June 3, 2025 • 41 mins
SEASON 3 EPISODE 132: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: “He came in through Biden’s ridiculous Open Border Policy,” Trump writes of the suspect who has confessed to the Boulder Flame-Thrower Attack, “which has hurt our country so badly. He must go out under Trump policy.”
Yeah, great. Well, he DIDN'T go out under the Trump policy because the Trump policy is to ignore the actual dangers and simply arrest the innocent and those who pose no threat and thus Trump has blood on his hands. The attack on the weekly march of those remembering the Gaza hostage was carried out by a man here illegally, whom Trump and his big talking crowd of bullies, losers and cowards, have had FOUR months to find and remove, and have criminally failed to do so because they under phony tough guy Tom Homan and Dress-Up Barbie Kristi Noem were too busy kidnapping mothers and gay hairdressers and kids at their high school graduations and people here legally and immigrants dutifully showing up for their hearings the way law-abiding people – law-abiding means NOT LIKE TRUMP – do.
That the suspect Mohamed Sabry Soliman, was still here, is TRUMP’S FAULT. Because the entire MAGA immigration STUNT is a show for the racists and the xenophobes. It goes after only the soft targets, it uses only brutality and force when neither is necessary, it is there to terrify one part of this country and satiate the sadism of the other. It is the opposite of securing borders – it is a prelude to the new Trump policy of “Re-migration” – and “Re-migration” is itself a prelude to Ethnic Cleansing. And the champion of re-migration, the demented, warped, soulless bastard behind that, is Stephen Miller, who couldn’t wait to turn the Sunday attack into a sword with which to again try to butcher this nation’s humanity. And I mean he COULDN’T wait, literally. If he had, more people would realize, Miller and his Gestapo are not the solution to the problem, they are its cause.
B-Block (20:07) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Something worse than what Glenn Greenwald revealed in "the tape?" How about Glenn Greenwald threatening to reveal me as his source for a story because I criticized him. Plus Riley Gaines has challenged me to a swim race. It's 50 years since I was admitted to my high school's Cum Laude Society and I have an admission to make. And the Washington Post reported that polling showed the weirdest name of them all is "Keith" and I thought they were both serious - and right.
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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. He
(00:25):
came in through Biden's ridiculous open border policy, Trump writes
of the man who has purportedly confessed in the Bolder
flamethrower attack, which has hurt our country so badly he
must go out under Trump policy. Yeah great, well he didn't. Trump,
You have blood on your hands for Boulder, Colorado. The
(00:49):
attack on the weekly march of those remembering the Gaza
hostages was carried out by a man here illegally, whom
Trump and his big talking crowd of bullies, losers and
cowards have had four months to find and removed, and
have criminally failed to do so because they under phony
tough guy Tom Homan and dress up Barbie Christinome. We're
(01:12):
too busy kidnapping mothers and gay hairdressers and kids at
their high school graduations, and people here legally and immigrants
dutifully showing up for their hearings the way law abiding
people law abiding means not like Trump. Law abiding people
do that. The suspect Mohammad Sabri Solomon was still here
(01:35):
is the fault of Donald Trump, because the entire Maga
immigration stunt is a show put on for the racists
and the xenophobes. It goes after only the soft targets.
It uses only brutality and force when neither is necessary.
It is there to terrify one part of this country
(01:57):
and satiate the sadism of the other part of this country.
It is the opposite of securing the borders. It is
a prelude to something called remigration, a term I will
get to in a moment. And remigration is itself the
prelude to ethnic cleansing. And the guy here illegally actually
(02:22):
doing something terroristic does not fit in to the scheme
of Trump and his henchman, Stephen Miller, the champion of remigration,
the demented, warped, soulless bastard behind it, Stephen Miller, who
couldn't wait to turn the Sunday attack into a sword
(02:44):
with which to again try to butcher this nation's humanity.
And I mean he couldn't wait, literally, he couldn't wait.
If he had waited, more people would have realized Miller
and his gestapo are not the solution to this problem.
They are its cause. Miller writes, a error attack was
(03:05):
committed in Boulder, Colorado, by an illegal alien. He was
granted a tourist visa by the Biden administration, and then
he illegally overstayed that visa. In response, the Biden administration
gave him a work permit. Suicidal migration must be fully reversed.
That's remigration. Incidentally, everything else in there is factually inaccurate.
(03:31):
Visa was overstayed in twenty thirteen, meaning Trump and Miller
have not just had the last four months to find
and remove this creature, but they had the entirety of
twenty seventeen through the beginning of twenty twenty one to
do so. They did not act against this man because
he doesn't fit the profile. He was not a sitting duck.
(03:53):
He was a real danger. And Miller and Nome and
Homan and the ice dickwads who are too terrified to
show their faces in public, let alone pursue a real danger,
don't want to take any chances with anybody who might
cause a problem. Miller, blood on your hands, scumbag. There
(04:15):
are people in this country who should not be There
are people who should be deported or repatriated or detained.
Every administration has acknowledged this. Every administration has done this.
The Obama administration did this at a rate higher than
the Trump one has, largely because they looked for threats,
(04:36):
not scapegoats, because they were fairly good at finding them.
The Boulder, Colorado flamethrower terror attack was hard work to
find who did it. It would have been harder work
to find who was going to do it. That they
didn't try is Donald Trump's fault. And what is to
(05:01):
come after this is even worse and even more per
formative and even more confirmational of the fact that Trump
and Miller and Marco Rubio are not looking for criminals
to remove. They are looking for innocent people and those
guilty of misdemeanors or things less than misdemeanors to purge,
(05:21):
to remove, to cleanse. Got little notice last week, but Rubio,
rapidly rising to the top of the hypocrisy charts to
replace even Lindsey Graham for largest percentage of soul sold,
announced a reorganization of the State Department that would in essence,
eliminate all efforts inside that department to provide a haven
(05:45):
here for foreign nationals who have helped this country, like
the thousands of people in Afghanistan who fought the Taliban
with us. Before Trump surrendered to the Taliban, it would
eliminate that department and replace it with quote the Office
of Remigration. Go look up that word remigration on social media.
(06:10):
Nearly everything you will find on Twitter x will be
in German. Sometimes it will have been translated from German
by some pasty white Englishmen with bad teeth associated with
Nigel Farage. It is the nice way to say ethnic cleansing.
(06:31):
It is the word of the decade among the far right,
Neo Nazis and the Nordic Arians. It is what they
say is their answer to their great paranoid, lunatic fear,
the great replacement, the theory that white people are to
be removed and succeeded by everybody else, by everybody who
(06:56):
isn't white at the moment. Remigration. It is what Nazis
do in the twenty first century. Marco Rubio wants to
introduce it into our country, and he is trying to
do so. Now, let's just pass on the irony that
(07:17):
most of the European Arians would look at Marco Rubio
and say he needs to be remigrated. They haven't told
Marco that part yet. The whole twisted inside out perverted
anti American, anti democracy, anti humanity approach of Rubio and
Miller and Holman and Gnome and Ice and Trump was
(07:41):
summarized in an exchange printed last week by the news
site Axios, in which an anonymous current Rubio flunky at
State claimed that we've had remigration before in this country
because a bureau doing exactly the opposite thing had the
same name, quote the way that it worked before. Population
(08:05):
refugee migration was basically an entire bureau dedicated to bringing
people into the United States, said the State Department official,
who spoke on condition of anonymity. It had the migration function,
it's in the name. We're just reversing the flow of
migrants who shouldn't be here to go out of the country.
(08:28):
Consider that for a moment, remigration is fine according to
Marco Rubio's stooges, because we used to call saving people
from bad countries and bringing them here is the same
to the Trump criminal gang as taking people from this
country and sending them into danger into bad countries. This
(08:52):
is exactly the same as saying a blood transfusion is
identical to letting somebody bleed to death because blood keeps
moving through a little hole in you. In both cases,
we're just quibbling over which direction it's flowing. It would
be patently monstrous if it were not first so patently stupid.
(09:17):
But that is the entire existence of Donald Trump in
one sentence, isn't it? And this isn't new. They sneaked
it through amid the other ten tons of shit that
comes out of Trump's mouth every day. In September of
last year, in the middle of the usual racist hate
(09:37):
dressed up as border issues, as Trump escalated it towards
his neo Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden just before
the election, Trump wrote of his vow to quote return
Kamala's illegal migrants to their home countries parentheses, also known
as remigration. Remigration is farther right than even those Trump
(10:02):
cultists cheering on the day disappearing of the innocence Advocate,
and Trump is at its forefront, and Trump is bringing
it here with his little horror Marco Rubio at the helm.
And the key thing to remember is, like all good
(10:22):
ethnic cleansing, it is not about finding people who are
actual threats, like the man who admitted to creating his
own flamethrowers, and trying to burn Jews to death in Colorado.
Those people are too much trouble for the ethnic cleansers.
Ethnic cleansing remigration is about convincing all the white people
(10:45):
that you don't actually have to search for threats, or
investigate for threats, or prepare for threats, or separate those
people who are threats from those people who are not.
You just round up all the people who you think
look like threats. That is remigration, that is ethnic cleansing.
(11:08):
That is Donald Trump's presidency. And that because you no
longer bothered to look for people who are guilty or
who might be planning heinous acts. You just look for
their skin tone and their names. That is why the
blood of Boulder, Colorado is on the hands of Donald Trump.
(12:01):
I said this would be a headline based format for
this special experimental Tuesday edition of the Countdown podcast. So
here are some headlines. Good news, big surprise in big
law at big at least the big vshy law. Wall
Street Journal reports that Oracle, Morgan, Stanley, McDonald's, and at
least eight other gigantic American corporations have moved at least
(12:26):
some of their legal representation away from the cowardly collaborators,
the ones who folded to Trump and agreed to do
his bidding for him, if only he would spare them,
collaborators like Paul Weiss and Scadden Arps now known as
Scadden Arps scumbag. McDonald's dropped its Paul Weiss litigator on
(12:51):
the eve of trial. Its litigator was Loretta Lynch, the
Obama Attorney General, who has not yet had the intestinal
fortitude to resign from Paul Weiss. Finally, somebody showing some
guts McDonald's, Morgan Stanley Oracle please note Columbia University. It's
(13:14):
not just the big money bailing out of those who
hoared themselves for Trump. Tesla sales in Europe have crashed
faster than well than a musk rocket. Down nineteen percent
in Spain, down thirty percent in Denmark, down thirty six
percent in Holland, down fifty four percent in Sweden, down
sixty seven percent in France, down sixty eight percent in Portugal.
(13:39):
But who will pay for Ewon's drugs? Hasn't anybody thought
about Ewon's drugs? What about Elon's drugs? The price of
depends will go down as a result of this, and
while most leading Democrats are still trying to throw everything
into reverse, looking at you, Gavin Newsom, because they think
(14:00):
all democracy needs is its own Trump, its own Joe Rogan,
its own Adolf Hitler. Wes Moore may at least be
driving in the right direction forward more, according to Politico,
got the real message out of Trump's success. The real
lesson cut to the chase with the voters. Quoting the
(14:24):
Maryland governor from last week, urgency is the instrument of change.
And do you know who understands that really well? Donald Trump?
Wes Moore went on. I want to be clear. We
can and we must condemn Donald Trump's reckless actions, but
we would also be foolish not to learn from his impatience.
(14:45):
He's right. The point is to promise change as quickly
as possible, and then do as much of it as
you can before they try to stop you. What is
the lesson of twenty twenty five? Have a game plan,
don't have a party. Have a game plan. Map out
(15:07):
your first hundred days down to who you are going
to indict. We saw what happened when Joe Biden thought
we could just go back to normal, not understanding that
normal had been destroyed by Trump. We saw what happened
when he appointed Merrick Garland, who's still thinking about it.
We saw what happened when Biden dithered on putting them
(15:30):
all in jail forever. They didn't go to jail. Democratic
candidates preparing for twenty twenty eight must now vow to
prosecute everybody and override any and all Trump pardons immediately
by whatever means are necessary. You want change, do you maga?
(15:56):
You want remigration? How about packing up Tom Holman, Christy Nome,
Marco Rubio and Trump at twelve oh one pm January twentieth,
twenty twenty nine, and putting them on a cargo flight
to El Salvador before anybody can stop you. Also of
(16:20):
interest here on this special edition, I have been challenged
by professional complainer and America's favorite eighty fifth place swimmer
Riley Gains to a swimming race of some kind to
prove she is right about everything she whinds about, which
is everything. Here is my advice, as a veteran of
(16:45):
fifty years in sports broadcasting. Bet on her, because I'm
sixty six and Riley Gains is what fifty fifty five
something like that. That's next This is Countdown. This is
(17:08):
Countdown with Keith Oberman, my crazy friend host scripts to
the news, some headlines, some updates, some snark, and sometimes,
(17:29):
like in this edition, some stories that are actually just
about me, some of them like perhaps all This is
the Countdown podcast and these are the places where there's news.
Dateline Brazil. So you heard about that Glenn Greenwald video. Yeah,
(17:52):
that's all I'm going to say about it, except it
was hardly the worst Glenn Greenwald video of recent date.
Just over the last week, in fact, just over the
past weekend. Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald also did a videotaped interview
with Tucker Carlson which had far more foot worship and sucking,
(18:15):
not necessarily of feat. He claimed Biden had been sick
for a five years, ten years, five hundred years, I
don't know. And let me tell you a story about
who Glenn Greenwald is. This is from twenty ten, when
Glenn Greenwald was with Salon and he was not totally
nuts yet. Joan Walsh was the editor in chief and
(18:39):
an occasional guest on Countdown, and I mentioned to Joan
that Joe Scarborough had gotten our contributor to the Countdown
program on MSNBC coas Marcos Mulitsis, the hosts of the
proprietor of the Daily Coast website. He'd gotten Marco's band
(19:02):
because Marcos had made a vague reference on Twitter to
the death of the assistant, the woman assistant in Joe
Scarborough's congressional office. There was a valid point in making
this reference because Joe had insisted that the Democrats would
never investigate something bad that had happened to somebody, and
Marcos was pointing out, Oh, an investigation like what happened
(19:23):
to your assistant in your office when she died? Well,
Scarborough accused Marcos of accusing him of murder, went to
our bosses, and because he and one of my bosses
used to like to go drinking together, he got him
to ban Marcos Militsus from my show. So somebody else
getting one of my regulars banned from my show, which
(19:45):
made the company one hundred million dollars a year, some
of which was spent on backstopping the money losing Jaw
Scarborough program, which has now proved to be what it
always was at heart, a conservative blowing with the wind.
He's back to blowing with the Trump wind and you
can make the next stage of that joke for yourself
(20:07):
in any event. I mentioned this to Joan Walsh in
a conversation before or after she was on the show
one night, and she said, you know, Glenn Greenwald is
really upset. He'd heard something about this and would love
to be able to write something, even if you have
to do it anonymously with him. And I said, well,
have him give me a call or shoot me an
email or whatever. And I can't remember if he emailed
(20:28):
me or shot me a call or what he did.
I don't remember which way it was, and I don't
have the records of this anymore, but I do remember
the conversation, whether it was written or actually oral au
are al. Glenn wanted to know if this was true,
if Scarborough had connived to get Malitsus thrown off MSNBC
(20:49):
on a permanent basis, and I told him what I
knew about it, and I said, now it has to
be completely off the record, because I can't I can't
talk to you about this. I can't reveal this information.
They could fire me, and I don't want them to
fire me because I am preparing to quit the place.
He said, I agree completely I will always keep your confidence.
I have never given up a source. I have that
(21:11):
same journalistic standard that you do. I have great respect
for your work. Blah blah blah blah blah. And he
published some kind of story about it, citing an anonymous
NBC source. He didn't even point me out as the
person who had talked to him, And apparently he had
many other sources for this story. Not exactly a secret,
but obviously I would have been the definitive one. Marcos
(21:34):
knew about it. Obviously too, he'd got in the phone
call from the MSNBC executive who did this act on
behalf of his pet, Joe Scarborough. So something happened in
the ensuing couple of days. And I don't even remember
what this was, but I was critical of some detail,
some minor conclusion in a Glenn Greenwald article and said
(21:55):
so on countdown, and the next thing I knew, Glenn Greenwald,
I believe, again, was on the phone telling me that
if I did not rich tacked to my criticism of him,
he would announce that I was the source for his
story about Marcos Malitsus being banned in effect by Joe Scarborough. Theoretically,
(22:16):
at least jeopardizing my employment at NBC and theoretically setting
me up to be fired for cause for speaking to
him without permission. That is who Glenn Greenwald was in
twenty ten. So if you saw what I saw in
the six or seven seconds I watched of that other video,
(22:38):
not the Tucker Carlson one. The Tucker Carlson stuff doesn't
surprise me in the least. Glenn Greenwald has no standards,
and certainly no standards that are relied upon to exist
in the same way six months from now, at alone,
fifteen years from now, Glenn Greenwald dressed up in like
a sexy French woman maids costume doesn't surprise you. Know.
(23:05):
It's like, oh, I knew he must have had one
of those Glenn Greenwald dateline eighty fifth place in some
swimming pool somewhere. Riley Gaines is back. I happen to
think this might be the greatest self own of the
modern social media era. I pointed out once again. I
(23:26):
think it was this time after Lynda McMahon, the secretary
of I Don't Have an Education, claimed that one of
our great Olympic swimmers, Riley Gaines, had had her career
ruined and something like her Olympic medals denied because she
had once had to face or she was beaten by
a transgendered swimmer. In point of fact, Riley Gaines never
(23:46):
participated in the Olympics because she was a mediocrity. She
finished fifth, tied for fifth in the race one by
Leah Thomas, the former male who was swimming as a
woman for Penn State. Whenever this was in like the
last known incident of a major sporting event in solving
a transgender athlete. Because all the time we spend talking
(24:08):
about this and the Republicans wringing their hands because of
their secret fear that one day they'll wake up wanting
to become transgendered, because that's what this is all about,
just as their hatred of gaye is all about their
secret desire to be gay. Look it up. In any event,
the whole thing behind this is they would rather spend months, years,
(24:29):
decades debating and of course demonizing the people involved, rather
than spending the same amount of time looking at each
case individually of there being a transgendered athlete competing against
women who were born women and saying, well, what kind
of balance can we make here? It's like the horse
races if the jockeys are different weights. In a horse race,
(24:51):
if all the jockeys are one hundred and thirty five
except for that one guy who weighs only one hundred
and thirty two pounds, they give him three pounds of
weights to put in his shoes so he weighs the
same as the other jockeys. Otherwise, you'd win the race
based on how light the jockey was, and someday somebody
would win a race with a forty seven pound kid
running the race on behalf of the horse owner. So
(25:12):
you could just do that by I don't know. In swimming,
add a second to the athlete who had the longer,
long bones, who had the male physique or part of
it before they were transgendered. It's not impossible. My friend
Renee Richards, who happens to be a transgender athlete who
won a title at the US Open as a woman
(25:33):
and did not destroy women's tennis in the process, and
did not beat Martina Navratilova and was accepted in the
community and did not destroy things, she has suggested that
perhaps this is the solution. You play a game in
tennis or a match in tennis, and the transgender athlete
starts having lost the first game, so that the other athlete,
the woman in the race, in the game, in the match,
(25:56):
is already ahead one nothing, and then you start something.
You could spend a lot of time examining each case
and reside of it equitably to everybody's belief. In one
millions of the time that has been wasted, turning this
into a debate as if the world is filled with
male athletes who decided to cut off their penises so
(26:19):
they could win a fricking tennis match. I've said it
before and I'll say it again. You will find lots
of male athletes who will joke that they'd cut off
a testicle to win. You've never heard one say they'd
cut off something a little bit more important in the
same general physiological area. In any event, Riley Gaines believes
(26:40):
her life was ruined by a transgender swimmer. She would
have finished I don't know, eighty fourth in the Olympic
trials rather than eighty fifth. She would be a little
less mediocre without transgendered athletes. Therefore, she has become a
campaigner against them. Her latest big thing was complaining about
the University of Maryland selecting as its speaker for its
(27:01):
commencement address Kermit the Frog. Then, I don't know just
to throw out a name, Riley Gaines. I think you
can make the comparison there and understand that Riley Gaines
is not considered to be as smart as Kermit the Frog.
Certainly she doesn't sound as unusual as Kermitt the Frog,
(27:21):
and she has more broad human intelligence than Kermit the Frog.
In any event, that was the latest thing. And of
course Kermit the Frog and the creator of the Uppets,
Jim Henson, have a long standing connection to the University
of Maryland. There's a statue of them there. There is
history there. But I digress the self own I promised you.
(27:43):
I wrote about Linda McMahon making a big deal and
pointing out that she finished eighty fifth in the Olympic Trials.
She finished tied for fifth the only race. If there
had been no transgendered athlete, she might have finished tied
for fourth. Riley Gaines responded, I'm literally one of the
fastest Americans of all time. But okay, l lol. If
(28:05):
you're one of the fastest Americans of all time, how
come you finished eighty fifth? I'd challenge Keith Olderman to
a race where the loser puts up money to the
charity of the winner's choice, but no one wants to
see him in a speedo. Yeah, deh, this is a
brilliant idea, though, Riley Gaines. I accept your challenge to
(28:28):
a race, a swimming race. A sixty six year old
man who has not been in a swimming pool to
swim in the swimming sense of the term since nineteen
seventy one, who has an arthritic left knee with enough
empty space in it that he could keep his keys
(28:48):
in it, who has chronic stress fractures in his right foot. Me,
sixty six year old guy, somebody you could finally beat
Dateline Tarrytown, New York yesterday, Hackley School, my alma mater
fifty years ago, which was the last time I actually
(29:10):
got into a pool to swim competitively. Dear members of
the Hackley kum Lauday Society, you are cordially invited to
the twenty twenty five Kum Loudi Society Induction Ceremony Jude
twas two in black Box Theater located in the Center
for the Creative Arts and Technology at Hackley School. Celebrad
Hackeys have founded in nineteen oh six. The kum Loude
Society is an association of three hundred and eighty two
(29:31):
chapters in the United States and abroad dedicated to honoring
scholastic achievement in secondary schools. Each chapter is limited to
electing a maximum of twenty percent of the senior class
per year. This is at least the fifty fifth ceremony
at Hackey. It's probably closer to the one hundred and nineteenth.
I can only refer to the ones I can testify to,
and it's fifty five years since I got to Hackley,
(29:51):
so they've been at least fifty five of them. And
I was invited because I am a member. I was
one of the seven or eight members inducted to the
kum Laude Society in nineteen seventy five. A certain grade
point average based on a percentage of the class is
set as the cutoff points, and I don't remember what
it was. It might have been a three point seven
or three point eight. I don't know, but I had
(30:12):
it and I was admitted, and I can now reveal
it's a total fraud. I don't mean it's a total
fraud in that it helped me get into college when
I didn't belong there. The college grades on which I
was judged preceded the events that I'm going to talk about.
I'm not saying that anybody took money for this, or
that anybody did anything other than did some common sense here.
(30:36):
This was not planned and at one of those rare
events where the law of unexpected consequences turns out to
be positive for everybody except whoever would have been behind
me on the list who actually should be in the
kum Laude Society. As I have said many times again,
I'd already gotten into my colleges that accepted me based
on grades that had nothing to do with the cum
(30:57):
Laude Society. So I didn't need it to get into college.
I didn't ask for it, I didn't check on it.
When they said you're going to show up for the
saraheremony tomorrow, I said, what ceremony? They said? Here in
the cum Laude Society? And I burst into laughter. Because
of the following story, I was mistaken as a child
for a math genius. In point of fact, I just
liked playing with small numbers. I literally had a box
(31:21):
full of numbers magnetic numbers, plastic numbers with magnets in
the back, and I like to play with the numbers.
And I loved numbers. And my interest in sports originates
from the numbers on the backs of the baseball cards,
and the numbers on the backs of the players, and
all the numbers in the statistics on the baseball cards.
That's my interest in it. I was a numbers freak,
(31:41):
but I was not a math prodigy. This was a mistake.
Several several people were involved in making this mistake, and
I learned it faster than they did. I was not
a math prodigy. I just like to sit there and
you know, add forty seven digit numbers or multiply them,
just to see if I could do it. That didn't
imply that I could do anything else, including divide. Once
(32:03):
we got into I began to flounder, and then later
on I really hit the wall. I hit the wall
as a senior in a class called Math five, and
Math five was taught by the head of the math department,
Jerry Murphy, a very nice, easygoing guy with a great
sardonic sense of humor. And when we got into the
trigonometry problems, he put one up on the board, six
(32:27):
or eight lines of x's and division marks and square
roots and equal signs. And I looked at it, and
then I turned my head upside down, and I looked
at it upside down, and it looked exactly the same.
And then I put one hand over my left eye
and looked at it, and one hand over my right
eye and looked at it, and it all looked exactly
(32:49):
the same. And I raised my hand and I said,
mister Murphy, which part is the question and which part
is the answer? And he went, oh, you've hit the
math wall. And I said, I thought I heard something.
He said, come see me after class. There were three
of us who went to see him after class, Three
(33:10):
of us, otherwise intelligent math students who had gotten a's
and b's in math throughout our high school careers, who
had suddenly hit that point in which that could have
been instructions on how to install a humidifier written in
Chinese up there on that blackboard, as well as a
(33:33):
math problem. We couldn't have told the difference. And mister
Murphy said, this is very easy. Don't worry about it.
I hit my math wall. It's why I'm not doctor Murphy.
I was on my second day of working one of
those equations that they would give you in math's college
that would take two or three days for you to solve.
And I was so far behind on day two that
(33:53):
I burst into tears. And my wife said, Jerry, it's
probably time for you to drop out, and I said,
you know, you're right. I'll just go become a math
teacher and teach the stuff I understand and not spend
the rest of my life trying to understand the things
I'm not wired to understand. He said, this is what
I want you to do. Go down to the registrar's
(34:15):
office and change this class from a graded class ABCDF
to a pass fail. I will pass you under the
following circumstances. You and you, and you Olberman, especially you.
You come in every day and I don't want to
hear a word out of you. I don't want you
talking to anybody else. I don't want you egging anybody
(34:37):
else on. I don't want you Oberman, making any quips.
I just want you sitting there quietly. You may bring newspapers.
The only noise I want to hear from you during
the class is the sound of you passing newspapers. Back
and forth. If you actually understand something, raise your hand
and we'll talk about it after the class. Otherwise I
(34:57):
don't want to know you're here. I'll pass you and
that will be that. I'm not going to keep you
from graduating because you hit the same math while I
did only little earlier. That was great. Annie said, one
more thing. You guys do this new Money Python series.
You watch this Monty Python show every night Sunday at
ten thirty, and you come in talking about it every
Monday morning. I want you to come into this class
(35:18):
and reenact as best you can the best skit from
the latest Monty Python show. Because I go to bed
at ten o'clock every night. We had met Missus Murphy,
so we were not surprised by that. In the slightest,
if anybody could get that class quiet in a hurry,
it would be when Missus Murphy would stop by. There
was a reason to consider maybe pursuing math a little bit. Further.
(35:41):
Missus Murphy liked math guys in any event, so we
would come in every Monday morning and we did the
parrot sketch from Monty Python, and then sat down and
I'd read the New York Daily News which I brought in,
and one of my friends would read the New York
Post that he brought in, and the third friend would
have the Times, and then when we were done, we'd
just pass it along and then we left and we
all got passes instead of fails or d minuses. So
(36:05):
my kum Lauday graduation record, the fact that I was
invited to the Kumlaude Society and have for fifty years
been in the Kumlaudee Society is a total unmitigated fraud.
Thank you, Jerry Murphy, because if you had not committed
that fraud and I had not participated with you, I
would not be in the Kumlaude Society. I would instead
(36:28):
be at Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, in my
fifty first year as a senior who had failed math
five fifty years in a row. Dateline Washington and the
Washington Post. One of the few remaining assets of that
newspaper is Philip Bump, especially his Saturday newsletter how to
(36:49):
read this chart? Imagine my surprise at this. CNN's Ariel
Edwards Levy has this annoying habit of finding weird, interesting
poll results that I feel compelled to explore This week,
Bump went on she for some reason and found twenty
ten polling from Pew Research Center in which respondents were
asked whether they knew anyone named Adam Allen Bruce or
(37:13):
one of nine other options. As it turns out, people
reported being least likely to know Walters and most likely
to know Rachel's. In fact, according to the charts, thirty
four percent knew a Walter, only thirty four percent new
a Walter, but fifty three percent knew somebody named Rachel.
(37:34):
At at least ten percent new at least three Rachel's.
I saw this chart and thought, you know, I have
to call Rachel and Rachel and Rachel. And here's the punchline.
The poll, Bump wrote, also asked respondents to identify the
weirdest name they could think of. The winner, by a
(37:54):
wide margin, Keith. I have reached out to Ms. Edwards
Levy and mister Bump for more information on this. I'd
have to say, the first other human I knew named
Keith was a couple of years behind me in grammar school.
I was, I guess eight. I had literally never met
(38:16):
nor heard of another Keith. I thought I was the
only one in the world, or at least there was
a chance of it. The other Keith was best known
around town for having run into the side of a
slow moving school bus. Now, anybody can run into a
bus coming towards them, or in front of a bus.
(38:36):
But I was there nineteen sixty seven, nineteen sixty eight,
and this bus was already partially past Other Keith, going
fairly slowly when he bolted out into the road and
ran headfirst into the side of it. He bounced off
in front of the back wheel, and as near as
(38:59):
I know, did not suffer a scratch. Later I found
out about Rupert Murdoch and the fact that his real
first name is Keith, and he prefers Rupert. I was
going to go on about how I think the weirdest
(39:19):
name you can think of is Keith, and say the
fact check was true, when mister Bump blew the whole
thing by getting back to me and telling me that
this was in fact a joke that had blown up
in his face. And I said, now, sir, you know
how us Keith's feel. I've done all the damage I
(39:57):
can do here. Thank you for listening. Most of our
countdown music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray
and John Phillips Shaneil musical directors have Countdown. It was
produced by Tko Brothers. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass
and drums, and mister Chanelle handled the orchestration and the keyboards.
Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best
baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The Olderman theme from
(40:21):
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Is the sports music. Some other music arranged and performed
by the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today was
my friend Tony Kornheiser. Everything else was as ever my fault.
That's countdown for today, Day one hundred and thirty five
of America held hostage just one three hundred and twenty
(40:43):
eight days until the scheduled end of Trump's lame duck
and lame brained term unless Putin removes him sooner, or
the actuarial tables to, or Leonard Leo does, or we do.
The next scheduled countdown is Thursday. Today's special episode was
(41:03):
an ex peer meant we'll see if it's feasible long term.
As always, bulletins as the news warrants, and remember, as always,
Trump is laying the groundwork now to not leave office later,
and thus he must be stopped till Thursday. I'm Keith Alderman.
Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown
(41:44):
with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. He
(00:25):
came in through Biden's ridiculous open border policy, Trump writes
of the man who has purportedly confessed in the Bolder
flamethrower attack, which has hurt our country so badly he
must go out under Trump policy. Yeah great, well he didn't. Trump,
You have blood on your hands for Boulder, Colorado. The
(00:49):
attack on the weekly march of those remembering the Gaza
hostages was carried out by a man here illegally, whom
Trump and his big talking crowd of bullies, losers and
cowards have had four months to find and removed, and
have criminally failed to do so because they under phony
tough guy Tom Homan and dress up Barbie Christinome. We're
(01:12):
too busy kidnapping mothers and gay hairdressers and kids at
their high school graduations, and people here legally and immigrants
dutifully showing up for their hearings the way law abiding
people law abiding means not like Trump. Law abiding people
do that. The suspect Mohammad Sabri Solomon was still here
(01:35):
is the fault of Donald Trump, because the entire Maga
immigration stunt is a show put on for the racists
and the xenophobes. It goes after only the soft targets.
It uses only brutality and force when neither is necessary.
It is there to terrify one part of this country
(01:57):
and satiate the sadism of the other part of this country.
It is the opposite of securing the borders. It is
a prelude to something called remigration, a term I will
get to in a moment. And remigration is itself the
prelude to ethnic cleansing. And the guy here illegally actually
(02:22):
doing something terroristic does not fit in to the scheme
of Trump and his henchman, Stephen Miller, the champion of remigration,
the demented, warped, soulless bastard behind it, Stephen Miller, who
couldn't wait to turn the Sunday attack into a sword
(02:44):
with which to again try to butcher this nation's humanity.
And I mean he couldn't wait, literally, he couldn't wait.
If he had waited, more people would have realized Miller
and his gestapo are not the solution to this problem.
They are its cause. Miller writes, a error attack was
(03:05):
committed in Boulder, Colorado, by an illegal alien. He was
granted a tourist visa by the Biden administration, and then
he illegally overstayed that visa. In response, the Biden administration
gave him a work permit. Suicidal migration must be fully reversed.
That's remigration. Incidentally, everything else in there is factually inaccurate.
(03:31):
Visa was overstayed in twenty thirteen, meaning Trump and Miller
have not just had the last four months to find
and remove this creature, but they had the entirety of
twenty seventeen through the beginning of twenty twenty one to
do so. They did not act against this man because
he doesn't fit the profile. He was not a sitting duck.
(03:53):
He was a real danger. And Miller and Nome and
Homan and the ice dickwads who are too terrified to
show their faces in public, let alone pursue a real danger,
don't want to take any chances with anybody who might
cause a problem. Miller, blood on your hands, scumbag. There
(04:15):
are people in this country who should not be There
are people who should be deported or repatriated or detained.
Every administration has acknowledged this. Every administration has done this.
The Obama administration did this at a rate higher than
the Trump one has, largely because they looked for threats,
(04:36):
not scapegoats, because they were fairly good at finding them.
The Boulder, Colorado flamethrower terror attack was hard work to
find who did it. It would have been harder work
to find who was going to do it. That they
didn't try is Donald Trump's fault. And what is to
(05:01):
come after this is even worse and even more per
formative and even more confirmational of the fact that Trump
and Miller and Marco Rubio are not looking for criminals
to remove. They are looking for innocent people and those
guilty of misdemeanors or things less than misdemeanors to purge,
(05:21):
to remove, to cleanse. Got little notice last week, but Rubio,
rapidly rising to the top of the hypocrisy charts to
replace even Lindsey Graham for largest percentage of soul sold,
announced a reorganization of the State Department that would in essence,
eliminate all efforts inside that department to provide a haven
(05:45):
here for foreign nationals who have helped this country, like
the thousands of people in Afghanistan who fought the Taliban
with us. Before Trump surrendered to the Taliban, it would
eliminate that department and replace it with quote the Office
of Remigration. Go look up that word remigration on social media.
(06:10):
Nearly everything you will find on Twitter x will be
in German. Sometimes it will have been translated from German
by some pasty white Englishmen with bad teeth associated with
Nigel Farage. It is the nice way to say ethnic cleansing.
(06:31):
It is the word of the decade among the far right,
Neo Nazis and the Nordic Arians. It is what they
say is their answer to their great paranoid, lunatic fear,
the great replacement, the theory that white people are to
be removed and succeeded by everybody else, by everybody who
(06:56):
isn't white at the moment. Remigration. It is what Nazis
do in the twenty first century. Marco Rubio wants to
introduce it into our country, and he is trying to
do so. Now, let's just pass on the irony that
(07:17):
most of the European Arians would look at Marco Rubio
and say he needs to be remigrated. They haven't told
Marco that part yet. The whole twisted inside out perverted
anti American, anti democracy, anti humanity approach of Rubio and
Miller and Holman and Gnome and Ice and Trump was
(07:41):
summarized in an exchange printed last week by the news
site Axios, in which an anonymous current Rubio flunky at
State claimed that we've had remigration before in this country
because a bureau doing exactly the opposite thing had the
same name, quote the way that it worked before. Population
(08:05):
refugee migration was basically an entire bureau dedicated to bringing
people into the United States, said the State Department official,
who spoke on condition of anonymity. It had the migration function,
it's in the name. We're just reversing the flow of
migrants who shouldn't be here to go out of the country.
(08:28):
Consider that for a moment, remigration is fine according to
Marco Rubio's stooges, because we used to call saving people
from bad countries and bringing them here is the same
to the Trump criminal gang as taking people from this
country and sending them into danger into bad countries. This
(08:52):
is exactly the same as saying a blood transfusion is
identical to letting somebody bleed to death because blood keeps
moving through a little hole in you. In both cases,
we're just quibbling over which direction it's flowing. It would
be patently monstrous if it were not first so patently stupid.
(09:17):
But that is the entire existence of Donald Trump in
one sentence, isn't it? And this isn't new. They sneaked
it through amid the other ten tons of shit that
comes out of Trump's mouth every day. In September of
last year, in the middle of the usual racist hate
(09:37):
dressed up as border issues, as Trump escalated it towards
his neo Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden just before
the election, Trump wrote of his vow to quote return
Kamala's illegal migrants to their home countries parentheses, also known
as remigration. Remigration is farther right than even those Trump
(10:02):
cultists cheering on the day disappearing of the innocence Advocate,
and Trump is at its forefront, and Trump is bringing
it here with his little horror Marco Rubio at the helm.
And the key thing to remember is, like all good
(10:22):
ethnic cleansing, it is not about finding people who are
actual threats, like the man who admitted to creating his
own flamethrowers, and trying to burn Jews to death in Colorado.
Those people are too much trouble for the ethnic cleansers.
Ethnic cleansing remigration is about convincing all the white people
(10:45):
that you don't actually have to search for threats, or
investigate for threats, or prepare for threats, or separate those
people who are threats from those people who are not.
You just round up all the people who you think
look like threats. That is remigration, that is ethnic cleansing.
(11:08):
That is Donald Trump's presidency. And that because you no
longer bothered to look for people who are guilty or
who might be planning heinous acts. You just look for
their skin tone and their names. That is why the
blood of Boulder, Colorado is on the hands of Donald Trump.
(12:01):
I said this would be a headline based format for
this special experimental Tuesday edition of the Countdown podcast. So
here are some headlines. Good news, big surprise in big
law at big at least the big vshy law. Wall
Street Journal reports that Oracle, Morgan, Stanley, McDonald's, and at
least eight other gigantic American corporations have moved at least
(12:26):
some of their legal representation away from the cowardly collaborators,
the ones who folded to Trump and agreed to do
his bidding for him, if only he would spare them,
collaborators like Paul Weiss and Scadden Arps now known as
Scadden Arps scumbag. McDonald's dropped its Paul Weiss litigator on
(12:51):
the eve of trial. Its litigator was Loretta Lynch, the
Obama Attorney General, who has not yet had the intestinal
fortitude to resign from Paul Weiss. Finally, somebody showing some
guts McDonald's, Morgan Stanley Oracle please note Columbia University. It's
(13:14):
not just the big money bailing out of those who
hoared themselves for Trump. Tesla sales in Europe have crashed
faster than well than a musk rocket. Down nineteen percent
in Spain, down thirty percent in Denmark, down thirty six
percent in Holland, down fifty four percent in Sweden, down
sixty seven percent in France, down sixty eight percent in Portugal.
(13:39):
But who will pay for Ewon's drugs? Hasn't anybody thought
about Ewon's drugs? What about Elon's drugs? The price of
depends will go down as a result of this, and
while most leading Democrats are still trying to throw everything
into reverse, looking at you, Gavin Newsom, because they think
(14:00):
all democracy needs is its own Trump, its own Joe Rogan,
its own Adolf Hitler. Wes Moore may at least be
driving in the right direction forward more, according to Politico,
got the real message out of Trump's success. The real
lesson cut to the chase with the voters. Quoting the
(14:24):
Maryland governor from last week, urgency is the instrument of change.
And do you know who understands that really well? Donald Trump?
Wes Moore went on. I want to be clear. We
can and we must condemn Donald Trump's reckless actions, but
we would also be foolish not to learn from his impatience.
(14:45):
He's right. The point is to promise change as quickly
as possible, and then do as much of it as
you can before they try to stop you. What is
the lesson of twenty twenty five? Have a game plan,
don't have a party. Have a game plan. Map out
(15:07):
your first hundred days down to who you are going
to indict. We saw what happened when Joe Biden thought
we could just go back to normal, not understanding that
normal had been destroyed by Trump. We saw what happened
when he appointed Merrick Garland, who's still thinking about it.
We saw what happened when Biden dithered on putting them
(15:30):
all in jail forever. They didn't go to jail. Democratic
candidates preparing for twenty twenty eight must now vow to
prosecute everybody and override any and all Trump pardons immediately
by whatever means are necessary. You want change, do you maga?
(15:56):
You want remigration? How about packing up Tom Holman, Christy Nome,
Marco Rubio and Trump at twelve oh one pm January twentieth,
twenty twenty nine, and putting them on a cargo flight
to El Salvador before anybody can stop you. Also of
(16:20):
interest here on this special edition, I have been challenged
by professional complainer and America's favorite eighty fifth place swimmer
Riley Gains to a swimming race of some kind to
prove she is right about everything she whinds about, which
is everything. Here is my advice, as a veteran of
(16:45):
fifty years in sports broadcasting. Bet on her, because I'm
sixty six and Riley Gains is what fifty fifty five
something like that. That's next This is Countdown. This is
(17:08):
Countdown with Keith Oberman, my crazy friend host scripts to
the news, some headlines, some updates, some snark, and sometimes,
(17:29):
like in this edition, some stories that are actually just
about me, some of them like perhaps all This is
the Countdown podcast and these are the places where there's news.
Dateline Brazil. So you heard about that Glenn Greenwald video. Yeah,
(17:52):
that's all I'm going to say about it, except it
was hardly the worst Glenn Greenwald video of recent date.
Just over the last week, in fact, just over the
past weekend. Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald also did a videotaped interview
with Tucker Carlson which had far more foot worship and sucking,
(18:15):
not necessarily of feat. He claimed Biden had been sick
for a five years, ten years, five hundred years, I
don't know. And let me tell you a story about
who Glenn Greenwald is. This is from twenty ten, when
Glenn Greenwald was with Salon and he was not totally
nuts yet. Joan Walsh was the editor in chief and
(18:39):
an occasional guest on Countdown, and I mentioned to Joan
that Joe Scarborough had gotten our contributor to the Countdown
program on MSNBC coas Marcos Mulitsis, the hosts of the
proprietor of the Daily Coast website. He'd gotten Marco's band
(19:02):
because Marcos had made a vague reference on Twitter to
the death of the assistant, the woman assistant in Joe
Scarborough's congressional office. There was a valid point in making
this reference because Joe had insisted that the Democrats would
never investigate something bad that had happened to somebody, and
Marcos was pointing out, Oh, an investigation like what happened
(19:23):
to your assistant in your office when she died? Well,
Scarborough accused Marcos of accusing him of murder, went to
our bosses, and because he and one of my bosses
used to like to go drinking together, he got him
to ban Marcos Militsus from my show. So somebody else
getting one of my regulars banned from my show, which
(19:45):
made the company one hundred million dollars a year, some
of which was spent on backstopping the money losing Jaw
Scarborough program, which has now proved to be what it
always was at heart, a conservative blowing with the wind.
He's back to blowing with the Trump wind and you
can make the next stage of that joke for yourself
(20:07):
in any event. I mentioned this to Joan Walsh in
a conversation before or after she was on the show
one night, and she said, you know, Glenn Greenwald is
really upset. He'd heard something about this and would love
to be able to write something, even if you have
to do it anonymously with him. And I said, well,
have him give me a call or shoot me an
email or whatever. And I can't remember if he emailed
(20:28):
me or shot me a call or what he did.
I don't remember which way it was, and I don't
have the records of this anymore, but I do remember
the conversation, whether it was written or actually oral au
are al. Glenn wanted to know if this was true,
if Scarborough had connived to get Malitsus thrown off MSNBC
(20:49):
on a permanent basis, and I told him what I
knew about it, and I said, now it has to
be completely off the record, because I can't I can't
talk to you about this. I can't reveal this information.
They could fire me, and I don't want them to
fire me because I am preparing to quit the place.
He said, I agree completely I will always keep your confidence.
I have never given up a source. I have that
(21:11):
same journalistic standard that you do. I have great respect
for your work. Blah blah blah blah blah. And he
published some kind of story about it, citing an anonymous
NBC source. He didn't even point me out as the
person who had talked to him, And apparently he had
many other sources for this story. Not exactly a secret,
but obviously I would have been the definitive one. Marcos
(21:34):
knew about it. Obviously too, he'd got in the phone
call from the MSNBC executive who did this act on
behalf of his pet, Joe Scarborough. So something happened in
the ensuing couple of days. And I don't even remember
what this was, but I was critical of some detail,
some minor conclusion in a Glenn Greenwald article and said
(21:55):
so on countdown, and the next thing I knew, Glenn Greenwald,
I believe, again, was on the phone telling me that
if I did not rich tacked to my criticism of him,
he would announce that I was the source for his
story about Marcos Malitsus being banned in effect by Joe Scarborough. Theoretically,
(22:16):
at least jeopardizing my employment at NBC and theoretically setting
me up to be fired for cause for speaking to
him without permission. That is who Glenn Greenwald was in
twenty ten. So if you saw what I saw in
the six or seven seconds I watched of that other video,
(22:38):
not the Tucker Carlson one. The Tucker Carlson stuff doesn't
surprise me in the least. Glenn Greenwald has no standards,
and certainly no standards that are relied upon to exist
in the same way six months from now, at alone,
fifteen years from now, Glenn Greenwald dressed up in like
a sexy French woman maids costume doesn't surprise you. Know.
(23:05):
It's like, oh, I knew he must have had one
of those Glenn Greenwald dateline eighty fifth place in some
swimming pool somewhere. Riley Gaines is back. I happen to
think this might be the greatest self own of the
modern social media era. I pointed out once again. I
(23:26):
think it was this time after Lynda McMahon, the secretary
of I Don't Have an Education, claimed that one of
our great Olympic swimmers, Riley Gaines, had had her career
ruined and something like her Olympic medals denied because she
had once had to face or she was beaten by
a transgendered swimmer. In point of fact, Riley Gaines never
(23:46):
participated in the Olympics because she was a mediocrity. She
finished fifth, tied for fifth in the race one by
Leah Thomas, the former male who was swimming as a
woman for Penn State. Whenever this was in like the
last known incident of a major sporting event in solving
a transgender athlete. Because all the time we spend talking
(24:08):
about this and the Republicans wringing their hands because of
their secret fear that one day they'll wake up wanting
to become transgendered, because that's what this is all about,
just as their hatred of gaye is all about their
secret desire to be gay. Look it up. In any event,
the whole thing behind this is they would rather spend months, years,
(24:29):
decades debating and of course demonizing the people involved, rather
than spending the same amount of time looking at each
case individually of there being a transgendered athlete competing against
women who were born women and saying, well, what kind
of balance can we make here? It's like the horse
races if the jockeys are different weights. In a horse race,
(24:51):
if all the jockeys are one hundred and thirty five
except for that one guy who weighs only one hundred
and thirty two pounds, they give him three pounds of
weights to put in his shoes so he weighs the
same as the other jockeys. Otherwise, you'd win the race
based on how light the jockey was, and someday somebody
would win a race with a forty seven pound kid
running the race on behalf of the horse owner. So
(25:12):
you could just do that by I don't know. In swimming,
add a second to the athlete who had the longer,
long bones, who had the male physique or part of
it before they were transgendered. It's not impossible. My friend
Renee Richards, who happens to be a transgender athlete who
won a title at the US Open as a woman
(25:33):
and did not destroy women's tennis in the process, and
did not beat Martina Navratilova and was accepted in the
community and did not destroy things, she has suggested that
perhaps this is the solution. You play a game in
tennis or a match in tennis, and the transgender athlete
starts having lost the first game, so that the other athlete,
the woman in the race, in the game, in the match,
(25:56):
is already ahead one nothing, and then you start something.
You could spend a lot of time examining each case
and reside of it equitably to everybody's belief. In one
millions of the time that has been wasted, turning this
into a debate as if the world is filled with
male athletes who decided to cut off their penises so
(26:19):
they could win a fricking tennis match. I've said it
before and I'll say it again. You will find lots
of male athletes who will joke that they'd cut off
a testicle to win. You've never heard one say they'd
cut off something a little bit more important in the
same general physiological area. In any event, Riley Gaines believes
(26:40):
her life was ruined by a transgender swimmer. She would
have finished I don't know, eighty fourth in the Olympic
trials rather than eighty fifth. She would be a little
less mediocre without transgendered athletes. Therefore, she has become a
campaigner against them. Her latest big thing was complaining about
the University of Maryland selecting as its speaker for its
(27:01):
commencement address Kermit the Frog. Then, I don't know just
to throw out a name, Riley Gaines. I think you
can make the comparison there and understand that Riley Gaines
is not considered to be as smart as Kermit the Frog.
Certainly she doesn't sound as unusual as Kermitt the Frog,
(27:21):
and she has more broad human intelligence than Kermit the Frog.
In any event, that was the latest thing. And of
course Kermit the Frog and the creator of the Uppets,
Jim Henson, have a long standing connection to the University
of Maryland. There's a statue of them there. There is
history there. But I digress the self own I promised you.
(27:43):
I wrote about Linda McMahon making a big deal and
pointing out that she finished eighty fifth in the Olympic Trials.
She finished tied for fifth the only race. If there
had been no transgendered athlete, she might have finished tied
for fourth. Riley Gaines responded, I'm literally one of the
fastest Americans of all time. But okay, l lol. If
(28:05):
you're one of the fastest Americans of all time, how
come you finished eighty fifth? I'd challenge Keith Olderman to
a race where the loser puts up money to the
charity of the winner's choice, but no one wants to
see him in a speedo. Yeah, deh, this is a
brilliant idea, though, Riley Gaines. I accept your challenge to
(28:28):
a race, a swimming race. A sixty six year old
man who has not been in a swimming pool to
swim in the swimming sense of the term since nineteen
seventy one, who has an arthritic left knee with enough
empty space in it that he could keep his keys
(28:48):
in it, who has chronic stress fractures in his right foot. Me,
sixty six year old guy, somebody you could finally beat
Dateline Tarrytown, New York yesterday, Hackley School, my alma mater
fifty years ago, which was the last time I actually
(29:10):
got into a pool to swim competitively. Dear members of
the Hackley kum Lauday Society, you are cordially invited to
the twenty twenty five Kum Loudi Society Induction Ceremony Jude
twas two in black Box Theater located in the Center
for the Creative Arts and Technology at Hackley School. Celebrad
Hackeys have founded in nineteen oh six. The kum Loude
Society is an association of three hundred and eighty two
(29:31):
chapters in the United States and abroad dedicated to honoring
scholastic achievement in secondary schools. Each chapter is limited to
electing a maximum of twenty percent of the senior class
per year. This is at least the fifty fifth ceremony
at Hackey. It's probably closer to the one hundred and nineteenth.
I can only refer to the ones I can testify to,
and it's fifty five years since I got to Hackley,
(29:51):
so they've been at least fifty five of them. And
I was invited because I am a member. I was
one of the seven or eight members inducted to the
kum Laude Society in nineteen seventy five. A certain grade
point average based on a percentage of the class is
set as the cutoff points, and I don't remember what
it was. It might have been a three point seven
or three point eight. I don't know, but I had
(30:12):
it and I was admitted, and I can now reveal
it's a total fraud. I don't mean it's a total
fraud in that it helped me get into college when
I didn't belong there. The college grades on which I
was judged preceded the events that I'm going to talk about.
I'm not saying that anybody took money for this, or
that anybody did anything other than did some common sense here.
(30:36):
This was not planned and at one of those rare
events where the law of unexpected consequences turns out to
be positive for everybody except whoever would have been behind
me on the list who actually should be in the
kum Laude Society. As I have said many times again,
I'd already gotten into my colleges that accepted me based
on grades that had nothing to do with the cum
(30:57):
Laude Society. So I didn't need it to get into college.
I didn't ask for it, I didn't check on it.
When they said you're going to show up for the
saraheremony tomorrow, I said, what ceremony? They said? Here in
the cum Laude Society? And I burst into laughter. Because
of the following story, I was mistaken as a child
for a math genius. In point of fact, I just
liked playing with small numbers. I literally had a box
(31:21):
full of numbers magnetic numbers, plastic numbers with magnets in
the back, and I like to play with the numbers.
And I loved numbers. And my interest in sports originates
from the numbers on the backs of the baseball cards,
and the numbers on the backs of the players, and
all the numbers in the statistics on the baseball cards.
That's my interest in it. I was a numbers freak,
(31:41):
but I was not a math prodigy. This was a mistake.
Several several people were involved in making this mistake, and
I learned it faster than they did. I was not
a math prodigy. I just like to sit there and
you know, add forty seven digit numbers or multiply them,
just to see if I could do it. That didn't
imply that I could do anything else, including divide. Once
(32:03):
we got into I began to flounder, and then later
on I really hit the wall. I hit the wall
as a senior in a class called Math five, and
Math five was taught by the head of the math department,
Jerry Murphy, a very nice, easygoing guy with a great
sardonic sense of humor. And when we got into the
trigonometry problems, he put one up on the board, six
(32:27):
or eight lines of x's and division marks and square
roots and equal signs. And I looked at it, and
then I turned my head upside down, and I looked
at it upside down, and it looked exactly the same.
And then I put one hand over my left eye
and looked at it, and one hand over my right
eye and looked at it, and it all looked exactly
(32:49):
the same. And I raised my hand and I said,
mister Murphy, which part is the question and which part
is the answer? And he went, oh, you've hit the
math wall. And I said, I thought I heard something.
He said, come see me after class. There were three
of us who went to see him after class, Three
(33:10):
of us, otherwise intelligent math students who had gotten a's
and b's in math throughout our high school careers, who
had suddenly hit that point in which that could have
been instructions on how to install a humidifier written in
Chinese up there on that blackboard, as well as a
(33:33):
math problem. We couldn't have told the difference. And mister
Murphy said, this is very easy. Don't worry about it.
I hit my math wall. It's why I'm not doctor Murphy.
I was on my second day of working one of
those equations that they would give you in math's college
that would take two or three days for you to solve.
And I was so far behind on day two that
(33:53):
I burst into tears. And my wife said, Jerry, it's
probably time for you to drop out, and I said,
you know, you're right. I'll just go become a math
teacher and teach the stuff I understand and not spend
the rest of my life trying to understand the things
I'm not wired to understand. He said, this is what
I want you to do. Go down to the registrar's
(34:15):
office and change this class from a graded class ABCDF
to a pass fail. I will pass you under the
following circumstances. You and you, and you Olberman, especially you.
You come in every day and I don't want to
hear a word out of you. I don't want you
talking to anybody else. I don't want you egging anybody
(34:37):
else on. I don't want you Oberman, making any quips.
I just want you sitting there quietly. You may bring newspapers.
The only noise I want to hear from you during
the class is the sound of you passing newspapers. Back
and forth. If you actually understand something, raise your hand
and we'll talk about it after the class. Otherwise I
(34:57):
don't want to know you're here. I'll pass you and
that will be that. I'm not going to keep you
from graduating because you hit the same math while I
did only little earlier. That was great. Annie said, one
more thing. You guys do this new Money Python series.
You watch this Monty Python show every night Sunday at
ten thirty, and you come in talking about it every
Monday morning. I want you to come into this class
(35:18):
and reenact as best you can the best skit from
the latest Monty Python show. Because I go to bed
at ten o'clock every night. We had met Missus Murphy,
so we were not surprised by that. In the slightest,
if anybody could get that class quiet in a hurry,
it would be when Missus Murphy would stop by. There
was a reason to consider maybe pursuing math a little bit. Further.
(35:41):
Missus Murphy liked math guys in any event, so we
would come in every Monday morning and we did the
parrot sketch from Monty Python, and then sat down and
I'd read the New York Daily News which I brought in,
and one of my friends would read the New York
Post that he brought in, and the third friend would
have the Times, and then when we were done, we'd
just pass it along and then we left and we
all got passes instead of fails or d minuses. So
(36:05):
my kum Lauday graduation record, the fact that I was
invited to the Kumlaude Society and have for fifty years
been in the Kumlaudee Society is a total unmitigated fraud.
Thank you, Jerry Murphy, because if you had not committed
that fraud and I had not participated with you, I
would not be in the Kumlaude Society. I would instead
(36:28):
be at Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, in my
fifty first year as a senior who had failed math
five fifty years in a row. Dateline Washington and the
Washington Post. One of the few remaining assets of that
newspaper is Philip Bump, especially his Saturday newsletter how to
(36:49):
read this chart? Imagine my surprise at this. CNN's Ariel
Edwards Levy has this annoying habit of finding weird, interesting
poll results that I feel compelled to explore This week,
Bump went on she for some reason and found twenty
ten polling from Pew Research Center in which respondents were
asked whether they knew anyone named Adam Allen Bruce or
(37:13):
one of nine other options. As it turns out, people
reported being least likely to know Walters and most likely
to know Rachel's. In fact, according to the charts, thirty
four percent knew a Walter, only thirty four percent new
a Walter, but fifty three percent knew somebody named Rachel.
(37:34):
At at least ten percent new at least three Rachel's.
I saw this chart and thought, you know, I have
to call Rachel and Rachel and Rachel. And here's the punchline.
The poll, Bump wrote, also asked respondents to identify the
weirdest name they could think of. The winner, by a
(37:54):
wide margin, Keith. I have reached out to Ms. Edwards
Levy and mister Bump for more information on this. I'd
have to say, the first other human I knew named
Keith was a couple of years behind me in grammar school.
I was, I guess eight. I had literally never met
(38:16):
nor heard of another Keith. I thought I was the
only one in the world, or at least there was
a chance of it. The other Keith was best known
around town for having run into the side of a
slow moving school bus. Now, anybody can run into a
bus coming towards them, or in front of a bus.
(38:36):
But I was there nineteen sixty seven, nineteen sixty eight,
and this bus was already partially past Other Keith, going
fairly slowly when he bolted out into the road and
ran headfirst into the side of it. He bounced off
in front of the back wheel, and as near as
(38:59):
I know, did not suffer a scratch. Later I found
out about Rupert Murdoch and the fact that his real
first name is Keith, and he prefers Rupert. I was
going to go on about how I think the weirdest
(39:19):
name you can think of is Keith, and say the
fact check was true, when mister Bump blew the whole
thing by getting back to me and telling me that
this was in fact a joke that had blown up
in his face. And I said, now, sir, you know
how us Keith's feel. I've done all the damage I
(39:57):
can do here. Thank you for listening. Most of our
countdown music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray
and John Phillips Shaneil musical directors have Countdown. It was
produced by Tko Brothers. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass
and drums, and mister Chanelle handled the orchestration and the keyboards.
Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best
baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The Olderman theme from
(40:21):
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Is the sports music. Some other music arranged and performed
by the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today was
my friend Tony Kornheiser. Everything else was as ever my fault.
That's countdown for today, Day one hundred and thirty five
of America held hostage just one three hundred and twenty
(40:43):
eight days until the scheduled end of Trump's lame duck
and lame brained term unless Putin removes him sooner, or
the actuarial tables to, or Leonard Leo does, or we do.
The next scheduled countdown is Thursday. Today's special episode was
(41:03):
an ex peer meant we'll see if it's feasible long term.
As always, bulletins as the news warrants, and remember, as always,
Trump is laying the groundwork now to not leave office later,
and thus he must be stopped till Thursday. I'm Keith Alderman.
Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown
(41:44):
with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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