in fact, as I found
out later, the thickest piece of metal on a New
York City subway train. As it was, my momentum carried
me safely into the train. I hit the floor. I
(36:38):
saw my sunglasses go flying off and rattling down towards
the back of the train like a plastic rat. I
heard the train doors close, I felt the blood on
my head and in my hair, and I crawled up
onto the plastic bench seating behind me. The mass gong
sound continued in my head, and my first coachin thought
was to see the blood on the train floor and think, oh,
(37:00):
I have spilled blood all over their train, and I
don't have anything to clean it up with. Similar nonsense
continued to bounce around my concussed size eight noggin for seconds,
maybe minutes. It was beginning to really hurt, and of
more practical import the bleeding had not really stopped. At
this point. An older woman sitting more or less across
(37:22):
from me handed me a small packet. It was a
wet wipe. I mumbled thanks, opened it, dabbed it on
my forehead for a second, and was surprised to find
it instantly inundated with blood. This was the first time
it occurred to me that I might be in real
trouble on the Number seven local train to Grand Central
and Times Square. Apparently this thought occurred simultaneously to the
(37:44):
woman with the wet wipes and to her friend, I
think you're kind of hurt. One of them said to me,
let's get you to the hospital. There's one a couple
blocks from the next stop. Now understand this situation. The
New York of nineteen eighty and particularly the subways of
nineteen eighty were not nice places. Two years later, I
took a rush hour train to my job at CNN
(38:06):
at the World Trade Center and was annoyed to find
one guy who had sprawled himself over three seats with
a newspaper covering his face. Nine hours later, when I
went home, I got onto a train and saw the
same guy with the same newspaper on the same seats,
because it was the same train, and more importantly, because
he was dead. Anyway, it was now around twelve forty
(38:29):
five of a Sunday afternoon. If it had been night,
or indeed certain other times of the day or on
other train lines, I would have simply been the easiest
mugging victim in New York history. Somebody could have knocked
me over and taken my wallet with next to no effort. Hell,
they could have asked me for my wallet, and I
was so dazed I probably would have said, sure, have
a nice day, got any wet wipes. Instead, I met
(38:51):
not one, but two good Samaritans who knew where the
hospitals were in a part of town I could barely
find on a map. Sure enough, they helped me to
my feet walked me down the steps and to the
two blocks or so that separated us from Elmhurst Hospital,
And when I reassured them I was clear headed enough
to get into the emergency room by myself, they wished
(39:12):
me luck, and they would not even accept my offer
of two tokens to get them back on the subway.
There should be a monument to these two women somewhere.
If the New York City subways of nineteen eighty were scary,
the emergency rooms of its hospitals were something out of
a Brian de Palma film. I think there were a
couple of dozen people in the er. I remember one
(39:35):
of them asking me how I got so bloody, and
I explained, and he said you should go ahead of me,
and he opened his windbreaker to show a blood covered shirt,
and he added the bullet only crazed me. I know.
I waited about two hours. During that time, I had
a singular experience which has informed my understanding of concussions
(39:55):
and traumatic brain injury ever since. The desk nurse asked
me for the name of a contact, preferably a family member.
I gave my father's name, Theodore. Then she asked me
for my full name, and when I went to say it,
I could not remember my middle name. Could not remember
my middle name Keith, I got Olderman, I got that
(40:16):
was it. My middle name is also Theodore. I could
remember Theodore my dad, but not Theodore my middle name.
That is how fragile your brain really is. Think of
that the next time you see somebody get clocked in
a sporting event. There was some comic relief. I called
(40:39):
into my office at United Press International's Audio network and
explained to the news editor a veteran named Ed Kerns,
the most dapperman in radio history, who looked like the
actor Ray Collins from Citizen Kane. I told Ed, I
had just sort of almost, you know, killed myself on
the subway coming in from Queen's and I really didn't
know when or if I would be at work. About
(41:01):
forty five minutes after that conversation, the desk nurse started
shouting my name, and I thought, Okay, I'm finally going
to be brought in to see a doctor. No, it
was Ed Caron's calling from UPI. My bosses were all
very sorry that I was wounded, he said, but there
was nobody available to fill in for me. So when
could they expect me to be in the office. I
explained I did not know that since I was technically
(41:22):
still bleeding to death. Forty five minutes more passed, and
again the nurse summoned me and said there was a
phone call, and this time I was sure it was
my dad, Keith ed Karin's again at UPI. He explained
that my boss now said that they would bring in
the guy who was supposed to do the next morning
sports cast, my college friend Peter shack Now, but they
(41:44):
expected me to do his shift starting at four point
thirty in the morning. I explained to Ed that I
would trye and that honestly I didn't know where I
was or what time it was. Now two nice ladies
had mentioned the name of the hospital, but I really
wasn't remembering too well. Plus I was still bleeding to death.
Needless to say, I did not bleed to day. I survived.
(42:05):
It was a severe concussion, but it only took a
stitch and a half to actually close that wound, and
the er doctor and the nurses were outstanding and they
gave me easy to remember instructions, plus a note indicating
that I should rest for at least forty eight hours,
just in case Ed Caarn showed up at my apartment.
No offense to Ed. They told me what symptoms to expect,
(42:26):
how to prepare for them, and when they would stop.
And they stopped like one day earlier. It was a
potential disaster that turned into a nothing burger, or so
I thought. Two years later, I was at the original
Louis Armstrong Stadium covering the nineteen eighty two US Tennis Open,
on the other side of the same elevated subway station
(42:47):
where I had run into the train going there. Always
actually made me laugh until the afternoon of Saturday, September eleventh,
nineteen eighty two. I was watching the women's final, covering
it for CNN Chris Evertt, ob Hannah Mandlakova and swinging
my head from side to side as one does to
follow the tennis action from over here, two over there,
(43:08):
two over here, two over there, as I had swung
my head from side to side for the preceding twelve
days of the tournament. Then I swung to the right,
but my left eye kept looking to the left, the
old Marty Feldman thing reversed crossed eyes that hurt worse
than hitting the train. Had I could barely stand any light.
(43:31):
I often had to keep my hand in front of
my eyes. I rushed to my optometrist Monday morning and
he started to laugh. This happened to you during the
US Open. I said, yes, Why are you laughing at me?
He said, I'm going to send you to the best
muscle ophthalmologist I've ever met. I said, so, why are
you laughing at me? He said, you don't know who
that is. I said, no, I let my knowledge of
(43:53):
the muscle ophthalmology ranking slip. Why are you laughing at me?
He said, The best muscle ophthalmologist I've ever met is
doctor Renee Richards, the transsexual tennis player. I said, I
don't care who you're sending me too. I'm in trouble here.
If they can fix this, I don't care who you're
sending me. My train accident was so far in my
past that when I got in to see doctor Richards
(44:13):
the next morning, I didn't even think to mention it
in my patient history. It didn't matter. Thirty seconds of
staring into my eyes through a wall sized feropter and
Renee Richards said, when exactly did you hit your head?
August or September of nineteen eighty. I was stunned. I
did hit my head in nineteen eighty. August twenty fourth,
(44:35):
she made a clicking noise of satisfaction. I've heard of
this before, but I've never seen it. You couldn't do
this again in a million years. The good news is
that muscle problem with the eyes, that's just muscle exhaustion.
We can fix that with a thing that costs to
buck ninety eight. The bad news is when you hit
your head, most of the damage must have been absorbed
by your inner ear. If you want to fix that,
(44:56):
you'll need brain surgery. I don't recommend brain surgery. Doctor
Renee Richards showed me the muscle exercise is that cost
a dollar ninety eight. That fixed my reverse cross eyes.
They felt better immediately. I still do the exercises. I
did them earlier today. Then Renee Richards said, so you're
a sports reporter. It says here, listen, my next patient
(45:20):
isn't due for half an hour. You should rest anyway
after my exam. Let's talk about sports reporting. Renee Richards
was an expert. Her transition had been outed by a sportscaster,
Tucker Carlson's father. If you can believe that. I can
believe it because she had been a man when she
(45:42):
played in the US Open. As a woman, she had
become almost instantaneously the most famous tennis player in the world.
Then she became Martina Navratilova's coach. I learned more from
her in that first half hour of conversation about the
ethics of reporting than I had in all of my
previous life experiences come by. Plus, she was gas Renee
(46:08):
Richards was hilarious, She was self effacing, She was a
great doctor, and to me, she was the definition of courage.
And she I am proud to say, is still my friend.
All because I did not know what Mom meant when
she said, don't run for a train. There'll always be
another one. The other phrase I never really understood till
then was break neck speed. Oh, when there is one
(46:31):
more punchline here. If the name of that hospital that
the two good Samaritans took me to, Elmhurst Hospital sounds
vaguely familiar, it should. It was ground zero when COVID
nineteen hit. When the pandemic had its hand around New
York City's throat, the worst hit community was Elmhurst in
Queen's and The worst hit hospital was Elmhurst Hospital. They
(46:53):
were in desperate need at that point of ventilators, so
I knew what I had to do. You could buy
them for cash legally, so I got two ventilators. I
had them delivered, one for each of the ladies who
helped me to get off the damn train that day.
(47:21):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Hey, sometime yesterday or maybe late Saturday night,
we crossed the two million audience plateau for August. With
your help, we have an excellent chance at three million
for the month. Tell the others. Countdown has come to
you from our studios hi ontop the Sports Capsule Building
(47:44):
in New York. Here are the credits. Most of the
music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and
John Phillip Schanel. They are the Countdown musical directors, of course.
All orchestration and keyboards by John Phillip Schanel, Guitars, bass
and drums by Brian Ray, produced by Tko Brothers. Other
Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the group
(48:04):
No Horn's Allowed. The sports music is the Olderman theme
from ESPN two and it was written by Mitch Warren
Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical comments by Nancy Fauss,
the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was
my crazy friend Tony Kornheiser. Everything else is pretty much
my fault. So that's countdown for this, the nine hundred
and fifty seventh day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup
(48:27):
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest
him again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown
is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm
Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, then good luck.
(48:57):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
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