December 15, 2023 • 57 mins
SERIES 2 EPISODE 92: BULLETIN EDITION/COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
BULLETIN: (1:40) In literally his last 24 hours in office, Donald Trump ordered a 10-inch thick binder of raw, ultra-secret intelligence about Russia interference, spying, and disinformation in this country - and American means of uncovering it - brought to the White House. He began to declassify it over the objection of every intelligence chief. His chief of staff Mark Meadows summoned disgraced ex-journalist John Solomon to the White House and handed him countless pages of the vital classified intelligence and a Solomon staffer "was even allowed to leave the White House with the declassified records in a paper bag.”
The original unredacted binder, containing thousands of pages, has never been recovered in the nearly three years since it was last seen in Trump's hands.
This comes from a new report this morning from CNN - startling even in the context of Trump's previously revealed treachery, treason, and intelligence theft. The implications of the report are obvious: Trump may still have the binder. Or he may have given it to someone else (the report implicates his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows). Or he may have given it to a foreign country. Or sold it.
And perhaps more importantly: WHAT did Trump hope to achieve by giving its contents to John Solomon the night before Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration? Solomon was literally stopped as he scanned the documents, presumably for publication, by White House lawyers who demanded he return what Trump had given him. Was Trump hoping that the small percentage of documents that pertained to "Operation Crossfire Hurricane" would serve as a pretext for him to act to STOP the Biden Inauguration by using the Insurrection Act, or by other pretext, and with the military's help?
Is this nightmare of Trump stealing thousands of pages of intelligence about Russia's perfidy in our country - its violation of our national borders - its virtual invasion of our country, simply the preface for a darker plot in which Trump would have used the material as an excuse to illegally remain in power?
Does he still have the binder? Does he still have the plan?
(14:35) SPECIAL COMMENT: After spending their lives as bullies, Donald John Trump and Rudolph William Louis Giuliani will go out as cowards. Guess who did NOT testify yesterday as testimony ended in the Ruby Freeman/Shay Moss/Rudy Giuliani case? Yes, the defendant, who had promised after court Monday and Tuesday that he would testify, prove that he was telling the truth about them, and that they were lying about him.
Instead, his lawyer was reduced to painting Giuliani as a pathetic "flat-earther" who could never process reality. Giuliani said nothing as the case concluded and the jury deliberated for three hours what he should make out the check for - and they didn't reach a conclusion. When it takes jurors more than one day to decide how much money you owe the people you lied about, guess what: you’re going to owe the people you lied about… eleventy billion dollars.
It has been quite the week for Trumpian cowardice, led by Trump himself, because if the whole Giuliani "I'll prove I'm right" posturing sounds familiar, Trump did the SAME THING this week. He vowed to tell the truth – under oath - about the New York Business Fraud judge and the clerk and the attorney general and then suddenly, he vanished.
Cowardice was on sale at popular prices in Trump-land this week. In ATLANTA yesterday the letters of apology required for the plea deals for Trump 19 confessed conspirators Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesbro were obtained through a Public Records Act motion and combined they stretched to just 26 words.
The importance of Giuliani and Trump wimping out is that it underscores that when the spit hits the fan, the bullies ARE the first to run. The lesson in this is simple: hit them. Hit them every day. Hit them w
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 bulletin edition of the Countdown podcast. Donald Trump
stole a binder full of this nation's most closely guarded,
ultra classified raw intelligence about Russia. He hid it, and
(00:27):
he tried to declassify and distribute its contents to his
Republican lackeys in the House and the Senate, and to
his preferred right wing media propagandists in literally his last
hours in the White House January nineteenth and January twentieth,
twenty twenty one. Some of the classified materials were given
(00:48):
to the serially fired, disgraced ex journalist John Solomon at
the White House on January nineteenth, twenty twenty one, and
quoting CNN's report on all this, one of Solomon's staffers
was even allowed to leave the White House with the
d classified records in a paper bag. Trump must be
(01:10):
detained immediately on suspicion of having illegally communicated this secret
information to people not in any way authorized to know
it even existed, and also, given his history of deceit
and his history of adoration of foreign dictators, of possibly
having communicated this information to other countries Trump is now,
(01:31):
for want of a better term, a suspected spy. The binder,
last seen at the Trump White House, has not been
found in the nearly three years since Trump took it
and retained it, or one of his aides retained it
in hopes that he could manipulate the secrets it contained
(01:53):
to try to erase the evidence of Russian efforts to
put the thumb that was the nation's espionage and disinformation
departments on the scales of the twenty sixteen American election
so that Trump would win and the Kremlin could then
manipulate him, as recent history proved that they have manipulated
him and manipulate him to this day. Yet the binder
(02:16):
and the ten inch thick binder would contain literally thousands
of pages and perhaps thousands of different secret documents, yet
only a few of them even pertained to what Trump,
in his monomaniacal effort to clear his name of his
treacherous guilt, wanted to see. Brief references to the Crossfire
(02:38):
Hurricane FBI investigation of the documented Trump campaign contacts with
Russian officials, disinfo distributors, and other infiltrators. The rest of
the binder secrets vital to the security of the United
States of America, covered almost every conceivable aspect of information
this country had fought to obtain about Russian spying and
(03:01):
international perfidy. These are among the implications of a report
this morning from CNN, startling and frightening even in the
context of the many treasonous crimes and gross and utterly
self serving abuses of power Trump has committed in just
the area of classified document theft. But the implications are
(03:23):
somehow far greater. Still easily inferred from the CNN report
is the startling reality that Trump either still has the
huge binder of classified documents, which also include American Intelligence
agency sources, spy methodology, the mechanics of how this nation
gathers intel, the things the Russians or any hostile power
(03:46):
would pay untold millions for. Trump either still has that
binder hidden somewhere else, or he has given it or
sold it to someone else. In short, Donald Trump is
unquestionably the starting point for one of the greatest thefts
of classified American intelligence about Russia in our nation's history.
(04:09):
This event immediately rises to the level of Robert Hanson
and Altridge aims, and very possibly even the atomic spies
of World War II, like Julius Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs.
Trump's crimes are thus elevated beyond the scope of the
Department of Justice, beyond the scope of the Special Prosecutor,
(04:33):
beyond the scope of the Attorney General of New York
or the District Attorney of New York, or of the
Attorney General of Georgia. When the FBI agent Robert Hanson
was detained for spying on February twentieth, two thousand and one,
he was not given bail, and his attorney's only concern
was to complete a plea bargain so that Hanson, a
(04:55):
Russian spy, could avoid the death penalty. Hanson would plead
guilty just over four months later. To this day, he
is serving fifteen consecutive life sentences. The CNN report today
also incriminates Trump's last chief of staff and co defendant,
(05:17):
Mark Meadows. Trump ordered the Russia binder brought to the
White House late during his occupation of that office quote
under the care of Meadows, quoting CNN again, the binder
was scoured by Republican aides working to redact the most
sensitive information so it could be declassified and released publicly.
Top Trump administration officials repeatedly tried to block the former
(05:41):
president from releasing the documents. On January nineteenth, twenty twenty one,
Trump tried to declassify most of the contents of that binder.
To again quote the CNN story by Jeremy Herb, Katie Bolillis,
Natasha Bertrand, Evan Perez, and Zachary Cohen. Multiple copies of
(06:02):
the redacted binder were created inside the White House with
plans to distribute them across Washington to Republicans in Congress
and right wing journalists. Instead, copies initially sent out were
frantically retrieved at the direction of White House lawyers demanding
additional redactions. Just minutes before Joe Biden was inaugurated, Meadows
(06:26):
rushed to the Justice Department to hand deliver a redacted
copy for a last review, but an unredacted version of
the binder containing the classified raw intelligence went missing. CNN
notes that the binder was not in either Trump's voluntary
(06:46):
return of documents that he stole and hid at Marri Lago,
nor was it found during the FBI search of Marri
Lago weeks later. Last year. The binder is also not
referenced in the indictment of Trump by the Special Council's
Office for his mishandling of classified information. There is a clue, however,
(07:06):
buried in the closed door testimony of the Meadows aid
Cassidy Hutchinson to the House January sixth Committee, quoting her,
I am almost positive it went home with mister Meadows.
Meadows's lawyer has denied this to CNN as if this
story on its surface were not appalling enough, not terrifying enough.
(07:30):
And remember, if this were the year two thousand and three,
and this or a similar binder had been taken by, say,
a suspected Al Qaeda operative or sympathizer, the Republican President
of the United States and his entire administration would have
authorized the capture and the detention at Guantanamo Bay and
(07:52):
the waterboarding of whoever was suspected of taking this binder.
If what we do know about this latest act of
Trump's utter disregard for American national security were not more
to fine enough on the surface, there are two further
threads to consider. One going back to the infamous Devin
Nunez and his frantic efforts to clear Trump on any
(08:16):
of the since proved Russian allegations. The history of this
binder begins in twenty eighteen, according to CNN, when Nunez,
as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, an ironic title
for him, demanded it be compiled. The material he demanded
the intelligence community produced was so sensitive that even the
(08:38):
Republican led committee agreed with the CIA that the documents
could only be stored inside a safe, which was itself
inside a vault at CIA headquarters. This was the legendary
safe within a safe, or, in a term stolen from
the late football announcer John Madden, the Terduccan. By October
(09:04):
twenty twenty, Wanny Trump was telling his very nervous intelligence
sensitive administration members that he was going to personally go
to CIA headquarters in Virginia and demand to see the
binder immediately. He insisted it be declassified. He threatened to
fire CIA Director Gina Haspell if she tried to block
(09:24):
him again, according to CNN, and this led to the
near appointment of Trump Lackey Cash Patel to run our
most important intelligence agency, a prospect that has already been
proposed for a second Trump presidency. By December twenty twenty,
Trump's Attorney General, William Barr and his Director of National
(09:45):
Intelligence John Ratcliffe were reportedly working to keep Trump from
declassifying everything in the ten inch thick binder, while still
trying to give Trump some of the material related to
him about which he was utterly obsessed. CNN further reports
that CI director Haskell, FBI Director Christopher Ray, and the
(10:08):
head of the National Security Agency went to congressional intelligence
leaders in November or more likely December twenty twenty to
warn them about their deep concerns that Trump would make
everything public. Attorney General Barr finally resigned on December fifteenth,
and those left in office were able to stall Trump
(10:29):
until December thirtieth, but by January nineteenth, Trump ordered quote
a binder of materials related to Crossfire, Hurricane declassified, and
the Keystone Cops Saga described earlier, ensued a paper bag.
That is, one thread which if pulled on, should place
(10:52):
Demon Nunez and other Republican congressmen of the day under
the spotlight of the investigation still maintained by the Special
Prosecutor's Office resulting in the charges against Trump in Florida.
But the other thread is, of course, what did Trump
expect to do with the declassified, ultra secret American intelligence
(11:14):
about Russia on such a late date as January nineteenth,
twenty twenty one, the eve of the inauguration of Joe Biden.
What did he hope to achieve by specifically giving it
to John Solomon, who was scanning all the documents in
his office when the White House frantically called and demanded
(11:34):
the documents be returned. Was Trump's plan part of a
last minute extra Trump coup attempt not previously recognized. Did
he hope, in his delusion addled mind, that on the
morning of the inauguration he might invoke the Insurrection Act
(11:54):
or some other pretense and attempt to prevent the Biden
inauguration on this most false premises, and by military force. Regardless,
Trump is responsible for the removal and the disappearance of
a ten inch thick binder describing the essence the elements
(12:16):
of what this nation discovered about Russian interference in America,
Russian spying in America, Russian manipulation in America. And those
Americans Trump foremost among them, who turned a blind eye
to this, or enabled this, or participated in this, must
(12:37):
meet the fullest measure of the law, Trump must be
immediately detained and held without bail until and unless this
secret binder is located. Trump is a clear and present
danger to this country. In fact, he is more so
(12:59):
that than he has ever been before. The remainder of
this bullet edition of the Countdown podcast is the regular
Friday edition for December fifteenth. If you have already listened
to it, there is no need to listen further. Thank you.
(13:27):
After spending most of his life as a bully, Rudolph
William Lewis Giuliani will go out as a coward when
it takes the jury more than one day to decide
how much money you owe the people you lied about.
Guess what you're going to owe the people you lied
about about eleventy billion dollars because guess what did not
(13:51):
happen yesterday? As testimony ended in the Ruby Freeman, Shaye Moss,
Rudy Giuliani case, I.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Was proven to be telling mis Ruthyn and they were
proven to be liars.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Once again, that will happen.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
When I justify to get the whole story, and it
will be definitively clear that what I said was true
and that whatever happened to them which is, it's unfortunate
if other people overreacting, but everything I said about them is.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
True, and Rudy never testified must have been laryngitis. To
defend him, Giuliani's attorney, Joe Sibley basically had to force
Giuliani not to testify, and Sibley basically had to turn
to an insanity plea. He compared Giuliani to a flat
earther who will never believe the truth. His own client
(14:48):
begged the jurors to remember that Giuliani did great things
on nine to eleven. Spoiler alert, he didn't do great
things on nine to eleven. Before the pyre had even
started to die down, Rudy Giuliani was trying to leverage
two thousand dead New Yorkers into an extra constitutional extent
of his term as mayor of the City of New York.
The empathy thing a politician reading the room and feigning
(15:14):
that he cared funny. Rudy missed the opportunity to go
under oath and finally prove that Ruby Freeman and Shane
Moss stole the election from his master dementia j Trump,
them and the dead president of Venezuela and the Chinese,
and I don't know the Symbionese Liberation Army and the
(15:34):
National Football League Players Association. Funny, he said nothing in
his own defense or to prove his case. Actually, it'll
be funny if Freeman and Moss do not file a
second defamation case against Giuliani for what he said. After
court adjourned the first two days of this past week.
(15:56):
As to this case, the jury deliberated three and a
half hours yesterday without telling Giuliani how much to make
the check for. It has been quite the week for
trumpy and cowardice, led by Trump himself, because if the
whole Giuliani, this is my chance to prove to you
I am right. The election was stolen and they lied
about me. Uh, I'm leaving because my grandmother is on fire.
(16:21):
Thing sounds familiar. Trump did the same thing this week.
He vowed to tell the truth under oath about the
New York Business Broad judge and his clerk and the
Attorney General and I don't know the bodder Minehoff gang
and the Visiting Nurse Association and then slight change of
plans instead of having what Trump would call a Perry
(16:42):
Mason moment. Since it is the year nineteen sixty six.
In all, Trump turned out was not revealing all, telling
all he was skipping the rest of the trial. There
are all kinds of terrible and even bigoted things that
one might call what Giuliani and Trump did, But the
worst things to call Giuliani and Trump are Giuliani and Trump.
(17:06):
Cowardice was also on sale at popular prices throughout trump
Land this week. In Atlanta yesterday, the letters of apology
required for the plea deals for Trump nineteen confessed conspirators
Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesbro were obtained through a Public
Records Act motion by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Powell's
videotape proffer may have been illuminating, but she and Chesbrow
(17:29):
spared the court and the citizens of Georgia and the
United States of America any troublesome, complicated, or lengthy remorse. Quote.
I apologize to the citizens of the state of Georgia
and of Fulton County for my involvement in count fifteen
of the indictment, wrote Kenny the Cheese Wow, twenty three
(17:52):
whole words. Ken, I've gotten fortune cookies longer than that. Still,
Chesbrow looked verbose by contrast to the Kraken Lady quote,
I apologize for my actions in connection with the events
in Coffee County. Thirteen words must have been up all
night editing that down. Huh, sid, you might say, so what.
(18:17):
The apologies are insincere? The letters are formalities, and of
course Giuliani wasn't going to stick to his beliefs, no
matter how crazy they were. And of course Trump would
back out or waddle out. Words don't count to him
because he's allowed to lie whenever he needs to in
both directions at the same time, because all of the
rest of us are just extras in his movie Dementia,
j Trump's autobiographical history of the Universe. But here listen carefully,
(18:43):
because it'll be the first and probably the last time
I do this. I will invoke and praise Jenna Ellis,
who also had to write one of those chesbro Howell
apology letters, and who, even if she still defines the
lawyer representing themselves, who has the fool for the client?
She wrote two hundred and fifty jially painful words and
(19:07):
had the guts or at least the strategic intelligence to
sit there and read it herself to the judge on
tape complete with tears, and as much as I would
like to think those tears were fake, they weren't. The
importance of Giuliani and Trump whimping out is that it
underscores that when the spit hits the fan, the bullies
(19:30):
are the first to run. The lesson in this is simple,
Hit them. Hit them every day. Hit them with every lawsuit,
every indictment, every protest, every public mockery, every embarrassment, every joke.
Hit them with everything you have, every day for the
(19:51):
rest of their lives. Because what Trump proved by not
being in a New York courtroom Monday, and what Giuliani
proved by squirming at the defense table yesterday is that
you can break them, both of them, maybe not all
at once and maybe not permanently, but they cannot bullshit
(20:12):
their way out of everything. People watching the movie Classic
Citizen Kin go to the dying Charles Foster Caine gurgling
out his dying word rosebud as the quote from an
eminently quotable film, But for me, it has always been
the scene in which the crooked politician Boss Getty's catches
(20:34):
Cain in an apartment with a woman who is not
his wife. And by the way, for context, this is
in the pre Moms for Liberty days, when that wasn't
okay even if your wife was also there. Getties offers
Cain a chance to withdraw from their race for governor
of New York rather than subject his family to the
(20:55):
subsequent scandal about the apartment and the woman who's not
his wife. Cain screams threats about sending Getty's to sing
sing Getty's, presented by actor Ray Collins as the definition
of the banality of evil, answers him flatly, You're the
(21:15):
greatest fool I've ever known, Cain. If it was anybody else,
I'd say, what's gonna happen to you? Would be a
lesson to you, Only you're gonna need more than one lesson,
and you're gonna get more than one lesson. Still gives
me chills. It should give Trump chills more eminently, probably today.
(21:37):
It should give Rudy Giuliani chills. It probably even would
if either of them had any nerve endings left. They'll
feel it later. Because we must make twenty twenty four
the year in which Trump and Giuliani and Steve Bannon
and Stephen Miller and Cash Patel and all of them
(21:59):
who need more than one lesson, we must make twenty
twenty four the year in which they get more than
one lesson. By the way, before moving on to how
much nobody cared about Vivek Ramaswami in a CNN town
Hall Wednesday, to say nothing about volume three of the
(22:21):
Charles Barkley Gaale King Witness Relocation Hour. Just to tie
off that you're going to get more than one lesson
quote from Citizen Kane for the benefit of one particular listener,
mister dementia. Jay trump I mentioned the actor who delivered
that line, portraying Boss Jim W. Getty's. He was Ray Collins,
(22:43):
and boy has he never gotten the do he deserves?
Just spectacular in Citizen Kane and in the other Orson
Wells masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons. He played in the Wells
radio events still controversial to this day, War of the Worlds.
He was unforgettable in Touch of Evil and in the
Best Years of Our Lives even at a bunch of
(23:03):
sappy bas small pictures. But Ray Collins ended his career
in a recurring role in a television series. He was
the diligent but a little too boastful LA Police flat
foot Lieutenant Arthur Trag who always got tripped up in
cross examination by the star of the show, the attorney
(23:26):
Perry Mason, the one Trump keeps talking about, You're gonna
need more than one lesson, and you're gonna get more
than one lesson, Perry Mason. And that's true also for
Vivic Ramaswami and CNN the town Hall Wednesday night with
the only man who might be able to outlie Trump
(23:47):
in a battle to the death, and how I wish
they would try that. V Bake Ramswami. The total number
of viewers in primetime on CNN five hundred and ninety
one thousand. I mean, television news is dying, but it's
not dying that fast. That's five episodes of this podcast.
(24:13):
Whatever CNN thought it was gaining putting that paranoid manure
salesman on, I can only guess. Ramaswami even drew thirty
one thousand fewer viewers than Ron DeSantis did on Tuesday.
He drew fewer viewers than he's lead in Anderson Cooper
did five hundred and ninety one thousand viewers. Good God.
Even Aaron Burnett had six hundred and fifty nine thousand,
(24:35):
and since we are on this subject, after Ramaswami. Right
afterwards comes episode three out of a complete series of
three of King Charles Chris Lickt's Last and Stupidest idea
four one hundred and fifty three thousand viewers for a
(24:56):
news show in which Charles Barkley and Gail King talk
about something, and it actually lost quarter of vv Gramaswami's
invisible audience, and King Charles is somehow down ten percent
from its disastrous launch ratings happily, and this brings us
(25:19):
back to Trump and politics and a culture in which
you don't like reality. Just call it a liar. You
want it to be day and it's night. You can
just shout loudly enough that it really is day, and
you and only you can see the fact that it's day.
Barkley responded to his humiliating failure the first night of
this show by blaming the ratings company. I want to
(25:42):
tell my team man, these Nielsen people are the biggest
clowns in the world, he said. The ratings can't be right,
he implied, because he doesn't know anybody with a Nielsen box.
And you may recall when he was still interesting, Charles
Barkley speculated about running for governor of Alabama as a Republican. Chuck,
(26:10):
you're not good at this, nobody's interested in you doing it,
and you're not honest about it with yourself or anybody else.
So let me ask you this. Do you own a
shell company? Did you loan your own brother two hundred
thousand dollars and then he paid you back? And if so,
could you still shout at the son of a president
from the other party for having a shell company or
at his father for loaning money? Chuck, if so, you
(26:32):
would be perfect for today's GOP. Also, I wouldn't worry
about having to tell your team anything for much longer.
Some headlines, Trump has sold the rooms rancid stakes, and
universities that didn't teach, and magazines that didn't sell, and
(26:54):
airlines that didn't fly. But I have rarely seen him
sell anything as hard, especially anything that literally does not
exist as this presidential immunity thing. He stumbled through a
reference to a plea deal from the Supreme Court about it,
whatever that means, and he posted and reposted and re
(27:18):
reposted the same rant yesterday on the important matter of
presidential immunity, something which is so basic to America that
it should be automatic. Trump does not say why it
would be basic to America, or why if it's so automatic,
and if it exists that the Supreme Court would not
(27:40):
rule that he's right about it. But he is selling
this hard. This underscores the fact that Trump has only
to say it to validate it with his cult. I
doubt anybody would bother. But I guarantee you if you
polled Dementia Jay's slaves, they would insist by ninety or
ninety five percent that no, no, he had testified this
(28:02):
week in the New York Business broad case. I saw him.
And then if he came out and said no, he
did not testify because he was being unfairly gagged, ninety
or ninety five percent would then say he had not testified.
I do not know what to do about these people.
I do know they are incompatible with a free society
(28:26):
with a representative form of government, and if it has
to be that or them, it's going to have to
be that. By the way, Trump lost again, this time
before a three judge state appeals panel in another attempt
to overturn the gag order. So he can resume trying
to get Judge Arthur Engeron's family and his clerk killed.
(28:50):
It is striking that, amid more legal activity than the
apocryphal law firm of Engulf and Devour, Trump has never
once turned to America First Legal, Stephen Miller's supposed conservative
counterpoint to the ACLU. It is now trying to find
people who believe they were unfairly not hired because they
were white and want to sue IBM, The Daily Beast
(29:14):
now says. In the year twenty twenty two, this nonprofit
reported forty four million dollars in contributions. It spent thirty
five million. Of that two million, seven hundred thousand went
to salaries, one and a half million was spent on
lawsuits and other legal services. Thirty million, thirty million dollars
(29:35):
eighty five percent of its expenses went to advertising. Advertising
that was mostly about things like Joe Biden. Even though
as a nonprofit, Steven Miller's America First Legal is barred
from participating in any political activity. Wait, so you're saying
(29:58):
Stephen Miller is a con man and a fraud bending,
if not flat out breaking the law, and not just
the paranoid hate Monger, whose dreams of ethnic cleansing in
America are driven because a girl of Hispanic heritage humiliated
him back in high school. Mister Miller, you're going to
(30:19):
need more than one lesson, and you're going to get
more than one lesson. And lastly, today, guess what's.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Back, Oh, ghost buses.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Those buses were removed from the Union station, and we're
going to document all of that.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
So you believe that those buses held undercover offices, not informants, correct.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
I feel very, very confident that everybody that was on
those two buses were FBI assets, and I have a
high degree of belief that they were actual FBI agents.
And I'm sorry to say, man, my objective conclusion is
that is, as sen your officials at the FBI were
(31:12):
deeply involved there.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yes, Congressman Kay Higgins, disgraced former cop in Opahalusa's city, Louisiana,
interviewed by disgraced former sixty Minutes correspondent Lara Logan. A
lot of disgrace, not a lot of functioning cortexes. So
now the ghost buses are missing, ghost buses. They're missing
(31:39):
that would make them ghosts ghost buses. This interview was
on Lara Logan's streaming show, which literally and I had
to look at it four times to make sure this
was not just my wishful thinking manifesting itself before my eyes.
Her show literally starts with Lara Logan playing in traffic,
(32:04):
and then a shot of her writing in penn in
your ninth grade composition class notebook in big, loony looking letters.
The rest of the story. There is, however, one thing
missing Lara Logan's The rest of the story with crazy
(32:26):
Clay Higgins is missing a theme song. If I may
suggest one, Oh Nancy into something parked. Hey you insurrection?
(32:49):
Who you gonna call God? Thank you, Nancy Faust. You
know it occurs to me if she had called the
series Lara Logan playing in Traffic, people might have watched.
Also of interest here, just when you thought the Republican
(33:10):
Party had reached some kind of apogee of cynicism and
corruption in George Santos, wait till you see who they
have lined up to run for the House seat he
had to resign in what passes for Republican shame. First hint,
she's a registered Democrat. That's next. This is countdown. This
(33:34):
is countdown with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 5 (33:49):
This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This
is Countdown with Keith Olberman in Sports Stateline, Los Angeles.
Not all the heroes are actually great players. Gene Carr
(34:11):
has died, and in some hockey circles he is being
mourned as if he were a Hall of Famer. The
fourth pick in the NHL draft in nineteen seventy one,
he made the Saint Louis Blues opening night roster as
a twenty year old with no professional experience, and he
broke into the league as perhaps the fastest skating player
(34:31):
of his generation. His father had played briefly in the NHL.
Gene Carr's mother was a championship speed skater. In the
NHL of nineteen seventy one, not everybody was even a
good skater, and almost nobody wore a helmet. So Gene Carr, young,
blonde haired, long haired, going from end to end of
(34:52):
the rink, his locks flowing behind him, looked like a superstar.
Fourteen games into his NHL career, the New York Rangers
traded four top prospects to Saint Louis for him, and
Broadway welcomed Gene Carr as a hero. And in the
next one hundred and thirty nine games with the New
York Rangers, Gene Carr scored eighteen goals. That's not a lot.
(35:20):
It became the subtext of games at Madison Square Garden.
Gene Carr could skate from one net to the other
in about four seconds, but if you gave him four
minutes in front of the opposing net, he still could
not score a goal. As the legendary New York born
referee and Rangers announcer Bill Chadwick once lamented, more in
sympathy than in anger.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Gene Carr couldn't put the puck in the ocean and
if he was standing on the pier. The Rangers eventually
gave up and traded gene Carr to the Los Angeles
Kings in nineteen seventy four, still just twenty three years
old and playing in a totally no pressure hockey environment,
meaning there were about nine thousand regular Kings fans in
those days. Carr played well, he learned to fight a
(36:04):
little bit, scored fifteen goals one season, and he fell
in with the celebrity crowd. One day, he brought some
friends to a King's home game at the Fabulous for him.
His friends were the Eagles, the Eagles, Glenn Frye and
Don Henley and everybody and whatever else Gene Carr had
or had not done when he died this week, he
(36:25):
will last as long as rock and roll does. Because
if you've ever heard the Eagles song new Kid in Town,
the new Kid in Town, the guy they wrote that
song about, reportedly anyway, was Gene Carr. Gene Carr, seventy
nine career NHL goals and a number one hit on
(36:45):
the charts, was seventy two years old. Thank you, Nancy Faust,
(37:28):
State Line, Guildford, Connecticut. Much in the same manner, Ken
McKenzie became a star with the original New York Mets.
The team lost one hundred and twenty out of the
one hundred and sixty games it played in its first
season of existence nineteen sixty two, but mackenzie, and unassuming,
bespectacled left handed reliever from Canada by way of Yale,
won five games and lost four, which made him the
(37:53):
only one of the seventeen pitchers on the nineteen sixty
two Mets to finish with a winning record. In fact,
the next year, he won three games and lost only
one making it the only pitcher on the nineteen sixty
three Mets to finish with a winning record. In fact,
no other Mets pitcher would have a winning record until
nineteen sixty five. Others suffered through the early years of
(38:17):
the Mets. Ken mackenzie, later the baseball coach at Yale,
then an alumni executive at the university, reveled in them.
He made it to the Mets twenty twenty two Old
Timers Day in a wheelchair. His license plate on his
car read nineteen sixty two met, and his humor was
consistent for sixty years. At one point, somebody pointed out
(38:40):
that he had the highest ERA on the team, to
which mackenzie answered, yes, but I have the lowest salary
of anybody in the Yale class of nineteen fifty six.
Ken mackenzie died at his home yesterday morning. He was
eighty nine years old. Still to come on Countdown Fridays
(39:19):
with Thurber and Mann versus machine, with the machine reduced
to the seemingly benign but anything but benign Medicine Cabinet
nine needles next first time for the daily roundup of
the miss Grants, Morons and Dunning Kruger effect specimens, who
constitute two days waste persons in the world is standing
(39:41):
on the pier the bronze the worst. Elon Musk. When
you're self driving cars keep crashing, what do you do?
Do you improve them? No? You do not. You try
to prevent the government from telling people that they keep crashing.
This is the kind of headline that could bankrupt a company,
and it is live on the website of our technica. Quote.
(40:05):
Tesla claims California false advertising law violates First Amendment. Tesla
fights DMB complaint that autopilot is falsely advertised as autonomous
unquote nice free speech advocacy Free speech boy, the runner
up wor Sir Kevin McCarthy, the already X speaker soon
(40:27):
to be ex congressman, has decided he is in demand.
McCarthy says he is open to serving in a Trump administration.
I mean, why not. McCarthy has already proved to Trump
his willingness to pore himself out for Trump, but a
far greater interest. McCarthy tells Axios he'd like to work
with his pal Elon Musk in artificial intelligence, And once again,
(40:52):
why not. I mean, when I think artificial the first
person who comes to mind is Kevin McCarthy. Intelligence not
so much the winner the Republican leadership of Queens and
Nassau Counties in New York. These are the people who
brought us George Santos, Congressman at Large, in drag their
(41:19):
new idea to run for the seat that Santos says
just had to resign from in disgrace. They have nominated
a county legislator with no public platform other than support
for Israel. How does she feel about abortion? Nowbody knows Trump,
nowbody knows democracy. Nobody knows anything else about President Biden.
(41:41):
Nobody knows. Her name is Mazi Melaissa Pilip and she
was born in Ethiopia and she served in the Israeli
Defense Forces. She checks interesting boxes. She's black, she's a veteran,
and there are a couple of drawbacks thrown in. She
has a really difficult accent. She makes George Santos sound
(42:03):
like a generic voiceover renown. And her name is pronounced Mazi,
but it's spelled Mazi, you know, like Nazi, but with
an M. Her only tenuous connection to Congress is she
campaigned alongside and called a quote amazing friend. George Santos
(42:24):
On one more little detail. The new Republican candidate for
the House, Miss Mazi Malaysa Pilip is a registered Democrat.
NASA and Queen's County Republicans just nominated a Democrat for Congress. Hey,
you know Santos is hugely popular on that cameo thing.
(42:45):
Think of his name recognition. Give him some time to
cool off. Maybe we can run them again. The NASA
and Queens County leadership of the Republican Party.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
Two days worst persons in the world, like Nazi, but
with an m.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Just ahead Fridays with Thurber and a double header including
one of his fables, word for word, the funniest and
most incisive stuff ever written. The City Mouse goes to
the country next first time for more dogs you can help.
Every dog has its day. In fact, nine dogs and
eleven cats, nine ducks, two EMUs, three rabbits, a parrot,
(43:38):
twenty four silky chickens, and ninety rescue chickens. They are
at National Boxer Rescue in Pierce, Minnesota, and the county
board there is about to vote to take the land
away from them and close this rescue. They're thirty thousand
dollars in debt, with almost no donations coming in and
no idea where the animals will go if they have
(44:00):
to close. If you think placing rescue dogs is tough,
imagine rescue chickens and rescue EMUs and crazy as it sounds,
many of them are special needs. Sounds crazy until you
picture them, and then it sounds heartbreaking. Anyway we can help.
They have a fundraiser on cuddly dot com. I'll tweet
out the link, or just go to cuddly dot com
(44:22):
and type National Boxer in the search bar. The chickens,
thank you, the Silky Chickens, thank you, the nine dogs,
thank you, and I thank you to the number one
story on the Countdown. And It's Fridays with Thurber and
a lot of his work details the fundamental clash between people,
(44:43):
husband and wife, he and various relatives, a guy and
a bed, and a seal, two animals representing any two
humans in conflict. But some of the most magical writing
is the stuff that is just about one person alone
against life. One of his stories ends with a great
(45:04):
grandmother struggling with a butter churn and screaming into the void.
Why doesn't somebody take this goddamn thing away from me,
a line which I think could be the start of
a national anthem somewhere. Such a story is Nine Needles
this week's selection. As you will see, it is a
little short for our usual time frames here, so I'll
give you a bonus another man versus life story afterwards,
(45:27):
in the form of one of Thurber's fables for our time,
the mouse who went to the country. But first, it's
unlikely this event has ever happened to you, but the
anxiety that should be immediately familiar. Nine Needles by James Thurber.
One of the more spectacular minor happenings of the past
(45:49):
few years, which I am sorry that I missed, took
place in the Columbus, Ohio home of some friends of
a friend of mine. It seems that a mister Albatross,
while looking for something in his medicine cabinet one morning,
discovered a bottle of a kind of patent medicine which
his wife had been taking for a stomach ailment. Now,
mister Albatross is one of those apprehensive men who are
(46:13):
afraid of patent medicines and of almost everything else. Some
weeks before he had encountered a paragraph in a consumer's
research bulletin which announced that this particular medicine was bad
for you. He had thereupon ordered his wife to throw
out what was left of her supply of the stuff
and never buy any more she had promised, And here
(46:33):
now was another bottle of the perilous liquid. Mister Albatross,
A man given to quick rages, shouted the conclusion of
the story at my friend. I threw the bottle out
the bathroom window, and the medicine chest after it. It
seems to me that must have been a spectacle worth
(46:54):
going a long way to see. I am sure that
many a husband has wanted to wrench the family medicine
cabinet off the wall and throw it out the window,
because the average medicine cabinet is so filled with mysterious
bottles and unidentifiable objects of all kinds, that it is
a source of constant bewilderment and exasperation to the American male. Surely,
(47:18):
the British medicine cabinet, and the French medicine cabinet, all
the other medicine cabinets must be simpler and better ordered
than ours. It may be that the American habit of
saving everything and never throwing anything away, even empty bottles,
causes the domestic medicine cabinet to become as cluttered in
its small way as the American attic becomes cluttered in
(47:42):
its major way. I have encountered few medicine cabinets in
this country which were not packed jammed with something between
one hundred and fifty and two hundred different items, from
dental floss to boracic acid, from razor blades to sodium perborate,
from adhesive tape to coconut oil. The neatest wife will
(48:06):
put off clearing out the medicine cabinet on the ground
that she has something else to do that is more
important at that moment, or more diverting. It was in
the apartment of such a wife and her husband that
I became enormously involved with a medicine cabinet. One morning
not long ago. I had spent the weekend with this couple.
They live on East tenth Street near Fifth Avenue. Such
(48:28):
a weekend as left me reluctant to rise up on
Monday morning with bright and shining face and go to work.
They got up and went to work, but I didn't.
I didn't get up until about to two thirty in
the afternoon. I had my face all lathered for shaving,
and the wash bowl was full of hot water, when
(48:49):
suddenly I cut myself with the razor. I cut my ear.
Very few men cut their ears with razors, but I do,
possibly because I was taught the old Spencerian free risk
movements by my writing teacher in the grammar grades. The
ear bleeds rather profusely when cut with a razor, and
is difficult to get at. More angry than hurt, I
(49:12):
jerked open the door of the medicine cabinet to see
if I could find a stiptick pencil, and out fell
from the top shelf a little black paper packet containing
nine needles. It seems that his wife kept a little
paper packet containing nine needles on the top shelf of
the medicine cabinet. The packet fell into the soapy water
(49:33):
of the wash bowl, where the paper rapidly disintegrated, leaving
nine needles at large in the bowl. I was, naturally enough,
not in the best condition, either physical or mental, to
recover nine needles from a wash bowl. No gentleman who
has lather on his face and whose ear is bleeding
(49:53):
is in the best condition for anything, even something involving
the handling of nine large blunt objects. It did not
seem wise to me to pull the plug out of
the wash bowl and let the needles go down the drain.
I had visions of clogging up the plumbing system of
the house, and also a vague fear of causing short
(50:15):
circuits somehow or other. I know very little about electricity,
and I don't want to have it explained to me. Finally,
I groped very gently around the bowl, and eventually had
four of the needles in the palm of one hand
and three in the palm of the other. Two I
couldn't find. If I had thought quickly and clearly, I
(50:37):
wouldn't have done that. A lathered man whose ear is bleeding,
and who has four wet needles in one hand and
three in the other may be said to have reached
the lowest known point of human efficiency. There is nothing
he can do but stand there. I tried transferring the
needles in my left hand to the palm of my
right hand, but I couldn't get the off my left hand.
(50:59):
Wet needles cling to you. In the end, I wiped
the needles off onto a bath towel, which was hanging
on a rod above the bath tub. It was the
only towel that I could find. I had to dry
my hands afterward on the bath mat. Then I tried
to find the needles in the towel. Hunting for seven
(51:20):
needles in a bath towel is the most tedious occupation
I have ever engaged in. I could find only five
of them with the two that had been left in
the bowl. That meant there were four needles in all,
missing two in the wash bowl and two others lurking
in the towel or lying in the bathtub under the towel.
(51:41):
Frightful thoughts came to me of what might happen to
anyone who used that towel, or washed his face in
the bowl, or got into the tub if I didn't
find the missing needles. Well, I didn't find them. I
sat down on the edge of the tub to think,
and I decided finally that the only thing to do
was to wrap up the towel in a newspaper and
(52:02):
take it away with me. I also decided to leave
a note for my friends, explaining as clearly as I
could that I was afraid there were two needles in
the bathtub and two needles in the wash bowl, and
that they better be careful. I looked everywhere in the apartment,
but I could not find a pencil, or a pen
(52:22):
or a typewriter. I could find pieces of paper, but
nothing with which to write on them. I don't know
what gave me the idea. A movie I had seen, perhaps,
or a story I had read. But I suddenly thought
of writing a message with lipstick. The wife might have
an extra lipstick lying around, and if so, I concluded
it would be in the medicine cabinet. I went back
(52:46):
to the medicine cabinet and began poking around in it
for a lipstick. I saw what I thought looked like
the metal tip of one, and I got two fingers
around it and began to pull gently. It was under
a lot of things. Every object in the medicine cabinet
began to slide. Bottles broke in the washbowl and on
the floor, red, brown, and white liquids, spurted, nail files, scissors,
(53:09):
razor blades, and miscellaneous objects sang and clattered and tinkled.
I was covered with perfume, peroxide, and cold cream. It
took me half an hour to get all the debris
all together in the middle of the bathroom floor. I
made no attempt to put anything back in the medicine cabinet.
(53:33):
I knew it would take a steadier hand than mine
and a less shattered spirit. Before I went away, only
partly shaved and abandoned the shambles. I left a note
saying that I was afraid there were needles in the
bathtub and the washbowl, and that I had taken their towel,
and that I would call up and tell them everything.
I wrote it in iodine with the end of a toothbrush.
(53:57):
I have not yet called up. I'm sorry to say.
I have neither found the courage nor thought up the
words to explain what happened. I suppose my friends believe
that I deliberately smashed up their bathroom and stole their towel.
I don't know for sure, because they have not yet
called me up either. Nine Needles by James Thurber, and
(54:23):
as I suggested in a broad sense on the same
subject from his Fables for Our Time and famous poems
illustrated The Mouse who Went to the Country by James Thurber,
Once upon a Sunday there was a city mouse who
(54:43):
went to visit a country mouse. He hid away on
a train the country mouse had told him to take,
only to find that on Sundays it did not stop
at Beddington. Hence the city mouse could not get off
at Beddington and catch a bus for Cybert's Junction, where
he was to be met by the country mouse. The
city mouse, in fact, was carried on to Middleburg, where
(55:04):
he weigh three hours for a train to take him back.
When he got back to Beddington, he found out that
the last bus for Siebert's Junction had just left, so
he ran, and he ran, and he ran, and he
finally caught the bus and crept aboard, only to find
that it was not the bus for Seebert's Junction at all,
but was going in the opposite direction through Pells Hollow
(55:24):
and Grum to a place called Wimberbee. When the bus
finally stopped, the city mouse got out into a heavy
rain and found that there were no more buses that
night going anywhere. To the hell with it, said the
city mouse, and he walked back to the city moral
Stay where you are, you're sitting pretty. The mouse who
(55:48):
went to the Country by James Thurber all the damage
I can do here. Thank you for listening. Do me
a solid and tell everybody who doesn't listen to to listen.
(56:11):
In fact, post it on your Facebook wall. I'm not
on Facebook. I think that's part of the issue here.
Countdown has come to you from the Vin Scully Studios
at the Olderman Broadcasting Empire in New York. There's a
video that I do every night promoting this thing. You
could put that on your wall. Put that on your wall.
Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel arranged, produced,
(56:32):
and performed most of our music. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums,
and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including
some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is courtesy ESPN, Inc.
It was written by Mitch Warren Davis. We call it
the Olberman theme from ESPN two. Our satirical and pithy
(56:55):
musical comments are by Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium
organist ever. Our announcer today was my friend Stevie van Zant.
Everything else was pretty much my that's countdown for this,
the one thousand and seventy fourth day since dementia j
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Use the Insurrection Act against him and
(57:17):
them while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is Tuesday.
Bulletins as the news warrant till then, I'm Keith Olderman.
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
(57:45):
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 bulletin edition of the Countdown podcast. Donald Trump
stole a binder full of this nation's most closely guarded,
ultra classified raw intelligence about Russia. He hid it, and
(00:27):
he tried to declassify and distribute its contents to his
Republican lackeys in the House and the Senate, and to
his preferred right wing media propagandists in literally his last
hours in the White House January nineteenth and January twentieth,
twenty twenty one. Some of the classified materials were given
(00:48):
to the serially fired, disgraced ex journalist John Solomon at
the White House on January nineteenth, twenty twenty one, and
quoting CNN's report on all this, one of Solomon's staffers
was even allowed to leave the White House with the
d classified records in a paper bag. Trump must be
(01:10):
detained immediately on suspicion of having illegally communicated this secret
information to people not in any way authorized to know
it even existed, and also, given his history of deceit
and his history of adoration of foreign dictators, of possibly
having communicated this information to other countries Trump is now,
(01:31):
for want of a better term, a suspected spy. The binder,
last seen at the Trump White House, has not been
found in the nearly three years since Trump took it
and retained it, or one of his aides retained it
in hopes that he could manipulate the secrets it contained
(01:53):
to try to erase the evidence of Russian efforts to
put the thumb that was the nation's espionage and disinformation
departments on the scales of the twenty sixteen American election
so that Trump would win and the Kremlin could then
manipulate him, as recent history proved that they have manipulated
him and manipulate him to this day. Yet the binder
(02:16):
and the ten inch thick binder would contain literally thousands
of pages and perhaps thousands of different secret documents, yet
only a few of them even pertained to what Trump,
in his monomaniacal effort to clear his name of his
treacherous guilt, wanted to see. Brief references to the Crossfire
(02:38):
Hurricane FBI investigation of the documented Trump campaign contacts with
Russian officials, disinfo distributors, and other infiltrators. The rest of
the binder secrets vital to the security of the United
States of America, covered almost every conceivable aspect of information
this country had fought to obtain about Russian spying and
(03:01):
international perfidy. These are among the implications of a report
this morning from CNN, startling and frightening even in the
context of the many treasonous crimes and gross and utterly
self serving abuses of power Trump has committed in just
the area of classified document theft. But the implications are
(03:23):
somehow far greater. Still easily inferred from the CNN report
is the startling reality that Trump either still has the
huge binder of classified documents, which also include American Intelligence
agency sources, spy methodology, the mechanics of how this nation
gathers intel, the things the Russians or any hostile power
(03:46):
would pay untold millions for. Trump either still has that
binder hidden somewhere else, or he has given it or
sold it to someone else. In short, Donald Trump is
unquestionably the starting point for one of the greatest thefts
of classified American intelligence about Russia in our nation's history.
(04:09):
This event immediately rises to the level of Robert Hanson
and Altridge aims, and very possibly even the atomic spies
of World War II, like Julius Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs.
Trump's crimes are thus elevated beyond the scope of the
Department of Justice, beyond the scope of the Special Prosecutor,
(04:33):
beyond the scope of the Attorney General of New York
or the District Attorney of New York, or of the
Attorney General of Georgia. When the FBI agent Robert Hanson
was detained for spying on February twentieth, two thousand and one,
he was not given bail, and his attorney's only concern
was to complete a plea bargain so that Hanson, a
(04:55):
Russian spy, could avoid the death penalty. Hanson would plead
guilty just over four months later. To this day, he
is serving fifteen consecutive life sentences. The CNN report today
also incriminates Trump's last chief of staff and co defendant,
(05:17):
Mark Meadows. Trump ordered the Russia binder brought to the
White House late during his occupation of that office quote
under the care of Meadows, quoting CNN again, the binder
was scoured by Republican aides working to redact the most
sensitive information so it could be declassified and released publicly.
Top Trump administration officials repeatedly tried to block the former
(05:41):
president from releasing the documents. On January nineteenth, twenty twenty one,
Trump tried to declassify most of the contents of that binder.
To again quote the CNN story by Jeremy Herb, Katie Bolillis,
Natasha Bertrand, Evan Perez, and Zachary Cohen. Multiple copies of
(06:02):
the redacted binder were created inside the White House with
plans to distribute them across Washington to Republicans in Congress
and right wing journalists. Instead, copies initially sent out were
frantically retrieved at the direction of White House lawyers demanding
additional redactions. Just minutes before Joe Biden was inaugurated, Meadows
(06:26):
rushed to the Justice Department to hand deliver a redacted
copy for a last review, but an unredacted version of
the binder containing the classified raw intelligence went missing. CNN
notes that the binder was not in either Trump's voluntary
(06:46):
return of documents that he stole and hid at Marri Lago,
nor was it found during the FBI search of Marri
Lago weeks later. Last year. The binder is also not
referenced in the indictment of Trump by the Special Council's
Office for his mishandling of classified information. There is a clue, however,
(07:06):
buried in the closed door testimony of the Meadows aid
Cassidy Hutchinson to the House January sixth Committee, quoting her,
I am almost positive it went home with mister Meadows.
Meadows's lawyer has denied this to CNN as if this
story on its surface were not appalling enough, not terrifying enough.
(07:30):
And remember, if this were the year two thousand and three,
and this or a similar binder had been taken by, say,
a suspected Al Qaeda operative or sympathizer, the Republican President
of the United States and his entire administration would have
authorized the capture and the detention at Guantanamo Bay and
(07:52):
the waterboarding of whoever was suspected of taking this binder.
If what we do know about this latest act of
Trump's utter disregard for American national security were not more
to fine enough on the surface, there are two further
threads to consider. One going back to the infamous Devin
Nunez and his frantic efforts to clear Trump on any
(08:16):
of the since proved Russian allegations. The history of this
binder begins in twenty eighteen, according to CNN, when Nunez,
as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, an ironic title
for him, demanded it be compiled. The material he demanded
the intelligence community produced was so sensitive that even the
(08:38):
Republican led committee agreed with the CIA that the documents
could only be stored inside a safe, which was itself
inside a vault at CIA headquarters. This was the legendary
safe within a safe, or, in a term stolen from
the late football announcer John Madden, the Terduccan. By October
(09:04):
twenty twenty, Wanny Trump was telling his very nervous intelligence
sensitive administration members that he was going to personally go
to CIA headquarters in Virginia and demand to see the
binder immediately. He insisted it be declassified. He threatened to
fire CIA Director Gina Haspell if she tried to block
(09:24):
him again, according to CNN, and this led to the
near appointment of Trump Lackey Cash Patel to run our
most important intelligence agency, a prospect that has already been
proposed for a second Trump presidency. By December twenty twenty,
Trump's Attorney General, William Barr and his Director of National
(09:45):
Intelligence John Ratcliffe were reportedly working to keep Trump from
declassifying everything in the ten inch thick binder, while still
trying to give Trump some of the material related to
him about which he was utterly obsessed. CNN further reports
that CI director Haskell, FBI Director Christopher Ray, and the
(10:08):
head of the National Security Agency went to congressional intelligence
leaders in November or more likely December twenty twenty to
warn them about their deep concerns that Trump would make
everything public. Attorney General Barr finally resigned on December fifteenth,
and those left in office were able to stall Trump
(10:29):
until December thirtieth, but by January nineteenth, Trump ordered quote
a binder of materials related to Crossfire, Hurricane declassified, and
the Keystone Cops Saga described earlier, ensued a paper bag.
That is, one thread which if pulled on, should place
(10:52):
Demon Nunez and other Republican congressmen of the day under
the spotlight of the investigation still maintained by the Special
Prosecutor's Office resulting in the charges against Trump in Florida.
But the other thread is, of course, what did Trump
expect to do with the declassified, ultra secret American intelligence
(11:14):
about Russia on such a late date as January nineteenth,
twenty twenty one, the eve of the inauguration of Joe Biden.
What did he hope to achieve by specifically giving it
to John Solomon, who was scanning all the documents in
his office when the White House frantically called and demanded
(11:34):
the documents be returned. Was Trump's plan part of a
last minute extra Trump coup attempt not previously recognized. Did
he hope, in his delusion addled mind, that on the
morning of the inauguration he might invoke the Insurrection Act
(11:54):
or some other pretense and attempt to prevent the Biden
inauguration on this most false premises, and by military force. Regardless,
Trump is responsible for the removal and the disappearance of
a ten inch thick binder describing the essence the elements
(12:16):
of what this nation discovered about Russian interference in America,
Russian spying in America, Russian manipulation in America. And those
Americans Trump foremost among them, who turned a blind eye
to this, or enabled this, or participated in this, must
(12:37):
meet the fullest measure of the law, Trump must be
immediately detained and held without bail until and unless this
secret binder is located. Trump is a clear and present
danger to this country. In fact, he is more so
(12:59):
that than he has ever been before. The remainder of
this bullet edition of the Countdown podcast is the regular
Friday edition for December fifteenth. If you have already listened
to it, there is no need to listen further. Thank you.
(13:27):
After spending most of his life as a bully, Rudolph
William Lewis Giuliani will go out as a coward when
it takes the jury more than one day to decide
how much money you owe the people you lied about.
Guess what you're going to owe the people you lied
about about eleventy billion dollars because guess what did not
(13:51):
happen yesterday? As testimony ended in the Ruby Freeman, Shaye Moss,
Rudy Giuliani case, I.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Was proven to be telling mis Ruthyn and they were
proven to be liars.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Once again, that will happen.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
When I justify to get the whole story, and it
will be definitively clear that what I said was true
and that whatever happened to them which is, it's unfortunate
if other people overreacting, but everything I said about them is.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
True, and Rudy never testified must have been laryngitis. To
defend him, Giuliani's attorney, Joe Sibley basically had to force
Giuliani not to testify, and Sibley basically had to turn
to an insanity plea. He compared Giuliani to a flat
earther who will never believe the truth. His own client
(14:48):
begged the jurors to remember that Giuliani did great things
on nine to eleven. Spoiler alert, he didn't do great
things on nine to eleven. Before the pyre had even
started to die down, Rudy Giuliani was trying to leverage
two thousand dead New Yorkers into an extra constitutional extent
of his term as mayor of the City of New York.
The empathy thing a politician reading the room and feigning
(15:14):
that he cared funny. Rudy missed the opportunity to go
under oath and finally prove that Ruby Freeman and Shane
Moss stole the election from his master dementia j Trump,
them and the dead president of Venezuela and the Chinese,
and I don't know the Symbionese Liberation Army and the
(15:34):
National Football League Players Association. Funny, he said nothing in
his own defense or to prove his case. Actually, it'll
be funny if Freeman and Moss do not file a
second defamation case against Giuliani for what he said. After
court adjourned the first two days of this past week.
(15:56):
As to this case, the jury deliberated three and a
half hours yesterday without telling Giuliani how much to make
the check for. It has been quite the week for
trumpy and cowardice, led by Trump himself, because if the
whole Giuliani, this is my chance to prove to you
I am right. The election was stolen and they lied
about me. Uh, I'm leaving because my grandmother is on fire.
(16:21):
Thing sounds familiar. Trump did the same thing this week.
He vowed to tell the truth under oath about the
New York Business Broad judge and his clerk and the
Attorney General and I don't know the bodder Minehoff gang
and the Visiting Nurse Association and then slight change of
plans instead of having what Trump would call a Perry
(16:42):
Mason moment. Since it is the year nineteen sixty six.
In all, Trump turned out was not revealing all, telling
all he was skipping the rest of the trial. There
are all kinds of terrible and even bigoted things that
one might call what Giuliani and Trump did, But the
worst things to call Giuliani and Trump are Giuliani and Trump.
(17:06):
Cowardice was also on sale at popular prices throughout trump
Land this week. In Atlanta yesterday, the letters of apology
required for the plea deals for Trump nineteen confessed conspirators
Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesbro were obtained through a Public
Records Act motion by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Powell's
videotape proffer may have been illuminating, but she and Chesbrow
(17:29):
spared the court and the citizens of Georgia and the
United States of America any troublesome, complicated, or lengthy remorse. Quote.
I apologize to the citizens of the state of Georgia
and of Fulton County for my involvement in count fifteen
of the indictment, wrote Kenny the Cheese Wow, twenty three
(17:52):
whole words. Ken, I've gotten fortune cookies longer than that. Still,
Chesbrow looked verbose by contrast to the Kraken Lady quote,
I apologize for my actions in connection with the events
in Coffee County. Thirteen words must have been up all
night editing that down. Huh, sid, you might say, so what.
(18:17):
The apologies are insincere? The letters are formalities, and of
course Giuliani wasn't going to stick to his beliefs, no
matter how crazy they were. And of course Trump would
back out or waddle out. Words don't count to him
because he's allowed to lie whenever he needs to in
both directions at the same time, because all of the
rest of us are just extras in his movie Dementia,
j Trump's autobiographical history of the Universe. But here listen carefully,
(18:43):
because it'll be the first and probably the last time
I do this. I will invoke and praise Jenna Ellis,
who also had to write one of those chesbro Howell
apology letters, and who, even if she still defines the
lawyer representing themselves, who has the fool for the client?
She wrote two hundred and fifty jially painful words and
(19:07):
had the guts or at least the strategic intelligence to
sit there and read it herself to the judge on
tape complete with tears, and as much as I would
like to think those tears were fake, they weren't. The
importance of Giuliani and Trump whimping out is that it
underscores that when the spit hits the fan, the bullies
(19:30):
are the first to run. The lesson in this is simple,
Hit them. Hit them every day. Hit them with every lawsuit,
every indictment, every protest, every public mockery, every embarrassment, every joke.
Hit them with everything you have, every day for the
(19:51):
rest of their lives. Because what Trump proved by not
being in a New York courtroom Monday, and what Giuliani
proved by squirming at the defense table yesterday is that
you can break them, both of them, maybe not all
at once and maybe not permanently, but they cannot bullshit
(20:12):
their way out of everything. People watching the movie Classic
Citizen Kin go to the dying Charles Foster Caine gurgling
out his dying word rosebud as the quote from an
eminently quotable film, But for me, it has always been
the scene in which the crooked politician Boss Getty's catches
(20:34):
Cain in an apartment with a woman who is not
his wife. And by the way, for context, this is
in the pre Moms for Liberty days, when that wasn't
okay even if your wife was also there. Getties offers
Cain a chance to withdraw from their race for governor
of New York rather than subject his family to the
(20:55):
subsequent scandal about the apartment and the woman who's not
his wife. Cain screams threats about sending Getty's to sing
sing Getty's, presented by actor Ray Collins as the definition
of the banality of evil, answers him flatly, You're the
(21:15):
greatest fool I've ever known, Cain. If it was anybody else,
I'd say, what's gonna happen to you? Would be a
lesson to you, Only you're gonna need more than one lesson,
and you're gonna get more than one lesson. Still gives
me chills. It should give Trump chills more eminently, probably today.
(21:37):
It should give Rudy Giuliani chills. It probably even would
if either of them had any nerve endings left. They'll
feel it later. Because we must make twenty twenty four
the year in which Trump and Giuliani and Steve Bannon
and Stephen Miller and Cash Patel and all of them
(21:59):
who need more than one lesson, we must make twenty
twenty four the year in which they get more than
one lesson. By the way, before moving on to how
much nobody cared about Vivek Ramaswami in a CNN town
Hall Wednesday, to say nothing about volume three of the
(22:21):
Charles Barkley Gaale King Witness Relocation Hour. Just to tie
off that you're going to get more than one lesson
quote from Citizen Kane for the benefit of one particular listener,
mister dementia. Jay trump I mentioned the actor who delivered
that line, portraying Boss Jim W. Getty's. He was Ray Collins,
(22:43):
and boy has he never gotten the do he deserves?
Just spectacular in Citizen Kane and in the other Orson
Wells masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons. He played in the Wells
radio events still controversial to this day, War of the Worlds.
He was unforgettable in Touch of Evil and in the
Best Years of Our Lives even at a bunch of
(23:03):
sappy bas small pictures. But Ray Collins ended his career
in a recurring role in a television series. He was
the diligent but a little too boastful LA Police flat
foot Lieutenant Arthur Trag who always got tripped up in
cross examination by the star of the show, the attorney
(23:26):
Perry Mason, the one Trump keeps talking about, You're gonna
need more than one lesson, and you're gonna get more
than one lesson, Perry Mason. And that's true also for
Vivic Ramaswami and CNN the town Hall Wednesday night with
the only man who might be able to outlie Trump
(23:47):
in a battle to the death, and how I wish
they would try that. V Bake Ramswami. The total number
of viewers in primetime on CNN five hundred and ninety
one thousand. I mean, television news is dying, but it's
not dying that fast. That's five episodes of this podcast.
(24:13):
Whatever CNN thought it was gaining putting that paranoid manure
salesman on, I can only guess. Ramaswami even drew thirty
one thousand fewer viewers than Ron DeSantis did on Tuesday.
He drew fewer viewers than he's lead in Anderson Cooper
did five hundred and ninety one thousand viewers. Good God.
Even Aaron Burnett had six hundred and fifty nine thousand,
(24:35):
and since we are on this subject, after Ramaswami. Right
afterwards comes episode three out of a complete series of
three of King Charles Chris Lickt's Last and Stupidest idea
four one hundred and fifty three thousand viewers for a
(24:56):
news show in which Charles Barkley and Gail King talk
about something, and it actually lost quarter of vv Gramaswami's
invisible audience, and King Charles is somehow down ten percent
from its disastrous launch ratings happily, and this brings us
(25:19):
back to Trump and politics and a culture in which
you don't like reality. Just call it a liar. You
want it to be day and it's night. You can
just shout loudly enough that it really is day, and
you and only you can see the fact that it's day.
Barkley responded to his humiliating failure the first night of
this show by blaming the ratings company. I want to
(25:42):
tell my team man, these Nielsen people are the biggest
clowns in the world, he said. The ratings can't be right,
he implied, because he doesn't know anybody with a Nielsen box.
And you may recall when he was still interesting, Charles
Barkley speculated about running for governor of Alabama as a Republican. Chuck,
(26:10):
you're not good at this, nobody's interested in you doing it,
and you're not honest about it with yourself or anybody else.
So let me ask you this. Do you own a
shell company? Did you loan your own brother two hundred
thousand dollars and then he paid you back? And if so,
could you still shout at the son of a president
from the other party for having a shell company or
at his father for loaning money? Chuck, if so, you
(26:32):
would be perfect for today's GOP. Also, I wouldn't worry
about having to tell your team anything for much longer.
Some headlines, Trump has sold the rooms rancid stakes, and
universities that didn't teach, and magazines that didn't sell, and
(26:54):
airlines that didn't fly. But I have rarely seen him
sell anything as hard, especially anything that literally does not
exist as this presidential immunity thing. He stumbled through a
reference to a plea deal from the Supreme Court about it,
whatever that means, and he posted and reposted and re
(27:18):
reposted the same rant yesterday on the important matter of
presidential immunity, something which is so basic to America that
it should be automatic. Trump does not say why it
would be basic to America, or why if it's so automatic,
and if it exists that the Supreme Court would not
(27:40):
rule that he's right about it. But he is selling
this hard. This underscores the fact that Trump has only
to say it to validate it with his cult. I
doubt anybody would bother. But I guarantee you if you
polled Dementia Jay's slaves, they would insist by ninety or
ninety five percent that no, no, he had testified this
(28:02):
week in the New York Business broad case. I saw him.
And then if he came out and said no, he
did not testify because he was being unfairly gagged, ninety
or ninety five percent would then say he had not testified.
I do not know what to do about these people.
I do know they are incompatible with a free society
(28:26):
with a representative form of government, and if it has
to be that or them, it's going to have to
be that. By the way, Trump lost again, this time
before a three judge state appeals panel in another attempt
to overturn the gag order. So he can resume trying
to get Judge Arthur Engeron's family and his clerk killed.
(28:50):
It is striking that, amid more legal activity than the
apocryphal law firm of Engulf and Devour, Trump has never
once turned to America First Legal, Stephen Miller's supposed conservative
counterpoint to the ACLU. It is now trying to find
people who believe they were unfairly not hired because they
were white and want to sue IBM, The Daily Beast
(29:14):
now says. In the year twenty twenty two, this nonprofit
reported forty four million dollars in contributions. It spent thirty
five million. Of that two million, seven hundred thousand went
to salaries, one and a half million was spent on
lawsuits and other legal services. Thirty million, thirty million dollars
(29:35):
eighty five percent of its expenses went to advertising. Advertising
that was mostly about things like Joe Biden. Even though
as a nonprofit, Steven Miller's America First Legal is barred
from participating in any political activity. Wait, so you're saying
(29:58):
Stephen Miller is a con man and a fraud bending,
if not flat out breaking the law, and not just
the paranoid hate Monger, whose dreams of ethnic cleansing in
America are driven because a girl of Hispanic heritage humiliated
him back in high school. Mister Miller, you're going to
(30:19):
need more than one lesson, and you're going to get
more than one lesson. And lastly, today, guess what's.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Back, Oh, ghost buses.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Those buses were removed from the Union station, and we're
going to document all of that.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
So you believe that those buses held undercover offices, not informants, correct.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
I feel very, very confident that everybody that was on
those two buses were FBI assets, and I have a
high degree of belief that they were actual FBI agents.
And I'm sorry to say, man, my objective conclusion is
that is, as sen your officials at the FBI were
(31:12):
deeply involved there.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yes, Congressman Kay Higgins, disgraced former cop in Opahalusa's city, Louisiana,
interviewed by disgraced former sixty Minutes correspondent Lara Logan. A
lot of disgrace, not a lot of functioning cortexes. So
now the ghost buses are missing, ghost buses. They're missing
(31:39):
that would make them ghosts ghost buses. This interview was
on Lara Logan's streaming show, which literally and I had
to look at it four times to make sure this
was not just my wishful thinking manifesting itself before my eyes.
Her show literally starts with Lara Logan playing in traffic,
(32:04):
and then a shot of her writing in penn in
your ninth grade composition class notebook in big, loony looking letters.
The rest of the story. There is, however, one thing
missing Lara Logan's The rest of the story with crazy
(32:26):
Clay Higgins is missing a theme song. If I may
suggest one, Oh Nancy into something parked. Hey you insurrection?
(32:49):
Who you gonna call God? Thank you, Nancy Faust. You
know it occurs to me if she had called the
series Lara Logan playing in Traffic, people might have watched.
Also of interest here, just when you thought the Republican
(33:10):
Party had reached some kind of apogee of cynicism and
corruption in George Santos, wait till you see who they
have lined up to run for the House seat he
had to resign in what passes for Republican shame. First hint,
she's a registered Democrat. That's next. This is countdown. This
(33:34):
is countdown with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 5 (33:49):
This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This
is Countdown with Keith Olberman in Sports Stateline, Los Angeles.
Not all the heroes are actually great players. Gene Carr
(34:11):
has died, and in some hockey circles he is being
mourned as if he were a Hall of Famer. The
fourth pick in the NHL draft in nineteen seventy one,
he made the Saint Louis Blues opening night roster as
a twenty year old with no professional experience, and he
broke into the league as perhaps the fastest skating player
(34:31):
of his generation. His father had played briefly in the NHL.
Gene Carr's mother was a championship speed skater. In the
NHL of nineteen seventy one, not everybody was even a
good skater, and almost nobody wore a helmet. So Gene Carr, young,
blonde haired, long haired, going from end to end of
(34:52):
the rink, his locks flowing behind him, looked like a superstar.
Fourteen games into his NHL career, the New York Rangers
traded four top prospects to Saint Louis for him, and
Broadway welcomed Gene Carr as a hero. And in the
next one hundred and thirty nine games with the New
York Rangers, Gene Carr scored eighteen goals. That's not a lot.
(35:20):
It became the subtext of games at Madison Square Garden.
Gene Carr could skate from one net to the other
in about four seconds, but if you gave him four
minutes in front of the opposing net, he still could
not score a goal. As the legendary New York born
referee and Rangers announcer Bill Chadwick once lamented, more in
sympathy than in anger.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Gene Carr couldn't put the puck in the ocean and
if he was standing on the pier. The Rangers eventually
gave up and traded gene Carr to the Los Angeles
Kings in nineteen seventy four, still just twenty three years
old and playing in a totally no pressure hockey environment,
meaning there were about nine thousand regular Kings fans in
those days. Carr played well, he learned to fight a
(36:04):
little bit, scored fifteen goals one season, and he fell
in with the celebrity crowd. One day, he brought some
friends to a King's home game at the Fabulous for him.
His friends were the Eagles, the Eagles, Glenn Frye and
Don Henley and everybody and whatever else Gene Carr had
or had not done when he died this week, he
(36:25):
will last as long as rock and roll does. Because
if you've ever heard the Eagles song new Kid in Town,
the new Kid in Town, the guy they wrote that
song about, reportedly anyway, was Gene Carr. Gene Carr, seventy
nine career NHL goals and a number one hit on
(36:45):
the charts, was seventy two years old. Thank you, Nancy Faust,
(37:28):
State Line, Guildford, Connecticut. Much in the same manner, Ken
McKenzie became a star with the original New York Mets.
The team lost one hundred and twenty out of the
one hundred and sixty games it played in its first
season of existence nineteen sixty two, but mackenzie, and unassuming,
bespectacled left handed reliever from Canada by way of Yale,
won five games and lost four, which made him the
(37:53):
only one of the seventeen pitchers on the nineteen sixty
two Mets to finish with a winning record. In fact,
the next year, he won three games and lost only
one making it the only pitcher on the nineteen sixty
three Mets to finish with a winning record. In fact,
no other Mets pitcher would have a winning record until
nineteen sixty five. Others suffered through the early years of
(38:17):
the Mets. Ken mackenzie, later the baseball coach at Yale,
then an alumni executive at the university, reveled in them.
He made it to the Mets twenty twenty two Old
Timers Day in a wheelchair. His license plate on his
car read nineteen sixty two met, and his humor was
consistent for sixty years. At one point, somebody pointed out
(38:40):
that he had the highest ERA on the team, to
which mackenzie answered, yes, but I have the lowest salary
of anybody in the Yale class of nineteen fifty six.
Ken mackenzie died at his home yesterday morning. He was
eighty nine years old. Still to come on Countdown Fridays
(39:19):
with Thurber and Mann versus machine, with the machine reduced
to the seemingly benign but anything but benign Medicine Cabinet
nine needles next first time for the daily roundup of
the miss Grants, Morons and Dunning Kruger effect specimens, who
constitute two days waste persons in the world is standing
(39:41):
on the pier the bronze the worst. Elon Musk. When
you're self driving cars keep crashing, what do you do?
Do you improve them? No? You do not. You try
to prevent the government from telling people that they keep crashing.
This is the kind of headline that could bankrupt a company,
and it is live on the website of our technica. Quote.
(40:05):
Tesla claims California false advertising law violates First Amendment. Tesla
fights DMB complaint that autopilot is falsely advertised as autonomous
unquote nice free speech advocacy Free speech boy, the runner
up wor Sir Kevin McCarthy, the already X speaker soon
(40:27):
to be ex congressman, has decided he is in demand.
McCarthy says he is open to serving in a Trump administration.
I mean, why not. McCarthy has already proved to Trump
his willingness to pore himself out for Trump, but a
far greater interest. McCarthy tells Axios he'd like to work
with his pal Elon Musk in artificial intelligence, And once again,
(40:52):
why not. I mean, when I think artificial the first
person who comes to mind is Kevin McCarthy. Intelligence not
so much the winner the Republican leadership of Queens and
Nassau Counties in New York. These are the people who
brought us George Santos, Congressman at Large, in drag their
(41:19):
new idea to run for the seat that Santos says
just had to resign from in disgrace. They have nominated
a county legislator with no public platform other than support
for Israel. How does she feel about abortion? Nowbody knows Trump,
nowbody knows democracy. Nobody knows anything else about President Biden.
(41:41):
Nobody knows. Her name is Mazi Melaissa Pilip and she
was born in Ethiopia and she served in the Israeli
Defense Forces. She checks interesting boxes. She's black, she's a veteran,
and there are a couple of drawbacks thrown in. She
has a really difficult accent. She makes George Santos sound
(42:03):
like a generic voiceover renown. And her name is pronounced Mazi,
but it's spelled Mazi, you know, like Nazi, but with
an M. Her only tenuous connection to Congress is she
campaigned alongside and called a quote amazing friend. George Santos
(42:24):
On one more little detail. The new Republican candidate for
the House, Miss Mazi Malaysa Pilip is a registered Democrat.
NASA and Queen's County Republicans just nominated a Democrat for Congress. Hey,
you know Santos is hugely popular on that cameo thing.
(42:45):
Think of his name recognition. Give him some time to
cool off. Maybe we can run them again. The NASA
and Queens County leadership of the Republican Party.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
Two days worst persons in the world, like Nazi, but
with an m.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Just ahead Fridays with Thurber and a double header including
one of his fables, word for word, the funniest and
most incisive stuff ever written. The City Mouse goes to
the country next first time for more dogs you can help.
Every dog has its day. In fact, nine dogs and
eleven cats, nine ducks, two EMUs, three rabbits, a parrot,
(43:38):
twenty four silky chickens, and ninety rescue chickens. They are
at National Boxer Rescue in Pierce, Minnesota, and the county
board there is about to vote to take the land
away from them and close this rescue. They're thirty thousand
dollars in debt, with almost no donations coming in and
no idea where the animals will go if they have
(44:00):
to close. If you think placing rescue dogs is tough,
imagine rescue chickens and rescue EMUs and crazy as it sounds,
many of them are special needs. Sounds crazy until you
picture them, and then it sounds heartbreaking. Anyway we can help.
They have a fundraiser on cuddly dot com. I'll tweet
out the link, or just go to cuddly dot com
(44:22):
and type National Boxer in the search bar. The chickens,
thank you, the Silky Chickens, thank you, the nine dogs,
thank you, and I thank you to the number one
story on the Countdown. And It's Fridays with Thurber and
a lot of his work details the fundamental clash between people,
(44:43):
husband and wife, he and various relatives, a guy and
a bed, and a seal, two animals representing any two
humans in conflict. But some of the most magical writing
is the stuff that is just about one person alone
against life. One of his stories ends with a great
(45:04):
grandmother struggling with a butter churn and screaming into the void.
Why doesn't somebody take this goddamn thing away from me,
a line which I think could be the start of
a national anthem somewhere. Such a story is Nine Needles
this week's selection. As you will see, it is a
little short for our usual time frames here, so I'll
give you a bonus another man versus life story afterwards,
(45:27):
in the form of one of Thurber's fables for our time,
the mouse who went to the country. But first, it's
unlikely this event has ever happened to you, but the
anxiety that should be immediately familiar. Nine Needles by James Thurber.
One of the more spectacular minor happenings of the past
(45:49):
few years, which I am sorry that I missed, took
place in the Columbus, Ohio home of some friends of
a friend of mine. It seems that a mister Albatross,
while looking for something in his medicine cabinet one morning,
discovered a bottle of a kind of patent medicine which
his wife had been taking for a stomach ailment. Now,
mister Albatross is one of those apprehensive men who are
(46:13):
afraid of patent medicines and of almost everything else. Some
weeks before he had encountered a paragraph in a consumer's
research bulletin which announced that this particular medicine was bad
for you. He had thereupon ordered his wife to throw
out what was left of her supply of the stuff
and never buy any more she had promised, And here
(46:33):
now was another bottle of the perilous liquid. Mister Albatross,
A man given to quick rages, shouted the conclusion of
the story at my friend. I threw the bottle out
the bathroom window, and the medicine chest after it. It
seems to me that must have been a spectacle worth
(46:54):
going a long way to see. I am sure that
many a husband has wanted to wrench the family medicine
cabinet off the wall and throw it out the window,
because the average medicine cabinet is so filled with mysterious
bottles and unidentifiable objects of all kinds, that it is
a source of constant bewilderment and exasperation to the American male. Surely,
(47:18):
the British medicine cabinet, and the French medicine cabinet, all
the other medicine cabinets must be simpler and better ordered
than ours. It may be that the American habit of
saving everything and never throwing anything away, even empty bottles,
causes the domestic medicine cabinet to become as cluttered in
its small way as the American attic becomes cluttered in
(47:42):
its major way. I have encountered few medicine cabinets in
this country which were not packed jammed with something between
one hundred and fifty and two hundred different items, from
dental floss to boracic acid, from razor blades to sodium perborate,
from adhesive tape to coconut oil. The neatest wife will
(48:06):
put off clearing out the medicine cabinet on the ground
that she has something else to do that is more
important at that moment, or more diverting. It was in
the apartment of such a wife and her husband that
I became enormously involved with a medicine cabinet. One morning
not long ago. I had spent the weekend with this couple.
They live on East tenth Street near Fifth Avenue. Such
(48:28):
a weekend as left me reluctant to rise up on
Monday morning with bright and shining face and go to work.
They got up and went to work, but I didn't.
I didn't get up until about to two thirty in
the afternoon. I had my face all lathered for shaving,
and the wash bowl was full of hot water, when
(48:49):
suddenly I cut myself with the razor. I cut my ear.
Very few men cut their ears with razors, but I do,
possibly because I was taught the old Spencerian free risk
movements by my writing teacher in the grammar grades. The
ear bleeds rather profusely when cut with a razor, and
is difficult to get at. More angry than hurt, I
(49:12):
jerked open the door of the medicine cabinet to see
if I could find a stiptick pencil, and out fell
from the top shelf a little black paper packet containing
nine needles. It seems that his wife kept a little
paper packet containing nine needles on the top shelf of
the medicine cabinet. The packet fell into the soapy water
(49:33):
of the wash bowl, where the paper rapidly disintegrated, leaving
nine needles at large in the bowl. I was, naturally enough,
not in the best condition, either physical or mental, to
recover nine needles from a wash bowl. No gentleman who
has lather on his face and whose ear is bleeding
(49:53):
is in the best condition for anything, even something involving
the handling of nine large blunt objects. It did not
seem wise to me to pull the plug out of
the wash bowl and let the needles go down the drain.
I had visions of clogging up the plumbing system of
the house, and also a vague fear of causing short
(50:15):
circuits somehow or other. I know very little about electricity,
and I don't want to have it explained to me. Finally,
I groped very gently around the bowl, and eventually had
four of the needles in the palm of one hand
and three in the palm of the other. Two I
couldn't find. If I had thought quickly and clearly, I
(50:37):
wouldn't have done that. A lathered man whose ear is bleeding,
and who has four wet needles in one hand and
three in the other may be said to have reached
the lowest known point of human efficiency. There is nothing
he can do but stand there. I tried transferring the
needles in my left hand to the palm of my
right hand, but I couldn't get the off my left hand.
(50:59):
Wet needles cling to you. In the end, I wiped
the needles off onto a bath towel, which was hanging
on a rod above the bath tub. It was the
only towel that I could find. I had to dry
my hands afterward on the bath mat. Then I tried
to find the needles in the towel. Hunting for seven
(51:20):
needles in a bath towel is the most tedious occupation
I have ever engaged in. I could find only five
of them with the two that had been left in
the bowl. That meant there were four needles in all,
missing two in the wash bowl and two others lurking
in the towel or lying in the bathtub under the towel.
(51:41):
Frightful thoughts came to me of what might happen to
anyone who used that towel, or washed his face in
the bowl, or got into the tub if I didn't
find the missing needles. Well, I didn't find them. I
sat down on the edge of the tub to think,
and I decided finally that the only thing to do
was to wrap up the towel in a newspaper and
(52:02):
take it away with me. I also decided to leave
a note for my friends, explaining as clearly as I
could that I was afraid there were two needles in
the bathtub and two needles in the wash bowl, and
that they better be careful. I looked everywhere in the apartment,
but I could not find a pencil, or a pen
(52:22):
or a typewriter. I could find pieces of paper, but
nothing with which to write on them. I don't know
what gave me the idea. A movie I had seen, perhaps,
or a story I had read. But I suddenly thought
of writing a message with lipstick. The wife might have
an extra lipstick lying around, and if so, I concluded
it would be in the medicine cabinet. I went back
(52:46):
to the medicine cabinet and began poking around in it
for a lipstick. I saw what I thought looked like
the metal tip of one, and I got two fingers
around it and began to pull gently. It was under
a lot of things. Every object in the medicine cabinet
began to slide. Bottles broke in the washbowl and on
the floor, red, brown, and white liquids, spurted, nail files, scissors,
(53:09):
razor blades, and miscellaneous objects sang and clattered and tinkled.
I was covered with perfume, peroxide, and cold cream. It
took me half an hour to get all the debris
all together in the middle of the bathroom floor. I
made no attempt to put anything back in the medicine cabinet.
(53:33):
I knew it would take a steadier hand than mine
and a less shattered spirit. Before I went away, only
partly shaved and abandoned the shambles. I left a note
saying that I was afraid there were needles in the
bathtub and the washbowl, and that I had taken their towel,
and that I would call up and tell them everything.
I wrote it in iodine with the end of a toothbrush.
(53:57):
I have not yet called up. I'm sorry to say.
I have neither found the courage nor thought up the
words to explain what happened. I suppose my friends believe
that I deliberately smashed up their bathroom and stole their towel.
I don't know for sure, because they have not yet
called me up either. Nine Needles by James Thurber, and
(54:23):
as I suggested in a broad sense on the same
subject from his Fables for Our Time and famous poems
illustrated The Mouse who Went to the Country by James Thurber,
Once upon a Sunday there was a city mouse who
(54:43):
went to visit a country mouse. He hid away on
a train the country mouse had told him to take,
only to find that on Sundays it did not stop
at Beddington. Hence the city mouse could not get off
at Beddington and catch a bus for Cybert's Junction, where
he was to be met by the country mouse. The
city mouse, in fact, was carried on to Middleburg, where
(55:04):
he weigh three hours for a train to take him back.
When he got back to Beddington, he found out that
the last bus for Siebert's Junction had just left, so
he ran, and he ran, and he ran, and he
finally caught the bus and crept aboard, only to find
that it was not the bus for Seebert's Junction at all,
but was going in the opposite direction through Pells Hollow
(55:24):
and Grum to a place called Wimberbee. When the bus
finally stopped, the city mouse got out into a heavy
rain and found that there were no more buses that
night going anywhere. To the hell with it, said the
city mouse, and he walked back to the city moral
Stay where you are, you're sitting pretty. The mouse who
(55:48):
went to the Country by James Thurber all the damage
I can do here. Thank you for listening. Do me
a solid and tell everybody who doesn't listen to to listen.
(56:11):
In fact, post it on your Facebook wall. I'm not
on Facebook. I think that's part of the issue here.
Countdown has come to you from the Vin Scully Studios
at the Olderman Broadcasting Empire in New York. There's a
video that I do every night promoting this thing. You
could put that on your wall. Put that on your wall.
Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel arranged, produced,
(56:32):
and performed most of our music. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums,
and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including
some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is courtesy ESPN, Inc.
It was written by Mitch Warren Davis. We call it
the Olberman theme from ESPN two. Our satirical and pithy
(56:55):
musical comments are by Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium
organist ever. Our announcer today was my friend Stevie van Zant.
Everything else was pretty much my that's countdown for this,
the one thousand and seventy fourth day since dementia j
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Use the Insurrection Act against him and
(57:17):
them while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is Tuesday.
Bulletins as the news warrant till then, I'm Keith Olderman.
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
(57:45):
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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