August 7, 2024 • 45 mins
SEASON 3 EPISODE 4: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: People. Like. Him.
In a time when 50% approval is a landslide of support, when the very few most earnest and most honest politicians are still tolerated, when we have had a decade of one of the most disliked humans on the planet hating everything and everybody, the idea that the Democrats are running not one but TWO likeable candidates is staggeringly important – and simple – and novel.
Tim Walz is HAPPY to be living here, and fighting to help other people become happy, and now to join Kamala Harris, who is ALSO happy and smiles – like a person. Trump isn’t HAPPY! At every moment of what should be success he’s degrading someone, he’s embittered, he’s angry, he’s the victim, he’s shortchanged, he’s threatening revenge.
As shown on his spectacular first day as her running mate, Walz and Vice President Harris recognize what Trump does not: America is so worn out by and done with, unhappy weirdos.
THE POLLS CONTINUE TO BE ALL KAMALA: Marist for PBS: Harris 51 Trump 48. Harris by three. Previous poll: Trump by one. Marist for PBS: Who do you trust more on abortion? Harris… 56-to-41. Who do you trust more on preserving democracy? Harris 53-46. Who do you trust more on the economy? Trump… but only by three. Who do you trust more on immigration – this is the killer, right? Trump’s real chance to survive the tsunami? Yes, poll says Trump but only by six.
And some very pro-conservative swing state polling were also all positive.
And all conducted before Tim Walz.
B-Block (26:40) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Jim Vandehei of Axios not only fires ten percent of his staff, but he makes them read about it in a memo written in the impenetrable Axios 'style.' Bloomberg editors' response to their decision to break the embargo on the trade for Evan Gershkovich? Fire the reporter! And a member of Code Pink who was already ahead of Congressman Derrick Van PTSD Orden is delayed slightly, he yells at her to move, as she moves she brushes past him, he is now demanding she be charged with "assault on a member of Congress."
C-Block (37:25) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I was supposed to anchor NBC’s cable coverage of the Summer Olympics in 2000 in Sydney. But I quit the job in 1998. Then I was supposed to anchor NBC’s cable coverage of the Summer Olympics in 2004 in Athens. But I told them – no, I think I’d prefer to stay in New Jersey and try to grow this new news show Countdown and there are still executives at NBC who think I am insane. And I am proud to tell you that I have not watched ONE minute, not ONE highlight, from the 2024 Olympics. I'm beginning to think I might not LIKE the Olympics. If this is true it dates to 1980 and my experience as part of a two-and-a-half man team that covered the ENTIRE WINTER Olympics at Lake Placid, New York – just the two-and-a-half of us. It was rewarding, it was challenging, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I have done everything since then to make SURE it WAS just once-in-a-lifetime, especially after the other one-and-a-half guys – my boss and my boss’s boss – got me drunk one night and then sent me to cover the skiing at sunrise and I almost didn’t survive.
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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. People
like him. The more and more you analyze the impact
(00:27):
from Tim Walls, the more and more you analyze the
process of the selection of Tim Walls, the more and
more you examine the reaction to Tim Walls, the more
and more clear it becomes it is that simple people
like him. In a time when fifty percent approval for
a politician is a landslide of support, when the very few,
(00:50):
most earnest and most honest politicos are still just tolerated.
When we have had a decade one of the most
dislike humans on the planet, hating everything and everybody, the
idea that the Democrats are running not one but two
likable candidates is staggeringly important and simple and novel. I mean,
(01:15):
when you get literally one hundred words into the founding
document of this nation, the Declaration of Independence, you hit
the unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness.
Tim Walls is happy. Tim Walls is happy to be
(01:36):
living here, happy to be fighting to help other people
become happy. And now to join Kamala Harris, who is
also happy and who smiles like a person Trump isn't happy.
At every moment of what should be rapturous success. Trump
is degrading somebody else. He's embittered, he's angry, he's the victim,
(01:59):
he's been shortchanged, he's threatening revenge. And he hasn't even
digested the newest new Paul. And yes, they continue to
be all Kamala, and I will review them in depth
in a moment. But to finish up this point, Trump
has dug up from the garbage dumps of this nation,
every slob who wants to force his will on you.
(02:19):
The latest of them is this robot dvance. Every slob
who believes that for him to succeed, somebody else must fall,
preferably one hundred somebody else's must fall. They're evil, they're greedy,
they're malignant, But at their core they fulfill hl Mankin's
priceless definition of puritanism, the haunting fear that someone somewhere
(02:45):
may be happy and it's not a one way street.
In response to them, we have become angry and self righteous,
and I put myself at the top of that list.
And then Vice President Harris steps out of the background,
smiling and laughing and underscoring a point I made two
weeks ago. When the hell have you ever seen Trump
actually laugh? And now here's Tim Walls and he's been
(03:09):
the vice presidential candidate for eight hours and he's not
just telling dad jokes. He's telling some dirty dad jokes.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Make no mistake, violent crime was up under Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
That's not even counting the crimes he committed. JD.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Vance literally literally wrote the foreword for the Architect of
the Project twenty twenty five agenda. Like all regular people
I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale,
had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then
(03:56):
wrote a bestseller trashing that community.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Come on, that's not what Middle America is.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
And I got to tell you, I can't wait to debate.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
The guy, that is, if he's willing to get off
(04:32):
the couch and show up.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
So I'll see what I did there. Don't underestimate that
seemingly throwaway line at the end. There see what I
did there? This is below the belt humor, used as
a political kill shot, but honed over his decades in classrooms.
(04:56):
Is that little softening agent that allows him to take
the meanest joke and reduce its trauma to mitigate. How
you couch it? See what I did there? By the way,
the couch thing will never go away? Viral yesterday a
photo of JD. Vance in a podcast appearance seated either
(05:17):
on a love seed of some sort of divan maybe,
legs spread as far apart as they can go, man spreading.
The pros call it as he sits on a large,
wide chair or a small narrow couch. The couch is JD.
(05:39):
Vance's dead bear cub and all credit to the Vice President.
Kamala Harris barely knew Tim Walls last week, and by
Monday he had vaulted over her favorites who supposedly carried
guarantees of guaranteeing states like Pennsylvania or Arizona, and barely
into day two. Is there any question that as good
(06:00):
as Senator Kelly and Governor Shapiro might be as leaders
or pola petiticians, is there a chance they could do
for this campaign what Tim Walls can do? Do you
want to hear what Tim Walls says next? Do you
you know like him? I don't like quoting Politico, but
they got it exactly right. Kamala Harris loved Tim Wallas's
(06:25):
governing record in Minnesota, his biography and record of winning
tough races resonated with her, and most of all, she
just really liked him. I also don't like videos of
the phone call. They are universally cringe except this one.
The words beautiful, enthusiasm, enjoyed, and joy are all used
(06:49):
in this phone call, and not ironically and not by
the goddamned candidate about himself. These two people get it.
America is so worn out by and so done withhappy weirdos.
Would you be my.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Running mate and let's get this thing.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
On the road.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
I would be honored, Madame Vice President, the joy that
you're bringing back to the country, the enthusiasm that's out there.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
It'll be a privilege to take this with you across
the country.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Well, let me say I have just a most respect
for you. I have really enjoyed our work together. And yes,
that was her second phone call to him. It turns
out he did not pick up the first time because
she didn't have call her id. Frankly, Tim Walls is
(07:43):
America pointing at Trump and saying, what the heck is
wrong with this weirdo? Thank goodness, the Trump people took
(08:10):
this well, it is instructed that the Trump cult, having
spent literally five years focused on nothing but Joe Biden,
has three weeks after his departure, still not come up
with one attack line against Kamala Harris. They were convinced
she was going to pick Josh Shapiro, so they had
attacks ready on him, and now they have nothing but
(08:33):
Nicki Haley accusing the Democrats of anti Semitism because they
didn't pick him. When Trump admitted to owning a book
of Hitler's speeches which he kept on a night stand
in his bedroom, and Trump is openly anti Semitic, and
she bowed to him after insisting she never would. They
threw everything at the wall at the tim walls. Am
I right? I can hear him making that joke. Maybe
(08:54):
I'm learning something. Not only did nothing stick to that
wall or walls, but there is no evidence that any
of it even hit the walls. Steven Miller insists going
to turn the Midwest into Mogadishu, which would be nice
and racist if any of Trump's supporters knew where the
hell Mogadishu was, or if they were certain it was
(09:15):
not some kind of delicious foreign food. Kevin McCarthy says,
Walls was known as the Bernie Sanders of the House,
and it was like, wait, is that is that an insult?
People like Bernie Sanders. People who don't like the policies
of Bernie Sanders, like Bernie Sanders. They look at him
and they see Larry David. You want to insult Tim Walls,
(09:35):
Kevin McCarthy, You tell them people said Tim Walls was
known as the Kevin McCarthy of the House. That's an insult.
They sent JD. Vance to Philadelphia to proactively attack Walls,
even before Kamala introduces him, and they have Vance stand
in front of a huge banner reading Kamala Chaos, which
(09:57):
isn't a bad line C minus maybe, especially not for Republicans,
especially not for Republicans in disarray. But they can't snap
out of their one template. So in the little mandatory
tableau they insist on there have to be people behind Vance.
It has to look like like there's a crowd of
(10:18):
people who agree with him, even if you have to
pay them. And there are no seats, so everybody is
standing behind Vance. So they're standing behind him, and because
they're not all three feet tall, you can't see the
word chaos, So all you get is JD. Vance giving
an impossibly monotonous speech, another one under a big banner
that reads Kamala, and you're thinking, man, now, this is
(10:39):
a surprise endorsement. And of course Vance is only out
there because Trump is taking the week off. And as
the Democrats go from political honeymoon number one through the
Harris Walls political honeymoon number two, on their way to
political honeymoon number three, the one that is the convention,
(11:00):
why would the Republican presidential candidate bother to appear in public?
Let the freak in the eyeliner do it all while
Trump stays home and tweets. Trump's campaign is suddenly bleeding
to death, and he's getting laughs scored off him by
the guy who would have been about the five hundredth
(11:21):
likeliest vice presidential candidate in the gambling houses two weeks ago. While,
by the way, all the networks carry his speech live,
and Carrie Harris's speech live, and Carrie Josh Shapiro's speech live,
and somebody at CNN who can read the ratings is thinking, say,
maybe we should show all of their speeches live from
here on in huh instead of three more hours of
(11:44):
Van Jones. Maybe Trump in the Bunker is in fact
the best for the cult, because, on top of everything
else that has gone wrong for the Republicans, Trump has
turned into a moron. Yesterday he posted nothing less than
very bad fan fic wherein Joe Biden storms into the
(12:05):
Democratic Convention to take back his nomination. And I'm sitting
there reading it, thinking, could you make the projection about
what you would do? Trump? Could you make it slightly
difficult to deduce from what you've written? After apparently deciding
to power through on what is also hands down the
(12:27):
worst attempt to tag an opponent with an insulting nickname,
the Biden fanfic was the highlight of the Trump social
media day. Face it. The nicknames are perhaps Trump's only
true political skill other than the fire hose of lies
that makes checking each lie impossible, and he has decided,
(12:49):
after years of success at political nicknames, that putting a
B the letter B in the middle of Kamala Harris's
name is the greatest idea he's ever had. Kamala with
a bee e Kama b La. I have spent more
(13:11):
time than I care to admit over the course of
two full days now trying to figure out what the
hell it means, what the hell it's supposed to mean,
how he is hearing it sound in the big cobweb
filled attic that is his head. Moble co maele come
(13:35):
maybe la comabla ca mable. I see the word able
in there. Donnie, sorry, punt on this one, or let
JD have a try at giving her a nickname, because
in the world of American politics twenty twenty four, jokes matter.
(13:59):
This is your fault and you are winning all this
time on this topic. But at three o'clock the high
school got out of class, and now they're out there
with you, kicking your ass. Sometimes it happens like that
in life, unbeaten, unchallenged, always at worst competitive, a perennial threat,
and then one day they go right off the cliff,
never to be heard from again. One day you are
(14:23):
the best, the next day it's all gone, the muse
has packed and moved out to like Australia. Let me
swing off into a baseball analogy for a moment before
I run the polls crazy. I know I never do
a baseball analogy. The nineteen eighty three Philadelphia Phillies had
four future Hall of Famers in their lineup, plus Pete Rose.
(14:46):
A sixth player won a Most Valuable Player award. Another
one won the Cy Young Award for Best pitcher. Four
other players won Gold Glove awards. Of the remaining fourteen
guys on their roster, eleven were passed or future All Stars.
The Phillies won twenty of their last twenty five games
in the nineteen eighty three season, but in the playoffs
(15:08):
they faced the Dodgers, to whom they had lost eleven
of twelve games during the season. It didn't matter. They
beat the Dodgers in four games. They rolled into the
World Series as an unstoppable juggernaut. They beat Baltimore and
Young Cal Ripken in Game one at Baltimore, and many
observers thought the nineteen eighty three Phillies might sweep the
(15:28):
World Series. And then the sun rose and they awoke
on the morning of Wednesday, October twelfth, nineteen eighty three,
and the Juggernaut overnight had become a bunch of washed
up old trumps. Phillies led Game two one to nothing
in the fourth inning. They blew that lead. They only
(15:51):
scored six more runs in the entire rest of the Series,
they benched Pete Rose and there was a huge controversy.
They lost the World Series in five games. They got
rid of Pete Rose, they got rid of two of
the Hall of Famers, most of the All Stars. The
award went. They next won the World Series twenty five
years later. And a little known baseball fact, it was
(16:12):
all because they tried calling her Combbla. They didn't. But
how great would it be if they had Marist polls
for PBS Harris fifty one, Trump forty eight. Harris by three.
(16:33):
Previous poll, Trump by one Marist for PBS. Who do
you trust more on abortion? Harris fifty six to forty one.
Who do you trust more on preserving democracy? Harris fifty
three to forty six. Who do you trust more on
the economy? Trump? But by only three. Who do you
trust more on immigration? Well? This is the killer right,
(16:56):
Trump's real chance to survive the Harris tsunami. Yes, the
pole says they trust Trump more on immigration only by six.
That is as startling a poll number as I have
seen in two years. Swing state polls Redfield, Wilton. The
(17:16):
polling was done Saturday. New Mexico is Harris by seven.
Minnesota is Harris by five that may rise. Arizona is
Harris by one. In this poll. It had been Trump
by three. Pennsylvania is Trump by two. In this pole,
it had been Trump by four. Michigan is Trump by one.
In this poll. It had been Trump by three. Georgia
(17:37):
is Trump by two. In this poll it had been
Trump by five. Nevada is tied at forty Wisconsin is
tied at forty three. Same pole. Harris approval up by
one point in Arizona and Georgia. Up by three points
in North Carolina, up by five in Wisconsin. All of this,
all of these numbers before Tim walls happily for Trump,
(18:02):
he can turn to his in house geniuses like senior
campaign advisor Chris Losavita and spokesperson Caroline with A k
Levitt los Avida. July twenty fourth, reliable sources confirm Kamala
to pick Governor Shapiro from Pennsylvania. Chris Losovita from August fifth,
(18:26):
five thirty PM breaking news. According to my sources, Kamala
Harris is not picking Josh Shapiro Pennsylvania. Caroline Levitt Yesterday's
statement on Kamala's selection of radical leftist Tim Walls doesn't
mention Joe Manchion supporting Tim Walls for Vice president, from
(18:46):
proposing his own carbon free agenda to suggesting strict your
mission standards for gas powered cars and embracing policies to
allow convicted felons to vote. Wait wait, wait, what was
the part in the middle there about embracing policies to
allow convicted felons to vote. Trump is opposed to this.
(19:07):
Trump is a convicted felon. I think he knows clearly
his spokesperson does not. Don't worry all as fine as
Trump Headquarters from now on, We're just gonna mention Caroline
Lovett's name, but put a B in the middle of it,
so she's Carol blind lev bit. How could this possibly
get any better? How could a day have gone better
(19:30):
for the Democrats than it did yesterday? How well? Monday
at twelve I'm sorry, I'm laughing in advance Monday at
twelve thirty four pm Eastern, retweeting the Writer's bulletin that
Josh Shapiro and Tim Walls were the vice presidential finalists
for Kamala Harris. One pundit retweeted this, adding, it's gonna
(19:53):
be Shapiro people signed Chris silzit. Oh, that's it. Trump,
That's it right there, that's it. I shouldn't say it
because this is it. This will put you right back
in the race. Hire Chris Slizza. Have him workshop the
(20:16):
Kamabla nickname. Maybe Cambabla, cub blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah, something like that. Give Chris a few years,
he'll come up with it. It's gonna be Shapiro people.
Chris is the Crystaliza of crystalizzes. Also of interest here,
somebody touches Congressman Derek van Orden brushes past him in
(20:40):
a line going into a hotel. He wants them charged
with assaulting a member of Congress because Derek van Orton
is nuts. And not only does Axios dot Com fire
ten percent of its staff, but the boss makes the
departed read about it in a memo that is written
in that disgusting, impossible to understand axios ease. That's next.
(21:09):
This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Oberman stell
(21:36):
ahead of us on this edition of Countdown. I was
supposed to anchor NBC's cable coverage of the summer Olympics
in two thousand from Sydney, Australia, but I kind of
quit the job in nineteen ninety eight, so that didn't happen.
Then I was supposed to anchor NBC's cable coverage of
the Summer Olympics in two thousand and four from Athens
in Greece, but I told them no, no, I'd rather
(22:00):
stay in New Jersey and try to grow this new
news show on MSNBC called Countdown. And there are still
former sports executives at NBC who are now retired who
continually think I am insane, even though that decision turned
out the way it did. I was also supposed to
cover the Summer Olympics in nineteen eighty in Moscow, but
(22:22):
then the US pulled out of those games in a
political thing, so that was not my fault. But I
am proud to tell you that I have not watched
one minute, not one highlight from the twenty twenty fourth
Summer Olympics in in France. France. I mean, you could
(22:44):
tell me Kamala Harris won the Olympic skeet shooting on
ice gold medal yesterday and I'd say, sure, sure, yeah,
she was great. I was watching. I'm beginning to think
I may not like the Olympics. If this is true.
My not liking the Olympics dates back to nineteen eight
(23:04):
in my experience as part of a two and a
half man team that covered the entire Winter Olympics at
Lake Placid, New York. Just the two and a half
of us. The half a guy was management. He was
in the office most of the time. It was rewarding,
it was challenging, it was snowy cold. It was a
once in a lifetime experience, and I have done everything
(23:26):
since then to make sure that it was literally just
once in a lifetime, especially after the other one and
a half guys, my boss and my boss's boss got
me drunk one night and then sent me to cover
the skiing at sunrise and I almost did not survive it.
Next in things I promised not to tell first, there
(23:49):
are still more new idiots to talk about. The daily
roundup of the miscreants, morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens
who constitute two days worst persons in the world from
the top of a mountain mountain, mountain mountain. The Bronze
Worse co founder Jim VandeHei of Axios dot com, the
(24:09):
news organization which fired fifty people yesterday five ozho and
did it not just by memo, but by Axio style memo.
Axios pretty much sucks. They overextended, they paid management too much.
They spent most of their time complimenting themselves. They relied
(24:29):
on a cut c style they called smart brevity, in
which they would state the basic facts of a story
for about a paragraph or so and then begin to
spin it with a subheadline indented that read why it matters.
This was part of the memo from Jim Vanda Hi
difficult changes. We're making some difficult changes to adapt fast
(24:51):
to a rapidly changing media landscape. Why it matters. We're
eliminating about fifty positions to get ahead of tectonic shifts.
And that they used the format of the publication that
CEOs puts out twice a day, their newsletters, to inform
the people writing the newsletters and reporting for the newsletters
(25:14):
that they were being fired from the company. It's like
I don't know, getting a pink slip inside a custom
made Ford motor company. I don't know, cover for your
inside windshield. Unbelievable. Why it matters? Why it matters you
(25:34):
might be unemployed. And there's an intented paragraph later on
that reads with a little dot if your job is
being eliminated, you will receive an accompanying email in the
next few minutes with information about your severance package and
a calendar invite for a meeting with a leader from
your team and a member of the people team. We
wanted to tell each of you in person first, but
(25:54):
the mechanics of that proved infeasible. In other words, Jim
Vandeheid didn't want to go to the office in the morning.
Why it matters, you may not have a job anymore.
Speaking of which, the runner up worser Bloomberg News. Sure
it's White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs was Trump's favorite, and
sure she once tried to make a thing out of
(26:16):
the Vice president saying the as in the point here,
And she did a lot of stupid stuff and a
lot of bad coverage and a lot of absolutely the
worst elements of Washington inside the Beltway. We just talked
to each other and have no idea that there are
human beings affected by this kind of insider access stuff.
(26:38):
Sure she did that. On the other hand, she was
apparently reportedly fired because Bloomberg blew the embargo on the
rescue mission the trade of hostages that got the Wall
Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich back they reported it too early.
(26:59):
She was the principal writer on the story, so naturally
she got fired. As some He wrote, I haven't heard
the last time that a reporter actually hit send on
their own story. Unless it's a one person website, even
at axios, they don't get to say why it matters.
An editor gets to say that. And so the Bloomberg
(27:21):
editor in chief, John Micklethwaite, disciplined staffers for jumping the
gun on the dramatic deal. This according to New York Magazine,
and he didn't seem to fire any editors, or if
he did, they were not as prominent in the organization
as this Jennifer Jacobs, who was fired because the story
she wrote was put out before the embargo was lifted.
(27:44):
There may be other details to this. Perhaps she told
her bosses that the embargo had already expired, or that
she had authorization from her sources, or that everybody there
at the White House team for Bloomberg said it was okay.
But we don't know any of that. Right now, it
just looks like Bloomberg fired the reporter because the editors
did something wrong, once again in the story of journalism.
(28:07):
But our winner, Congressman Derek Van Orden of Wisconsin, we
have talked about him too many times for me to
go into a review about him and the fact that
it looks like he has PTSD and has never done
anything about it. He was about twenty five years in
the military and the wear and tear seems to have
gotten to him. Plus he's a Republican from Wisconsin, so
(28:28):
he's an asshole. However, Rep. Van Orden was in line
for the morning event at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee
and happened to find himself trying to get into the
Fister Hotel. That's right, They've kept the name Fister for
a century, the Fister Hotel. I'll meet you at the Fister. Also,
(28:49):
the Fister is supposedly haunted by people who were really
bothered by the name Fister. I suspect, were people sentenced
to eternity in the Fister Hotel? Where were you sentenced? Well?
I went to hell for a thousand years. Where did you? Oh,
it's much worse than Hell. I went to the Fister
Hotel pfi st er Fister. Anyway, I'm getting away from
(29:13):
the point here. He was in line, Van Orden was,
and if he's going to purgatory, he's definitely going to
the Fister. Van Orden was in line along with the
members of the protest group Code Pink, including one newer Jagama,
a twenty four year old woman who was in line
apparently just in front of Van Orden in this security
(29:34):
line to get in during the Republican National Convention along
with other members of Code Pink. The congressman seemed to
touch her gently to get her to move. When the
line towards the security box began to move, she said
we're moving, or he said we're moving, and she moved,
and she grumbled about it, and she said something wise,
and then she walked back in front of him, which
(29:56):
is where she had been before the line was moving,
and he then says, ma'am, you'd better watch it, and
begins to claim that she has cut in front of him.
She was already in front of him, and Van Orden
then accused her of political violence. You just assaulted a
member of Congress. Van Orden is about a foot taller
(30:20):
than this woman. He said he'd be filing a police report.
He told policemen on the scene that he would do that,
and as usual, the real victim here is always Derek
Van Orden. A helpful cop then says to another officer,
she just shoved a senator. There was no shove, and
Van Orden is not a senator, He's barely a congressman.
(30:42):
Van Orden is seen saying this blank ain't happening anymore.
Then the police bodycam video, which reporters were told did
not exist, suddenly existed again and it was released, and
on it you see it the way I've just described
it to you. There's a woman standing in front of
a congressman. A line starts to move. She doesn't move
(31:04):
fast enough for him. He tells her to move, She
moves and mouths off to him. She moves back in
front of him where she was, and he accuses her
of well, to use the parlance of the time, an
attempted assassination. Well almost Then there is a conversation between
Van Orden and one of the cops. The questions one
(31:26):
of the cops asks Van Orden, They're gonna ask is
did you feel pain? Van Orden replies, I have really
bad hips. Okay, so pain. The officer asks again. Then
Van Orden pauses and says, yes, my hip, my hip hurts.
I mean it hurts already. Did she exacerbate it? I
(31:47):
don't know, but a hip check is a hip check.
Van Orden was a Navy seal. He was deployed five times,
but oddly go look up the five deployments online. The
only one you'll find named that he boasts about is
going to Bosnia, where I guess he suffered a hangnail.
(32:09):
I don't know if he received the Congressional Medal of Honor,
but I'm sure he thinks he did. Congressman Derek Oh oh,
I have been mortally wounded my hip parts. Oh nos,
it's an act of political terrorism. This tiny woman, five
foot nothing just knocked me to the ground. My legs
(32:31):
have fallen of Oh no, oh, I'm bleeding. I'm dash.
He actually murdered me. Van Orden two Day's worst person
in Oh no, the world soft as a great. The
(33:00):
alarm goes off. It is pitch black in my room
at the Swiss Acres Motel. It is Valentine's Day and
I am still drunk. Keith knew he was in trouble,
but I was also twenty one years old, and in fact,
my twenty first birthday had only been eighteen days earlier.
(33:22):
So somehow I survived, showered, dressed, packed, and I mean
I packed two cassette tape recorders, four sets of batteries,
an audio processing machine that weighed like fourteen pounds. The
nine volt batteries it took, I think it was a
dozen of them, a telephone, a backup telephone, twelve assorted
patch cords, two loose leaf notebooks, about eight pens, two microphones,
(33:45):
two extra pair of socks, and I got dressed, two
full sets of thermal underwear, shirts, sweaters, snow pants, snow
shoes because it was eleven degrees below zero that morning.
I got something quick to eat at the commissary, and
I made it out somehow to the line for the
bus from the Lake Placid Olympics Center to the Lake
(34:08):
Placid Transportation Center to Lake Placid's own White Face Mountain,
then onto the snow track the open penned mountain tractor
that went up the side of Whiteface Mountain and took
me to the finish line of the nineteen eighty Olympic
Men's downhill ski final still drunk. That is how a
(34:28):
reporter covered the Olympics nearly forty three years ago. You drank,
you woke up, you went, You stood near the finish line,
and when the skiers completed their runs, you hiked or
wobbled over to them and you took out your microphone
or your pen and you interviewed them, like two minutes
after they had finished hurtling towards you down the hill.
(34:49):
You could see almost nothing of the race from there.
There were no TV monitors. Basically your only clue was
the sound of the crowd that would give you about
thirty seconds worth of warning that the skier was coming
over the near horizon and you should be prepared to
flee just in case he or she wiped out. Also,
(35:10):
you were on top of a mountain at the dead
point of winter, and whereas it might have been a
balney eleven degrees below zero in the comfort of the
Swiss Acres motel with the wind chill, at the base
of the mountain, it was forty eight below zero and
there had already been four inches of new snow since
the sun came up, which is where the still drunk
(35:34):
part came in handy. My boss is at my first job,
the thousand station radio network called United pres International Audio,
had decided the night before to teach me how to
drink while on assignment. My bosses were the bureau manager
for that part of you PI, the late Stan Sabik,
who had hired me, and Sam Rosen, the sports director
(35:54):
of the network, who not only somehow survived being my
first boss, but today, just forty three years later, is
still working as the television voice of the New York
hockey team and is in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
So I guess my reputation is a tough employee is
wildly overrated, or at least Sam thinks. So Sam and
(36:16):
Stan kept me drinking at the motel until two am,
knowing full well that I had to get on the
six am bus to go cover the men's downhill because
it was the two of them who had assigned me
to go cover the men's downhill, And bluntly, I was
surprisingly pleased with myself that freezing morning because I had
indeed learned how to drink while on assignment. I had
(36:37):
somehow found the phone jack for the UPI phone buried
under all the new snow, which of course was buried
under all the old snow. Attached the phone to it,
gotten a dial tone, called the office, checked the alligator
clips with which I would feed the tape, and all
was well until I went to put a cassette tape
(36:59):
into the cassette recorder. I didn't have one fat lot
of good two cassette tape machines. Gonna do you without
a cassette to sticking one of them? I looked forlornly
around the base of Whiteface Mountain, twelve hundred feet above
(37:19):
sea level. As we were. There was a surprisingly nice
chalet and a decent restaurant, but there were no radio
shacks or other electronics stores. There was, however, one other
radio guy, Jack Briggs, from the Associated Press Radio Network,
the nominal arch rival to our own UPI Audio. I
knew Jack a little. He was a nice guy. I
(37:42):
went and explained my plight, making sure to blame my
bosses for my predicament. Oh man, he said, his breath
turning into first steam and then ice cubes. I'm so sorry,
but I can't give you a cassette. I'm sorry you
were UPI, and I'm ap oh I laughed. That was
(38:06):
a great line to say to a rookie reporter still drunk.
Thanks to the initiation rituals of his own bosses, the
possessor of one great buzz but zero audio cassettes, Jack
Briggs could tell I thought he was kidding. That's when
he said, I'm not kidding. Look, if my boss, Shelby Whitfield,
ever found out, he'd fire me. I suddenly wasn't drunk anymore,
(38:29):
not at all. My boss will will fire me. Briggs
was adamant. I can't run the risk of Shelby finding out.
I have to confess. I shouted, how the hell is
he gonna find out? Jack? I think subconsciously I was
hoping to create an avalanche, which would have been a
(38:50):
better solution than the one I was faced with. I
said to him, there's you and there's me, and we're
on top of a goddamn mountain, and Shelby Whitfield, your
boss is in Washington, DC, and he's a drunk. He's
probably more drunk than I am, and he'd probably thank
you for helping me to drink more. Briggs would not budge.
(39:12):
I told him I would pay him. I told him
I would give him the cassette back after I fed
my boss the interviews over the phone, so there'd be
no evidence and he wouldn't even have to do any interviews.
No good, I'm sorry, and I know you're going to
tell this story about me for a while. As he
walked away from me, I shouted after him. Forever. Turned
(39:34):
out there was no radio shack and no camaraderie, but
there was a West Coast newspaper reporter atop the mountain
who heard some of this conversation. I guess I yelled
a little loudly at mister Briggs. Some guy standing next
to a Saint Bernard told me to quiet down. He
mentioned something else about the avalanches, or maybe I dreamed
that part. I don't know. Anyway, the West Coast newspaper
(39:56):
guy said he had a micro cassette machine and he
would loan it to me and I could give it
back to him at the media center that day or
the next one. But I had to do him because
there was this really cute reporter in our UPI bureau
and he really wanted to be introduced to her. And
I said, I can promise you nothing but a handshake,
and he understood and That's how I did not get fired.
But of course a story like this has punchlines, and
(40:19):
this one has two of them. The first is two
years and a couple of months later, Shelby Whitfield asked
me to lunch. He had left the Associated Press to
run the sports department at the ABC Radio network, back
when that was not only a thing, but a big thing.
We went to a terrific New York City Chinese restaurant
near ABC called shun Lee, and Shelby Whitfield interviewed me
(40:42):
for a job when that kind of job paid eighty
thousand a year in my very nice studio apartment and
a very nice part of town costs less than five
hundred dollars a month later, in an interesting twist, I
found out that jobs didn't exist. I was mentioning the
interview in a press box somewhere I think Madison Square Garden,
and there was another kid reporter named Howie Rose, and
(41:05):
how he is still working, he does the New York
Mets games on the radio. And how he said, wait,
they interviewed me for that job last year. Just an
excuse for that damn Whitfield to go drink his lunch
on ABC's tab. Anyway, before we started the interview for
the job I did not know did not exist at ABC.
I told Shelby Whitfield the White Face Mountain? Can I
(41:26):
borrow a cassette Jack Briggs story? And Shelby's exact reply was,
I don't know. Was I going to find out? There
was you and there was him, and you were on
top of a goddamn mountain and I was in Washington.
Only he didn't say goddamn that Briggs. He added, always
trying to suck up to me, I got to tell
you something I actually once promised I wouldn't tell you
(41:46):
if we ever met. This. When the Olympics were over
and came back to the office, he told me what happened.
He expected me to be happy or give him a
bonus or something, and I called him a little snitch.
Only Shelby didn't say snitch, just a word that rhymed
with it. The other punch line is from nineteen ninety two,
and remember this happened at the nineteen eighty Olympics. I
(42:08):
go to work at ESPN and come in a little
early to launch their radio network, a story I've told
here before, and there I find a friend of mine
since my radio days, who I had not seen in
a year or so, and he says, Hey, last month,
I was at an NBA game in Washington. I ran
into Jack Briggs. He heard you were going to ESPN.
He asked me if you were still telling that story
about the time you got stuck on Whiteface Mountain without
(42:30):
a cassette, And he was the only other reporter there,
and he wouldn't give you a spare And I told
him you were, and I smiled, and I replied, I
hope you remembered to use the word forever. I've done
(42:54):
all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Brian Ray and John Phillip Shaneil, the musical directors of
our little countdown podcast here, have arranged, produced, and performed
most of the music you've heard throughout. Mister Schaneil on
orchestration and keyboards, Mister Ray on guitars, bass and drums,
and their work was produced by TKO Brothers, which is
the two of them and me. Our satirical and pithy
(43:17):
musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever,
Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Olderman theme from
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
My announcer today is my friend John Dean. Everything else
was pretty much my fault. And yes, part of me
(43:38):
is still in line somewhere waiting for a van at
Lake Placid, New York in February nineteen eighty. Let's countdown
for this the ninety first day until the twenty twenty
four presidential election, and the one thy three hundred and
eighth day since convicted felon Donald J. Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
(44:00):
Use the September eighteenth sentencing hearing. Use the mental health system.
You've got it. President Biden used presidential immunity to stop
Trump from doing it again while we still can. And
also anti Semitic, anti immigration, lunatic Republicans, please stop shooting
at Trump. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. If you've
(44:23):
suffered along with me and my voice today, I'll just
mention here that I'm living in the middle of a
construction site and there is every impossible debris in the air,
and that's causing my voice a lot of harm. So
if there's none tomorrow, blame the construction site. I'll do
my best bulletins as the news requires until the next one.
(44:46):
Whenever it is. I'm Keith Olrumman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is
(45:08):
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. People
like him. The more and more you analyze the impact
(00:27):
from Tim Walls, the more and more you analyze the
process of the selection of Tim Walls, the more and
more you examine the reaction to Tim Walls, the more
and more clear it becomes it is that simple people
like him. In a time when fifty percent approval for
a politician is a landslide of support, when the very few,
(00:50):
most earnest and most honest politicos are still just tolerated.
When we have had a decade one of the most
dislike humans on the planet, hating everything and everybody, the
idea that the Democrats are running not one but two
likable candidates is staggeringly important and simple and novel. I mean,
(01:15):
when you get literally one hundred words into the founding
document of this nation, the Declaration of Independence, you hit
the unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness.
Tim Walls is happy. Tim Walls is happy to be
(01:36):
living here, happy to be fighting to help other people
become happy. And now to join Kamala Harris, who is
also happy and who smiles like a person Trump isn't happy.
At every moment of what should be rapturous success. Trump
is degrading somebody else. He's embittered, he's angry, he's the victim,
(01:59):
he's been shortchanged, he's threatening revenge. And he hasn't even
digested the newest new Paul. And yes, they continue to
be all Kamala, and I will review them in depth
in a moment. But to finish up this point, Trump
has dug up from the garbage dumps of this nation,
every slob who wants to force his will on you.
(02:19):
The latest of them is this robot dvance. Every slob
who believes that for him to succeed, somebody else must fall,
preferably one hundred somebody else's must fall. They're evil, they're greedy,
they're malignant, But at their core they fulfill hl Mankin's
priceless definition of puritanism, the haunting fear that someone somewhere
(02:45):
may be happy and it's not a one way street.
In response to them, we have become angry and self righteous,
and I put myself at the top of that list.
And then Vice President Harris steps out of the background,
smiling and laughing and underscoring a point I made two
weeks ago. When the hell have you ever seen Trump
actually laugh? And now here's Tim Walls and he's been
(03:09):
the vice presidential candidate for eight hours and he's not
just telling dad jokes. He's telling some dirty dad jokes.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Make no mistake, violent crime was up under Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
That's not even counting the crimes he committed. JD.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Vance literally literally wrote the foreword for the Architect of
the Project twenty twenty five agenda. Like all regular people
I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale,
had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then
(03:56):
wrote a bestseller trashing that community.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Come on, that's not what Middle America is.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
And I got to tell you, I can't wait to debate.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
The guy, that is, if he's willing to get off
(04:32):
the couch and show up.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
So I'll see what I did there. Don't underestimate that
seemingly throwaway line at the end. There see what I
did there? This is below the belt humor, used as
a political kill shot, but honed over his decades in classrooms.
(04:56):
Is that little softening agent that allows him to take
the meanest joke and reduce its trauma to mitigate. How
you couch it? See what I did there? By the way,
the couch thing will never go away? Viral yesterday a
photo of JD. Vance in a podcast appearance seated either
(05:17):
on a love seed of some sort of divan maybe,
legs spread as far apart as they can go, man spreading.
The pros call it as he sits on a large,
wide chair or a small narrow couch. The couch is JD.
(05:39):
Vance's dead bear cub and all credit to the Vice President.
Kamala Harris barely knew Tim Walls last week, and by
Monday he had vaulted over her favorites who supposedly carried
guarantees of guaranteeing states like Pennsylvania or Arizona, and barely
into day two. Is there any question that as good
(06:00):
as Senator Kelly and Governor Shapiro might be as leaders
or pola petiticians, is there a chance they could do
for this campaign what Tim Walls can do? Do you
want to hear what Tim Walls says next? Do you
you know like him? I don't like quoting Politico, but
they got it exactly right. Kamala Harris loved Tim Wallas's
(06:25):
governing record in Minnesota, his biography and record of winning
tough races resonated with her, and most of all, she
just really liked him. I also don't like videos of
the phone call. They are universally cringe except this one.
The words beautiful, enthusiasm, enjoyed, and joy are all used
(06:49):
in this phone call, and not ironically and not by
the goddamned candidate about himself. These two people get it.
America is so worn out by and so done withhappy weirdos.
Would you be my.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Running mate and let's get this thing.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
On the road.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
I would be honored, Madame Vice President, the joy that
you're bringing back to the country, the enthusiasm that's out there.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
It'll be a privilege to take this with you across
the country.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Well, let me say I have just a most respect
for you. I have really enjoyed our work together. And yes,
that was her second phone call to him. It turns
out he did not pick up the first time because
she didn't have call her id. Frankly, Tim Walls is
(07:43):
America pointing at Trump and saying, what the heck is
wrong with this weirdo? Thank goodness, the Trump people took
(08:10):
this well, it is instructed that the Trump cult, having
spent literally five years focused on nothing but Joe Biden,
has three weeks after his departure, still not come up
with one attack line against Kamala Harris. They were convinced
she was going to pick Josh Shapiro, so they had
attacks ready on him, and now they have nothing but
(08:33):
Nicki Haley accusing the Democrats of anti Semitism because they
didn't pick him. When Trump admitted to owning a book
of Hitler's speeches which he kept on a night stand
in his bedroom, and Trump is openly anti Semitic, and
she bowed to him after insisting she never would. They
threw everything at the wall at the tim walls. Am
I right? I can hear him making that joke. Maybe
(08:54):
I'm learning something. Not only did nothing stick to that
wall or walls, but there is no evidence that any
of it even hit the walls. Steven Miller insists going
to turn the Midwest into Mogadishu, which would be nice
and racist if any of Trump's supporters knew where the
hell Mogadishu was, or if they were certain it was
(09:15):
not some kind of delicious foreign food. Kevin McCarthy says,
Walls was known as the Bernie Sanders of the House,
and it was like, wait, is that is that an insult?
People like Bernie Sanders. People who don't like the policies
of Bernie Sanders, like Bernie Sanders. They look at him
and they see Larry David. You want to insult Tim Walls,
(09:35):
Kevin McCarthy, You tell them people said Tim Walls was
known as the Kevin McCarthy of the House. That's an insult.
They sent JD. Vance to Philadelphia to proactively attack Walls,
even before Kamala introduces him, and they have Vance stand
in front of a huge banner reading Kamala Chaos, which
(09:57):
isn't a bad line C minus maybe, especially not for Republicans,
especially not for Republicans in disarray. But they can't snap
out of their one template. So in the little mandatory
tableau they insist on there have to be people behind Vance.
It has to look like like there's a crowd of
(10:18):
people who agree with him, even if you have to
pay them. And there are no seats, so everybody is
standing behind Vance. So they're standing behind him, and because
they're not all three feet tall, you can't see the
word chaos, So all you get is JD. Vance giving
an impossibly monotonous speech, another one under a big banner
that reads Kamala, and you're thinking, man, now, this is
(10:39):
a surprise endorsement. And of course Vance is only out
there because Trump is taking the week off. And as
the Democrats go from political honeymoon number one through the
Harris Walls political honeymoon number two, on their way to
political honeymoon number three, the one that is the convention,
(11:00):
why would the Republican presidential candidate bother to appear in public?
Let the freak in the eyeliner do it all while
Trump stays home and tweets. Trump's campaign is suddenly bleeding
to death, and he's getting laughs scored off him by
the guy who would have been about the five hundredth
(11:21):
likeliest vice presidential candidate in the gambling houses two weeks ago. While,
by the way, all the networks carry his speech live,
and Carrie Harris's speech live, and Carrie Josh Shapiro's speech live,
and somebody at CNN who can read the ratings is thinking, say,
maybe we should show all of their speeches live from
here on in huh instead of three more hours of
(11:44):
Van Jones. Maybe Trump in the Bunker is in fact
the best for the cult, because, on top of everything
else that has gone wrong for the Republicans, Trump has
turned into a moron. Yesterday he posted nothing less than
very bad fan fic wherein Joe Biden storms into the
(12:05):
Democratic Convention to take back his nomination. And I'm sitting
there reading it, thinking, could you make the projection about
what you would do? Trump? Could you make it slightly
difficult to deduce from what you've written? After apparently deciding
to power through on what is also hands down the
(12:27):
worst attempt to tag an opponent with an insulting nickname,
the Biden fanfic was the highlight of the Trump social
media day. Face it. The nicknames are perhaps Trump's only
true political skill other than the fire hose of lies
that makes checking each lie impossible, and he has decided,
(12:49):
after years of success at political nicknames, that putting a
B the letter B in the middle of Kamala Harris's
name is the greatest idea he's ever had. Kamala with
a bee e Kama b La. I have spent more
(13:11):
time than I care to admit over the course of
two full days now trying to figure out what the
hell it means, what the hell it's supposed to mean,
how he is hearing it sound in the big cobweb
filled attic that is his head. Moble co maele come
(13:35):
maybe la comabla ca mable. I see the word able
in there. Donnie, sorry, punt on this one, or let
JD have a try at giving her a nickname, because
in the world of American politics twenty twenty four, jokes matter.
(13:59):
This is your fault and you are winning all this
time on this topic. But at three o'clock the high
school got out of class, and now they're out there
with you, kicking your ass. Sometimes it happens like that
in life, unbeaten, unchallenged, always at worst competitive, a perennial threat,
and then one day they go right off the cliff,
never to be heard from again. One day you are
(14:23):
the best, the next day it's all gone, the muse
has packed and moved out to like Australia. Let me
swing off into a baseball analogy for a moment before
I run the polls crazy. I know I never do
a baseball analogy. The nineteen eighty three Philadelphia Phillies had
four future Hall of Famers in their lineup, plus Pete Rose.
(14:46):
A sixth player won a Most Valuable Player award. Another
one won the Cy Young Award for Best pitcher. Four
other players won Gold Glove awards. Of the remaining fourteen
guys on their roster, eleven were passed or future All Stars.
The Phillies won twenty of their last twenty five games
in the nineteen eighty three season, but in the playoffs
(15:08):
they faced the Dodgers, to whom they had lost eleven
of twelve games during the season. It didn't matter. They
beat the Dodgers in four games. They rolled into the
World Series as an unstoppable juggernaut. They beat Baltimore and
Young Cal Ripken in Game one at Baltimore, and many
observers thought the nineteen eighty three Phillies might sweep the
(15:28):
World Series. And then the sun rose and they awoke
on the morning of Wednesday, October twelfth, nineteen eighty three,
and the Juggernaut overnight had become a bunch of washed
up old trumps. Phillies led Game two one to nothing
in the fourth inning. They blew that lead. They only
(15:51):
scored six more runs in the entire rest of the Series,
they benched Pete Rose and there was a huge controversy.
They lost the World Series in five games. They got
rid of Pete Rose, they got rid of two of
the Hall of Famers, most of the All Stars. The
award went. They next won the World Series twenty five
years later. And a little known baseball fact, it was
(16:12):
all because they tried calling her Combbla. They didn't. But
how great would it be if they had Marist polls
for PBS Harris fifty one, Trump forty eight. Harris by three.
(16:33):
Previous poll, Trump by one Marist for PBS. Who do
you trust more on abortion? Harris fifty six to forty one.
Who do you trust more on preserving democracy? Harris fifty
three to forty six. Who do you trust more on
the economy? Trump? But by only three. Who do you
trust more on immigration? Well? This is the killer right,
(16:56):
Trump's real chance to survive the Harris tsunami. Yes, the
pole says they trust Trump more on immigration only by six.
That is as startling a poll number as I have
seen in two years. Swing state polls Redfield, Wilton. The
(17:16):
polling was done Saturday. New Mexico is Harris by seven.
Minnesota is Harris by five that may rise. Arizona is
Harris by one. In this poll. It had been Trump
by three. Pennsylvania is Trump by two. In this pole,
it had been Trump by four. Michigan is Trump by one.
In this poll. It had been Trump by three. Georgia
(17:37):
is Trump by two. In this poll it had been
Trump by five. Nevada is tied at forty Wisconsin is
tied at forty three. Same pole. Harris approval up by
one point in Arizona and Georgia. Up by three points
in North Carolina, up by five in Wisconsin. All of this,
all of these numbers before Tim walls happily for Trump,
(18:02):
he can turn to his in house geniuses like senior
campaign advisor Chris Losavita and spokesperson Caroline with A k
Levitt los Avida. July twenty fourth, reliable sources confirm Kamala
to pick Governor Shapiro from Pennsylvania. Chris Losovita from August fifth,
(18:26):
five thirty PM breaking news. According to my sources, Kamala
Harris is not picking Josh Shapiro Pennsylvania. Caroline Levitt Yesterday's
statement on Kamala's selection of radical leftist Tim Walls doesn't
mention Joe Manchion supporting Tim Walls for Vice president, from
(18:46):
proposing his own carbon free agenda to suggesting strict your
mission standards for gas powered cars and embracing policies to
allow convicted felons to vote. Wait wait, wait, what was
the part in the middle there about embracing policies to
allow convicted felons to vote. Trump is opposed to this.
(19:07):
Trump is a convicted felon. I think he knows clearly
his spokesperson does not. Don't worry all as fine as
Trump Headquarters from now on, We're just gonna mention Caroline
Lovett's name, but put a B in the middle of it,
so she's Carol blind lev bit. How could this possibly
get any better? How could a day have gone better
(19:30):
for the Democrats than it did yesterday? How well? Monday
at twelve I'm sorry, I'm laughing in advance Monday at
twelve thirty four pm Eastern, retweeting the Writer's bulletin that
Josh Shapiro and Tim Walls were the vice presidential finalists
for Kamala Harris. One pundit retweeted this, adding, it's gonna
(19:53):
be Shapiro people signed Chris silzit. Oh, that's it. Trump,
That's it right there, that's it. I shouldn't say it
because this is it. This will put you right back
in the race. Hire Chris Slizza. Have him workshop the
(20:16):
Kamabla nickname. Maybe Cambabla, cub blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah, something like that. Give Chris a few years,
he'll come up with it. It's gonna be Shapiro people.
Chris is the Crystaliza of crystalizzes. Also of interest here,
somebody touches Congressman Derek van Orden brushes past him in
(20:40):
a line going into a hotel. He wants them charged
with assaulting a member of Congress because Derek van Orton
is nuts. And not only does Axios dot Com fire
ten percent of its staff, but the boss makes the
departed read about it in a memo that is written
in that disgusting, impossible to understand axios ease. That's next.
(21:09):
This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Oberman stell
(21:36):
ahead of us on this edition of Countdown. I was
supposed to anchor NBC's cable coverage of the summer Olympics
in two thousand from Sydney, Australia, but I kind of
quit the job in nineteen ninety eight, so that didn't happen.
Then I was supposed to anchor NBC's cable coverage of
the Summer Olympics in two thousand and four from Athens
in Greece, but I told them no, no, I'd rather
(22:00):
stay in New Jersey and try to grow this new
news show on MSNBC called Countdown. And there are still
former sports executives at NBC who are now retired who
continually think I am insane, even though that decision turned
out the way it did. I was also supposed to
cover the Summer Olympics in nineteen eighty in Moscow, but
(22:22):
then the US pulled out of those games in a
political thing, so that was not my fault. But I
am proud to tell you that I have not watched
one minute, not one highlight from the twenty twenty fourth
Summer Olympics in in France. France. I mean, you could
(22:44):
tell me Kamala Harris won the Olympic skeet shooting on
ice gold medal yesterday and I'd say, sure, sure, yeah,
she was great. I was watching. I'm beginning to think
I may not like the Olympics. If this is true.
My not liking the Olympics dates back to nineteen eight
(23:04):
in my experience as part of a two and a
half man team that covered the entire Winter Olympics at
Lake Placid, New York. Just the two and a half
of us. The half a guy was management. He was
in the office most of the time. It was rewarding,
it was challenging, it was snowy cold. It was a
once in a lifetime experience, and I have done everything
(23:26):
since then to make sure that it was literally just
once in a lifetime, especially after the other one and
a half guys, my boss and my boss's boss got
me drunk one night and then sent me to cover
the skiing at sunrise and I almost did not survive it.
Next in things I promised not to tell first, there
(23:49):
are still more new idiots to talk about. The daily
roundup of the miscreants, morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens
who constitute two days worst persons in the world from
the top of a mountain mountain, mountain mountain. The Bronze
Worse co founder Jim VandeHei of Axios dot com, the
(24:09):
news organization which fired fifty people yesterday five ozho and
did it not just by memo, but by Axio style memo.
Axios pretty much sucks. They overextended, they paid management too much.
They spent most of their time complimenting themselves. They relied
(24:29):
on a cut c style they called smart brevity, in
which they would state the basic facts of a story
for about a paragraph or so and then begin to
spin it with a subheadline indented that read why it matters.
This was part of the memo from Jim Vanda Hi
difficult changes. We're making some difficult changes to adapt fast
(24:51):
to a rapidly changing media landscape. Why it matters. We're
eliminating about fifty positions to get ahead of tectonic shifts.
And that they used the format of the publication that
CEOs puts out twice a day, their newsletters, to inform
the people writing the newsletters and reporting for the newsletters
(25:14):
that they were being fired from the company. It's like
I don't know, getting a pink slip inside a custom
made Ford motor company. I don't know, cover for your
inside windshield. Unbelievable. Why it matters? Why it matters you
(25:34):
might be unemployed. And there's an intented paragraph later on
that reads with a little dot if your job is
being eliminated, you will receive an accompanying email in the
next few minutes with information about your severance package and
a calendar invite for a meeting with a leader from
your team and a member of the people team. We
wanted to tell each of you in person first, but
(25:54):
the mechanics of that proved infeasible. In other words, Jim
Vandeheid didn't want to go to the office in the morning.
Why it matters, you may not have a job anymore.
Speaking of which, the runner up worser Bloomberg News. Sure
it's White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs was Trump's favorite, and
sure she once tried to make a thing out of
(26:16):
the Vice president saying the as in the point here,
And she did a lot of stupid stuff and a
lot of bad coverage and a lot of absolutely the
worst elements of Washington inside the Beltway. We just talked
to each other and have no idea that there are
human beings affected by this kind of insider access stuff.
(26:38):
Sure she did that. On the other hand, she was
apparently reportedly fired because Bloomberg blew the embargo on the
rescue mission the trade of hostages that got the Wall
Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich back they reported it too early.
(26:59):
She was the principal writer on the story, so naturally
she got fired. As some He wrote, I haven't heard
the last time that a reporter actually hit send on
their own story. Unless it's a one person website, even
at axios, they don't get to say why it matters.
An editor gets to say that. And so the Bloomberg
(27:21):
editor in chief, John Micklethwaite, disciplined staffers for jumping the
gun on the dramatic deal. This according to New York Magazine,
and he didn't seem to fire any editors, or if
he did, they were not as prominent in the organization
as this Jennifer Jacobs, who was fired because the story
she wrote was put out before the embargo was lifted.
(27:44):
There may be other details to this. Perhaps she told
her bosses that the embargo had already expired, or that
she had authorization from her sources, or that everybody there
at the White House team for Bloomberg said it was okay.
But we don't know any of that. Right now, it
just looks like Bloomberg fired the reporter because the editors
did something wrong, once again in the story of journalism.
(28:07):
But our winner, Congressman Derek Van Orden of Wisconsin, we
have talked about him too many times for me to
go into a review about him and the fact that
it looks like he has PTSD and has never done
anything about it. He was about twenty five years in
the military and the wear and tear seems to have
gotten to him. Plus he's a Republican from Wisconsin, so
(28:28):
he's an asshole. However, Rep. Van Orden was in line
for the morning event at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee
and happened to find himself trying to get into the
Fister Hotel. That's right, They've kept the name Fister for
a century, the Fister Hotel. I'll meet you at the Fister. Also,
(28:49):
the Fister is supposedly haunted by people who were really
bothered by the name Fister. I suspect, were people sentenced
to eternity in the Fister Hotel? Where were you sentenced? Well?
I went to hell for a thousand years. Where did you? Oh,
it's much worse than Hell. I went to the Fister
Hotel pfi st er Fister. Anyway, I'm getting away from
(29:13):
the point here. He was in line, Van Orden was,
and if he's going to purgatory, he's definitely going to
the Fister. Van Orden was in line along with the
members of the protest group Code Pink, including one newer Jagama,
a twenty four year old woman who was in line
apparently just in front of Van Orden in this security
(29:34):
line to get in during the Republican National Convention along
with other members of Code Pink. The congressman seemed to
touch her gently to get her to move. When the
line towards the security box began to move, she said
we're moving, or he said we're moving, and she moved,
and she grumbled about it, and she said something wise,
and then she walked back in front of him, which
(29:56):
is where she had been before the line was moving,
and he then says, ma'am, you'd better watch it, and
begins to claim that she has cut in front of him.
She was already in front of him, and Van Orden
then accused her of political violence. You just assaulted a
member of Congress. Van Orden is about a foot taller
(30:20):
than this woman. He said he'd be filing a police report.
He told policemen on the scene that he would do that,
and as usual, the real victim here is always Derek
Van Orden. A helpful cop then says to another officer,
she just shoved a senator. There was no shove, and
Van Orden is not a senator, He's barely a congressman.
(30:42):
Van Orden is seen saying this blank ain't happening anymore.
Then the police bodycam video, which reporters were told did
not exist, suddenly existed again and it was released, and
on it you see it the way I've just described
it to you. There's a woman standing in front of
a congressman. A line starts to move. She doesn't move
(31:04):
fast enough for him. He tells her to move, She
moves and mouths off to him. She moves back in
front of him where she was, and he accuses her
of well, to use the parlance of the time, an
attempted assassination. Well almost Then there is a conversation between
Van Orden and one of the cops. The questions one
(31:26):
of the cops asks Van Orden, They're gonna ask is
did you feel pain? Van Orden replies, I have really
bad hips. Okay, so pain. The officer asks again. Then
Van Orden pauses and says, yes, my hip, my hip hurts.
I mean it hurts already. Did she exacerbate it? I
(31:47):
don't know, but a hip check is a hip check.
Van Orden was a Navy seal. He was deployed five times,
but oddly go look up the five deployments online. The
only one you'll find named that he boasts about is
going to Bosnia, where I guess he suffered a hangnail.
(32:09):
I don't know if he received the Congressional Medal of Honor,
but I'm sure he thinks he did. Congressman Derek Oh oh,
I have been mortally wounded my hip parts. Oh nos,
it's an act of political terrorism. This tiny woman, five
foot nothing just knocked me to the ground. My legs
(32:31):
have fallen of Oh no, oh, I'm bleeding. I'm dash.
He actually murdered me. Van Orden two Day's worst person
in Oh no, the world soft as a great. The
(33:00):
alarm goes off. It is pitch black in my room
at the Swiss Acres Motel. It is Valentine's Day and
I am still drunk. Keith knew he was in trouble,
but I was also twenty one years old, and in fact,
my twenty first birthday had only been eighteen days earlier.
(33:22):
So somehow I survived, showered, dressed, packed, and I mean
I packed two cassette tape recorders, four sets of batteries,
an audio processing machine that weighed like fourteen pounds. The
nine volt batteries it took, I think it was a
dozen of them, a telephone, a backup telephone, twelve assorted
patch cords, two loose leaf notebooks, about eight pens, two microphones,
(33:45):
two extra pair of socks, and I got dressed, two
full sets of thermal underwear, shirts, sweaters, snow pants, snow
shoes because it was eleven degrees below zero that morning.
I got something quick to eat at the commissary, and
I made it out somehow to the line for the
bus from the Lake Placid Olympics Center to the Lake
(34:08):
Placid Transportation Center to Lake Placid's own White Face Mountain,
then onto the snow track the open penned mountain tractor
that went up the side of Whiteface Mountain and took
me to the finish line of the nineteen eighty Olympic
Men's downhill ski final still drunk. That is how a
(34:28):
reporter covered the Olympics nearly forty three years ago. You drank,
you woke up, you went, You stood near the finish line,
and when the skiers completed their runs, you hiked or
wobbled over to them and you took out your microphone
or your pen and you interviewed them, like two minutes
after they had finished hurtling towards you down the hill.
(34:49):
You could see almost nothing of the race from there.
There were no TV monitors. Basically your only clue was
the sound of the crowd that would give you about
thirty seconds worth of warning that the skier was coming
over the near horizon and you should be prepared to
flee just in case he or she wiped out. Also,
(35:10):
you were on top of a mountain at the dead
point of winter, and whereas it might have been a
balney eleven degrees below zero in the comfort of the
Swiss Acres motel with the wind chill, at the base
of the mountain, it was forty eight below zero and
there had already been four inches of new snow since
the sun came up, which is where the still drunk
(35:34):
part came in handy. My boss is at my first job,
the thousand station radio network called United pres International Audio,
had decided the night before to teach me how to
drink while on assignment. My bosses were the bureau manager
for that part of you PI, the late Stan Sabik,
who had hired me, and Sam Rosen, the sports director
(35:54):
of the network, who not only somehow survived being my
first boss, but today, just forty three years later, is
still working as the television voice of the New York
hockey team and is in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
So I guess my reputation is a tough employee is
wildly overrated, or at least Sam thinks. So Sam and
(36:16):
Stan kept me drinking at the motel until two am,
knowing full well that I had to get on the
six am bus to go cover the men's downhill because
it was the two of them who had assigned me
to go cover the men's downhill, And bluntly, I was
surprisingly pleased with myself that freezing morning because I had
indeed learned how to drink while on assignment. I had
(36:37):
somehow found the phone jack for the UPI phone buried
under all the new snow, which of course was buried
under all the old snow. Attached the phone to it,
gotten a dial tone, called the office, checked the alligator
clips with which I would feed the tape, and all
was well until I went to put a cassette tape
(36:59):
into the cassette recorder. I didn't have one fat lot
of good two cassette tape machines. Gonna do you without
a cassette to sticking one of them? I looked forlornly
around the base of Whiteface Mountain, twelve hundred feet above
(37:19):
sea level. As we were. There was a surprisingly nice
chalet and a decent restaurant, but there were no radio
shacks or other electronics stores. There was, however, one other
radio guy, Jack Briggs, from the Associated Press Radio Network,
the nominal arch rival to our own UPI Audio. I
knew Jack a little. He was a nice guy. I
(37:42):
went and explained my plight, making sure to blame my
bosses for my predicament. Oh man, he said, his breath
turning into first steam and then ice cubes. I'm so sorry,
but I can't give you a cassette. I'm sorry you
were UPI, and I'm ap oh I laughed. That was
(38:06):
a great line to say to a rookie reporter still drunk.
Thanks to the initiation rituals of his own bosses, the
possessor of one great buzz but zero audio cassettes, Jack
Briggs could tell I thought he was kidding. That's when
he said, I'm not kidding. Look, if my boss, Shelby Whitfield,
ever found out, he'd fire me. I suddenly wasn't drunk anymore,
(38:29):
not at all. My boss will will fire me. Briggs
was adamant. I can't run the risk of Shelby finding out.
I have to confess. I shouted, how the hell is
he gonna find out? Jack? I think subconsciously I was
hoping to create an avalanche, which would have been a
(38:50):
better solution than the one I was faced with. I
said to him, there's you and there's me, and we're
on top of a goddamn mountain, and Shelby Whitfield, your
boss is in Washington, DC, and he's a drunk. He's
probably more drunk than I am, and he'd probably thank
you for helping me to drink more. Briggs would not budge.
(39:12):
I told him I would pay him. I told him
I would give him the cassette back after I fed
my boss the interviews over the phone, so there'd be
no evidence and he wouldn't even have to do any interviews.
No good, I'm sorry, and I know you're going to
tell this story about me for a while. As he
walked away from me, I shouted after him. Forever. Turned
(39:34):
out there was no radio shack and no camaraderie, but
there was a West Coast newspaper reporter atop the mountain
who heard some of this conversation. I guess I yelled
a little loudly at mister Briggs. Some guy standing next
to a Saint Bernard told me to quiet down. He
mentioned something else about the avalanches, or maybe I dreamed
that part. I don't know. Anyway, the West Coast newspaper
(39:56):
guy said he had a micro cassette machine and he
would loan it to me and I could give it
back to him at the media center that day or
the next one. But I had to do him because
there was this really cute reporter in our UPI bureau
and he really wanted to be introduced to her. And
I said, I can promise you nothing but a handshake,
and he understood and That's how I did not get fired.
But of course a story like this has punchlines, and
(40:19):
this one has two of them. The first is two
years and a couple of months later, Shelby Whitfield asked
me to lunch. He had left the Associated Press to
run the sports department at the ABC Radio network, back
when that was not only a thing, but a big thing.
We went to a terrific New York City Chinese restaurant
near ABC called shun Lee, and Shelby Whitfield interviewed me
(40:42):
for a job when that kind of job paid eighty
thousand a year in my very nice studio apartment and
a very nice part of town costs less than five
hundred dollars a month later, in an interesting twist, I
found out that jobs didn't exist. I was mentioning the
interview in a press box somewhere I think Madison Square Garden,
and there was another kid reporter named Howie Rose, and
(41:05):
how he is still working, he does the New York
Mets games on the radio. And how he said, wait,
they interviewed me for that job last year. Just an
excuse for that damn Whitfield to go drink his lunch
on ABC's tab. Anyway, before we started the interview for
the job I did not know did not exist at ABC.
I told Shelby Whitfield the White Face Mountain? Can I
(41:26):
borrow a cassette Jack Briggs story? And Shelby's exact reply was,
I don't know. Was I going to find out? There
was you and there was him, and you were on
top of a goddamn mountain and I was in Washington.
Only he didn't say goddamn that Briggs. He added, always
trying to suck up to me, I got to tell
you something I actually once promised I wouldn't tell you
(41:46):
if we ever met. This. When the Olympics were over
and came back to the office, he told me what happened.
He expected me to be happy or give him a
bonus or something, and I called him a little snitch.
Only Shelby didn't say snitch, just a word that rhymed
with it. The other punch line is from nineteen ninety two,
and remember this happened at the nineteen eighty Olympics. I
(42:08):
go to work at ESPN and come in a little
early to launch their radio network, a story I've told
here before, and there I find a friend of mine
since my radio days, who I had not seen in
a year or so, and he says, Hey, last month,
I was at an NBA game in Washington. I ran
into Jack Briggs. He heard you were going to ESPN.
He asked me if you were still telling that story
about the time you got stuck on Whiteface Mountain without
(42:30):
a cassette, And he was the only other reporter there,
and he wouldn't give you a spare And I told
him you were, and I smiled, and I replied, I
hope you remembered to use the word forever. I've done
(42:54):
all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Brian Ray and John Phillip Shaneil, the musical directors of
our little countdown podcast here, have arranged, produced, and performed
most of the music you've heard throughout. Mister Schaneil on
orchestration and keyboards, Mister Ray on guitars, bass and drums,
and their work was produced by TKO Brothers, which is
the two of them and me. Our satirical and pithy
(43:17):
musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever,
Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Olderman theme from
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
My announcer today is my friend John Dean. Everything else
was pretty much my fault. And yes, part of me
(43:38):
is still in line somewhere waiting for a van at
Lake Placid, New York in February nineteen eighty. Let's countdown
for this the ninety first day until the twenty twenty
four presidential election, and the one thy three hundred and
eighth day since convicted felon Donald J. Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
(44:00):
Use the September eighteenth sentencing hearing. Use the mental health system.
You've got it. President Biden used presidential immunity to stop
Trump from doing it again while we still can. And
also anti Semitic, anti immigration, lunatic Republicans, please stop shooting
at Trump. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. If you've
(44:23):
suffered along with me and my voice today, I'll just
mention here that I'm living in the middle of a
construction site and there is every impossible debris in the air,
and that's causing my voice a lot of harm. So
if there's none tomorrow, blame the construction site. I'll do
my best bulletins as the news requires until the next one.
(44:46):
Whenever it is. I'm Keith Olrumman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is
(45:08):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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