November 1, 2023 • 43 mins
SEASON 2 EPISODE 65: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The likeliest explanation is that she said it in order to fool the cultists to think that there is no chance Trump could actually go to JAIL in Washington, Florida, New York, or Atlanta (or to fool Trump himself) but Trump's noted parking lot attorney Alina Habba has gone on NewsMax and insisted that she tells anybody who panics about the prospect that Trump will be arrested that "He's protected by Secret Service. Period. He's protected by Secret Service, number one...Number two, he did nothing wrong...Secret Service will always protect President Trump. That's the truth. They have to. Wherever he is. But it's not even something we think about." The NewsMax host then literally dares a judge to try to jail him. Did they literally present a passive-aggressive threat? Or just carefully phrased one to reassure the idiots that Trump, who is at great risk in four different courtrooms, is not at risk at all?
DEMENTIA J. TRUMP SCOREBOARD: He has gotten the day wrong again (and this time it's on videotape) AND gotten the year wrong - twice - while the time stamps of his posts indicate he's being plagued by insomnia. We can't ignore these little-for-Trump things. The bar has to be: if Biden did this, what would The Times, The Post, and the Networks say about him? Remember the polling: if both are thought too old, Biden wins in a landslide.
AND YOUR JOHNSON MAY NOT LAST: The 5th-String Speaker continues to pile up L's and the creepy factor continues to mount. Not only did he try to tie aid to Israel to cutting IRS investigation of wealthy tax cheats, but it turns out that as late as seven years ago he demanded that every candidate for office be subjected to a religious purity test - exactly the opposite of what the constitution says.
B-Block (25:03) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Senator Josh Hawley humiliates himself while trying to brand Holocaust survivor DHS Secretary Mayorkas as an antisemite. Wait, there are POPULAR Senators and Governors? And woo hoo, Elon Musk proves that you are safe in his Cybertruck if you are attacked by a squadron of medieval French archery. (30:29) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: My ex Kyrsten Sinema, followed by my ex Laura Ingraham, followed by... Dean Phillips. Who I don't even know. But - Harlan Crow DOES know him.
C-Block (36:40) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It's nerve-wracking enough to be handed, at age 20, the home phone number of a very famous athlete and be told he's expecting your call and you have to interview him. When it gets interesting is when he picks up the phone and pretends to be a woman.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. One
of Trump's attorneys, the Parking Lot One, seems to have
(00:26):
encouraged Trump's cultists to believe that the Secret Service might
intervene to prevent Trump's arrest if he is ordered to
jail for contempt of court whenever he finally fully violates
one of the many gag orders. This is from Newsmax
last night. The Trump flunky Alina Haba is pretending to
(00:49):
be the news interviewee and attorney, and the Trump flunky
Carl Higbee is pretending to be the news interviewer. Could
they even possibly throw them jail? What would that look like?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
He's protected by Secret Service, period, So I always tell
people and their panic listen, he's protected by Secret Service
number one, number two. He did nothing wrong. So when
people go to jails because they've done something wrong, do
we have crooked situations in and out of court? Absolutely?
Could they try, probably, but it won't work because there
is still trial process, there is still facts, and unfortunately
(01:22):
they're not going to win on the facts. Secret Service
will always protect President Trump. That's the truth. They have
to wherever he is. But it's not even something we
think about, to be honest, because this is all political,
it's really not. There's no criminal acts that he's done.
There's no civil wrongs that he's done, unless making money
for banks is a civil wrong. All of a sudden,
(01:43):
Orange man bad, I mean, that's ter It's Trump arrangement
syndrome at its best. I'm not worried about him. He's
not worried, and the American public shouldn't be worried. He's
succeeding for a reason.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Well, I will dare this judge to try to throw
them in jails again.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
First Amendment. First Amendment is a thing.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
The first time I heard that, I thought Alina Haba
was definitively saying that his secrets are detail would protect
Trump from being arrested. Now, having listened to it multiple times,
I think that while she has proven for her fourteen
months plus in the limelight that she is a raging idiot,
she is not actually expressing her idiocy by issuing some
(02:20):
sort of passive aggressive warning to the nation that the
Secret Service officers would try to obstruct the court officers
from detaining Trump, which they would not, even if a
scenario required a negotiated apprehension. Or a surrender, and Trump
somehow pulled an OJ Simpson and he tried to flee.
But I think she is trying to leave that exact
(02:43):
impression within the Trump cult. Don't worry. They can't arrest
him cause Secret Service, and in this nation reduced to
a tinderbox full of stochastic terrorists programmed by Trump and
his followers, it is still goddamned dangerous to do even that.
(03:05):
Note that Elena Haba, when asked about Trump going to prison,
chooses to say first he's protected by Secret Service. She
says it twice and only then does she claim he
did nothing wrong, and then she goes back to the
Secret Service will always protect him. Well, a third time.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Secret Service will always protect President Trump. That's the truth
they have to wherever he is.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
In reality, even Trump would be smart enough to Okay,
even Trump would probably be smart enough to realize that no,
a shootout between court officers and Secret Service with him
in the middle would actually not be a smart fundraising strategy.
(03:48):
Trump and probably even Haba are likely to be aware
that Secret Service works for homeland security, and in the
event of any real confrontation, if Trump shouted to his detail,
are you with me, boys, he would turn around to
find that there was nobody behind him. Should to check
the schedule? They all have the day off. Some sort
of screw up in human wor resources. What are you
gonna do? Whatever the purpose of trying to convince the
(04:12):
Trump morons that the Secret Service is some sort of magic,
impenetrable shield that will always protect Trump, Haba is clearly
dumb enough here to think that if Trump were actually
sentenced to prison just for violating the gag order, that
the Secret Service would go with him into the prison
(04:33):
like the slaves of the dead Pharaohs used to go
with them to the Great Beyond. Spoiler alert, They wouldn't.
A jailed ex president would unquestionably get additional security in jail,
but it will not be a couple of Secret Service
rookies who drew the short straw. And then, on a
(04:54):
final and entirely separate note, there are several other people
who have heard or will hear that interview with Haba
and will completely ignore the secret Service stuff and and
the usual not guilty First Amendment bluster. This group would
include Judge Chutkin and Judge Engern and Judge McAfee, maybe
even Judge Cannon, and certainly Jack Smith and his team,
(05:16):
and Fannie Willis and hers and Letitia James and hers,
and what they heard was this, it's.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Not even something we think about, to be honest, because
this is all political. It's really not. There's no criminal
acts that he's done, there's no civil wrongs that he's done.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
What the judges and prosecutors heard there was Alena Habba
saying that she and her client do not take the
terms of his release on bail seriously. They never think
he might actually wind up in jail for violating them.
And then they heard a frequent Trump surrogate in this
clown Higbee, saying at the end, I will dare this
(05:53):
judge to try to throw him in jail. See from
what little I know about judges, I've heard that they
don't like to be dared. Meanwhile, on the dementia Jay
Trumps scoreboard, he did it again. He has no idea
(06:14):
what day or what year it is. The day part first.
Last night at eight seventeen, he posted another one of
those monotone videos, but it had this weird climax. This
truly is our final chance to save America.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
And with the twenty twenty four election now less than
one year away.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
No, Sonny, it's not less than one year away. I mean,
I mean you're close. It's a year from this coming Sunday.
But dear listener, if you were asked what day it
was and you got it wrong by five days and
you weren't just coming up out of a coma or something,
your relatives might peel out of the room in order
(06:57):
to try to get you professional help as quickly as possible.
As to the wrong year part, he did that again
and again, provided compelling proof that his mind is cracking.
And this has a delightful bonus surprise to it, evidence
of insomnia. It was just a pair down. He really
can be terrified sometimes twenty seven words salvo. But boy,
(07:19):
oh boy, does it underscore one point that Trump is
clearly detaching from the easiest parts of reality, you know,
the when it is and the where you are parts.
At one twelve am Eastern, he posted quote Biden and
his radical left thugs waited three years to bring these
indictments unquote, and this cannot be overstated. One of three
(07:43):
things is wrong with him here. He either thinks we're
currently in the year twenty twenty four, or he doesn't
remember that he was president three years ago, or he
can't successfully subtract three from twenty twenty three. Again, he
posts that message at one of them, but then he
(08:06):
reposts it three hours later at four to twenty four am.
And before you normalize that and you say that's nothing
special for Trump, just a reminder that the new barometer
here is a simple one. If Joe Biden were crazy
enough to have started his own social media site just
to allow himself to post crazy stuff and read only
(08:26):
adoring stroking from the members of his cults, and he
posted the same crazy thing twice in three hours in
the middle of the night, getting the year wrong, what
would they be saying about Joe Biden? Not what would
Fox be saying about Joe Biden, but what would the
both sidest times and posts and networks be saying about Biden.
(08:49):
The point of this, again, if you missed yesterday's edition,
is about two startling polls, one from Pennsylvania last week
and another nationally by the Associated Press from August, the
unmistakable conclusion of which is that there will actually be
only two groups of voters in twenty two twenty four.
You know, a year from Sunday, the forty three percent
who think that both Trump and Biden are too old,
(09:12):
and the fifty seven percent who are everybody else, And
as counterintuitive as it sounds, the everybody else, the ones
who think Biden is too old and Trump isn't, the
ones who think neither are too old, the ones who
support RFK Junior because they're firmly convinced he's actually JFK Junior.
Everybody else, they are nearly evenly split on who they
(09:36):
are going to vote for, or they are leaning towards
Trump by varying margins depending on the state a point
two points, maybe five six seven in some of the
red states, and the other forty three percent who believe
they are both too old are going to vote Biden
by sixty one to fifteen. In Pennsylvania, it's sixty six
(10:00):
to eleven as of last week. So if you can
pump up the number of voters who believe they are
both too old, even just from you know, forty three
percent to forty eight percent, you've got the makings of
a Biden landslide, even if every single undecided in the
both are too old group were to break for Trump.
(10:20):
So the strategy has to be to make a headline
out of every Trump gaff and every Trump bit of confusion,
and everything that we have come to accept as Trump's
baseline mental incompetence. There are lots of subtexts to this
new key American voting block Agists United, but the key
(10:42):
is that they are not exclusively Democrats, and there is
lots of room to grow them among soft Republicans at
especially independence and the only vaguely political who know that
the election is important, but will be damned if they
know why. Thus we cannot just skate past these little
things anymore. The likely Republican nominee were president of the
(11:05):
United States, no matter how used to his madness we
may have gotten, was up at quarter past one in
the middle of the night, went on social media, posted
paranoid inanities, and in the process got the year we
are living in wrong. And then three hours later he
(11:27):
was up, up again, up still, and he decided he
had not yelled loudly enough at that cloud, so he
reposted his inanities and still did not notice or did
not care, that he got the year wrong. Donald Trump
is too old. We're not talking about Biden. Now. You
(11:49):
think whatever you want to about Biden's age, they're both
too old. Fine whatever, welcome to the club. Sign here.
And if the Biden campaign does not want to play
this game, if they do not want to run with
my idea of the slogan, my old man can beat
up your old man because they think if they ignore it,
maybe on his birthday this month Joe will turn seventy
nine instead of eighty one. We'll find they don't have
(12:10):
to carry the message. Everybody else can do it for them. Sure,
they're both too old, so that allows you to go
back to judge who you're voting for on which one
is old and which one is old and crazy and evil.
(12:37):
Thank you, Nancy Faust to the House now and anybody
else got an ineffable sensation that Speaker Mike Johnson is
not going to last till Christmas. It is perhaps the
political definition of our time that only an obscure and
non vetted backbencher with a name that sounds like an
unimaginative alias for a registered sex offender could manage to
(13:02):
get elected anything within the collect of boxing hoboes that
comprises the House Republican Caucus. But that comes with the
potential time bomb that he's unvetted, not because there's nothing
to vet, but simply because he had hidden it well
or they just hadn't gotten around to him yet. The
(13:23):
stuff coming out about the fifth string Speaker is amazing,
I mean amazing, even for a Republican, even for a
Bible thumping Republican. First thing Mike Johnson did after election
was to say God put him there. I mean, insisting
the Almighty voted for you is okay, I guess if
you are the comic relief Mayor of New York. But
(13:43):
it could be politically dangerous if you are a new
Speaker of the House who was obviously placed there not
by the Lord but by Trump and the archangel Gates.
And then the second thing they did, Johnson his colleagues
knelt in a circle on the house floor and they
weren't shooting craps. And then it was off to the races.
(14:06):
Indefatigable anti gay writer for the last twenty years, virulent
Christo fascist. He taught at Liberty University, where the liberty
turned out to be how the founder had the liberty
to have as much sex with the pool boy as possible.
He has publicly stated he believes the Ken Ham stuff
that humans lived alongside the dinosaurs. He has publicly stated
(14:30):
he believes the Bishop Usher stuff the quote calculations unquote
from the ages of the people in the Bible, calculations
that confirm that the universe was created on October twenty second,
four thousand and four BC, right around six pm. Damn,
the anniversary was ten days ago, and I forgot to
(14:52):
send a card. Yes, the Bishop Usher stuff is the
same nonsense they laughed at William Jennings Brian for testifying
about during the Scopes monkey trial in nineteen twenty six.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives thinks these are facts.
(15:14):
And he's the former representative for the giant replica arc
that the other creationists built in Williamstown, Kentucky, the one
that he had to close when in an irony of
biblical proportions, literally biblical proportions, the arc flooded. Somebody miscounted
(15:39):
their cubbits. Then Huffington Post found the mother load, the
website of Johnson's apparently even battier wife, Kelly Johnson Onward
Christian Education Services, on which there were live documents comparing
being gay to incest and bestiality. Within twenty four hours,
(16:00):
Kelly Johnson had taken the entire site down, which suggests
a she has the Internet savvy of a founder and
be her faith in the Lord ain't quite what she
says it is. And see she never heard of the
Internet wayback machine, which God invented. Now my old friend
David Corn of Mother Jones has found something else. Twenty
(16:22):
sixteen seminar by these ugly Johnson's called answers for our times, government, culture,
and Christianity. And we are now way past bestiality and
homosexuality and the land of the dinosaurs. We are at
mandatory religious exams for all American political candidates. Johnson told
(16:45):
the assembled quote, I want to know what you think
about the Christian heritage of this country. I want to
know what you think about God's design for society. Have
you even thought about that? If they hadn't thought about it,
you need to move on and find somebody who has.
We have too many people in government who don't know
any of this stuff. They haven't even thought about it. Unquote, Well, Mike,
(17:08):
that's probably because it's bullshit. You know what Mike does
not say In the transcript of that twenty sixteen seminar
parts of which he's repeated as recently as twenty nineteen.
He does not say no religious test shall ever be
required as a qualification to any office or public trust
under the United States. The Speaker of the House does
(17:31):
not believe that. Article six Clause three of our Constitution
does believe that. And on top of all this screwball
Bible stuff, Mike Johnson also appears to be an idiot.
He did a full side show Bob Rakestep yesterday. He
tried to tie fourteen billion dollars in aid to Israel
(17:54):
to fourteen billion dollars in off sets. And of all
the offsets he could have picked, fourteen billion dollars taken
out of the defense budget, fourteen billion dollars taken out
out of liberal causes, whatever he selected funding to be
taken from the expansion of the Internal Revenue Service. He
wants fourteen billion cut from the IRS, specifically the money
(18:18):
being spent to enhance the investigation of wealthy tax cheats, which,
on top of having no possible relationship to Israel or
to the two parties arms race to show which one
of them is more pro Israel at the moment, that
does not offset anything. It will in fact, add thirty
(18:39):
billion dollars to the deficit because we don't get the
tax cheat's money that way. We got laughed at by
the Democrats, raged at by Mitch McConnell. Susan Collins not
only looked at him like she was about to mention
how many lessons he still needed. She said he not
only needed to rethink the package, but he needed to
put the Ukraine Aid back into it. Even Jonie Ernst
(19:01):
sat up and took notice. And then Mike Johnson took
time out of his rake hunting expedition to hire raj
Shaw to build the communications operation inside the Speaker's office.
Where do you know that name from? Raj Shaw? The
former Trump Deputy White House Press secretary who went directly
(19:23):
from that low level entry job to becoming senior vice
president in charge of Tucker Carlson at Fox News, The
one who told Murdoch and Company that it had better
push more election denihalism or it would lose more viewers.
The guy they then fired from Fox after the lawsuit
was settled. That I'm proud to say rod Shaw a
(19:47):
fellow cornell alum. He's over there on our Yeah, the
admissions office frequently screws up list with and Coulter with
Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred with mar anyway back to the point,
I don't know about you, but all this Johnson talk
has the feel of being just the warm up act.
(20:09):
As the reporter and our preeminent George Santos scholar Jacqueline
Sweet wrote quote, I want a Mike Johnson sex scandal,
but I'm also afraid of how gross and creepy it
will probably end up being L O L. And if
you weren't already thinking that might be a remote possibility,
(20:29):
sure enough, what frog marches out of Johnson's office yesterday afternoon?
A frog wow, A guy in a frog suit wearing
a sign reading jumping for joy for a speaker Johnson.
And you know, if this isn't the sign of a
(20:50):
sex scandal, there is, given Johnson's religious rap sheet, an
even more disturbing possibility. The frog plague has begun, hasn't it? Also?
Of interest here the Secretary of Homeland Security, you know,
(21:13):
the boss of all those secret service agents. The Secretary
of Homeland Security answered Josh Hawley so thoroughly that they
had to carry the senator off in buckets, and the
Arizona Diamondbacks so thoroughly humiliated themselves in Game four of
the World Series last night in falling to Texas, which
now leads the Fall Classic. That's just a brand name,
(21:35):
now leading the Fall Classic three games to one. It
was so bad, I'm not really sure why they are
going to play a game five tonight. And best of all,
Elon Musk proves his new cyber truck will keep you
safe if you are attacked by a detachment of medieval
(21:56):
French archers. That's next. This is countdown.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
This is countdown with Keith o Woman, my crazy friend.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Host. Scripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snarks,
some predictions, and these are the places making news. Dateline Washington,
when the right wing Washington Examiner headlines the story of
a Republican senator's day with quote Majorcas shuts down Hawley's
anti Jewish claim I am the child of a Holocaust survivor.
(22:38):
That Republican senator has had a really bad day. Josh Hawley,
aka running Man, tried to pin a pro Palestinian tweet
by a Department of Homeland Security employee and paint DHS
as anti Israel and put that on Secretary Alejandro Majorcis
Majorcus then did to him what the insurrectionists Hally raised
(23:01):
a fist of support too on January sixth, would have
done to Holly if they had caught him. Frankly, mister Secretary,
I think that your performance is despicable, and I think
the fact that you are not willing to provide answers
to this committee is absolutely atrocious.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Mister Chairman, may I like if you'd like to have
a military respond you arrived, I would, and I'm not
sure I'll limit it to sixty seconds. That's fine. Number one.
What I found despicable is the implication that this language
tremendously odious actually could be emblematic of the sentiments of
(23:43):
the two hundred and sixty thousand men and women of
the Department of Homeland Security.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Number one.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Number two, Senator Holly takes an adversarial approach to me
in this question, and perhaps he doesn't know my own background,
Perhaps he does not know that I am the child
of a Holocaust survivor perhaps he does not know that
my mother lost almost all her family at the hands
(24:12):
of the Nazis. And so I find his adversarial tone
to be entirely misplaced. I find it to be disrespectful
of me and my heritage, and I do not expect
an apology, but I did want to say what I
just articulated, Thank you, missus.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Chairman. Can I just response and see has referenced me personally.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Senator Holly, we need to move on center, Robbie.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
To paraphrase the Republican chairman there to Senator Hawley by Felicia.
By the way, you may have missed it, but in
their Secretary of Mayorcus slipped in a subtle fact that
suspended author of the anti Israel tweet was appointed to
DHS during the Trump administration. Dateline a state house or
(25:01):
a Senate near you. Most and least popular senators governor's
per the Monthly Morning Consult Poll. Most popular Governor Phil
Scott of Vermont approval rating eighty three percent. Also there's
Governor Gordon of Wyoming and Governor Sununu of New Hampshire.
The top senators Barasso of Wyoming it's seventy percent approval,
(25:22):
Shats of Hawaii sixty five percent. Least popular Ron DeSantis
Governor Kim Reynolds of Iowa forty seven percent. But it
was thirty nine percent disapproval in the first quarter, and
Governor Tate reeves of mississip and dateline elon Musk's tiny
little mind. He has released another proof of performance video
(25:45):
for one of his exploding inventions. This time it is
the cyber truck. He had somebody fire an arrow into
the side of the cyber truck to prove its something,
just to make this even better, Well, what's missing from
this equation? Musk? The cyber truck a bow and arrow?
Why that's right? Who else could he choose? But he
(26:06):
had Joe Rogan fire the arrow from a crossbow. It
was almost as big and shiny and full of holes
as Joe's head. In a response to the tweet with
that video, somebody said the cyber truck was on fire,
(26:30):
like most of Musk's inventions, And yes, what you heard
was correct. The arrow bounced off the side of the
cyber truck, so you can rely on it in case
you and George Custer are ever driving through the Battle
of the Big Horn still ahead on this heavy production
(27:12):
episode of Countdown. It is scary enough to be told
when you are twenty years old. Here, Keith, here is
the home phone number of a very famous person in
your field. They know you are going to call them,
go and interview them. And when you call, and when
he answers, he pretends to be somebody else. In fact,
(27:32):
he pretends to be a woman. Things I promise not
to tell next first time for the daily roundup of
the miss Grints, morons, Undunning, krugriffect specimens who constitute today's
worst persons in the world. And by the way, congrats
to doctor Dave Dunning, who has won the Society of
Experimental Social Psychology Scientific Impact Award because the famous paper
(27:56):
that he and Justin Krueger wrote in nineteen ninety nine
at Cornell Unskilled and unaware of it, how difficulties in
recognizing one's own inc confidence led to inflated self assessments
the dawn of the Dunning Krueger effect. That paper just
keeps on getting quoted daily. They're both going to the
(28:16):
Hall of fame anyway. Here they are worse, my old pal,
Kirsten Cinema. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has now presented
its brand new internal polling on the race in Arizona.
This is according to punch Bowl News. You're ready, Ruben
Diego Democrat forty one percent, Carrie Lake crazy woman thirty
seven percent, and in last place, last place with less
(28:41):
than half of what Carrie Lake is getting and taking
most of her support not from the Democrats but from
the Republicans, like carry Lake. Senator Kirsten Cinema seventeen percent,
the incumbent in third place. So now the Republicans want
to run her out of town too. But don't worry,
She'll be fine, she said. So she saved the Senate,
(29:03):
She saved the filibuster. He can now become a member
of any corporate board in the country or president of
a university. Yeah, you got it, Sinny, congrats you're the
next president of Faber College. Worser Laura ingram At say,
this is quite the unexpected theme developing here for worse persons.
(29:25):
Kirsten Cinema, Laura ingram AnyWho Laura ingram was showing off
her only skill on Fox, mocking successful people. She was
howling with laughter because President Biden referred to the web telescope,
and he ain't come the web tallescope. Isn't it the hubble?
(29:45):
Is he thinking of web hobble? Then she braids some
more for a few more seconds, and apparently Laura still
does not realize that two Christmases ago we launched the
web Telescope, which is the upgrade for the Hubble, the
web Telescope, which was what the President was referring to.
Because he's the President and he's smarter than Laura is.
(30:08):
She's mocking somebody for being right when she's wrong. Trust me,
that sort of sums her up, but you do have
to excuse her. In college, Laura studied Russian and alcohol.
But our winner the worst. Now, I couldn't find a
third X I get along with most of my exes,
my forty nine years worth of exes. So instead it's
(30:33):
Dean Phillips, the Mike Johnson of the Democratic Party, the
congressional non entity for Minnesota, who just has to challenge
President Biden for the nomination because Biden's too old. Oh
did I mention that Biden wins a landslide of half
the voters believe that he and Trump are both too old?
Go old or go home anyway. Turns out that in
(30:53):
twenty nineteen, Representative Phillips, Noble Democrat, received the maximum twenty
eight hundred dollars personal campaign donation from Harlan you know
Harlan Crowe. He's the owner and operator of Clarence Thomas.
Plus he donates to the truly worthy Democrats and liberals
(31:16):
like Joe Manchin, twenty eight hundred dollars, thirty five hundred
dollars to Cornell West as mentioned, twenty eight hundred dollars
to Dean Phillips, and ten thousand, eight hundred dollars to
Kirsten Cinema. Dean Phillips is, Harlan crow is Kirsten Cinema.
(31:38):
So I did manage to put an X into all
three slots. Watch it, I said, slots two days part
said he the word now to the number one story
(32:12):
on the countdown on my favorite topic, me and things
I promised not to tell. And this has been a
somewhat uh fierce edition of the program. So let me
do something here at the end that's a little lighter.
October twenty seventh is the anniversary of one of the
damnedest interviews I ever did, and it was with Baseball
Hall of Famer Willie Mays. Every time Willy Mays's name
(32:35):
comes up, I think of two things. One is that
interview at my first job from my first radio network,
and like I wasn't scared enough. He did a bit
that if I'd have done it, they would have fired
me on the spot. The other thing is an amazing
injustice that befell Willy Mays that nobody talks about. Okay,
(32:57):
So it's a Saturday afternoon, October twenty seventh, nineteen seventy nine,
just forty three years ago today, and Willie Mays has
just been banned from baseball because word has gotten out
that he has signed a contract to do promotional events
for an Atlantic city casino, and there's a press conference
coming up on Monday. I know, try explaining this concept
(33:21):
to any current sports fan now used to seeing retired
players on TV, not just telling them to bet on games,
but telling them how to bet and who to bet on.
Plus even then, this made no sense. It was like
three months after Willie Mays had been inducted into the
Baseball Hall of Fame. Three months now he's being banned
(33:44):
for life for something that today the Commissioner of Baseball
would send him a note of congratulations and a paycheck.
So anyway, nobody has done an interview with Willy yet
because he has been traveling and my phone rings in
my little cubby hole at United Press Internationals Radio network
three months that coincidentally was how long my full time
(34:07):
broadcasting career had been to this point. And on the
phone is maybe the top baseball reporter of his day, Keith,
it's Milt Richmond. This man once reported in July nineteen
fifty five that if the Milwaukee Braves didn't start winning,
that they would fire their manager. Exactly one year later,
they didn't start winning, and exactly one year later to
(34:28):
the day, they fired their manager. That's how good Milt
Richmond was. Keith, write his phone number down. It's William
Mays's home. He's expecting your call for an interview about
this banishment story. I squeaked, yes, sir, yes, sir, and
I went into one of our recording studios and I
dialed the number. And I will not recreate the voice
(34:51):
that I heard answer William Mays's phone, because while doing
this voice was once considered to be a staple of
American humor, even American humor written or performed by liberals.
James Thurber's short stories are full of this voice. The
voice is wildly racist. It is racist enough that if
today you heard an African American man, do this voice,
(35:12):
you might still say still racist. It is a voice
similar to that of the actress Hattie McDaniel, who won
the Academy Award in nineteen thirty nine for Gone with
the Wind, who was a world class blues singer, a
top patriotic fundraiser during World War Two, who played maids
(35:32):
housekeepers in maybe two hundred films. She also played one
on a famous radio show, and was paid so little
that while she was performing her role of the maid,
she had to keep working as a real maid. Anyway,
I'm twenty years old and I have to interview Willie
Mays about him getting banned from baseball, by the way,
(35:55):
getting banned from baseball at the same time they were
banning Mickey Mantle from baseball for doing promotional announcements for
a casino. And I call Willie Mays's number and I'm
shaking like a leaf and the phone is answered, and
a gravelly but feminine voice that sounded exactly like Haddie
McDaniel says hello, mister Mays's residence. And I am a
(36:20):
little thrown by this, but I power through and I
explain who I am, and she says, uh huh, and
I say where I'm calling from, and she says uh huh,
And I say, Milt Richmond said, mister Mays was expecting me,
and she interrupts me and says, this is Willie. The
Hattie McDaniel like impersonation was done by Willie Mays. Now
(36:42):
I do not have this on tape. Silly me. When
they said you could never start recording before you got
expressed permission from the interviewee to start recording, I believed them.
Anybody else would have a tape of the phone being answered,
and that impression done by Willie Mays. I'm afraid you
(37:03):
will have to take my word for because why would
I make this up? October twenty seventh, nineteen seventy nine.
And honestly, I still haven't recovered from mister Mays's residence. Now,
the injustice about William Mays that nobody talks about this
is something else no fan believes today. The US military
(37:26):
used to draft Major League Baseball players and NFL players
and NBA players and other athletes and send them into
the service in the middle of their seasons, in the
primes of their careers, even if there was no war
in progress. Now they only did it a couple of
times after saying nineteen forty five, and usually that was
(37:49):
thinly veiled racist political pressure, like when they drafted Muhammad
Ali in nineteen sixty six when he was heavyweight champion
of the world at an activist Muslim and twenty four
years old, when everybody else who was getting drafted was eighteen. Remember,
but in nineteen fifty two they drafted Willie Mays. Willie
Mays had come up from the Miners the year before
(38:11):
and led the New York Giants from thirteen games back
to the National League pennant and was the kind of
all around whirlwind of a player nobody had ever seen before.
And on May twenty ninth, thirty four games into his
second season boom, he was drafted and inducted and he
missed the rest of that season, and he missed all
of the nineteen fifty three season. They didn't draft Mickey Mantle,
(38:35):
who also broke in also in New York, also in
nineteen fifty one, and to be fair, Mickey Mantle had
about four hundred medical problems. But they also didn't draft
nineteen fifty one American League Rookie of the Year Gil
McDougald of the Yankees who was a white guy. Or
Walt Dropo who was the Rookie of the Year in
nineteen fifty and was a white guy. Or Roy Severs
(38:56):
who was the rookie of the Year in nineteen forty
nine and was a white guy, or or or you
get the point. Now. Trying to calculate should have bins
and would have beens in sports is a risky business,
but you can get a statistical approximation. If a player
hits twenty homers in his first season, then misses two years,
(39:18):
then comes back and hits forty one homers in his
first year back, you can extrapolate from that that he
probably would have hit twenty seven homers in the first
missing year and thirty four in the second missing year.
Your numerical sequence is twenty homers, then twenty seven, then
thirty four, then forty one. You have to taker a
(39:39):
little bit with it in Mays's case, because he did
not miss all of nineteen fifty two, just from June
on and he had a slow start. He only hit
four homers in the first two months of nineteen fifty two,
so instead of twenty seven that year, maybe he only
hits twenty four. So a good guess as to how
many homers William Ays did not hit because he got
(40:00):
drafted and all the other guys didn't. The good guess
is a all told, he missed the chance to hit
fifty four homers that he probably would have hit in
real life. Willie Mays finished with six hundred and sixty
career home runs. For most of the nineteen sixties, it
was thought he was the man who would challenge Babe
(40:23):
Ruth's career home run record, not Hank Aaron, but Willie Mays.
Willie Mays hit six hundred and sixty homers, but if
you give him the fifty four more homers he might
have hit if he hadn't been so curiously drafted. In
nineteen fifty two, Willie Mays finishes with seven hundred and
fourteen home runs, which is exactly how many Babe Ruth
(40:45):
hit seven hundred and fourteen, So no drafting, and maybe
in nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy three and nineteen
seventy four, we are seeing Willie Mays hit his seven
hundredth home run and challenging Babe Ruth and coming down
the stretch and tying and breaking Babe Ruth's record, and
(41:06):
then right behind him, Henry Aaron hits his seven hundred
and fifteenth homer and then his seven hundred and sixteenth
homer to break the all time record held by Willie Mays.
(41:32):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Countdown has come to you from the
Vin Scully Studio at the Olderman Broadcasting Empire here in
New York Countown. Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip
Chanel arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister
Chanelle handling orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray on the guitars,
bass and drums produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including
(41:55):
some Beethoven in there, arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed.
Sports music is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. It was written
by Mitch Warren Davis. We call it the Olderman Theme
from ESPN two. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are
by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our
announcer today was my crazy friend Tony Kornheiser, and everything
(42:16):
else was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for
this the one thousand and thirtieth day since dementia Jay
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Convict him now while we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletin says the news
warrants till then, I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon,
(42:38):
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is
(42:59):
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. One
of Trump's attorneys, the Parking Lot One, seems to have
(00:26):
encouraged Trump's cultists to believe that the Secret Service might
intervene to prevent Trump's arrest if he is ordered to
jail for contempt of court whenever he finally fully violates
one of the many gag orders. This is from Newsmax
last night. The Trump flunky Alina Haba is pretending to
(00:49):
be the news interviewee and attorney, and the Trump flunky
Carl Higbee is pretending to be the news interviewer. Could
they even possibly throw them jail? What would that look like?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
He's protected by Secret Service, period, So I always tell
people and their panic listen, he's protected by Secret Service
number one, number two. He did nothing wrong. So when
people go to jails because they've done something wrong, do
we have crooked situations in and out of court? Absolutely?
Could they try, probably, but it won't work because there
is still trial process, there is still facts, and unfortunately
(01:22):
they're not going to win on the facts. Secret Service
will always protect President Trump. That's the truth. They have
to wherever he is. But it's not even something we
think about, to be honest, because this is all political,
it's really not. There's no criminal acts that he's done.
There's no civil wrongs that he's done, unless making money
for banks is a civil wrong. All of a sudden,
(01:43):
Orange man bad, I mean, that's ter It's Trump arrangement
syndrome at its best. I'm not worried about him. He's
not worried, and the American public shouldn't be worried. He's
succeeding for a reason.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Well, I will dare this judge to try to throw
them in jails again.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
First Amendment. First Amendment is a thing.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
The first time I heard that, I thought Alina Haba
was definitively saying that his secrets are detail would protect
Trump from being arrested. Now, having listened to it multiple times,
I think that while she has proven for her fourteen
months plus in the limelight that she is a raging idiot,
she is not actually expressing her idiocy by issuing some
(02:20):
sort of passive aggressive warning to the nation that the
Secret Service officers would try to obstruct the court officers
from detaining Trump, which they would not, even if a
scenario required a negotiated apprehension. Or a surrender, and Trump
somehow pulled an OJ Simpson and he tried to flee.
But I think she is trying to leave that exact
(02:43):
impression within the Trump cult. Don't worry. They can't arrest
him cause Secret Service, and in this nation reduced to
a tinderbox full of stochastic terrorists programmed by Trump and
his followers, it is still goddamned dangerous to do even that.
(03:05):
Note that Elena Haba, when asked about Trump going to prison,
chooses to say first he's protected by Secret Service. She
says it twice and only then does she claim he
did nothing wrong, and then she goes back to the
Secret Service will always protect him. Well, a third time.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Secret Service will always protect President Trump. That's the truth
they have to wherever he is.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
In reality, even Trump would be smart enough to Okay,
even Trump would probably be smart enough to realize that no,
a shootout between court officers and Secret Service with him
in the middle would actually not be a smart fundraising strategy.
(03:48):
Trump and probably even Haba are likely to be aware
that Secret Service works for homeland security, and in the
event of any real confrontation, if Trump shouted to his detail,
are you with me, boys, he would turn around to
find that there was nobody behind him. Should to check
the schedule? They all have the day off. Some sort
of screw up in human wor resources. What are you
gonna do? Whatever the purpose of trying to convince the
(04:12):
Trump morons that the Secret Service is some sort of magic,
impenetrable shield that will always protect Trump, Haba is clearly
dumb enough here to think that if Trump were actually
sentenced to prison just for violating the gag order, that
the Secret Service would go with him into the prison
(04:33):
like the slaves of the dead Pharaohs used to go
with them to the Great Beyond. Spoiler alert, They wouldn't.
A jailed ex president would unquestionably get additional security in jail,
but it will not be a couple of Secret Service
rookies who drew the short straw. And then, on a
(04:54):
final and entirely separate note, there are several other people
who have heard or will hear that interview with Haba
and will completely ignore the secret Service stuff and and
the usual not guilty First Amendment bluster. This group would
include Judge Chutkin and Judge Engern and Judge McAfee, maybe
even Judge Cannon, and certainly Jack Smith and his team,
(05:16):
and Fannie Willis and hers and Letitia James and hers,
and what they heard was this, it's.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Not even something we think about, to be honest, because
this is all political. It's really not. There's no criminal
acts that he's done, there's no civil wrongs that he's done.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
What the judges and prosecutors heard there was Alena Habba
saying that she and her client do not take the
terms of his release on bail seriously. They never think
he might actually wind up in jail for violating them.
And then they heard a frequent Trump surrogate in this
clown Higbee, saying at the end, I will dare this
(05:53):
judge to try to throw him in jail. See from
what little I know about judges, I've heard that they
don't like to be dared. Meanwhile, on the dementia Jay
Trumps scoreboard, he did it again. He has no idea
(06:14):
what day or what year it is. The day part first.
Last night at eight seventeen, he posted another one of
those monotone videos, but it had this weird climax. This
truly is our final chance to save America.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
And with the twenty twenty four election now less than
one year away.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
No, Sonny, it's not less than one year away. I mean,
I mean you're close. It's a year from this coming Sunday.
But dear listener, if you were asked what day it
was and you got it wrong by five days and
you weren't just coming up out of a coma or something,
your relatives might peel out of the room in order
(06:57):
to try to get you professional help as quickly as possible.
As to the wrong year part, he did that again
and again, provided compelling proof that his mind is cracking.
And this has a delightful bonus surprise to it, evidence
of insomnia. It was just a pair down. He really
can be terrified sometimes twenty seven words salvo. But boy,
(07:19):
oh boy, does it underscore one point that Trump is
clearly detaching from the easiest parts of reality, you know,
the when it is and the where you are parts.
At one twelve am Eastern, he posted quote Biden and
his radical left thugs waited three years to bring these
indictments unquote, and this cannot be overstated. One of three
(07:43):
things is wrong with him here. He either thinks we're
currently in the year twenty twenty four, or he doesn't
remember that he was president three years ago, or he
can't successfully subtract three from twenty twenty three. Again, he
posts that message at one of them, but then he
(08:06):
reposts it three hours later at four to twenty four am.
And before you normalize that and you say that's nothing
special for Trump, just a reminder that the new barometer
here is a simple one. If Joe Biden were crazy
enough to have started his own social media site just
to allow himself to post crazy stuff and read only
(08:26):
adoring stroking from the members of his cults, and he
posted the same crazy thing twice in three hours in
the middle of the night, getting the year wrong, what
would they be saying about Joe Biden? Not what would
Fox be saying about Joe Biden, but what would the
both sidest times and posts and networks be saying about Biden.
(08:49):
The point of this, again, if you missed yesterday's edition,
is about two startling polls, one from Pennsylvania last week
and another nationally by the Associated Press from August, the
unmistakable conclusion of which is that there will actually be
only two groups of voters in twenty two twenty four.
You know, a year from Sunday, the forty three percent
who think that both Trump and Biden are too old,
(09:12):
and the fifty seven percent who are everybody else, And
as counterintuitive as it sounds, the everybody else, the ones
who think Biden is too old and Trump isn't, the
ones who think neither are too old, the ones who
support RFK Junior because they're firmly convinced he's actually JFK Junior.
Everybody else, they are nearly evenly split on who they
(09:36):
are going to vote for, or they are leaning towards
Trump by varying margins depending on the state a point
two points, maybe five six seven in some of the
red states, and the other forty three percent who believe
they are both too old are going to vote Biden
by sixty one to fifteen. In Pennsylvania, it's sixty six
(10:00):
to eleven as of last week. So if you can
pump up the number of voters who believe they are
both too old, even just from you know, forty three
percent to forty eight percent, you've got the makings of
a Biden landslide, even if every single undecided in the
both are too old group were to break for Trump.
(10:20):
So the strategy has to be to make a headline
out of every Trump gaff and every Trump bit of confusion,
and everything that we have come to accept as Trump's
baseline mental incompetence. There are lots of subtexts to this
new key American voting block Agists United, but the key
(10:42):
is that they are not exclusively Democrats, and there is
lots of room to grow them among soft Republicans at
especially independence and the only vaguely political who know that
the election is important, but will be damned if they
know why. Thus we cannot just skate past these little
things anymore. The likely Republican nominee were president of the
(11:05):
United States, no matter how used to his madness we
may have gotten, was up at quarter past one in
the middle of the night, went on social media, posted
paranoid inanities, and in the process got the year we
are living in wrong. And then three hours later he
(11:27):
was up, up again, up still, and he decided he
had not yelled loudly enough at that cloud, so he
reposted his inanities and still did not notice or did
not care, that he got the year wrong. Donald Trump
is too old. We're not talking about Biden. Now. You
(11:49):
think whatever you want to about Biden's age, they're both
too old. Fine whatever, welcome to the club. Sign here.
And if the Biden campaign does not want to play
this game, if they do not want to run with
my idea of the slogan, my old man can beat
up your old man because they think if they ignore it,
maybe on his birthday this month Joe will turn seventy
nine instead of eighty one. We'll find they don't have
(12:10):
to carry the message. Everybody else can do it for them. Sure,
they're both too old, so that allows you to go
back to judge who you're voting for on which one
is old and which one is old and crazy and evil.
(12:37):
Thank you, Nancy Faust to the House now and anybody
else got an ineffable sensation that Speaker Mike Johnson is
not going to last till Christmas. It is perhaps the
political definition of our time that only an obscure and
non vetted backbencher with a name that sounds like an
unimaginative alias for a registered sex offender could manage to
(13:02):
get elected anything within the collect of boxing hoboes that
comprises the House Republican Caucus. But that comes with the
potential time bomb that he's unvetted, not because there's nothing
to vet, but simply because he had hidden it well
or they just hadn't gotten around to him yet. The
(13:23):
stuff coming out about the fifth string Speaker is amazing,
I mean amazing, even for a Republican, even for a
Bible thumping Republican. First thing Mike Johnson did after election
was to say God put him there. I mean, insisting
the Almighty voted for you is okay, I guess if
you are the comic relief Mayor of New York. But
(13:43):
it could be politically dangerous if you are a new
Speaker of the House who was obviously placed there not
by the Lord but by Trump and the archangel Gates.
And then the second thing they did, Johnson his colleagues
knelt in a circle on the house floor and they
weren't shooting craps. And then it was off to the races.
(14:06):
Indefatigable anti gay writer for the last twenty years, virulent
Christo fascist. He taught at Liberty University, where the liberty
turned out to be how the founder had the liberty
to have as much sex with the pool boy as possible.
He has publicly stated he believes the Ken Ham stuff
that humans lived alongside the dinosaurs. He has publicly stated
(14:30):
he believes the Bishop Usher stuff the quote calculations unquote
from the ages of the people in the Bible, calculations
that confirm that the universe was created on October twenty second,
four thousand and four BC, right around six pm. Damn,
the anniversary was ten days ago, and I forgot to
(14:52):
send a card. Yes, the Bishop Usher stuff is the
same nonsense they laughed at William Jennings Brian for testifying
about during the Scopes monkey trial in nineteen twenty six.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives thinks these are facts.
(15:14):
And he's the former representative for the giant replica arc
that the other creationists built in Williamstown, Kentucky, the one
that he had to close when in an irony of
biblical proportions, literally biblical proportions, the arc flooded. Somebody miscounted
(15:39):
their cubbits. Then Huffington Post found the mother load, the
website of Johnson's apparently even battier wife, Kelly Johnson Onward
Christian Education Services, on which there were live documents comparing
being gay to incest and bestiality. Within twenty four hours,
(16:00):
Kelly Johnson had taken the entire site down, which suggests
a she has the Internet savvy of a founder and
be her faith in the Lord ain't quite what she
says it is. And see she never heard of the
Internet wayback machine, which God invented. Now my old friend
David Corn of Mother Jones has found something else. Twenty
(16:22):
sixteen seminar by these ugly Johnson's called answers for our times, government, culture,
and Christianity. And we are now way past bestiality and
homosexuality and the land of the dinosaurs. We are at
mandatory religious exams for all American political candidates. Johnson told
(16:45):
the assembled quote, I want to know what you think
about the Christian heritage of this country. I want to
know what you think about God's design for society. Have
you even thought about that? If they hadn't thought about it,
you need to move on and find somebody who has.
We have too many people in government who don't know
any of this stuff. They haven't even thought about it. Unquote, Well, Mike,
(17:08):
that's probably because it's bullshit. You know what Mike does
not say In the transcript of that twenty sixteen seminar
parts of which he's repeated as recently as twenty nineteen.
He does not say no religious test shall ever be
required as a qualification to any office or public trust
under the United States. The Speaker of the House does
(17:31):
not believe that. Article six Clause three of our Constitution
does believe that. And on top of all this screwball
Bible stuff, Mike Johnson also appears to be an idiot.
He did a full side show Bob Rakestep yesterday. He
tried to tie fourteen billion dollars in aid to Israel
(17:54):
to fourteen billion dollars in off sets. And of all
the offsets he could have picked, fourteen billion dollars taken
out of the defense budget, fourteen billion dollars taken out
out of liberal causes, whatever he selected funding to be
taken from the expansion of the Internal Revenue Service. He
wants fourteen billion cut from the IRS, specifically the money
(18:18):
being spent to enhance the investigation of wealthy tax cheats, which,
on top of having no possible relationship to Israel or
to the two parties arms race to show which one
of them is more pro Israel at the moment, that
does not offset anything. It will in fact, add thirty
(18:39):
billion dollars to the deficit because we don't get the
tax cheat's money that way. We got laughed at by
the Democrats, raged at by Mitch McConnell. Susan Collins not
only looked at him like she was about to mention
how many lessons he still needed. She said he not
only needed to rethink the package, but he needed to
put the Ukraine Aid back into it. Even Jonie Ernst
(19:01):
sat up and took notice. And then Mike Johnson took
time out of his rake hunting expedition to hire raj
Shaw to build the communications operation inside the Speaker's office.
Where do you know that name from? Raj Shaw? The
former Trump Deputy White House Press secretary who went directly
(19:23):
from that low level entry job to becoming senior vice
president in charge of Tucker Carlson at Fox News, The
one who told Murdoch and Company that it had better
push more election denihalism or it would lose more viewers.
The guy they then fired from Fox after the lawsuit
was settled. That I'm proud to say rod Shaw a
(19:47):
fellow cornell alum. He's over there on our Yeah, the
admissions office frequently screws up list with and Coulter with
Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred with mar anyway back to the point,
I don't know about you, but all this Johnson talk
has the feel of being just the warm up act.
(20:09):
As the reporter and our preeminent George Santos scholar Jacqueline
Sweet wrote quote, I want a Mike Johnson sex scandal,
but I'm also afraid of how gross and creepy it
will probably end up being L O L. And if
you weren't already thinking that might be a remote possibility,
(20:29):
sure enough, what frog marches out of Johnson's office yesterday afternoon?
A frog wow, A guy in a frog suit wearing
a sign reading jumping for joy for a speaker Johnson.
And you know, if this isn't the sign of a
(20:50):
sex scandal, there is, given Johnson's religious rap sheet, an
even more disturbing possibility. The frog plague has begun, hasn't it? Also?
Of interest here the Secretary of Homeland Security, you know,
(21:13):
the boss of all those secret service agents. The Secretary
of Homeland Security answered Josh Hawley so thoroughly that they
had to carry the senator off in buckets, and the
Arizona Diamondbacks so thoroughly humiliated themselves in Game four of
the World Series last night in falling to Texas, which
now leads the Fall Classic. That's just a brand name,
(21:35):
now leading the Fall Classic three games to one. It
was so bad, I'm not really sure why they are
going to play a game five tonight. And best of all,
Elon Musk proves his new cyber truck will keep you
safe if you are attacked by a detachment of medieval
(21:56):
French archers. That's next. This is countdown.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
This is countdown with Keith o Woman, my crazy friend.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Host. Scripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snarks,
some predictions, and these are the places making news. Dateline Washington,
when the right wing Washington Examiner headlines the story of
a Republican senator's day with quote Majorcas shuts down Hawley's
anti Jewish claim I am the child of a Holocaust survivor.
(22:38):
That Republican senator has had a really bad day. Josh Hawley,
aka running Man, tried to pin a pro Palestinian tweet
by a Department of Homeland Security employee and paint DHS
as anti Israel and put that on Secretary Alejandro Majorcis
Majorcus then did to him what the insurrectionists Hally raised
(23:01):
a fist of support too on January sixth, would have
done to Holly if they had caught him. Frankly, mister Secretary,
I think that your performance is despicable, and I think
the fact that you are not willing to provide answers
to this committee is absolutely atrocious.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Mister Chairman, may I like if you'd like to have
a military respond you arrived, I would, and I'm not
sure I'll limit it to sixty seconds. That's fine. Number one.
What I found despicable is the implication that this language
tremendously odious actually could be emblematic of the sentiments of
(23:43):
the two hundred and sixty thousand men and women of
the Department of Homeland Security.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Number one.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Number two, Senator Holly takes an adversarial approach to me
in this question, and perhaps he doesn't know my own background,
Perhaps he does not know that I am the child
of a Holocaust survivor perhaps he does not know that
my mother lost almost all her family at the hands
(24:12):
of the Nazis. And so I find his adversarial tone
to be entirely misplaced. I find it to be disrespectful
of me and my heritage, and I do not expect
an apology, but I did want to say what I
just articulated, Thank you, missus.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Chairman. Can I just response and see has referenced me personally.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Senator Holly, we need to move on center, Robbie.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
To paraphrase the Republican chairman there to Senator Hawley by Felicia.
By the way, you may have missed it, but in
their Secretary of Mayorcus slipped in a subtle fact that
suspended author of the anti Israel tweet was appointed to
DHS during the Trump administration. Dateline a state house or
(25:01):
a Senate near you. Most and least popular senators governor's
per the Monthly Morning Consult Poll. Most popular Governor Phil
Scott of Vermont approval rating eighty three percent. Also there's
Governor Gordon of Wyoming and Governor Sununu of New Hampshire.
The top senators Barasso of Wyoming it's seventy percent approval,
(25:22):
Shats of Hawaii sixty five percent. Least popular Ron DeSantis
Governor Kim Reynolds of Iowa forty seven percent. But it
was thirty nine percent disapproval in the first quarter, and
Governor Tate reeves of mississip and dateline elon Musk's tiny
little mind. He has released another proof of performance video
(25:45):
for one of his exploding inventions. This time it is
the cyber truck. He had somebody fire an arrow into
the side of the cyber truck to prove its something,
just to make this even better, Well, what's missing from
this equation? Musk? The cyber truck a bow and arrow?
Why that's right? Who else could he choose? But he
(26:06):
had Joe Rogan fire the arrow from a crossbow. It
was almost as big and shiny and full of holes
as Joe's head. In a response to the tweet with
that video, somebody said the cyber truck was on fire,
(26:30):
like most of Musk's inventions, And yes, what you heard
was correct. The arrow bounced off the side of the
cyber truck, so you can rely on it in case
you and George Custer are ever driving through the Battle
of the Big Horn still ahead on this heavy production
(27:12):
episode of Countdown. It is scary enough to be told
when you are twenty years old. Here, Keith, here is
the home phone number of a very famous person in
your field. They know you are going to call them,
go and interview them. And when you call, and when
he answers, he pretends to be somebody else. In fact,
(27:32):
he pretends to be a woman. Things I promise not
to tell next first time for the daily roundup of
the miss Grints, morons, Undunning, krugriffect specimens who constitute today's
worst persons in the world. And by the way, congrats
to doctor Dave Dunning, who has won the Society of
Experimental Social Psychology Scientific Impact Award because the famous paper
(27:56):
that he and Justin Krueger wrote in nineteen ninety nine
at Cornell Unskilled and unaware of it, how difficulties in
recognizing one's own inc confidence led to inflated self assessments
the dawn of the Dunning Krueger effect. That paper just
keeps on getting quoted daily. They're both going to the
(28:16):
Hall of fame anyway. Here they are worse, my old pal,
Kirsten Cinema. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has now presented
its brand new internal polling on the race in Arizona.
This is according to punch Bowl News. You're ready, Ruben
Diego Democrat forty one percent, Carrie Lake crazy woman thirty
seven percent, and in last place, last place with less
(28:41):
than half of what Carrie Lake is getting and taking
most of her support not from the Democrats but from
the Republicans, like carry Lake. Senator Kirsten Cinema seventeen percent,
the incumbent in third place. So now the Republicans want
to run her out of town too. But don't worry,
She'll be fine, she said. So she saved the Senate,
(29:03):
She saved the filibuster. He can now become a member
of any corporate board in the country or president of
a university. Yeah, you got it, Sinny, congrats you're the
next president of Faber College. Worser Laura ingram At say,
this is quite the unexpected theme developing here for worse persons.
(29:25):
Kirsten Cinema, Laura ingram AnyWho Laura ingram was showing off
her only skill on Fox, mocking successful people. She was
howling with laughter because President Biden referred to the web telescope,
and he ain't come the web tallescope. Isn't it the hubble?
(29:45):
Is he thinking of web hobble? Then she braids some
more for a few more seconds, and apparently Laura still
does not realize that two Christmases ago we launched the
web Telescope, which is the upgrade for the Hubble, the
web Telescope, which was what the President was referring to.
Because he's the President and he's smarter than Laura is.
(30:08):
She's mocking somebody for being right when she's wrong. Trust me,
that sort of sums her up, but you do have
to excuse her. In college, Laura studied Russian and alcohol.
But our winner the worst. Now, I couldn't find a
third X I get along with most of my exes,
my forty nine years worth of exes. So instead it's
(30:33):
Dean Phillips, the Mike Johnson of the Democratic Party, the
congressional non entity for Minnesota, who just has to challenge
President Biden for the nomination because Biden's too old. Oh
did I mention that Biden wins a landslide of half
the voters believe that he and Trump are both too old?
Go old or go home anyway. Turns out that in
(30:53):
twenty nineteen, Representative Phillips, Noble Democrat, received the maximum twenty
eight hundred dollars personal campaign donation from Harlan you know
Harlan Crowe. He's the owner and operator of Clarence Thomas.
Plus he donates to the truly worthy Democrats and liberals
(31:16):
like Joe Manchin, twenty eight hundred dollars, thirty five hundred
dollars to Cornell West as mentioned, twenty eight hundred dollars
to Dean Phillips, and ten thousand, eight hundred dollars to
Kirsten Cinema. Dean Phillips is, Harlan crow is Kirsten Cinema.
(31:38):
So I did manage to put an X into all
three slots. Watch it, I said, slots two days part
said he the word now to the number one story
(32:12):
on the countdown on my favorite topic, me and things
I promised not to tell. And this has been a
somewhat uh fierce edition of the program. So let me
do something here at the end that's a little lighter.
October twenty seventh is the anniversary of one of the
damnedest interviews I ever did, and it was with Baseball
Hall of Famer Willie Mays. Every time Willy Mays's name
(32:35):
comes up, I think of two things. One is that
interview at my first job from my first radio network,
and like I wasn't scared enough. He did a bit
that if I'd have done it, they would have fired
me on the spot. The other thing is an amazing
injustice that befell Willy Mays that nobody talks about. Okay,
(32:57):
So it's a Saturday afternoon, October twenty seventh, nineteen seventy nine,
just forty three years ago today, and Willie Mays has
just been banned from baseball because word has gotten out
that he has signed a contract to do promotional events
for an Atlantic city casino, and there's a press conference
coming up on Monday. I know, try explaining this concept
(33:21):
to any current sports fan now used to seeing retired
players on TV, not just telling them to bet on games,
but telling them how to bet and who to bet on.
Plus even then, this made no sense. It was like
three months after Willie Mays had been inducted into the
Baseball Hall of Fame. Three months now he's being banned
(33:44):
for life for something that today the Commissioner of Baseball
would send him a note of congratulations and a paycheck.
So anyway, nobody has done an interview with Willy yet
because he has been traveling and my phone rings in
my little cubby hole at United Press Internationals Radio network
three months that coincidentally was how long my full time
(34:07):
broadcasting career had been to this point. And on the
phone is maybe the top baseball reporter of his day, Keith,
it's Milt Richmond. This man once reported in July nineteen
fifty five that if the Milwaukee Braves didn't start winning,
that they would fire their manager. Exactly one year later,
they didn't start winning, and exactly one year later to
(34:28):
the day, they fired their manager. That's how good Milt
Richmond was. Keith, write his phone number down. It's William
Mays's home. He's expecting your call for an interview about
this banishment story. I squeaked, yes, sir, yes, sir, and
I went into one of our recording studios and I
dialed the number. And I will not recreate the voice
(34:51):
that I heard answer William Mays's phone, because while doing
this voice was once considered to be a staple of
American humor, even American humor written or performed by liberals.
James Thurber's short stories are full of this voice. The
voice is wildly racist. It is racist enough that if
today you heard an African American man, do this voice,
(35:12):
you might still say still racist. It is a voice
similar to that of the actress Hattie McDaniel, who won
the Academy Award in nineteen thirty nine for Gone with
the Wind, who was a world class blues singer, a
top patriotic fundraiser during World War Two, who played maids
(35:32):
housekeepers in maybe two hundred films. She also played one
on a famous radio show, and was paid so little
that while she was performing her role of the maid,
she had to keep working as a real maid. Anyway,
I'm twenty years old and I have to interview Willie
Mays about him getting banned from baseball, by the way,
(35:55):
getting banned from baseball at the same time they were
banning Mickey Mantle from baseball for doing promotional announcements for
a casino. And I call Willie Mays's number and I'm
shaking like a leaf and the phone is answered, and
a gravelly but feminine voice that sounded exactly like Haddie
McDaniel says hello, mister Mays's residence. And I am a
(36:20):
little thrown by this, but I power through and I
explain who I am, and she says, uh huh, and
I say where I'm calling from, and she says uh huh,
And I say, Milt Richmond said, mister Mays was expecting me,
and she interrupts me and says, this is Willie. The
Hattie McDaniel like impersonation was done by Willie Mays. Now
(36:42):
I do not have this on tape. Silly me. When
they said you could never start recording before you got
expressed permission from the interviewee to start recording, I believed them.
Anybody else would have a tape of the phone being answered,
and that impression done by Willie Mays. I'm afraid you
(37:03):
will have to take my word for because why would
I make this up? October twenty seventh, nineteen seventy nine.
And honestly, I still haven't recovered from mister Mays's residence. Now,
the injustice about William Mays that nobody talks about this
is something else no fan believes today. The US military
(37:26):
used to draft Major League Baseball players and NFL players
and NBA players and other athletes and send them into
the service in the middle of their seasons, in the
primes of their careers, even if there was no war
in progress. Now they only did it a couple of
times after saying nineteen forty five, and usually that was
(37:49):
thinly veiled racist political pressure, like when they drafted Muhammad
Ali in nineteen sixty six when he was heavyweight champion
of the world at an activist Muslim and twenty four
years old, when everybody else who was getting drafted was eighteen. Remember,
but in nineteen fifty two they drafted Willie Mays. Willie
Mays had come up from the Miners the year before
(38:11):
and led the New York Giants from thirteen games back
to the National League pennant and was the kind of
all around whirlwind of a player nobody had ever seen before.
And on May twenty ninth, thirty four games into his
second season boom, he was drafted and inducted and he
missed the rest of that season, and he missed all
of the nineteen fifty three season. They didn't draft Mickey Mantle,
(38:35):
who also broke in also in New York, also in
nineteen fifty one, and to be fair, Mickey Mantle had
about four hundred medical problems. But they also didn't draft
nineteen fifty one American League Rookie of the Year Gil
McDougald of the Yankees who was a white guy. Or
Walt Dropo who was the Rookie of the Year in
nineteen fifty and was a white guy. Or Roy Severs
(38:56):
who was the rookie of the Year in nineteen forty
nine and was a white guy, or or or you
get the point. Now. Trying to calculate should have bins
and would have beens in sports is a risky business,
but you can get a statistical approximation. If a player
hits twenty homers in his first season, then misses two years,
(39:18):
then comes back and hits forty one homers in his
first year back, you can extrapolate from that that he
probably would have hit twenty seven homers in the first
missing year and thirty four in the second missing year.
Your numerical sequence is twenty homers, then twenty seven, then
thirty four, then forty one. You have to taker a
(39:39):
little bit with it in Mays's case, because he did
not miss all of nineteen fifty two, just from June
on and he had a slow start. He only hit
four homers in the first two months of nineteen fifty two,
so instead of twenty seven that year, maybe he only
hits twenty four. So a good guess as to how
many homers William Ays did not hit because he got
(40:00):
drafted and all the other guys didn't. The good guess
is a all told, he missed the chance to hit
fifty four homers that he probably would have hit in
real life. Willie Mays finished with six hundred and sixty
career home runs. For most of the nineteen sixties, it
was thought he was the man who would challenge Babe
(40:23):
Ruth's career home run record, not Hank Aaron, but Willie Mays.
Willie Mays hit six hundred and sixty homers, but if
you give him the fifty four more homers he might
have hit if he hadn't been so curiously drafted. In
nineteen fifty two, Willie Mays finishes with seven hundred and
fourteen home runs, which is exactly how many Babe Ruth
(40:45):
hit seven hundred and fourteen, So no drafting, and maybe
in nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy three and nineteen
seventy four, we are seeing Willie Mays hit his seven
hundredth home run and challenging Babe Ruth and coming down
the stretch and tying and breaking Babe Ruth's record, and
(41:06):
then right behind him, Henry Aaron hits his seven hundred
and fifteenth homer and then his seven hundred and sixteenth
homer to break the all time record held by Willie Mays.
(41:32):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Countdown has come to you from the
Vin Scully Studio at the Olderman Broadcasting Empire here in
New York Countown. Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip
Chanel arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister
Chanelle handling orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray on the guitars,
bass and drums produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including
(41:55):
some Beethoven in there, arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed.
Sports music is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. It was written
by Mitch Warren Davis. We call it the Olderman Theme
from ESPN two. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are
by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our
announcer today was my crazy friend Tony Kornheiser, and everything
(42:16):
else was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for
this the one thousand and thirtieth day since dementia Jay
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Convict him now while we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletin says the news
warrants till then, I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon,
(42:38):
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is
(42:59):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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