BIDEN'S CANCER; TRUMP THREATENS SUPREME COURT - 5.19.25 - Countdown with Keith Olbermann

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Let
me start, of course, with my best wishes to a
man I still love no matter what. President Joe Biden
after his diagnosis was revealed yesterday a prostate cancer which

(00:27):
has also appeared in his bones, quoting. While this represents
a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears
to be hormone sensitive, which allows for effective management. I
am anything but an expert on this subject, except like you,
probably a close witness, but as a man who is

(00:48):
himself moving exceptionally too rapidly into Joe's age cohort, I
will offer this I think hopeful insight. I cannot imagine
this isn't a new development, newly found, and that he
has not been frequently checked for this exact form of
this DIY. Because my mother had breast cancer and my

(01:08):
father had colon cancer, I get the entirety of that
department checked with amazing frequency without going into too much detail.
I have a urologist, so he necessarily has to check it.
This year, I actually had him write a note I
could carry with me to my GP, who weeks later
wanted to check it, and my internist, who wanted to

(01:29):
check it, and my Gastro who did check it before
I could stop him. It is the exam of the moment,
the long, unpleasant moment. Better safe than sorry. The concern here,
obviously is Joe Biden's health and comfort. I know him enough, however,
to believe that it has already occurred to him, that

(01:50):
the timing of this terrible news carries with it one
extraordinary irony. The car in which all of the Biden
acuity truthers and reporters and book writers and finger waggers
and editors in Washington has just stopped suddenly, and they
have all been ejected from the vehicle in which they

(02:14):
were climbing over each other in order to drive it
faster and faster. And you deserve it utterly, Jake Tapper
and Alex Thompson and Jonathan Allen and Robert her and
Politico and the Washington Post, The Washington Post which yesterday
morning printed a column which began, quote, the verdict is

(02:36):
in Joe Biden is to blame unquote, which is why
you never write a sentence like that more or later
in worse persons. Now to Joe Biden's evil, worthless successor

(03:08):
Trump has now descended to making threats against the Supreme
Court under his own name, indirectly and stochastically under the
names of others who's menacing. He reposts directly, directly and
specifically towards the justices he himself appointed. This country is

(03:30):
now in this frozen moment of madness in which its
president isn't just ignoring or trying to veto the Judiciary
and the Supreme Court, but actually encouraging violence against its justices.
Trump has also now amplified at least fourteen posts demanding

(03:52):
the arrest of the former FBI director James Comy, including
one which claims Coomy's dumb photo post proves the assassination
attempt against Trump last year was quote an inside job.
At another post calling for quote public military tribunals for
President Obama, a post that was actually captioned retruth if

(04:15):
you want public military tribunals, which Trump retruthed. The President
of the United States an asshole is actively endorsing or
acquiescing to violence against the former president of the United
States and the former FBI director, and most importantly against

(04:36):
the Supreme Court the current justices right now because they
endorse late last Friday, due process and the Constitution, rather
than his belief that he has a dictatorial right to
kidnap and rendition to other countries people off the streets
of America. The most dangerous of these threats are by

(05:00):
Mike Davis, the former Chuck Grassley Aid, the federalist hack
behind the Article three project, the online bully and troll.
Trump reposted them carefully, making sure not to comment in
any way, as ever, keeping space between him and his henchmen.
Davis on the ironically named quote truth unquote social Let's

(05:24):
get this straight. Obama can drone strikes Americans, but Trump
can't repel foreign terrorists. Biden can import over ten million
illegal aliens, but Trump can't send them home without years
of court process. Those are apparent hallucinations by mister Davis.
The American people never agreed to this, not at our founding,

(05:45):
not after the Civil War, not anytime since then, certainly
not in the last election. The Supreme Court is heading
down a perilous path. End of message, and note the
careful vague wording quote a perilous path. Note also Davis's
mischaracterization of the most recent election, in which Trump got

(06:05):
a minority of the total vote and in which those
suffering from MAGA disease have perverted into some kind of
magic wand well, you voted for him, therefore you authorized
him to break the law any way he damn well pleases.
Later in a separate post, Davis also questioned the basic
legitimacy of the Supreme Court's ruling and proposed subjecting its

(06:29):
justices to at least the threat of imminent violence. Davis
wants Trump to release those he and Davis claim are
foreign and violent and terrorists near where the justices and
their families and their presumed friends live. Quoting Davis again,

(06:50):
the Supreme Court still has an illegal injunction on the
President of the United States not possible preventing him from
commanding military operations to expel these foreign terrorists. The President
should have these terrorists near the Chevy Chase country Club
with daytime release unquote. Besides the threat there, taken at

(07:15):
face value, it is as cynical as any produced by
Maga disease. So far, either the Supreme Court lets Trump
kidnap and disappear people protected by law, or Trump should
sick them on the members of the court. Apart from that,
as the American Immigration Council Senior fellow Aaron Reichland Melnick

(07:35):
notes Mike Davis's second post is full of lies. Quote
the Alien Enemies Act. Deportations are not military operations, DHS
runs them. Reichland Melnick also notes the injunction isn't against Trump,
it's against DHS. A Supreme Court injunction, by definition, can't

(07:56):
be illegal. The order made clear DHS can deport people normally,
And of course mister Reichland Melnick is correct. But to
the others with MAGA disease, Davis has simply used all
the correct buzzwords. Invoke Obama and Biden, call the people
abducted and renditioned by Trump terrorists, falsely connect what Trump

(08:18):
is doing to his role as commander in chief, and
pretend it is authorized because he and you use the
phrase military operations vaguely suggest violence to be committed, of
course by others. And of course, the nonsensical ellipsis calling
a ruling of the Supreme Court illegal when the Supreme

(08:39):
Court exists to interpret the Constitution and the deciding votes
in this case were cast by justices Trump himself appointed.
If you're going to point back to the last election,
you have to point back to the election, so to speak,
of these justices by Trump himself, final vote total one

(08:59):
nothing on each of them. As to Trump himself, his
usual cowardly response, reposting both of Davis's stochastic threats, pointing
at those who have thwarted him, as he is always
pointed at judges, politicians, foreign leaders, presidents, presidential candidates, reporters,
anybody he thinks might be intimidated, and now the Supreme Court.

(09:22):
Hoping that the scum who follow him will act, Trump
wrote all caps, the Supreme Court won't allow us to
get criminals out of our country. Well, you're still here.
That was just the appetizer. This was the meal. The
Supreme Court of the United States. Thanks for letting me

(09:42):
know it's the United States rather than the United Kingdom.
The Supreme Court of the United States is not allowing
me to do what I was elected to do, which
is bullshit. Sleepy Joe Biden allowed millions of criminal aliens
to come into our country without a quote capital letters
process also bullshit. But in order to get them out

(10:02):
of our country, we have to go through a long
and extended process capitals. In any event, Thank you to
Justice Alito and Justice Thomas for attempting to protect our country.
This is a bad and dangerous day for America. There
is another standard Trump ploy here, Thank you to Justice

(10:24):
Alito and Justice Thomas, thus reminding there would be vigilantes
that the others, the liberals on the Court and even
Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsich and Amy Cony Barrett, they are
to receive the blame and to receive god knows what else.
It is again, as ever with Trump, stochastic terrorism by Trump,

(11:12):
and in this context of the Komy farce, in the
context of how the fascists are still trying to turn
into a threat of assassination, a stupid Instagram post calling
for Trump to be fired or dumped or removed, by
every definition and interpretation of the terms used, a decidedly
non violent call for change. Non violent, not violent in

(11:39):
the context of what these belligerent yet always thin skinned
morons are pretending James Comy meant. If that context were accurate,
the Mike Davis and Trump posts would be menacing enough
that they both would have to be immediately arrested. Comy,
of course, posted a photo of some shells on sand

(12:01):
that he had formed either physically or dig into the
numbers eighty six and forty seven, and made a further
stupid joke that the numbers had to rayed themselves naturally. Somehow.
Eighty six believed to have originated in slang created by
Soda Fountain employees eighty and ninety years ago, meaning they

(12:24):
were out of a particular drink or food fanella egg creams.
Eighty six. That number supposedly selected because it rhymes with nicks.
Not violent, never violent, unlike a phrase like deep six
to throw something or somebody overboard literally or figuratively. Not
necessarily violent deep six, but it could be, unlike eighty six,

(12:46):
which is at its core about running out of milkshakes.
As they say usually about Trump, there's always a tweet.
This time it isn't one of his, but rather from
the right wing extremist Jack Posobic, who tweeted James Comy
should be arrested and to have to dismantle the FBI
building brick by brick. That tweet was on May sixteenth,

(13:10):
twenty twenty five. On January twenty ninth, twenty twenty two,
the same facodic tweeted eighty six forty six. Unfortunately it
is not just the amateur right wing nuts who tried
to turn Comy's stupid post into the modern equivalent of
the crucifixion. The professional right wing nuts trampled each other

(13:32):
to try this. They proceeded with typical caution, and by
typical caution, I mean escalating hysteria. From the FBI Director Popeye,
we are aware of the recent social media post by
former FBI Director James Comy directed at President Trump. We
are in communication with the Secret Service and director. Current
primary jurisdiction is with the SS on these matters, and

(13:56):
we the FBI will provide all necessary support. Good call
on using SS. He's a genie cash Pattel from Secretary
Gnome quote. Disgraced former FBI Director James Comy just called
for the assassination of President Trump. He didn't. That doesn't

(14:17):
stop her. I think we should just be happy she
didn't drag him over to the gravel pit. And yeah,
DHS and Secret Services investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.
Here's how you should respond appropriately. Shove it, dn I,

(14:37):
Telsey Gabbard, James Comey just issued a call to action
to murder the President of the United States. Telsea Gabbart
is an incredibly stupid woman. But there is nothing in
that post that is a call to action or to murder.
Forty seven is a reference to the President of the

(14:58):
United States. You got one third of it right. This,
I believe is your personal best. He's a former FBI
director and someone who spent most of his career prosecuting
mobsters and gangsters. He knew exactly what he was doing
and must be held accountable. Doesn't say anything about prosecuting
soda jerks. Thank you, Madam d and I director of

(15:21):
No Intelligence Gabbard and Stephen Miller, as the former FBI
director and key leader of the deep state. Comy's call
for assassination while the president is abroad no less is
a chilling escalation of the war against our democracy by

(15:41):
a faction committed to its destruction. So Stephen Miller, you
sent Comy's post, and remember this is assassination by egg
cream and Trump still trying to portray strength and weakness,
invulnerability and imminent martyrdom and all at the same time

(16:03):
he said, comye knew exactly what that meant. A child
knows what that meant. That meant assassination unquote a child. Well,
every Trump accusation is a confession. Mercifully, half the MAGA
disease sufferers made idiots out of themselves, trying to make

(16:23):
Komy's gratuitous and frankly weak image and imagery into something serious.
Congressman James Comer, who may or may not have ever
realized that he and James Komy literally differ by exactly
one letter, confessed more than he accused when he went
on Fox and insisted he wouldn't be surprised if Komy's

(16:43):
Seashell arrangement meant quote they were trying to jizz up
some kind of coup or some kind of insurrection. One
presumes Comer was reaching for the phrase gin up, or

(17:03):
he was reaching for something else, perhaps something that Lauren
Bobert could help him with. Jesse Waters went into some
intricate explanation that somebody told him, or maybe he dreamed it.
Who knows of eighty six, the man who makes his
predecessors Tucker Carlson and Bill O'Reilly seem intelligent. Waters says, quote,

(17:27):
it's military slang, t O on a rotary phone. He
was a marine. He obviously knew what he was doing. Unquote.
Comy was not a marine you may be thinking of Mueller.
Comy wasn't a marine. He was never in the military.
His dad was a cop in the town next to

(17:48):
mine when I was a kid. If that'll help. Jesse
also to in military slang means throw out, which once
again does not imply violence among the randas. There was
the usual rate of ten to fifteen percent hilarious typos
from somebody identifying himself as Sean R. Larabee. Quote. As

(18:10):
the Left wages war against the people of the United
Stairs of American, they call for the assassination of their leader.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Stairs
of American. But dumbest of all, as ever knew Gingrich,

(18:33):
who as ever will believe anything quote? Does anyone believe
the eighty six forty seven seashell arrangement Comy quote found
unquote occurred naturally? He clearly is in need of psychiatrist help.
Gingrich once tweeted that something was the fault of elites

(18:55):
in New York City who looked down on ordinary people
and showed their contempt and superiority by riding the New
York subway. The elites take the subway here that I
thought was untoppable for its Gingrichian stupidity, yet Newt has

(19:15):
now somehow exceeded it. He thinks he thinks Komy was
serious about this, just washed up on the beach like that.
It's still, though, is not the dumbest Thingnut Gingrich has
ever done in a fantastically dumb life filled not just
with an extraordinary volume of dumbness, but one with amazing

(19:38):
variety of dumb. Nut, of course, is the man who
twisted this country in knots for a year and forced
us to take our eyes off the gathering storm of
bin laden led terrorism in his insane attempt to impeach
and remove a president, then block the appointment of a
new vice president, then impeach and remove the new president,
and as Speaker of the House, automatically rise to take

(20:00):
the place of both of them in the White House.
You may recall how that turned out. The impeachment died
quickly in the Senate, the President's approval rate rose, and
the only person who lost his job was Newt Gingrich.
Who is it that's clearly in need of quote psychiatrist

(20:24):
help Newt Among reeler headlines, Trump supposedly on the phone
with Putin At ten am Monday, Trump making the call
for instructions from President Putin on how to destroy America.

(20:45):
Press one for instructions from President Putin on how to
destroy Ukraine. Press two for updates from President Putin about
your compromant. Press three. We're sorry, we're experiencing higher than
usual call volume. Please wait and a Putin will be
with you shortly. There are nine hundred and seventy four

(21:06):
calls ahead of you. Domestically, Trump's Secretary of the Treasury,
Scott Bessant, who doesn't actually exist. He's just a dim
witted character played to perfection by the great American character
actor Barry Bostwick, the mayor in Spin City, Scott Bessant,
if that is your real name, says Walmart will reply

(21:27):
to Trump's demand that it quote eat most of the
price increases Trump has created with his tariffs. Of course,
Bessant said this on Meet the Press, So Kristen Welker
did not follow up by asking the obvious question. Didn't
Trump say there wouldn't be any price increases because the
foreign countries pay the tariffs and thus eat the price increases. Meanwhile,

(21:52):
may I suggest something Trump can eat among the other
secretaries stuffed into the Trump cabinet circus clown car. Pro
Publica has intimated the Attorney General Blondie may have done
a Martha Stewart by selling more than a million dollars
in stock in Trump's social media site just before Trump
crashed the stock market with his tariff announcement. I'm sure

(22:14):
the Justice Department will get right on that. It is
now confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security, except if you're a
dog in her home. Christy Nome is vetting a reality
show proposed by a veteran of Duck dynasty that would
have immigrants compete for actual US citizenship papers and all
by proving they are the most American. The pitch Deck

(22:38):
reports The Wall Street Journal is thirty six slides long.
How about another reality series in which immigrants compete for
actual US citizenship by guessing how many plastic surgery procedures
Secretary Nome has had, you know, rounded off to the
nearest one hundred and as to either FCC Chairman Brendan

(23:01):
Carr or the Secretary of Blackmail, who is who is? Well,
Trump is his own secretary of blackmail, right. Guess what
submitting to blackmail gets you Bob Iger immunity, no, sir,
more blackmail quote from Trump. Why doesn't Chairman Bob Iger

(23:22):
do something about ABC fake news, especially since I just
won sixteen million dollars based on the fake and defamatory
reporting of little George Slopadopoulos. You didn't win anything that
was a bribe. He was given warnings but just couldn't
be restrained by management. Now I see they are at
it again, and I again give these sleeze bags fair warning.

(23:46):
The wonderful country of Katar, after agreeing to invest more
than one point four trillion dollars in the United States
of America, deserves much better than misleading fake news. Everyone,
including their lawyers, has been told that ABC must not
say that Katar is giving me a free Boeing set
and forty seven airplane because they are not. Instead, and

(24:08):
as fake news, ABC fully knows and understands, this highly
respected country is donating the plane to the United States
Air Force Defense Department and not to me. By so doing,
their saving our country and the American taxpayer hundreds of
millions of dollars. ABC fake news is one of the worst. Gee, Trump,

(24:28):
you left out the part about how it's a used plane.
That Katar wasn't able to sell One quote in there
that should tell Bob Iiger and all the rest of
media where Trump wants to take this. The quote is,
I again give these sleezebags fair warning. Everyone including their lawyers,
has been told that ABC must not say that's where

(24:53):
the government of this country is going, that's where America
is going. Where Trump tells you he is defending freedom
of the press, and then tell the press and television
and eventually you what you can and cannot say line
by line. Good call, Bob. Now more on Trump voters

(25:24):
and buyer's remorse. I mentioned Elliott Morris's excellent new website,
Strength in Numbers last week, which sure seems to be
polling about issues and news rather than just horse races.
Last week, he calculated, using his own polling, that Trump's
pulling is so bad in so many ways that if

(25:45):
the twenty twenty four election were to be conducted now,
Harris would win by five points. Morris, the last king
of five thirty eight dot com after Bob Iger got
rid of that, has now moved on to the issue
of actual regret by those who voted for Trump. CNN
did poll indicating that only four percent do only four

(26:09):
percent of Trump voters would rather have voted for somebody
else or not voted at all. After this start seems trivial,
except that four percent of Trump's vote total would be
three million, ninety two thousand votes, and Trump only best
at Harris by two million, two undred and eighty five
thousand votes. So I don't know what explains why they
would position that as trivial, except maybe for CNN's recent

(26:32):
lurch right word. Morris notes in a way few pollsters
I have ever met would even think of quote. The
first problem is that people are probably very unwilling to
tell a stranger that they regret an action they took.
More practically, Morris also writes this in a poll of

(26:53):
one thousand US adults, I find that if you ask
people simply how they would vote in a hypothetical election
not framed as regret, persistent voting for Trump is in
fact significantly lower than persistent support for Kamala Harris. The
percentage of Trump twenty twenty four voters who say they'd
vote for him again is just eighty six percent. In comparison,

(27:14):
Harris retains ninety two percent of her prior voters. Those
differences seem small, but in a close election, they absolutely
add up. Morris continues, what people tend to ignore is
the non voters. A meaningful number of people who set
out twenty twenty four now say they would participate, and
they lean towards Harris over Trump by fourteen points. While

(27:39):
twenty twenty four voters are split forty three percent to
forty three percent for Trump and Harris, in the hypothetical rematch,
non voters go for Harris thirty six percent to twenty
two percent. Non voters represented about a third of US adults,
so that shift is large enough to tip the electoral
balance away from Trump. Overall. Unquote, the sum total is

(28:03):
the same sum total as is no numbers from last week.
If the election were held now, Trump would lose and
buy a large margin. I think you can tell. I
like Morris's site strength in numbers. His polling is done
by Verisite, and while I am plugging it, i'd add
Morris thinks Trump's interior numbers are now so bad they

(28:25):
are nearing blue wave territory. He has upgraded Trump's overall
disapproval to just net minus eight, which he calculates translates
to losing forty seats in the House next year nineteen
fifty two. Except for the two thousand and two terror election,

(28:46):
every president has lost House seats. There is a predictable
correlation between how bad your NET approval is and how
many seats you lose in the House. In May twenty
twenty two, Joe Biden was at net plus thirteen and
the Republicans gained nine seats. Twenty eighteen, Trump was about

(29:12):
where he was now, at about minus eight minus nine
minus ten net, and he lost forty House seats. So
the roadmap is in one sense simple for the next
nineteen months until they regain the House. The Democrat's most
important role is to hold, block, delay, stall, defer, and

(29:37):
throw their bodies in front of anything Trump wants, anything
and everything. Are we picking which Democrats have to throw
their bodies in front of this newsome first? Gretchen Whitmer,

(30:04):
Bill Maher are yeah? Bill Maher? Also of interest here,
Trump wonders if a new soccer stadium will be used
for the twenty twenty Los Angeles Olympics. The stadium is
in New York City. Apparently it has never occurred to
Trump that Los Angeles is not in New York City.

(30:29):
That's next. God bless Joe Biden. This is Countdown. This
is Countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead on this all

(30:59):
new edition of Countdown. Another baseball manager fired by an
underperforming team that had had hopes. That's one way of
looking at it. The other way of looking at it
is another baseball manager fired by a franchise desperately hoping
to make its fans think their team stinks because the
players are greedy and it's worth locking them out and

(31:22):
maybe not having a season in twenty twenty seven instead.
Next in Sportsball Center First, believe it or not, there's
still more new idiots to talk about. The roundup of
the miscreants, morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute
the latest other worse persons in the world, Thebrons worse

(31:43):
Trumpy again. On his bribery tour of the Middle East,
he was shown a presentation about a new soccer stadium
in New York City and the naming rights that will
go to an Abu Dhabi company, and Trump asked his host,
so where is it and the answer was Queen's And
Trump said, I know the area well. I grew up

(32:04):
in Queens. Will they be using that in the Olympics? Uh?
Using it in the What now? The Olympics Trump is
referring to, presumably are the twenty twenty eight games in
Los Angeles, So naturally they'd use a queen's stadium three

(32:24):
thousand miles away for the soccer in the Los Angeles Olympics,
unless Trump meant the twenty twenty six Winter Games, which
are in Italy. Years ago, when I worked in Boston,
I was at the ABC station while we were carrying
the Olympics, the nineteen eighty four Olympics from coincidentally Los Angeles.

(32:46):
We got so many phone calls from viewers, most of
them complaining that we were preempting the soap operas in
the afternoon, that many of those calls were forwarded to
us in the sports department. One earnest, serene, intelligent sounding
viewer was on the phone explaining he'd never seen Bucker
before and was fascinated by this game and he wanted

(33:08):
to go watch some of it. Where are they playing
these soccer games, he asked me. I explained, in the
Los Angeles area, in a couple of stadiums. Oh, he replied, pleasantly.
What part of Boston is that. I survived that question
and explained it was in California. He hadn't heard me.
In fact, some of the games were at the Rose

(33:29):
Bowl in Pasadena, and he said, Passadena. Is that anywhere
near Gloucester. This went on for a while while I
got increasingly worried. It became quite clear the guy had
no idea that there were parts of the world that
weren't in or near Boston. Finally, he asked which tea

(33:52):
line the subway system, the trolley's green or blue he
should take to get to that game in Pasadena. So
I had to explain to him it was three thousand
miles away and it would take him a week or
so to get there, and he'd have to walk. After
he got to the farthest station on the Green line.
He laughed at me, Sorry, that's impossible. There's no place

(34:13):
that far away, and he hung up. I'm wondering now
if maybe my nineteen eighty four collar was actually Trump
the stadium in Queens, Will it be used for the
Los Angeles Olympics. No, he's not brain damaged at all.
The runner up worser is pal Musk talk about brain

(34:33):
damage Musk's AI chat bot on X GROC has gone
all Hal three thousand from the movie two thousand and
one on us. First, it started to bring up white
genocide in South Africa when asked about anything like, never
mind that, what about the white genocide in South Africa?
Human Then some questioner brought up the Holocaust and GROC

(34:58):
replied mentioning the six million Jews killed, and then without provocation,
GROC explained it was skeptical about that figure. This led
to a statement from the company on May fourteenth, at
approximately three point fifteen AMPST, an unauthorized modification was made
to the GROCK response bots prompt on X huh. An

(35:23):
unauthorized modification was made to GROC in the middle of
the night Pacific time by somebody who would know how
to get past all the X electronic firewalls and then
go in and actually alter the programming of the artificial
intelligence bot or tell one of his employees to do it. Hmmmm.

(35:47):
I wonder if there are any suspects but our winner
talking about artificial intelligence or artificial lack of intelligence the
worst again, Politico and Axios. They're not alone out here.
CNN also mistakenly decided This subject is click or viewer bait,

(36:09):
but one headline on politico site and the lead item
on some of its newsletters read the Biden question hanging
over the twenty twenty eight field. Some Democrats argue their
leaders aren't owning up to the truth about Biden and
risk keeping the issue alive indefinitely. Adam Wren and Holly
otter Bine then write something that might seem true to

(36:32):
them from inside the DC bubble, but is bluntly outright fiction.
I will quote it. Joe Biden may have cost Democrats
the White House in twenty twenty four. That's true. Their
inability to admit it, some Democrats fear could hobble them
in twenty twenty eight. Say what now? As a fresh
reckoning in the party unfolds around the former president's mental acuity,

(36:57):
what party is this happening at? Potential presidential contenders have
mostly dodged questions about his condition while in all office,
since since he's not in office anymore and that was resolved.
They also sidestepped whether the party should have more forcefully
called on him to abandon his re election bid earlier. Yeah,

(37:19):
that's a tough one to judge here. From after the
fact whether or not they should have done more get
them to leave. Maybe maybe that's be answered with the
one hundred percent of the people saying the same thing
to that that's a big controversy. They've also sidestepped whether
the party should have more forcellly called on him to
abandon his reelection bit earlier. I'm waiting for somebody to say, no,

(37:41):
we like the way it turned out. More from this
article by otter Bine and Wren. Why isn't the Grock
name of artificial intelligence? Otter Bine, That sounds like a
name of a chatbot. How are some of these national
front runners or people who are already barnstorming states like
South Carolina or Iowa expected to look voters in the

(38:04):
eye with a straight face and say, trust me, even
though I got the twenty twenty four election so terribly wrong,
asked the former Representative Joe Cunningham, Democrat of South Carolina,
who said he expects the issue to come up on
the trail in what is now the first in the
nation primary state. There's no courage on display by any
of the folks whose names are being circulated right now.

(38:26):
Speaking of names, who the hell is Joe Cunningham the
lead quote in this story, Joe Cunningham, the White Sox
and Cardinals first baseman from the fifties and sixties. The
lead quote, Joe Cunningham turns out to be a one
term congressman who lost to Nancy Mace. Joe, you lost

(38:52):
to a slightly animated box of plastic. I had literally
never heard of Joe Cunningham before the Politico story. If
he he is the lead item in your story, you
ain't got a story. Meanwhile, Axios under Mike Allen, another

(39:13):
guy who'll carry anybody's water and will go to his
grave having never really understood the meaning of any story
he ever covered, just its relative heat and maybe the
metrics of the audience it drew, and who thanked him
for it and said I owe you one. Mike Allen
published the audio of Trump Horror X special counsel Robert

(39:34):
Hurr's interview with Biden in Washington. This is all a
big deal. Like the way I get with baseball history,
nineteenth century World Series, break into programming. I just found
out something about the third inning of the seventh game
of the n eighteen eighty six World Series. I care
and two or three other people care outside Washington. If

(39:58):
this story registers, it registers as part of the Trump
and Republican attempt to overshadow his crashing of the economy,
his threatening of the Supreme Court, his attempt to turn
us into a dictatorship, and especially his attempt to change
the topic from Trump's panorama of psychological and mental capacity issues.

(40:18):
Trump's got a defective brain, and he isn't emotionally close
to being responsible, and he's getting worse. But let's talk
about Joe Biden and not talk about the key reality
in the Joe Biden acuity story, which is simply whatever
condition he was in and whatever point in his presidency
you want to fixate on. Ultimately, when push came to shove,

(40:42):
he was sharp enough to do something nobody had ever
done before in the history of this country, to withdraw
his nomination for re election and have the vice president
run in his place instead. When exactly did Trump, who
has both a diseased and a disordered mind and has

(41:03):
had them for the entire party of both of his
terms in office, when did he do that? When is
he likely to do that? When will Politico and Axios
call for him to do that? When will they question
those Republicans and those Republicans and those other Republicans and
the reporters, including some at Politico and Axios, who have

(41:24):
covered up for a Trumpian mentally incompetent man and allowed
him to push this country and this world towards the
brink of disaster. When you do that, you can then
write a story about Biden, who did the right thing,
quoting a guy who who you say was a congressman.

(41:44):
But none of us have ever heard of Politico and
Axios and Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson and all the
other eighth rate DC media prostitutes today's other worst persons
in the world. This is Sports Senate. Wait, check that,

(42:19):
not anymore. This is Countdown with Keith Ulberman still ahead.
Good luck to anybody out there trying to graduate, not
really being sure if you will. This month, forty six
years ago right now, I was right where you are
the Friday before graduation at Cornell, and I had to

(42:40):
call the registrar to find out and she said yes,
no next in things I promised not to tell. First
from the sports Balls Central Center newsdesk Tonight dateline, Baltimore,
Maryland on Saturday, the Baltimore Orioles. I'm sorry, Balmer oriol

(43:04):
Oils fired manager Brandon Hyde, meaning that in a span
of ten days, three big League Baseball managers were Cashiered
Derek Shelton and Pittsburgh my friend Bud Black in Colorado
and Hide managers, as the cliche goes, are hired to
be fired. So on the surface, this would not be
that big a big deal among them, The Pirates, Rockies,

(43:25):
and Orioles had won a combined thirty four games and
lost a combined eighty seven games this year. Colorado had
lost thirty three of its first forty. But there might
be more to this, and the timing will support your
local neighborhood baseball conspiracy theorist. Baseball's basic agreement, the labor
deal between the owners and the players, expires after next season.

(43:48):
As always, when these fraught times approach from the horizon,
there are owners who still dream that they can force
the players' union into giving back something essential, something the
owners gave them or had to give them in the waning,
stubborn days of their predecessors, who in the nineteen seventies
and eighties believed that nothing could really force them to

(44:10):
give up their almost literal ownership of the players. Then
came free agency and court decisions and mediation decisions and
salary arbitration and seven hundred and sixty five million dollar contracts.
And the owners want you to give them all that back.
We want it, we want it now. Sometimes, as the

(44:31):
labor negotiations approach the labor negotiations of oh only the
last half century, the owners dream of eliminating or restricting
free agency. They forced the players to strike over that
in nineteen eighty one. Other times they think they can
coerce the players into agreeing to a hard salary cap,
in which teams cannot, under any circumstances, spend more on

(44:53):
players than a certain given figure, like they haven't hockey.
They tried that in eighteen eighty nine. The players not
only went on strike in eighteen eighty nine, in eighteen
ninety they formed their own league and their own teams,
and total war ensued. Anyway, for the last twenty five years,

(45:14):
a bunch of owners have dreamed of a salary cap.
A friend of mine bought a big league ball club,
and I ran into him at a ballpark just after
he did. I'll leave his name out of it, but
he asked me seriously, So when do you think I'll
get that salary cap? The commissioner promised me when we
closed the purchase. I laughed. He did not laugh. He

(45:34):
really thought it was going to happen. I said, well,
not this lifetime, certainly, not next lifetime. Maybe the lifetime
after that. This was like twenty years ago. Many of
the owners are again now dreaming of a salary cap,
of making the players accept a salary cap by locking
them out by threatening to delay or cancel, or to

(45:56):
actually cancel the beginning of or the whole of the
twenty twenty seven season. This would be sold to the
fans as a way to make sure the teams in
the smaller markets can always be competitive and their stars
on their teams don't leave for the clubs with more
cash because they play in bigger cities. Even though those

(46:17):
two free agency mega deals, the ones for Shoheo Tani
and Juan Soto, they both saw the players leave for
the other team in the same market. It will be
pitched as a guarantee of balance and parody. Even though
no team has won consecutive World Series since the nineteen
ninety nine two thousand Yankees and the teams in the

(46:38):
biggest market, New York, have only been in a total
of five World Series since the two thousand Yankees. It
will be presented as a way to rein in ticket prices, when,
of course, the owners will keep raising them and will
keep any money they make from raising them and any
money they save under a salary cap, they'll just keep
that too, their owners. That's what they're supposed to do,

(47:00):
keep the money. What's interesting is that three of the
franchises that are pushing the hardest for a baseball salary
cap are the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Colorado Rockies, and the
Baltimore Orioles. And what a coincidence. Those are the ones
that just fired their managers after terrible starts, the ones
that spent almost nothing to obtain new players in free

(47:22):
agency last winter. The ones that could succeed on the
field and at the bank but have chosen not to
for some reason. It's as if they've decided to make
their teams bad, fire the managers as proof, and blame
the players for the lack of a salary cap, you know,
like the peribial guys who murder their parents then ask

(47:44):
the judge for mercy. Because they're orphans. Were the guys
who ask the fans to support a lockout to force
a salary cap on those greedy players? Dateline New York,
New York at a PostScript to Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred's

(48:05):
announcement last week that if you were on the permanently
ineligible list but you're dead now, you are no longer
on the permanently ineligible list, and thus you are now
eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame. Pete Rose and Shulish,
Joe Jackson, and fifteen others. Manfred wrote to Rose's lawyer, quote,
I have concluded that permanent ineligibility ends upon the passing

(48:28):
of the disciplined individual. And they put out the press
release saying how this affected seventeen guys who were put
on that list by commissioners. I hadn't thought of this
at the time because the Rose and Jackson news was
the news. But what about the fifteen or sixteen people
banned from baseball before there was a commissioner. It's probably
unlikely that any of them would get elected to the

(48:50):
Hall of Fame, but a couple of them might. The
gambler and game fixer and premier defensive first baseman hal
Chase was named on nine percent of the ballots in
the nineteen thirty seven Hall of Fame vote. Jim Devlin,
a game fixer from the Louisville team in eighteen seventy seven,
had a career ERA of one point nine to zero,

(49:11):
and he as a pitcher won thirty games twice before
they banned him. What about those guys, what should they do, Commissioner?
Do they have to die again? Do you have to
ban them officially so they die again and then they're unbanned?
More importantly, it also didn't dawn on me at first.
But these guys didn't all die last September like Charlie

(49:32):
Hussel Pete Rose did. This isn't some sort of new
ruling necessitated by some kind of mass casualty event. And
the phrasing from Manfred is not from now on, permanent
ineligibility ends upon the passing of the way Manfred and
Baseball have put it in that statement, All these other
banned players have been eligible for the Hall of Fame

(49:56):
since they died so shoeless Joe Jackson has been eligible
for the Hall of Fame since nineteen fifty one. And
what Commissioner you and your predecessors just didn't bother to
tell us a graduation time to the number one story

(50:25):
on the countdown, And every year the anniversary arises, and
my memory comes back to the same place, my college
graduation and how close it came to not happening, so
close that for literally forty years after I graduated, I
had the same dream that I think all graduates have,

(50:49):
of not graduating and not finding out until a few
hours before graduation, in which time you have maybe two
hours and fifteen minutes to read three thousand pages and
write a report on something, or you have to take
a chemistry lab exam or or or everybody has this dream.
I had this dream because I took twenty eight credits

(51:12):
in I believe, ten different courses in the second semester
of my senior year, and the dream in which you
have forgotten an entire class that was a literal possibility
for me. Happily, somehow I got out of it. As background,

(51:33):
I completed college in seven semesters. This was not some
attempted feat of strength. It just worked out that way.
I missed my second semester as a freshman. I was
sick and went home, and also in the fall of
each year. I had concluded that I would learn more
covering the Baseball Playoffs and World Series for our college

(51:56):
student operated commercial radio station than I would in the
wonderfully intended but not quite as sophisticated Cornell University Communication
Arts classes doing for a couple of weeks rather than
listening for a couple of weeks. Needless to say, this
washed me out of several courses, so as I entered

(52:20):
what I viewed as my senior year, which was actually
only my sixth semester at Cornell in nineteen seventy eight,
I needed forty two credits to get out on time
in May nineteen seventy nine. I don't to this day
know what I was thinking was going to happen. How

(52:41):
When the typical workload at a major university or an
ordinary college is fifteen credits, that's enough sixteen if you're
actually going for a feed of strength, and I needed
twenty one credits in the fall and twenty one credits
in the spring, and I had signed up for, if

(53:02):
I remember correctly, fifteen credits in the fall, thus leaving
me needing twenty seven in the spring, and then at
some point late in the summer of nineteen seventy eight,
before my senior year, or early in the fall semester,
my dad mentioned, you know, I'm not paying for anything
after next spring. So now it wasn't just a question

(53:22):
of graduating on time or not. It was a question
of graduating on time or having to pay for it myself.
At this point, I had never earned a dollar other
than in media as a teenager part time United pres International,
working on books, working on magazines, writing articles for money,

(53:44):
doing the commercials in the college radio station. The rest
of the money I had ever earned in my life
came from raking leaves. I was not prepared to being
a student who also worked on the side. If that
had befallen me, I would still be trying to complete
my last year somewhere working on the side. Thank goodness,

(54:07):
I went into broadcasting. I never had to work a
day in my life, a time commitment. Yes, work, not
really back to the story. So I needed all this
large amount of student work in the last two semesters
or now I was not going to graduate, and all
of my career moves, all of the preparation I had made,

(54:31):
had been with the idea that I would be exiting
school in May nineteen seventy nine and available for employment
in June nineteen seventy nine, or May, if it came
to that. But I don't know, and I can't recall
what I was thinking was going to happen, except that
I was utterly confident that I would be graduating on time,

(54:54):
not staying long, not dropping out of the university. I
did think about dropping out of the university because I
was up for a job that would have started in
March of nineteen seventy nine in New York. I didn't
get it, But I don't remember having a backup plan, Like,
you know, if you just take eighteen credits, which would

(55:17):
be a lot, you'd have to get special permission for it.
What would happen? Then? I'd still be way short, no
idea in that happy, go lucky manner that most teenagers had.
And I was still nineteen as this played out of
my mind in the summer and early fall of nineteen
seventy eight, I had no idea, no backup plan. I

(55:38):
was just gonna wing it. Yeah, So I did, in
fact get the fourteen credits completed or fifteen credits in
the fall of nineteen seventy eight, and that left me
with a mere twenty seven credits needed for the spring
of nineteen seventy nine. And I laid out my schedule

(56:01):
and realized that there were several shortcuts, let's put it
that way, shortcuts in which I could get a credit
for having done an internship the year before by writing
up a paper about the news gathering techniques at Channel
five News in New York, or another three credits for

(56:22):
writing an entire history of that internship, a thirty forty
page document. There were a couple of shortcuts, but that
still left me needing, you know, twenty three real credits.
So I went into my advisor with my proposed schedule
of ten courses might have been eleven worth twenty eight credits.

(56:45):
Every way I worked it out, I couldn't get it
to just be twenty seven. I needed twenty seven, and
it said twenty eight. And my advisor looked at this
and went, literally, are you out of your effing mind?
This was this was not just an advisor. He was
the professor of parliamentary Procedure in Communication Arts at Cornell

(57:06):
and he did other things too, but the whole idea
of parliamentary procedure was playing by the rules. And the
man just swore at me in astonishment, not in anger,
and I said, well, I've looked into it, and there
aren't any regulations that deny me the opportunity to take these.
I mean, many of these are freshman courses, because when
I was sick as a freshman, I had to bail

(57:26):
out on the second semester of freshman biology, freshman chemistry,
freshman physics. And my degree required a minimum number of
hours six I think in two science fields and nine
in one other science field, and I was going to
be taking each of those freshman classes and a freshman
English class, and these history classes over here are worth

(57:47):
four and a couple of communication arts classes and the
independent study classes that I mentioned. And he looked at
me like I was out of my mind. Of course,
there are rules against this. Why do you think nobody
tries this? It's too much. Nobody can do it. The
greatest scholar we've ever had here could not possibly graduate,
And think if you did, what your grades would look like.

(58:09):
I had long before ascertained that nobody would ever look
at my grade point average, which was to that point
probably about two point two. No one would ever know,
No one would ever care. They would care about my
voice and my ability to write, my ability to report,
and my ability to read, probably in that order. And

(58:30):
I said to him, I'm not worried about the grade point.
I just want to graduate. I'm not going to take
any classes pass fail. I'm not going to take any
classes in which I'm going to be really challenged by
these things. Ei, there's a four point history exam. I'm
pretty good at the history and I did pretty well
here in the first half of that course. Professor Pollenberg,
as I remember, in any event, he said, no, there's

(58:52):
a rule against it. And he called the university registrar
to confer this, the college registrar, the College of Agriculture
and Life Sciences at Cornell, and I heard this end
of this conversation with the RUSS Martin. Yeah, I have
a student here who's tried to register for twenty eight
credits for the spring semester. I know now he does

(59:16):
not appear to have a hole in his head. Now, Yes,
it's Olberman, that's right. How did you know? Yes, Well,
I'm just explaining to him that he can't because the rules.
What do you mean, But why aren't there any rules. Well,
this is ridiculous. You mean any of these students could
sign up for twenty eight credits? What's the limit? What

(59:39):
do you mean there's no limit. This went on with
him conveniently repeating everything that she said. He did everything
except in the comedy routine. Yes, I know, I'm repeating
everything you said. Yes I know, I'm still doing it.
He kept giving me what she was saying, and finally
he hung up the phone and went, well, there's no
college rule against it, but I'm confident there's a university

(01:00:00):
rule against it. So he called up the university registrar
and had this same conversation, only this woman was not
named Martha. She was named Marsha. Damn it, Marsha. We're
going to bring this up at the faculty meeting at
the Board of Cross College Heads of Faculties and Parliamentary
Procedure Professors. And he put the phone down. He went,

(01:00:22):
damn you, you can take the twenty eight credits. I
don't think you have a chance of doing it. And
I said, well, I'm not worried about it, and I
don't have a backup plan, and I'm going to leave
this school on May twenty eighth nineteen seventy nine, with
or without a degree. They let me take the twenty
eight credits. Somehow later in the semester, I found out

(01:00:43):
that the record, as near as they could ascertain at
Cornell was twenty eight credits in a semester. So I
was going to tie the all time record or not
graduate on time. And I was taking basically twice what
everybody else did. And it turned out that the guy
who had done twenty eight credits had in fact cheated
the system. He was read steered under his own name

(01:01:05):
for fifteen and in the days when you could still
get away with this, registered for thirteen credits for a
friend of his who'd already taken a job, and I
believe had moved to Portland, Oregon, which was a considerable
commute from Ithaca, New York. He didn't attend any of
the classes his friend did. He took exams as somebody
else and did this, which I think is a very

(01:01:26):
significant accomplishment and much more impressive than my own still
twenty eight under my own name. One schedule. Needless to say,
this involved a lot of laboratory meetings being scheduled at
the same time as three hour lectures, a lot of
courses that in this modern computer age would never ever
be scheduled for you because they conflicted. There were classes

(01:01:49):
I could not attend. There were teaching sections in which
they would hand out to the assembled two or three
hundred students in a biology class a written exam that
I had taken, or paper I had written, and they'd
just named everybody in the class here Oaks, and Oaks
would get his paper, and Ackerman would get his paper,

(01:02:11):
and then Oberman and the entire class would burst into
laughter because of course I wasn't there. Those who knew
me knew I was in the biology lab because I
had two classes scheduled at the same time. I do
remember that the thing that made me think I could
get away with this was something I experienced in my
first week at Cornell as a sixteen year old in

(01:02:31):
nineteen seventy five. I had been pretty good at Shakespeare,
to the point where my high school teacher had me
teach a Shakespeare class to the high school juniors one day,
much to my shock and fear and much to their
rising rage and resentment. But he thought I should be
a Shakespeare teacher, so I took the second level Shakespeare

(01:02:54):
class and got special permission, as many freshmen did to
take that class. And in this class, the professor took
off his classes and started to yell at us, you're
not in goddamn high school anymore. You're going to be
expected to do college level work, and the volume of
college level work, and some of the other kids in
this class began to shake. I didn't know quite what

(01:03:16):
he meant. I knew that in high school, every week,
every Wednesday, depending on the year, or Thursday morning, the
first thing we did, from the ninth grade on was
come in, sit down, get our loose leaf or our
composition notebooks handed to us by the teacher, and a
topic would go up on the board. The anticipation is

(01:03:37):
greater than the event. We had fifty five pages at
fifty five minutes to write three to five pages on
the topic. Often it would have something to do with
the English class we were taking. Often it would be
something as generic as a catch phrase. I wrote about
the Super Bowl and how the lead up to the
Super Bowl was far more interesting than the game itself.

(01:03:58):
Once the sound of silence was the topic and one
of my friends. After the composition books were taken in
at fifty five minutes, said I was thinking of just
writing the silence of the pen and leaving it blank.
And our English teacher, mister mcmowen, said, I would have
given you an A plus on that. In any event,

(01:04:21):
We did this for five years so I could write
and organize in my head and hand write three to
five pages of an essay in fifty five minutes. That
was my level of work, like forty of those a year,
once a week, plus all the other work that high
school demanded. This teacher back at Cornell in my freshman

(01:04:42):
year in nineteen seventy five in the advanced Shakespeare class
with all the really smart people, and me said, I'm
going to be expecting college level work out of you idiots.
No more getting through on nothing. You will be expected,
in the course of this semester to produce three three
page papers. The girl across from me on the other

(01:05:07):
side of the boardroom table at which we sat let
out a cry like that and began to turn pale.
And I thought, three three page papers, so that's nine pages,
and you on it Thursday. It was nothing compared to
what I normally did, all right, Maybe it was the

(01:05:28):
equivalent of two of my weekly high school essays, but
nine pages was probably what I wrote every ten days
at Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York. I asked the
girl after the class if three pages was a lot
in her perspective. She had explained at some point that
she knew somebody from my school, because each year there

(01:05:50):
were two national scholars two presidential scholars, who were chosen
by various means, two from each state to a total
of one hundred that were then invited to Washington to
meet the President of the United States. And one of
the ones from New York had been my classmate, Billy Roberts,
and one from Ohio was this girl whose name has
long been lost in the cracks in the sidewalk of

(01:06:12):
my memory. Nice girl, and she had told me she
knew Billy Roberts, and Billy Roberts warned her about me,
not that I was a threat, just that I was unusual.
So we had a good friendship and it didn't amount
to anything of interest one way or the other, except
for this one interaction where I said to her, so

(01:06:34):
you were a national merit scholarship, is this a lot
of work for you? And she went, I have never
written anything in school longer than three paragraphs. I did
a quick survey of the other students in the class,
at about half of them, nine pages over the course
of three months was a lot of work to them,
or at least above average, and to me it was

(01:06:57):
the golden key. I knew that all I had to
do was find classes that allowed me to write, rather
than you know, mix chemicals or I don't know, take
tests with multiple choice. If it was an exam that
involved writing, I was going to do well in the course.

(01:07:17):
In my senior year, I took Ecology because there was
no lab work except a couple of marches through the
woods around Cornell, which were nice anyway, and there were
six papers and a written exam with some multiple choice questions.
But the majority of the work was writing, and I
could always write. I would start twenty five page papers

(01:07:38):
the night before they were due and do well on
them because I learned how to write in high school.
So now as my senior year with the twenty eight
credits in it a record a record tying performance. And
by the way, they changed the rules after I graduated,
so you can't take more than something like twenty one credits,

(01:07:58):
So my record is unbreakable, thank you very much as
the week's PA. And I was also working at the
radio station and also tried to get my first job.
As all this went on, I began to have the
dreams in which I would forget a class. Oh man,
I forgot physics completely. I didn't actually all of the

(01:08:20):
teachers who saw me and knew I was a senior
taking physics freshman physics, as one of them said, when
I didn't do too well on the lab, I'm giving
you an A on this. I'll be damned if I
keep a second semester senior from graduating because of freshman
physics a communications major. So they were all good to me,
and nobody padded my numbers that much. And then came

(01:08:47):
two events, the final in ecology and the phone call
from my father. And I don't remember the sequence of
these things. The exam must have been first. I had
written the final paper, which was about extinction, and the
professor had said, you can write about the philosophy extinction,

(01:09:10):
the moral implications of extinction, the theories of extinction, And
I went go back one and he said the moral
implications or the theory or philosophy of extinctions or extrapolating
from what we know about extinctions to possibly the meaning
of it. I want I'll take that one because I
knew if I could come up with one idea, I

(01:09:32):
could turn it into twenty five pages. And the one
idea was that perhaps extinction was a function of the
growth of mankind from an advanced ape to our current
state of not quite an advanced ape. That as we
grew as our footprint in large, it would necessitate extinction

(01:09:53):
of other species. It's not a bad idea, it's not
a bad theory. It's not twenty five pages. And yet
somehow there it was, and I handed it in. But
most of my grade would depend on how that did
and how I did on the exam, and in the
final exam. In the middle of it, this guy, this
teaching assistant or professor, whatever he was, hands back my paper,

(01:10:15):
my theory of the societal and evolutionary implications of extinction,
and at the top, in red he has written fourteen
see me the world darkened, my blood ran cold, fourteen fourteen.

(01:10:43):
This means that to graduate, I'm going to have to
do one hundred on this final that's in front of me.
I was the fastest test taker in the history of
Cornell University. I believe fully, instinctively, your first answer is
probably your best because that memory that moment is, you know,
seven minutes fresher than the memory you're going to have
seven minutes from now when you decide you got the

(01:11:05):
first one wrong. So I would just do the exam,
double check to see if I'd written in something by mistake,
and then hand it in and leave. In this case,
that's not how this worked. I had the exam in
my hands when they said time, and I had changed
countless answers, and they had to pull it out of

(01:11:27):
my hands. And as I walked out into the spring
sun of Cornell University and the AG campus in the
spring of nineteen seventy nine, I did not know what
I was going to do other than throttle this teaching
assistant who suddenly appeared in front of me fourteen see

(01:11:47):
me and read. There he was and he was smiling,
and I thought I'd just deckham and I didn't do it,
and he went, listen, I'm glad I ran into you.
I wanted to explain the reason I didn't give you
the fifteenth point was I loved your argument. I didn't
hear the rest of it. It was fourteen out of
pit fifteen. Who grades like that? At that point I
was ready to say, why didn't you say fourteen out

(01:12:09):
of fifteen? It just says fourteen, But I didn't. I
just gave him a kiss on the cheek and then
went and got drunk at nine or ten in the morning.
So that hurdle was first off, it looked like it
had wrapped itself around my neck, and then it turned
out it had been vaulted. But at that point I
thought I was not graduating. The job I was up

(01:12:31):
for at United Press International was going to go to
somebody else. I would either have to stay for the
summer or leave Cornell without a degree and somehow come
back later or something and probably never get the degree.
And then I walked out into the sun and realized
that there were like five of my other ten courses
in which there was an excellent chance I might not graduate.
And that final in history, I think it was going

(01:12:54):
to come down maybe three or four points on a
five point question and a fifteen point section on a
one hundred and fifty point exam. I hadn't done that
well in the history exam. I knew it they'd hit
all the topics I had not mastered, and so on
the Friday before the graduation, on Monday, May twenty eighth,

(01:13:14):
nineteen seventy nine, my dad called and said, are you
graduating or not? Because your mother and your sister and
I are not coming up unless you're graduating. We're not
taking that drive again. If you haven't graduated. You can
get home on your own. I told you I'm not
paying for anything that includes your ride home if you
didn't graduate. I said, thank you for your support. He said,
you know I love you and I'm supporting you the

(01:13:34):
best I can. But you did miss a semester, and
I went, well, I was sick. Yeah, you were sick.
You were sick. After the day, I could have gotten
the refund for the whole semester. My dad was very
practical with money. So I called the registrar's office. I
don't think I got Marcia or Martha, but I needed
to know. It was Friday, graduation was Monday. I really

(01:13:56):
needed to know whether or not I had to go
to graduation on Monday morning or make a reservation to
go home to New York on the back of the bus,
perhaps as luggage, maybe ship myself through the post office.
She said, Lank, let me check. Hold on. Okay, we
have this one, saying okay, An you passed. That's a

(01:14:17):
C minus in over here is and Dan, boy, you
took a lot of classes Olderman. Yes, well, let me
just hold on a second, puts her hand over the phone,
and for some reason I could hear her even better. Gladys,
I need to check. Did Olberman graduate? Now? Olberman? Oh
l no, no, no, no, no, no, not's o b

(01:14:40):
he's no I no, he's in the hotel school. Oh
l b E R M A N. This is when
I spoke two ends, two ends. Gladys, No, no he didn't.

(01:15:01):
Oh that's too bad. No again, the world receded in
front of my eyes. It got very dark and my
blood got very cold. And then she came back onto
removing her hand from the phone, onto full voice and said, yes,
you graduated. We just couldn't find the history final congratulations.

(01:15:24):
And I said to her, and I'm quoting myself, I
think exactly I got and she went, yes, thank god,
have a nice weekend, have fun at graduation. Don't drink
too much. Click. She hadn't been able to find the
history result which I passed. I think it was a
CS or a D plus. I just passed those five points.

(01:15:46):
I got four instead of three and the five point
in the fifteen point section in the one hundred and
fifty point history exam, and I graduated. And I got
a C plus in the biology course ecology because of
my one sentence theory that I turned into twenty five pages.
And I graduated and graduated with twenty eight credits in
my last semester when the average number of credits was fifteen,

(01:16:08):
and then they changed the rules so nobody could take
more than twenty one and they had to get special
permission to do that. So I share the all time
Cornell record for the most credits in one semester, and
my grade point average would have led either the American
or National leagues in earned run average for nineteen seventy nine.

(01:16:29):
That's how bad I was. And to this day, no
employer and nobody else I've ever known has asked to
see any of these numbers. I graduated, Dad came up.
We had a great time. I wore the suit, I
wore the hat. They had to order a special size
eight mortarboard for me, and as soon as it ended.

(01:16:52):
I did the whole bit. I went over to Dad
and I handed him my diploma and said, in the
tradition of college graduates, then and I hope now here,
here's your goddamned receipt. I've done all the damage I

(01:17:23):
can do here. Thank you for listening. Occurs to me
that I left something out of that story, which is
the part about the dreams. The dream started about a
month later that I didn't graduate on time, And obviously
they were not terrifying dreams, but depending on how much
stress there was in my life, often I would be
required not just to redo the classes I failed, but

(01:17:45):
to start college all over again, or start high school
all over again. And once, at a particularly tense point
in my life, at about the age of thirty five,
I had a dream in which because I did not
graduate college on time, they sent me back to the
third grade as an adult to sit in those tiny chairs.
That's how bad the dream was. And the dream continued,

(01:18:08):
and most people who've graduated from school were gone through
some similar Am I going to do this in time
kind of thing? Have a dream like this? The dream
continued in pretty much the same fashion for the next
forty years. And I began to wonder if the theories
about it, which is that it was just a stress
based dream based on reality, had been replaced by something else.
And finally it dawned on me as I hit sixty

(01:18:30):
years old and was having this dream, that in fact
I was still having the dream because in the dream
I was twenty and almost anything, including having to take
twenty eight credits in one semester and not really being
sure you're going to graduate, is better if you're twenty
than almost anything is if you're sixty. And the moment

(01:18:52):
I realized that it had turned into a nostalgia dream
for my now gone youth, the dream stopped. I haven't
had it since. Something to think about twenty eight credits?
Oh you can't. They changed their roles. Sorry, My academic
career in terrible grade point average. However, I'll always have that.

(01:19:13):
Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel, the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass and drums,
and it was produced by TKO Brothers. I should also
add that upon graduation one of my dear friends who've
been out looking for a job, came back and said,
when she saw me in line in my mortarboard and

(01:19:36):
my gown, you graduated. And I said yes. And she
then asked me about another one of our friends who
was also on the bubble, and I said, no, she
didn't graduate. She failed sex roles. She took sex roles
past fail and she failed it. And I burst into laughter,
and I had this strange experience of looking into my
friend's face. My friend said, you know, and this is

(01:19:59):
the first time I ever heard this cliche. You know,
she's standing right behind you. And I turned around and
she said, you've deserved this for a long time. And
on graduation morning she smacked me, and my glasses literally
did fly off into the bushes. But I didn't care.
I was graduating and she was not. Our satirical and

(01:20:23):
fifthy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever,
Nancy Faust, once again of the Chicago White Sox, the
Papacy's team. The sports music is the Ulderman theme for
Me ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Other music arranged and performed by the group no horns allowed,
and my announcer today was my friend Dennis Leary. Everything

(01:20:43):
else was, as ever, my fault. My friend Carol said
of the Lady who shall remain nameless, after she wandered
off not graduating on time, she said, Keith, you're a
strange guy, and I like you very much. You're one
of my best friends, and I hope that will always
be the case. But I need you to know something.

(01:21:06):
No matter how strange people might find you, how different
in both good and bad ways you might be, just
remember you'll never be as crazy as she is. I
should have married Carol. In fact, I should have married
Carol that morning. Based on that. That's countdown for today,

(01:21:27):
Day one hundred and twenty of America held hostage, just
three hundred and forty three days until the scheduled end
of his lame duck and lame brained term, unless Musk
removes him sooner. Where the actuarial tables do or we do?
We all have regrets in life. But I graduated on
time and started work a month later. The rest while

(01:21:49):
you're listening to it. The next scheduled countdown is Monday.
As always, bulletins as the news warrants. No, No, it's
not next Monday. This is Monday. The next scheduled countdown
is Thursday. As always, bulletins as the news warrants. I
was too busy trying to graduate. I didn't learn anything
as boldin's as the news warrants. And remember Trump is

(01:22:11):
laying the groundwork now to not leave office later, to
not graduate on time like he graduated on time. He
must be stopped till next time. I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning,
good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olberman

(01:22:46):
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.

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BIDEN'S CANCER; TRUMP THREATENS SUPREME COURT - 5.19.25

Episode Transcript

Host

Keith Olbermann

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