February 16, 2024 • 49 mins
BULLETIN: SEASON 2 EPISODE 125: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:40) BULLETIN: Russia's most vital and most vociferous opponent of Vladimir Putin and his dictatorship and international terrorism, Alexei Navalny, has died at a prison near the Arctic Circle.
Putin killed him.
Trump helped.
The Republican Party helped.
By coincidence, Navalny's wife - now his widow - was speaking at the Munich Security Conference this morning, as was Vice President Kamala Harris. Both of them spoke. The Vice President stated bluntly "Russia did this." Mrs. Navalny said she believed the day would come sooner than Putin would be punished for what he did, and urged world leaders to hasten that day.
Putin invaded Ukraine - again - a year and one week ago, next Saturday. His useful idiots in this country, from Trump to Marjorie Greene to Tucker Carlson, must be held responsible. And the President must fulfill his 2021 warning to Putin that if Navalny died, the consequences to Russia would be terrible.
They must start with the transfer of the $300,000,000,000 in Russian assets seized after the attack on Ukraine, to the Ukrainian government. We must spend Putin's money to destroy him.
(The rest of this bulletin is a repeat of Friday's regular edition of Countdown)
(14:00) SPECIAL COMMENT: The Stormy Daniels Trump Trial will start as scheduled on March 25. The attempt to derail the Georgia 11,780 Votes Trial is bloodied but unbowed when the witness claiming the DA is lying about her relationship can't remember when she found out or who told her, and is a disgruntled ex-employee. The fine in the Trump Financial Fraud Trial should come today.
And that ISN'T the Trump legal headline. The meticulous Trump really screwed up last night and posed for a series of photos that defied the first thing all lawyers tell all clients: Whatever you do, DON'T LOOK GUILTY. He not only looks guilty in these shots, he looks like he's already imprisoned.
Plus the Comer/Grassley/Hannity "case" against the Bidens hits a slight bump (the "whistleblower" was just indicted for lying to the FBI - he made it all up) and Robert Hur's "Biden Age Plot" has two new conspirators, and shockingly enough they're both - just like Hur - Trump appointees.
B-Block (38:47) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: What could bring the ever-warring world of baseball together in one quest? Nike. Fans, players, writers, jersey wonks, all agree: new uniforms it's made for 2024 suck. So, of course, does Marjorie Taylor Greene and after that hearing yesterday nobody knows that better than she does. And the mild, modest Associated Press produces the worst Bothsidesist headline of the month.
C-block (45:00) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: Back to the beginnings. Back to the story I heard William Windom recite in 1977 and hoped someday I could emulate him. Thurber's impeccable story of madness just beneath the surface: "A Box To Hide In."
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. This
is a bullet edition of the Countdown podcast. Alexey Navalni
is dead. The Russian prison service says Vladimir Putin's most vociferous,
most vital opponent has died after a walk today. Cause
(00:27):
of death is being established, reads a statement. The cause
of death is Vladimir Putin. Alexey Nevali is dead and
Vladimir Putin is an international terrorist. Alexey Nevali is dead,
and in his own benighted land, Vladimir Putin is a
domestic terrorist. Alexey Nevalni is dead, and Vladimir Putin had
(00:49):
him murdered as sure as if he'd shown him over
to the window. And after years of arresting him and
barring him and warning him and threatening him and poisoning
him and jailing him and sending him to a gulag
in the Arctic Circle, Putin's Dictatorship's prison service in Yamalo
(01:10):
Nenets has announced that Navalani had quote felt unwell after
a walk and had almost immediately lost consciousness. Doctors had
been called and tried to resuscitate him, but without success.
The emergency doctors declared the prisoner dead. Cause of death
is being established. Cause of death is Putin and his
(01:31):
dictatorship and his terrorism and his murder's regime, and most
importantly for our purposes, his Russian wares inside our government
and outside our government in this country. And the foremost
of the Russian wares is Donald Trump, whose efforts on
behalf of Putin and Medvedev and Lavrov and the other
(01:52):
Russian garbage before his own election, after his own election,
and since we shack Trump out may well go down
in American history as the greatest treachery of anybody since
Klaus Fuchs or Jefferson Davis or Benedict Arnold. Trump has
never been able to tell good from evil, but in
(02:13):
the case of Russia, he has long had a shallow
understanding of both, and he has always sided with Russia's evil,
with Putin's evil, he sided with it. Last week he
told Putin to go ahead and invade Europe despite our
treaties with NATO countries, and he boasted of Russia's evil.
(02:33):
And he has serviced it and fed it, and we
yet do not know what he has fed it, because
his own appointee overseeing his stolen documents an espionage case
in Florida, has behaved criminally in delaying and foot dragging
and corruptly slow walking his trial there. We don't know
how much Trump has helped Russia. We only know he
(02:56):
has valued America lesson he has valued Vladimir Putin, And
unfortunately for the rest of the world, Vladimir Putin is
alive and Donald Trump is alive, and Alexey Novalni is dead.
Trump obviously is anything but alone in his American perfidy
(03:16):
about Russia, far from the only perpetrator in creating the
environment in which Putin knew he could get away with
knocking Navalni off the Russian presidential ballot. I mean, where
do you think Trump got the idea that Hillary Clinton
or Joe Biden, or whoever most threatened him at the
moment quote shouldn't be allowed to run for president? Here
(03:38):
Putin knew Trump would do nothing when he poisoned Novalni,
and would do nothing when he seized Novalni, And he
kept Nevale as a judicial hostage until he could kill him.
And he may have known it because he had blackmail
on Trump. But whether or not any of that was
actually even remotely true. Putin also knew he did not
need blackmail. Trump would simply help Putin's terrorism because in
(04:03):
Putin Trump sees a role model. But here the authoritarians,
the conservatives without conscience, the American Republican Russians, the people
who literally do not care if Russia controls Ukraine because
Putin thinks it is actually Russian because of the protocols
of Catherine the Great and it now needs to be
(04:25):
cleansed of non Russians. There the people who will next
not care when Putin, as he telegraphed this past week,
invades Poland because he has now rewritten history, as Ron
DeSantis and the book banners are trying to rewrite history
in this country. Only there Putin has created a fantasy
world in which Poland forced Hitler to start World War II.
(04:47):
Putin is telling us what he intends to do with
the death of Novalni. He is telling us what he
will do to those who oppose him. And Putin, who
has just Hadnvalini killed, has his new agents here, and
the most recent of them is Tucker Carlson, who prost
tutored himself to do what Putin needed him to do,
(05:07):
and then Putin humiliated him and dismissed him, and Carlson
doesn't even realize it yet. Two hours Carlson sat there,
his head nodding up and down like a car dashboard
babbo head doll, and he never asked Putin about NAVALNI
And in a post interview conference, the questioner asked why not,
and Carlson had the audacity to say, quote, every leader
(05:30):
kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.
And Elon Musk platforms Tucker Carlson. Frankly, we should not
let Tucker Carlson return to this country, and we should
see what we can do about throwing Elon Musk out
of this country. Carlson is that most dangerous of foreign tools,
(05:52):
the one too stupid to know. He is just what
the Russians have always called a useful idiot, except after
the recording with Putin, Carlson is no longer useful to him.
Trump obviously is another one. Rand Paul Tommy Tuberville, Mike Johnson,
Marjorie Taylor Green hell who better defines mental incapacity as
(06:14):
policy than Marjorie Taylor Green and the others who have
wilted before Trump's pro Russia stance on Ukraine, and the
fact that one unelected man can threaten a series of
elected officials of the United States to do a foreign
dictator's bidding for him about Ukraine. That fact shows the
ultimate danger of Trump. He may be too old and
(06:37):
too deranged, and too physically ill to himself create an
America that looks like Trump's Russia, but he is ready
to put the components in place next year for somebody
else to finish the job. And then it is our
government that will send troops into another country, not too
rightly or wrongly try to stabilize that other country, or
(06:59):
democratize it, or nation build it, or any other cliche
pertinent to it, to take over another country for its resources,
to make a desert and call it peace, as Putin
is doing now in Ukraine, with the help of the
Republicans in the House and the Senate. And now it
(07:19):
is time to bury Trump's influence here and bury the
influence of those pro Russian Republican whorees who would not
give a damn if Putin took over Mexico. And to
this we look to the White House and the honorable
man who leads the free world what's left of it?
What Trump didn't give away, what Trump didn't undermine. What
(07:41):
Trump and Putin are not destabilizing at this minute. Nearly
three years ago, Joe Biden met with Putin at a
summit in Geneva and was as blunt as he could
have been with him. Biden warned him about human rights
and consequences. A reporter asked, Biden, what did you say
would happen if opposition leader Alexey Navalni dies. The answer
(08:03):
from President Biden quote, I made it clear to him
that I believe the consequences of that would be devastating
for Russia. Well, Alexei Navalni has died. The Vice President,
speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Germany about eight
thirty Eastern time this morning, made clear who killed him.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Before I begin today, we've all just received reports that
Alexei Navalni has died in Russia. This is, of course
terrible news, which we are working to confirm. My prayers
are with his family, including his wife Julia, who is
with us today, and if confirmed, this would be a
(08:46):
further sign of Putin's brutality. Whatever story they tell, let
us be clear, Russia is responsible and we will have
more to say on this later.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
As the Vice president said, Navalny's wife, Navali's widow was
at the Munich Security Conference this morning. My coincidence, when
news of her husband's murder came, she had the courage
to address the conference through tears, to a standing ovation
in which she urged in Russian the international community to
(09:20):
unite and hold Putin personally responsible and his allies, his friends,
his government for what they did to her husband and
to Russia, and that she believes this day when the
world will do so will come sooner than Putin thinks.
Ending in the rough translation of the BBC, she said
(09:40):
she wants Putin to know that he and his friends
will be punished. Julia Navanni also met with the US
Secretary of State Blincoln and other world leaders. In Russia,
there has been little formal response. A propagandist working for
Russian television said, thank god it was not Tucker Carlson.
(10:01):
Here some leadership emerged, at least solid words. Trump's Vice
President Mike Pence writes, there is no room in the
Republican Party for apologists for Putin. Alexey Navalni rip even
though sadly in fact pretty much all there is in
(10:23):
the Republican Party is room for apologists for Putin. What
is needed now is for President Biden to fulfill his
warning to Putin from twenty twenty one about consequences if
Navalny was killed. That statement not only needs to be
more true than ever at this minute, but how President
(10:46):
Biden responds in the next week to Putin killing Navalny
may decide whether the next necessity the end of Putin's
regime and the end of the political lives of Putin's
stooges in this country, and the fulfillment of Julia Navalni's
predictions today in Munich, whether or not those things happen,
whether the world can proceed in some safety and some
(11:10):
freedom without a menacing dictatorship spanning from Europe to Asia
to Republican national headquarters. There are many things to do,
including the complete economic isolation of Russia by the West,
a complex process that we'll meet with resistance from those
scoundrels in this country whose first loyalty is not to
(11:33):
this country, whose first job is to work for Vladimir Putin.
But the first step is easy comparatively, and its impact
would be manifold and devastating in Russia and in the
Republican Party. Three hundred billion dollars in Russian assets frozen
since Putin invaded Ukraine again two years and one week ago.
(11:58):
Next Saturday, Biden and the Western leaders should immediately not
just freeze, but claim those assets and unilaterally award them
to the government of Ukraine. That three hundred billion dollars
should begin to destroy Russian ships and should begin to
destroy Vladimir Putin's regime tomorrow morning. Vladimir Putin has killed
(12:24):
Alexey Navalni. We must kill Vladimir Putin's role in world affairs.
The rest of this bulletin edition is a repeat of
Friday's regular edition of Countdown. It is mostly about Trump's
legal battles here and a terrible image mistake that he made,
leading to photographs which could symbolically at least make him
(12:48):
the prisoner he should be. Putin can send him a
postcard in jail. Trump's attempt to stall his New York
trial has failed. That's the trial for claiming hush money
(13:12):
he paid to the porn star he cheated with on
his wife three months after she gave birth was legal expenses.
The New York trial will start thirty four counts as
planned March twenty fifth, and obviously the implications are that
Trump trial Air Traffic Control will now be waiving the
Stormy Daniels Trump case in for a landing first, and
(13:34):
it just told the Trump election subversion case in DC
to go round and try to set down later. The
Trump Georgia eleven seven and eighty votes trial is encountering
some turbulence, even though the only witness claiming any evidence
of anything improper between Fannie Willis and the extra prosecutor
cannot remember how or when she found out about the affair.
(13:58):
And remember, the whole purpose of this is the same
purpose it always is, stalling the Trump business. And this
fraud case has already landed and might have deplayed yesterday
in the same court building as the Trump what did
you do after your son was born? I did Stormy
Daniels case, but it didn't. We may hear from Judge
(14:19):
Arthur and Gern with the final count and the amount
in the second New York trial as early as today.
And now the punchline to this brief resume of all
the criminal trials and other trials that Trump is currently facing.
None of that none of that is the current Trump
legal headline. You do not get to survive to become
(14:57):
a seventy seven year old, deranged, malignant narcissist without being
really good at controlling your own image. Trump's brain does
not work right to him. Other people are just furniture
that can move on its own. He has no courage,
no conscience, and no conception that the world was not
created solely for him. But he's good at controlling his
(15:20):
own image, or at least he was until he made
what could ultimately be a fatal mistake if the rest
of us just jump on it, because as he yelled
at cameras at Manhattan Criminal Court on Center Street in
New York yesterday, he made a terrible logistical decision. Whenever
(15:40):
Trump has talked to the media that has been separated
from him, even by those cold, imposing silver police barricades,
the one that looks like the bottom half of a
jail cell, Trump has always managed in that situation to
position himself in a way in which it is clear
that it is the media that is behind the half
(16:02):
jail cell barricades and not him behind them. It's simple, really,
you stand parallel to those barricades, and you make sure
you are doing so in such a way that only
barricades in front of you are visible. Even the taller
barricades will only go up to the belt line of
even an average size man as long as they are
(16:22):
in front of him. Photographs of Trump will therefore be
cropped often, and even if they are not, the barricades
just look like ordinary railings. But something happened to Trump
yesterday in court. Those police barricades were in front of
him and also behind him in a kind of loose
(16:42):
octagon shape. Suddenly there were these half jail cell bars
in front of him as usual, but also half jail
cell bars behind him in the distance, so that almost
every photo of him and every video of him showed
the ones in the back, and thanks to the laws
(17:03):
of perspective, they were even with his shoulders or somewhat
higher than his shoulders, and basically what looked like jail
cells could not be cropped out of every photo of Trump.
Just to make it worse, Trump, the incredibly good orchestrator
of his own image, exacerbated the problem somehow. His lawyer
(17:26):
stood behind the barricade that was placed perfectly parallel to
the two men and Trump stood to the lawyer's left,
and perhaps without ever realizing it, he put himself in
one of the corners where the front barricade angled backwards.
So if you have not seen the picture, bars in
(17:48):
front of Trump, a second set of bars to the
side of Trump, stretching from where he stood to back
behind him, and to the right of him, a third
set of bars which sloped back from there in Trump's direction,
and then the pista resistance, the fourth set of bars
(18:08):
unmistakable and unavoidable at the height of Trump's shoulders. Trump
behind bars. Several times. Trump even put his hands on
the railing in front of him, and he might as
well have been shouting, get me out of this prison, yell,
lousy screw. In fact, there is one set of images.
(18:31):
The photographer was named Timothy Clary of Ajen's Franz Press,
and he must have put his camera over his own head,
because in his shots those back bars are literally appearing
as if they were above Trump's head. The shot is
so wide that you see perhaps two dozen people leaning
(18:52):
against walls and standing staring at Trump, and then in
the middle bars suggesting jail behind him above his head,
bars suggesting jail to his right, bars suggesting jail in
front of him. Looking left to right, you see the
cop outside the barricades, Trump inside the barricades, lawyer inside
the barricades, second cop outside the barricades. Even if it
(19:17):
is just on an unconscious level, the photograph screams Trump
in prison, Trump behind bars, Trump guilty, Trump the criminal,
Trump indicted, Trump, so indicted, Wait, so indicted.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Oh, Nancy, I'm so indicted, and I just can't fight it.
I'm about to go to jail in America likes it.
I'm so indicted, tightened, and I know, I know the
(20:09):
unundicted co conspirators can bite it, bite it.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Thank you, Nancy Faust. More than that, though, For once,
it is Trump in that photograph, and most of those photographs,
it is Trump who is behind bars, and everybody else
in the shot is free, the court staff, the cops,
the media. I'll post the photo on Twitter x and
wherever else I can think to. I've never been on trial.
(20:38):
I've never actually been a witness or anything else in
a courtroom. And only once have I ever been in
a deposition. Of course, it was a two day deposition
over an issue of fifty million dollars and one of
the things my very good lawyers for that deposition hammered
into me for use in the deposition and any other
time I encountered other lawyers. It was a very simple warning,
(21:02):
whatever you do, try not to look guilty. And in
the picture, God does Trump look guilty. I don't know
if Nicki Gley's campaign can license that image. It merely
proves her last honest point of her campaign that a
Trump candidacy will be nothing but him in court. It's
(21:25):
like five hundred bucks to license the rights to use
a photo like that off Getty Images, but for a
campaign would probably be way higher. However, the Biden campaign
ought to buy that photo and the rights and the
camera and any piece of video shot from that damning angle,
and hire the cameraman and plaster it everywhere. Trump on trial,
(21:46):
you know he's guilty, your Republican nominee only with nominee
crossed out and defendant written above it in red. On
this photographer, Tim Clary, lead pipe, cinch, Pulitzer prize. That
(22:10):
sound effect. That's what the picture looks like. Meanwhile, a
California grand jury has indicted James Comer's and Sean Hannity's
and Grandpa Grassley's key FBI informant against the Bidens. He
did make all that stuff up, the infamous FD one
zero two three form that Grassley released and Comber tried
(22:35):
to sell as real about Barisma and bribing the Bidens.
And when they went back to the informant and they
said that a Barisma official told him in twenty fifteen,
according to his story, that he'd bribed the Bidens. But
it turned out this guy had not met with anybody
at Barrisma until two years after that, that the timeline
didn't work. It was obvious he'd made it up. He
(22:58):
just repeated his crap, which was where sounds awfully like
Kremlin composed info and James Comer and Chuck Grassley and
Sean Hannity served as de facto Russian agents in spreading it,
And now Alexander Smirnoff faces twenty five years in prison
for lying to the FBI in Russia. FBI sues you.
(23:25):
If they were democrats, James Comer would have been stripped
of his chairmanship by right now, possibly forced out of
the house already, and Chuck Grassley would have been in
jail years ago. So now Joe Biden's legal problems have
been reduced to just the one. Unfortunately, that one is
having an idiot for his attorney general. How Merrick Garland
(23:47):
has not resigned yet is beyond me. I assume it's
just because, as we saw in the Trump prosecutions, he
does nothing quickly or in normal time, or even slowly.
I presume he cannot go to the bathroom without a
six month long series of meetings and consultation first. Well,
now Garland's got to act fast and spit or get
(24:09):
off the pot, and if he won't, Biden has to
fire him again. This political prostitute, Robert Her, the Trump
appointee and now apparently de facto Trump campaign surrogate, the
centerpiece in what Politico aptly named the Biden Age plot,
Her is revealing more and more of his plans to
(24:30):
try to sink the president, violating all legal ethics both
of them, by including his neurological guesswork about Biden's memory
inside a special Council investigation that, oh, by the way,
cleared Biden. That wasn't enough damage to do, That wasn't
enough prostitution to perform on behalf of Donald Trump. This
(24:55):
bastard Her, as I keep repeating here is actively and
not even secretly, arranging to testify to at least the
House Judiciary Committee. It is now next month. CNN and
The Times reported yesterday HER's congressional testimony is set for
March twelfth, and somebody on HER's side of this equation
(25:16):
has spun HER's tawdry, subhuman question about the president's late
sun bo as justified because it was Biden and not her,
who first brought up bo. Biden Axios also reports that
her quote has been in discussions with Sarah Isker, the
head of public affairs and a senior counselor to Trump's
(25:37):
deputy attorney general during the Mueller investigation, to help him
navigate a congressional hearing. Sarah Isker Sarah Isker is the
federalist phony who attacked Trump in twenty sixteen for having
threatened to prosecute Hillary Clinton and who bashed CNN as
fake news and first went to work for Trump as
(26:00):
the spokesperson for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, all while pitching
herself for a job with MSNBC and CNN, and finally
being hired by CNN, which she had called fake news,
as political editor. They blew her out quickly over there,
and she was last seen at ABC News before she
signed on as Robert Hrr's assistant henchman in the aptly
(26:25):
titled biden Age plot. And now besides this, there is
a new twist to the biden Age plot. The New
York Times reported that before it was released, the White
House pushed back on that report, but did not take
any of the actions it or the DOJ could have
done to censor that report. Nobl not smart, but noble.
(26:49):
The day before the report was released, the DOJ's senior
career official, a man named Bradley Weinsheimer, wrote back that
HER's amateur doctoring and his other political opinions inserted into
his report quote fall well within the department standards for
public release. The Times does not tell you who this
(27:10):
Bradley Weinsheimer is. They describe him as the department's senior
career official or non political appointee. That's bullshit. He is
hardly that. He was appointed by George H. W. Bush
to the Department of Justice, and he was elevated to
his current non political position under Trump. There is nothing
(27:35):
stopping Merrick Garland from stopping them all dead in their tracks.
Denying the House Judiciary Committee any material at hers testimony.
There's nothing stopping him except Garland's own sluggish trees instead
of the forest phony piety about the Department of Justice
and Law with a capital L. Eric Garland already missed
(27:59):
his chance to redact hers utterly uninformed and politically poisoned
conspiracy thingy. And now we have this Weinsheimer guy involved
in this, and this Isker involved in this, and it
is a little miniature right wing conspiracy. Your Department of Justice,
mister Garland. It just produced a document in which some
(28:22):
idiot from the Federalist Society was permitted to speculate on
the president's acuity. James Comy and then Bill Barr had
already turned DOJ and its branches into a political whorehouse,
and this clown Robert Hurr just turned it into a
free political whorehouse once again. Garland has to shut this
(28:48):
down or Biden has to fire him and take the
fallout for doing so. Unless I don't know, Jack Smith
has threatened to quit if Garland goes. Unless it's something
like that, there is no reason to continue to trust
Merrick Garland a foolish, naive man, not just to do
(29:08):
the right thing, but to do anything. Remember when I
said that actor their Sunday shows deceptively edited quotes from
the non brain parts of her report, edited them like
you would edit the phrase not guilty into dot dot
(29:30):
dot guilty. That they needed to fire their anchors and
their anchors bosses. This is probably a coincidence, but ABC
News is president. Kim Godwin just discovered, Hey, there's another
ABC News president above her. Deborah O'Connell has been promoted
to president News Group and Network's Disney Entertainment. She has
(29:57):
more words in her job, so that means she's boss.
This is not necessarily cause in effect, I would actually
guess it's not clause and effect. Godwin was reportedly hated
at ABC, and evinced no earthly clue that she knew
what she was doing. But the news president positions the
producers and management at the key shows. They put those
(30:20):
people there and keep them there, and it's usually their favorites.
Not so much with the talent, but definitely the producers
of shows like Meet the Press and This Week are
the people that the Kim Goodwins of this world want there.
So those producers, the ones, particularly at This Week, all
have to be scared right now because their boss is
(30:44):
no longer the boss. And by the way, after how
they screwed up the her story good two other TV stories.
The Washington Post has made a million arteries run cold,
a nice little feature on biden game strategy for the
election and why nearly three percent of the one hundred
(31:05):
and thirty million dollars Swing states ad buy that they
have arranged is going to go for Joe Biden's spots
in Omaha, Nebraska, three million, seven hundred thousand dollars worth
of Biden commercials and Biden ad and Biden's streaming stuff
in Nebraska Well in the second district of Nebraska, that
(31:31):
state splits its electoral votes. Four are awarded from the
deeply read first district, one is awarded from the deeply
Omaha second district. It's kind of blue there, it's a city.
I'll just read the rest of the little post story.
(31:51):
Under a scenario where Biden wins the three northern swing
states and the other uncontested blue states, a loss in
Nebraska's second district Well could result in a two hundred
and sixty nine two hundred and sixty nine tie, kicking
the selection of the president to the House, where Republicans
(32:13):
currently have an advantage in the number of state delegations
they control. And remember, if God help us, the House
ever has to decide who's going to be president. Each
state gets one vote, and right now the Republicans control
twenty six state delegations. So you're going to spend three
(32:37):
point seven mil in the Omaha market? Are we sure
that's enough? And a year ago today, Tucker Carlson was
already in negotiations with Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy,
remember Kevin McCarthy, to unleash the greatest blockbuster in the
history of American television, the real January sixth Tapes, which
(33:01):
of course turned out to be several days worth of
video of empty hallways, so didn't wind up being a
full length Zupruder film. But we didn't know that then.
A year ago today, and where's Tucker Carlson now filming
inside a Moscow supermarket explaining that Russia is far better
(33:27):
than the United States because the prices in the supermarket
are so low, without ever noting that the prices are
still two to three times higher than the average Russian
can ever afford in his lifetime. Moreover, if you thought
Carlson's flatulent lap sitting interview with the Russian dictator Vladimir
(33:47):
Putin was useless, I hope you saw how it was
trashed by a critic named Vladimir Putin. Putin said, I
honestly thought he would be aggressive and ask so called
sharp questions, but he chose a different tactic unquote. What's
he implying there? What's the opposite of sharp? Dull? Soft? Worst? Yet,
(34:17):
Putin made Carlson release their interview unedited, and then when
it appeared on the Russian government's official site, they had
edited out the really dull parts, which turned out to
be many of Tucker Carlson's questions. One day you're in
the middle of the Kremlin praising Putin to his face.
(34:39):
The next day you're praising the prices in the Borsche
department at the Moscow Win Dixie. So I'd like to
congratulate Tucker Carlson, the first broadcaster to my knowledge, who
has been fired by CNN, PBS, MSNBC, Fox News and
(35:00):
now by the KGB. Also of interest here, how many
different things does Marjorie Taylor Green not understand? I mean,
I suppose the answer is infinite. I mean, she has
spent several days congratulating herself now on being named one
(35:22):
of the impeachment managers for the trial of Secretary Majorcas
in the Senate, blithely unaware or blithely too stupid to
be aware that there is not going to be a
trial of Secretary Majorcas in the Senate. The stunt is over.
But yesterday Marge went back to one of her favorite
gaps in her knowledge back things and she got called
(35:48):
out for it. Crushed. Thank you, Congressman Robert Garcia of California.
That's next. This is Countdown.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Does his countdown with Keith Oberman.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Oberman still ahead of us on Countdown. It's Fridays with Thurber,
(36:28):
and we'll get back to the beginning. To my mind,
it is the quintessential Thurber story. It's the one I
heard the actor William Windham recite on public television in
nineteen seventy seven in his one man Thurber Show. And
I thought, I wonder if I could ever have a
job that would let me read Thurber stories out loud
(36:51):
for an audience. The perfection of a box to hide
in coming up first, Yes, it's the daily roundup of
the miscrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens, who constitute
two days worse parsons in the world, the bronze worse
Nike and Major League Baseball. Nike is the new supplier
(37:15):
of baseball's uniforms, and thus they are the people who
have brought everybody in the game into rare agreement. Everybody
in the game loves to disagree. That's the point about baseball.
It's about to end. Somebody says, oh, no, it's never
been better, says somebody else. Now we all agree. Young fans,
uniform nerds, old reporters now in their seventh decade of
(37:38):
going to games, and the players themselves, they are all
saying the same thing. This February, the new uniforms suck eggs.
As spring training begins, everybody can see the obvious. The
numbers and the player names have been shrunk to near illegibility.
(37:58):
Outfielder Taylor Ward of the Angels says they look like
replica uniforms. Somebody else said, yeah, they look like replicas
at TJ Max. But it's worse than that. The hefty
and large Angels reliever at Carlos Estevez pointed out to
reporters that the white in his team's pants does not
match the white in his team's shirts, and Estebez says
(38:21):
he can't fit into his pants and they will not
let him tailor his pants. I feel like I'm wearing
someone else's pants. The blue in the Cubs uniforms, according
to a Cubs player, does not appear to be the
same blue. The Cubs have warren since the mid nineteen fifties,
and they have screwed up the fabled script Dodgers uniforms
(38:44):
of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The shirt used to open
used to button between the O and the middle D
in the word Dodgers across the chest. Now it opens
in the middle of the O. So if an LA
player has his top buttons un button, it really looks
like his uniform reads Dugers eod Gers, Dudegers. The next
(39:10):
complaint will come from the fans when they find out
that the price of one of these replicant uniforms has
risen to about four hundred dollars. The runner up worser,
Marjorie Taylor Barney Rubble, please get your deviated septum fixed.
Green the first congress person dumber than Rosie the robot
(39:33):
from the Jetsons.
Speaker 4 (39:34):
I'm not a doctor, but I have a PhD In
recognizing bullshit when I hear it. It's time to be
honest about the vaccine injured and we need to stop
allowing these COVID nineteen vaccines to be given out to
children in lady's time has expired, and now recognize mister
Garcia from California for five minutes of questions.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Thank you, so Chairman. I'm sorry you all had to
go through that.
Speaker 5 (39:57):
That was a lot of conspiracy theories and wild accusations
which we now have been debunked by medical and we
should be clear that vaccines work and save lives, and
they have millions of lives in this country.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Good lord, I mean Marjorie Taylor Green can't spell PhD.
Thank you, Congressman Garcia. But our winner the worst the
Associated Press, you know, for the most concentrated, most absurd
both siding of the presidential election. The AP, which is
usually just bland and shallow, may have won the award
(40:33):
for all of journalism. In the month of February. The
headline of a story analyzing Congressman elect Tom Swase's victory
in the special election in the New York Third quote,
Democrats cheered New York win as good omen for November.
But is it enough to calm anxiety over Biden? The
(40:58):
Associated Press. I swear to Jesus if Kamala Harris discovered
a pill guaranteeing everybody eternal life, and she was handing
them out to everybody on the street. Here take two,
somebody would write, Democrats cheer public reaction to their immortality pill,
(41:19):
but is it enough to calm anxiety over Biden? Today's
worst persons in the world. It's been a long week.
(41:51):
And every time I find myself thinking it's been a
long week, I like to turn to my book of
James Thurber, and it's Fridays with Thurber. And it's been
a few fridays since I've done any James Thurber. And
so let's start at the beginning. As I've mentioned many times,
I read this story first aloud in a class in
college in nineteen seventy nine, and a friend of mine
(42:11):
came up to me and said, you should forget that
sportscasting thing. You should read Thurber for a living, And
I said, yeah, that'll ever happen. This is for some
reason salvation for me, Catharsis, and every other emotion that
is appropriate after it has been a long week. A
(42:32):
Box to Hide In by James Thurber. I waited till
the large woman with the awful hat took up her
sack of groceries and went out, peering at the tomatoes
and the lettuce on her way. The clerk asked me
(42:52):
what mine was. Have you got a box, I asked,
A large box. I want a box to hide in.
You want a box, he asked, I want a box
to hide in. I said, what do you mean? He said,
you mean a big box? I said, I meant a
(43:12):
big box big enough to hold me. I haven't got
any boxes, he said, only cottons that cans come in.
I tried several other groceries and none of them had
a box big enough for me to hide in. And
there was nothing for it but to face life out.
I didn't feel strong, and I'd had this overpowering desire
(43:34):
to hide in a box for a long time. Well,
what do you mean you want to hide in this box?
One grocer asked me. It's a form of escape. I
told him, hiding in a box. It circumscribes your worries
in the range of your anguish. You don't see people either.
(43:58):
How the hell do you eat when you're in this box,
asked the grocer, How the hell do you get anything
to eat? I said I'd never been in a box
and didn't know, but that that would take care of itself. Well,
he said, finally, I haven't got any boxes, only some
pasteboard curtains that cans come in. It was the same
(44:18):
every place. I gave up when it got dark and
the groceries closed, and hid in my room again. I
turned out the light and lay on the bed. You
feel better when it gets dark. I could have hit
in a closet, I suppose, but people are always opening doors.
(44:38):
Somebody would find you in a closet. They would be startled,
and you'd have to tell them why you're in the closet.
Nobody pays attention to a big box line on the floor.
You could stay in it for days and nobody'd think
to look in it, not even the cleaning woman. My
(45:00):
cleaning woman came the next morning and woke me up,
and I was still feeling bad. I asked her if
she knew where I could get a large box. How
big a box you want she asked, I want a
box big enough for me to get inside of, I said.
She looked at me with big, dim eyes. There's something
(45:21):
wrong with her glands. She's awful, but she has a
big heart, which makes it worse. She's unbearable. Her husband
is sick, and her children are sick, and she is
sick too. I got to thinking how pleasant it would
be if I were in a box now and didn't
have to see her. I'd be in a box right
there in the room, and she wouldn't know. I wondered,
if you had a desire to bark or laugh when
(45:44):
someone who doesn't know walks by the box you were in,
maybe she would have a spell with her heart. If
I did that would die right there. The officers and
the elevator man and mister Grammage would find us funny.
Dog gone thing happened at the building last night. The
doorman would say to his wife, I led in this
(46:05):
woman to clean up tenf and she never come out.
See She's never in there more in an hour, but
she never come out. See. So when it got time
for me to go off duty, why, I says to Krenic,
who was on the elevator. I says, what the hell
you suppose happened to that woman cleans tenf? He says
he didn't know. He says he never seen her after
he took her up. So I spoke to mister Drammage
about it. I'm sorry to bother you, mister Grammage, I says,
(46:28):
but there's something funny about that woman cleans tenf. So
I told him so he said we better have a look,
and we all three goes up and knots on the
door and rings the bells see and nobody answers. So
he said we'd have to walk in. So Credick opened
the door and we walked in, and here was this
woman cleans the apartment, dead as a herring on the floor,
(46:50):
and the gentleman that lives there was in a box.
The cleaning woman kept looking at me. It was hard
to realize she wasn't dead. It's a form of escape.
I murmured, what say? She asked, Dully, you don't know
(47:13):
of any large packing boxes, do you? I asked, now,
I don't. She said, I haven't found one yet, But
I still have this overpowering urge to hide in a box.
Maybe it will go away, maybe I'll be all right,
maybe it will get worse. It's hard to say. A
(47:39):
box to hide in by James Thurber. I've done all
the damage I can do. Here Here are the credits.
Most of the music was arranged, produced, and performed by
(48:01):
Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel, who are the count
On musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by John Phillip Schaneil, guitars,
bass and drums by Brian Ray, produced by Tko Brothers.
Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Olberman
theme from ESPN two and it was written by Mitch
(48:22):
Warren Davis and appears courtesy of ESPN Inc. Musical comments
from Nancy Faust the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our
announcer was John Dean, and everything else is pretty much
my fault. So that's countdown for this the eight hundred
and sixty fourth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Don't
forget to keep arresting him while we still can. The
(48:46):
next schedule countdown is Monday, and until then, I'm Keith Oldriman,
good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown
(49:10):
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. This
is a bullet edition of the Countdown podcast. Alexey Navalni
is dead. The Russian prison service says Vladimir Putin's most vociferous,
most vital opponent has died after a walk today. Cause
(00:27):
of death is being established, reads a statement. The cause
of death is Vladimir Putin. Alexey Nevali is dead and
Vladimir Putin is an international terrorist. Alexey Nevali is dead,
and in his own benighted land, Vladimir Putin is a
domestic terrorist. Alexey Nevalni is dead, and Vladimir Putin had
(00:49):
him murdered as sure as if he'd shown him over
to the window. And after years of arresting him and
barring him and warning him and threatening him and poisoning
him and jailing him and sending him to a gulag
in the Arctic Circle, Putin's Dictatorship's prison service in Yamalo
(01:10):
Nenets has announced that Navalani had quote felt unwell after
a walk and had almost immediately lost consciousness. Doctors had
been called and tried to resuscitate him, but without success.
The emergency doctors declared the prisoner dead. Cause of death
is being established. Cause of death is Putin and his
(01:31):
dictatorship and his terrorism and his murder's regime, and most
importantly for our purposes, his Russian wares inside our government
and outside our government in this country. And the foremost
of the Russian wares is Donald Trump, whose efforts on
behalf of Putin and Medvedev and Lavrov and the other
(01:52):
Russian garbage before his own election, after his own election,
and since we shack Trump out may well go down
in American history as the greatest treachery of anybody since
Klaus Fuchs or Jefferson Davis or Benedict Arnold. Trump has
never been able to tell good from evil, but in
(02:13):
the case of Russia, he has long had a shallow
understanding of both, and he has always sided with Russia's evil,
with Putin's evil, he sided with it. Last week he
told Putin to go ahead and invade Europe despite our
treaties with NATO countries, and he boasted of Russia's evil.
(02:33):
And he has serviced it and fed it, and we
yet do not know what he has fed it, because
his own appointee overseeing his stolen documents an espionage case
in Florida, has behaved criminally in delaying and foot dragging
and corruptly slow walking his trial there. We don't know
how much Trump has helped Russia. We only know he
(02:56):
has valued America lesson he has valued Vladimir Putin, And
unfortunately for the rest of the world, Vladimir Putin is
alive and Donald Trump is alive, and Alexey Novalni is dead.
Trump obviously is anything but alone in his American perfidy
(03:16):
about Russia, far from the only perpetrator in creating the
environment in which Putin knew he could get away with
knocking Navalni off the Russian presidential ballot. I mean, where
do you think Trump got the idea that Hillary Clinton
or Joe Biden, or whoever most threatened him at the
moment quote shouldn't be allowed to run for president? Here
(03:38):
Putin knew Trump would do nothing when he poisoned Novalni,
and would do nothing when he seized Novalni, And he
kept Nevale as a judicial hostage until he could kill him.
And he may have known it because he had blackmail
on Trump. But whether or not any of that was
actually even remotely true. Putin also knew he did not
need blackmail. Trump would simply help Putin's terrorism because in
(04:03):
Putin Trump sees a role model. But here the authoritarians,
the conservatives without conscience, the American Republican Russians, the people
who literally do not care if Russia controls Ukraine because
Putin thinks it is actually Russian because of the protocols
of Catherine the Great and it now needs to be
(04:25):
cleansed of non Russians. There the people who will next
not care when Putin, as he telegraphed this past week,
invades Poland because he has now rewritten history, as Ron
DeSantis and the book banners are trying to rewrite history
in this country. Only there Putin has created a fantasy
world in which Poland forced Hitler to start World War II.
(04:47):
Putin is telling us what he intends to do with
the death of Novalni. He is telling us what he
will do to those who oppose him. And Putin, who
has just Hadnvalini killed, has his new agents here, and
the most recent of them is Tucker Carlson, who prost
tutored himself to do what Putin needed him to do,
(05:07):
and then Putin humiliated him and dismissed him, and Carlson
doesn't even realize it yet. Two hours Carlson sat there,
his head nodding up and down like a car dashboard
babbo head doll, and he never asked Putin about NAVALNI
And in a post interview conference, the questioner asked why not,
and Carlson had the audacity to say, quote, every leader
(05:30):
kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.
And Elon Musk platforms Tucker Carlson. Frankly, we should not
let Tucker Carlson return to this country, and we should
see what we can do about throwing Elon Musk out
of this country. Carlson is that most dangerous of foreign tools,
(05:52):
the one too stupid to know. He is just what
the Russians have always called a useful idiot, except after
the recording with Putin, Carlson is no longer useful to him.
Trump obviously is another one. Rand Paul Tommy Tuberville, Mike Johnson,
Marjorie Taylor Green hell who better defines mental incapacity as
(06:14):
policy than Marjorie Taylor Green and the others who have
wilted before Trump's pro Russia stance on Ukraine, and the
fact that one unelected man can threaten a series of
elected officials of the United States to do a foreign
dictator's bidding for him about Ukraine. That fact shows the
ultimate danger of Trump. He may be too old and
(06:37):
too deranged, and too physically ill to himself create an
America that looks like Trump's Russia, but he is ready
to put the components in place next year for somebody
else to finish the job. And then it is our
government that will send troops into another country, not too
rightly or wrongly try to stabilize that other country, or
(06:59):
democratize it, or nation build it, or any other cliche
pertinent to it, to take over another country for its resources,
to make a desert and call it peace, as Putin
is doing now in Ukraine, with the help of the
Republicans in the House and the Senate. And now it
(07:19):
is time to bury Trump's influence here and bury the
influence of those pro Russian Republican whorees who would not
give a damn if Putin took over Mexico. And to
this we look to the White House and the honorable
man who leads the free world what's left of it?
What Trump didn't give away, what Trump didn't undermine. What
(07:41):
Trump and Putin are not destabilizing at this minute. Nearly
three years ago, Joe Biden met with Putin at a
summit in Geneva and was as blunt as he could
have been with him. Biden warned him about human rights
and consequences. A reporter asked, Biden, what did you say
would happen if opposition leader Alexey Navalni dies. The answer
(08:03):
from President Biden quote, I made it clear to him
that I believe the consequences of that would be devastating
for Russia. Well, Alexei Navalni has died. The Vice President,
speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Germany about eight
thirty Eastern time this morning, made clear who killed him.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Before I begin today, we've all just received reports that
Alexei Navalni has died in Russia. This is, of course
terrible news, which we are working to confirm. My prayers
are with his family, including his wife Julia, who is
with us today, and if confirmed, this would be a
(08:46):
further sign of Putin's brutality. Whatever story they tell, let
us be clear, Russia is responsible and we will have
more to say on this later.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
As the Vice president said, Navalny's wife, Navali's widow was
at the Munich Security Conference this morning. My coincidence, when
news of her husband's murder came, she had the courage
to address the conference through tears, to a standing ovation
in which she urged in Russian the international community to
(09:20):
unite and hold Putin personally responsible and his allies, his friends,
his government for what they did to her husband and
to Russia, and that she believes this day when the
world will do so will come sooner than Putin thinks.
Ending in the rough translation of the BBC, she said
(09:40):
she wants Putin to know that he and his friends
will be punished. Julia Navanni also met with the US
Secretary of State Blincoln and other world leaders. In Russia,
there has been little formal response. A propagandist working for
Russian television said, thank god it was not Tucker Carlson.
(10:01):
Here some leadership emerged, at least solid words. Trump's Vice
President Mike Pence writes, there is no room in the
Republican Party for apologists for Putin. Alexey Navalni rip even
though sadly in fact pretty much all there is in
(10:23):
the Republican Party is room for apologists for Putin. What
is needed now is for President Biden to fulfill his
warning to Putin from twenty twenty one about consequences if
Navalny was killed. That statement not only needs to be
more true than ever at this minute, but how President
(10:46):
Biden responds in the next week to Putin killing Navalny
may decide whether the next necessity the end of Putin's
regime and the end of the political lives of Putin's
stooges in this country, and the fulfillment of Julia Navalni's
predictions today in Munich, whether or not those things happen,
whether the world can proceed in some safety and some
(11:10):
freedom without a menacing dictatorship spanning from Europe to Asia
to Republican national headquarters. There are many things to do,
including the complete economic isolation of Russia by the West,
a complex process that we'll meet with resistance from those
scoundrels in this country whose first loyalty is not to
(11:33):
this country, whose first job is to work for Vladimir Putin.
But the first step is easy comparatively, and its impact
would be manifold and devastating in Russia and in the
Republican Party. Three hundred billion dollars in Russian assets frozen
since Putin invaded Ukraine again two years and one week ago.
(11:58):
Next Saturday, Biden and the Western leaders should immediately not
just freeze, but claim those assets and unilaterally award them
to the government of Ukraine. That three hundred billion dollars
should begin to destroy Russian ships and should begin to
destroy Vladimir Putin's regime tomorrow morning. Vladimir Putin has killed
(12:24):
Alexey Navalni. We must kill Vladimir Putin's role in world affairs.
The rest of this bulletin edition is a repeat of
Friday's regular edition of Countdown. It is mostly about Trump's
legal battles here and a terrible image mistake that he made,
leading to photographs which could symbolically at least make him
(12:48):
the prisoner he should be. Putin can send him a
postcard in jail. Trump's attempt to stall his New York
trial has failed. That's the trial for claiming hush money
(13:12):
he paid to the porn star he cheated with on
his wife three months after she gave birth was legal expenses.
The New York trial will start thirty four counts as
planned March twenty fifth, and obviously the implications are that
Trump trial Air Traffic Control will now be waiving the
Stormy Daniels Trump case in for a landing first, and
(13:34):
it just told the Trump election subversion case in DC
to go round and try to set down later. The
Trump Georgia eleven seven and eighty votes trial is encountering
some turbulence, even though the only witness claiming any evidence
of anything improper between Fannie Willis and the extra prosecutor
cannot remember how or when she found out about the affair.
(13:58):
And remember, the whole purpose of this is the same
purpose it always is, stalling the Trump business. And this
fraud case has already landed and might have deplayed yesterday
in the same court building as the Trump what did
you do after your son was born? I did Stormy
Daniels case, but it didn't. We may hear from Judge
(14:19):
Arthur and Gern with the final count and the amount
in the second New York trial as early as today.
And now the punchline to this brief resume of all
the criminal trials and other trials that Trump is currently facing.
None of that none of that is the current Trump
legal headline. You do not get to survive to become
(14:57):
a seventy seven year old, deranged, malignant narcissist without being
really good at controlling your own image. Trump's brain does
not work right to him. Other people are just furniture
that can move on its own. He has no courage,
no conscience, and no conception that the world was not
created solely for him. But he's good at controlling his
(15:20):
own image, or at least he was until he made
what could ultimately be a fatal mistake if the rest
of us just jump on it, because as he yelled
at cameras at Manhattan Criminal Court on Center Street in
New York yesterday, he made a terrible logistical decision. Whenever
(15:40):
Trump has talked to the media that has been separated
from him, even by those cold, imposing silver police barricades,
the one that looks like the bottom half of a
jail cell, Trump has always managed in that situation to
position himself in a way in which it is clear
that it is the media that is behind the half
(16:02):
jail cell barricades and not him behind them. It's simple, really,
you stand parallel to those barricades, and you make sure
you are doing so in such a way that only
barricades in front of you are visible. Even the taller
barricades will only go up to the belt line of
even an average size man as long as they are
(16:22):
in front of him. Photographs of Trump will therefore be
cropped often, and even if they are not, the barricades
just look like ordinary railings. But something happened to Trump
yesterday in court. Those police barricades were in front of
him and also behind him in a kind of loose
(16:42):
octagon shape. Suddenly there were these half jail cell bars
in front of him as usual, but also half jail
cell bars behind him in the distance, so that almost
every photo of him and every video of him showed
the ones in the back, and thanks to the laws
(17:03):
of perspective, they were even with his shoulders or somewhat
higher than his shoulders, and basically what looked like jail
cells could not be cropped out of every photo of Trump.
Just to make it worse, Trump, the incredibly good orchestrator
of his own image, exacerbated the problem somehow. His lawyer
(17:26):
stood behind the barricade that was placed perfectly parallel to
the two men and Trump stood to the lawyer's left,
and perhaps without ever realizing it, he put himself in
one of the corners where the front barricade angled backwards.
So if you have not seen the picture, bars in
(17:48):
front of Trump, a second set of bars to the
side of Trump, stretching from where he stood to back
behind him, and to the right of him, a third
set of bars which sloped back from there in Trump's direction,
and then the pista resistance, the fourth set of bars
(18:08):
unmistakable and unavoidable at the height of Trump's shoulders. Trump
behind bars. Several times. Trump even put his hands on
the railing in front of him, and he might as
well have been shouting, get me out of this prison, yell,
lousy screw. In fact, there is one set of images.
(18:31):
The photographer was named Timothy Clary of Ajen's Franz Press,
and he must have put his camera over his own head,
because in his shots those back bars are literally appearing
as if they were above Trump's head. The shot is
so wide that you see perhaps two dozen people leaning
(18:52):
against walls and standing staring at Trump, and then in
the middle bars suggesting jail behind him above his head,
bars suggesting jail to his right, bars suggesting jail in
front of him. Looking left to right, you see the
cop outside the barricades, Trump inside the barricades, lawyer inside
the barricades, second cop outside the barricades. Even if it
(19:17):
is just on an unconscious level, the photograph screams Trump
in prison, Trump behind bars, Trump guilty, Trump the criminal,
Trump indicted, Trump, so indicted, Wait, so indicted.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Oh, Nancy, I'm so indicted, and I just can't fight it.
I'm about to go to jail in America likes it.
I'm so indicted, tightened, and I know, I know the
(20:09):
unundicted co conspirators can bite it, bite it.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Thank you, Nancy Faust. More than that, though, For once,
it is Trump in that photograph, and most of those photographs,
it is Trump who is behind bars, and everybody else
in the shot is free, the court staff, the cops,
the media. I'll post the photo on Twitter x and
wherever else I can think to. I've never been on trial.
(20:38):
I've never actually been a witness or anything else in
a courtroom. And only once have I ever been in
a deposition. Of course, it was a two day deposition
over an issue of fifty million dollars and one of
the things my very good lawyers for that deposition hammered
into me for use in the deposition and any other
time I encountered other lawyers. It was a very simple warning,
(21:02):
whatever you do, try not to look guilty. And in
the picture, God does Trump look guilty. I don't know
if Nicki Gley's campaign can license that image. It merely
proves her last honest point of her campaign that a
Trump candidacy will be nothing but him in court. It's
(21:25):
like five hundred bucks to license the rights to use
a photo like that off Getty Images, but for a
campaign would probably be way higher. However, the Biden campaign
ought to buy that photo and the rights and the
camera and any piece of video shot from that damning angle,
and hire the cameraman and plaster it everywhere. Trump on trial,
(21:46):
you know he's guilty, your Republican nominee only with nominee
crossed out and defendant written above it in red. On
this photographer, Tim Clary, lead pipe, cinch, Pulitzer prize. That
(22:10):
sound effect. That's what the picture looks like. Meanwhile, a
California grand jury has indicted James Comer's and Sean Hannity's
and Grandpa Grassley's key FBI informant against the Bidens. He
did make all that stuff up, the infamous FD one
zero two three form that Grassley released and Comber tried
(22:35):
to sell as real about Barisma and bribing the Bidens.
And when they went back to the informant and they
said that a Barisma official told him in twenty fifteen,
according to his story, that he'd bribed the Bidens. But
it turned out this guy had not met with anybody
at Barrisma until two years after that, that the timeline
didn't work. It was obvious he'd made it up. He
(22:58):
just repeated his crap, which was where sounds awfully like
Kremlin composed info and James Comer and Chuck Grassley and
Sean Hannity served as de facto Russian agents in spreading it,
And now Alexander Smirnoff faces twenty five years in prison
for lying to the FBI in Russia. FBI sues you.
(23:25):
If they were democrats, James Comer would have been stripped
of his chairmanship by right now, possibly forced out of
the house already, and Chuck Grassley would have been in
jail years ago. So now Joe Biden's legal problems have
been reduced to just the one. Unfortunately, that one is
having an idiot for his attorney general. How Merrick Garland
(23:47):
has not resigned yet is beyond me. I assume it's
just because, as we saw in the Trump prosecutions, he
does nothing quickly or in normal time, or even slowly.
I presume he cannot go to the bathroom without a
six month long series of meetings and consultation first. Well,
now Garland's got to act fast and spit or get
(24:09):
off the pot, and if he won't, Biden has to
fire him again. This political prostitute, Robert Her, the Trump
appointee and now apparently de facto Trump campaign surrogate, the
centerpiece in what Politico aptly named the Biden Age plot,
Her is revealing more and more of his plans to
(24:30):
try to sink the president, violating all legal ethics both
of them, by including his neurological guesswork about Biden's memory
inside a special Council investigation that, oh, by the way,
cleared Biden. That wasn't enough damage to do, That wasn't
enough prostitution to perform on behalf of Donald Trump. This
(24:55):
bastard Her, as I keep repeating here is actively and
not even secretly, arranging to testify to at least the
House Judiciary Committee. It is now next month. CNN and
The Times reported yesterday HER's congressional testimony is set for
March twelfth, and somebody on HER's side of this equation
(25:16):
has spun HER's tawdry, subhuman question about the president's late
sun bo as justified because it was Biden and not her,
who first brought up bo. Biden Axios also reports that
her quote has been in discussions with Sarah Isker, the
head of public affairs and a senior counselor to Trump's
(25:37):
deputy attorney general during the Mueller investigation, to help him
navigate a congressional hearing. Sarah Isker Sarah Isker is the
federalist phony who attacked Trump in twenty sixteen for having
threatened to prosecute Hillary Clinton and who bashed CNN as
fake news and first went to work for Trump as
(26:00):
the spokesperson for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, all while pitching
herself for a job with MSNBC and CNN, and finally
being hired by CNN, which she had called fake news,
as political editor. They blew her out quickly over there,
and she was last seen at ABC News before she
signed on as Robert Hrr's assistant henchman in the aptly
(26:25):
titled biden Age plot. And now besides this, there is
a new twist to the biden Age plot. The New
York Times reported that before it was released, the White
House pushed back on that report, but did not take
any of the actions it or the DOJ could have
done to censor that report. Nobl not smart, but noble.
(26:49):
The day before the report was released, the DOJ's senior
career official, a man named Bradley Weinsheimer, wrote back that
HER's amateur doctoring and his other political opinions inserted into
his report quote fall well within the department standards for
public release. The Times does not tell you who this
(27:10):
Bradley Weinsheimer is. They describe him as the department's senior
career official or non political appointee. That's bullshit. He is
hardly that. He was appointed by George H. W. Bush
to the Department of Justice, and he was elevated to
his current non political position under Trump. There is nothing
(27:35):
stopping Merrick Garland from stopping them all dead in their tracks.
Denying the House Judiciary Committee any material at hers testimony.
There's nothing stopping him except Garland's own sluggish trees instead
of the forest phony piety about the Department of Justice
and Law with a capital L. Eric Garland already missed
(27:59):
his chance to redact hers utterly uninformed and politically poisoned
conspiracy thingy. And now we have this Weinsheimer guy involved
in this, and this Isker involved in this, and it
is a little miniature right wing conspiracy. Your Department of Justice,
mister Garland. It just produced a document in which some
(28:22):
idiot from the Federalist Society was permitted to speculate on
the president's acuity. James Comy and then Bill Barr had
already turned DOJ and its branches into a political whorehouse,
and this clown Robert Hurr just turned it into a
free political whorehouse once again. Garland has to shut this
(28:48):
down or Biden has to fire him and take the
fallout for doing so. Unless I don't know, Jack Smith
has threatened to quit if Garland goes. Unless it's something
like that, there is no reason to continue to trust
Merrick Garland a foolish, naive man, not just to do
(29:08):
the right thing, but to do anything. Remember when I
said that actor their Sunday shows deceptively edited quotes from
the non brain parts of her report, edited them like
you would edit the phrase not guilty into dot dot
(29:30):
dot guilty. That they needed to fire their anchors and
their anchors bosses. This is probably a coincidence, but ABC
News is president. Kim Godwin just discovered, Hey, there's another
ABC News president above her. Deborah O'Connell has been promoted
to president News Group and Network's Disney Entertainment. She has
(29:57):
more words in her job, so that means she's boss.
This is not necessarily cause in effect, I would actually
guess it's not clause and effect. Godwin was reportedly hated
at ABC, and evinced no earthly clue that she knew
what she was doing. But the news president positions the
producers and management at the key shows. They put those
(30:20):
people there and keep them there, and it's usually their favorites.
Not so much with the talent, but definitely the producers
of shows like Meet the Press and This Week are
the people that the Kim Goodwins of this world want there.
So those producers, the ones, particularly at This Week, all
have to be scared right now because their boss is
(30:44):
no longer the boss. And by the way, after how
they screwed up the her story good two other TV stories.
The Washington Post has made a million arteries run cold,
a nice little feature on biden game strategy for the
election and why nearly three percent of the one hundred
(31:05):
and thirty million dollars Swing states ad buy that they
have arranged is going to go for Joe Biden's spots
in Omaha, Nebraska, three million, seven hundred thousand dollars worth
of Biden commercials and Biden ad and Biden's streaming stuff
in Nebraska Well in the second district of Nebraska, that
(31:31):
state splits its electoral votes. Four are awarded from the
deeply read first district, one is awarded from the deeply
Omaha second district. It's kind of blue there, it's a city.
I'll just read the rest of the little post story.
(31:51):
Under a scenario where Biden wins the three northern swing
states and the other uncontested blue states, a loss in
Nebraska's second district Well could result in a two hundred
and sixty nine two hundred and sixty nine tie, kicking
the selection of the president to the House, where Republicans
(32:13):
currently have an advantage in the number of state delegations
they control. And remember, if God help us, the House
ever has to decide who's going to be president. Each
state gets one vote, and right now the Republicans control
twenty six state delegations. So you're going to spend three
(32:37):
point seven mil in the Omaha market? Are we sure
that's enough? And a year ago today, Tucker Carlson was
already in negotiations with Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy,
remember Kevin McCarthy, to unleash the greatest blockbuster in the
history of American television, the real January sixth Tapes, which
(33:01):
of course turned out to be several days worth of
video of empty hallways, so didn't wind up being a
full length Zupruder film. But we didn't know that then.
A year ago today, and where's Tucker Carlson now filming
inside a Moscow supermarket explaining that Russia is far better
(33:27):
than the United States because the prices in the supermarket
are so low, without ever noting that the prices are
still two to three times higher than the average Russian
can ever afford in his lifetime. Moreover, if you thought
Carlson's flatulent lap sitting interview with the Russian dictator Vladimir
(33:47):
Putin was useless, I hope you saw how it was
trashed by a critic named Vladimir Putin. Putin said, I
honestly thought he would be aggressive and ask so called
sharp questions, but he chose a different tactic unquote. What's
he implying there? What's the opposite of sharp? Dull? Soft? Worst? Yet,
(34:17):
Putin made Carlson release their interview unedited, and then when
it appeared on the Russian government's official site, they had
edited out the really dull parts, which turned out to
be many of Tucker Carlson's questions. One day you're in
the middle of the Kremlin praising Putin to his face.
(34:39):
The next day you're praising the prices in the Borsche
department at the Moscow Win Dixie. So I'd like to
congratulate Tucker Carlson, the first broadcaster to my knowledge, who
has been fired by CNN, PBS, MSNBC, Fox News and
(35:00):
now by the KGB. Also of interest here, how many
different things does Marjorie Taylor Green not understand? I mean,
I suppose the answer is infinite. I mean, she has
spent several days congratulating herself now on being named one
(35:22):
of the impeachment managers for the trial of Secretary Majorcas
in the Senate, blithely unaware or blithely too stupid to
be aware that there is not going to be a
trial of Secretary Majorcas in the Senate. The stunt is over.
But yesterday Marge went back to one of her favorite
gaps in her knowledge back things and she got called
(35:48):
out for it. Crushed. Thank you, Congressman Robert Garcia of California.
That's next. This is Countdown.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Does his countdown with Keith Oberman.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Oberman still ahead of us on Countdown. It's Fridays with Thurber,
(36:28):
and we'll get back to the beginning. To my mind,
it is the quintessential Thurber story. It's the one I
heard the actor William Windham recite on public television in
nineteen seventy seven in his one man Thurber Show. And
I thought, I wonder if I could ever have a
job that would let me read Thurber stories out loud
(36:51):
for an audience. The perfection of a box to hide
in coming up first, Yes, it's the daily roundup of
the miscrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens, who constitute
two days worse parsons in the world, the bronze worse
Nike and Major League Baseball. Nike is the new supplier
(37:15):
of baseball's uniforms, and thus they are the people who
have brought everybody in the game into rare agreement. Everybody
in the game loves to disagree. That's the point about baseball.
It's about to end. Somebody says, oh, no, it's never
been better, says somebody else. Now we all agree. Young fans,
uniform nerds, old reporters now in their seventh decade of
(37:38):
going to games, and the players themselves, they are all
saying the same thing. This February, the new uniforms suck eggs.
As spring training begins, everybody can see the obvious. The
numbers and the player names have been shrunk to near illegibility.
(37:58):
Outfielder Taylor Ward of the Angels says they look like
replica uniforms. Somebody else said, yeah, they look like replicas
at TJ Max. But it's worse than that. The hefty
and large Angels reliever at Carlos Estevez pointed out to
reporters that the white in his team's pants does not
match the white in his team's shirts, and Estebez says
(38:21):
he can't fit into his pants and they will not
let him tailor his pants. I feel like I'm wearing
someone else's pants. The blue in the Cubs uniforms, according
to a Cubs player, does not appear to be the
same blue. The Cubs have warren since the mid nineteen fifties,
and they have screwed up the fabled script Dodgers uniforms
(38:44):
of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The shirt used to open
used to button between the O and the middle D
in the word Dodgers across the chest. Now it opens
in the middle of the O. So if an LA
player has his top buttons un button, it really looks
like his uniform reads Dugers eod Gers, Dudegers. The next
(39:10):
complaint will come from the fans when they find out
that the price of one of these replicant uniforms has
risen to about four hundred dollars. The runner up worser,
Marjorie Taylor Barney Rubble, please get your deviated septum fixed.
Green the first congress person dumber than Rosie the robot
(39:33):
from the Jetsons.
Speaker 4 (39:34):
I'm not a doctor, but I have a PhD In
recognizing bullshit when I hear it. It's time to be
honest about the vaccine injured and we need to stop
allowing these COVID nineteen vaccines to be given out to
children in lady's time has expired, and now recognize mister
Garcia from California for five minutes of questions.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Thank you, so Chairman. I'm sorry you all had to
go through that.
Speaker 5 (39:57):
That was a lot of conspiracy theories and wild accusations
which we now have been debunked by medical and we
should be clear that vaccines work and save lives, and
they have millions of lives in this country.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Good lord, I mean Marjorie Taylor Green can't spell PhD.
Thank you, Congressman Garcia. But our winner the worst the
Associated Press, you know, for the most concentrated, most absurd
both siding of the presidential election. The AP, which is
usually just bland and shallow, may have won the award
(40:33):
for all of journalism. In the month of February. The
headline of a story analyzing Congressman elect Tom Swase's victory
in the special election in the New York Third quote,
Democrats cheered New York win as good omen for November.
But is it enough to calm anxiety over Biden? The
(40:58):
Associated Press. I swear to Jesus if Kamala Harris discovered
a pill guaranteeing everybody eternal life, and she was handing
them out to everybody on the street. Here take two,
somebody would write, Democrats cheer public reaction to their immortality pill,
(41:19):
but is it enough to calm anxiety over Biden? Today's
worst persons in the world. It's been a long week.
(41:51):
And every time I find myself thinking it's been a
long week, I like to turn to my book of
James Thurber, and it's Fridays with Thurber. And it's been
a few fridays since I've done any James Thurber. And
so let's start at the beginning. As I've mentioned many times,
I read this story first aloud in a class in
college in nineteen seventy nine, and a friend of mine
(42:11):
came up to me and said, you should forget that
sportscasting thing. You should read Thurber for a living, And
I said, yeah, that'll ever happen. This is for some
reason salvation for me, Catharsis, and every other emotion that
is appropriate after it has been a long week. A
(42:32):
Box to Hide In by James Thurber. I waited till
the large woman with the awful hat took up her
sack of groceries and went out, peering at the tomatoes
and the lettuce on her way. The clerk asked me
(42:52):
what mine was. Have you got a box, I asked,
A large box. I want a box to hide in.
You want a box, he asked, I want a box
to hide in. I said, what do you mean? He said,
you mean a big box? I said, I meant a
(43:12):
big box big enough to hold me. I haven't got
any boxes, he said, only cottons that cans come in.
I tried several other groceries and none of them had
a box big enough for me to hide in. And
there was nothing for it but to face life out.
I didn't feel strong, and I'd had this overpowering desire
(43:34):
to hide in a box for a long time. Well,
what do you mean you want to hide in this box?
One grocer asked me. It's a form of escape. I
told him, hiding in a box. It circumscribes your worries
in the range of your anguish. You don't see people either.
(43:58):
How the hell do you eat when you're in this box,
asked the grocer, How the hell do you get anything
to eat? I said I'd never been in a box
and didn't know, but that that would take care of itself. Well,
he said, finally, I haven't got any boxes, only some
pasteboard curtains that cans come in. It was the same
(44:18):
every place. I gave up when it got dark and
the groceries closed, and hid in my room again. I
turned out the light and lay on the bed. You
feel better when it gets dark. I could have hit
in a closet, I suppose, but people are always opening doors.
(44:38):
Somebody would find you in a closet. They would be startled,
and you'd have to tell them why you're in the closet.
Nobody pays attention to a big box line on the floor.
You could stay in it for days and nobody'd think
to look in it, not even the cleaning woman. My
(45:00):
cleaning woman came the next morning and woke me up,
and I was still feeling bad. I asked her if
she knew where I could get a large box. How
big a box you want she asked, I want a
box big enough for me to get inside of, I said.
She looked at me with big, dim eyes. There's something
(45:21):
wrong with her glands. She's awful, but she has a
big heart, which makes it worse. She's unbearable. Her husband
is sick, and her children are sick, and she is
sick too. I got to thinking how pleasant it would
be if I were in a box now and didn't
have to see her. I'd be in a box right
there in the room, and she wouldn't know. I wondered,
if you had a desire to bark or laugh when
(45:44):
someone who doesn't know walks by the box you were in,
maybe she would have a spell with her heart. If
I did that would die right there. The officers and
the elevator man and mister Grammage would find us funny.
Dog gone thing happened at the building last night. The
doorman would say to his wife, I led in this
(46:05):
woman to clean up tenf and she never come out.
See She's never in there more in an hour, but
she never come out. See. So when it got time
for me to go off duty, why, I says to Krenic,
who was on the elevator. I says, what the hell
you suppose happened to that woman cleans tenf? He says
he didn't know. He says he never seen her after
he took her up. So I spoke to mister Drammage
about it. I'm sorry to bother you, mister Grammage, I says,
(46:28):
but there's something funny about that woman cleans tenf. So
I told him so he said we better have a look,
and we all three goes up and knots on the
door and rings the bells see and nobody answers. So
he said we'd have to walk in. So Credick opened
the door and we walked in, and here was this
woman cleans the apartment, dead as a herring on the floor,
(46:50):
and the gentleman that lives there was in a box.
The cleaning woman kept looking at me. It was hard
to realize she wasn't dead. It's a form of escape.
I murmured, what say? She asked, Dully, you don't know
(47:13):
of any large packing boxes, do you? I asked, now,
I don't. She said, I haven't found one yet, But
I still have this overpowering urge to hide in a box.
Maybe it will go away, maybe I'll be all right,
maybe it will get worse. It's hard to say. A
(47:39):
box to hide in by James Thurber. I've done all
the damage I can do. Here Here are the credits.
Most of the music was arranged, produced, and performed by
(48:01):
Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel, who are the count
On musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by John Phillip Schaneil, guitars,
bass and drums by Brian Ray, produced by Tko Brothers.
Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Olberman
theme from ESPN two and it was written by Mitch
(48:22):
Warren Davis and appears courtesy of ESPN Inc. Musical comments
from Nancy Faust the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our
announcer was John Dean, and everything else is pretty much
my fault. So that's countdown for this the eight hundred
and sixty fourth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Don't
forget to keep arresting him while we still can. The
(48:46):
next schedule countdown is Monday, and until then, I'm Keith Oldriman,
good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown
(49:10):
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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