December 15, 2025 • 52 mins
SEASON 4 EPISODE 40: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump’s losing streak has hit 27 days. His LATEST losing streak.
MAGA knows it. The Head of the Republican National Committee knows it. The Wall Street Journal knows it. The Indiana GOP knows it. The Ukrainians know it. Anybody who saw his pathetic credit-grabbing disinformational tweet Saturday night after the Brown shooting knows it. His own economists know it. The terrorists know it.
Even TRUMP knows it.
Since the house passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 19th Trump has been SINKING. In quicksand. SINKING. And not more than one or two of his more insane more desperate colleagues even getting close enough to hand him a rope, for fear of being pulled down with him.
They are beginning to blame him. “We are facing almost certain defeat,” says the purulent face of the RNC Joe Gruters, about the midterms. Then, “this is an absolute disaster.” Then “There’s no sugarcoating it. This is a pending looming disaster headed our way.” Then, I think quoting me quoting the late football owner Al Davis, “the chances are Republicans will go down and will go down HARD.”
Just lose, baby.
And boy, has he been losing. On affordability. In the Miami election. In the Georgia state house election. On affordability. On telling you to buy your daughter only two dolls. In Indiana. About Somalia. In his "peace" deal in the Middle East. In Thailand. In Syria. In Ukraine. About ObamaCare. About Alina Habba. About Kilmar Abrego Garcia. About the National Guard troops in L.A.
And mostly about Epstein. Those four photos show nothing and would normally would therefore MEAN nothing. But they form a reminder that Trump tried to stop you from SEEING photos of him with Epstein. That THOSE photos weren’t PART of the tranche in the files, doesn’t matter. It only raises a kind of instinctive speculation about how much WORSE those OTHER Epstein-Trump photos are. It keeps the Epstein story alive when Trump COULD HAVE killed it, weeks ago, months ago. But he knew better. And now we get an endless scandal that only has to promise shocks to self-perpetuate. Trump used to win with those. Now he's losing.
Because he's Donald Trump. Donald - with 47 L's.
B-Block (30:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Anna Paulina Luna, member of the U.S. Congress and top Russian influencer? Governor Josh Shapiro is so stuck on bipartisanship he's bothsides-ing political violence (including the day the fascists firebombed his family). And Howard Lutnick with the greatest self-contradiction of the year.
C-Block (38:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: A tragic event on the streets of New York 65 years ago led to me winding up in the authorized biography of the creator of Willy Wonka, Roald Dahl. He was a complicated and controversial figure but he did great things too - like encourage any kid he interacted with. Including me!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump's
losing streak has hit twenty seven days, his latest losing streak.
(00:26):
MAGA knows it. The head of the Republican National Committee
knows it. The Wall Street Journal knows it. The Indiana
GOP knows it. The Ukrainians know it. Anybody who saw
his pathetic, credit grabbing, disinformational tweet Saturday night after the
Brown shooting knows it. His own economists know it, the
terrorists know it. Even Trump knows it. Since the House
(00:47):
passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November nineteenth, Trump
has been sinking in quicksand sinking, and not more than
one or two of his more insane, more desperate colleagues
have even gotten close enough to hand him a rope
for fear of being pulled down with him. His losing
(01:07):
streak is today twenty seven days long, his latest losing streak,
and they are beginning to blame him. We are facing
almost certain defeats, says the purulent face of the RNC
Joe Gruders about the midterms. Then, quote, this is an
absolute disaster. Then if that wasn't clear enough, quote there's
(01:31):
no sugarcoating it. This is a pending, looming disaster headed
our way. And then I think, quoting me, quoting the
late football owner Al Davis Gruters, says, the chances are
Republicans will go down, and will go down. Hod just lose, baby,
and boy has Trump been losing. He called affordability a hoax,
(01:55):
got his arm twisted by his economists who know the
last thing it is is a hoax. Tried to give
a speech saying he will fix affordability rather than being
crush under its weight politically, and still could not stop himself.
Could not not mock those advisors, and not mock America,
and not mock his own speech, and not mock affordability again,
(02:18):
and even not mock the charts they gave him, and
not mock Christmas presents. Quote you don't need thirty seven
dollars for your daughter two or three? Is nice, she thinks,
santi the results the next day, the Democrat Eileen Higgins
(02:38):
swamped the MAGA loser in the election for mayor of Miami,
and the Republicans coughed up what was thought to be
a permanently red seat in the state House in Georgia,
and Trump still kept mocking affordability, and Trump even mocked
Trump twenty eighteen, twenty eighteen when he was caught saying
shithole countries, and he denied he said shithole countries, and
(03:01):
he lied and said he didn't say it, and his
people who there and heard him say it, they lied
and said he didn't say it. And now he says
he did say it, and he said it again, and
he said it about Somalia. And I don't know what
it is, but somehow this group he has attacked seems
to have been respected in this country, even by Republicans.
And the shithole in question looks like Trump's mouth. And
(03:26):
then there's nearby Indiana. Indiana is not a hot prospect
to join the new Left, and it never has been.
And yet Mike Pence was from there. And the Indiana
Republicans who stared Trump down when he threatened to cut
off all federal funding if they didn't readdistrict the way
he wanted him to there from there, and they told
(03:48):
him to go f himself. And then the Maga lieutenant governor,
whose name is Micah Beckwith and is exactly as dumb
as that sounds, first posted that threat online then deleted
the post, and then, when confronted by reporters, repeated the
threat almost word for word. Quote, Yes, these conversations happened.
(04:09):
Beckwith said this to Politico. But it's not a threat,
it's an honest conversation about who does the White House
want to partner with. There are forty nine other states
competing for all kinds of projects. Indianatol the White House today.
They don't want to be a good partner to the
Trump administration. And I suspect the White House will look
to partner with other states before US. But did they
(04:33):
actually say, here are projects you could lose out on
if you do not deliver for us. Political Politico asked
them that question, and mister Beckwith answered, quote, yes, unbelievable. Hey, Becky, One,
don't blackmail. Two, don't blackmail people who aren't going to
(04:55):
give in to blackmail. Three, when your blackmail fails, don't
advertise that it's failed. And four, when you realize the
validity of point three and you try to bury your advertisement,
don't go back and advertise it again. Indiana thus becomes
multiple Trump losses. He loses there like three times, and
(05:18):
he also loses wherever he decides the next Indiana is
and he looks, well, what's the opposite of impregnable? He
looks pregnable. And there are multiple, multiple l's, not just Indiana,
these beauty pageant also rans. He's tried to dress up
as US attorneys Julianne Murray in Delaware Gone, the slimy
(05:41):
Elina Haba Gone, Miss Uncongeniality, Lindsay Halligan going seven of them,
by Trump's own admission going. And Trump's replacement evil plan
is to eliminate blue slips in the Senate the way
home state senators keep unqualified nominees from being qualified by
the whores still working for the would be dictator. And
(06:04):
John has responded to this by saying no, and Chuck
Grassley has responded to this by saying, no, that's two
more els in one game. No three l's in one game.
He'd already tried to get them to eliminate the filibuster too,
els el's els marching into the White House just in
time for the construction permits to be denied for the
(06:26):
new combination ballroom and Trump egos storage Hangar, I don't
know what's going to happen to Obamacare, but He's not
gonna gut it or replace it with the latest lame
brained idea for a new scheme. Ran Paul's brilliant plan
for you to buy your insurance on Amazon or at
(06:47):
Sam's Club or at Costco. He Randy, maybe I can
buy my insurance from your neighbor. He seemed to come
out of his problems. Okay, Trump's healthcare plan fell in
the Senate. Maybe he can find a new one on Amazon.
Rdreie Taylor Green remains under the influence of a possibly
(07:07):
transient but definitely tertiary stage case of conscience in open rebellion,
planning one final bid to unseat Speaker Johnson before she
leaves the House. The two thousand dollars tariff checks are gone,
The Doge checks never happened. Buy your own insurance checks
have apparently been replaced by Domino's new avoid thenoid insurance.
(07:30):
Trump's approval numbers are frozen Pizza economy approvals down to
thirty one percent, and if the Obamacare subsidies expire, that
approval will drop below thirty and maybe take his overall
approval with it. Because even his people realize he is
turning this place into a shithole country. The Trump ells
(07:52):
are everywhere. You can't spell kilmar Abrego, Garcia without a
Trump l. The courts have ordered him to let go
of the LA National Guard troops. He's losing in wars.
He said he'd already settled, or would settle in twenty
four hours or twenty four days or twenty four weeks.
(08:14):
Ukraine is further from peace than ever. The Thailand Cambodia war,
Trump said he ended on Friday, resumed on Saturday. His
peace in the Middle East saw the Israelis kill a
top Hamas commander over the weekend. An attack in Syria
three Americans dead, including two service members, and he promised
serious retaliation. And he would have sounded tougher if he'd said,
(08:37):
I'm going to hit you real hard, like I said
at the top. There are so many els, And for
twenty seven days at least, there have been nothing but
els that even Trump has begun to notice. So add
that to the list of els. His ability to believe
his own bullshit is showing holes. He still clings to
(08:59):
this financial imbecility that tariffs will turn the economy into
a money printing machine, even for people not named Trump
or Musk or Bezos. But even he has now told
the Wall Street Journal, Yeah, he doesn't know when that
money printing machine will actually turn on. The Journal interviewed
him Friday in the Oval, and he must have stepped
(09:22):
in some reality and couldn't get it off his shoes,
quoting them. Quoting him, he acknowledged that he couldn't predict
if that would translate into political gains for Republicans next fall.
Asked whether Republicans would lose the House in November, Trump
said quote, I can't tell you. I don't know when
all of this money is going to kick in narrator,
(09:46):
It didn't kick in. Wait, there's more. Quote. I've created
the greatest economy in history, but it may take people
a while to figure all these things out. Oh they've
figured it out, Donald, They figured it out. Saturday night,
when rushing, stumbling, waddling to grab at it, almost literally
climbing over the bodies of dead students to claim he
(10:09):
had found their killer, Trump posted this quote, I have
been briefed on the shooting that took place at Brown
University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene,
the suspect is in custody. God bless the victims and
the families of the victim's exclamation point, F you, buddy,
(10:30):
you've stepped on your dick again. You've stepped on your
tiny dick again. While millions mourned and questioned, what is
wrong with this goddamn country that we throw school kids,
whether toddlers or teenagers, into the volcano like we were
practicing the human sacrifice madness of the Aztecs, just to
protect your right to walk around with a gun. Sure,
(10:51):
what's another bunch of human hearts? What's another bunch of kids?
As long as people know that Trump alone has found
the real killer. Way, what's that you're saying? They haven't
found the real killer. Hadn't found the real killer when
he posted that. So now in just three months, Trump's
bubbleheaded FBI director who didn't know the job meant work.
(11:13):
He thought it only met a free jet. He wrongly
said they'd caught the Charlie Kirk assassin. And now Trump
has made the same mistake and tried to blame his
mistake on others. And when you do that, and when
you post that, you open yourself up to attacks from
the other side, like Chris Murphy attacked on State of
the Union yesterday. He said it opaquely, he said it
(11:34):
with nuance. But make no mistake, this is a US
senator blaming the President of the United States for this
gun attack and the next gun attack quote. Right now,
we don't have the leadership in Washington to do anything
anything to respond to the shooting this weekend. Trump has
(11:54):
been engaged in a pretty deliberate campaign to try to
make violence more likely in this country, and I think
you're unfortunately going to see the results of that on
the streets of America. He's knowingly restoring gun rights to
dangerous people. He is cutting off grants that have bipartisan
support to try to interrupt violence in our cities or
(12:16):
to try to get necessary mental health resources to families
and children in need unquote. As I said earlier, this
has been going on all of these els since at
least the nineteenth of November, when enough MAGA congressmen realized
that only one of these things could happen. They could
(12:36):
continue to help Trump hide the Epstein files, or they
could get re elected. That's why, of all these els,
the biggest Trump loss in the last twenty seven days
may have been the release of those four pictures of
him with Jeffrey Epstein. The photos show nothing. The photos
would therefore normally mean nothing, but they serve as a
(12:58):
reminder that Trump tried to stop you from seeing photos
of him with Epstein, that those photos that were released
weren't part of that tranch in the files. That doesn't matter.
It only raises a kind of instinctive speculation about how
much worse those other Epstein Trump photos might be. It
keeps the Epstein story alive when Trump could have killed
(13:20):
it weeks ago, months ago, even if there was stuff
more incriminating about him than say, a drawn of the
naked woman made out to Epstein that he may or
may not have drawn. But he's sure as shit signed
right over the naughty bits. Instead of moving Epstein off
the table and out of the picture, he's letting it
(13:41):
drip drip drip on him. The photos mean nothing, yet
here they are just another element that says this is
Trump's scandal. The way the constant coverage of Clinton Lewinsky,
even when there was no actual news for days, for weeks,
kept that front of mind for all of the year
nineteen ninety eight. I'll tell you something at MSNBC in
(14:03):
nineteen ninety eight the promo. But used to ask our
staffers every day to give them something, anything, a news
morsel that could turn into a thirty second promo for
tomorrow's show. And on Thursday they used to have to
turn something into a promo for Monday's show. Monday on
the White House in crisis, we were locking in the
(14:26):
crisis four days in advance. We were programming the crisis.
And when we hit Friday, and those files are by
law required to be released, whatever is released will be
another Trump L. And whatever isn't released will be another
Trump L. And lord knows how many l's there will
be if there's something actually startling in the files. And
(14:47):
that's the point. It doesn't have to be a good
scandal to be a gripping scandal. It just has to
have new stories every day. That's what Clinton Lewinsky's true
meaning was. And as Philip Bump pointed out, Trump basically
got elected by knowing this. There wasn't crap actually in
wiki leaks or her emails, except that there was only
(15:10):
something new in them. So in some more losses than
the nineteen sixty two New York mets, or if you
are a current New York Mets fan more losses than
the twenty twenty five twenty six offseason New York Mets.
And maybe it's only one hour a week, but even
Trump knows it. During that hour, and way more than
(15:32):
one hour a week, the Trump media industrial complex knows it.
It's not my habit to quote the insufferable, inexhaustible phony
Peggy Noonan. But when there's a column in the goddamned
Rupert Murdoch goddamned Wall Street Journal titled quote Trump may
be losing his touch, Yeah, I'm quoting it. One hundred
and thirty six words. I swear that's it for this year.
(15:54):
Just one hundred and thirty six words. And don't be
thrown by the imaginary world in which Peggy Noonan lives.
She still thinks Ronald Reagan isn't in hell, and now
she thinks Charlie Kirk was a mediating force inside the
Trump cult. Okay, just go with that, But the other
points she makes are salient and deadly. Quote outside Washington,
(16:20):
mister Trump's base is fighting with itself. America first is
saying I'm not maga conspiracies all over Israel killed Charlie
the assassination of Charlie Kirk, she writes, looks increasingly like
an epical event. Did he understand how much he was
holding together the Trumpian right Without the force of his
(16:43):
mediating presence, they are cracking up percolating below unseen is
the price you pay in time for success? The President's
border triumph, sorry what? The president's border triumph will likely
weaken his and maga's political position. He shut down illegal
immigration on the southern border, which had been more less
(17:05):
open for decades. But it was anger at illegal immigration
noonan rights that kept his base cleaved to him and
allied with each other. Remove the issue that made you,
and you can no longer use it to gain votes
or maintain unity. Unquote Oh no, oh, dear Trump's lost
(17:25):
his touch. God damn shame not going to affect those
midterms and give us enough Democratic congressman to impeach him
and enough Democratic senators to remove him. Is it? Oh?
Really you think so wow? That'll be fun? Let me
quote this RNC blob gruters again, quoting me again, quoting
(17:46):
al Davis again. Republicans will go down and will go
down hobb okay. Two quick media notes The CBS evening
(18:12):
news about Barry Weiss, edited by Barry Weiss, anchored by
Barry Weiss, starring Barry Weiss, is not going so well.
If she had not been put there to do something
bad like this, her stay on this job might be
as long as RONA. Romney's glorious hour and a half
as an MSNBC commentator. It was Brian Steinberg and Variety
(18:35):
who noticed this, and to whom all credit goes, And I'm
just going to quote him and read his story from
Variety that Barry Weiss town hall with Erica Kirk, the
merry widow, the woman who used all the eyeliner left
over after jd Vance got done. No real advertiser was
willing to buy time on it. No real advertiser was
(18:57):
willing to buy time on the CBS television network. Mister
Steinberg writes headline, Big advertisers appear wary of CBS News's
Barryweiss town Hall format during a Saturday night town hall
led by Barry Weiss, the recently named editor in chief
of CBS News, and I believe she liked the article
(19:19):
so far most of Madison Avenue sought an off ramp.
Steinberg writes the News special aired at eight pm on Saturday,
one of the least watch hours in broadcast TV, and
that may have contributed to a relative dearth of top
advertisers appearing to support the show during the hour. Commercial
(19:39):
breaks were largely filled with spots from direct response advertisers,
including the taietary supplement super Beats, the home repair service
HomeServe dot com, and Carfax, a supplier of auto ownership data.
Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS's flagship station in
(20:00):
New York even saw a commercial for Giampet, the terra
cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.
I wonder if CBS will still sprout plant life after
a two weeks, continuing the article quote. A more moneyed
class of sponsors was evident during the first commercial break,
(20:21):
appearing in the nine pm hour on CBS a rebroadcast
of a twenty twenty four episode of forty eight Hours.
Marketers appearing included Amazon, Ferrero Group, and Procter and Gamble. Unquote,
uh oh, Congratsbery Weiss and the Ellisons. You've turned CBS
News into overnights. On superstation WTBS in nineteen seventy six,
(20:46):
got a Ginsu knife collection for sale Airberry. But wait,
what was that again about chiapets? Viewers of the telecast
on WCBS. CBS was flagship station in New York even
saw commercial for Chiapet the terracotta figure that sprout's plant
life after a few weeks. Oh my god, Chia Pet Company,
I'll give you one thousand dollars if you make a
(21:08):
Barry Weiss chia pet. Please, oh please, please, please please please. Meanwhile,
something that a week ago would have outdrawn the Barry
Weiss town Hall with Tammy fay Baker Kirk may now
belong to the Ages as well as Vivid as parts
of the latest Ryan Lizzer response to Olivia Newsy may
(21:29):
have been the whole thing has collapsed under the realization
that actually the only guaranteed audience for Lizz's segments have
been Olivia's other exes. Hey her book first week out,
first publication week, maximum visibility. As you probably have not heard,
(21:53):
her book, the first week sold. With all that publicity,
including the most thorough job of The New York Times
ever missing the lead and the next twenty off leads
in its history, that book sold and sixty five copies
a book that sold five thousand copies the same week,
placed fiftieth among nonfiction sellers. Not great, Bob. So, barring
(22:20):
anything else that might come up later on in this
to which I could add something that is either relevant
or true, I'll bow out here. But I do want
to read one last paragraph, because this is the easiest
way for me to get mister lendsa an answer he
apparently needs. Let me quote him. Quote Olivia, this person
said was starting to tell people that I might kill her.
(22:43):
I tried to explain that Olivia watched a lot of
Law and Order growing up and has an active imagination,
especially when it comes to being killed. She feared that
her mother would kill her. She had told me that
she thought Keith might kill her, and now I have
to assume she told Keith the same thing about me.
Of course, she repeatedly told me that she feared Bobby
would kill her. Now she was saying that I might
(23:06):
kill her. I never heard her say one way or
the other about Mark Sandford's level of interest in killing her.
That's a good line. So many people were out to
kill her, and yet here she was, at thirty one,
somehow very much alive. End quote. Okay, Ryan. I haven't
talked to her since twenty fifteen, and by the way,
(23:27):
every contact I've had with her since twenty fifteen was
about what to do with her clothes or about the
health of what had been our dogs, about which she
had no interest, for which I will never forgive her,
and which I think summarizes her. Once I did post
on Facebook twenty eighteen, maybe that the place in Central
(23:49):
Park that you two guys like to hang out at
was my utter coincidence, right on the path I walked
the dogs every day, and way too near my home,
and it was a miracle we hadn't run into each
other already. So maybe we should all make that our DMZ.
But about the killing her question, exhale Ryan, she never
(24:12):
told me she thought you might kill her. She only
told me she thought you were stalking her. Also of interest,
here a top governor tries to insist Democrats have a
hand in political violence in this country. And this would
just be stupid if this governor weren't a Democrat, and
if he weren't the democratic governor whose fascist haters tried
(24:35):
to burn him and his family alive in their own
home during passover. Worst Persons is next This is Countdown.
This is Countdown with Keith Oberman still ahead on this
(25:11):
edition of Countdown. Sixty five years ago this month, a
little boy named Theo Dall was hit by a New
York City cab while being pushed across the street in
his baby carriage. He was never the same, nor was
his father, who, in part to entertain his stricken son,
wrote a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And
although the next development was not quite on that level
(25:33):
of importance, the writing of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
led me to write to Theo's dad, who was the
legendary both good and bad legendary Roal Doll, to write
him a fan letter, and he wrote back, and he
wrote back again, And these letters are referenced somehow in
Roald Dahl's official biography. This very strange story ahead in
(25:58):
things I promised not to tell first of believe it
or not, there's still more new idiots to talk about.
The roundup of the disagreants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects
specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world.
The runner up to the runner up Bronze, Anna Paulina
(26:18):
Luna the congresswoman from Smolensk. I know, I'm sorry, I
got that wrong from Florida. Problem is she might as
well be and it might as well be Smolensk. The
Russian Embassy in the US social media account has posted
her photo and quote at the invitation by at Rep. Luna,
(26:38):
Ambassador Dartkiev visited her Christmas reception on Capitol Hill. Wonderful
event with warm atmosphere and exceptional hospitality. Continue working to
make Russian American relations great again. Yeah. Sorry, anybody who
thinks we should have great relations with Russia before the
Russians overthrow the Putent dictatorship is to totally loyal to
(27:02):
this country, but really dumb. Not loyal and dumb. Sorry,
Russia is our enemy, but there are degrees of how
truly not you can be. And from the Twitter ex
account of the gadfly Jay in Kiev comes this addendum
to that photo of Luna to whom the Russians gave
their JFK quote files unquote, because why would they ever
(27:26):
give America fake historical records or disinformation? Jay in Kiev
notes and quoting him since August when her and Steve
Whitcoff met some of Putin's representatives at a Miami hotel
owned by Russian business partner of Witcoff. US Congresswoman Anna
Paulina Luna has been a prolific member of the Russian
(27:48):
government's Paid Influencers program, turning her ex timeline into display
case of NonStop Kremlin talking points. Jay in Kiev writes
and continues, what she does isn't illegal. Today she gleefully
met her handler unquote yikes. I don't know if she's
a paid influencer or a paid Influencer's program member. That's
(28:12):
Jay's assertion. I do know she operates under an adopted name.
She was born Anna Paulina Meyerhoffer. Right, your arm is Meyerhoffer,
and she has the IQ of a goldfish on a
good day to goldfish. The runner up worser, Governor Josh
Shapiro of Pennsylvania. Now, look, I get what he's trying
to do here, but it's Pollyanna to the point of ridiculousness. Worse,
(28:35):
it's Pollyanna to the point of John fetterman esque. Remember
that they tried to burn the governor and his family
alive and burn them to death in his home in
the Governor's residence just last April during the holidays, and
he is still both sides political violence in America. Governor
(28:56):
Shapiro writes, quote, it shouldn't be hard to mourn the
loss of the Minnesota Speaker of the House, Melissa Hortman,
after she was gunned down in her bed. It shouldn't
be hard to follow Erica Kirk's eulogy with an amen
and a prayer for her and her family. We have
a crisis of political violence in this country and it
requires all of us to do better every time. No,
(29:19):
we don't. We have a crisis of conservative, fascist, maga
republican political violence in this country. And I will say
this again, the assassination of Charlie Kirk was and is indefensible,
But so was Charlie Kirk. He was a terrible destructive force.
And the sane washing of him calls for the execution
(29:41):
of President Biden. Things like that that he did forcing
kids to watch public hangings, that he called for putting
public hangings on TV. Charlie Kirk called for that Saine washing.
All that is appalling, And I get what Josh Shapiro
is trying to do, but my god, man, the right
wingers tried to burn you to death, and you are
(30:02):
acting like this guy was Saint Charlie of Kirk and
his rage filled wife is Jackie Kennedy. Preach all the
condemn all political violence sermons you want, Governor, but the
right is going to continue to attack physically Democrats and
liberals and you know, our form of government, and as
it turns out, any Republican who disagrees with them, like
(30:25):
the ones in Indiana, and then they will insist that
it's only the liberals who do all the political violence. Governor,
They're gonna do that as they have now for twenty years.
You should not help them. They are doing fine on
this by themselves. Do not join the both sides in parade, Governor,
(30:45):
especially since these are the people who tried to kill you.
But our winner is Howard Lutnik, chief bullshit advisor to Trump.
I mean, there are lots of toadies and there are
lots of liars around Trump, but this guy may be
the champion. I am indebted to my former NBC colleague
Carl Kintenia on this one. It's priceless. As Carl noted
(31:06):
on Face the Nation on April sixth of this year,
Lutnik said, quote, the army of millions and millions of
human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, That
kind of thing is going to come to America. The
army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in
little screws to make iPhones, That kind of thing is
(31:27):
going to come to America. Then Lutnick, same guy, same topic,
goes on CNBC last Thursday, and he says, quote, Remember
Americans don't have millions of people to screw in little
screws in iPhones, but we do have capacity to run robotics.
(31:48):
Remember Americans don't have millions of people to screw in
little screws in iPhones, but we do have capacity to
run robot So Trump's ass kissing bullshit artist is bullshitting
us in both directions. In April, Howard Lutnik promised that
Trump's America would be where millions of us would be
screwing in the little screws to make iPhones. By December,
(32:11):
he is promising that Trump's America will be where millions
of us will not be screwing in the little screws
to make iPhones. The arrogance and the degree to which
this man will say anything to try to make it
seem like Trump isn't screwing this economy into the ground
is seriously astonishing, even in the context of the world
(32:34):
in which we live today. Howard, may I suggest you
screw your little screws in yourself, Lutnik Today's other worst
person in the world. If the name Royal Dahl does
(33:15):
not immediately ring a bell for you. He was the
author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and thus the
creator of Willy Wonka, and he wrote James and the
Giant Peach, and all of his kids books combined have
sold about a quarter of a billion copies Dead since
nineteen ninety. Two years ago, Forbes placed Dall first on
(33:36):
its list of the top earning dead celebrities, ahead of
Prince and Michael Jackson. Royal Dahl made about five hundred
and thirteen million dollars in twenty twenty one, compared to
thirteen million by the late John Lennon. And that is
where the problems began. And if you have not heard
about the problems, the first is Royal Dahl was often,
(33:57):
as somebody on Twitter put it succinctly, he was often
the C word. He was at times anti Semitic, racist, misogynistic,
and cruel, and his writing was at times anti Semitic, racist, misogynistic,
and cruel. None of that has ever really slowed down
his book sales, though, largely because first, kids who read
(34:18):
books are actually smarter than nearly every adult thinks they are.
And second, it seemed then and now that the more
problematic a lot of Doll's characters were, the smarter he
made them. The Umphilumpas of Willy Wonka are not Doll's
finest moments. On the other hand, they do run everything
(34:38):
in the chocolate factory. They know everything about the ticket
winning kids and their foibles. And when Violet turns into
a giant blueberry, and when Veruka gets devoured by squirrels,
it is the Umphilumpas who know how to save them.
So apparently the Umphluopas are doctors, or at least paramedics. Anyway,
(34:59):
the reason Royal Dahl made five hundred and thirteen million
dollars thirty one years after he died was that his
estate sold the rights to the books to Netflix. By then,
the book publishers had already brought in a company of
so called sensitivity readers to rewrite the more troublesome parts
of Dol's work. We're seeing the first results of this now,
and it is literally what George Orwell described in his
(35:22):
novel nineteen eighty four, erasing the past, replacing it with
a new past, and leaving no indication that any editing
or changing was done. While I'm assuming it still says
that in nineteen eighty four, presumably all of that could
be edited out of Orwell and we'd never know, right.
But it's even worse than that, because the edits are
(35:43):
being made not because of some pure if misguided desire
to make changes reflecting the changes in morays and respect
changes even the author might want to make. They're being
done so that the books, according to the publisher, can
continue to be enjoyed by all today, meaning they did
this to literally sell more books. This is not even
(36:04):
about why intentioned censorship. It's about profit. And if all
that were not bad enough, the rewriting of ro al
Dahl has from a quality viewpoint, gone about as well
as the so called restoration of the painting of Jesus
in Spain in twenty twelve. The painting is now known
as monkey Christ or potato Jesus. Apart from the wholesale
(36:27):
elimination of words like fat and ugly, the publishers have
decided to take out references that no kid would ever notice.
She went to India with Rudyard Kipling becomes she went
to California with John Steinbeck. Why. In his story The Witches,
(36:48):
Roul Dahl has the hero believe that all witches are
bald and wear wigs and gloves, and that's a way
to check. Don't be foolish, my grandmother said. You can't
go around pulling the hair of every lady you meet,
even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it
and see what happens. That would be an admonition not
to believe that everybody with a wig is a witch.
(37:09):
It has now been changed to don't be foolish, my
grandmother said. Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why
women might wear wigs, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.
It's like Shakespeare. Now. Look, it is one thing if
you are giving a public reading of Tom Sawyer, and
you may want to drop a couple of words here
(37:30):
and there. I have performed James Thurber's stories since twenty
ten on TV on radio on this podcast in Person,
his epic story by the way, forecasting Trump the greatest
man in the World, is coming up shortly. Thurber's daughter
Rosie offered me the right to edit anything I felt
(37:50):
I needed to edit for time or for taste, and
said there was plenty in there. Her dad would be
mortified by today that he wrote. Letting me edit it, though,
is like saying, hey, you have a heart, so that
means you can perform heart surgery. But the goal in
doing that is to change as little as possible. There
are adjectives that were once perfectly normal and seemingly liberal,
(38:14):
and once thought even to be complimentary that you really
need to just skip, So when you're reading them aloud,
just skip them, but erase them permanently forever from Thurber's books,
when maybe a note to new readers would be sufficient warning. Plus,
if I'm changing anything about Thurber while transforming his work
(38:35):
into a different medium like podcasts, I am necessarily going
to edit things. A movie might leave out nine tenths
of any novel, but just reading a novel aloud might
change something as important as the emphasis on the way
certain words were said from the way the author intended
that emphasis to be. Besides which, all those changes are temporary.
(38:59):
I'm not altering Thurber's text. I'm altering my reading of
his text next. And the same goes for Royal Dahl.
And a lot of people saying this are people who
do not like Royal Dall. Sir Solomon rushed. He wrote,
he was a self confessed anti Semite with pronounced racist leanings,
and he joined in the attack on me back in
(39:20):
nineteen eighty nine. Royal Dahl was no angel. But this
is absurd censorship, puffin books and the doll estate should
be ashamed, because that's the point. If we're going to
edit or otherwise circumscribe every book or author, or film
or producer with a significant problem, we're going to wind
(39:40):
up with a world library of about fifty books and
ten films. I mean, this isn't Florida. And artists, like people,
are rarely all good or all bad, and often they
have huge disturbing flaws which can, in their own way,
teach you what not to do or be in life.
The publishers defended doing this on the premise that Roald
(40:02):
Dahl's works have always been edited and modified, that he
permanently changed the description of those umpah lumpas several times
to make it less offensive. And again that misses the
point he made those changes, not his publishers, not his
literary estate, not you, not me, him. And if you're
(40:23):
wondering why I'm going on so long about this, it's
because this is personal for me. I think I learned
that truth that almost everybody is a mix of good
and bad, often in big, bright, ugly letters, often with
extraordinary self contradictions. I learned all that from Royal Dahl.
Sometime in the second half of March nineteen sixty six,
(40:45):
a letter unlike any other I had seen before arrived
at our little house in the suburbs of New York City,
where my parents packed me off each morning to the
third grade. The words par Avian were printed in the
upper left, and the postmark was from somewhere called Great Missenden,
and the address see was me. It was a letter
(41:08):
from Royal Dahl. I had a number of very special
teachers in my life, but the first of them was
Missus Marjorie Plant, who survived an entire school year of me.
In nineteen sixty five and nineteen sixty six, we sidled
down the hallway to miss Ritz for an hour or
so of math every day, but the rest of the
(41:28):
time we were Missus Plant's class. And when she was
not leading us out to the glorious natural meadow in
the pond just behind the elementary school and teaching us
the name of every plant and every tree and every bird,
she was reading to us, or getting us to read
to her, or one day asking each of us to
name our favorite author. Well, I didn't hesitate. My dad
(41:50):
read to me each night, and it's probable somebody else's
book was first. And I know he later read me
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming, But the first
books for me were Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and
James and the Giant Peach by Royl Doll. And I
don't know how many times Dad read each of them
to me, but I now do know that somehow those
(42:11):
books conveyed to me that books didn't just happen, That
a grown up like my dad had written them deliberately
for kids to read and to listen to. And this
man had clearly included jokes that the kids would get,
but the grown ups didn't seem to notice, and This
(42:32):
was this man's job, the way being a draftsman and
later an architect was my dad's job. That you could
do this and people would pay you. This is how
I understood about this. A thousand other writers and broadcasters
flashed out the details and the specifics for me. But
the man who opened the first door into the world
(42:52):
in which perhaps I could write for a living was
ro Al Dahl. So, Keith, who's your favorite author, Missus Plant,
asked ro Al Dahl. Missus Plant, knowing her and knowing me,
she probably said I knew it, and soon after she
explained that we had an assignment that day. We were
all going to write. Great. I thought, I'll write another book.
(43:14):
I had already written something like forty books in Missus
Plant's class, two or three pages with illustrations, with construction paper, covers,
with staples, with titles. I wasn't just going to be
a writer like Royal Dahl. I already was one. Not
a book today, Keith, she said, I want you all
to write a letter to your favorite author. I know
(43:34):
how to get your letters to your author, so you
don't have to worry about that part. You can ask
them anything you want in the letter you can tell
them anything about yourself, but I especially want you to
tell them why you like their books, and who you
are and how old you are. And on that day
in March nineteen sixty six, my favorite author had written
(43:55):
me back. I had a sense immediately of it being
a special occasion. I believe only one author besides Royal Dahl,
replied to anybody in our class. I do know the
school thought it was a big enough deal to call
the town newspaper to do a story on it. It's
not as if I forgot the story, or the letter
or the sense of wonder at its arrival, either. But
(44:18):
despite the coverage in the weekly Hastings News, it still
seemed like a very private family kind of thing. And
then in twenty ten, somebody told me, maybe it was
the publisher, that the private family thing had made it
into the authorized biography of roy Al Dahl, a book
called Storyteller by Donald Sturrock. He wrote this next part,
(44:41):
I did not. I think it's okay for me to
bother it here, quoting mister Sturrock, his stories were encouraging
children the world over to read books, and that many
of them loved his stories so much that they felt
impelled to write and tell him so. The current rate
of letters from children in the US is between fifty
and sixty a week. He had written to Mike Watkins
(45:01):
in nineteen sixty six. I try to answer them all
with a postcard. Roald was always a diligent and engaging correspondent,
and if he was in the right mood and thought
a child's letter particularly imaginative, he or she would receive
a fuller and more memorable response. When the sports journalist
and television anchorman Keith Olberman was seven years old and
(45:23):
head of maps in his class at school, he wrote
to Dahl from Hastings on Hudson in New York and
told him at some length about his own writing ambitions
and successes. Roald's reply was thoughtful, generous, and full of
gentle ironic humor. My dear Keith, he began, It was
wonderful to receive a letter from a fellow author. It
(45:45):
meant so much more than the usual ordinary message from
a mere reader. As head of maps, you will be
able to calculate very easily what a long way your
letter had to travel in order to reach me in
this little village, thousands of miles The postman, an elderly
fellow who comes on foot, knocked on the door this morning,
said I have a letter from you, from Kay Ulderman
(46:08):
of Hastings, USA. I said, how do you know? He said,
it says so on the envelope. He is a very
inquisitive postman, and he likes to know who is writing
to me. Who is Ulberman, asked the postman. I opened
the letter and read it. He is a writer, I said,
he has written more books than me. Oldraman's parents later
(46:31):
told the local newspaper that the letter had given the
boy the kick of his young life. Missus Ulriman added
that it just about proves that there are still some
very nice people left in this old, beat up world.
If all adults acted with such loving attention to children,
would it not be wonderful? Dahl was quite sincere when
he argued that he thought children alone were decent judges
(46:52):
of whether a book written for them was any good
or not. In nineteen sixty two, he had written to
a child critic of James and the Giant Peach to
tell him that up to now, a whole lot of
grown ups have written reviews, but none of them have
really known what they were talking about, because a grown
up talking about a children's book is like a man
talking about a woman's hat. The author, mister Sterrock not
(47:16):
only put me in the authorized biography of Royal Dall,
he also put me in the index there. I am
right between David Ogilvie, the advertising legend, and Sir Laurence Olivier.
Left out of Sterrock's account and the quotes from my
mother was the fact that mom was a fan of
the actress Patricia Neil, Royal Dahl's wife, and she had
(47:38):
read horror stories about their marriage and about Neil's stroke
and Dol's tough love during her recovery. As I began
to appreciate her point of view and Dall's books at
the same time and his letter to me, I began
to formulate a theory that not everybody was just one thing,
that you could be good and bad and shouldn't be
(47:58):
judged on just half of yourself. Naturally, I wrote my
new pen pal back he had mentioned having a son
about my age. In fact, Theo Dahl had been born
in New York just like I was, but at the
age of four months in his baby carriage, Theo was
hit by a cab, and his injuries were so profound
(48:19):
that for a while he was blind and Royal Dahl
himself had helped to develop a shunt used to drain
swelling in Theo's brain to make his life better and
more worthwhile I did not know any of this when
I mentioned, among other mundating details, that a seven year
old was likely to tell an adult in a letter
that my middle name was Theodore. I also apparently included
(48:42):
some poems I had written. And I know this because
sure enough Rol Dahl wrote back again. This next letter
did not come for nearly a year. My dear Keith.
It begins dated February second, nineteen sixty seven. Your last
letter was a very good one, So were the poems.
(49:03):
Imagine the impact of that from your favorite writer right
after your eighth birthday. But Doll went on, I hope
you will not become a poet when you grow up,
because poets have a terribly hard time earning a living.
I am writing a musical film, he went on, for
Dick van Dyke, based roughly on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
(49:25):
the Flying Motor Car. Could I have mentioned liking this
book by a different author in my letter to him
or did he just decide to announce it to me.
We'll be making it here in England next summer, and
you can go and see it in nineteen sixty eight,
when you are nine years old. You will be impressed
at the things this car is going to do. With
love from Roal Dahl, I'm sure I wrote again. I
(49:50):
can almost remember he did not write back. I do
not recall holding it against him, nor do I now.
I do recall that when I followed his instructions and
went to see his movie. I think, in fact it
was my tenth birthday party in early nineteen sixty nine.
I was disappointed. Too much girl chasing, not enough car flying.
(50:11):
Still almost no one is all good or all bad,
And every new reissue of every Royal Doll book could
include a twenty page treatise about what was bad about
him and the negativities in that book and his other writings,
just so long as it is included instead of rather
than in addition to the nonsensical rewrites that Puffin publishing
(50:34):
is produced. Also, I think it might be appropriate to
mention that though the letters from kids just in the
US just in nineteen sixty six totaled around what twenty
five hundred, he tried to answer them all with a postcard,
or if you were very lucky, a letter, or if
(50:56):
you were very very lucky, two letters, and to mention
forty three years later in his official biography, I've done
(51:19):
all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Most of our countdown music was arranged, produced, and performed
by Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel, our musical directors
who Countdown, and it was produced by TKO Brothers. Mister
Ray was on the guitars, the bass, and the drums.
Mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Our satirical and pithy
musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever,
(51:40):
Nancy Faust. The Olderman theme from ESPN two by Mitch
Warren Davis appears courtesy of ESPN, Inc. And is our
sports music. And some other music arranged and performed by
the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today is my
friend Dennis Leary. Everything else was, as always my fault.
So that's countdown for today. Day three hundred and thirty
(52:03):
of America held hostage again about just one and thirty
three days until the scheduled end of his lame duck
and lame brain term unless he is removed sooner by
Maga and Epstein or Indiana or Anosagnosia or Taile and
All or affordability or the second Strike video. The next
(52:23):
scheduled edition of Countdown is Thursday. Until then, I'm Keith Olberman.
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(52:45):
you get your podcasts
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump's
losing streak has hit twenty seven days, his latest losing streak.
(00:26):
MAGA knows it. The head of the Republican National Committee
knows it. The Wall Street Journal knows it. The Indiana
GOP knows it. The Ukrainians know it. Anybody who saw
his pathetic, credit grabbing, disinformational tweet Saturday night after the
Brown shooting knows it. His own economists know it, the
terrorists know it. Even Trump knows it. Since the House
(00:47):
passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November nineteenth, Trump
has been sinking in quicksand sinking, and not more than
one or two of his more insane, more desperate colleagues
have even gotten close enough to hand him a rope
for fear of being pulled down with him. His losing
(01:07):
streak is today twenty seven days long, his latest losing streak,
and they are beginning to blame him. We are facing
almost certain defeats, says the purulent face of the RNC
Joe Gruders about the midterms. Then, quote, this is an
absolute disaster. Then if that wasn't clear enough, quote there's
(01:31):
no sugarcoating it. This is a pending, looming disaster headed
our way. And then I think, quoting me, quoting the
late football owner Al Davis Gruters, says, the chances are
Republicans will go down, and will go down. Hod just lose, baby,
and boy has Trump been losing. He called affordability a hoax,
(01:55):
got his arm twisted by his economists who know the
last thing it is is a hoax. Tried to give
a speech saying he will fix affordability rather than being
crush under its weight politically, and still could not stop himself.
Could not not mock those advisors, and not mock America,
and not mock his own speech, and not mock affordability again,
(02:18):
and even not mock the charts they gave him, and
not mock Christmas presents. Quote you don't need thirty seven
dollars for your daughter two or three? Is nice, she thinks,
santi the results the next day, the Democrat Eileen Higgins
(02:38):
swamped the MAGA loser in the election for mayor of Miami,
and the Republicans coughed up what was thought to be
a permanently red seat in the state House in Georgia,
and Trump still kept mocking affordability, and Trump even mocked
Trump twenty eighteen, twenty eighteen when he was caught saying
shithole countries, and he denied he said shithole countries, and
(03:01):
he lied and said he didn't say it, and his
people who there and heard him say it, they lied
and said he didn't say it. And now he says
he did say it, and he said it again, and
he said it about Somalia. And I don't know what
it is, but somehow this group he has attacked seems
to have been respected in this country, even by Republicans.
And the shithole in question looks like Trump's mouth. And
(03:26):
then there's nearby Indiana. Indiana is not a hot prospect
to join the new Left, and it never has been.
And yet Mike Pence was from there. And the Indiana
Republicans who stared Trump down when he threatened to cut
off all federal funding if they didn't readdistrict the way
he wanted him to there from there, and they told
(03:48):
him to go f himself. And then the Maga lieutenant governor,
whose name is Micah Beckwith and is exactly as dumb
as that sounds, first posted that threat online then deleted
the post, and then, when confronted by reporters, repeated the
threat almost word for word. Quote, Yes, these conversations happened.
(04:09):
Beckwith said this to Politico. But it's not a threat,
it's an honest conversation about who does the White House
want to partner with. There are forty nine other states
competing for all kinds of projects. Indianatol the White House today.
They don't want to be a good partner to the
Trump administration. And I suspect the White House will look
to partner with other states before US. But did they
(04:33):
actually say, here are projects you could lose out on
if you do not deliver for us. Political Politico asked
them that question, and mister Beckwith answered, quote, yes, unbelievable. Hey, Becky, One,
don't blackmail. Two, don't blackmail people who aren't going to
(04:55):
give in to blackmail. Three, when your blackmail fails, don't
advertise that it's failed. And four, when you realize the
validity of point three and you try to bury your advertisement,
don't go back and advertise it again. Indiana thus becomes
multiple Trump losses. He loses there like three times, and
(05:18):
he also loses wherever he decides the next Indiana is
and he looks, well, what's the opposite of impregnable? He
looks pregnable. And there are multiple, multiple l's, not just Indiana,
these beauty pageant also rans. He's tried to dress up
as US attorneys Julianne Murray in Delaware Gone, the slimy
(05:41):
Elina Haba Gone, Miss Uncongeniality, Lindsay Halligan going seven of them,
by Trump's own admission going. And Trump's replacement evil plan
is to eliminate blue slips in the Senate the way
home state senators keep unqualified nominees from being qualified by
the whores still working for the would be dictator. And
(06:04):
John has responded to this by saying no, and Chuck
Grassley has responded to this by saying, no, that's two
more els in one game. No three l's in one game.
He'd already tried to get them to eliminate the filibuster too,
els el's els marching into the White House just in
time for the construction permits to be denied for the
(06:26):
new combination ballroom and Trump egos storage Hangar, I don't
know what's going to happen to Obamacare, but He's not
gonna gut it or replace it with the latest lame
brained idea for a new scheme. Ran Paul's brilliant plan
for you to buy your insurance on Amazon or at
(06:47):
Sam's Club or at Costco. He Randy, maybe I can
buy my insurance from your neighbor. He seemed to come
out of his problems. Okay, Trump's healthcare plan fell in
the Senate. Maybe he can find a new one on Amazon.
Rdreie Taylor Green remains under the influence of a possibly
(07:07):
transient but definitely tertiary stage case of conscience in open rebellion,
planning one final bid to unseat Speaker Johnson before she
leaves the House. The two thousand dollars tariff checks are gone,
The Doge checks never happened. Buy your own insurance checks
have apparently been replaced by Domino's new avoid thenoid insurance.
(07:30):
Trump's approval numbers are frozen Pizza economy approvals down to
thirty one percent, and if the Obamacare subsidies expire, that
approval will drop below thirty and maybe take his overall
approval with it. Because even his people realize he is
turning this place into a shithole country. The Trump ells
(07:52):
are everywhere. You can't spell kilmar Abrego, Garcia without a
Trump l. The courts have ordered him to let go
of the LA National Guard troops. He's losing in wars.
He said he'd already settled, or would settle in twenty
four hours or twenty four days or twenty four weeks.
(08:14):
Ukraine is further from peace than ever. The Thailand Cambodia war,
Trump said he ended on Friday, resumed on Saturday. His
peace in the Middle East saw the Israelis kill a
top Hamas commander over the weekend. An attack in Syria
three Americans dead, including two service members, and he promised
serious retaliation. And he would have sounded tougher if he'd said,
(08:37):
I'm going to hit you real hard, like I said
at the top. There are so many els, And for
twenty seven days at least, there have been nothing but
els that even Trump has begun to notice. So add
that to the list of els. His ability to believe
his own bullshit is showing holes. He still clings to
(08:59):
this financial imbecility that tariffs will turn the economy into
a money printing machine, even for people not named Trump
or Musk or Bezos. But even he has now told
the Wall Street Journal, Yeah, he doesn't know when that
money printing machine will actually turn on. The Journal interviewed
him Friday in the Oval, and he must have stepped
(09:22):
in some reality and couldn't get it off his shoes,
quoting them. Quoting him, he acknowledged that he couldn't predict
if that would translate into political gains for Republicans next fall.
Asked whether Republicans would lose the House in November, Trump
said quote, I can't tell you. I don't know when
all of this money is going to kick in narrator,
(09:46):
It didn't kick in. Wait, there's more. Quote. I've created
the greatest economy in history, but it may take people
a while to figure all these things out. Oh they've
figured it out, Donald, They figured it out. Saturday night,
when rushing, stumbling, waddling to grab at it, almost literally
climbing over the bodies of dead students to claim he
(10:09):
had found their killer, Trump posted this quote, I have
been briefed on the shooting that took place at Brown
University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene,
the suspect is in custody. God bless the victims and
the families of the victim's exclamation point, F you, buddy,
(10:30):
you've stepped on your dick again. You've stepped on your
tiny dick again. While millions mourned and questioned, what is
wrong with this goddamn country that we throw school kids,
whether toddlers or teenagers, into the volcano like we were
practicing the human sacrifice madness of the Aztecs, just to
protect your right to walk around with a gun. Sure,
(10:51):
what's another bunch of human hearts? What's another bunch of kids?
As long as people know that Trump alone has found
the real killer. Way, what's that you're saying? They haven't
found the real killer. Hadn't found the real killer when
he posted that. So now in just three months, Trump's
bubbleheaded FBI director who didn't know the job meant work.
(11:13):
He thought it only met a free jet. He wrongly
said they'd caught the Charlie Kirk assassin. And now Trump
has made the same mistake and tried to blame his
mistake on others. And when you do that, and when
you post that, you open yourself up to attacks from
the other side, like Chris Murphy attacked on State of
the Union yesterday. He said it opaquely, he said it
(11:34):
with nuance. But make no mistake, this is a US
senator blaming the President of the United States for this
gun attack and the next gun attack quote. Right now,
we don't have the leadership in Washington to do anything
anything to respond to the shooting this weekend. Trump has
(11:54):
been engaged in a pretty deliberate campaign to try to
make violence more likely in this country, and I think
you're unfortunately going to see the results of that on
the streets of America. He's knowingly restoring gun rights to
dangerous people. He is cutting off grants that have bipartisan
support to try to interrupt violence in our cities or
(12:16):
to try to get necessary mental health resources to families
and children in need unquote. As I said earlier, this
has been going on all of these els since at
least the nineteenth of November, when enough MAGA congressmen realized
that only one of these things could happen. They could
(12:36):
continue to help Trump hide the Epstein files, or they
could get re elected. That's why, of all these els,
the biggest Trump loss in the last twenty seven days
may have been the release of those four pictures of
him with Jeffrey Epstein. The photos show nothing. The photos
would therefore normally mean nothing, but they serve as a
(12:58):
reminder that Trump tried to stop you from seeing photos
of him with Epstein, that those photos that were released
weren't part of that tranch in the files. That doesn't matter.
It only raises a kind of instinctive speculation about how
much worse those other Epstein Trump photos might be. It
keeps the Epstein story alive when Trump could have killed
(13:20):
it weeks ago, months ago, even if there was stuff
more incriminating about him than say, a drawn of the
naked woman made out to Epstein that he may or
may not have drawn. But he's sure as shit signed
right over the naughty bits. Instead of moving Epstein off
the table and out of the picture, he's letting it
(13:41):
drip drip drip on him. The photos mean nothing, yet
here they are just another element that says this is
Trump's scandal. The way the constant coverage of Clinton Lewinsky,
even when there was no actual news for days, for weeks,
kept that front of mind for all of the year
nineteen ninety eight. I'll tell you something at MSNBC in
(14:03):
nineteen ninety eight the promo. But used to ask our
staffers every day to give them something, anything, a news
morsel that could turn into a thirty second promo for
tomorrow's show. And on Thursday they used to have to
turn something into a promo for Monday's show. Monday on
the White House in crisis, we were locking in the
(14:26):
crisis four days in advance. We were programming the crisis.
And when we hit Friday, and those files are by
law required to be released, whatever is released will be
another Trump L. And whatever isn't released will be another
Trump L. And lord knows how many l's there will
be if there's something actually startling in the files. And
(14:47):
that's the point. It doesn't have to be a good
scandal to be a gripping scandal. It just has to
have new stories every day. That's what Clinton Lewinsky's true
meaning was. And as Philip Bump pointed out, Trump basically
got elected by knowing this. There wasn't crap actually in
wiki leaks or her emails, except that there was only
(15:10):
something new in them. So in some more losses than
the nineteen sixty two New York mets, or if you
are a current New York Mets fan more losses than
the twenty twenty five twenty six offseason New York Mets.
And maybe it's only one hour a week, but even
Trump knows it. During that hour, and way more than
(15:32):
one hour a week, the Trump media industrial complex knows it.
It's not my habit to quote the insufferable, inexhaustible phony
Peggy Noonan. But when there's a column in the goddamned
Rupert Murdoch goddamned Wall Street Journal titled quote Trump may
be losing his touch, Yeah, I'm quoting it. One hundred
and thirty six words. I swear that's it for this year.
(15:54):
Just one hundred and thirty six words. And don't be
thrown by the imaginary world in which Peggy Noonan lives.
She still thinks Ronald Reagan isn't in hell, and now
she thinks Charlie Kirk was a mediating force inside the
Trump cult. Okay, just go with that, But the other
points she makes are salient and deadly. Quote outside Washington,
(16:20):
mister Trump's base is fighting with itself. America first is
saying I'm not maga conspiracies all over Israel killed Charlie
the assassination of Charlie Kirk, she writes, looks increasingly like
an epical event. Did he understand how much he was
holding together the Trumpian right Without the force of his
(16:43):
mediating presence, they are cracking up percolating below unseen is
the price you pay in time for success? The President's
border triumph, sorry what? The president's border triumph will likely
weaken his and maga's political position. He shut down illegal
immigration on the southern border, which had been more less
(17:05):
open for decades. But it was anger at illegal immigration
noonan rights that kept his base cleaved to him and
allied with each other. Remove the issue that made you,
and you can no longer use it to gain votes
or maintain unity. Unquote Oh no, oh, dear Trump's lost
(17:25):
his touch. God damn shame not going to affect those
midterms and give us enough Democratic congressman to impeach him
and enough Democratic senators to remove him. Is it? Oh?
Really you think so wow? That'll be fun? Let me
quote this RNC blob gruters again, quoting me again, quoting
(17:46):
al Davis again. Republicans will go down and will go
down hobb okay. Two quick media notes The CBS evening
(18:12):
news about Barry Weiss, edited by Barry Weiss, anchored by
Barry Weiss, starring Barry Weiss, is not going so well.
If she had not been put there to do something
bad like this, her stay on this job might be
as long as RONA. Romney's glorious hour and a half
as an MSNBC commentator. It was Brian Steinberg and Variety
(18:35):
who noticed this, and to whom all credit goes, And I'm
just going to quote him and read his story from
Variety that Barry Weiss town hall with Erica Kirk, the
merry widow, the woman who used all the eyeliner left
over after jd Vance got done. No real advertiser was
willing to buy time on it. No real advertiser was
(18:57):
willing to buy time on the CBS television network. Mister
Steinberg writes headline, Big advertisers appear wary of CBS News's
Barryweiss town Hall format during a Saturday night town hall
led by Barry Weiss, the recently named editor in chief
of CBS News, and I believe she liked the article
(19:19):
so far most of Madison Avenue sought an off ramp.
Steinberg writes the News special aired at eight pm on Saturday,
one of the least watch hours in broadcast TV, and
that may have contributed to a relative dearth of top
advertisers appearing to support the show during the hour. Commercial
(19:39):
breaks were largely filled with spots from direct response advertisers,
including the taietary supplement super Beats, the home repair service
HomeServe dot com, and Carfax, a supplier of auto ownership data.
Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS's flagship station in
(20:00):
New York even saw a commercial for Giampet, the terra
cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.
I wonder if CBS will still sprout plant life after
a two weeks, continuing the article quote. A more moneyed
class of sponsors was evident during the first commercial break,
(20:21):
appearing in the nine pm hour on CBS a rebroadcast
of a twenty twenty four episode of forty eight Hours.
Marketers appearing included Amazon, Ferrero Group, and Procter and Gamble. Unquote,
uh oh, Congratsbery Weiss and the Ellisons. You've turned CBS
News into overnights. On superstation WTBS in nineteen seventy six,
(20:46):
got a Ginsu knife collection for sale Airberry. But wait,
what was that again about chiapets? Viewers of the telecast
on WCBS. CBS was flagship station in New York even
saw commercial for Chiapet the terracotta figure that sprout's plant
life after a few weeks. Oh my god, Chia Pet Company,
I'll give you one thousand dollars if you make a
(21:08):
Barry Weiss chia pet. Please, oh please, please, please please please. Meanwhile,
something that a week ago would have outdrawn the Barry
Weiss town Hall with Tammy fay Baker Kirk may now
belong to the Ages as well as Vivid as parts
of the latest Ryan Lizzer response to Olivia Newsy may
(21:29):
have been the whole thing has collapsed under the realization
that actually the only guaranteed audience for Lizz's segments have
been Olivia's other exes. Hey her book first week out,
first publication week, maximum visibility. As you probably have not heard,
(21:53):
her book, the first week sold. With all that publicity,
including the most thorough job of The New York Times
ever missing the lead and the next twenty off leads
in its history, that book sold and sixty five copies
a book that sold five thousand copies the same week,
placed fiftieth among nonfiction sellers. Not great, Bob. So, barring
(22:20):
anything else that might come up later on in this
to which I could add something that is either relevant
or true, I'll bow out here. But I do want
to read one last paragraph, because this is the easiest
way for me to get mister lendsa an answer he
apparently needs. Let me quote him. Quote Olivia, this person
said was starting to tell people that I might kill her.
(22:43):
I tried to explain that Olivia watched a lot of
Law and Order growing up and has an active imagination,
especially when it comes to being killed. She feared that
her mother would kill her. She had told me that
she thought Keith might kill her, and now I have
to assume she told Keith the same thing about me.
Of course, she repeatedly told me that she feared Bobby
would kill her. Now she was saying that I might
(23:06):
kill her. I never heard her say one way or
the other about Mark Sandford's level of interest in killing her.
That's a good line. So many people were out to
kill her, and yet here she was, at thirty one,
somehow very much alive. End quote. Okay, Ryan. I haven't
talked to her since twenty fifteen, and by the way,
(23:27):
every contact I've had with her since twenty fifteen was
about what to do with her clothes or about the
health of what had been our dogs, about which she
had no interest, for which I will never forgive her,
and which I think summarizes her. Once I did post
on Facebook twenty eighteen, maybe that the place in Central
(23:49):
Park that you two guys like to hang out at
was my utter coincidence, right on the path I walked
the dogs every day, and way too near my home,
and it was a miracle we hadn't run into each
other already. So maybe we should all make that our DMZ.
But about the killing her question, exhale Ryan, she never
(24:12):
told me she thought you might kill her. She only
told me she thought you were stalking her. Also of interest,
here a top governor tries to insist Democrats have a
hand in political violence in this country. And this would
just be stupid if this governor weren't a Democrat, and
if he weren't the democratic governor whose fascist haters tried
(24:35):
to burn him and his family alive in their own
home during passover. Worst Persons is next This is Countdown.
This is Countdown with Keith Oberman still ahead on this
(25:11):
edition of Countdown. Sixty five years ago this month, a
little boy named Theo Dall was hit by a New
York City cab while being pushed across the street in
his baby carriage. He was never the same, nor was
his father, who, in part to entertain his stricken son,
wrote a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And
although the next development was not quite on that level
(25:33):
of importance, the writing of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
led me to write to Theo's dad, who was the
legendary both good and bad legendary Roal Doll, to write
him a fan letter, and he wrote back, and he
wrote back again, And these letters are referenced somehow in
Roald Dahl's official biography. This very strange story ahead in
(25:58):
things I promised not to tell first of believe it
or not, there's still more new idiots to talk about.
The roundup of the disagreants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects
specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world.
The runner up to the runner up Bronze, Anna Paulina
(26:18):
Luna the congresswoman from Smolensk. I know, I'm sorry, I
got that wrong from Florida. Problem is she might as
well be and it might as well be Smolensk. The
Russian Embassy in the US social media account has posted
her photo and quote at the invitation by at Rep. Luna,
(26:38):
Ambassador Dartkiev visited her Christmas reception on Capitol Hill. Wonderful
event with warm atmosphere and exceptional hospitality. Continue working to
make Russian American relations great again. Yeah. Sorry, anybody who
thinks we should have great relations with Russia before the
Russians overthrow the Putent dictatorship is to totally loyal to
(27:02):
this country, but really dumb. Not loyal and dumb. Sorry,
Russia is our enemy, but there are degrees of how
truly not you can be. And from the Twitter ex
account of the gadfly Jay in Kiev comes this addendum
to that photo of Luna to whom the Russians gave
their JFK quote files unquote, because why would they ever
(27:26):
give America fake historical records or disinformation? Jay in Kiev
notes and quoting him since August when her and Steve
Whitcoff met some of Putin's representatives at a Miami hotel
owned by Russian business partner of Witcoff. US Congresswoman Anna
Paulina Luna has been a prolific member of the Russian
(27:48):
government's Paid Influencers program, turning her ex timeline into display
case of NonStop Kremlin talking points. Jay in Kiev writes
and continues, what she does isn't illegal. Today she gleefully
met her handler unquote yikes. I don't know if she's
a paid influencer or a paid Influencer's program member. That's
(28:12):
Jay's assertion. I do know she operates under an adopted name.
She was born Anna Paulina Meyerhoffer. Right, your arm is Meyerhoffer,
and she has the IQ of a goldfish on a
good day to goldfish. The runner up worser, Governor Josh
Shapiro of Pennsylvania. Now, look, I get what he's trying
to do here, but it's Pollyanna to the point of ridiculousness. Worse,
(28:35):
it's Pollyanna to the point of John fetterman esque. Remember
that they tried to burn the governor and his family
alive and burn them to death in his home in
the Governor's residence just last April during the holidays, and
he is still both sides political violence in America. Governor
(28:56):
Shapiro writes, quote, it shouldn't be hard to mourn the
loss of the Minnesota Speaker of the House, Melissa Hortman,
after she was gunned down in her bed. It shouldn't
be hard to follow Erica Kirk's eulogy with an amen
and a prayer for her and her family. We have
a crisis of political violence in this country and it
requires all of us to do better every time. No,
(29:19):
we don't. We have a crisis of conservative, fascist, maga
republican political violence in this country. And I will say
this again, the assassination of Charlie Kirk was and is indefensible,
But so was Charlie Kirk. He was a terrible destructive force.
And the sane washing of him calls for the execution
(29:41):
of President Biden. Things like that that he did forcing
kids to watch public hangings, that he called for putting
public hangings on TV. Charlie Kirk called for that Saine washing.
All that is appalling, And I get what Josh Shapiro
is trying to do, but my god, man, the right
wingers tried to burn you to death, and you are
(30:02):
acting like this guy was Saint Charlie of Kirk and
his rage filled wife is Jackie Kennedy. Preach all the
condemn all political violence sermons you want, Governor, but the
right is going to continue to attack physically Democrats and
liberals and you know, our form of government, and as
it turns out, any Republican who disagrees with them, like
(30:25):
the ones in Indiana, and then they will insist that
it's only the liberals who do all the political violence. Governor,
They're gonna do that as they have now for twenty years.
You should not help them. They are doing fine on
this by themselves. Do not join the both sides in parade, Governor,
(30:45):
especially since these are the people who tried to kill you.
But our winner is Howard Lutnik, chief bullshit advisor to Trump.
I mean, there are lots of toadies and there are
lots of liars around Trump, but this guy may be
the champion. I am indebted to my former NBC colleague
Carl Kintenia on this one. It's priceless. As Carl noted
(31:06):
on Face the Nation on April sixth of this year,
Lutnik said, quote, the army of millions and millions of
human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, That
kind of thing is going to come to America. The
army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in
little screws to make iPhones, That kind of thing is
(31:27):
going to come to America. Then Lutnick, same guy, same topic,
goes on CNBC last Thursday, and he says, quote, Remember
Americans don't have millions of people to screw in little
screws in iPhones, but we do have capacity to run robotics.
(31:48):
Remember Americans don't have millions of people to screw in
little screws in iPhones, but we do have capacity to
run robot So Trump's ass kissing bullshit artist is bullshitting
us in both directions. In April, Howard Lutnik promised that
Trump's America would be where millions of us would be
screwing in the little screws to make iPhones. By December,
(32:11):
he is promising that Trump's America will be where millions
of us will not be screwing in the little screws
to make iPhones. The arrogance and the degree to which
this man will say anything to try to make it
seem like Trump isn't screwing this economy into the ground
is seriously astonishing, even in the context of the world
(32:34):
in which we live today. Howard, may I suggest you
screw your little screws in yourself, Lutnik Today's other worst
person in the world. If the name Royal Dahl does
(33:15):
not immediately ring a bell for you. He was the
author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and thus the
creator of Willy Wonka, and he wrote James and the
Giant Peach, and all of his kids books combined have
sold about a quarter of a billion copies Dead since
nineteen ninety. Two years ago, Forbes placed Dall first on
(33:36):
its list of the top earning dead celebrities, ahead of
Prince and Michael Jackson. Royal Dahl made about five hundred
and thirteen million dollars in twenty twenty one, compared to
thirteen million by the late John Lennon. And that is
where the problems began. And if you have not heard
about the problems, the first is Royal Dahl was often,
(33:57):
as somebody on Twitter put it succinctly, he was often
the C word. He was at times anti Semitic, racist, misogynistic,
and cruel, and his writing was at times anti Semitic, racist, misogynistic,
and cruel. None of that has ever really slowed down
his book sales, though, largely because first, kids who read
(34:18):
books are actually smarter than nearly every adult thinks they are.
And second, it seemed then and now that the more
problematic a lot of Doll's characters were, the smarter he
made them. The Umphilumpas of Willy Wonka are not Doll's
finest moments. On the other hand, they do run everything
(34:38):
in the chocolate factory. They know everything about the ticket
winning kids and their foibles. And when Violet turns into
a giant blueberry, and when Veruka gets devoured by squirrels,
it is the Umphilumpas who know how to save them.
So apparently the Umphluopas are doctors, or at least paramedics. Anyway,
(34:59):
the reason Royal Dahl made five hundred and thirteen million
dollars thirty one years after he died was that his
estate sold the rights to the books to Netflix. By then,
the book publishers had already brought in a company of
so called sensitivity readers to rewrite the more troublesome parts
of Dol's work. We're seeing the first results of this now,
and it is literally what George Orwell described in his
(35:22):
novel nineteen eighty four, erasing the past, replacing it with
a new past, and leaving no indication that any editing
or changing was done. While I'm assuming it still says
that in nineteen eighty four, presumably all of that could
be edited out of Orwell and we'd never know, right.
But it's even worse than that, because the edits are
(35:43):
being made not because of some pure if misguided desire
to make changes reflecting the changes in morays and respect
changes even the author might want to make. They're being
done so that the books, according to the publisher, can
continue to be enjoyed by all today, meaning they did
this to literally sell more books. This is not even
(36:04):
about why intentioned censorship. It's about profit. And if all
that were not bad enough, the rewriting of ro al
Dahl has from a quality viewpoint, gone about as well
as the so called restoration of the painting of Jesus
in Spain in twenty twelve. The painting is now known
as monkey Christ or potato Jesus. Apart from the wholesale
(36:27):
elimination of words like fat and ugly, the publishers have
decided to take out references that no kid would ever notice.
She went to India with Rudyard Kipling becomes she went
to California with John Steinbeck. Why. In his story The Witches,
(36:48):
Roul Dahl has the hero believe that all witches are
bald and wear wigs and gloves, and that's a way
to check. Don't be foolish, my grandmother said. You can't
go around pulling the hair of every lady you meet,
even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it
and see what happens. That would be an admonition not
to believe that everybody with a wig is a witch.
(37:09):
It has now been changed to don't be foolish, my
grandmother said. Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why
women might wear wigs, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.
It's like Shakespeare. Now. Look, it is one thing if
you are giving a public reading of Tom Sawyer, and
you may want to drop a couple of words here
(37:30):
and there. I have performed James Thurber's stories since twenty
ten on TV on radio on this podcast in Person,
his epic story by the way, forecasting Trump the greatest
man in the World, is coming up shortly. Thurber's daughter
Rosie offered me the right to edit anything I felt
(37:50):
I needed to edit for time or for taste, and
said there was plenty in there. Her dad would be
mortified by today that he wrote. Letting me edit it, though,
is like saying, hey, you have a heart, so that
means you can perform heart surgery. But the goal in
doing that is to change as little as possible. There
are adjectives that were once perfectly normal and seemingly liberal,
(38:14):
and once thought even to be complimentary that you really
need to just skip, So when you're reading them aloud,
just skip them, but erase them permanently forever from Thurber's books,
when maybe a note to new readers would be sufficient warning. Plus,
if I'm changing anything about Thurber while transforming his work
(38:35):
into a different medium like podcasts, I am necessarily going
to edit things. A movie might leave out nine tenths
of any novel, but just reading a novel aloud might
change something as important as the emphasis on the way
certain words were said from the way the author intended
that emphasis to be. Besides which, all those changes are temporary.
(38:59):
I'm not altering Thurber's text. I'm altering my reading of
his text next. And the same goes for Royal Dahl.
And a lot of people saying this are people who
do not like Royal Dall. Sir Solomon rushed. He wrote,
he was a self confessed anti Semite with pronounced racist leanings,
and he joined in the attack on me back in
(39:20):
nineteen eighty nine. Royal Dahl was no angel. But this
is absurd censorship, puffin books and the doll estate should
be ashamed, because that's the point. If we're going to
edit or otherwise circumscribe every book or author, or film
or producer with a significant problem, we're going to wind
(39:40):
up with a world library of about fifty books and
ten films. I mean, this isn't Florida. And artists, like people,
are rarely all good or all bad, and often they
have huge disturbing flaws which can, in their own way,
teach you what not to do or be in life.
The publishers defended doing this on the premise that Roald
(40:02):
Dahl's works have always been edited and modified, that he
permanently changed the description of those umpah lumpas several times
to make it less offensive. And again that misses the
point he made those changes, not his publishers, not his
literary estate, not you, not me, him. And if you're
(40:23):
wondering why I'm going on so long about this, it's
because this is personal for me. I think I learned
that truth that almost everybody is a mix of good
and bad, often in big, bright, ugly letters, often with
extraordinary self contradictions. I learned all that from Royal Dahl.
Sometime in the second half of March nineteen sixty six,
(40:45):
a letter unlike any other I had seen before arrived
at our little house in the suburbs of New York City,
where my parents packed me off each morning to the
third grade. The words par Avian were printed in the
upper left, and the postmark was from somewhere called Great Missenden,
and the address see was me. It was a letter
(41:08):
from Royal Dahl. I had a number of very special
teachers in my life, but the first of them was
Missus Marjorie Plant, who survived an entire school year of me.
In nineteen sixty five and nineteen sixty six, we sidled
down the hallway to miss Ritz for an hour or
so of math every day, but the rest of the
(41:28):
time we were Missus Plant's class. And when she was
not leading us out to the glorious natural meadow in
the pond just behind the elementary school and teaching us
the name of every plant and every tree and every bird,
she was reading to us, or getting us to read
to her, or one day asking each of us to
name our favorite author. Well, I didn't hesitate. My dad
(41:50):
read to me each night, and it's probable somebody else's
book was first. And I know he later read me
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming, But the first
books for me were Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and
James and the Giant Peach by Royl Doll. And I
don't know how many times Dad read each of them
to me, but I now do know that somehow those
(42:11):
books conveyed to me that books didn't just happen, That
a grown up like my dad had written them deliberately
for kids to read and to listen to. And this
man had clearly included jokes that the kids would get,
but the grown ups didn't seem to notice, and This
(42:32):
was this man's job, the way being a draftsman and
later an architect was my dad's job. That you could
do this and people would pay you. This is how
I understood about this. A thousand other writers and broadcasters
flashed out the details and the specifics for me. But
the man who opened the first door into the world
(42:52):
in which perhaps I could write for a living was
ro Al Dahl. So, Keith, who's your favorite author, Missus Plant,
asked ro Al Dahl. Missus Plant, knowing her and knowing me,
she probably said I knew it, and soon after she
explained that we had an assignment that day. We were
all going to write. Great. I thought, I'll write another book.
(43:14):
I had already written something like forty books in Missus
Plant's class, two or three pages with illustrations, with construction paper, covers,
with staples, with titles. I wasn't just going to be
a writer like Royal Dahl. I already was one. Not
a book today, Keith, she said, I want you all
to write a letter to your favorite author. I know
(43:34):
how to get your letters to your author, so you
don't have to worry about that part. You can ask
them anything you want in the letter you can tell
them anything about yourself, but I especially want you to
tell them why you like their books, and who you
are and how old you are. And on that day
in March nineteen sixty six, my favorite author had written
(43:55):
me back. I had a sense immediately of it being
a special occasion. I believe only one author besides Royal Dahl,
replied to anybody in our class. I do know the
school thought it was a big enough deal to call
the town newspaper to do a story on it. It's
not as if I forgot the story, or the letter
or the sense of wonder at its arrival, either. But
(44:18):
despite the coverage in the weekly Hastings News, it still
seemed like a very private family kind of thing. And
then in twenty ten, somebody told me, maybe it was
the publisher, that the private family thing had made it
into the authorized biography of roy Al Dahl, a book
called Storyteller by Donald Sturrock. He wrote this next part,
(44:41):
I did not. I think it's okay for me to
bother it here, quoting mister Sturrock, his stories were encouraging
children the world over to read books, and that many
of them loved his stories so much that they felt
impelled to write and tell him so. The current rate
of letters from children in the US is between fifty
and sixty a week. He had written to Mike Watkins
(45:01):
in nineteen sixty six. I try to answer them all
with a postcard. Roald was always a diligent and engaging correspondent,
and if he was in the right mood and thought
a child's letter particularly imaginative, he or she would receive
a fuller and more memorable response. When the sports journalist
and television anchorman Keith Olberman was seven years old and
(45:23):
head of maps in his class at school, he wrote
to Dahl from Hastings on Hudson in New York and
told him at some length about his own writing ambitions
and successes. Roald's reply was thoughtful, generous, and full of
gentle ironic humor. My dear Keith, he began, It was
wonderful to receive a letter from a fellow author. It
(45:45):
meant so much more than the usual ordinary message from
a mere reader. As head of maps, you will be
able to calculate very easily what a long way your
letter had to travel in order to reach me in
this little village, thousands of miles The postman, an elderly
fellow who comes on foot, knocked on the door this morning,
said I have a letter from you, from Kay Ulderman
(46:08):
of Hastings, USA. I said, how do you know? He said,
it says so on the envelope. He is a very
inquisitive postman, and he likes to know who is writing
to me. Who is Ulberman, asked the postman. I opened
the letter and read it. He is a writer, I said,
he has written more books than me. Oldraman's parents later
(46:31):
told the local newspaper that the letter had given the
boy the kick of his young life. Missus Ulriman added
that it just about proves that there are still some
very nice people left in this old, beat up world.
If all adults acted with such loving attention to children,
would it not be wonderful? Dahl was quite sincere when
he argued that he thought children alone were decent judges
(46:52):
of whether a book written for them was any good
or not. In nineteen sixty two, he had written to
a child critic of James and the Giant Peach to
tell him that up to now, a whole lot of
grown ups have written reviews, but none of them have
really known what they were talking about, because a grown
up talking about a children's book is like a man
talking about a woman's hat. The author, mister Sterrock not
(47:16):
only put me in the authorized biography of Royal Dall,
he also put me in the index there. I am
right between David Ogilvie, the advertising legend, and Sir Laurence Olivier.
Left out of Sterrock's account and the quotes from my
mother was the fact that mom was a fan of
the actress Patricia Neil, Royal Dahl's wife, and she had
(47:38):
read horror stories about their marriage and about Neil's stroke
and Dol's tough love during her recovery. As I began
to appreciate her point of view and Dall's books at
the same time and his letter to me, I began
to formulate a theory that not everybody was just one thing,
that you could be good and bad and shouldn't be
(47:58):
judged on just half of yourself. Naturally, I wrote my
new pen pal back he had mentioned having a son
about my age. In fact, Theo Dahl had been born
in New York just like I was, but at the
age of four months in his baby carriage, Theo was
hit by a cab, and his injuries were so profound
(48:19):
that for a while he was blind and Royal Dahl
himself had helped to develop a shunt used to drain
swelling in Theo's brain to make his life better and
more worthwhile I did not know any of this when
I mentioned, among other mundating details, that a seven year
old was likely to tell an adult in a letter
that my middle name was Theodore. I also apparently included
(48:42):
some poems I had written. And I know this because
sure enough Rol Dahl wrote back again. This next letter
did not come for nearly a year. My dear Keith.
It begins dated February second, nineteen sixty seven. Your last
letter was a very good one, So were the poems.
(49:03):
Imagine the impact of that from your favorite writer right
after your eighth birthday. But Doll went on, I hope
you will not become a poet when you grow up,
because poets have a terribly hard time earning a living.
I am writing a musical film, he went on, for
Dick van Dyke, based roughly on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
(49:25):
the Flying Motor Car. Could I have mentioned liking this
book by a different author in my letter to him
or did he just decide to announce it to me.
We'll be making it here in England next summer, and
you can go and see it in nineteen sixty eight,
when you are nine years old. You will be impressed
at the things this car is going to do. With
love from Roal Dahl, I'm sure I wrote again. I
(49:50):
can almost remember he did not write back. I do
not recall holding it against him, nor do I now.
I do recall that when I followed his instructions and
went to see his movie. I think, in fact it
was my tenth birthday party in early nineteen sixty nine.
I was disappointed. Too much girl chasing, not enough car flying.
(50:11):
Still almost no one is all good or all bad,
And every new reissue of every Royal Doll book could
include a twenty page treatise about what was bad about
him and the negativities in that book and his other writings,
just so long as it is included instead of rather
than in addition to the nonsensical rewrites that Puffin publishing
(50:34):
is produced. Also, I think it might be appropriate to
mention that though the letters from kids just in the
US just in nineteen sixty six totaled around what twenty
five hundred, he tried to answer them all with a postcard,
or if you were very lucky, a letter, or if
(50:56):
you were very very lucky, two letters, and to mention
forty three years later in his official biography, I've done
(51:19):
all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Most of our countdown music was arranged, produced, and performed
by Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel, our musical directors
who Countdown, and it was produced by TKO Brothers. Mister
Ray was on the guitars, the bass, and the drums.
Mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Our satirical and pithy
musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever,
(51:40):
Nancy Faust. The Olderman theme from ESPN two by Mitch
Warren Davis appears courtesy of ESPN, Inc. And is our
sports music. And some other music arranged and performed by
the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today is my
friend Dennis Leary. Everything else was, as always my fault.
So that's countdown for today. Day three hundred and thirty
(52:03):
of America held hostage again about just one and thirty
three days until the scheduled end of his lame duck
and lame brain term unless he is removed sooner by
Maga and Epstein or Indiana or Anosagnosia or Taile and
All or affordability or the second Strike video. The next
(52:23):
scheduled edition of Countdown is Thursday. Until then, I'm Keith Olberman.
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(52:45):
you get your podcasts
Host
Keith Olbermann
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