November 22, 2023 • 45 mins
SEASON 2 EPISODE 79: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Ludicrous as it looks, insane as Musk seems, corrupt as the Texas Attorney General is, this “Indict Media Matters” story is the FUTURE. It is practice, and Musk is the stand-in for the role ultimately to be played by Dementia J. Trump. Not merely politicizing but fully privatizing criminal prosecution in this country.
Media Matters catches Musk placing high-priced corporate ads next to antisemitic content, the corporations investigate, the corporations cancel the ads. Musk complains. Trump's Renfield, Stephen Miller, responds and lights the bat signal. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has to do stuff like this or the billionaires will stop protecting him, promises to jail reporters for telling the truth.
It's stochastic prosecution.
The template is being sanded down and polished as we watch. This is practice for the bastards. Like January 6th was practice for the bastards. Just like the entirety of Trump’s time in the White House was practice for the bastards. Trump won't have to repeal the 1st Amendment to put Kristen Welker in jail. Or in theory, YOU, if you’ve ever tweeted or written anything online that he doesn’t like. Or in theory, ME. Hell: I could easily be FIRST. Trump doesn’t have to GET Congress to MAKE a law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. He reads something he doesn't like in The Washington Post (or one of his benefactors reads something bad on somebody's website and calls Trump) and he just drops the prosecution down to a state and the next thing you know Texas or Florida or Missouri or Mississippi becomes a veritable journalistic speed-trap.
The Trumpists are so confident that they are giving us previews of their plans for 2025.
There is one way to beat them: Liberal money, matching them dime for dime to save democracy. That, or this Trumpian nightmare isn't the future - it's the present.
B-Block (22:13) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Mayor Adams' daily scandal is followed by a really weird sound bite. Senator Menendez needs to keep you from thinking about his gold bars so he hires a lawyer with the nickname "Gold Bars." (26:58) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Senator Kennedy does a racism and a sexism and a mispronunciationism; a Trumper messes up a meme; Nikki Haley just couldn't leave the nine-year old girl wearing the Haley hat alone. She had to ask her something. And Nikki got owned.
C-Block (32:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I'm just about the youngest person you know who actually remembers the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 60 years ago today. And now it's clear it was a turning point in another way: it was the beginning of Conspiracy Theory Nation.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Rarely
do we get to see the future. But make no mistake,
(00:27):
ludacrous as it looks insane, as Elon Musk seems corrupt,
as the Texas Attorney General is this indict media matters.
Story is the future. It is practice. Musk, in fact,
is the stand in for the role ultimately to be
played by dementia Jay Trump, not merely politicizing, but fully
(00:52):
privatizing criminal prosecution in this country. This is what the
Republicans want. This is why they have embraced fascism. This
is why they have sold the fragments of souls they
have to Trump. This is why they spent millions to
buy Attorney General Paxton's acquittal when he was impeached by
his own party in Texas. This is the future, a
(01:16):
theocracy with theocratic courts, or a corporate state with corporate courts,
or whatever brand of authoritarianism they want, with any brand
of authoritarian courts they want. Happy Thanksgiving could be worse,
could be next year. We could all already be packing
to move if the borders are still open. I know
(01:41):
you regret that I was ever taught the word stochastic.
But here it is again Elon Musk, a large and
not very well adjusted child with some developmental problems that
have lately been exacerbated by something. Somebody suggested it was
Ozempic buys and almost non denominational social media site, lets
(02:01):
his inner fascist out, swings the site wildly to the right,
and then swings it past mere conservatism or repression into
outright religious and racial hatred and incitement, and he gets caught.
His business genius has been exposed as exploitative luck. He
(02:21):
has broken a successful business model. He has let his
hatreds and prejudices leak out. Just yesterday, somebody tweeted a
photo of Musk standing in front of an American flag
swinging a sword. He replied to it, there is a
large graveyard filled with my enemies. I do not wish
to add to it, but will if given no choice.
(02:44):
I can't imagine how Twitter lost half its value in
his year owning it with public relations like that, and
now he is caught caught endorsing anti semitism, platforming anti semitism,
mainstreaming anti semitism, and caught by investigative journalists getting major
corporations large sure than his to pay him to be
(03:08):
juxtaposed alongside the Nazis. The corporations read that investigation, the
corporations did their own investigations. The corporations bailed out, and
Musk must blame someone. Musk blamed the journalists Media Matters,
claimed they were guilty of fraud, even though while making
the claim, he in fact confessed that Twitter x did
(03:30):
place mainstream ads next to anti Semitic content. Then the
leader of the Trump Undead, Stephen Miller, replied, fraud is
both the civil and criminal violation. There are two dozen
plus conservative attorneys general and that here's the word again.
That was the stochastic call. It echoed, and within two
(03:54):
and a half hours, the conservative Attorney general of Missouri wrote,
my team is looking into this matter. Interestingly, his team
evidently noticed there was no crime, no fraud, nothing but
a whiny, blubbering man boy needing a scapegoat, because the
next day that attorney general and his team stop looking
into this matter, but the one from Texas. Ken Paxton,
(04:17):
now wholly owned by the forces that run the state's
lieutenant governor, must do whatever those forces want, and what
they want is anything that puts a finger on the
political scale, anything that favors the Republicans, even though their
demographic is dying out. And this man Paxton is backed
by oil billionaires named Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes, and
(04:38):
Tim Dunn is linked to Brad Parscale, and Brad Parscale
is back working on Trump's twenty twenty four campaign. It's
stochastic prosecution. Musk, new right wing hero and owner of
a useful platform for spreading the violist filth, most quickly
complaints Steven Miller, truly one of the worst human beings
(04:59):
on the planet, lights the bat signal. Ken Paxton, who
has to do stuff like this or the billionllionaires will
stop protecting him, promises to jail reporters for telling the truth.
It isn't Musk prosecuting Media Matters. It isn't Stephen Miller,
It's Paxton. If Paxton gets anywhere right now, the leading
(05:20):
evidence of a violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices
Act is Musk's allegation that because when Media Matters tested
the advertising algorithm, it followed only thirty accounts and managed
to generate fourteen times more ads per hour than an
average user would see If Paxton gets anywhere with that,
(05:40):
other attorneys general will follow, and even if all of
them get laughed out of court, Media Matters is now
spending millions to defend itself in how many different states?
The template is being sanded down and polished as we watch.
This is the future. This is practice for the bastards,
(06:04):
like January sixth was practice for the bastards, just like
the entirety of Trump's time in the White House was
practice for the bastards. Trump doesn't have to repeal the
First Amendment to put Kristen Welker in jail, or in
theory to put you in jail if you've ever tweeted
or written anything online that he doesn't like, or in
(06:25):
theory me in jail. Hell I could easily be first.
Trump doesn't have to get Congress to make a law
abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. He
just drops the prosecution down to a state and the
next thing you know, Texas or Florida or Missouri or
Mississippi becomes a veritable journalistic speed trap. Is the Washington
(06:48):
Post based in Mississippi? Now? Can you buy it there?
Hell I don't know where to buy it anymore? In
New York City. Can you read it online or it's
posts on Twitter while you are physically in Mississippi ballgame.
Trump may or may not understand any of this. He
is the definition of the old joke about how nobody
(07:09):
wants to hear about the labor pains, they just want
to see the baby. How many times though, has he
called the press the enemy of the people. He hands
Steven Miller an article in the New York Times or
something from the Gateway pundit shaming Jim Acosta or MSNBC
or worshyet, somebody who can help him calls up and says,
(07:29):
mister President, the Bucks County Beacon here in Pennsylvania just
incommoded me. And Trump says, tel Paxton, jail, costa jail,
the Bucks County Beacon. And Miller says yes, Master and
crawls back to his cave. And if Paxton won't prosecute,
maybe Bailey and Missouri will. And ninety nine percent of
the public won't even see Trump's grubby fingerprints on any
(07:52):
of it, or Miller's if he has fingerprints. And even
if it doesn't get that far, even if this thing
right now does not become a Trump dictatorship, and we
don't privatize and politicized prosecution, and state attorneys general don't
constantly refresh social media waiting for their opportunity to spring
(08:14):
into action for Trump like so many flying monkeys, waiting
for the wicked witch to point out which direction the
chilling effect is already there. I have said this again
and again. Every media corporation in this country has already
had this meeting. What do we do if Trump regains power?
(08:37):
Not what do we do to protect our ability to
cover the news, but what do we do to protect
our ability to make profits for our stockholders and salaries
for ourselves. We have our phony, blooney jobs to worry about, Gentlemen.
We never did find out what that internal NBC investigation
of the Meet the Press Trump interview found out about
(08:59):
a rumored deal to keep virtually all fact checking to
an obscure corner of the website. But even if it's
just all coincidence there, you think people aren't scared. And
even if somehow they aren't scared, you think they aren't
blanching at the thought of all the work involved in
fending off another four years. We're twelve of Trump. These
(09:22):
are people with mortgages and jobs in an industry already
being shrunk by market forces. The head of the news
division in the movie Network, played by William Holden, tells
the acting president of the network, you want me out
of here, You're gonna have to drag me out, kicking
and screaming, and the whole news division kicking and screaming
(09:43):
with me, and the acting president played by Robert Duval answers, calmly,
you think they're going to quit their jobs for you?
Not in this recession, buddy. It's like everybody asking why
Musk's stooge Linda Yakarino hasn't yet quit her job as
as Musk's stooge, or why her family hasn't staged an intervention. Well,
(10:06):
he's paying Linda Yakarino six million a year. Who is
the last media person to walk out on a job
paying that much or more? On principle? I mean, besides me,
I'll hang up and listen. And one more self referential thing.
The future reminds us of the turnover in political coverage newspapers, online, television, whatever.
(10:30):
It's always been about five years. And I don't just
mean the fact that the White House correspondents get out
as fast as they can. I mean that about seventy
five percent of the people in political journalism in this
country five years ago no longer are in political journalism.
I started on MSNBC on October first, nineteen ninety seven.
(10:53):
In March nineteen ninety eight, April, I can't remember, I
was the featured guest of the Washington Post at the
front table at the White House Correspondence dinner, and I
ran screaming back into sports. In December nineteen ninety eight,
and a year after that, I was in the gift
shop at a hotel in Saint Louis and the former
Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson walks in and sees me and
(11:17):
gives me a big hug and says, congratulations on escaping.
Wait wait here a minute. And then he leaves, goes
back into the lobby, and he returns to the gift shop,
and he's got his wife with him now, and he
says to her, you see this guy, honey, This is Keith.
This is the one I was telling you about. He
got out of politics after just one year. It's taken
me forty two years later. I went back into politics
(11:41):
at MSNBC and nobody, literally nobody who was at that
Washington Post table with me just four years earlier was
still at the Washington Post. And no, I don't think
it was me. Think of the TV people and even
most of the print people who were on Trump's campaign
in twenty sixteen, or who were White House correspondents, how
(12:04):
many of them still have that job. How many of
them will see getting that job in the future as
a great assignment and a great stepping stone to something
bigger and less consuming. If you can get prosecuted, prosecuted
by proxy, prosecuted for doing your job well, prosecuted by
(12:26):
Trump for telling the truth, even something as stupidly open
and shut as truth about Musk's platforming of anti Semitism,
why are you going to aspire to do that job?
If somehow I need to emphasize to you that we
(12:47):
cannot let Trump back into the White House, you are
probably listening to the wrong podcast, or you are taking
notes for Ken Paxton. But it is increasingly obvious to
me that they are so confident they will get there that,
as they used to say the football coaches, they have
already scripted all the plays for the entire first half,
(13:09):
because they are letting us see the future from Project
twenty twenty five and the consortium of right wing nut
jobs Trump will call upon to punish anybody they want
to punish, to Agenda forty seven, to make up crimes,
to prosecute everybody from Bill Barr to Barack Obama, to
(13:30):
Schedule f to purge the civil service of anybody not
personally loyal to Trump. And now this the privatized prosecution
double play. Musk to Miller to Paxton, and we got
another glimpse of the twenty twenty five that you might
have seen in the bad portions of Back to the
(13:50):
Future Part two, or It's a Wonderful Life. The reference
earlier to Trump wanting somebody to prosecute the Bucks County
Beacon was not gratuitous. It is the small investigative operation
in Pennsylvania doing great, end dangerous work, and you can't
convince me that their work did not at least contribute
to a small but meaningful victory. Earlier this month, a
(14:12):
MAGA millionaire named Paul Martino poured untold money into the
Central Bucks School District school board race. They ran five
humanoid book banners and librarian prosecutors, and they lost all
five seats to Democrats, swept out roughly sixteen thousand total
(14:36):
votes to twelve thousand. So what happens next? The Bucks
County Beacon reports that the Pennsylvania Court of Common Please
has now received no fewer than thirteen different petitions claiming
Title twenty five of the State Elections Code Statute three
two sixty one was violated and the ballot boxes were
improperly opened, and thus the election has to be thrown out.
(15:00):
The thirteen different petitions are identical. The Trumpists are so
confident that they are tipping their hands and they are
running the stop the Steal playbook again in a county
that is exactly six hundred and twenty two square miles,
and whose largest community has fifty three thousand residents and
(15:21):
the second largest has ten thousand. And this is about
a school board. And if you see the QAnon shaman
walking around one of those communities, please alert the authorities.
So ultimately, how do we stop this? Oh? By the way,
CNBC reports that the mercers are reconsidering. The mercers are
(15:44):
the Maga Hedge fund millionaire family who apparently got nauseated
by Trump in twenty eighteen and have not given money
to him since, and sources close to them think they
may have changed their minds such as they are and
sworn new fealty to Trump and their family nonprofit foundation
(16:05):
that is the polite euphemism for a post citizens United
political slush fund. Their little Mercer and family nonprofit has
eighty eight million dollars just sitting in it, waiting to
be spent in politics. How do you defeat this, Well,
(16:26):
there is one way, and it starts by recognizing the
through line that connects Musk and Trump and Paxton and
the mercers and faint hearted media executives and Yakarino and
Bucks freaking County and our little preview of the future
these last two days. Some of them are doing it
(16:49):
for wackadoodle religious reasons. Some of them are doing it
to stop the pounding in their adult brains, like Musk
and Trump. Some of them are doing it for the
power trip. But all of them are at least also
doing it for one other reason. There's money in it
for them. Now we can't boycott all of them. The
(17:14):
United States of America cannot even drop Elon Musk as
a contractor. His communications devices he sells us are more
secure than the ones we make. We can't legislate our
way out of government by highest bidder. We cannot appeal
to people's knowledge of the nation's history of freedom, nor
their knowledge that it all could be at risk because
(17:34):
we stop teaching these things thirty years ago. Nope, we
are going to have to outbribe them. We have to
find the democratic mercers. We have to find the democratic billionaires,
and they have to flood the market and support not
just media matters, but create one hundred media matters. And
(17:55):
they have to literally underwrite liberal media the way conservative
billionaires keep fascist media from going bankrupt. And they have
to play the dirtier game, and they have to buy legislatures,
and they have to buy judges. And if the other
side is stretching democracy to destroy democracy, they and we
had to stretch democracy to save democracy. Hit them with
(18:18):
your wallets, boys, or this nightmare Trump and the Trumpists
are showing us is not the future, it's the present.
Also of interest here sixty years since the assassination of
President Kennedy. And not only is that day etched in
(18:41):
the memories of those of us who were alive then,
even those of us like me who were little kids
but this day in nineteen sixty three was ground zero
for the world we live in now, conspiracy theory America.
But mostly it was just the day so many of
us realized something was terribly terribly wrong because the grown
(19:05):
ups were crying. That's next. This is countdown. This is
countdown with Keith Overman. Post scripts to the news, some headline,
some updates, some snark, some predictions. Dateline New York City.
(19:31):
This is just a hunch based on the last couple
weeks and about fifty seven years of knowing who the
mayor of New York is. I go all the way
back to John Lindsay. I don't think the current mayor
is going to finish his term. The New York independent
news site The City reports there is now another new
(19:52):
business that got fast tracked by the mayor's office, and
it's part of the federal investigation into his fundraising. And
the problem here is the business is a sushi restaurant
next to Grand Central, and it got clear to opening
a record three months. And it's co owned by S. L. Green,
the developers who just happened to have been one of
(20:12):
Mayor Eric Adams's top campaign contributors. Bad enough, Yes, but
match it up with this. The mayor has launched a
legal defense fund and was asked about it by the
local New York TV news outlet, New York Won, which
then got him saying and swaying this on tape away,
(20:34):
did you see did you see? Do you see all
these people? You sell? These people? Do you sell? These people?
Love me? So people love me as man, So they
have the right to do they love they may there
you go. I don't know how does expect people who
love me they love the broad them doing. They have
a right to do whatever they want. That's what the
mountains about you, the right to do what they want. Yeah,
(21:01):
Mayor Adams sounds fine. No, yoh, problems at all. He's
just what's the right word sailing? Huh? Dateline, Trenton, New Jersey. No,
everything's also fine. With Senator Bob Menendez is legal defense.
You will recall that the senator was accused of, among
(21:24):
other things, accepting quote gifts un quote from people connected
to the government of Turkey in the form of gold bars. Now,
I've never actually been a criminal defendant, but I was
in a lawsuit once with a lot of money on
the table and the advice that my lawyers gave me
then was lay low. Don't draw attention to the case.
(21:46):
Don't draw attention to yourself. Just you know, when you
have the option, keep it small rather than big. Be circumspect.
The Daily Beast reports that Senator Menendez has hired a
new lawyer, Robert Luskin, to defend him in the gold
Bars case. That mister Luscin's nickname is This is not
(22:07):
a joke. Mister Luscin's nickname is gold Bars Luskin because
he once got paid with gold bars by a client. Senator,
there wasn't some lawyer from Turkey you could have hired instead,
(22:55):
Thank you, Nancy Faust still ahead of his uncountdown. Do
(23:20):
you remember the assassination of President Kennedy? I mean, do
you remember where you were when it happened? Not if
you ain't sixty meat, or more realistically, if you ain't
sixty four or sixty five. Well, I'm sixty four or
sixty five, and I sure remember it, and now I
also recognize it as ground zero of the nightmare we
(23:43):
live today, in which the more insane a conspiracy theory is,
the easier it is to sell it to the rubes
and the goobers. I mean, think about this. One of
the biggest conspiracy theories of twenty twenty one and twenty
twenty two, though it's calmed down a little since, was
that President Kennedy was not actually dead. The things I
(24:05):
promised not to tell first time for the daily roundup
of the miss Grants, morons and Dunning Kruger effect specimens
who constitute today's worst persons in the world. Worse coincidental
Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana. He went on Fox Business
News and he did a racism and a sexism, says
(24:27):
the Democrats have decided to dump Vice President Harris and
adds quote, when her IQ gets to seventy five, she
should sell. I will note that, even though he looks
like a twenty first century version of mister Heaney from
Green Acres, only after his face had melted, Senator Kennedy
went to Oxford. I will also note that when he
(24:49):
tried to say, when her IQ gets to seventy five,
she should sell, he was unable to successfully pronounce the
word should a mirror sir by a mirror worser, whoever
he is on Twitter, he or it is one bad dude.
(25:09):
Dwarf seven three two five six, five two seven. He's boasting.
He got reposted by Trump on Trump's social media site.
So I guess that means he's not a robod, He's
a mammal of some sort. To me, this is the
Trump cult mentality. In one meme, this was a response
on Twitter to Trump's website suing twenty media outlets for
(25:30):
bad coverage. Hey, why does that sound so familiar? Paging
Ken Paxton? And there is a meme with the picture
of the dejected Trump walking back in the darkness with
one of them stupid hats in his hand, with his
tie untied and strung around his neck. It's like forty
three feet long and he looks like a piece of crap.
I mean more than usual. And the tweeter writes above
(25:52):
this picture, this man will not give up ever. But
the meme reads, this man gave it all up and
one bad dude never noticed. This man will not give
up ever. This man gave it all up. The Trump
fan in a nutshell. But our winner the worst. I
often describe Nicki Haley as one of the dumbest people
(26:13):
I have ever encountered. I realize she might be the
last hope of those who still think Trump will somehow
be derailed by the GOP. I'm sorry to say. If
she's the last hope, there is no hope. She's in
hooksit in Hampshire. God help her, and she spies at
a little rally, a nine year old girl named Hannah
(26:35):
in the crowd wearing a Nicky Haley campaign hat, and
NICKI Haley looks at this and she can't leave well
enough alone. She just can't take the win. I love
your hand, thank you for your nine year old hat.
(27:05):
Has a better chance of derailing Trump than Nicky. Never
work with animals or children, Haley. Two days worse, Parson
annoy say to the number one story on the countdown,
(27:34):
and things I promised not to tell. And it is
now sixty years since the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
And there are a thousand consequences we could not have
foreseen that day that have all come true, and maybe
of most relevance right now, that horror was the starting
point of the modern American society obsessed with conspiracy theories.
(27:59):
We have always had conspiracy theories. Ask the Masons, or
Jewish people or circus performers, but the Bungling of the
Kennedy investigation, the privatizing of the film evidence, the failure
to ever address the obvious questions fostered a collective doubt
(28:20):
in this country. It seems like it doubled every year
from nineteen sixty three into the nineties, I guess. And
then as people who really remembered President Kennedy began to
die off, the conspiracy cloud did not die off. It lingered,
and it split up and fragmented, and it attached itself
(28:41):
to almost anything, almost everything that somebody did not want
to believe was true. Nine to eleven climate change elections,
and we know where it has gone since then. It
has overtaken this country and destroyed our collective ability to
have a nation in which we have one set of
(29:03):
just basic facts and on climate change. It will kill
us parts of the globe, parts of America will become uninhabitable,
and there will be politicians and influencers telling us no,
that hasn't happened, And most people will realize that climate
change is true only in the last year of their life,
(29:26):
maybe the last minute. In any event, the Kennedy assassination
has become so much more than as if anybody could
have foreseen this statement ever being uttered. More than just
a presidential assassination. It was, in many ways an assassination
of a culture. We really did used to have a
(29:48):
shared set of facts. And I speak on this as
one of the youngest people you know who has a
distinct memory of the day JFK was killed. Understand how
old this memory actually is. Telling it to you now
is the equivalent of somebody on that day on November
(30:11):
twenty second, nineteen sixty three telling me about his own
childhood memories of the election of nineteen oh four, or
somebody in say, nineteen twenty four, nineteen twenty five, going
on about the personal memories of the Civil War, or
more appropriately for this, their memories of the day Lincoln
(30:31):
was shot. On November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, I
was two months and five days shy of my fifth birthday.
I was in kindergarten, and we finished every Friday around noon,
and I was already home and in my room. And
the reason I can see it so distinctly is that
just weeks before, my folks had bought a new television
black and white of course, crystal clear picture, or so
(30:54):
we thought, and it was the first new one they
had bought in eight years, and they took the old television,
a gigantic thing that required its own rolling stem, and
had a speaker the size and the tan color of
a high five record player, and had the giant rabbit
ear antennas that you hear about in satires these days.
(31:14):
And they rolled that thing into my room and set
it up speaking of rabbits under my giant bugs bunny
wall clock, with the ears pointing to all the characters
in the cartoons. I was in my room watching cartoons,
luxuriating in my newfound television ownership. No other kid I
knew had their own TV. And my mother was out
(31:35):
in our tiny living room in our tiny house in
Hastings on Hudson, New York, when I heard her shout,
and not long after I heard the phone ring. It
was in the kitchen, the phone, and it had a
chord so long that it could stretch into the living room.
And it was quickly apparent that if my mother was
not crying, she seemed about to. I came out and
stood next to her, and she said, your father wants
(31:56):
you to go in the room and close the door
and watch the cartoons. He will be home soon. This
made no sense. I was not an idiot. I was
still aware of time. It was the middle of the afternoon,
and Dad would not be home on the train from
New York before six, at least he wasn't supposed to be.
(32:16):
But I went back into my room. I did not
fully close the door because I was something of a sneak,
and soon I heard my mother tell my father to
be careful and hurry back home. The next thing I
heard was her back in the kitchen dialing the phone.
And these were the days of the rotary phones, where
if you had to dial the number nine, it took
several seconds to move the rotary dial clockwise and even
(32:38):
longer for it to rebound to the starting point counterclockwise.
And each time you did this it made so much noise.
It sounded like somebody trying to start the electric lawnmower
or maybe a prop plane. Given enough quiet on the street,
you could hear from outside. Well, that noise gave me
cover to sneak back into the hallway about halfway between
(32:58):
my room and the living room, and I heard my
mother say, my god, Barbara, did you see Kennedy's been shot?
What's going to happen? Next, it was her sister in law,
my uncle Bill's wife, Barbara. Barbara and Bill lived in
Connecticut at that time. This was a long distance call.
I am not sure if they got off the phone
before my dad got home more than an hour later.
(33:20):
I am confident my mother told Aunt Barbara that she
heard Walter Cronkite say three men shot Kennedy, and she
would insist that for the rest of her life. Now,
I went back to my room and started changing the
channel another feet of strength. In nineteen sixty three, you
had to literally change the dial. I settled on Channel two,
(33:41):
and yes, at age four, I occasionally watched the news.
I certainly had an idea who the President was and
who John F. Kennedy was, And although it is lodged
in my memory that fifty nine years ago today, I
was not sure that they were one and the same person.
But what I could tell was that either Kennedy or
the President, or both of them, or they were the
same person had been shot in some place called Dallas.
(34:06):
I didn't know what the president did per se, but
I had figured out a lot earlier, mostly because of
the coverage of John Glenn and the other early astronauts
that anything on television that wasn't a cartoon or a
comedy or a western, or a ballgame or a thing
with doctors, or something designed to scare the crap out
of me, like the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits.
Anything but that was necessarily important, often very important. The
(34:32):
rest of that day is largely a blank, except for dinner.
I ate my parents did not. I have some memory
of them putting me to bed impossibly early for a
Friday night, with the excuse being that we were going
to see the Carls the next day in New Jersey.
The Carls were friends of my folks. I think my
mother knew her from a bank she had worked at.
(34:53):
They lived in Westfield, New Jersey, an hour away across
the George Washington Bridge and everything, and maybe every three
or four weeks or so, either we would go see
them or they would come see us, and our trip
had long since been played. The Carls had two boys,
one a couple of years older than me, one just
slightly younger. I can remember the trip only because one
of my joys at the age of four and five
(35:15):
was looking for all the different kinds of cars, and
on that Saturday I was sorely disappointed. There weren't any cars.
The roads were deserted. First, my folks didn't eat today,
they didn't talk. And now there was nobody on the
streets or the parkways or the bridge. Something was really wrong.
(35:37):
We got to the Carls faster than I could recall
ever having done so. Ordinarily, mister Carl loved to quiz
me about the cars I'd seen, But on that Saturday
in the twenty third, he and his wife simply said
a quick hello to me, and then their boys and
I were rushed into their room, and for all I know,
they locked us in. I last saw these two guys
around nineteen sixty nine. Their dad was in the petroleum industry,
(35:58):
and they had lived in Venezuela, and I think they
went back there, so forgive me, I don't remember their names.
But as soon as missus Carl slammed their door shut,
the older one said to me, all right, what's wrong
with the grownups? Why are they all crying? I remember
telling them that Kennedy had been shot, and I thought
Kennedy was the president, and the older one gulped and asked,
(36:19):
shot with a gun? We put on their ancient black
and white TV and went looking for something to watch,
and there was nothing on except men sitting at desks
looking ashen, even on the black and white TVs of
nineteen sixty three. But I'm confident we did not realize
that they were talking about Kennedy and the assassination. We
just knew they were not supposed to be there on
(36:41):
our TVs. Saturday morning belonged to kids. On a Saturday morning,
the only two of the seven New York television stations
would not ordinarily be wall to wall with cartoons until
eleven AM or noon or later. One was the educational station,
Channel thirteen. The other was Channel five, and they had
a kid's show with a live studio audience full of
(37:03):
kids and games and clowns and whatever. On the others,
we could rely on quick Draw McGraw and bugs and
the like. But on this Saturday morning, they were playing
what sounded like church music, and the only thing they
displayed was their channel number and the call letters at
the station. Maybe they ran out of cartoons, said the
younger of the Carl brothers. Even at age four, I
(37:26):
understood television better than I did. Assassinations. They don't run out,
I said, They just play the same ones over and
over again, haven't you noticed? It amazed me that he
hadn't noticed, And it was at this point that I
began to really worry about what was happening. Anytime one
of us left the brother's room to use the bathroom,
the adults would stop talking. They were stopping in mid word.
(37:49):
I Meanwhile, the three of us kids had played every
board game the brothers had, and the older of them
asked their parents to let us go outside and play,
and he came back shaken because they had said no,
they always want us out of the house. What's wrong?
On the way home to Hastings and I think we
had been there long enough that it was getting dark already,
my parents finally filled me in at some point later
(38:12):
before I went to college. I remember asking my mother
what she told me and when, and she said they
had waited until the second day because they believed there
was a chance Kennedy had been killed by the Russians
and that there would be a war. And remember we
had almost had a war, almost a nuclear war, thirteen
months earlier that I have no memory of. I guessed
(38:35):
that it was easier to tell me in the car
because they didn't have to hide their faces from me,
so I would not see if they were crying. My
mother did say she was amazed that I had figured
out what had happened, and that it had shocked all
the adults without really understanding what any of it meant.
She thought, by Saturday evening, it was pretty clear that
the Russians had not killed President Kennedy, and as bad
(38:55):
as it was, it was not going to get worse.
So they might as well tell me what I could understand,
and they decided it was safe enough to let me
go outside and play again. This, my mom was pretty confident,
meant that I was sitting there with them on Sunday
the twenty fourth, probably over lunch, when Lee Harvey Oswald
was himself assassinated on live television. I think she's right.
(39:15):
I recall them changing the channel away from CBS, which
they rarely did, for once because they had just started
to run some sort of report from Roger Mudd. My
folks could not abide Roger Mudd no offense, they just couldn't.
Only ABC and NBC showed the murder of Oswald live.
(39:35):
I'd love to recount my reaction or my folks. I
can't remember it. I also have no idea what happened
in school that following short week. It was Thanksgiving coming up,
and for all I know, they canceled the three days
worth of classes. I do remember that as the shock
of the assassination wore off, my father was angry about
something comparatively trivial. He had, for the first time in
(39:57):
his life as a native New Yorker, got an actual
reserved bleacher seats for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Thirty
four years He had waited for this, but now it
was obvious that there were only two choices. Either they
would cancel the parade outright, or they would make it
the briefest, grimmest parade in New York City history. They
(40:19):
chose the latter. My memory is that my dad took me,
but my mom stayed home. Our location was at Broadway
and around fiftieth Straight, and I asked my dad what
all the black stuff was on a couple of the buildings.
It was mourning crape. Some of the buildings were adorned
with black mourning crape, as if we were there for
Kennedy's funeral procession, not the ceremonial. First seasonal appearance of
(40:42):
Santa Claus. At one point, a group marched by with
a huge American flag wrapped in mourning crape, bigger than
the flags themselves. A year ago I found the box
of slides that my dad and inveterate photographer took of
that parade. It is amazing that the sense of shock
out of people pretending to be happy to be at
(41:04):
a parade is either retained by the images from that
November twenty eighth or it sparks my own emotional memories
of the weird, disturbing experience. There were the traditional Thanksgiving balloons.
By the time Donald Duck got to us, he was
losing air rapidly gotten punctured somehow. If you want a
metaphor for November nineteen sixty three, there were bands, there
(41:28):
was Santa and it was warm. It was sixty degrees.
Coats were open, hats were off. But more than anything else,
it was almost silent. You could hear kids throughout, the younger,
the louder, but you could hear them from the other
side of the parade. It was as if you went
to a ballgame and the public address system didn't work.
(41:49):
It's actually quite a relief for the first few minutes,
I am convinced I could hear the shoes of the
band members hit the pavement as they walked past me.
There is only one other thing from my childhood about
the Kennedy assassination that I remember carrying the kind of
shock like those first few days of observing all the
(42:10):
disoriented and as my friend in Jersey noted, crying adults
in nineteen seventy might have been nineteen seventy one, but
I'm pretty sure it was nineteen seventy. When I was
in the eighth grade, all of our classes were canceled
late one morning and we were gathered in the school
chapel for a special assembly. We had a lot of
(42:31):
assemblies there, but never as late as eleven am. Some
guy came in, and I have thought and asked and
researched and have figured out nothing about who he was.
But he had a copy of something almost none of us,
and by us, I mean Americans of nineteen seventy had
ever seen before. It had been on television local television
(42:53):
a couple of times, but it would not be shown
on national television in whole for another five years. The
speaker called it the Zepruder film and as much other
assorted film from that day as any JFK documentary I
saw before I was an adult. He showed that too,
(43:17):
And while I do not remember him espousing any of
the conspiracy theories that by then had become a constant
in our country, that might be because he showed us
the Zuppruder film the way Kevin Costner showed it in
the Oliver Stone film. JFK. We must have seen the
fatal shots twenty times, at every speed slower than real time.
(43:38):
I think we were all ordered back into our respective
history classes, where shocked students listened to even more shocked teachers,
and we asked the same questions the Carls and I
did on November twenty third, nineteen sixty three, what's wrong
with the grown ups? I've done all the damage I
(44:12):
can do here? Thank you for listening. Countdown has come
to you from the Vin Scully Studios at the Old
Women Broadcasting Empire World Headquarters in New York. Countdown musical
directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel arranged, produced, and
performed most of our music. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards.
Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums, produced by
(44:33):
tk O Brothers. Other music, including other Beethoven tunage, arranged
and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music is
courtesy of ESPN, Inc. It was written by Mitch Warren Davis.
We called the Old Woman 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
(44:54):
friend Howard Feinneman, and everything else was pretty much my fault.
So that's countdown for this the one thousand and fiftieth
day since dementia Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the
democratically elected government of the United States. Convict him now, well,
we still can. The next scheduled countdown is Tuesday. Bulletin
says the news warrants till then. I'm Keith Oulremman. Good morning,
(45:16):
good afternoon, good night, good luck, and Happy Thanksgiving. Countdown
with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
(45:39):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Rarely
do we get to see the future. But make no mistake,
(00:27):
ludacrous as it looks insane, as Elon Musk seems corrupt,
as the Texas Attorney General is this indict media matters.
Story is the future. It is practice. Musk, in fact,
is the stand in for the role ultimately to be
played by dementia Jay Trump, not merely politicizing, but fully
(00:52):
privatizing criminal prosecution in this country. This is what the
Republicans want. This is why they have embraced fascism. This
is why they have sold the fragments of souls they
have to Trump. This is why they spent millions to
buy Attorney General Paxton's acquittal when he was impeached by
his own party in Texas. This is the future, a
(01:16):
theocracy with theocratic courts, or a corporate state with corporate courts,
or whatever brand of authoritarianism they want, with any brand
of authoritarian courts they want. Happy Thanksgiving could be worse,
could be next year. We could all already be packing
to move if the borders are still open. I know
(01:41):
you regret that I was ever taught the word stochastic.
But here it is again Elon Musk, a large and
not very well adjusted child with some developmental problems that
have lately been exacerbated by something. Somebody suggested it was
Ozempic buys and almost non denominational social media site, lets
(02:01):
his inner fascist out, swings the site wildly to the right,
and then swings it past mere conservatism or repression into
outright religious and racial hatred and incitement, and he gets caught.
His business genius has been exposed as exploitative luck. He
(02:21):
has broken a successful business model. He has let his
hatreds and prejudices leak out. Just yesterday, somebody tweeted a
photo of Musk standing in front of an American flag
swinging a sword. He replied to it, there is a
large graveyard filled with my enemies. I do not wish
to add to it, but will if given no choice.
(02:44):
I can't imagine how Twitter lost half its value in
his year owning it with public relations like that, and
now he is caught caught endorsing anti semitism, platforming anti semitism,
mainstreaming anti semitism, and caught by investigative journalists getting major
corporations large sure than his to pay him to be
(03:08):
juxtaposed alongside the Nazis. The corporations read that investigation, the
corporations did their own investigations. The corporations bailed out, and
Musk must blame someone. Musk blamed the journalists Media Matters,
claimed they were guilty of fraud, even though while making
the claim, he in fact confessed that Twitter x did
(03:30):
place mainstream ads next to anti Semitic content. Then the
leader of the Trump Undead, Stephen Miller, replied, fraud is
both the civil and criminal violation. There are two dozen
plus conservative attorneys general and that here's the word again.
That was the stochastic call. It echoed, and within two
(03:54):
and a half hours, the conservative Attorney general of Missouri wrote,
my team is looking into this matter. Interestingly, his team
evidently noticed there was no crime, no fraud, nothing but
a whiny, blubbering man boy needing a scapegoat, because the
next day that attorney general and his team stop looking
into this matter, but the one from Texas. Ken Paxton,
(04:17):
now wholly owned by the forces that run the state's
lieutenant governor, must do whatever those forces want, and what
they want is anything that puts a finger on the
political scale, anything that favors the Republicans, even though their
demographic is dying out. And this man Paxton is backed
by oil billionaires named Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes, and
(04:38):
Tim Dunn is linked to Brad Parscale, and Brad Parscale
is back working on Trump's twenty twenty four campaign. It's
stochastic prosecution. Musk, new right wing hero and owner of
a useful platform for spreading the violist filth, most quickly
complaints Steven Miller, truly one of the worst human beings
(04:59):
on the planet, lights the bat signal. Ken Paxton, who
has to do stuff like this or the billionllionaires will
stop protecting him, promises to jail reporters for telling the truth.
It isn't Musk prosecuting Media Matters. It isn't Stephen Miller,
It's Paxton. If Paxton gets anywhere right now, the leading
(05:20):
evidence of a violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices
Act is Musk's allegation that because when Media Matters tested
the advertising algorithm, it followed only thirty accounts and managed
to generate fourteen times more ads per hour than an
average user would see If Paxton gets anywhere with that,
(05:40):
other attorneys general will follow, and even if all of
them get laughed out of court, Media Matters is now
spending millions to defend itself in how many different states?
The template is being sanded down and polished as we watch.
This is the future. This is practice for the bastards,
(06:04):
like January sixth was practice for the bastards, just like
the entirety of Trump's time in the White House was
practice for the bastards. Trump doesn't have to repeal the
First Amendment to put Kristen Welker in jail, or in
theory to put you in jail if you've ever tweeted
or written anything online that he doesn't like, or in
(06:25):
theory me in jail. Hell I could easily be first.
Trump doesn't have to get Congress to make a law
abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. He
just drops the prosecution down to a state and the
next thing you know, Texas or Florida or Missouri or
Mississippi becomes a veritable journalistic speed trap. Is the Washington
(06:48):
Post based in Mississippi? Now? Can you buy it there?
Hell I don't know where to buy it anymore? In
New York City. Can you read it online or it's
posts on Twitter while you are physically in Mississippi ballgame.
Trump may or may not understand any of this. He
is the definition of the old joke about how nobody
(07:09):
wants to hear about the labor pains, they just want
to see the baby. How many times though, has he
called the press the enemy of the people. He hands
Steven Miller an article in the New York Times or
something from the Gateway pundit shaming Jim Acosta or MSNBC
or worshyet, somebody who can help him calls up and says,
(07:29):
mister President, the Bucks County Beacon here in Pennsylvania just
incommoded me. And Trump says, tel Paxton, jail, costa jail,
the Bucks County Beacon. And Miller says yes, Master and
crawls back to his cave. And if Paxton won't prosecute,
maybe Bailey and Missouri will. And ninety nine percent of
the public won't even see Trump's grubby fingerprints on any
(07:52):
of it, or Miller's if he has fingerprints. And even
if it doesn't get that far, even if this thing
right now does not become a Trump dictatorship, and we
don't privatize and politicized prosecution, and state attorneys general don't
constantly refresh social media waiting for their opportunity to spring
(08:14):
into action for Trump like so many flying monkeys, waiting
for the wicked witch to point out which direction the
chilling effect is already there. I have said this again
and again. Every media corporation in this country has already
had this meeting. What do we do if Trump regains power?
(08:37):
Not what do we do to protect our ability to
cover the news, but what do we do to protect
our ability to make profits for our stockholders and salaries
for ourselves. We have our phony, blooney jobs to worry about, Gentlemen.
We never did find out what that internal NBC investigation
of the Meet the Press Trump interview found out about
(08:59):
a rumored deal to keep virtually all fact checking to
an obscure corner of the website. But even if it's
just all coincidence there, you think people aren't scared. And
even if somehow they aren't scared, you think they aren't
blanching at the thought of all the work involved in
fending off another four years. We're twelve of Trump. These
(09:22):
are people with mortgages and jobs in an industry already
being shrunk by market forces. The head of the news
division in the movie Network, played by William Holden, tells
the acting president of the network, you want me out
of here, You're gonna have to drag me out, kicking
and screaming, and the whole news division kicking and screaming
(09:43):
with me, and the acting president played by Robert Duval answers, calmly,
you think they're going to quit their jobs for you?
Not in this recession, buddy. It's like everybody asking why
Musk's stooge Linda Yakarino hasn't yet quit her job as
as Musk's stooge, or why her family hasn't staged an intervention. Well,
(10:06):
he's paying Linda Yakarino six million a year. Who is
the last media person to walk out on a job
paying that much or more? On principle? I mean, besides me,
I'll hang up and listen. And one more self referential thing.
The future reminds us of the turnover in political coverage newspapers, online, television, whatever.
(10:30):
It's always been about five years. And I don't just
mean the fact that the White House correspondents get out
as fast as they can. I mean that about seventy
five percent of the people in political journalism in this
country five years ago no longer are in political journalism.
I started on MSNBC on October first, nineteen ninety seven.
(10:53):
In March nineteen ninety eight, April, I can't remember, I
was the featured guest of the Washington Post at the
front table at the White House Correspondence dinner, and I
ran screaming back into sports. In December nineteen ninety eight,
and a year after that, I was in the gift
shop at a hotel in Saint Louis and the former
Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson walks in and sees me and
(11:17):
gives me a big hug and says, congratulations on escaping.
Wait wait here a minute. And then he leaves, goes
back into the lobby, and he returns to the gift shop,
and he's got his wife with him now, and he
says to her, you see this guy, honey, This is Keith.
This is the one I was telling you about. He
got out of politics after just one year. It's taken
me forty two years later. I went back into politics
(11:41):
at MSNBC and nobody, literally nobody who was at that
Washington Post table with me just four years earlier was
still at the Washington Post. And no, I don't think
it was me. Think of the TV people and even
most of the print people who were on Trump's campaign
in twenty sixteen, or who were White House correspondents, how
(12:04):
many of them still have that job. How many of
them will see getting that job in the future as
a great assignment and a great stepping stone to something
bigger and less consuming. If you can get prosecuted, prosecuted
by proxy, prosecuted for doing your job well, prosecuted by
(12:26):
Trump for telling the truth, even something as stupidly open
and shut as truth about Musk's platforming of anti Semitism,
why are you going to aspire to do that job?
If somehow I need to emphasize to you that we
(12:47):
cannot let Trump back into the White House, you are
probably listening to the wrong podcast, or you are taking
notes for Ken Paxton. But it is increasingly obvious to
me that they are so confident they will get there that,
as they used to say the football coaches, they have
already scripted all the plays for the entire first half,
(13:09):
because they are letting us see the future from Project
twenty twenty five and the consortium of right wing nut
jobs Trump will call upon to punish anybody they want
to punish, to Agenda forty seven, to make up crimes,
to prosecute everybody from Bill Barr to Barack Obama, to
(13:30):
Schedule f to purge the civil service of anybody not
personally loyal to Trump. And now this the privatized prosecution
double play. Musk to Miller to Paxton, and we got
another glimpse of the twenty twenty five that you might
have seen in the bad portions of Back to the
(13:50):
Future Part two, or It's a Wonderful Life. The reference
earlier to Trump wanting somebody to prosecute the Bucks County
Beacon was not gratuitous. It is the small investigative operation
in Pennsylvania doing great, end dangerous work, and you can't
convince me that their work did not at least contribute
to a small but meaningful victory. Earlier this month, a
(14:12):
MAGA millionaire named Paul Martino poured untold money into the
Central Bucks School District school board race. They ran five
humanoid book banners and librarian prosecutors, and they lost all
five seats to Democrats, swept out roughly sixteen thousand total
(14:36):
votes to twelve thousand. So what happens next? The Bucks
County Beacon reports that the Pennsylvania Court of Common Please
has now received no fewer than thirteen different petitions claiming
Title twenty five of the State Elections Code Statute three
two sixty one was violated and the ballot boxes were
improperly opened, and thus the election has to be thrown out.
(15:00):
The thirteen different petitions are identical. The Trumpists are so
confident that they are tipping their hands and they are
running the stop the Steal playbook again in a county
that is exactly six hundred and twenty two square miles,
and whose largest community has fifty three thousand residents and
(15:21):
the second largest has ten thousand. And this is about
a school board. And if you see the QAnon shaman
walking around one of those communities, please alert the authorities.
So ultimately, how do we stop this? Oh? By the way,
CNBC reports that the mercers are reconsidering. The mercers are
(15:44):
the Maga Hedge fund millionaire family who apparently got nauseated
by Trump in twenty eighteen and have not given money
to him since, and sources close to them think they
may have changed their minds such as they are and
sworn new fealty to Trump and their family nonprofit foundation
(16:05):
that is the polite euphemism for a post citizens United
political slush fund. Their little Mercer and family nonprofit has
eighty eight million dollars just sitting in it, waiting to
be spent in politics. How do you defeat this, Well,
(16:26):
there is one way, and it starts by recognizing the
through line that connects Musk and Trump and Paxton and
the mercers and faint hearted media executives and Yakarino and
Bucks freaking County and our little preview of the future
these last two days. Some of them are doing it
(16:49):
for wackadoodle religious reasons. Some of them are doing it
to stop the pounding in their adult brains, like Musk
and Trump. Some of them are doing it for the
power trip. But all of them are at least also
doing it for one other reason. There's money in it
for them. Now we can't boycott all of them. The
(17:14):
United States of America cannot even drop Elon Musk as
a contractor. His communications devices he sells us are more
secure than the ones we make. We can't legislate our
way out of government by highest bidder. We cannot appeal
to people's knowledge of the nation's history of freedom, nor
their knowledge that it all could be at risk because
(17:34):
we stop teaching these things thirty years ago. Nope, we
are going to have to outbribe them. We have to
find the democratic mercers. We have to find the democratic billionaires,
and they have to flood the market and support not
just media matters, but create one hundred media matters. And
(17:55):
they have to literally underwrite liberal media the way conservative
billionaires keep fascist media from going bankrupt. And they have
to play the dirtier game, and they have to buy legislatures,
and they have to buy judges. And if the other
side is stretching democracy to destroy democracy, they and we
had to stretch democracy to save democracy. Hit them with
(18:18):
your wallets, boys, or this nightmare Trump and the Trumpists
are showing us is not the future, it's the present.
Also of interest here sixty years since the assassination of
President Kennedy. And not only is that day etched in
(18:41):
the memories of those of us who were alive then,
even those of us like me who were little kids
but this day in nineteen sixty three was ground zero
for the world we live in now, conspiracy theory America.
But mostly it was just the day so many of
us realized something was terribly terribly wrong because the grown
(19:05):
ups were crying. That's next. This is countdown. This is
countdown with Keith Overman. Post scripts to the news, some headline,
some updates, some snark, some predictions. Dateline New York City.
(19:31):
This is just a hunch based on the last couple
weeks and about fifty seven years of knowing who the
mayor of New York is. I go all the way
back to John Lindsay. I don't think the current mayor
is going to finish his term. The New York independent
news site The City reports there is now another new
(19:52):
business that got fast tracked by the mayor's office, and
it's part of the federal investigation into his fundraising. And
the problem here is the business is a sushi restaurant
next to Grand Central, and it got clear to opening
a record three months. And it's co owned by S. L. Green,
the developers who just happened to have been one of
(20:12):
Mayor Eric Adams's top campaign contributors. Bad enough, Yes, but
match it up with this. The mayor has launched a
legal defense fund and was asked about it by the
local New York TV news outlet, New York Won, which
then got him saying and swaying this on tape away,
(20:34):
did you see did you see? Do you see all
these people? You sell? These people? Do you sell? These people?
Love me? So people love me as man, So they
have the right to do they love they may there
you go. I don't know how does expect people who
love me they love the broad them doing. They have
a right to do whatever they want. That's what the
mountains about you, the right to do what they want. Yeah,
(21:01):
Mayor Adams sounds fine. No, yoh, problems at all. He's
just what's the right word sailing? Huh? Dateline, Trenton, New Jersey. No,
everything's also fine. With Senator Bob Menendez is legal defense.
You will recall that the senator was accused of, among
(21:24):
other things, accepting quote gifts un quote from people connected
to the government of Turkey in the form of gold bars. Now,
I've never actually been a criminal defendant, but I was
in a lawsuit once with a lot of money on
the table and the advice that my lawyers gave me
then was lay low. Don't draw attention to the case.
(21:46):
Don't draw attention to yourself. Just you know, when you
have the option, keep it small rather than big. Be circumspect.
The Daily Beast reports that Senator Menendez has hired a
new lawyer, Robert Luskin, to defend him in the gold
Bars case. That mister Luscin's nickname is This is not
(22:07):
a joke. Mister Luscin's nickname is gold Bars Luskin because
he once got paid with gold bars by a client. Senator,
there wasn't some lawyer from Turkey you could have hired instead,
(22:55):
Thank you, Nancy Faust still ahead of his uncountdown. Do
(23:20):
you remember the assassination of President Kennedy? I mean, do
you remember where you were when it happened? Not if
you ain't sixty meat, or more realistically, if you ain't
sixty four or sixty five. Well, I'm sixty four or
sixty five, and I sure remember it, and now I
also recognize it as ground zero of the nightmare we
(23:43):
live today, in which the more insane a conspiracy theory is,
the easier it is to sell it to the rubes
and the goobers. I mean, think about this. One of
the biggest conspiracy theories of twenty twenty one and twenty
twenty two, though it's calmed down a little since, was
that President Kennedy was not actually dead. The things I
(24:05):
promised not to tell first time for the daily roundup
of the miss Grants, morons and Dunning Kruger effect specimens
who constitute today's worst persons in the world. Worse coincidental
Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana. He went on Fox Business
News and he did a racism and a sexism, says
(24:27):
the Democrats have decided to dump Vice President Harris and
adds quote, when her IQ gets to seventy five, she
should sell. I will note that, even though he looks
like a twenty first century version of mister Heaney from
Green Acres, only after his face had melted, Senator Kennedy
went to Oxford. I will also note that when he
(24:49):
tried to say, when her IQ gets to seventy five,
she should sell, he was unable to successfully pronounce the
word should a mirror sir by a mirror worser, whoever
he is on Twitter, he or it is one bad dude.
(25:09):
Dwarf seven three two five six, five two seven. He's boasting.
He got reposted by Trump on Trump's social media site.
So I guess that means he's not a robod, He's
a mammal of some sort. To me, this is the
Trump cult mentality. In one meme, this was a response
on Twitter to Trump's website suing twenty media outlets for
(25:30):
bad coverage. Hey, why does that sound so familiar? Paging
Ken Paxton? And there is a meme with the picture
of the dejected Trump walking back in the darkness with
one of them stupid hats in his hand, with his
tie untied and strung around his neck. It's like forty
three feet long and he looks like a piece of crap.
I mean more than usual. And the tweeter writes above
(25:52):
this picture, this man will not give up ever. But
the meme reads, this man gave it all up and
one bad dude never noticed. This man will not give
up ever. This man gave it all up. The Trump
fan in a nutshell. But our winner the worst. I
often describe Nicki Haley as one of the dumbest people
(26:13):
I have ever encountered. I realize she might be the
last hope of those who still think Trump will somehow
be derailed by the GOP. I'm sorry to say. If
she's the last hope, there is no hope. She's in
hooksit in Hampshire. God help her, and she spies at
a little rally, a nine year old girl named Hannah
(26:35):
in the crowd wearing a Nicky Haley campaign hat, and
NICKI Haley looks at this and she can't leave well
enough alone. She just can't take the win. I love
your hand, thank you for your nine year old hat.
(27:05):
Has a better chance of derailing Trump than Nicky. Never
work with animals or children, Haley. Two days worse, Parson
annoy say to the number one story on the countdown,
(27:34):
and things I promised not to tell. And it is
now sixty years since the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
And there are a thousand consequences we could not have
foreseen that day that have all come true, and maybe
of most relevance right now, that horror was the starting
point of the modern American society obsessed with conspiracy theories.
(27:59):
We have always had conspiracy theories. Ask the Masons, or
Jewish people or circus performers, but the Bungling of the
Kennedy investigation, the privatizing of the film evidence, the failure
to ever address the obvious questions fostered a collective doubt
(28:20):
in this country. It seems like it doubled every year
from nineteen sixty three into the nineties, I guess. And
then as people who really remembered President Kennedy began to
die off, the conspiracy cloud did not die off. It lingered,
and it split up and fragmented, and it attached itself
(28:41):
to almost anything, almost everything that somebody did not want
to believe was true. Nine to eleven climate change elections,
and we know where it has gone since then. It
has overtaken this country and destroyed our collective ability to
have a nation in which we have one set of
(29:03):
just basic facts and on climate change. It will kill
us parts of the globe, parts of America will become uninhabitable,
and there will be politicians and influencers telling us no,
that hasn't happened, And most people will realize that climate
change is true only in the last year of their life,
(29:26):
maybe the last minute. In any event, the Kennedy assassination
has become so much more than as if anybody could
have foreseen this statement ever being uttered. More than just
a presidential assassination. It was, in many ways an assassination
of a culture. We really did used to have a
(29:48):
shared set of facts. And I speak on this as
one of the youngest people you know who has a
distinct memory of the day JFK was killed. Understand how
old this memory actually is. Telling it to you now
is the equivalent of somebody on that day on November
(30:11):
twenty second, nineteen sixty three telling me about his own
childhood memories of the election of nineteen oh four, or
somebody in say, nineteen twenty four, nineteen twenty five, going
on about the personal memories of the Civil War, or
more appropriately for this, their memories of the day Lincoln
(30:31):
was shot. On November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, I
was two months and five days shy of my fifth birthday.
I was in kindergarten, and we finished every Friday around noon,
and I was already home and in my room. And
the reason I can see it so distinctly is that
just weeks before, my folks had bought a new television
black and white of course, crystal clear picture, or so
(30:54):
we thought, and it was the first new one they
had bought in eight years, and they took the old television,
a gigantic thing that required its own rolling stem, and
had a speaker the size and the tan color of
a high five record player, and had the giant rabbit
ear antennas that you hear about in satires these days.
(31:14):
And they rolled that thing into my room and set
it up speaking of rabbits under my giant bugs bunny
wall clock, with the ears pointing to all the characters
in the cartoons. I was in my room watching cartoons,
luxuriating in my newfound television ownership. No other kid I
knew had their own TV. And my mother was out
(31:35):
in our tiny living room in our tiny house in
Hastings on Hudson, New York, when I heard her shout,
and not long after I heard the phone ring. It
was in the kitchen, the phone, and it had a
chord so long that it could stretch into the living room.
And it was quickly apparent that if my mother was
not crying, she seemed about to. I came out and
stood next to her, and she said, your father wants
(31:56):
you to go in the room and close the door
and watch the cartoons. He will be home soon. This
made no sense. I was not an idiot. I was
still aware of time. It was the middle of the afternoon,
and Dad would not be home on the train from
New York before six, at least he wasn't supposed to be.
(32:16):
But I went back into my room. I did not
fully close the door because I was something of a sneak,
and soon I heard my mother tell my father to
be careful and hurry back home. The next thing I
heard was her back in the kitchen dialing the phone.
And these were the days of the rotary phones, where
if you had to dial the number nine, it took
several seconds to move the rotary dial clockwise and even
(32:38):
longer for it to rebound to the starting point counterclockwise.
And each time you did this it made so much noise.
It sounded like somebody trying to start the electric lawnmower
or maybe a prop plane. Given enough quiet on the street,
you could hear from outside. Well, that noise gave me
cover to sneak back into the hallway about halfway between
(32:58):
my room and the living room, and I heard my
mother say, my god, Barbara, did you see Kennedy's been shot?
What's going to happen? Next, it was her sister in law,
my uncle Bill's wife, Barbara. Barbara and Bill lived in
Connecticut at that time. This was a long distance call.
I am not sure if they got off the phone
before my dad got home more than an hour later.
(33:20):
I am confident my mother told Aunt Barbara that she
heard Walter Cronkite say three men shot Kennedy, and she
would insist that for the rest of her life. Now,
I went back to my room and started changing the
channel another feet of strength. In nineteen sixty three, you
had to literally change the dial. I settled on Channel two,
(33:41):
and yes, at age four, I occasionally watched the news.
I certainly had an idea who the President was and
who John F. Kennedy was, And although it is lodged
in my memory that fifty nine years ago today, I
was not sure that they were one and the same person.
But what I could tell was that either Kennedy or
the President, or both of them, or they were the
same person had been shot in some place called Dallas.
(34:06):
I didn't know what the president did per se, but
I had figured out a lot earlier, mostly because of
the coverage of John Glenn and the other early astronauts
that anything on television that wasn't a cartoon or a
comedy or a western, or a ballgame or a thing
with doctors, or something designed to scare the crap out
of me, like the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits.
Anything but that was necessarily important, often very important. The
(34:32):
rest of that day is largely a blank, except for dinner.
I ate my parents did not. I have some memory
of them putting me to bed impossibly early for a
Friday night, with the excuse being that we were going
to see the Carls the next day in New Jersey.
The Carls were friends of my folks. I think my
mother knew her from a bank she had worked at.
(34:53):
They lived in Westfield, New Jersey, an hour away across
the George Washington Bridge and everything, and maybe every three
or four weeks or so, either we would go see
them or they would come see us, and our trip
had long since been played. The Carls had two boys,
one a couple of years older than me, one just
slightly younger. I can remember the trip only because one
of my joys at the age of four and five
(35:15):
was looking for all the different kinds of cars, and
on that Saturday I was sorely disappointed. There weren't any cars.
The roads were deserted. First, my folks didn't eat today,
they didn't talk. And now there was nobody on the
streets or the parkways or the bridge. Something was really wrong.
(35:37):
We got to the Carls faster than I could recall
ever having done so. Ordinarily, mister Carl loved to quiz
me about the cars I'd seen, But on that Saturday
in the twenty third, he and his wife simply said
a quick hello to me, and then their boys and
I were rushed into their room, and for all I know,
they locked us in. I last saw these two guys
around nineteen sixty nine. Their dad was in the petroleum industry,
(35:58):
and they had lived in Venezuela, and I think they
went back there, so forgive me, I don't remember their names.
But as soon as missus Carl slammed their door shut,
the older one said to me, all right, what's wrong
with the grownups? Why are they all crying? I remember
telling them that Kennedy had been shot, and I thought
Kennedy was the president, and the older one gulped and asked,
(36:19):
shot with a gun? We put on their ancient black
and white TV and went looking for something to watch,
and there was nothing on except men sitting at desks
looking ashen, even on the black and white TVs of
nineteen sixty three. But I'm confident we did not realize
that they were talking about Kennedy and the assassination. We
just knew they were not supposed to be there on
(36:41):
our TVs. Saturday morning belonged to kids. On a Saturday morning,
the only two of the seven New York television stations
would not ordinarily be wall to wall with cartoons until
eleven AM or noon or later. One was the educational station,
Channel thirteen. The other was Channel five, and they had
a kid's show with a live studio audience full of
(37:03):
kids and games and clowns and whatever. On the others,
we could rely on quick Draw McGraw and bugs and
the like. But on this Saturday morning, they were playing
what sounded like church music, and the only thing they
displayed was their channel number and the call letters at
the station. Maybe they ran out of cartoons, said the
younger of the Carl brothers. Even at age four, I
(37:26):
understood television better than I did. Assassinations. They don't run out,
I said, They just play the same ones over and
over again, haven't you noticed? It amazed me that he
hadn't noticed, And it was at this point that I
began to really worry about what was happening. Anytime one
of us left the brother's room to use the bathroom,
the adults would stop talking. They were stopping in mid word.
(37:49):
I Meanwhile, the three of us kids had played every
board game the brothers had, and the older of them
asked their parents to let us go outside and play,
and he came back shaken because they had said no,
they always want us out of the house. What's wrong?
On the way home to Hastings and I think we
had been there long enough that it was getting dark already,
my parents finally filled me in at some point later
(38:12):
before I went to college. I remember asking my mother
what she told me and when, and she said they
had waited until the second day because they believed there
was a chance Kennedy had been killed by the Russians
and that there would be a war. And remember we
had almost had a war, almost a nuclear war, thirteen
months earlier that I have no memory of. I guessed
(38:35):
that it was easier to tell me in the car
because they didn't have to hide their faces from me,
so I would not see if they were crying. My
mother did say she was amazed that I had figured
out what had happened, and that it had shocked all
the adults without really understanding what any of it meant.
She thought, by Saturday evening, it was pretty clear that
the Russians had not killed President Kennedy, and as bad
(38:55):
as it was, it was not going to get worse.
So they might as well tell me what I could understand,
and they decided it was safe enough to let me
go outside and play again. This, my mom was pretty confident,
meant that I was sitting there with them on Sunday
the twenty fourth, probably over lunch, when Lee Harvey Oswald
was himself assassinated on live television. I think she's right.
(39:15):
I recall them changing the channel away from CBS, which
they rarely did, for once because they had just started
to run some sort of report from Roger Mudd. My
folks could not abide Roger Mudd no offense, they just couldn't.
Only ABC and NBC showed the murder of Oswald live.
(39:35):
I'd love to recount my reaction or my folks. I
can't remember it. I also have no idea what happened
in school that following short week. It was Thanksgiving coming up,
and for all I know, they canceled the three days
worth of classes. I do remember that as the shock
of the assassination wore off, my father was angry about
something comparatively trivial. He had, for the first time in
(39:57):
his life as a native New Yorker, got an actual
reserved bleacher seats for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Thirty
four years He had waited for this, but now it
was obvious that there were only two choices. Either they
would cancel the parade outright, or they would make it
the briefest, grimmest parade in New York City history. They
(40:19):
chose the latter. My memory is that my dad took me,
but my mom stayed home. Our location was at Broadway
and around fiftieth Straight, and I asked my dad what
all the black stuff was on a couple of the buildings.
It was mourning crape. Some of the buildings were adorned
with black mourning crape, as if we were there for
Kennedy's funeral procession, not the ceremonial. First seasonal appearance of
(40:42):
Santa Claus. At one point, a group marched by with
a huge American flag wrapped in mourning crape, bigger than
the flags themselves. A year ago I found the box
of slides that my dad and inveterate photographer took of
that parade. It is amazing that the sense of shock
out of people pretending to be happy to be at
(41:04):
a parade is either retained by the images from that
November twenty eighth or it sparks my own emotional memories
of the weird, disturbing experience. There were the traditional Thanksgiving balloons.
By the time Donald Duck got to us, he was
losing air rapidly gotten punctured somehow. If you want a
metaphor for November nineteen sixty three, there were bands, there
(41:28):
was Santa and it was warm. It was sixty degrees.
Coats were open, hats were off. But more than anything else,
it was almost silent. You could hear kids throughout, the younger,
the louder, but you could hear them from the other
side of the parade. It was as if you went
to a ballgame and the public address system didn't work.
(41:49):
It's actually quite a relief for the first few minutes,
I am convinced I could hear the shoes of the
band members hit the pavement as they walked past me.
There is only one other thing from my childhood about
the Kennedy assassination that I remember carrying the kind of
shock like those first few days of observing all the
(42:10):
disoriented and as my friend in Jersey noted, crying adults
in nineteen seventy might have been nineteen seventy one, but
I'm pretty sure it was nineteen seventy. When I was
in the eighth grade, all of our classes were canceled
late one morning and we were gathered in the school
chapel for a special assembly. We had a lot of
(42:31):
assemblies there, but never as late as eleven am. Some
guy came in, and I have thought and asked and
researched and have figured out nothing about who he was.
But he had a copy of something almost none of us,
and by us, I mean Americans of nineteen seventy had
ever seen before. It had been on television local television
(42:53):
a couple of times, but it would not be shown
on national television in whole for another five years. The
speaker called it the Zepruder film and as much other
assorted film from that day as any JFK documentary I
saw before I was an adult. He showed that too,
(43:17):
And while I do not remember him espousing any of
the conspiracy theories that by then had become a constant
in our country, that might be because he showed us
the Zuppruder film the way Kevin Costner showed it in
the Oliver Stone film. JFK. We must have seen the
fatal shots twenty times, at every speed slower than real time.
(43:38):
I think we were all ordered back into our respective
history classes, where shocked students listened to even more shocked teachers,
and we asked the same questions the Carls and I
did on November twenty third, nineteen sixty three, what's wrong
with the grown ups? I've done all the damage I
(44:12):
can do here? Thank you for listening. Countdown has come
to you from the Vin Scully Studios at the Old
Women Broadcasting Empire World Headquarters in New York. Countdown musical
directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel arranged, produced, and
performed most of our music. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards.
Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums, produced by
(44:33):
tk O Brothers. Other music, including other Beethoven tunage, arranged
and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music is
courtesy of ESPN, Inc. It was written by Mitch Warren Davis.
We called the Old Woman 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
(44:54):
friend Howard Feinneman, and everything else was pretty much my fault.
So that's countdown for this the one thousand and fiftieth
day since dementia Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the
democratically elected government of the United States. Convict him now, well,
we still can. The next scheduled countdown is Tuesday. Bulletin
says the news warrants till then. I'm Keith Oulremman. Good morning,
(45:16):
good afternoon, good night, good luck, and Happy Thanksgiving. Countdown
with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
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podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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