June 13, 2024 • 45 mins
SEASON 2 EPISODE 193: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I have no use for Merrick Garland, in large part because he is one of those people who would never think to do this, and never realize that his Republican counterpart would do it in a heartbeat. Found in Contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena, as rammed through by Jim Jordan, who BEGAN to ignore a Congressional subpoena two years and a month ago? Garland should get a grand jury to indict Jordan TODAY.
LET THE ASS-KISSING BEGIN: Trump goes to Capitol Hill for the first time since his attempted coup. Just to ratchet up the imagery, he'll be at the Capitol Hill Club, which is where the still undiscovered terrorist left one of his/her pipe bombs the night before.
COULD SCOTUS DECIDE TODAY? It is to issue decisions today and tomorrow. One of them may be about Trump's imaginary "Presidential Immunity." Or not. Or maybe they'll keep it a secret. Or run it up a flag poll to see who'll salute. Another bid to make them follow SOME rules has been vetoed by Lindsey Graham.
AND IN MEMORY OF MY FRIEND HOWARD FINEMAN: There is a tiny silver lining in Howard's story, which he honored me by sharing with me since his diagnosis and prognosis 18 months ago. He was with me from literally the HOUR my political career began through last Wednesday when his "intro" to the B-Block last ran. He was brilliant, supportive, honest, indefatigable, funny, beloved, and I will tell you why his fight made our sadness just a little easier to endure.
B-Block (25:14) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: So she felt she had to tell everybody to stop calling Jill Biden "Hunter Biden's mother" because she wasn't his biological mother. Someone wrote - and I could not find a clip to confirm this - that she then implied that when the President referred to his wife, and to Hunter as "their son" it was a sign of dementia.
So we need to talk about what's wrong with Katy Tur.
We'll start with the fact that Katy is herself the step-mother to two children. I have known that families and motherhood have been issues for her since we met in 2006, even before we lived together. But to drag this onto the air - onto news coverage - is unforgivable. It's time for MSNBC to find somebody else.
C-Block (45:02) GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK
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. My
friend and colleague of twenty six years, Howard Feinneman has died,
(00:26):
and I have much to tell you about him, and
I will do so. But the journalist in Howard Feyneman
would kick me in the shins if I led with
his passing instead of with the alice through the looking glass.
News that the head of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan,
has managed to get the Attorney General of the United States,
Merrick Garland, held in contempt of Congress for ignoring a
(00:49):
House subpoena, even though it is now exactly seven hundred
and sixty four days, two years and a month that
Jim Jordan himself has been ignoring a House subpoena. I
have no use for Merrick Garland, and in part that
is because Merrick Garland would never think of doing what
(01:10):
he should do today, what he should do right now,
which is to seek today and gain today and announce
today the indictment of Jim Jordan for contempt of Congress.
We are metaphorically at war with these fascists who live
(01:31):
among us, and who have decades ago jennisoned any standards
or morality, have embraced only cheating, have used the legal
system for purely political purposes as long ago as the
Ken Star investigation of Bill Clinton and the illegal publication
of Clinton's videotape grand jury testimony a quarter century ago.
(01:55):
They created what they have now named law fair. They
created it in a preceding century, and they are pretending
that they are its victims when they are its inventors
and manipulators, when they are the criminals and the corrupted,
remorseless authoritarians. When any time they lie that they are
(02:17):
not behaving that way, they are pretending solely because their
base now expects them to pretend and lie, and only
expects of them a well crafted lie they can hold
on to. And there is no easier to digest proof
of this than just the last two morally bankrupt years
(02:42):
out of the morally bankrupt life of Jim Jordan and Merrick.
Garland should announce charges against him today now, and if
he doesn't think so, and he doesn't, Garland should just
change the names in this equation around and make the
(03:03):
Attorney General Mike Davis the Trump lunatic, and make the
chairman Jamie Raskin and ask what the Trumpsts would do
in the hypothetical future, and the answer is Davis would
have had Raskin indicted and arrested or just arrested, screw
bothering with an indictment or a trial just arrested seven
(03:26):
hundred and sixty four days ago. The House Republicans did
this yesterday because they and Trump's Republican Senate slaves are
set to promise fealty to Trump at meetings today in Washington.
It is a relief they do not have to offer
him his weight in gold, as if there were that
(03:51):
much gold. Fox reports that for his first trip to
Capitol Hill since his attempted coup on January sixth, Trump
will be at the Capitol Hill Club, and boy, they
sure amp the symbol up to eleven. This time. It
was right between the Republican National Committee headquarters and the
(04:12):
very same Capitol Hill Club that one of the pipe
bombs was left the night before January sixth by a
still unidentified mass murderer wannabe March. Of course, by the
(04:51):
time of those kiss the ass meetings between Trump and
the Republicans on Capitol Hill, America may have figuratively already
been blown up. The Supreme Court will issue rulings on
pending cases like oh, maybe the Trump's fabricated monarchical concept
of quote presidential immunity. We don't know which cases the
(05:13):
Court will rule on today, We don't know when. We
do know they scheduled two days for publishing decisions, which
is an unusual step for them. And yes, you're right,
Sam Alito, tomorrow is Flag Day. Why do you ask
if you were hoping that somehow Democrats would get a
(05:35):
first step towards mandatory Supreme Court ethics codes through on
unanimous consent. Oh well, why did you think that? Secondly,
guess which Trump whore stepped up to proudly stop that,
Lindsey Graham. Still more ripples in the pool of the
(05:56):
conviction of elderly first offender j. Trump. New Jersey's Attorney
General and the Division of Alcoholic Beverage ConTroll There are
now reviewing the liquor licenses at the three Trump owned
golf courses. Quote. No license of any class shall be
issued to any person under the age of eighteen years,
(06:18):
or to any person who has been convicted of a
crime involving moral turpitude, reads Jersey state law. The alcoholic
Beverage Control Division guidebook offers a definition quote a serious
crime from the viewpoint of society in general, and usually
contains elements of dishonesty, fraud, or depravity. Dishonesty, fraud, or depravity.
(06:47):
They got you there, don And just one other note.
June thirteenth, This is so two weeks from tonight is
the first Biden Trump debate, the one at CNN in Atlanta,
which means Trump now has less than fourteen days to
(07:08):
choose the excuse for backing out that he thinks we'll
make it look most like Biden was actually the one
backing out. This is countdown with Keith Oberman. That was
(07:32):
my friend Howard Fineman, who died yesterday after And it
is a cliche a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. This
is one of the worst of the diseases. And I
will tell you the extraordinary story of Howard versus pancreatic
cancer and how despite the outcome, Howard won at length.
(07:53):
In a moment, Howard Fineman told me in the middle
of January last year, twenty twenty three, that he had
been diagnosed that they had found pancreatic cancer during another surgery.
And that they had given him four to six months
to live, and he was writing and then talking to
me to say goodbye. And he died yesterday, having survived
(08:16):
the disease and survived it extraordinarily well for eighteen months.
But let me tell that story in the correct chronological order.
About a week before my thirty ninth birthday in nineteen
ninety eight, when I was the unhappy new host of
a show on MSNBC called The Big Show, and we
did things like this. I was in Hollywood, in Burbank,
(08:39):
I think, on the set of Third Rock from the Sun,
about to interview its lead actor, the great actor John Lithgow,
when the producer of the show came to me and said, oh,
by the way, slight change of plans. And I know
I've told this story before, slight change of plans. We
are going to instead be doing a talkback with Tim
Russert because the president may resign, and then we'll do
(09:01):
lithgo and we'll we'll tape lithgo now and we'll get
that out of the way, but we're going to do
this first. And I went say that again. He went,
what will tape lifth go now? He later became the
president of MSNBC. I actually had to say to him, no, no, no, no,
not the part about taping the actor. What was that
about the president resigning? Suffice to say, shortly thereafter, I
was on the air with the top ranked person from
(09:23):
Newsweek who would go on our air because our show
was nothing. We had perhaps one hundred thousand viewers a night.
Within a week we would have a million. The man
from Newsweek who consented to come on with the Big
Show with Keith Olberman then in its I guess third
month on the air, not drawing any viewers, was named
Howard Feinneman. He was one of the political writers, and
(09:46):
he was, if I remember correctly, if not the first guest,
because the first guest was Tim Russert, but the first
one to analyze what we were dealing with was Howard Feineman.
I don't know that he knew me, other than perhaps
from ESPN. I did not know him. We immediately hit
it off. At some point during the interview he laughed
(10:06):
at something I said, and soon we were bringing on
Howard Feinman as often as we could, because Howard had
a unique capacity to not only tell you the facts
of a story, what was actually out there to that minute,
but he could then assess what that probably meant in
the next week, month, year to these key people involved
(10:29):
in it. And then if you wanted him to to
express some sort of historical perspective or analysis of the
pasts of the people involved in this case, Bill Clinton,
Knut Gingrich, ken Starr, whoever you needed to know about.
If he didn't already know, give him twenty minutes and
he would have found it out from people that he trusted,
(10:49):
who knew the individuals. He was an all purpose all
star for us. And as I began to become disenchanted
with the journalism surrounding that story, the person who told
me I was right when everybody else covered the goddamned
Clinton Lewinsky story insisted this was the worst thing that
had happened in human history and we needed to cover
(11:12):
it twenty four hours a day. And I said, sounds
like they're trying to shoot the proverbial fly with an
atomic bomb. The one person who agreed with me from
the beginning was Howard Feyneman, who said, I can't go
full bore into this the way you are saying it,
(11:32):
but I will backstop you anywhere I can say what
you feel, and I will support what you say because
you are right. Do not think I am somehow criticizing
you by not going yes, You're absolutely right. This is
insane and illegal, and it is Newt Gingrich trying to
become president of the United States because he really thinks
it can happen. But that's what he's doing, needless to say.
(11:56):
As I became more and more disenchanted with the story,
Howard Feinneman became more and more valuable to me as
a friend, and I talked to him more. Were often
off the air, and he was one of the few
bright spots of a long year in which I had
to cover that story while I was trying to extricate
myself from a company that could not understand why I
(12:17):
would want to leave a show that now had an
audience of fifty or sixty times what it had when
it began. When all this at NBC News was available
to me, if I just stuck with the story and
kept telling it, Howard Feineman got it. Howard Feieman was
an old school newsman from Newsweek, and he'd been a
great local reporter in Louisville and was a master of
(12:37):
Kentucky politics. If you wanted to know about the Mitch
McConnell of eighteen eighty seven, he would know, and he
knew everything about Pittsburgh from where he was. At the end,
I finally extricated myself from this, and again one of
the few people who called on the last day, because
the NBC people were all mad at me, one of
the few people who called me the last day to
(13:00):
say goodbye was Howard Feineman. Not long after I left
NBC in nineteen ninety eight and went to Fox Sports,
a box showed up on my desk on the Fox
office in Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. It was the
size of a baseball, and I opened it up in
much to my surprise, it was a baseball. It was
an autographed baseball, signed by all of the regulars on
(13:24):
the MSNBC show The Big Show, including Howard. A souvenir
he said, or if you really don't want to remember
any of it, just throw it through the window. For
a couple of years, as I went back into sports,
I heard about Howard and heard from Howard. Occasionally. I
get a letter, saw you on the World Series, saw
(13:44):
at the All Star Game, saw at the Super Bowl whatever.
Always stayed in touch, and not stayed in touch because
he thought, well, he's going to go back into politics
someday and this will be my access to television. No,
he stayed in touch. Howard stayed in touch with everybody.
Howard was one of the original networkers in the best
possible sense of that word. If you were in news
(14:07):
and you did not know Howard Feineman and you did
not know he was a good guy, guess what, I
don't think you were in news the first or second time.
I appeared as a fill in host on MSNBC in
two thousand and three as a little gratuitous mend some
fences throwaway when I went back to what was supposed
to be an NBC Sports Olympic hosting job at the
(14:30):
two thousand and four Summer Olympics in Greece. I went
over and did a couple of shows as a fill
in for Jerry Nackman, who was very sick, in fact,
fatally sick. Got a call from Howard Fyeman in the office,
My god, you're back. What happened? He wanted to hear
the whole story, and he wanted to come on. Although
we didn't cover much politics on that show, but soon
we would cover politics again because then I came back
(14:52):
to MSNBC with the Countdown program, and Howard was the
first person I asked them to make an arrangement with
to be a regular contributor to the show. And as
Howard would say, he was not a television great. He
did not have the sexiest stories, he did not have
the hottest takes. But as I'm referenced earlier, whatever you
(15:12):
needed him to talk about, he knew it, and what
he did not know, and sometimes what he already thought
he knew. He would go and research fresh just to
make sure that he was giving you his best. Howard Feineman,
I in fact did approach him when I left MSNBC
(15:34):
in twenty eleven after they breached my contract and I
went over to Current TV for a lot of money.
I approached him about joining me there, about becoming a
contributor or perhaps full time, and he said, no, I
have something else I'm working on. I'll be probably leaving
in a year or two, And sure enough he had,
and he was one of the first people to recognize this.
(15:55):
He was a by this point star at Newsweek, and
he realized that Newsweek's shelf life was not very long.
In fact, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, all the great
news organizations of the early twenty tens, they were not
going to make it. Howard took a job basically running
Huffington Post, and everybody went, he's going to go do
(16:18):
something on the computer. Guess who was right there. There's
not only no longer copies of Newsweek on newsstands in
this country, there are no longer any newsstands on this country.
Howard Fineman saw it coming old school, and yet one
of those few who saw the future coming. All this time,
(16:42):
I stayed in touch with Howard Feinneman off and on irregularly,
sometimes bursts of conversation, phone calls, running into him somewhere,
sometimes a text, sometimes nothing for a year and then,
and I mentioned that my first contact with him was
just before my thirty ninth birthday, just before my sixty
(17:04):
fourth birthday. So in January of last year, twenty twenty three,
I got an email from Howard and it was short,
and it was sweet, and it ended with the word love.
He'd had an operation. Then. I don't think I'm telling
too much out of school, especially since Howard said when
I'm gone, you can say anything you want about me,
(17:25):
You can tell any details you want, because he won.
And I'm getting to that. They had brought him in
for surgery of some kind, and when he awoke, he
was told he had pancreatic cancer. He had four to
six months to live. He said, he cherished our friendship.
(17:49):
He was sorry to shock me goodbye. Well not quite. Uh,
sometime in the middle of early spring, if that makes
any sense. So sometime in late March or early April
of last year, I called him or he called me,
(18:12):
I don't remember which, and I said, well, how how
are you? He goes, I'm I'm surprisingly well, he said.
I never really knew what that meant until now. I've
been sitting here waiting for it to start, and it
it hasn't started yet. And I just got back from
my doctor and they haven't. They haven't found any more
any more cancer. It's it's still there, but it hasn't
(18:36):
moved or gotten worse. Or In May, another conversation about
the same thing. July fourth, he was planning a trip
to New York. Did I have any time? Yes, I
think I do. August September, mind you, he was supposed
to be dead at the latest by June, or maybe July.
(19:00):
I think it was August of last year when he
said his kids had gotten him at T shirt that
read outlier, and they went through the whole logic of
the thing. If the average survival time for a diagnosis
of advanced pancreatic cancer is four to six months, well
to get that number. There's some people who heartbreakingly don't
(19:23):
make it a month, and then there are the other
ones who go on for a long time. And as
Howard said, I guess I'm one of those. He traveled.
He went to see things, He went to see people,
He went to visits. He went to Pittsburgh, he went
to Kentucky. He went to New York to see his
son who was a producer at MSNBC. He went everywhere.
(19:50):
The holidays came and went last year and he was
feeling fine February doing great, and he has now survived
twice as long as they said he might. In March
came the first bad sign. Quick texts say hello. I said,
(20:10):
how are you feeling? And he said fine, there's no
pain or anything, but I'm beginning to fade. Well that
was the sign. Howard Feinneman died after a long battle
with pancreatic cancer. He died a year after what they
had told him would be the longest he would survive.
(20:31):
He played all that time with house money, and I
can tell you without fear of contradiction, that he knew
it and was rapturous about it, as were all of
us who considered ourselves having the privilege to be his friend.
He beat the system, he beat the pancreatic cancer. If
you accept the premise of the memento mora, we're all
(20:53):
going to die. If you accept that premise, longevity is
in fact victory. And when you are told you have
maybe six months, mind you that was the high end,
and you last for eighteen. When you treble the score,
you have won. None of us. And my heartfelt condolences
(21:14):
go out to his son Nick, and his wife Amy
and everybody in the Fineman family. But all of us
had some sense of goddamn it, Howard, you pulled this off. Congratulations.
So this is an awful time, and yes, it is
(21:36):
an awful shock to those of us who were his friends.
On the other hand, there is still that little corner
of it in which we're kind of kind of laughing
with him. I still have that autograph Baseball. It's still
(21:58):
on my desk, along with all of my memories of
Howard Feyneman, Pittsburgh Pirates fan. Thank you, Howard, from the
sublime to the ridiculous. I guess I'm going to have
(22:18):
to talk about Katie Turr again. I'll do that next.
I guess this counts as another episode of things I
promised not to tell, honest to goodness, and I know
this will not sound like me, but I am getting
(22:39):
tired of talking about my ex living girlfriend Katie Terr,
as you probably know. On the air, at the announcement
of the guilty verdict in the Hunter Biden case on Tuesday,
Katie Urr on MSNBC emphasized that Jill Biden, who flew
(23:02):
to Delaware to be at the trial, was not, as
she put it, Hunter Biden's birth mother. The wrath of
anger from people who have mothers who may not be
biologically their mother, their birth mother. There might be some
(23:22):
other consideration involved in this. The wrath of people for
whom that is true has actually, I think, been exceeded
by the wrath of people for whom that is not true,
and who are just offended by that remark, the latest
in a series of indefensible remarks from a woman who
I once loved, who proposed herself as the mother of
(23:45):
my children. So this issue of motherhood, as much as
I really am tired of talking about her and the
things that have happened to her and have changed her
in the last decade, I don't feel like I have
any option but to talk to you about them, because
this issue of motherhood is essential to the history of
(24:06):
my relationship with her, and I would argue it is
essential to her history. And I think things have escalated
or decomposed to the point where there is no rationale
for continuing her career as an anchor, if it has
anything to do with politics in this country. Something has
(24:28):
warped her perception of reality and the reality we are in,
and the frankly reality of the network she is on.
MSNBC is not supposed to be a liberal network. It
is supposed to be a true network. That these things
tend to overlap a lot is actually coincidental. But she
(24:48):
seems to be rebelling against reality, and it is come
to the fore now. It was also described what she
said on the air on Tuesday, and I did not
hear these things, and I have not seen clips of them,
so I cannot verify this. But it was described as
an emphasis on her part about who's the biological mother
(25:09):
of Hunter Biden, as someone phrased it on Twitter. Ex
Katie Terre wants you to believe that President Biden is
showing signs of dementia because he referred to Hunter as
our son, meaning the hour being him and Jill. I
cannot verify that that was said. I don't doubt for
(25:30):
a moment that it could have been, and she would
have meant that. The one component to this that I
think I can actually add in terms of people's understanding
or decreasing their understanding of what is actually going on here,
is that Katie Urr is herself a stepmother. Her husband
(25:50):
was previously married, He has two children. There's nothing wrong
with that. They live in Israel, there's nothing wrong with that.
I do not know to what degree her relationship with
them is good, bad, or indifferent or infrequent. I do
know when she took and we had remained friends, solid friends,
better friends as friends than when she lived with me
(26:11):
for eight years after I asked her to leave my apartment.
She was excited and a little confused by the fact
that she was going to be a stepmother. This was
going to be something she was looking forward to. And
since then she and Tony have had two children of
their own. So she is a stepmother. And to emphasize that, technically,
(26:34):
Jill Biden is a stepmother and a stepmother because of course,
Hunter Biden's mother and his sister were killed in an
automobile accident in nineteen seventy two. To emphasize this is
not just the wrong thing to do on television, But
I don't understand where it is coming from from inside her.
And this is the part that transcends the fact that
(26:54):
I used to live with this woman. I wouldn't understand
it if it was said by a man referring to stepfathers.
If it was said by somebody I didn't know, If
was said by somebody I was related to, it makes
it all the stranger. Why would you emphasize and seemingly
criticize the fact that Jill Biden is the stepmother when
you yourself are a stepmother more amazingly, And I don't
(27:18):
think I'm telling stories out of school here, And I
don't think that she meant it. I never since that
she meant this fact as a kind of detriment or
criticism of her own mother. But Katie made no bones
for years about the fact that the person in her
family she was closest to, the one she relied on,
(27:38):
the one whose memory she relied on, the one whose
advice that she had been given a decade earlier when
I knew her before this person passed away, the person
she was closest to in her family was not her mother,
or a father or a brother, but her grandmother. So
the idea that the sense of strength of who has
(28:00):
raised you comes from outside the traditional well, biologically, that's
my dad and that's my mom, and that can be
fine too, but it doesn't have to be and it
doesn't have to be the only solution for a family
or configuration of a family. I don't understand this. I
know relationships have always been fraught things for her. This
(28:23):
I can talk about for several months without interruption. I
will spare you that. I will tell you that, in
an attempt to keep our relationship going, we went to
see a relationship counselor at whom she screamed, who told
her at one point that she was being childish, who said, no,
(28:45):
you're wrong about that, And even though I was not
there to get validated, he said, this guy is right
and you are wrong. It's normally not this black and white,
but you're really wrong here, and she stormed out of
the place, swearing at the man. We got into a
car on our way to see my friend Norman Lloyd,
who was about ninety six years old at the time,
(29:07):
for lunch, and she would not stop swearing in the car.
It got so bad I got out of the car
in the middle of traffic in New York and I said,
you go wherever you need to go. I'm going to
go have lunch with Norman. Do not show up. I'm
not telling you where we're going. I may come off
as a little mean in this except she then apologized
(29:29):
and said, let's go to see another counselor. Whether I
screwed that up or he did, maybe we could try
a different counselor. I said, yes, she did exactly the
same thing. So this subject of family is fraught, and
I'm not trying to come up with excuses for her.
I was baked a little bit on Twitter by people
(29:52):
who misunderstood a pronoun I used when I said she
is a stepmother. They thought I was referring to Jill Biden. No,
I was referring to Katie. I wasn't trying to defend
her then, and I'm not trying to defend her now.
I'm not going to rehash every story I've told you
previously about the vagaries of the relationship that I had.
I'll leave a couple of details out and tell a
(30:14):
couple of other details I have not told before. There
was physical violence in the relationship, not a lot of it,
but periodically when she would get frustrated, she hit me.
She hit me once the day after I came back
from an emergency appendectomy and could barely stand up and
could not wear a shirt because my temperature was like
one hundred and three degrees and I was profusely sweating.
(30:37):
I'll stop that imagery for you right now. She came
over and hit me. I'm a foot taller than she is.
What was I supposed to do? Apart from the fact
that I was a little worried about toppling over because
I was weak from the appendectomy and three days of hospitalization, Like,
what do you do? I couldn't even push her away.
(30:57):
I could have knocked her over, or in the condition
I was in, I could have fallen over. So there
has been physical violence in a relationship situation instigated by her,
And I'll balance this out by saying that she did
many wonderful things in the relationship. I have no doubt
she is an excellent mother. I have no doubt she's
an excellent wife. I saw the good things too. The
(31:23):
good things are good. She was a good friend for
a long time. These bad things are really bad, and
they're especially bad if you happen to do an hour
or two of news on a national network, the only
one that is not in some way pandering to the fascists,
either Lively Today because you are the fascist news channel,
(31:45):
or like CNN preparing for the possibility that the fascists
will take over in January of next year and you
want to get in good with them, even though none
of this will help you get in good with them.
She's on the only network that is not ostensibly doing that,
and she is to some degree doing it and criticizing
Jill for being stepmother to Hunter Biden and perhaps using
(32:09):
it as a step back towards arguing that Joe Biden
should not be president, should not be a candidate. You
know what Nancy Pelosi said about her. It's been a
rough year or so. And I don't want to make
this just about me, even though it is things I
promised not to tell. But have you ever trended on Twitter? Okay?
(32:33):
It's sometimes a pleasant experience. Sometimes it's a disturbing experience.
Have you ever had a woman you used to live
with trend on Twitter? How about twice? Three times in
a week. Katie started trending on Tuesday afternoon and was
still trending as I sat down to record this. And
(32:53):
it's not just that. I'll tell you one comical story now,
I'll save that for the end. I wanted to make
the one point about the professional element here. Things were,
as I said, really good professionally. They probably were aided
when Katie moved to London to work out of the
NBC London Bureau in twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen, and
(33:14):
her visits to New York were very, very sporadic, and
I only saw her briefly, but we always visited, always
talked about careers, always talked about advice. I always helped
her with her scripts from the time she was working
for News twelve of the Bronx until she was on
NBC Nightly News. Helped her write the scripts, rewrite the scripts,
(33:34):
suggest things she could look into, try to steer her
away from problems. When she was assigned to cover Donald
Trump's campaign, she knew next to nothing about Donald Trump,
even though we had lived together in a building that
was called Trump Palace at the time, and she knew
next to nothing about Hitler. In any event, things changed
(33:56):
late in the campaign of twenty sixteen, and I have
always wondered if something between stuff home syndrome, and the
impact of having your life threatened for doing your job
on television combined to change her in some way. But
one day late in the campaign, I got a call
(34:19):
from Katie. And mostly I heard from her by email
or text, especially when she was on the campaign, and
one day I got a call from her criticizing me
for saying something mean about Kelly and Conway. If anything
on the left is universally agreed upon, if anything in
the middle is universally agreed upon, if anything of all
(34:41):
the people, the entire subset of human beings who know
Kelly and Conway is agreed upon, it's that Kelly and
Conway is not only one of the worst persons in
the world, but also has and I mean this metaphorically,
the skin of a crocodile and three elephants wearing armor
on top of all of that. And Katie ter called
(35:03):
me and said, you really shouldn't say such terrible things
about Kelly Ann Conway. And I said, why not? Am
I repeating myself? And she said, there are bad people
on both sides. There are threats on both sides. And
I said, I didn't know that I was supposed to
prevent threats being made against someone who is trying to
(35:25):
get a fascist dictator. And this is twenty sixteen, a
fascist dictator who's out of his mind and kept a
book of Hitler's speeches on a bedstand, trying to get
him elected president of the United States, where he probably
when he is ever supposed to leave office, will probably
not go voluntarily. As I said to her in twenty sixteen,
(35:48):
I did not know I had to defend her or
to somehow mute my comments, because what she's your source.
There's a long silence. Katie would not confirm she was
one of her sources. She later did confirm that, but
there was genuine anger in her voice. No, you should
take that back, and she was totally confused about why
(36:13):
I refused to delete the tweets in which I had
called Kelly Ane Conway a liar and far worse than that.
And the name Kelly Ane Conway would come up again
when she wrote her first book. I've told before the
story of Katie coming to me late in twenty sixteen
or early in twenty seventeen and asking me to write
her book about the Trump campaign and her experiences on
(36:36):
it for her, and I said, I think they'd catch us.
And then she said, well, I'm going to have to
give the money back because I can't write a book.
And the next thing I knew the book was out.
In the interim, I had given her all of my
files on the Trump campaign and on Trump, probably amounting
to in a computer four hundred pages worth of links.
(36:57):
And she said, what's the price for this? And I said,
of course it's free. Just use it in good health.
I said, just you know, don't leave me out of
the acknowledgments the book comes out. I'm not in the
acknowledgments the book comes out. I'm not in the book
except for one story, the story the Kelly an Conway story,
her defense of Kelly an Conway, and there were some
(37:18):
platitudes about how I was always a wonderful person and
I've been a great friend to her. But I was
only in the book mentioned once as somebody she had
briefly dated in her twenties, because she wanted to tell
the Kelly ane Conway anecdote. I've mentioned before that she
was promoting the book. The Washington Post wanted my comments
(37:41):
on her and on the book. She asked me not
to talk to the Post. I said, fine, whatever you want.
She said, I'm not talking to the Post. A week later,
the article came out in the Post. She had talked
to the Post. She had lied to me to get
me to not talk to the Washington Post. Several months later,
The New York Times came out with a whole story,
and in the middle of it, her former boyfriend Keith
(38:02):
Olberman refused to meant to The New York Times for
this article. I'd never even heard of the name of
the writer. She had, in fact told the writer who
I spoke to that she would ask me on the
writer's behalf to talk to the New York Times about her.
She never did. She lied again. So this is the
(38:26):
roots of this week, and that singular feeling of going
to see what's trending on Twitter and finding it's always
your ex girlfriend. The roots of this are very deep,
and I wish I could wade through them, but this
is as far as I want to go. My knowledge
(38:47):
of her directly ended with those lies about the Times
and the Post, less so the book, although I thought
that was a pretty schmuck move on her part, but
it really ended when she was actively lying to keep
my name out of articles about her. And yes, I
told her, I agreed with her it was sexist and
unfair for every article about her to contain some kind
(39:09):
of reference to me. And I helped her, in fact,
to try to scrub my own name out of articles
and references to her online. But I thought lying to
the New York Times and to me and to the
Washington Post to keep me out of those articles was
just a little bit beyond the pale. And now we
(39:30):
have this whole episode with Jill Biden is not Hunter
Biden's birth mother. Shame on you, Katie, and no apology.
And now the lighter side of the story as you know,
(39:50):
twice in the last ten years, I have escaped this
golden prison of mine in the world of politics that
I have occupied off and on since nineteen ninety seven.
Twice I have escaped to go back and work for
ESPN for a time, largely simply because I wanted to
(40:12):
enjoy what I do. This is why I do these
terrible songs in this podcast, because it's just a little stupid,
silly thing that makes me laugh and maybe it makes
you laugh. And here I thought, Okay, here's an opportunity
to go work for ESPN and just do fun things
and reminiscent things of my childhood in the media. I mean,
(40:35):
I was thirty three years old today I showed up
at ESPN. In fact, I was still thirty two years old.
It was just before my birthday. It was nice to
be nostalgic. It was nice to be giving scores. And then,
of course, as the elections approached in twenty sixteen, in
twenty twenty, I said I'd better get back to work now,
and I did, and here we are. But while I
(40:57):
was at ESPN the second time, one of the joys
of that assignment, in addition to getting to do a
few baseball games with mixed results as a play by
play man with mixed results and SportsCenter and go back
to ESPN for the first time since nineteen ninety seven
and be Rip van Winkle, Where did these eighty seven
extra buildings come from? In addition to that, one of
(41:19):
the joys was that several times they sent me to
Washington to fill in for Michael Wilbon and co host
with Tony Kornheiser. Pardon the interruption. I loved working with
Tony and he could not have been nicer nor more
supportive to me, and we had a great time, and
I'd do it again in a heartbeat. But one day,
(41:42):
in the very well equipped newsroom that they occupied at
ABC News in Washington, in their building, I was seated
out in the middle of the newsroom and talking to
the executive producer of the show, and over his shoulder
I could see into his office where he had three TVs.
One of them was on Fox News, one of them
(42:03):
was on CNN, and one of them was on MSNBC.
And it was the middle of the day. We were
going to tape in an hour or two when we
were preparing the show, and I was looking at the
producer and we were talking. I don't know about what,
but it was an interesting conversation. And yet my few
kept drifting over to those three TVs that were framed
right over his left shoulder, because they were the three
(42:28):
news channels. Fox News was in a commercial. On CNN,
there was a pundit, a young woman that I also
used to go out with, who I lived with in
fact more or less for three and a half years.
And then on the right channel, the one with MSNBC,
Katie was anchoring. So we have two television networks, two
(42:52):
of the three major news operations hebex live in Girlfriends
of Mine, and the third one, Fox is in commercial.
And I finally said to the executive producer of the
pardon the interim show, turn around, look at this. See
Fox is in commercial. I used to live with her.
I used to live with her on MSNBC. If when
Fox comes back, Laura Ingram is on the air, run
(43:17):
over to your TVs because I think a bunch of
gold coins will come out of that bank of TVs.
Because you have just hit the Keith Olderman girlfriend Jack Pott.
(43:41):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Count on. Musical directors Brian Ray and
John Phillip Schaneale arranged, produced, and performed most of our music.
Mister Ray was on guitars, bass, and drums, and mister
Shaneale handled orchestration and keyboards. It was produced by Tko Brothers.
Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, were arranged
(44:01):
and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. Its music
is the Olberman theme from ESPN two. It was written
by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical
and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Faust, the best
baseball stadium organist ever, and everything else was pretty much
my fault. So that's countdown for this. The one hundred
and forty sixth day until the twenty twenty four presidential election,
(44:25):
the two hundred and fifty fifth day since convicted felon
Donald J. Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected
government of the United States. Use the July eleventh sentencing hearing,
use the mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens,
use the not regularly given elector objection option to stop
(44:47):
him from doing it again. While we still can. The
next scheduled countdown is tomorrow bulletins as the news warrants
till then, I'm Keith Oulderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck, and this episode has been dedicated to
the memory of my friend our refinement. Countdown with Keith
(45:17):
Oldreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. My
friend and colleague of twenty six years, Howard Feinneman has died,
(00:26):
and I have much to tell you about him, and
I will do so. But the journalist in Howard Feyneman
would kick me in the shins if I led with
his passing instead of with the alice through the looking glass.
News that the head of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan,
has managed to get the Attorney General of the United States,
Merrick Garland, held in contempt of Congress for ignoring a
(00:49):
House subpoena, even though it is now exactly seven hundred
and sixty four days, two years and a month that
Jim Jordan himself has been ignoring a House subpoena. I
have no use for Merrick Garland, and in part that
is because Merrick Garland would never think of doing what
(01:10):
he should do today, what he should do right now,
which is to seek today and gain today and announce
today the indictment of Jim Jordan for contempt of Congress.
We are metaphorically at war with these fascists who live
(01:31):
among us, and who have decades ago jennisoned any standards
or morality, have embraced only cheating, have used the legal
system for purely political purposes as long ago as the
Ken Star investigation of Bill Clinton and the illegal publication
of Clinton's videotape grand jury testimony a quarter century ago.
(01:55):
They created what they have now named law fair. They
created it in a preceding century, and they are pretending
that they are its victims when they are its inventors
and manipulators, when they are the criminals and the corrupted,
remorseless authoritarians. When any time they lie that they are
(02:17):
not behaving that way, they are pretending solely because their
base now expects them to pretend and lie, and only
expects of them a well crafted lie they can hold
on to. And there is no easier to digest proof
of this than just the last two morally bankrupt years
(02:42):
out of the morally bankrupt life of Jim Jordan and Merrick.
Garland should announce charges against him today now, and if
he doesn't think so, and he doesn't, Garland should just
change the names in this equation around and make the
(03:03):
Attorney General Mike Davis the Trump lunatic, and make the
chairman Jamie Raskin and ask what the Trumpsts would do
in the hypothetical future, and the answer is Davis would
have had Raskin indicted and arrested or just arrested, screw
bothering with an indictment or a trial just arrested seven
(03:26):
hundred and sixty four days ago. The House Republicans did
this yesterday because they and Trump's Republican Senate slaves are
set to promise fealty to Trump at meetings today in Washington.
It is a relief they do not have to offer
him his weight in gold, as if there were that
(03:51):
much gold. Fox reports that for his first trip to
Capitol Hill since his attempted coup on January sixth, Trump
will be at the Capitol Hill Club, and boy, they
sure amp the symbol up to eleven. This time. It
was right between the Republican National Committee headquarters and the
(04:12):
very same Capitol Hill Club that one of the pipe
bombs was left the night before January sixth by a
still unidentified mass murderer wannabe March. Of course, by the
(04:51):
time of those kiss the ass meetings between Trump and
the Republicans on Capitol Hill, America may have figuratively already
been blown up. The Supreme Court will issue rulings on
pending cases like oh, maybe the Trump's fabricated monarchical concept
of quote presidential immunity. We don't know which cases the
(05:13):
Court will rule on today, We don't know when. We
do know they scheduled two days for publishing decisions, which
is an unusual step for them. And yes, you're right,
Sam Alito, tomorrow is Flag Day. Why do you ask
if you were hoping that somehow Democrats would get a
(05:35):
first step towards mandatory Supreme Court ethics codes through on
unanimous consent. Oh well, why did you think that? Secondly,
guess which Trump whore stepped up to proudly stop that,
Lindsey Graham. Still more ripples in the pool of the
(05:56):
conviction of elderly first offender j. Trump. New Jersey's Attorney
General and the Division of Alcoholic Beverage ConTroll There are
now reviewing the liquor licenses at the three Trump owned
golf courses. Quote. No license of any class shall be
issued to any person under the age of eighteen years,
(06:18):
or to any person who has been convicted of a
crime involving moral turpitude, reads Jersey state law. The alcoholic
Beverage Control Division guidebook offers a definition quote a serious
crime from the viewpoint of society in general, and usually
contains elements of dishonesty, fraud, or depravity. Dishonesty, fraud, or depravity.
(06:47):
They got you there, don And just one other note.
June thirteenth, This is so two weeks from tonight is
the first Biden Trump debate, the one at CNN in Atlanta,
which means Trump now has less than fourteen days to
(07:08):
choose the excuse for backing out that he thinks we'll
make it look most like Biden was actually the one
backing out. This is countdown with Keith Oberman. That was
(07:32):
my friend Howard Fineman, who died yesterday after And it
is a cliche a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. This
is one of the worst of the diseases. And I
will tell you the extraordinary story of Howard versus pancreatic
cancer and how despite the outcome, Howard won at length.
(07:53):
In a moment, Howard Fineman told me in the middle
of January last year, twenty twenty three, that he had
been diagnosed that they had found pancreatic cancer during another surgery.
And that they had given him four to six months
to live, and he was writing and then talking to
me to say goodbye. And he died yesterday, having survived
(08:16):
the disease and survived it extraordinarily well for eighteen months.
But let me tell that story in the correct chronological order.
About a week before my thirty ninth birthday in nineteen
ninety eight, when I was the unhappy new host of
a show on MSNBC called The Big Show, and we
did things like this. I was in Hollywood, in Burbank,
(08:39):
I think, on the set of Third Rock from the Sun,
about to interview its lead actor, the great actor John Lithgow,
when the producer of the show came to me and said, oh,
by the way, slight change of plans. And I know
I've told this story before, slight change of plans. We
are going to instead be doing a talkback with Tim
Russert because the president may resign, and then we'll do
(09:01):
lithgo and we'll we'll tape lithgo now and we'll get
that out of the way, but we're going to do
this first. And I went say that again. He went,
what will tape lifth go now? He later became the
president of MSNBC. I actually had to say to him, no, no, no, no,
not the part about taping the actor. What was that
about the president resigning? Suffice to say, shortly thereafter, I
was on the air with the top ranked person from
(09:23):
Newsweek who would go on our air because our show
was nothing. We had perhaps one hundred thousand viewers a night.
Within a week we would have a million. The man
from Newsweek who consented to come on with the Big
Show with Keith Olberman then in its I guess third
month on the air, not drawing any viewers, was named
Howard Feinneman. He was one of the political writers, and
(09:46):
he was, if I remember correctly, if not the first guest,
because the first guest was Tim Russert, but the first
one to analyze what we were dealing with was Howard Feineman.
I don't know that he knew me, other than perhaps
from ESPN. I did not know him. We immediately hit
it off. At some point during the interview he laughed
(10:06):
at something I said, and soon we were bringing on
Howard Feinman as often as we could, because Howard had
a unique capacity to not only tell you the facts
of a story, what was actually out there to that minute,
but he could then assess what that probably meant in
the next week, month, year to these key people involved
(10:29):
in it. And then if you wanted him to to
express some sort of historical perspective or analysis of the
pasts of the people involved in this case, Bill Clinton,
Knut Gingrich, ken Starr, whoever you needed to know about.
If he didn't already know, give him twenty minutes and
he would have found it out from people that he trusted,
(10:49):
who knew the individuals. He was an all purpose all
star for us. And as I began to become disenchanted
with the journalism surrounding that story, the person who told
me I was right when everybody else covered the goddamned
Clinton Lewinsky story insisted this was the worst thing that
had happened in human history and we needed to cover
(11:12):
it twenty four hours a day. And I said, sounds
like they're trying to shoot the proverbial fly with an
atomic bomb. The one person who agreed with me from
the beginning was Howard Feyneman, who said, I can't go
full bore into this the way you are saying it,
(11:32):
but I will backstop you anywhere I can say what
you feel, and I will support what you say because
you are right. Do not think I am somehow criticizing
you by not going yes, You're absolutely right. This is
insane and illegal, and it is Newt Gingrich trying to
become president of the United States because he really thinks
it can happen. But that's what he's doing, needless to say.
(11:56):
As I became more and more disenchanted with the story,
Howard Feinneman became more and more valuable to me as
a friend, and I talked to him more. Were often
off the air, and he was one of the few
bright spots of a long year in which I had
to cover that story while I was trying to extricate
myself from a company that could not understand why I
(12:17):
would want to leave a show that now had an
audience of fifty or sixty times what it had when
it began. When all this at NBC News was available
to me, if I just stuck with the story and
kept telling it, Howard Feineman got it. Howard Feieman was
an old school newsman from Newsweek, and he'd been a
great local reporter in Louisville and was a master of
(12:37):
Kentucky politics. If you wanted to know about the Mitch
McConnell of eighteen eighty seven, he would know, and he
knew everything about Pittsburgh from where he was. At the end,
I finally extricated myself from this, and again one of
the few people who called on the last day, because
the NBC people were all mad at me, one of
the few people who called me the last day to
(13:00):
say goodbye was Howard Feineman. Not long after I left
NBC in nineteen ninety eight and went to Fox Sports,
a box showed up on my desk on the Fox
office in Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. It was the
size of a baseball, and I opened it up in
much to my surprise, it was a baseball. It was
an autographed baseball, signed by all of the regulars on
(13:24):
the MSNBC show The Big Show, including Howard. A souvenir
he said, or if you really don't want to remember
any of it, just throw it through the window. For
a couple of years, as I went back into sports,
I heard about Howard and heard from Howard. Occasionally. I
get a letter, saw you on the World Series, saw
(13:44):
at the All Star Game, saw at the Super Bowl whatever.
Always stayed in touch, and not stayed in touch because
he thought, well, he's going to go back into politics
someday and this will be my access to television. No,
he stayed in touch. Howard stayed in touch with everybody.
Howard was one of the original networkers in the best
possible sense of that word. If you were in news
(14:07):
and you did not know Howard Feineman and you did
not know he was a good guy, guess what, I
don't think you were in news the first or second time.
I appeared as a fill in host on MSNBC in
two thousand and three as a little gratuitous mend some
fences throwaway when I went back to what was supposed
to be an NBC Sports Olympic hosting job at the
(14:30):
two thousand and four Summer Olympics in Greece. I went
over and did a couple of shows as a fill
in for Jerry Nackman, who was very sick, in fact,
fatally sick. Got a call from Howard Fyeman in the office,
My god, you're back. What happened? He wanted to hear
the whole story, and he wanted to come on. Although
we didn't cover much politics on that show, but soon
we would cover politics again because then I came back
(14:52):
to MSNBC with the Countdown program, and Howard was the
first person I asked them to make an arrangement with
to be a regular contributor to the show. And as
Howard would say, he was not a television great. He
did not have the sexiest stories, he did not have
the hottest takes. But as I'm referenced earlier, whatever you
(15:12):
needed him to talk about, he knew it, and what
he did not know, and sometimes what he already thought
he knew. He would go and research fresh just to
make sure that he was giving you his best. Howard Feineman,
I in fact did approach him when I left MSNBC
(15:34):
in twenty eleven after they breached my contract and I
went over to Current TV for a lot of money.
I approached him about joining me there, about becoming a
contributor or perhaps full time, and he said, no, I
have something else I'm working on. I'll be probably leaving
in a year or two, And sure enough he had,
and he was one of the first people to recognize this.
(15:55):
He was a by this point star at Newsweek, and
he realized that Newsweek's shelf life was not very long.
In fact, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, all the great
news organizations of the early twenty tens, they were not
going to make it. Howard took a job basically running
Huffington Post, and everybody went, he's going to go do
(16:18):
something on the computer. Guess who was right there. There's
not only no longer copies of Newsweek on newsstands in
this country, there are no longer any newsstands on this country.
Howard Fineman saw it coming old school, and yet one
of those few who saw the future coming. All this time,
(16:42):
I stayed in touch with Howard Feinneman off and on irregularly,
sometimes bursts of conversation, phone calls, running into him somewhere,
sometimes a text, sometimes nothing for a year and then,
and I mentioned that my first contact with him was
just before my thirty ninth birthday, just before my sixty
(17:04):
fourth birthday. So in January of last year, twenty twenty three,
I got an email from Howard and it was short,
and it was sweet, and it ended with the word love.
He'd had an operation. Then. I don't think I'm telling
too much out of school, especially since Howard said when
I'm gone, you can say anything you want about me,
(17:25):
You can tell any details you want, because he won.
And I'm getting to that. They had brought him in
for surgery of some kind, and when he awoke, he
was told he had pancreatic cancer. He had four to
six months to live. He said, he cherished our friendship.
(17:49):
He was sorry to shock me goodbye. Well not quite. Uh,
sometime in the middle of early spring, if that makes
any sense. So sometime in late March or early April
of last year, I called him or he called me,
(18:12):
I don't remember which, and I said, well, how how
are you? He goes, I'm I'm surprisingly well, he said.
I never really knew what that meant until now. I've
been sitting here waiting for it to start, and it
it hasn't started yet. And I just got back from
my doctor and they haven't. They haven't found any more
any more cancer. It's it's still there, but it hasn't
(18:36):
moved or gotten worse. Or In May, another conversation about
the same thing. July fourth, he was planning a trip
to New York. Did I have any time? Yes, I
think I do. August September, mind you, he was supposed
to be dead at the latest by June, or maybe July.
(19:00):
I think it was August of last year when he
said his kids had gotten him at T shirt that
read outlier, and they went through the whole logic of
the thing. If the average survival time for a diagnosis
of advanced pancreatic cancer is four to six months, well
to get that number. There's some people who heartbreakingly don't
(19:23):
make it a month, and then there are the other
ones who go on for a long time. And as
Howard said, I guess I'm one of those. He traveled.
He went to see things, He went to see people,
He went to visits. He went to Pittsburgh, he went
to Kentucky. He went to New York to see his
son who was a producer at MSNBC. He went everywhere.
(19:50):
The holidays came and went last year and he was
feeling fine February doing great, and he has now survived
twice as long as they said he might. In March
came the first bad sign. Quick texts say hello. I said,
(20:10):
how are you feeling? And he said fine, there's no
pain or anything, but I'm beginning to fade. Well that
was the sign. Howard Feinneman died after a long battle
with pancreatic cancer. He died a year after what they
had told him would be the longest he would survive.
(20:31):
He played all that time with house money, and I
can tell you without fear of contradiction, that he knew
it and was rapturous about it, as were all of
us who considered ourselves having the privilege to be his friend.
He beat the system, he beat the pancreatic cancer. If
you accept the premise of the memento mora, we're all
(20:53):
going to die. If you accept that premise, longevity is
in fact victory. And when you are told you have
maybe six months, mind you that was the high end,
and you last for eighteen. When you treble the score,
you have won. None of us. And my heartfelt condolences
(21:14):
go out to his son Nick, and his wife Amy
and everybody in the Fineman family. But all of us
had some sense of goddamn it, Howard, you pulled this off. Congratulations.
So this is an awful time, and yes, it is
(21:36):
an awful shock to those of us who were his friends.
On the other hand, there is still that little corner
of it in which we're kind of kind of laughing
with him. I still have that autograph Baseball. It's still
(21:58):
on my desk, along with all of my memories of
Howard Feyneman, Pittsburgh Pirates fan. Thank you, Howard, from the
sublime to the ridiculous. I guess I'm going to have
(22:18):
to talk about Katie Turr again. I'll do that next.
I guess this counts as another episode of things I
promised not to tell, honest to goodness, and I know
this will not sound like me, but I am getting
(22:39):
tired of talking about my ex living girlfriend Katie Terr,
as you probably know. On the air, at the announcement
of the guilty verdict in the Hunter Biden case on Tuesday,
Katie Urr on MSNBC emphasized that Jill Biden, who flew
(23:02):
to Delaware to be at the trial, was not, as
she put it, Hunter Biden's birth mother. The wrath of
anger from people who have mothers who may not be
biologically their mother, their birth mother. There might be some
(23:22):
other consideration involved in this. The wrath of people for
whom that is true has actually, I think, been exceeded
by the wrath of people for whom that is not true,
and who are just offended by that remark, the latest
in a series of indefensible remarks from a woman who
I once loved, who proposed herself as the mother of
(23:45):
my children. So this issue of motherhood, as much as
I really am tired of talking about her and the
things that have happened to her and have changed her
in the last decade, I don't feel like I have
any option but to talk to you about them, because
this issue of motherhood is essential to the history of
(24:06):
my relationship with her, and I would argue it is
essential to her history. And I think things have escalated
or decomposed to the point where there is no rationale
for continuing her career as an anchor, if it has
anything to do with politics in this country. Something has
(24:28):
warped her perception of reality and the reality we are in,
and the frankly reality of the network she is on.
MSNBC is not supposed to be a liberal network. It
is supposed to be a true network. That these things
tend to overlap a lot is actually coincidental. But she
(24:48):
seems to be rebelling against reality, and it is come
to the fore now. It was also described what she
said on the air on Tuesday, and I did not
hear these things, and I have not seen clips of them,
so I cannot verify this. But it was described as
an emphasis on her part about who's the biological mother
(25:09):
of Hunter Biden, as someone phrased it on Twitter. Ex
Katie Terre wants you to believe that President Biden is
showing signs of dementia because he referred to Hunter as
our son, meaning the hour being him and Jill. I
cannot verify that that was said. I don't doubt for
(25:30):
a moment that it could have been, and she would
have meant that. The one component to this that I
think I can actually add in terms of people's understanding
or decreasing their understanding of what is actually going on here,
is that Katie Urr is herself a stepmother. Her husband
(25:50):
was previously married, He has two children. There's nothing wrong
with that. They live in Israel, there's nothing wrong with that.
I do not know to what degree her relationship with
them is good, bad, or indifferent or infrequent. I do
know when she took and we had remained friends, solid friends,
better friends as friends than when she lived with me
(26:11):
for eight years after I asked her to leave my apartment.
She was excited and a little confused by the fact
that she was going to be a stepmother. This was
going to be something she was looking forward to. And
since then she and Tony have had two children of
their own. So she is a stepmother. And to emphasize that, technically,
(26:34):
Jill Biden is a stepmother and a stepmother because of course,
Hunter Biden's mother and his sister were killed in an
automobile accident in nineteen seventy two. To emphasize this is
not just the wrong thing to do on television, But
I don't understand where it is coming from from inside her.
And this is the part that transcends the fact that
(26:54):
I used to live with this woman. I wouldn't understand
it if it was said by a man referring to stepfathers.
If it was said by somebody I didn't know, If
was said by somebody I was related to, it makes
it all the stranger. Why would you emphasize and seemingly
criticize the fact that Jill Biden is the stepmother when
you yourself are a stepmother more amazingly, And I don't
(27:18):
think I'm telling stories out of school here, And I
don't think that she meant it. I never since that
she meant this fact as a kind of detriment or
criticism of her own mother. But Katie made no bones
for years about the fact that the person in her
family she was closest to, the one she relied on,
(27:38):
the one whose memory she relied on, the one whose
advice that she had been given a decade earlier when
I knew her before this person passed away, the person
she was closest to in her family was not her mother,
or a father or a brother, but her grandmother. So
the idea that the sense of strength of who has
(28:00):
raised you comes from outside the traditional well, biologically, that's
my dad and that's my mom, and that can be
fine too, but it doesn't have to be and it
doesn't have to be the only solution for a family
or configuration of a family. I don't understand this. I
know relationships have always been fraught things for her. This
(28:23):
I can talk about for several months without interruption. I
will spare you that. I will tell you that, in
an attempt to keep our relationship going, we went to
see a relationship counselor at whom she screamed, who told
her at one point that she was being childish, who said, no,
(28:45):
you're wrong about that, And even though I was not
there to get validated, he said, this guy is right
and you are wrong. It's normally not this black and white,
but you're really wrong here, and she stormed out of
the place, swearing at the man. We got into a
car on our way to see my friend Norman Lloyd,
who was about ninety six years old at the time,
(29:07):
for lunch, and she would not stop swearing in the car.
It got so bad I got out of the car
in the middle of traffic in New York and I said,
you go wherever you need to go. I'm going to
go have lunch with Norman. Do not show up. I'm
not telling you where we're going. I may come off
as a little mean in this except she then apologized
(29:29):
and said, let's go to see another counselor. Whether I
screwed that up or he did, maybe we could try
a different counselor. I said, yes, she did exactly the
same thing. So this subject of family is fraught, and
I'm not trying to come up with excuses for her.
I was baked a little bit on Twitter by people
(29:52):
who misunderstood a pronoun I used when I said she
is a stepmother. They thought I was referring to Jill Biden. No,
I was referring to Katie. I wasn't trying to defend
her then, and I'm not trying to defend her now.
I'm not going to rehash every story I've told you
previously about the vagaries of the relationship that I had.
I'll leave a couple of details out and tell a
(30:14):
couple of other details I have not told before. There
was physical violence in the relationship, not a lot of it,
but periodically when she would get frustrated, she hit me.
She hit me once the day after I came back
from an emergency appendectomy and could barely stand up and
could not wear a shirt because my temperature was like
one hundred and three degrees and I was profusely sweating.
(30:37):
I'll stop that imagery for you right now. She came
over and hit me. I'm a foot taller than she is.
What was I supposed to do? Apart from the fact
that I was a little worried about toppling over because
I was weak from the appendectomy and three days of hospitalization, Like,
what do you do? I couldn't even push her away.
(30:57):
I could have knocked her over, or in the condition
I was in, I could have fallen over. So there
has been physical violence in a relationship situation instigated by her,
And I'll balance this out by saying that she did
many wonderful things in the relationship. I have no doubt
she is an excellent mother. I have no doubt she's
an excellent wife. I saw the good things too. The
(31:23):
good things are good. She was a good friend for
a long time. These bad things are really bad, and
they're especially bad if you happen to do an hour
or two of news on a national network, the only
one that is not in some way pandering to the fascists,
either Lively Today because you are the fascist news channel,
(31:45):
or like CNN preparing for the possibility that the fascists
will take over in January of next year and you
want to get in good with them, even though none
of this will help you get in good with them.
She's on the only network that is not ostensibly doing that,
and she is to some degree doing it and criticizing
Jill for being stepmother to Hunter Biden and perhaps using
(32:09):
it as a step back towards arguing that Joe Biden
should not be president, should not be a candidate. You
know what Nancy Pelosi said about her. It's been a
rough year or so. And I don't want to make
this just about me, even though it is things I
promised not to tell. But have you ever trended on Twitter? Okay?
(32:33):
It's sometimes a pleasant experience. Sometimes it's a disturbing experience.
Have you ever had a woman you used to live
with trend on Twitter? How about twice? Three times in
a week. Katie started trending on Tuesday afternoon and was
still trending as I sat down to record this. And
(32:53):
it's not just that. I'll tell you one comical story now,
I'll save that for the end. I wanted to make
the one point about the professional element here. Things were,
as I said, really good professionally. They probably were aided
when Katie moved to London to work out of the
NBC London Bureau in twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen, and
(33:14):
her visits to New York were very, very sporadic, and
I only saw her briefly, but we always visited, always
talked about careers, always talked about advice. I always helped
her with her scripts from the time she was working
for News twelve of the Bronx until she was on
NBC Nightly News. Helped her write the scripts, rewrite the scripts,
(33:34):
suggest things she could look into, try to steer her
away from problems. When she was assigned to cover Donald
Trump's campaign, she knew next to nothing about Donald Trump,
even though we had lived together in a building that
was called Trump Palace at the time, and she knew
next to nothing about Hitler. In any event, things changed
(33:56):
late in the campaign of twenty sixteen, and I have
always wondered if something between stuff home syndrome, and the
impact of having your life threatened for doing your job
on television combined to change her in some way. But
one day late in the campaign, I got a call
(34:19):
from Katie. And mostly I heard from her by email
or text, especially when she was on the campaign, and
one day I got a call from her criticizing me
for saying something mean about Kelly and Conway. If anything
on the left is universally agreed upon, if anything in
the middle is universally agreed upon, if anything of all
(34:41):
the people, the entire subset of human beings who know
Kelly and Conway is agreed upon, it's that Kelly and
Conway is not only one of the worst persons in
the world, but also has and I mean this metaphorically,
the skin of a crocodile and three elephants wearing armor
on top of all of that. And Katie ter called
(35:03):
me and said, you really shouldn't say such terrible things
about Kelly Ann Conway. And I said, why not? Am
I repeating myself? And she said, there are bad people
on both sides. There are threats on both sides. And
I said, I didn't know that I was supposed to
prevent threats being made against someone who is trying to
(35:25):
get a fascist dictator. And this is twenty sixteen, a
fascist dictator who's out of his mind and kept a
book of Hitler's speeches on a bedstand, trying to get
him elected president of the United States, where he probably
when he is ever supposed to leave office, will probably
not go voluntarily. As I said to her in twenty sixteen,
(35:48):
I did not know I had to defend her or
to somehow mute my comments, because what she's your source.
There's a long silence. Katie would not confirm she was
one of her sources. She later did confirm that, but
there was genuine anger in her voice. No, you should
take that back, and she was totally confused about why
(36:13):
I refused to delete the tweets in which I had
called Kelly Ane Conway a liar and far worse than that.
And the name Kelly Ane Conway would come up again
when she wrote her first book. I've told before the
story of Katie coming to me late in twenty sixteen
or early in twenty seventeen and asking me to write
her book about the Trump campaign and her experiences on
(36:36):
it for her, and I said, I think they'd catch us.
And then she said, well, I'm going to have to
give the money back because I can't write a book.
And the next thing I knew the book was out.
In the interim, I had given her all of my
files on the Trump campaign and on Trump, probably amounting
to in a computer four hundred pages worth of links.
(36:57):
And she said, what's the price for this? And I said,
of course it's free. Just use it in good health.
I said, just you know, don't leave me out of
the acknowledgments the book comes out. I'm not in the
acknowledgments the book comes out. I'm not in the book
except for one story, the story the Kelly an Conway story,
her defense of Kelly an Conway, and there were some
(37:18):
platitudes about how I was always a wonderful person and
I've been a great friend to her. But I was
only in the book mentioned once as somebody she had
briefly dated in her twenties, because she wanted to tell
the Kelly ane Conway anecdote. I've mentioned before that she
was promoting the book. The Washington Post wanted my comments
(37:41):
on her and on the book. She asked me not
to talk to the Post. I said, fine, whatever you want.
She said, I'm not talking to the Post. A week later,
the article came out in the Post. She had talked
to the Post. She had lied to me to get
me to not talk to the Washington Post. Several months later,
The New York Times came out with a whole story,
and in the middle of it, her former boyfriend Keith
(38:02):
Olberman refused to meant to The New York Times for
this article. I'd never even heard of the name of
the writer. She had, in fact told the writer who
I spoke to that she would ask me on the
writer's behalf to talk to the New York Times about her.
She never did. She lied again. So this is the
(38:26):
roots of this week, and that singular feeling of going
to see what's trending on Twitter and finding it's always
your ex girlfriend. The roots of this are very deep,
and I wish I could wade through them, but this
is as far as I want to go. My knowledge
(38:47):
of her directly ended with those lies about the Times
and the Post, less so the book, although I thought
that was a pretty schmuck move on her part, but
it really ended when she was actively lying to keep
my name out of articles about her. And yes, I
told her, I agreed with her it was sexist and
unfair for every article about her to contain some kind
(39:09):
of reference to me. And I helped her, in fact,
to try to scrub my own name out of articles
and references to her online. But I thought lying to
the New York Times and to me and to the
Washington Post to keep me out of those articles was
just a little bit beyond the pale. And now we
(39:30):
have this whole episode with Jill Biden is not Hunter
Biden's birth mother. Shame on you, Katie, and no apology.
And now the lighter side of the story as you know,
(39:50):
twice in the last ten years, I have escaped this
golden prison of mine in the world of politics that
I have occupied off and on since nineteen ninety seven.
Twice I have escaped to go back and work for
ESPN for a time, largely simply because I wanted to
(40:12):
enjoy what I do. This is why I do these
terrible songs in this podcast, because it's just a little stupid,
silly thing that makes me laugh and maybe it makes
you laugh. And here I thought, Okay, here's an opportunity
to go work for ESPN and just do fun things
and reminiscent things of my childhood in the media. I mean,
(40:35):
I was thirty three years old today I showed up
at ESPN. In fact, I was still thirty two years old.
It was just before my birthday. It was nice to
be nostalgic. It was nice to be giving scores. And then,
of course, as the elections approached in twenty sixteen, in
twenty twenty, I said I'd better get back to work now,
and I did, and here we are. But while I
(40:57):
was at ESPN the second time, one of the joys
of that assignment, in addition to getting to do a
few baseball games with mixed results as a play by
play man with mixed results and SportsCenter and go back
to ESPN for the first time since nineteen ninety seven
and be Rip van Winkle, Where did these eighty seven
extra buildings come from? In addition to that, one of
(41:19):
the joys was that several times they sent me to
Washington to fill in for Michael Wilbon and co host
with Tony Kornheiser. Pardon the interruption. I loved working with
Tony and he could not have been nicer nor more
supportive to me, and we had a great time, and
I'd do it again in a heartbeat. But one day,
(41:42):
in the very well equipped newsroom that they occupied at
ABC News in Washington, in their building, I was seated
out in the middle of the newsroom and talking to
the executive producer of the show, and over his shoulder
I could see into his office where he had three TVs.
One of them was on Fox News, one of them
(42:03):
was on CNN, and one of them was on MSNBC.
And it was the middle of the day. We were
going to tape in an hour or two when we
were preparing the show, and I was looking at the
producer and we were talking. I don't know about what,
but it was an interesting conversation. And yet my few
kept drifting over to those three TVs that were framed
right over his left shoulder, because they were the three
(42:28):
news channels. Fox News was in a commercial. On CNN,
there was a pundit, a young woman that I also
used to go out with, who I lived with in
fact more or less for three and a half years.
And then on the right channel, the one with MSNBC,
Katie was anchoring. So we have two television networks, two
(42:52):
of the three major news operations hebex live in Girlfriends
of Mine, and the third one, Fox is in commercial.
And I finally said to the executive producer of the
pardon the interim show, turn around, look at this. See
Fox is in commercial. I used to live with her.
I used to live with her on MSNBC. If when
Fox comes back, Laura Ingram is on the air, run
(43:17):
over to your TVs because I think a bunch of
gold coins will come out of that bank of TVs.
Because you have just hit the Keith Olderman girlfriend Jack Pott.
(43:41):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Count on. Musical directors Brian Ray and
John Phillip Schaneale arranged, produced, and performed most of our music.
Mister Ray was on guitars, bass, and drums, and mister
Shaneale handled orchestration and keyboards. It was produced by Tko Brothers.
Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, were arranged
(44:01):
and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. Its music
is the Olberman theme from ESPN two. It was written
by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical
and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Faust, the best
baseball stadium organist ever, and everything else was pretty much
my fault. So that's countdown for this. The one hundred
and forty sixth day until the twenty twenty four presidential election,
(44:25):
the two hundred and fifty fifth day since convicted felon
Donald J. Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected
government of the United States. Use the July eleventh sentencing hearing,
use the mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens,
use the not regularly given elector objection option to stop
(44:47):
him from doing it again. While we still can. The
next scheduled countdown is tomorrow bulletins as the news warrants
till then, I'm Keith Oulderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck, and this episode has been dedicated to
the memory of my friend our refinement. Countdown with Keith
(45:17):
Oldreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.