July 19, 2024 • 65 mins
SERIES 2 EPISODE 216: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-BLOCK (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I’m sorry to write this, but it is now time for Joe Biden to withdraw his name for nomination for re-election as president of the United States. He should release his delegates with instructions to vote for Kamala Harris for president. We can, I hope, spend the next twenty years embracing Joe Biden and the greatest sacrifice made by any American politician in our lifetimes while we celebrate Trump being turned down by the pardon board for the twentieth consecutive year. For now, we must approach this without emotion because what is now a problem is on the verge of becoming a disaster. Its essence can be boiled down to five points.
First: democracy lives or dies on this. Also the climate and thus continuing life on the planet. We have to choose whatever path offers the best odds.
Second: the long awaited FOB (Friends of Biden) push in private is complete. Friends of Biden. Obama’s warning to “allies” that the Biden path was “greatly diminished” followed Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries, and possibly the Clintons reaching out in private to the president to tell him he must exit. I believe if he does not do so by next week these same leaders will risk a temporary rupture of the party by publicly saying they can no longer support him.
Third: as I said previously America will always choose the old man yelling at the cloud, especially over the old man whispering intelligently but inaudibly. This nation elected Reagan twice.
Fourth: the president has said he will be re-elected because he’s done such a good job. This, sadly, is no longer predominant in elections. And it is no how you beat a liar promising the gullible eternal life.
Fifth: the polls are cratering. The last 47 of them, Trump leads. I’m beginning to spot a pattern. In new polling by Emerson College, Biden is down by four nationally, and now an average of five-and-a-half in the seven swing states. On the other hand, the same poll pitted Trump against a mythical “younger Democrat who is qualified for the job.” As ludicrously vague as that is, and as much as the rule that the Imaginary Candidate always out-polls the real one, the results are too staggering to totally ignore. In those same seven swing states, that imaginary Democrat beats Trump by an average of seven points. The pendulum swings nearly thirteen points, and even with all the caveats it should at least reassure Democrats that they would not be throwing away their only chance of victory by changing – even now.
MEANWHILE: Evidence continues to mount that Trump was not hit by a bullet but by debris knocked towards him, and is lying about it - as he lies about everything else. The usual idiots were fooled into believing he’d pivot. His acceptance speech at FascistCon24 was the pivot everyone expected, until he demanded that all the charges be dropped against him CUZ UNITY. And the exploitation of the firefighter killed at his rally kind of went off the rails when he brought what was supposedly the man's uniform onstage as if it were a religious icon - and they had misspelled his names. And one of Trump's longest-standing pro-conspiracy co-conspirators is dead. Lou Dobbs – an original birther and a despicable human being – died yesterday.
B-BLOCK (32:25) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: We now have more information on who thought MSNBC would do better taking Joe Scarborough off the air as the Republican convention opened and replacing him with NBC’s online-only news anchors. It’s Cesar Conde, the NBC News boss who’s as bad as all the other NBC News bosses. Matt Gaetz spoke at the RNC and he either got too much botox or he had himself laminated. And we have that rare consecutive edition winner. Van Jones of CNN is back and badder than ever.
C-BLOCK (47:47) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: So the Republicans have officially nominated a convicted felon still scheduled to be on trial for e
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. I'm sorry,
(00:25):
but it is time for him to go. Joe Biden
must withdraw his name for nomination for reelection as President
of the United States. He should release his delegates with
instructions that they should vote for Kamala Harris for president.
I don't mean to treat this more lightly than it
seemingly deserves. I do not make a comparison between their conditions,
(00:47):
but truly to have said those words makes me feel
like I felt the day I had to make the
decision to stop the medical treatments that were keeping my
father alive. But there is a time for emotion and
a time for being emotionless, and this is the latter.
We can, I hope, spend the next twenty years embracing
(01:12):
Joe Biden and the greatest sacrifice made by any American
politician in our lifetimes, while we also celebrate Trump being
turned down by the pardon board for the twentieth consecutive
year later, we need now to make those things happen.
(01:35):
The essence of the problem boils down. I think to
five points. First, democracy lives or dies on the outcome
of this election. Also the climate and thus continuing life
of all kinds on this planet. Second, the long awaited
(01:59):
fob push in private is complete. Friends of Biden O
be noon yesterday was I think the final semi private
warning before they all go public. There appeared at that
hour in the Washington Post News that President Obama had
told allies in recent days that the Biden path to
(02:20):
victory had greatly diminished and that his vice president needs
to seriously rethink the viability of his candidacy. The Post
reports Nancy Pelosi called Obama. We know from CNN that
Pelosi got on the phone with Biden about how bad
the polls are and how the bleeding had spread to
the House races, and CNN reports he got defensive. The
(02:43):
Clintons may have done what Obama is doing, let something
leak publicly. First, we knew Wednesday that Chuck Schumer had
told Biden privately last Saturday that he should drop out
a Keen Jeffries in private, we know Adam Schiff was
the first big name to go off the public diving
board into the pool of unknown depth and call for
(03:06):
him to withdraw. CNN and The Times and Axios all
said the President was more receptive now to outside input.
Even like that. Axios also said he was more dug
in than ever before. Axios also said he is also
resigned to the pressure and the polls and could drop
out as soon as this weekend. And that's how to
cover politics. Three possible outcomes, predict all three of them
(03:28):
will happen. Be Steven A. Smith. I will again report
what I reported yesterday and just referenced. If the President
does not bow out presently, maybe my Monday, the fobs,
some combination of Obama, the Clintons, Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffrees, maybe
others will gently and with that same sense of bereavement,
(03:52):
I feel, go public and force President Biden to get out,
merely to repair the damage that such an unprecedented vote
of no confidence would represent. It would be manipulative on
the part of the Fobs, but powerful. Third point, as
(04:14):
I said previously, America will always choose the old man
yelling at the cloud, especially instead of the old man
whispering intelligently but inaudibly. This nation elected Reagan twice and
George W. Bush twice. And even if you don't think
(04:34):
w was an old man, you will agree he was
an old man in spirit. In fact, I believe you
could look at every presidential election since the invention of
recorded sound and not find one in which a candidate
who was often literally unintelligible defeated one who was not.
Trump may be saying crazier and crazier things, but those
(04:57):
persuadable voters are having trouble understanding what President Biden is saying. Fourth,
as he has voiced in every public appearance since the debate, interviews,
news conferences, speeches, the debate itself, the President believes he
will be re elected because he's done such a good job,
(05:19):
and I refer you to the noted political analyst Mae
West and her observation that goodness has nothing to do
with it. He has done such a good job, a
great job. This, however, is not how you beat a
liar promising the gullible that he will bring them eternal life.
They didn't beat Jim Jones that way, and Biden did
(05:41):
not beat Trump that way four years ago. It is
both a crisis and a tragedy that American politics has
devolved into what it is now, But it would be
more of a tragedy if Joe and the holdout Democratic
leaders denied that it has so devolved, and fifth, the
polls are cratering forty seven of them the last forty
(06:07):
seven polls, Trump leads them all. I'm beginning to spot
a pattern. The polls underscore a simple reality that the
situation the Democratic and Democracy campaigns are now in is
not about Joe Biden somehow maintaining the status quo, nor
even making up the ground lost since the debate. Before
the debate he needed to improve down the stretch. How
(06:33):
even if they found him the proverbial fountain of youth,
how would they still stop the parsing of every utterance
for a slip. How could we stop what is now
the ingrained default position, not just of today's incomparably unqualified
political reporters, but of today's incomparably uninformed political voters. We
(06:54):
all look for failure, not success. We all remember the
wrong name said, not the right one. Even the people
who will make more mistakes in the next hour then
Joe Biden will in the rest of his life, will
do so because pointing at his mistakes also allows them
to ignore their own mistakes and don't blame someone else.
(07:17):
I'm not blaming someone else. What do you and I
remember from the speeches of Trump that he's crazy and
he's evil, and far more easily that he gets all
the goddamn names and words wrong. We are living in
snark America, and snark feeds on mistakes. In the new poles, however,
(07:42):
there is both the nettle that must be grasped and
in that the pained relief that, no, we are not
throwing away a victory of some kind by changing horses
so well past midstream, but in other new poles by
the same company at the same time that didn't get
one thousandth of the coverage. The prospect for redemption that
(08:04):
a new candidate will bring is glimpsed polling by Emerson
College Monday and Tuesday, widely reported yesterday, widely accepted nationally.
It was Trump by two earlier in the month. In
this poll, it is now Trump by four. In this poll,
Biden is now losing in all seven original swing states,
(08:27):
by three in Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, by five in Georgia,
by six in Pennsylvania, by nine in North Carolina, by
ten in Arizona. Since March, in the Emerson poll, President
Biden has lost an average of two points in each
of the seven swing states. Those numbers are cataclysmic, yet
(08:52):
they are only half the numbers. Emerson is not considered
the gold standard in polling, but honest to God, how
close do they have to be if Trump is beating
Biden by ten in Arizona and six in Pennsylvania. Adding
to the uncertainty about the exactitude of this data is
the sponsor of this Emerson poll, the Bill Harris super
(09:15):
Pack Democrats for the Next Generation, which has not only
come out of nowhere to push hard for Biden to
drop out, but propose this nonsensical mini primary and pledged
to underwrite it. So just to climb further out onto
this particular Harris limb on Democrats for the Next Generation's behested.
(09:38):
Emerson also asked another question of the voters in those
swing states where Biden is losing on average now by
five and a half points. The question is really self fulfilling.
It's almost on the level of for people who like
this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing
they like, but the results are so large, they're so
(09:58):
startling that it's worth listening to them as some kind
of guide post. In imagine, the pollsters asked always a
bad start to a poll question. Imagine you have to
choose between two people for president, Donald Trump or another candidate.
(10:19):
The other candidate is a younger Democrat who is qualified
for the job. How would you decide who to pick?
Should have also asked them how many things were wrong
with that question? Imagine? Also, what does younger mean define
qualified for the job? Please? What if the voter thinks
(10:43):
you're asking them about Taylor Swift? What do pass poles
tell us about how much better nameless imaginary candidates do
than real life ones. Still, these are the results in
North Carolina, the imaginary younger Democrat beats Trump by two.
(11:06):
In Arizona and Pennsylvania, he or she beats Trump by
six in Nevada and Wisconsin. The Democrat beats Trump by
eight in Georgia and Michigan. It is your invisible little
Democratic friend by ten. So that's over here. Biden losing
(11:26):
to Trump in the seven Swing states by five and
a half in each state. Or the generic imaginary qualified
younger Democrat, let's call her for the sake of argument,
t Swizzle beating Trump in the seven Swing states by
more than seven points in each state. That would be better.
That would be better by just under let's see the
(11:49):
swing is just under thirteen points. Again, I'm assuming there
is a lot wrong with the pole company, with the pole,
with the sponsor, with the question, with the built in
imaginary stuff, with the self fulfilling prophecy element. But how
much wrong does it have to be before it stops
(12:10):
giving a clear indication that, yes, even now, a different
Democrat will do better on November fifth than will President Biden.
That is ultimately the only question, and there is some,
i think infallible intuitive logic behind this. The nation, even
(12:33):
if one hundred percent of those intending to vote for
Biden would still vote for him, will still vote for him,
no matter what is crying out for a younger, less
viscerally flawed candidate. There are drawbacks and prejudices and uncharted territory.
And every American who is worried about America's willingness to
(12:54):
elect a woman of color as president on sixteen weeks
notice should worry, but should also remember that America has
elected a man of color twice and given more popular
votes to a woman in the only three elections in
(13:15):
which representatives of either group have stood for the office,
and those three elections have happened in the last four elections.
One note about process here. I have remained, as I
keep using this term, agnostic about this because to me,
until and unless President Biden was ready to step away
(13:38):
or ready to be convinced to step away, and there
were clear indications and some reports yesterday and late Wednesday
that he was at least willing to have the meetings,
if not take the action. Until that point, I wanted
to tamp down the discussion and leave it behind the
scenes where it belonged, because the moment it went public
there would be only two remaining options. He quits, where
(14:00):
he goes right through until midnight strikes on November fourth
and fifth, being told he still needs to quit. And
that is where we are now. We got there on
the night of the debate. Not your fault, not my fault,
the president's fault, and there is only one way out
of this place. I have had my doubts for the
(14:24):
most practical reason, which I outlined earlier, for at least
a year. And that practical reason, when was the last
time a presidential candidate down by two or three or
four nationally and at least that much in all the
swing states roared back in the final one hundred days,
when he no longer had the ability to literally roar.
(14:47):
But things seemed to have stabilized, and obviously, given whatever
has been inhibiting President Biden, that State of the Union
address was the speech of his lifetime and one of
the greatest speeches in American political history. And you may
recall that the dump him movement went silent that night,
(15:09):
and it stayed silent until the debate. It was buckle
up and hope for the best, and we did not
get the best. We may have gotten the best possible,
but it is clear now it is not enough. And no,
this may not work either, but I think, having thought
about little else for the last year, this has a
(15:34):
better chance of working than staying with Joe Biden does.
I will add two more things. I am not surprised
things like this never work out in real life, but
I am sorry they could not have arranged for the
President to step aside during Trump's acceptance speech last night
(15:58):
and watch the networks cutaway. Don't make that face. This
always works when you can do it. Eleven years ago,
ESPN and I were talking about me going back there
after fifteen years of pretty much NonStop nuclear war. They
(16:20):
liked the idea. We had a good plan for a show,
but there was no compelling reason to actually do it.
And then Fox announced it was launching two new all
sports cable networks, and it vowed to take ESPN's business
away from it. And that's when the plot was hatched.
Fox scheduled and made a lot of noise about a
(16:41):
launch party for its new networks, a launch party on
July seventeenth, twenty thirteen, at their movie studio, a lot
on Pico Boulevard in La and they spent money. They
flew in writers from local newspapers around the country, and
on July seventeenth, we let them have about an hour
or so of fun and booze and food. And then
(17:05):
ESPN put out a press release announcing that after fifteen
years of nuclear war, Keith Alberman is returning to ESPN.
There is literally video of those writers streaming out of
the party to go write stories not about Fox but
about me and ESPN sports writers who left free food.
(17:35):
The trick works every time, and I'll add it could
still work if President Biden were to use it today.
And yes, the last note here, I am trying to
make myself laugh, so I don't cry. As I alluded
to earlier, this is as striking a moment to me
as was the day I had to tell them to
(17:56):
disconnect my father's life support. It was the right decision,
even from his own unconscious body language as it happened,
I think he knew it, and he too knew it
was the right decision. And thirteen years and four months later,
I have had only one regret, only one. And maybe
it's useful here, and maybe it's not. Maybe it's just
(18:18):
about me. I don't know. You be the judge. But
my one regret after all this time is this, I
waited about two weeks too long, because for those two
weeks I just couldn't do it. Also, the Republican Convention
(18:44):
is over, the Festival of Whites is at an end.
Asshole con twenty four is complete, and the headline you
did not hear. There is now even more evidence today
that Trump is lying about having actually been hit by
a bullet. The investigative unit at w Television in Pittsburgh
(19:06):
reports that four police officers from that city assigned Trump's
motorcade Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, were standing just feet from
Trump when the shots rang out, and they too were wounded.
The policemen were hit by quote either plastic or metal
fragments when the bullets struck objects nearby. The four officers
(19:29):
suffered minor injuries from flying debris caused by the bullets,
but Trump, standing next to them, and not next to
any of the gunshot victims, he was hit by a bullet,
not a piece of plastic or metal, even though Secret
Service sources confirmed before Trump was out of the Pennsylvania
(19:49):
hospital that he had not been shot with a bullet,
but had suffered a minor ear injury due to being
hit by flying debris, probably glass, possibly from a teleprompter screen.
Even though there has been no Secret Service report indicating
Trump was shot, no police report indicating Trump was shot,
no hospital reports that his injuries were consistent with those
(20:10):
produced by a bullet, no investigation indicating that a bullet
hit him or anywhere near him. And of course Trump
would never lie about something like this, and he and
his handlers would never trot out the gear of the fireman,
the bystander who was actually killed Saturday, as if the
(20:30):
pieces of his equipment were religious relics. Certainly they wouldn't
do that, and misspell the man's name. His name was misspelled.
That Trump survived an assassination attempt is not in doubt
here that it was a close call. Is in doubt
(20:53):
that it looks more and more like he exaggerated the
gravity of his injuries and especially what caused them. And
he seemingly has put some kind of restriction on anybody
saying either yes he was shot or no, he wasn't shot.
It was a piece of plastic like maybe he had
invoked Hippa regulations. That is essential to understanding this the
(21:14):
latest in his endless series of cons and also the
new religious overtones to Trump's hold on the unwashed and
the unloved who have been so mercilessly exploited by Trump's
new Republican fascist party, and the latest reason that idiots
like Politico's Natalie Allison would publish a preview of Trump's
(21:35):
acceptance speech just five hours before he gave it, in
which she claimed quote, there appears to be a new
softness to Trump, with people who've talked to him describing
him with words like existential, serene, emotional, and even spiritual.
Hey you left out misspelled? Yeah? And which does this
(21:56):
sound like? Is this the existential part, or the serene,
or the emotional or the spiritual. Was this the pivot
or maybe this was just the same goddamned selfish thing
he posted literally hours after that deadly piece of plastic
just missed him and cut his ear. A Republican maga
(22:19):
shot at me, So all criminal charges against me must
be dropped. Because unity, we.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Must not criminalize dissent or demonize political disagreement, which is
what's been happening in our country lately at a level
that nobody has ever seen before. In that spirit, the
Democrat Party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and
labeling their political opponent as an enemy of democracy, especially
(22:54):
since that is not true. In fact, I am the
one saving democracy for the people of our contract.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Yes, that's the new ooh Trump. After his record breaking
nine hundred and forty third pivot since the year twenty sixteen,
he has changed just as you would have had you
survived by just inches the assassin shard of glass, bullet, bullet,
assassin's bullet. Of course, he was hit by a bullet.
(23:25):
What are you crazy? Just because people standing next to
him were hit by glass. He's Trump. He got a
bullet of course, he got a bullet, a deluxe bullet.
Two other notes. First, my seemingly weakly offer to get
a conservative a free CT scan because just on a
human level, I'm concerned about their brain. Goes out today
(23:48):
to Marjorie Taylor Green, Neanderthal woman appeared on bright Bart
News from asshole con and I swear the interviewer had
one of those foreheads that juts forward like australopithecus, and
she Neanderthal woman claimed Trump was saved from assassination by
(24:09):
an angel flag. It seems like God's hand is on
his shoulder.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
You thought, I believe it. I believe we all witnessed
a miracle literally from you know, before it happened. The
flag above got blown in the wind and it got
tied into literally what looked like an angel.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Did you see that video? Oh my gosh, you guys.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
Have to find that. It was truly, it was like
an angel coming down. It was the American flag tied.
They had to bring it down and all the people
in the sands helped unravel it, and it was literally
before he came out on the stage.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
The only thing unraveling here is Marge. One of the
real giveaways that even they don't believe Marge when she
goes into one of her ecstatic religious trances like that
is this bright Bart put a whole story out about
this angel flag interview with her on its website, and
(25:01):
it used the clip, including the weird interviewer guy, and
it did not post the video of the flag that
supposedly wrapped itself into the shape of an angel, not
even a still photo. You know why not because the
flag didn't look a flipping thing like an angel. Google
it Google Trump angel flag and you'll see what it
(25:22):
looked like. I vowed to say to you the first
thing it made me think of the moment I saw it,
And the first thing it made me think of was
a sickle as in Grim Reaper. The flag looked like
that curved sharp blade the sickle at the top of
the sickle, and there was even part of the handle too.
(25:44):
And no, the flag didn't turn into a sickle either.
So Marge, it's my offer, free cat scan. And lastly,
lou Dobbs died. He was once a respected business anchor
on CNN, and then a not so respected business anchor
on CNN, and then an original Berther and incredibly he
(26:06):
was still host of his own CNN show until they
finally fired him in two thousand and nine. He went
to Fox Business and got increasingly fascist and crazy, and
naturally he connected with Trump, and by twenty twenty he
was pushing the election bullshit, and especially the hallucination that
January sixth was Antifa or George Soros or Soros Tifa
(26:28):
or whatever, and that the election was rigged by socialist
zombie extraterrestrials from the planet Skyron and the Galaxy of
Andromeda using Smartmatic machines. And when Smartmatic sued Fox for
two billion, seven hundred million dollars, Lou Dobbs was one
of only three Fox anchors actually named in the suit.
(26:49):
Fox fired him on February fifth, twenty twenty one, and
his show wound up streaming on Mike Lindell's Pillow website.
I have previously mentioned my extraordinary personal connection to b
Lou Dobbs. He was a CNN original based with the
rest of CNN's old nightly business show in the New
(27:10):
York Bureau. I had interviewed with CNN Sports for a
job twice in its first year on the air, when
I was still in radio and they were interested, and
I was interested. And then one Thursday I got a
call asking if I could fill in for two weeks
as the sports reporter in the New York Bureau, and
I said sure, and they said Monday. Only after I
(27:33):
had been there a few days did I ask what
had happened to their regular sports reporter, a woman I
had met several times on stories named Debbie Sigura. I
was told by our producer that Debbie Sigura and her
boyfriend Lou Dobbs had suddenly gone on vacation. Then one
of the cameramen, once the producer was out of the way,
(27:53):
said the boyfriend right. He relayed that Dobbs had suddenly
been found out by Missus Dobbs, and by Dobbs's mistress,
and by the executive in the New York Bureau he
was supposedly gallivanting around with as well. All at once
they found out. So Lou had to get out of
town fast, but I mean really fast. Ultimately, Dobbs and
(28:17):
Debbie moved to Atlanta and got married, and I got
Debbie's job in New York. And when I left that
job to go into local TV, CNN sent up an
anchor they had in Atlanta to replace me as the
New York sports reporter. His name was Dan Patrick. So
Lou Dobbs inadvertently invented SportsCenter Lewis Carl Dobbs CNN original
(28:42):
is dead and you know how old he was. He
was two hundred and six. Also of interest, here, I
can count on the fingers of one hand the number
of times the same guy, one worst person two shows
in a row. I think Dobbs did it. It has
happened again. The guy went on CNN and announced, quote,
(29:05):
a bullet couldn't stop Trump, A virus just stopped Biden.
And the guy is an idiot. Those are your clues
the malefactor's identity. Next, this is countdown. This is countdown
with Keith Olberman, my crazy friend, still ahead of us
(29:47):
on this editiative countdown. In the wake of the Republican Party,
which started with Lincoln, all right, he was there. What
third presidential nominee after John Fremont and somebody else started
with Lincoln moved on to Teddy Roosevelt even offered this
nation the useful boredom of Dwight E. Eisenhower. In the fifties,
the Republican Party nominated a convicted felon and the plotter
(30:10):
of an attempt to violently overthrow the government of the
United States, and a psychopath. In the wake of that,
there is only one story for me to read to you.
In our weekly visits with the Master, the greatest man
in the world. On Fridays with Thurber, I had first
still more idiots to talk about the daily roundup of
(30:32):
the worst persons in the world. We cover the world
here the daily roundup of the misgrants, morons and Dunning
Kruger effects specimens who constitute two days worse persons in
the world. Lebron's worse, says our Condey, chairman of NBC News.
I've told you before about him, back when I concluded
(30:54):
ten years of listening to MSNBC about going back there.
Sometimes they started the conversation. Sometimes I started the conversation,
says Our Condey. Had assistant asked me if I was
available for breakfast on fairly short notice to talk about
a new version of Countdown. I said, of course. She
selected a restaurant, I said, of course. Minutes later she
(31:16):
emailed back to say, oh, sorry, he's going to be
away in the rest of this week. We'll have to postpone.
Little did I know that that was the pinnacle of
Saesar Condey's NBC news career, Puck News, and I believe
they changed that from the original name, which was something
like puck Puck News reports that he not the head
(31:40):
of MSNBC, not even the president of NBC News. He
Sayesar Conde was the idiot who decided that they should
take their morning political gossip show off the air Monday,
even though its entire two hundred and forty three member
cast was already in the studios the day the Republican
Convention began in Milwaukee. CNN reported that Condy decided this
was the right call out of fear that somebody would
(32:02):
say something that would piss off the Trump Nazis. As
I noted, this was exactly the MSNBC NBC reaction in
two thousand and eight, when the Republicans leaned on Tom
Brokaw and Brokaw blackmailed NBC management into removing me and
Matthews from covering the rest of the convention and the
debates that year. Puck News, however, which employs a media
(32:26):
writer with a one hundred percent score from the Committee
to defend corporate news management, at all costs. He says, No,
it wasn't censorship, it was condy thinking that quote, he
would preempt all of MSNBC's perspective programming with the rolling
news coverage from the NBC broadcast feed. In other words,
(32:46):
no Scarborough, no Mado Hayes, O'Donnell, No what's your name
at night? Know the other? What's your name at night?
Know the on the weekend? What's their names? All of
them off the air. As Puck wrote, quote, Conday had
been peaked, peaked at by Puck the idea of mobilizing
his news platforms to cover a major news event, just
(33:09):
as CNN might, only to be reminded that the network's
real value proposition was the perspective itself. So wait this moron.
Conde had started that morning at NBC. Oh no, he's
been chairman of NBC News since May twenty twenty. He's
been on the job for four freaking years and two months,
(33:30):
and just Monday he realized that you can't just replace
the opinion programs on MSNBC with generic news coverage. And
I hate Scarborough like I hate few people in life.
He truly is the scum of the earth. But they
replaced him and missus Joey Scars with Savannah Sellers and
(33:52):
Joe Fryar of NBC News Now. And I've never heard
of Savannah Sellers and Joe Fryar, And in fact, if
you asked me, I would have said they sounded like
never seen offstage minor characters from the TV series The
Morning Show, and the chairman of the News division somehow
thought that Savannah Sellers and Joe Fryer would do better
(34:15):
in the ratings. For twenty eight years now, executives at
NBC have never accepted the reality that they can't just
use MSNBC or CNBC or any of the other channels
they own for that matter, as a spillover channel for
when there's really news and just fill it the rest
of the time with you know, other crap. Just put
(34:38):
on that Rachelle woman or whatever her name is, Meadows,
Just put on that Meadows woman. This dynamic, let's establish
a news based network with appointment viewing and its own
stars that makes money hand over fist. This has fought
with this other cynical dream of we can put on
all the stuff we can't fit into the Today Show
(34:58):
and we can train people on a cable, and when
they get good enough, we promote them to real NBC.
This has gone on, off and on, waxing and waning
since nineteen freaking ninety six. Generation after generation of producers
and executives and broadcasters have lived and died as first
one boss said make it its own network, and then
(35:20):
the next one said, no, America loves NBC News. MSNBC
must be NBC News Junior, MNBC News Triple A, and
then back to the first guy again. When we finally
got MSNBC profitable two thousand and five or two thousand
and six, instead of losing tens of millions of dollars
(35:40):
a year for the entirety of its first decade, all
of a sudden it started making hundreds of millions of
dollars because I yelled at George Bush. Since the day
I started doing special comments, MSNBC has earned its owners
ge and now Comcast, several billion dollars. But management's response became, well,
(36:02):
that's nice. We liked the billions of dollars, but we
wanted to make that money without any controversy and without
us having to stay past five PM to deal with
the controversy. And they're still doing it, or this guy
Conde is just a fool or both. The solution, by
the way, which I presented to them in a long
(36:24):
memo in two thousand and three, which I'll read here
one day soon, is actually simple. Stop calling MSNBC, MSNBC
caught anything else. Call it the American News Channel, caught,
the Politics Channel, caught, ethel the Frog, anything, anything that
doesn't have NBC in it, and you'll be fine. Silver
(36:49):
worser Matt Gates, Florida congressman and botox enthusiast, after his
speech to the Republican National Fascist Convention, in which he
looked like something in the way of a living iPhone filter.
I'm waiting for Gates to do a commercial in which
he says, aha uh sal kunfabo docs a side side cutta. Well,
(37:11):
I'll be able to move my mouth again. But there's
a larger issue here. The guy looked like he had
left his face home and had gotten one drawn on
for him. He looked like late stage Bruce Jenner CNNMSNBC, Fox,
BBC News, ethel Lefrog News. Dozens of small outlets covered
(37:34):
the convention wall to wall, and did anybody say, you know,
Gates looks like somebody just laminated him. I mean, the
concept of covering political conventions had died in the nineteen nineties.
Nobody watched them, nothing happened. The original idea was that's
where they nominated the presidential candidates. That's why you were
(37:55):
there to see who the presidential candidate would be. That
stopped years ago. Nothing happens now maybe this year. But
they're cheap filler for cable news networks even if nothing happens,
and they are easily understood by the morons who work
for the cable news networks, but at least brings some
actual reporting to them just thirty seconds out of every
(38:16):
twenty four hours. Gates looks like he melted Trump last
night was preceded by corrupt, racist wrestlers. You people at
CNN and the others you over there at ethel the
Frog News. You will go to your graves having never
actually contributed anything to people's understanding of the world around you.
(38:38):
You will be satisfied, Dana Bash, during your last twenty
breaths on this earth, that you managed to get in
the entire promo copy before the stage manager finished counting
down from ten. That's it. That's your legacy. That's your legacy,
Jake Tapper, that's your mark on this world. I mean,
not even saying Matt Gates, unlike we've ever heard him
(39:01):
before or seen Dana not even that, just once, maybe
just once. Of course, saying something, especially on CNN, brings
its own risks, as evidenced by the fact that we
have a repeat winner consecutive days. The worst Van Jones
(39:24):
I have mentioned before his extraordinary ability to be so
impressed by fascists that he thinks you're supposed to praise them.
This is when Donald Trump became president, and particularly that
you're supposed to forget all about the rest of what
they've done in their lives, as malefactor is in society.
Wednesday night, Van Jones, former Obama Special advisor for Green Jobs,
(39:47):
went on CNN and mocked the illness of the President
of the United States, who was the vice president of
the United States when he Van Jones had a job
with the government. Quote, a bullet couldn't stop Trump, A
virus just stopped Biden. You've got the nominees of this
party getting their butts kissed. Biden's getting his butt kicked
(40:11):
by his own party. The Democrats are coming apart, the
Republicans are coming together, and then of course he injured himself,
patting himself on the back. What was Van Jones's motive there?
As often with political pundits at all ends of the
left right spectrum, the desire to sound cool on TV
(40:32):
erases all other goals. If you can spontaneously produce parallel
sentence structure, you keep going seemingly never realizing you're creating
comparisons that are not valid and are not even replacement
level intelligent. A bullet couldn't stop Trump. A virus just
(40:53):
stopped Biden. The virus stopped Biden because Biden chose to
isolate to protect other human beings. The bullet didn't stop
Trump because A it may not have been a bullet
that hit him, but certainly b He couldn't see the
(41:13):
statistics on a screen next to him that was the
size of a railroad box car, so he had to
turn his head. Utter luck, no skill, no quality, no
action to protect others. One day, I'd like to hear somebody,
maybe somebody like Van Jones or whoever replaces him, ask
(41:34):
why Trump hid below the podium, emerged unscathed, maybe grazed
by a bullet, maybe grazed by a bottle cap, and
the only thing he did was to scream and rage
rather than urge the crowd to get down, Get down,
just for one second in his whole life, to think
(41:56):
about somebody else. Nobody asked why he didn't do that. Well,
we know why he didn't do that. He's not actually
a human being. He didn't care if you get shot
one day. I'd like to hear somebody, maybe somebody like
Van Jones or whoever replaces him, ask if now, after
the assassination attempt, if now is finally the time we
can talk about gun laws, given that the fascist candidate
(42:19):
for president almost had his effing head blown off by
another gun nut from his own political gun nut party.
But no, Van Jones couldn't do any of that because
he saw staring him in the face. Parallel sentence construction.
A bullet couldn't stop Trump. A virus just stopped Biden.
(42:43):
I'm some great, Oh, I hurt my shoulder patting myself
on the back. Common decency couldn't stop Biden. Common sense
just stopped Van Jones. You see how this works, Van CNN.
You must fire him the nation and you're remaining eight
hundred and thirty seven viewers will accept no less Jones
(43:06):
for the second consecutive day, two days. Worse person and
the world I've thought. I've seen this story playing out
in real time in this country almost every day for
(43:29):
about seven years. Sit back and relax, if relax is
the right word for it. For the Greatest Man in
the World by James Thurber. Looking back on it now
from the vantage point of nineteen forty one can only
marvel that it had not happened long before it did.
(43:51):
The United States of America had been ever since Kitty
Hawk blindly constructing the elaborate petard by which, sooner or
later it must be hoist will. It was inevitable that
someday there would come, roaring out of the skies a
national hero of insufficient intelligence, background, and character, successfully to
(44:12):
endure the mounting orgies of glory prepared for aviators who
stayed up for a long time or flew a great distance.
Both Lindbergh and Byrd, fortunately for national decorum and international amity,
had been gentlemen, So had our other famous aviators. They
wore their laurels, gracefully, withstood the awful weather of publicity,
(44:35):
married excellent women, usually fine family and quietly retired to
private life and the enjoyment of their varying fortunes. No
untoward incidents on a worldwide scale marred the perfection of
their conduct on the perilous heights of fame. The exception
to the rule was, however, bound to occur, and it
(44:58):
did in July nineteen thirty seven, when Jack Pal Smirch
erstwhile mechanics helper in a small garage in Westfield, Iowa,
flew a second hand, single motored Breasthabn Dragonfly three monoplane
all the way around the world without stopping. Never before
(45:21):
in the history of aviation had such a flight as
Smirches even been dreamed of. No one had even taken
seriously the weird floating auxiliary gas tanks invention of the
mad New Hampshire professor of astronomy, doctor Charles Lewis, Gresham,
upon which Smirch placed full reliance. When the garage worker,
a slightly built, surly unprepossessing young man of twenty two,
(45:45):
appeared at Roosevelt Field early in July nineteen thirty seven,
slowly chewing a great quid of scrap, tobacco and announced,
nobody ain't seen no flying yet. The newspapers touched briefly
and satirically upon his projected twenty five thousand mile flight.
Aeronautical and automotive experts dismissed the idea, curtly, implying that
(46:09):
it was a hoax, the publicity stunt. The rusty, battered
second hand plane wouldn't go, The Gresham auxiliary tanks wouldn't work.
It was simply a cheap joke. Smirch. However, after calling
on a girl in Brooklyn who worked in the flap
(46:30):
folding department of a large paper box factory, a girl
whom he later described as his sweet Petuti climbed nonchalantly
into his ridiculous plane at dawn the memorable seventh of
July nineteen thirty seven, spit a curve of tobacco juice
into the still air, and took off, carrying with him
(46:50):
only a gallon of bootleg gin and six pounds of salami.
When the garage boy thundered out over the ocean, the
papers were forced to record in all seriousness that a mad,
unknown young man his name was variously misspelled, had actually
set out upon a preposterous attempt to span the world
(47:12):
in a rickety one engine contraption, trusting to the long
distance refueling device of a crazy schoolmaster. When nine days later,
without having stopped once, the tiny plane appeared above San
Francisco Bay, headed for New York, spluttering and choking, to
be sure, but still magnificently and miraculously aloft the headlines,
(47:32):
which long since had crowded everything else off the front page.
Even the shooting of the governor of Illinois by the
Valetti Gang swelled to unprecedented size, and the news stories
began to run to twenty five and thirty columns. It
was noticeable, however, that the accounts of the epoch making
(47:54):
flight touched rather lightly upon the aviator himself. This was
not because the facts about the hero as a man
were too meager, but because they were too complete. Reporters
who had been rushed out to Iowa when Smirch's plane
was first sighted over the little French coast town of
(48:15):
ser Lee Lemaire to dig up the story of the
great man's life had promptly discovered that the story of
his life could not be printed. His mother, a sullen
short order cook and a shack restaurant on the edge
of a tourist's camping ground near Westfield, met all inquiries
as to her son, with an angry and the hell
with him a help, he drowns. His father appeared to
(48:37):
be in jail somewhere for stealing spotlights and lap robes
from tourists automobiles. His young brother, a weak minded lad,
had but recently escaped from the Preston, Iowa Reformatory, and
was already wanted in several Western towns for the theft
of money order blanks from post offices. These alarming discoveries
(48:58):
were still piling up at the very time that pal Smirch,
the greatest hero of the twentieth century, dead for sleep,
half starved, was piloting his crazy junk heap high above
the region in which the lamentable story of his private
life was being unearthed, headed for New York and a
greater glory than any man of his time had ever known.
(49:22):
The necessity for printing some account in the papers of
the young man's career and personality had led to a
remarkable predicament. It was, of course, impossible to reveal the
facts for a tremendous popular feeling in favor of the
young hero had sprung up like a grass fire when
he was halfway across Europe on his flight around the globe.
(49:43):
He was therefore described as a modest, chap taciturn blonde,
popular with his friends, popular with girls. The only available
snapshot of Smirch, taken at the wheel of a phony
automobile in a cheap photo studio at an amusement park,
was touched up so that the little vulgarian looked quite handsome.
(50:05):
Twisted leer was smoothed into a pleasant smile. The truth
was in this way kept from the youth's ecstatic compatriots.
They did not dream that the Smirch family was despised
and feared by its neighbors in the obscure Iowa town,
nor that the hero himself, because of numerous unsavory exploits,
(50:25):
had come to be regarded in Westfield as a nuisance
and a menace. Pal's Smirch had, the reporters discovered, once
knife the principle of his high school, not mortally, to
be sure, but he had knifed him, and on another occasion,
surprised in the act of an stealing altar cloth from
a church, he had bashed the sexton over the head
(50:48):
with a pot of Easter lilies. For each of these offenses,
he had served a sentence in the reformatory. Inwardly, the authorities,
both in New York and in Washington, prayed that an
understanding providence might, however awful, such a thing seemed, bring
disaster to the rusty, battered plane and its illustrious pilot,
(51:10):
whose unheard of flight had aroused the civilized world to
hosannas of hysterical praise. The authorities were convinced that the
character of the renowned aviator was such that the limelight
of adulation was bound to reveal him to all the
world as a congenital hooligan, mentally and morally unequipped to
(51:31):
cope with his own prodigious fame. I trust, said the
Secretary of State, at one of the many secret cabinet
meetings called to consider the national dilemma. I trust that
his mother's prayer will be answered, by which he referred
to missus Emma's smirch's wish that her son might be drowned.
(51:53):
It was, however, too late for that Spurch had leaped
the Atlantic and then the Pacific as if they were
mill ponds. At three minutes after two o'clock on the
afternoon of July seventeenth, nineteen thirty seven, j Boy brought
his idiotic plane into Roosevelt Field for a perfect three
point landing. It had, of course been out of the
(52:14):
question to arrange a modest little reception for the greatest
flier in the history of the world. He was received
at Roosevelt Field with such elaborate and pretentious ceremonies as
rocked the world. Fortunately, however, the warren and spent hero
promptly swooned, had to be removed bodily from his plane,
and was spirited from the field without having opened his
(52:35):
mouth once. Thus he did not jeopardize the dignity of
his first reception, a reception illumined by the presence of
the Secretaries of War and the Navy, Mayor Michael J.
Moriarty of New York, the Premier of Canada, Governors Fanamine Groves,
mcpheey and Critchfield, and a brilliant array of European diplomats.
Smirch did not, in fact come too in time to
(52:58):
take part in the gigantic hullabaloo arranged at City Hall
for the next day he was rushed to a secluded
nursing home and confined in bed. It was nine days
before he was able to get up, or, to be
more exact, before he was permitted to get up. Meanwhile,
the greatest minds in the country, in solemn assembly, had
(53:19):
arranged a secret conference of city, state and government officials,
which Smirch was to attend for the purpose of being
instructed in the ethics and behavior of heroism. On the
day that the little mechanic was finally allowed to get
up in dress and for the first time in two weeks,
took a great chew of tomacco, he was permitted to receive.
(53:41):
The newspaper men this by way of testing him out.
Smirch did not wait for questions. Use guys, he said,
and the Times Man winced. Use guys can tell the
cock eyed world that I put it over on Lindberg.
See yeah, man, an assaid, I'm two frogs. The two
(54:03):
frogs was a reference to a pair of gallant French flyers, who,
in attempting to flight only halfway round the world, had
two weeks before unhappily been lost at sea. The Times
Man was bold enough at this point to sketch out
for Smirch the accepted formula for interviews in cases of
this kind. He explained that there should be no arrogant
(54:24):
statements belittling the achievements of other heroes, particularly heroes of
foreign nations. A the hell with that, said Smirch, I
did it. See I did it, and I'm talking about it,
and he did talk about it. None of this extraordinary
interview was, of course printed. On the contrary, the newspapers,
(54:46):
already under the disciplined direction of a secret directorate created
for the occasion and composed of statesmen and editors, gave
out to a panting and restless world that Jackie, as
he had been arbitrarily nicknamed, would consent to say only
that he was very happy, and that anyone could have
done what he did. My achievement has been I fear
(55:08):
slightly exaggerated. The times Man's article had him protest with
a modest smile. These newspaper stories were kept from the hero,
a restriction which did not serve to abate the rising
malevolence of his temper. The situation was indeed extremely grave
for Palell' Smirch was, as he kept insisting, raring to go.
(55:32):
He could not much longer be kept from a nation
clamorous to lionize him. It was the most desperate crisis
the United States of America had faced since the sinking
of Belusitania. On the afternoon of the twenty seventh of July,
Smirch was spirited away to a conference room in which
were gathered mayors, governors, government officials, behaviorist, psychologists, and editors.
(55:56):
He gave them each a limp moist paw, and a brief,
unlovely grin hi, he said. When Smirch was seated, the
Mayor of New York arose, and, with obvious pessimism, attempted
to explain what he must say and how he must
act when presented to the world, ending his talk with
a high tribute to the hero's courage and integrity. The
(56:19):
Mayor was followed by Governor Fannerman of New York, who,
after a touching declaration of faith, introduced Cameron Spottiswood, second
Secretary of the American Embassy in Paris, the gentleman selected
to coach Smirch in the amenities of public ceremonies. Sitting
in a chair with a soiled yellow tie in his
hand and his shirt open at the throat unshaved, smoking
(56:42):
a rolled cigarette. Jack Smirch listened with a leer on
his lips. I get you, I get you, he cut
in nastily. You want me to act like a softie. Huh?
You want me to act like that bemny memty baby
face lind big huh, Well nuts to that. See. Everyone
(57:03):
took in his breath sharply. It was a sigh and
a hiss. Mister Lindbergh began a United States Senator purple
with rage, and mister bird Smirch, who was paring his
nails with a jackknife, cut in again. Boyd, he exclaimed, Oh,
for God's sake, that big somebody shut off the blasphemies
(57:24):
with a sharp word. A newcomer had entered the word
the room. Everyone stood up, except Smirch, who was still
busy with his nails, and he did not even glance up.
Mister Smirch, said someone sternly. The President of the United States.
It had been thought that the presence of the Chief
Executive might have a chastening effect on the young hero,
and the former had been, thanks to the remarkable cooperation
(57:47):
of the press, secretly brought to the obscure conference room
a great, painful silence fell. Smirch looked up, waved a
hand at the president, he asked, and began rolling a
(58:09):
fresh cigarette. The silence deepened. Someone coughed in a strained way.
Jesuits hot, ain't it, said Smirch. He loosened two more
shirt buttons, revealing a hairy chest and the tattooed word
sadie enclosed in a stenciled heart. The great and important
(58:34):
men in the room, faced by the most serious crisis
in American history, exchanged worried frowns. Nobody seemed to know
how to proceed. Come on, come on, said Smirch. Let's
get the hell out of here. When do I start
cutting in on the podies? Huh? And when is there
gonna be this in it? He rubbed a thumb and
(58:57):
forefinger together meaningly. Money, exclaimed a state senator, shocked pale, Yeah, money,
said pal, flipping his cigarette out of the window. And
big money. He began rolling a fresh cigarette. Big money,
he repeated, Frowning over the rice paper. He tilted back
(59:18):
in his chair and leered at each gentleman separately. The
leer of an animal that knows its power, the leer
of a leopard loose in a bird and dog shop. Ah,
for God's sake, let's get someplace where it's cool, he said.
I've been cooped up plenty for three weeks. Smirch stood
(59:39):
up and walked over to an open window, where he
stood staring down into the street nine floors below. The
faint shouting of newsboys floated up to him. He made
out his name, hot Dog, he cried, grinning ecstatic. He
leaned out over the sill. You tell um babies, he
(01:00:00):
shouted down, Hot Diggity Dog. In the tense little knot
of men standing behind him, a quick, mad impulse flared up.
An unspoken word of appeal of command seemed to ring
through the room, yet it was deadly silent. Charles K.
L Brand, secretary to the Mayor of New York City,
happened to be standing nearest Smirch. He looked inquiringly at
(01:00:23):
the President of the United States. The President, pale grim,
nodded shortly. Brand, a tall, powerfully built man wants to
tackle at Rutgers University, stepped forward, seized the greatest man
in the world by his left shoulder and the seat
of his pants, and pushed him out the window. My god,
he's fallen out the window, cried a quick witted editor.
(01:00:45):
Get me out of here, cried the president. Several men
sprang to his side, and he was hurriedly escorted out
of a door toward a side entrance to the building.
The editor of the Associated Press took charge, Being used
to such things crisply, he ordered certain men to leave,
others to stay quickly. He outlined a story which all
the papers were to agree on, sent two men to
the street to handle that end of the track, commanded
a senator to sob and two congressmen to go to
(01:01:08):
pieces nervously. In a word, he skillfully set the stage
for the gigantic task that was to follow, the task
of breaking to a grief stricken world the sad story
of the untimely accidental death of its most illustrious and
spectacular figure. The funeral was, as you know, the most elaborate,
(01:01:33):
the finest, the solemnest, and the saddest ever held in
the United States of America. The monument in Arlington Cemetery,
with its clean white shaft of marble and the simple
device of a tiny plane carved on its base, is
a place for pilgrims in deep reverence to visit. The
(01:01:56):
nations of the world paid lofty tributes to little Jackie Smirch,
America's greatest hero give an hour. There were two minutes
of silence throughout the nation. Even the inhabitants of the small,
bewildered town of Westfield, Iowa, observed this touching ceremony. Agents
of the Department of Justice sough to that one of
(01:02:19):
them was especially assigned to stand grimly in the doorway
of a little shack restaurant on the edge of the
tourist's camping ground just outside the town. There, under his
stern scrutiny, missus Emma Smirch bowed her head over two
Hamburger steaks sizzling on her grill, bowed her head and
(01:02:40):
turned away so that the secret serviceman could not see
the twisted, strangely familiar leer on her lips. The Greatest
Man in the World by James Thurber. Can't imagine who
(01:03:11):
that story could have been about. Never ceases to amaze me.
Nineteen thirty one. I've done all the damage I can
do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown Musical directors Brian
Ray and John Phillip, Shaneil arranged, produced, and performed most
of our music. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass,
(01:03:31):
and drums, and mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. It
was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of
the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the group No
Horns Allowed. Sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two,
written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our
satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the
(01:03:53):
best baseball stadium organist ever. The Thurber was by Thurber.
My announcer today is my crazy friend Tony Kornheiser, and
everything else was pretty much my fault. That's countdown for this,
the one and tenth day until the twenty twenty fourth
presidential election and the two and eighty ninth day since
convicted felon Crazy J. Trump's first attempt at coup against
(01:04:17):
the democratically elected government of the United States. Use the
September eighteenth sentencing hearing. Use the mental health system. You've
got it. President Biden used presidential immunity to stop him
from doing it again. While we still can, while you
still can, mister President and Republicans please stop shooting at Trump.
(01:04:42):
The next scheduled countdown is Tuesday. Bulletins as the news requires.
Why do I think there's going to be a bulletin
till then? I'm Keith Olverman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(01:05:08):
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. I'm sorry,
(00:25):
but it is time for him to go. Joe Biden
must withdraw his name for nomination for reelection as President
of the United States. He should release his delegates with
instructions that they should vote for Kamala Harris for president.
I don't mean to treat this more lightly than it
seemingly deserves. I do not make a comparison between their conditions,
(00:47):
but truly to have said those words makes me feel
like I felt the day I had to make the
decision to stop the medical treatments that were keeping my
father alive. But there is a time for emotion and
a time for being emotionless, and this is the latter.
We can, I hope, spend the next twenty years embracing
(01:12):
Joe Biden and the greatest sacrifice made by any American
politician in our lifetimes, while we also celebrate Trump being
turned down by the pardon board for the twentieth consecutive
year later, we need now to make those things happen.
(01:35):
The essence of the problem boils down. I think to
five points. First, democracy lives or dies on the outcome
of this election. Also the climate and thus continuing life
of all kinds on this planet. Second, the long awaited
(01:59):
fob push in private is complete. Friends of Biden O
be noon yesterday was I think the final semi private
warning before they all go public. There appeared at that
hour in the Washington Post News that President Obama had
told allies in recent days that the Biden path to
(02:20):
victory had greatly diminished and that his vice president needs
to seriously rethink the viability of his candidacy. The Post
reports Nancy Pelosi called Obama. We know from CNN that
Pelosi got on the phone with Biden about how bad
the polls are and how the bleeding had spread to
the House races, and CNN reports he got defensive. The
(02:43):
Clintons may have done what Obama is doing, let something
leak publicly. First, we knew Wednesday that Chuck Schumer had
told Biden privately last Saturday that he should drop out
a Keen Jeffries in private, we know Adam Schiff was
the first big name to go off the public diving
board into the pool of unknown depth and call for
(03:06):
him to withdraw. CNN and The Times and Axios all
said the President was more receptive now to outside input.
Even like that. Axios also said he was more dug
in than ever before. Axios also said he is also
resigned to the pressure and the polls and could drop
out as soon as this weekend. And that's how to
cover politics. Three possible outcomes, predict all three of them
(03:28):
will happen. Be Steven A. Smith. I will again report
what I reported yesterday and just referenced. If the President
does not bow out presently, maybe my Monday, the fobs,
some combination of Obama, the Clintons, Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffrees, maybe
others will gently and with that same sense of bereavement,
(03:52):
I feel, go public and force President Biden to get out,
merely to repair the damage that such an unprecedented vote
of no confidence would represent. It would be manipulative on
the part of the Fobs, but powerful. Third point, as
(04:14):
I said previously, America will always choose the old man
yelling at the cloud, especially instead of the old man
whispering intelligently but inaudibly. This nation elected Reagan twice and
George W. Bush twice. And even if you don't think
(04:34):
w was an old man, you will agree he was
an old man in spirit. In fact, I believe you
could look at every presidential election since the invention of
recorded sound and not find one in which a candidate
who was often literally unintelligible defeated one who was not.
Trump may be saying crazier and crazier things, but those
(04:57):
persuadable voters are having trouble understanding what President Biden is saying. Fourth,
as he has voiced in every public appearance since the debate, interviews,
news conferences, speeches, the debate itself, the President believes he
will be re elected because he's done such a good job,
(05:19):
and I refer you to the noted political analyst Mae
West and her observation that goodness has nothing to do
with it. He has done such a good job, a
great job. This, however, is not how you beat a
liar promising the gullible that he will bring them eternal life.
They didn't beat Jim Jones that way, and Biden did
(05:41):
not beat Trump that way four years ago. It is
both a crisis and a tragedy that American politics has
devolved into what it is now, But it would be
more of a tragedy if Joe and the holdout Democratic
leaders denied that it has so devolved, and fifth, the
polls are cratering forty seven of them the last forty
(06:07):
seven polls, Trump leads them all. I'm beginning to spot
a pattern. The polls underscore a simple reality that the
situation the Democratic and Democracy campaigns are now in is
not about Joe Biden somehow maintaining the status quo, nor
even making up the ground lost since the debate. Before
the debate he needed to improve down the stretch. How
(06:33):
even if they found him the proverbial fountain of youth,
how would they still stop the parsing of every utterance
for a slip. How could we stop what is now
the ingrained default position, not just of today's incomparably unqualified
political reporters, but of today's incomparably uninformed political voters. We
(06:54):
all look for failure, not success. We all remember the
wrong name said, not the right one. Even the people
who will make more mistakes in the next hour then
Joe Biden will in the rest of his life, will
do so because pointing at his mistakes also allows them
to ignore their own mistakes and don't blame someone else.
(07:17):
I'm not blaming someone else. What do you and I
remember from the speeches of Trump that he's crazy and
he's evil, and far more easily that he gets all
the goddamn names and words wrong. We are living in
snark America, and snark feeds on mistakes. In the new poles, however,
(07:42):
there is both the nettle that must be grasped and
in that the pained relief that, no, we are not
throwing away a victory of some kind by changing horses
so well past midstream, but in other new poles by
the same company at the same time that didn't get
one thousandth of the coverage. The prospect for redemption that
(08:04):
a new candidate will bring is glimpsed polling by Emerson
College Monday and Tuesday, widely reported yesterday, widely accepted nationally.
It was Trump by two earlier in the month. In
this poll, it is now Trump by four. In this poll,
Biden is now losing in all seven original swing states,
(08:27):
by three in Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, by five in Georgia,
by six in Pennsylvania, by nine in North Carolina, by
ten in Arizona. Since March, in the Emerson poll, President
Biden has lost an average of two points in each
of the seven swing states. Those numbers are cataclysmic, yet
(08:52):
they are only half the numbers. Emerson is not considered
the gold standard in polling, but honest to God, how
close do they have to be if Trump is beating
Biden by ten in Arizona and six in Pennsylvania. Adding
to the uncertainty about the exactitude of this data is
the sponsor of this Emerson poll, the Bill Harris super
(09:15):
Pack Democrats for the Next Generation, which has not only
come out of nowhere to push hard for Biden to
drop out, but propose this nonsensical mini primary and pledged
to underwrite it. So just to climb further out onto
this particular Harris limb on Democrats for the Next Generation's behested.
(09:38):
Emerson also asked another question of the voters in those
swing states where Biden is losing on average now by
five and a half points. The question is really self fulfilling.
It's almost on the level of for people who like
this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing
they like, but the results are so large, they're so
(09:58):
startling that it's worth listening to them as some kind
of guide post. In imagine, the pollsters asked always a
bad start to a poll question. Imagine you have to
choose between two people for president, Donald Trump or another candidate.
(10:19):
The other candidate is a younger Democrat who is qualified
for the job. How would you decide who to pick?
Should have also asked them how many things were wrong
with that question? Imagine? Also, what does younger mean define
qualified for the job? Please? What if the voter thinks
(10:43):
you're asking them about Taylor Swift? What do pass poles
tell us about how much better nameless imaginary candidates do
than real life ones. Still, these are the results in
North Carolina, the imaginary younger Democrat beats Trump by two.
(11:06):
In Arizona and Pennsylvania, he or she beats Trump by
six in Nevada and Wisconsin. The Democrat beats Trump by
eight in Georgia and Michigan. It is your invisible little
Democratic friend by ten. So that's over here. Biden losing
(11:26):
to Trump in the seven Swing states by five and
a half in each state. Or the generic imaginary qualified
younger Democrat, let's call her for the sake of argument,
t Swizzle beating Trump in the seven Swing states by
more than seven points in each state. That would be better.
That would be better by just under let's see the
(11:49):
swing is just under thirteen points. Again, I'm assuming there
is a lot wrong with the pole company, with the pole,
with the sponsor, with the question, with the built in
imaginary stuff, with the self fulfilling prophecy element. But how
much wrong does it have to be before it stops
(12:10):
giving a clear indication that, yes, even now, a different
Democrat will do better on November fifth than will President Biden.
That is ultimately the only question, and there is some,
i think infallible intuitive logic behind this. The nation, even
(12:33):
if one hundred percent of those intending to vote for
Biden would still vote for him, will still vote for him,
no matter what is crying out for a younger, less
viscerally flawed candidate. There are drawbacks and prejudices and uncharted territory.
And every American who is worried about America's willingness to
(12:54):
elect a woman of color as president on sixteen weeks
notice should worry, but should also remember that America has
elected a man of color twice and given more popular
votes to a woman in the only three elections in
(13:15):
which representatives of either group have stood for the office,
and those three elections have happened in the last four elections.
One note about process here. I have remained, as I
keep using this term, agnostic about this because to me,
until and unless President Biden was ready to step away
(13:38):
or ready to be convinced to step away, and there
were clear indications and some reports yesterday and late Wednesday
that he was at least willing to have the meetings,
if not take the action. Until that point, I wanted
to tamp down the discussion and leave it behind the
scenes where it belonged, because the moment it went public
there would be only two remaining options. He quits, where
(14:00):
he goes right through until midnight strikes on November fourth
and fifth, being told he still needs to quit. And
that is where we are now. We got there on
the night of the debate. Not your fault, not my fault,
the president's fault, and there is only one way out
of this place. I have had my doubts for the
(14:24):
most practical reason, which I outlined earlier, for at least
a year. And that practical reason, when was the last
time a presidential candidate down by two or three or
four nationally and at least that much in all the
swing states roared back in the final one hundred days,
when he no longer had the ability to literally roar.
(14:47):
But things seemed to have stabilized, and obviously, given whatever
has been inhibiting President Biden, that State of the Union
address was the speech of his lifetime and one of
the greatest speeches in American political history. And you may
recall that the dump him movement went silent that night,
(15:09):
and it stayed silent until the debate. It was buckle
up and hope for the best, and we did not
get the best. We may have gotten the best possible,
but it is clear now it is not enough. And no,
this may not work either, but I think, having thought
about little else for the last year, this has a
(15:34):
better chance of working than staying with Joe Biden does.
I will add two more things. I am not surprised
things like this never work out in real life, but
I am sorry they could not have arranged for the
President to step aside during Trump's acceptance speech last night
(15:58):
and watch the networks cutaway. Don't make that face. This
always works when you can do it. Eleven years ago,
ESPN and I were talking about me going back there
after fifteen years of pretty much NonStop nuclear war. They
(16:20):
liked the idea. We had a good plan for a show,
but there was no compelling reason to actually do it.
And then Fox announced it was launching two new all
sports cable networks, and it vowed to take ESPN's business
away from it. And that's when the plot was hatched.
Fox scheduled and made a lot of noise about a
(16:41):
launch party for its new networks, a launch party on
July seventeenth, twenty thirteen, at their movie studio, a lot
on Pico Boulevard in La and they spent money. They
flew in writers from local newspapers around the country, and
on July seventeenth, we let them have about an hour
or so of fun and booze and food. And then
(17:05):
ESPN put out a press release announcing that after fifteen
years of nuclear war, Keith Alberman is returning to ESPN.
There is literally video of those writers streaming out of
the party to go write stories not about Fox but
about me and ESPN sports writers who left free food.
(17:35):
The trick works every time, and I'll add it could
still work if President Biden were to use it today.
And yes, the last note here, I am trying to
make myself laugh, so I don't cry. As I alluded
to earlier, this is as striking a moment to me
as was the day I had to tell them to
(17:56):
disconnect my father's life support. It was the right decision,
even from his own unconscious body language as it happened,
I think he knew it, and he too knew it
was the right decision. And thirteen years and four months later,
I have had only one regret, only one. And maybe
it's useful here, and maybe it's not. Maybe it's just
(18:18):
about me. I don't know. You be the judge. But
my one regret after all this time is this, I
waited about two weeks too long, because for those two
weeks I just couldn't do it. Also, the Republican Convention
(18:44):
is over, the Festival of Whites is at an end.
Asshole con twenty four is complete, and the headline you
did not hear. There is now even more evidence today
that Trump is lying about having actually been hit by
a bullet. The investigative unit at w Television in Pittsburgh
(19:06):
reports that four police officers from that city assigned Trump's
motorcade Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, were standing just feet from
Trump when the shots rang out, and they too were wounded.
The policemen were hit by quote either plastic or metal
fragments when the bullets struck objects nearby. The four officers
(19:29):
suffered minor injuries from flying debris caused by the bullets,
but Trump, standing next to them, and not next to
any of the gunshot victims, he was hit by a bullet,
not a piece of plastic or metal, even though Secret
Service sources confirmed before Trump was out of the Pennsylvania
(19:49):
hospital that he had not been shot with a bullet,
but had suffered a minor ear injury due to being
hit by flying debris, probably glass, possibly from a teleprompter screen.
Even though there has been no Secret Service report indicating
Trump was shot, no police report indicating Trump was shot,
no hospital reports that his injuries were consistent with those
(20:10):
produced by a bullet, no investigation indicating that a bullet
hit him or anywhere near him. And of course Trump
would never lie about something like this, and he and
his handlers would never trot out the gear of the fireman,
the bystander who was actually killed Saturday, as if the
(20:30):
pieces of his equipment were religious relics. Certainly they wouldn't
do that, and misspell the man's name. His name was misspelled.
That Trump survived an assassination attempt is not in doubt
here that it was a close call. Is in doubt
(20:53):
that it looks more and more like he exaggerated the
gravity of his injuries and especially what caused them. And
he seemingly has put some kind of restriction on anybody
saying either yes he was shot or no, he wasn't shot.
It was a piece of plastic like maybe he had
invoked Hippa regulations. That is essential to understanding this the
(21:14):
latest in his endless series of cons and also the
new religious overtones to Trump's hold on the unwashed and
the unloved who have been so mercilessly exploited by Trump's
new Republican fascist party, and the latest reason that idiots
like Politico's Natalie Allison would publish a preview of Trump's
(21:35):
acceptance speech just five hours before he gave it, in
which she claimed quote, there appears to be a new
softness to Trump, with people who've talked to him describing
him with words like existential, serene, emotional, and even spiritual.
Hey you left out misspelled? Yeah? And which does this
(21:56):
sound like? Is this the existential part, or the serene,
or the emotional or the spiritual. Was this the pivot
or maybe this was just the same goddamned selfish thing
he posted literally hours after that deadly piece of plastic
just missed him and cut his ear. A Republican maga
(22:19):
shot at me, So all criminal charges against me must
be dropped. Because unity, we.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Must not criminalize dissent or demonize political disagreement, which is
what's been happening in our country lately at a level
that nobody has ever seen before. In that spirit, the
Democrat Party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and
labeling their political opponent as an enemy of democracy, especially
(22:54):
since that is not true. In fact, I am the
one saving democracy for the people of our contract.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Yes, that's the new ooh Trump. After his record breaking
nine hundred and forty third pivot since the year twenty sixteen,
he has changed just as you would have had you
survived by just inches the assassin shard of glass, bullet, bullet,
assassin's bullet. Of course, he was hit by a bullet.
(23:25):
What are you crazy? Just because people standing next to
him were hit by glass. He's Trump. He got a
bullet of course, he got a bullet, a deluxe bullet.
Two other notes. First, my seemingly weakly offer to get
a conservative a free CT scan because just on a
human level, I'm concerned about their brain. Goes out today
(23:48):
to Marjorie Taylor Green, Neanderthal woman appeared on bright Bart
News from asshole con and I swear the interviewer had
one of those foreheads that juts forward like australopithecus, and
she Neanderthal woman claimed Trump was saved from assassination by
(24:09):
an angel flag. It seems like God's hand is on
his shoulder.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
You thought, I believe it. I believe we all witnessed
a miracle literally from you know, before it happened. The
flag above got blown in the wind and it got
tied into literally what looked like an angel.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Did you see that video? Oh my gosh, you guys.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
Have to find that. It was truly, it was like
an angel coming down. It was the American flag tied.
They had to bring it down and all the people
in the sands helped unravel it, and it was literally
before he came out on the stage.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
The only thing unraveling here is Marge. One of the
real giveaways that even they don't believe Marge when she
goes into one of her ecstatic religious trances like that
is this bright Bart put a whole story out about
this angel flag interview with her on its website, and
(25:01):
it used the clip, including the weird interviewer guy, and
it did not post the video of the flag that
supposedly wrapped itself into the shape of an angel, not
even a still photo. You know why not because the
flag didn't look a flipping thing like an angel. Google
it Google Trump angel flag and you'll see what it
(25:22):
looked like. I vowed to say to you the first
thing it made me think of the moment I saw it,
And the first thing it made me think of was
a sickle as in Grim Reaper. The flag looked like
that curved sharp blade the sickle at the top of
the sickle, and there was even part of the handle too.
(25:44):
And no, the flag didn't turn into a sickle either.
So Marge, it's my offer, free cat scan. And lastly,
lou Dobbs died. He was once a respected business anchor
on CNN, and then a not so respected business anchor
on CNN, and then an original Berther and incredibly he
(26:06):
was still host of his own CNN show until they
finally fired him in two thousand and nine. He went
to Fox Business and got increasingly fascist and crazy, and
naturally he connected with Trump, and by twenty twenty he
was pushing the election bullshit, and especially the hallucination that
January sixth was Antifa or George Soros or Soros Tifa
(26:28):
or whatever, and that the election was rigged by socialist
zombie extraterrestrials from the planet Skyron and the Galaxy of
Andromeda using Smartmatic machines. And when Smartmatic sued Fox for
two billion, seven hundred million dollars, Lou Dobbs was one
of only three Fox anchors actually named in the suit.
(26:49):
Fox fired him on February fifth, twenty twenty one, and
his show wound up streaming on Mike Lindell's Pillow website.
I have previously mentioned my extraordinary personal connection to b
Lou Dobbs. He was a CNN original based with the
rest of CNN's old nightly business show in the New
(27:10):
York Bureau. I had interviewed with CNN Sports for a
job twice in its first year on the air, when
I was still in radio and they were interested, and
I was interested. And then one Thursday I got a
call asking if I could fill in for two weeks
as the sports reporter in the New York Bureau, and
I said sure, and they said Monday. Only after I
(27:33):
had been there a few days did I ask what
had happened to their regular sports reporter, a woman I
had met several times on stories named Debbie Sigura. I
was told by our producer that Debbie Sigura and her
boyfriend Lou Dobbs had suddenly gone on vacation. Then one
of the cameramen, once the producer was out of the way,
(27:53):
said the boyfriend right. He relayed that Dobbs had suddenly
been found out by Missus Dobbs, and by Dobbs's mistress,
and by the executive in the New York Bureau he
was supposedly gallivanting around with as well. All at once
they found out. So Lou had to get out of
town fast, but I mean really fast. Ultimately, Dobbs and
(28:17):
Debbie moved to Atlanta and got married, and I got
Debbie's job in New York. And when I left that
job to go into local TV, CNN sent up an
anchor they had in Atlanta to replace me as the
New York sports reporter. His name was Dan Patrick. So
Lou Dobbs inadvertently invented SportsCenter Lewis Carl Dobbs CNN original
(28:42):
is dead and you know how old he was. He
was two hundred and six. Also of interest, here, I
can count on the fingers of one hand the number
of times the same guy, one worst person two shows
in a row. I think Dobbs did it. It has
happened again. The guy went on CNN and announced, quote,
(29:05):
a bullet couldn't stop Trump, A virus just stopped Biden.
And the guy is an idiot. Those are your clues
the malefactor's identity. Next, this is countdown. This is countdown
with Keith Olberman, my crazy friend, still ahead of us
(29:47):
on this editiative countdown. In the wake of the Republican Party,
which started with Lincoln, all right, he was there. What
third presidential nominee after John Fremont and somebody else started
with Lincoln moved on to Teddy Roosevelt even offered this
nation the useful boredom of Dwight E. Eisenhower. In the fifties,
the Republican Party nominated a convicted felon and the plotter
(30:10):
of an attempt to violently overthrow the government of the
United States, and a psychopath. In the wake of that,
there is only one story for me to read to you.
In our weekly visits with the Master, the greatest man
in the world. On Fridays with Thurber, I had first
still more idiots to talk about the daily roundup of
(30:32):
the worst persons in the world. We cover the world
here the daily roundup of the misgrants, morons and Dunning
Kruger effects specimens who constitute two days worse persons in
the world. Lebron's worse, says our Condey, chairman of NBC News.
I've told you before about him, back when I concluded
(30:54):
ten years of listening to MSNBC about going back there.
Sometimes they started the conversation. Sometimes I started the conversation,
says Our Condey. Had assistant asked me if I was
available for breakfast on fairly short notice to talk about
a new version of Countdown. I said, of course. She
selected a restaurant, I said, of course. Minutes later she
(31:16):
emailed back to say, oh, sorry, he's going to be
away in the rest of this week. We'll have to postpone.
Little did I know that that was the pinnacle of
Saesar Condey's NBC news career, Puck News, and I believe
they changed that from the original name, which was something
like puck Puck News reports that he not the head
(31:40):
of MSNBC, not even the president of NBC News. He
Sayesar Conde was the idiot who decided that they should
take their morning political gossip show off the air Monday,
even though its entire two hundred and forty three member
cast was already in the studios the day the Republican
Convention began in Milwaukee. CNN reported that Condy decided this
was the right call out of fear that somebody would
(32:02):
say something that would piss off the Trump Nazis. As
I noted, this was exactly the MSNBC NBC reaction in
two thousand and eight, when the Republicans leaned on Tom
Brokaw and Brokaw blackmailed NBC management into removing me and
Matthews from covering the rest of the convention and the
debates that year. Puck News, however, which employs a media
(32:26):
writer with a one hundred percent score from the Committee
to defend corporate news management, at all costs. He says, No,
it wasn't censorship, it was condy thinking that quote, he
would preempt all of MSNBC's perspective programming with the rolling
news coverage from the NBC broadcast feed. In other words,
(32:46):
no Scarborough, no Mado Hayes, O'Donnell, No what's your name
at night? Know the other? What's your name at night?
Know the on the weekend? What's their names? All of
them off the air. As Puck wrote, quote, Conday had
been peaked, peaked at by Puck the idea of mobilizing
his news platforms to cover a major news event, just
(33:09):
as CNN might, only to be reminded that the network's
real value proposition was the perspective itself. So wait this moron.
Conde had started that morning at NBC. Oh no, he's
been chairman of NBC News since May twenty twenty. He's
been on the job for four freaking years and two months,
(33:30):
and just Monday he realized that you can't just replace
the opinion programs on MSNBC with generic news coverage. And
I hate Scarborough like I hate few people in life.
He truly is the scum of the earth. But they
replaced him and missus Joey Scars with Savannah Sellers and
(33:52):
Joe Fryar of NBC News Now. And I've never heard
of Savannah Sellers and Joe Fryar, And in fact, if
you asked me, I would have said they sounded like
never seen offstage minor characters from the TV series The
Morning Show, and the chairman of the News division somehow
thought that Savannah Sellers and Joe Fryer would do better
(34:15):
in the ratings. For twenty eight years now, executives at
NBC have never accepted the reality that they can't just
use MSNBC or CNBC or any of the other channels
they own for that matter, as a spillover channel for
when there's really news and just fill it the rest
of the time with you know, other crap. Just put
(34:38):
on that Rachelle woman or whatever her name is, Meadows,
Just put on that Meadows woman. This dynamic, let's establish
a news based network with appointment viewing and its own
stars that makes money hand over fist. This has fought
with this other cynical dream of we can put on
all the stuff we can't fit into the Today Show
(34:58):
and we can train people on a cable, and when
they get good enough, we promote them to real NBC.
This has gone on, off and on, waxing and waning
since nineteen freaking ninety six. Generation after generation of producers
and executives and broadcasters have lived and died as first
one boss said make it its own network, and then
(35:20):
the next one said, no, America loves NBC News. MSNBC
must be NBC News Junior, MNBC News Triple A, and
then back to the first guy again. When we finally
got MSNBC profitable two thousand and five or two thousand
and six, instead of losing tens of millions of dollars
(35:40):
a year for the entirety of its first decade, all
of a sudden it started making hundreds of millions of
dollars because I yelled at George Bush. Since the day
I started doing special comments, MSNBC has earned its owners
ge and now Comcast, several billion dollars. But management's response became, well,
(36:02):
that's nice. We liked the billions of dollars, but we
wanted to make that money without any controversy and without
us having to stay past five PM to deal with
the controversy. And they're still doing it, or this guy
Conde is just a fool or both. The solution, by
the way, which I presented to them in a long
(36:24):
memo in two thousand and three, which I'll read here
one day soon, is actually simple. Stop calling MSNBC, MSNBC
caught anything else. Call it the American News Channel, caught,
the Politics Channel, caught, ethel the Frog, anything, anything that
doesn't have NBC in it, and you'll be fine. Silver
(36:49):
worser Matt Gates, Florida congressman and botox enthusiast, after his
speech to the Republican National Fascist Convention, in which he
looked like something in the way of a living iPhone filter.
I'm waiting for Gates to do a commercial in which
he says, aha uh sal kunfabo docs a side side cutta. Well,
(37:11):
I'll be able to move my mouth again. But there's
a larger issue here. The guy looked like he had
left his face home and had gotten one drawn on
for him. He looked like late stage Bruce Jenner CNNMSNBC, Fox,
BBC News, ethel Lefrog News. Dozens of small outlets covered
(37:34):
the convention wall to wall, and did anybody say, you know,
Gates looks like somebody just laminated him. I mean, the
concept of covering political conventions had died in the nineteen nineties.
Nobody watched them, nothing happened. The original idea was that's
where they nominated the presidential candidates. That's why you were
(37:55):
there to see who the presidential candidate would be. That
stopped years ago. Nothing happens now maybe this year. But
they're cheap filler for cable news networks even if nothing happens,
and they are easily understood by the morons who work
for the cable news networks, but at least brings some
actual reporting to them just thirty seconds out of every
(38:16):
twenty four hours. Gates looks like he melted Trump last
night was preceded by corrupt, racist wrestlers. You people at
CNN and the others you over there at ethel the
Frog News. You will go to your graves having never
actually contributed anything to people's understanding of the world around you.
(38:38):
You will be satisfied, Dana Bash, during your last twenty
breaths on this earth, that you managed to get in
the entire promo copy before the stage manager finished counting
down from ten. That's it. That's your legacy. That's your legacy,
Jake Tapper, that's your mark on this world. I mean,
not even saying Matt Gates, unlike we've ever heard him
(39:01):
before or seen Dana not even that, just once, maybe
just once. Of course, saying something, especially on CNN, brings
its own risks, as evidenced by the fact that we
have a repeat winner consecutive days. The worst Van Jones
(39:24):
I have mentioned before his extraordinary ability to be so
impressed by fascists that he thinks you're supposed to praise them.
This is when Donald Trump became president, and particularly that
you're supposed to forget all about the rest of what
they've done in their lives, as malefactor is in society.
Wednesday night, Van Jones, former Obama Special advisor for Green Jobs,
(39:47):
went on CNN and mocked the illness of the President
of the United States, who was the vice president of
the United States when he Van Jones had a job
with the government. Quote, a bullet couldn't stop Trump, A
virus just stopped Biden. You've got the nominees of this
party getting their butts kissed. Biden's getting his butt kicked
(40:11):
by his own party. The Democrats are coming apart, the
Republicans are coming together, and then of course he injured himself,
patting himself on the back. What was Van Jones's motive there?
As often with political pundits at all ends of the
left right spectrum, the desire to sound cool on TV
(40:32):
erases all other goals. If you can spontaneously produce parallel
sentence structure, you keep going seemingly never realizing you're creating
comparisons that are not valid and are not even replacement
level intelligent. A bullet couldn't stop Trump. A virus just
(40:53):
stopped Biden. The virus stopped Biden because Biden chose to
isolate to protect other human beings. The bullet didn't stop
Trump because A it may not have been a bullet
that hit him, but certainly b He couldn't see the
(41:13):
statistics on a screen next to him that was the
size of a railroad box car, so he had to
turn his head. Utter luck, no skill, no quality, no
action to protect others. One day, I'd like to hear somebody,
maybe somebody like Van Jones or whoever replaces him, ask
(41:34):
why Trump hid below the podium, emerged unscathed, maybe grazed
by a bullet, maybe grazed by a bottle cap, and
the only thing he did was to scream and rage
rather than urge the crowd to get down, Get down,
just for one second in his whole life, to think
(41:56):
about somebody else. Nobody asked why he didn't do that. Well,
we know why he didn't do that. He's not actually
a human being. He didn't care if you get shot
one day. I'd like to hear somebody, maybe somebody like
Van Jones or whoever replaces him, ask if now, after
the assassination attempt, if now is finally the time we
can talk about gun laws, given that the fascist candidate
(42:19):
for president almost had his effing head blown off by
another gun nut from his own political gun nut party.
But no, Van Jones couldn't do any of that because
he saw staring him in the face. Parallel sentence construction.
A bullet couldn't stop Trump. A virus just stopped Biden.
(42:43):
I'm some great, Oh, I hurt my shoulder patting myself
on the back. Common decency couldn't stop Biden. Common sense
just stopped Van Jones. You see how this works, Van CNN.
You must fire him the nation and you're remaining eight
hundred and thirty seven viewers will accept no less Jones
(43:06):
for the second consecutive day, two days. Worse person and
the world I've thought. I've seen this story playing out
in real time in this country almost every day for
(43:29):
about seven years. Sit back and relax, if relax is
the right word for it. For the Greatest Man in
the World by James Thurber. Looking back on it now
from the vantage point of nineteen forty one can only
marvel that it had not happened long before it did.
(43:51):
The United States of America had been ever since Kitty
Hawk blindly constructing the elaborate petard by which, sooner or
later it must be hoist will. It was inevitable that
someday there would come, roaring out of the skies a
national hero of insufficient intelligence, background, and character, successfully to
(44:12):
endure the mounting orgies of glory prepared for aviators who
stayed up for a long time or flew a great distance.
Both Lindbergh and Byrd, fortunately for national decorum and international amity,
had been gentlemen, So had our other famous aviators. They
wore their laurels, gracefully, withstood the awful weather of publicity,
(44:35):
married excellent women, usually fine family and quietly retired to
private life and the enjoyment of their varying fortunes. No
untoward incidents on a worldwide scale marred the perfection of
their conduct on the perilous heights of fame. The exception
to the rule was, however, bound to occur, and it
(44:58):
did in July nineteen thirty seven, when Jack Pal Smirch
erstwhile mechanics helper in a small garage in Westfield, Iowa,
flew a second hand, single motored Breasthabn Dragonfly three monoplane
all the way around the world without stopping. Never before
(45:21):
in the history of aviation had such a flight as
Smirches even been dreamed of. No one had even taken
seriously the weird floating auxiliary gas tanks invention of the
mad New Hampshire professor of astronomy, doctor Charles Lewis, Gresham,
upon which Smirch placed full reliance. When the garage worker,
a slightly built, surly unprepossessing young man of twenty two,
(45:45):
appeared at Roosevelt Field early in July nineteen thirty seven,
slowly chewing a great quid of scrap, tobacco and announced,
nobody ain't seen no flying yet. The newspapers touched briefly
and satirically upon his projected twenty five thousand mile flight.
Aeronautical and automotive experts dismissed the idea, curtly, implying that
(46:09):
it was a hoax, the publicity stunt. The rusty, battered
second hand plane wouldn't go, The Gresham auxiliary tanks wouldn't work.
It was simply a cheap joke. Smirch. However, after calling
on a girl in Brooklyn who worked in the flap
(46:30):
folding department of a large paper box factory, a girl
whom he later described as his sweet Petuti climbed nonchalantly
into his ridiculous plane at dawn the memorable seventh of
July nineteen thirty seven, spit a curve of tobacco juice
into the still air, and took off, carrying with him
(46:50):
only a gallon of bootleg gin and six pounds of salami.
When the garage boy thundered out over the ocean, the
papers were forced to record in all seriousness that a mad,
unknown young man his name was variously misspelled, had actually
set out upon a preposterous attempt to span the world
(47:12):
in a rickety one engine contraption, trusting to the long
distance refueling device of a crazy schoolmaster. When nine days later,
without having stopped once, the tiny plane appeared above San
Francisco Bay, headed for New York, spluttering and choking, to
be sure, but still magnificently and miraculously aloft the headlines,
(47:32):
which long since had crowded everything else off the front page.
Even the shooting of the governor of Illinois by the
Valetti Gang swelled to unprecedented size, and the news stories
began to run to twenty five and thirty columns. It
was noticeable, however, that the accounts of the epoch making
(47:54):
flight touched rather lightly upon the aviator himself. This was
not because the facts about the hero as a man
were too meager, but because they were too complete. Reporters
who had been rushed out to Iowa when Smirch's plane
was first sighted over the little French coast town of
(48:15):
ser Lee Lemaire to dig up the story of the
great man's life had promptly discovered that the story of
his life could not be printed. His mother, a sullen
short order cook and a shack restaurant on the edge
of a tourist's camping ground near Westfield, met all inquiries
as to her son, with an angry and the hell
with him a help, he drowns. His father appeared to
(48:37):
be in jail somewhere for stealing spotlights and lap robes
from tourists automobiles. His young brother, a weak minded lad,
had but recently escaped from the Preston, Iowa Reformatory, and
was already wanted in several Western towns for the theft
of money order blanks from post offices. These alarming discoveries
(48:58):
were still piling up at the very time that pal Smirch,
the greatest hero of the twentieth century, dead for sleep,
half starved, was piloting his crazy junk heap high above
the region in which the lamentable story of his private
life was being unearthed, headed for New York and a
greater glory than any man of his time had ever known.
(49:22):
The necessity for printing some account in the papers of
the young man's career and personality had led to a
remarkable predicament. It was, of course, impossible to reveal the
facts for a tremendous popular feeling in favor of the
young hero had sprung up like a grass fire when
he was halfway across Europe on his flight around the globe.
(49:43):
He was therefore described as a modest, chap taciturn blonde,
popular with his friends, popular with girls. The only available
snapshot of Smirch, taken at the wheel of a phony
automobile in a cheap photo studio at an amusement park,
was touched up so that the little vulgarian looked quite handsome.
(50:05):
Twisted leer was smoothed into a pleasant smile. The truth
was in this way kept from the youth's ecstatic compatriots.
They did not dream that the Smirch family was despised
and feared by its neighbors in the obscure Iowa town,
nor that the hero himself, because of numerous unsavory exploits,
(50:25):
had come to be regarded in Westfield as a nuisance
and a menace. Pal's Smirch had, the reporters discovered, once
knife the principle of his high school, not mortally, to
be sure, but he had knifed him, and on another occasion,
surprised in the act of an stealing altar cloth from
a church, he had bashed the sexton over the head
(50:48):
with a pot of Easter lilies. For each of these offenses,
he had served a sentence in the reformatory. Inwardly, the authorities,
both in New York and in Washington, prayed that an
understanding providence might, however awful, such a thing seemed, bring
disaster to the rusty, battered plane and its illustrious pilot,
(51:10):
whose unheard of flight had aroused the civilized world to
hosannas of hysterical praise. The authorities were convinced that the
character of the renowned aviator was such that the limelight
of adulation was bound to reveal him to all the
world as a congenital hooligan, mentally and morally unequipped to
(51:31):
cope with his own prodigious fame. I trust, said the
Secretary of State, at one of the many secret cabinet
meetings called to consider the national dilemma. I trust that
his mother's prayer will be answered, by which he referred
to missus Emma's smirch's wish that her son might be drowned.
(51:53):
It was, however, too late for that Spurch had leaped
the Atlantic and then the Pacific as if they were
mill ponds. At three minutes after two o'clock on the
afternoon of July seventeenth, nineteen thirty seven, j Boy brought
his idiotic plane into Roosevelt Field for a perfect three
point landing. It had, of course been out of the
(52:14):
question to arrange a modest little reception for the greatest
flier in the history of the world. He was received
at Roosevelt Field with such elaborate and pretentious ceremonies as
rocked the world. Fortunately, however, the warren and spent hero
promptly swooned, had to be removed bodily from his plane,
and was spirited from the field without having opened his
(52:35):
mouth once. Thus he did not jeopardize the dignity of
his first reception, a reception illumined by the presence of
the Secretaries of War and the Navy, Mayor Michael J.
Moriarty of New York, the Premier of Canada, Governors Fanamine Groves,
mcpheey and Critchfield, and a brilliant array of European diplomats.
Smirch did not, in fact come too in time to
(52:58):
take part in the gigantic hullabaloo arranged at City Hall
for the next day he was rushed to a secluded
nursing home and confined in bed. It was nine days
before he was able to get up, or, to be
more exact, before he was permitted to get up. Meanwhile,
the greatest minds in the country, in solemn assembly, had
(53:19):
arranged a secret conference of city, state and government officials,
which Smirch was to attend for the purpose of being
instructed in the ethics and behavior of heroism. On the
day that the little mechanic was finally allowed to get
up in dress and for the first time in two weeks,
took a great chew of tomacco, he was permitted to receive.
(53:41):
The newspaper men this by way of testing him out.
Smirch did not wait for questions. Use guys, he said,
and the Times Man winced. Use guys can tell the
cock eyed world that I put it over on Lindberg.
See yeah, man, an assaid, I'm two frogs. The two
(54:03):
frogs was a reference to a pair of gallant French flyers, who,
in attempting to flight only halfway round the world, had
two weeks before unhappily been lost at sea. The Times
Man was bold enough at this point to sketch out
for Smirch the accepted formula for interviews in cases of
this kind. He explained that there should be no arrogant
(54:24):
statements belittling the achievements of other heroes, particularly heroes of
foreign nations. A the hell with that, said Smirch, I
did it. See I did it, and I'm talking about it,
and he did talk about it. None of this extraordinary
interview was, of course printed. On the contrary, the newspapers,
(54:46):
already under the disciplined direction of a secret directorate created
for the occasion and composed of statesmen and editors, gave
out to a panting and restless world that Jackie, as
he had been arbitrarily nicknamed, would consent to say only
that he was very happy, and that anyone could have
done what he did. My achievement has been I fear
(55:08):
slightly exaggerated. The times Man's article had him protest with
a modest smile. These newspaper stories were kept from the hero,
a restriction which did not serve to abate the rising
malevolence of his temper. The situation was indeed extremely grave
for Palell' Smirch was, as he kept insisting, raring to go.
(55:32):
He could not much longer be kept from a nation
clamorous to lionize him. It was the most desperate crisis
the United States of America had faced since the sinking
of Belusitania. On the afternoon of the twenty seventh of July,
Smirch was spirited away to a conference room in which
were gathered mayors, governors, government officials, behaviorist, psychologists, and editors.
(55:56):
He gave them each a limp moist paw, and a brief,
unlovely grin hi, he said. When Smirch was seated, the
Mayor of New York arose, and, with obvious pessimism, attempted
to explain what he must say and how he must
act when presented to the world, ending his talk with
a high tribute to the hero's courage and integrity. The
(56:19):
Mayor was followed by Governor Fannerman of New York, who,
after a touching declaration of faith, introduced Cameron Spottiswood, second
Secretary of the American Embassy in Paris, the gentleman selected
to coach Smirch in the amenities of public ceremonies. Sitting
in a chair with a soiled yellow tie in his
hand and his shirt open at the throat unshaved, smoking
(56:42):
a rolled cigarette. Jack Smirch listened with a leer on
his lips. I get you, I get you, he cut
in nastily. You want me to act like a softie. Huh?
You want me to act like that bemny memty baby
face lind big huh, Well nuts to that. See. Everyone
(57:03):
took in his breath sharply. It was a sigh and
a hiss. Mister Lindbergh began a United States Senator purple
with rage, and mister bird Smirch, who was paring his
nails with a jackknife, cut in again. Boyd, he exclaimed, Oh,
for God's sake, that big somebody shut off the blasphemies
(57:24):
with a sharp word. A newcomer had entered the word
the room. Everyone stood up, except Smirch, who was still
busy with his nails, and he did not even glance up.
Mister Smirch, said someone sternly. The President of the United States.
It had been thought that the presence of the Chief
Executive might have a chastening effect on the young hero,
and the former had been, thanks to the remarkable cooperation
(57:47):
of the press, secretly brought to the obscure conference room
a great, painful silence fell. Smirch looked up, waved a
hand at the president, he asked, and began rolling a
(58:09):
fresh cigarette. The silence deepened. Someone coughed in a strained way.
Jesuits hot, ain't it, said Smirch. He loosened two more
shirt buttons, revealing a hairy chest and the tattooed word
sadie enclosed in a stenciled heart. The great and important
(58:34):
men in the room, faced by the most serious crisis
in American history, exchanged worried frowns. Nobody seemed to know
how to proceed. Come on, come on, said Smirch. Let's
get the hell out of here. When do I start
cutting in on the podies? Huh? And when is there
gonna be this in it? He rubbed a thumb and
(58:57):
forefinger together meaningly. Money, exclaimed a state senator, shocked pale, Yeah, money,
said pal, flipping his cigarette out of the window. And
big money. He began rolling a fresh cigarette. Big money,
he repeated, Frowning over the rice paper. He tilted back
(59:18):
in his chair and leered at each gentleman separately. The
leer of an animal that knows its power, the leer
of a leopard loose in a bird and dog shop. Ah,
for God's sake, let's get someplace where it's cool, he said.
I've been cooped up plenty for three weeks. Smirch stood
(59:39):
up and walked over to an open window, where he
stood staring down into the street nine floors below. The
faint shouting of newsboys floated up to him. He made
out his name, hot Dog, he cried, grinning ecstatic. He
leaned out over the sill. You tell um babies, he
(01:00:00):
shouted down, Hot Diggity Dog. In the tense little knot
of men standing behind him, a quick, mad impulse flared up.
An unspoken word of appeal of command seemed to ring
through the room, yet it was deadly silent. Charles K.
L Brand, secretary to the Mayor of New York City,
happened to be standing nearest Smirch. He looked inquiringly at
(01:00:23):
the President of the United States. The President, pale grim,
nodded shortly. Brand, a tall, powerfully built man wants to
tackle at Rutgers University, stepped forward, seized the greatest man
in the world by his left shoulder and the seat
of his pants, and pushed him out the window. My god,
he's fallen out the window, cried a quick witted editor.
(01:00:45):
Get me out of here, cried the president. Several men
sprang to his side, and he was hurriedly escorted out
of a door toward a side entrance to the building.
The editor of the Associated Press took charge, Being used
to such things crisply, he ordered certain men to leave,
others to stay quickly. He outlined a story which all
the papers were to agree on, sent two men to
the street to handle that end of the track, commanded
a senator to sob and two congressmen to go to
(01:01:08):
pieces nervously. In a word, he skillfully set the stage
for the gigantic task that was to follow, the task
of breaking to a grief stricken world the sad story
of the untimely accidental death of its most illustrious and
spectacular figure. The funeral was, as you know, the most elaborate,
(01:01:33):
the finest, the solemnest, and the saddest ever held in
the United States of America. The monument in Arlington Cemetery,
with its clean white shaft of marble and the simple
device of a tiny plane carved on its base, is
a place for pilgrims in deep reverence to visit. The
(01:01:56):
nations of the world paid lofty tributes to little Jackie Smirch,
America's greatest hero give an hour. There were two minutes
of silence throughout the nation. Even the inhabitants of the small,
bewildered town of Westfield, Iowa, observed this touching ceremony. Agents
of the Department of Justice sough to that one of
(01:02:19):
them was especially assigned to stand grimly in the doorway
of a little shack restaurant on the edge of the
tourist's camping ground just outside the town. There, under his
stern scrutiny, missus Emma Smirch bowed her head over two
Hamburger steaks sizzling on her grill, bowed her head and
(01:02:40):
turned away so that the secret serviceman could not see
the twisted, strangely familiar leer on her lips. The Greatest
Man in the World by James Thurber. Can't imagine who
(01:03:11):
that story could have been about. Never ceases to amaze me.
Nineteen thirty one. I've done all the damage I can
do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown Musical directors Brian
Ray and John Phillip, Shaneil arranged, produced, and performed most
of our music. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass,
(01:03:31):
and drums, and mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. It
was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of
the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the group No
Horns Allowed. Sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two,
written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our
satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the
(01:03:53):
best baseball stadium organist ever. The Thurber was by Thurber.
My announcer today is my crazy friend Tony Kornheiser, and
everything else was pretty much my fault. That's countdown for this,
the one and tenth day until the twenty twenty fourth
presidential election and the two and eighty ninth day since
convicted felon Crazy J. Trump's first attempt at coup against
(01:04:17):
the democratically elected government of the United States. Use the
September eighteenth sentencing hearing. Use the mental health system. You've
got it. President Biden used presidential immunity to stop him
from doing it again. While we still can, while you
still can, mister President and Republicans please stop shooting at Trump.
(01:04:42):
The next scheduled countdown is Tuesday. Bulletins as the news requires.
Why do I think there's going to be a bulletin
till then? I'm Keith Olverman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(01:05:08):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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