THE MEDIA JUST FIGURED IT OUT: TRUMP IS HITLER - 11.14.23

SERIES 2 EPISODE 73: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump IS our Hitler. I posited this as early as 2016 and stated it in this series in September, 2022. But some bridge was crossed over the weekend, something happened that was so bad that even The Washington Post sat up and took notice. And now, suddenly, the forces of Groupthink and Conventional Wisdom and The Run On The Bank and The Fear Of Coming In Last On The New Big Beat have all aligned - and for once, for good.

Trump is Hitler. Not Hitler 1940, not Hitler 1938. But Hitler 1933? The last moment at which he could have been stopped before he unleashed the cataclysms of European destruction and the holocaust.

That's where we are with Trump. And a bevy of his quotes FINALLY broke through: calling his enemies vermin and promising to root them out and echoing Hitler's "ein Volk" speech, while at the same time his evil psychotic henchmen let one too many detail leak about plans to vet every significant military leader so he could count on the army, and his plan to build concentration camps for migrants (and oh by the way anybody who would defend them) and his attempts to get Mo Brooks to demand a new election and his reinstallation as president LAST YEAR and some kind of an overthrow of the Biden regime - all came out simultaneously.

To say nothing of the video proffers that got Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell their Georgia plea deals, full of previously sourced stories that will now have witness testimony about seizing voting machines and "the boss is not going to leave" and suddenly a million light bulbs have gone off around the media: TRUMP REALLY MEANS TO TAKE POWER AND NEVER GIVE IT UP.

It just might, just might not be too late. But we have to advance it, and the way you and I can do so directly is to use the words. Suspend Godwin's law and the Survivors' Law (there is only one Hitler - it's Hitler) by making sure there really IS only one Hitler. We must call Trump Hitler. We must call them Nazis. We must get President Biden to call them Nazis.

We must make people realize that stopping Trump is essential to saving freedom and democracy in this nation. Because it is. And the first group - the media - just began to wake up to it.

B-BLOCK (37:09) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Fox News fired a guy for reporting the truth about January 6; A Texas Trumpist is trying to get elected to congress by reenacting the Martin Luther King assassination; And the Supreme Court just instituted a Code of Ethics that a) isn't a code, and doesn't have anything to do with ethics. (43:03) IT IS NOW TWO YEARS since the death of my hospice pup Mishu and there is actually news about him. Even in death, he may have made it so that other dogs afflicted with the terrible heart malformation that claimed him, may survive.

C-BLOCK (1:02:10) THE STORY OF MISHU, Part 2

 

 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump
is Hitler through endless blinding fogs of denial and self delusion.

(00:28):
Those of us who have refused to see have made
sure that they and others could not see through years
of rationalizations that the worst cannot happen here, even as
every lesser step on the path to the worst has
already happened here through a million both sides, Its dismissals
that America is different, that there are checks, that there

(00:51):
are balances, that there are guide rails through the most
fundamental of desires. If we believe it cannot be, then
it will not be. Through all of that, most of
us have refused to believe it. Trump is Hitler, not

(01:14):
nineteen forty Hitler, not nineteen thirty eight Hitler, but nineteen
thirty three Hitler, the one who, had he been stopped,
would not have destroyed Europe and committed the Holocaust. Our
last chance to stop Hitler. Hitler. That's who Trump is

(01:34):
right now, and that's who American journalism has to some
degree just discovered. Hey, Trump, he's Hitler. Now, Finally, with
the events of the last five days, finally, perhaps too late,
perhaps still too little. Something has broken. Some line that

(01:59):
was actually crossed a year ago, or ten years ago
or forty years ago when I met him, is being
treated today as if that line had just been broken
last week. The line is fictional. It is internal to
the media. It's being a rased not because it's time,
but because some guy in another newspaper wrote something, so

(02:23):
we have to as well. It's being a race because
the guy on the other station said something. Did you
see the graphic on CNN? Conventional wisdom, Times, groupthink, Times,
a run on the bank, only for good for once. Finally,

(02:45):
some in position to sound the alarm have quote. Trump
calls political enemies Vermin, echoing dictators, Hitler, Comma Mussolini. The
headline in the Washington Post quote Trump compares political foes
to Vermin on Veteran's Day, echoing Nazi propaganda. The headline

(03:09):
in Forbes magazine quote, it's official with Vermin. Trump is
now using straight up Nazi talk. The headline in The
New Republic Trump is Hitler. Quote. Those who try to
make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes, and their entire

(03:31):
existence will be crushed. When Trump returns to the White
House unquote, that was the spokesman Stephen Chung. Later yesterday
Stephen Chung realized, or somebody smarter than Stephen Chung realized
what he said. And Chung then insisted he had intended
to say, and their sad, miserable existence will be crushed

(03:55):
when Trump returns to the White House, and that Chung
or somebody thought the horrifying part of his threat was
the word entire rather than in the phrase existence will
be crushed, tells you all you really need to know
that Trump and Stephen Chung and Stephen Miller and all
the others in their gang know exactly what they are

(04:15):
saying and exactly what it means, and exactly who they
plan to kill. Moments after Chung's correction, Trump raised the
stakes yet again, sampling from another dictatorship quote Jack Smith,
Andrew Weissman, Lisa Monaco, the team of losers and misfits

(04:36):
from crewe and all the rest of the radical left
zelots and thugs who have been working illegally for years
to take me down will end up in a mental
institution by the time my next term as president is
successfully completed. Unquote. Forced psychiatric institutionalization was less the Nazis

(04:58):
than it was the Soviets. He's branching out. I guess
I'm on that list. You see it inside. For a time,
Trump seemed to understand that to keep spaces between his
overt quotations of, and imitations of, and emulations of Hitler

(05:20):
was his way to slip them past those who were
looking for excuses to not believe and looking for excuses
to not report, or perhaps with his deteriorating mind, those
spaces were inadvertent and simply accidentally protected him. But now
something has happened, deliberate or accidental within him. The Hitler phrases,

(05:45):
the Nazi obsessions with blood and purity and poisoning and vermin.
They are beginning to be the only things that come
into his mind anymore. His rage is growing, whatever is
physically wrong with him, feeding his fury and his insanity
that is growing two like a cancer. September twentieth, Dubuque,

(06:09):
Iowa on immigrants, it's the blood of our country. What
they're doing is destroying our country. September twenty fourth, an
interview with something called the National Pulse.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now.
It is a very sad thing for our country. It's
poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and
people are coming in with disease.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
That's Hitler talking. That's what Hitler said last Thursday, November ninth,
at one o three in the morning, we are one movement,
one people, one family, and one glorious nation. And last Saturday,
November eleventh, Veterans Day, at one twenty five in the afternoon,
he wrote, in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day,

(06:59):
we pledge to you that we will root out the communists,
Marxist fascists, and radical left thugs that live like vermin
within the confines of our country. The threat from outside
forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the
threat from within.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
That's Hitler today, especially in honor of our great veterans,
on Veterans'.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
Day, we pledge to you that we will root out
the communists, Marxist fascist and the radical left thugs that
live like vermin within the confines of our country.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
The threat from.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
Outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Than the threat from within.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Our threat is from within.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
Trump isn't just playing at being Hitler. He is enjoying
playing at being Hitler. Trump talks about the communist vermin
and how he would root them out. Hitler talked about
the communist vermin and how he would root them out.
Trump talks about the threat from within. Hitler was more explicit,

(08:11):
but not much the enemy from within. Trump advocates for
conformity and suppression of descent. One people, one family, one
glorious nation. For Hitler, it was more lyrical. One people,
one realm, one leader. Trump always sounds like Reagi's Philbin
reading Hitler, Trump has now moved to the sanguine imagery

(08:34):
migrants poisoning the blood of our country. Hitler began with
his nonsense of pure Aryan blood, and he ended by
killing those who he could get who did not have
pure Aryan blood. Trump's puppeteer, Stephen Miller, has revealed plans
for quote vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,

(08:58):
built by the military and operated by homeland Security. There's
a suggestive word homeland enabling quote Trump to unleash the
vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular
migration crackdown. Hitler's view was identical his terminology was simpler.

(09:19):
He just called them concentration camps. Stephen Miller's rapture at
this underscores that we are not merely witnessing Trump using
the latest in a decade's long list of bad advertising
slogans for products that he will never deliver anyway. He
means this, they mean this, and they do not mean

(09:43):
it just rhetorically. Any activists, Miller said, who doubt Trump's
resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error. The
immigration legal activists won't know what's happening. Miller has just
told you that Trump is hitler. Each day brings two

(10:06):
or three more stories like this, underscoring that the Trump
we saw in office was nothing, nothing compared to what
he has planned for twenty twenty five. Often these stories
are about the past, like with the release of the
Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell Proffer videos, which I'll get
to in a moment, But often, like the Miller's story,
they are about Trump measuring the windows for the proverbial

(10:30):
new drapes, the windows at the vast holding facilities or
the Force psychiatric centers. Hundreds of people are spending tens
of millions of dollars they write in Axios, they being
the co founders of Axios, the Trump leaks are going
to only the most receptive. Hundreds of people are spending

(10:51):
tens of millions of dollars to install a pre vetted
pro Trump army of up to fifty four thousand loyalists
across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the
previous forty six presidents. That's got our are me and
restraints in it. Well, this is Agenda forty seven plus

(11:12):
Project twenty twenty five to make sure that there are
no mere Republicans in the White House. That there would
be only those who had figuratively perhaps literally sworn an
oath to obey Trump. AI is being used to screen them,
powered by Oracle no less social media accounts are being scoured.

(11:37):
How serious they all are is measured in what is
a sad reference, even for those of us who hate
the man quote. The people leading these efforts aren't figures
like Rudy Giuliani. They're experienced people, many with very unconventional
and elastic views of presidential power and traditional rule of law. Unquote.

(11:58):
You know Nazis. Eighty different partners, eighty different organizations Axios
reports make up Project twenty twenty five. One of them
belongs to Charlie Kirk, the fascist and lunatic who in
July said President Biden should be quote put in prison
and were given the death penalty for crimes against America unquote.

(12:20):
Another one is run by Russ Vote, who just last
week mapped out how to turn the Department of Justice
into a real life or well in Department of revenge.
You don't need a statutory change at all. You need
a mindset change. You need an Attorney general in a
White House Counsel's office that don't view themselves as trying
to protect the department from the president. Russ Vote is

(12:44):
now referenced by Axios as being behind a plan to
quote rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions to
make sure the senior military officials line up with Trump's philosophies.
They're bringing an army with them. Jeff Clark or somebody
or a lot of somebody's right now are planning out

(13:06):
the prosecutions of William Barr and John Kelly and General
Milly and Jack Smith. And no, I'm sorry, no, no,
I got it wrong. Jack Smith is going to be
forced into a psychiatric institution. Sorry, he's not going to
be prosecuted. But they are all, quoting the Washington Post,
drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on Trump's
first day in office, to allow him to deploy the

(13:27):
military against civil demonstrations, in other words, to allow Trump
to kill civilians with the army. And of course Trump
and Steven Miller waiting for the bell to ring, quoting
the New York Times, because Trump plans to scour the
country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions

(13:49):
per year. Scour again, and as I first pointed out
in twenty sixteen, we really do need to remember two
condicils to that number. One. Surprisingly enough, all the immigrants
are not just going to say okay, you got me
and leave for the nearest border. Many of them will
try to get away and then Trump will shoot them.

(14:10):
And it's not as if non immigrants would not try
to stop this. And of course when they did that,
they would go to those vast holding facilities that would
function as staging centers along with the immigrants, just like
in Nazi Germany, the vast centers that are just camps
camps with concentration concentration camps It must also be caveated

(14:34):
that Trump tried to do this in twenty seventeen and failed,
but as with January sixth, we must see it from
his diseased point of view. These were not failures. They
were practice for every once in a while there is
a second story revealing something else that he tried last time,
that he will try harder at next time, but it

(14:57):
gets buried behind something bigger, like Agenda forty seven or
the Army of fifty four thousand Trump Nazis. We come
back always to the idea that as Trump believed the
Department of Justice was his, he believed the military was
also his. Jonathan Carl of ABC has written a book
about all this, and there's a lot in it about

(15:17):
the well covered meeting between Jack Smith and Trump's lawyers
on July twenty seventh that we knew nothing about, and
that got most of the headlines yesterday because it turned
out that for an hour, per John Carl, Trump's ambulance
chasing lawyers talked and talked and talked to Jack Smith
about why he should not indict Trump for January sixth,

(15:38):
and the Special Council literally said nothing and just stared
at them with that stare. The only thing he said
was would you like a glass of water? Cool story,
John Carl. But Politico got the wrong John Carl excerpt,
and thus they buried the lead, or more correctly than
many leads, because John Carl had just a few other

(16:01):
nuggets in that book, like Trump calling Moe Brooks last
year the former congressman last year twenty twenty two, while
Mobrooks was running for Senate, Trump had already endorsed him. Mobrooks,
who might have been from Congress, his wildest fascist ally
in the coup attempt, spoke right before Trump on January sixth.

(16:21):
But when Trump called, he needed from Mobrooks a favor,
three favors. Actually, he wanted Mobrooks to publicly call for
Joe Biden to be removed from the White House. This
is in twenty twenty two. He wanted Mobrooks to publicly
then call for an immediate rerunning of the election in

(16:42):
twenty twenty two, and he wanted Mobrooks in twenty twenty
two to publicly insist that Trump be reinstated. In short,
Trump wanted Brooks to make demands that could have easily
actually touched off a military overthrow of the government of
the United States of America or a full scale civil war,

(17:02):
or both. Maybe the real headline here is mow Brooks declined,
whereupon Trump withdrew his endorsement and Mobrooks lost the primary
and his political career ended. And speaking of that, Carl
also writes that the reason the same Republicans who attacked

(17:23):
Trump after the coup did a one point eighty within
weeks and began making excuses for him was that Trump
called the RNC chairwoman, Ronald McDaniel, on the morning of
his last day in office on January twentieth, twenty twenty one,
and he told her that if they did not get
in line behind him, he would be leaving the Republican

(17:44):
Party to form his own party. And God, how I
wish he had done that. What that means is, since
January twentieth, twenty twenty one, Trump has been holding the
Republican Party hostage, which also means they have each and
collectively missed the opportunity to bury Trump alive politically by refusing.

(18:07):
As recently as two thousand and eight, the presidential campaign
slogan of the Republican Party was Country First. May they
all burn in hell? John Carl has also written of
what the House January sixth Committee found about Trump's final days,
but did not put them entirely before the public. The

(18:29):
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and its chief of Staff James McConville,
had announced that the military would play no role in
determining the outcome of the twenty twenty election nor in
the transition of power, and this infuriated Trump. Trump was
busy at that time huddling with Jeff Clark and such
experts as Sidney the Plea Deal Powell and the guy

(18:51):
from overstock dot Com, and Mike Lindell about having the
military seize the voting machines and declaring martial law as
one does. Trump quoting John Carl, sent top aid Johnny
mcintee to warn Pentagon leaders that Trump was irate. Mcintee
relayed Trump's concerns to Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, and

(19:13):
took some notes on the conversation to pass back to
the West Wing. And there is a photo of the
note torn in pieces in one of the five hourly
Trumpian pre pubescent rages, and taped back together by aids
more loyal to your National Archives than to Trump. Quote

(19:34):
this is what the note said. Quote Chris Miller spoke
to both of them and anticipates no more statements coming out.
If another happens, he will fire them unquote. There it
is the twenty twenty Trumpian warm up that we just
talked about for twenty twenty five, when all the generals
who are disloyal to Trump will be fired at all

(19:56):
the generals who are loyal to Trump will be firing
at us, although he might yet be stopped by scared weasels.
Scared weasels rushing to save their own sorry asses like
Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis. Turns out those proffers. This

(20:17):
is what I know. This is what I'll testify to.
This is who you'll be able to convict. The proffers
in the plea deals that Ellis and Powell made with
Fannie Willis and Georgia. They're on video and really good
video too, and somebody leaked highlights to ABC News. There
are sixteen suspects. There would have been a seventeenth, but

(20:39):
I'm doubting Trump did this as to who leaked them,
because the other defendants in the case and their lawyers
would each get copies of the proffers and the proffer videos.
Somebody among them wants to make sure Trump goes down
and goes down hod from one of the excerpts from

(21:00):
ABC News. They asked jen Ellis about the twenty twenty
White House Christmas Party and the SKEEVIEE. Trump social media
guide Dan Scubino.

Speaker 4 (21:08):
The conversation was.

Speaker 5 (21:09):
Are in December nineteenth of twenty twenty at the White
House Christmas Party, and I emphasized him I thought that
the claims and the ability to challenge the election results
was essentially over because he said to me, in a
kind of excited to him, well, we don't care and
we're not going to leave. And I said, what do

(21:29):
you mean? And he said, well, the Boss meaning President
Trump and everyone understood the Boss, that's what we all
called him. He said, the Boss is not going to
leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay
in power. And I said, Tim, well it doesn't quite
work that way, you realize, and he said, we don't care.

Speaker 1 (21:47):
The Boss is not going to leave. Ah, the Boss
is not going to leave, then go in with guns
and get him AnyWho kind of suggests he won't leave
next time. Huh. I don't know if legally the Biden

(22:08):
campaign can actually use that video in a campaign commercial,
but I'm damned sure Democratic allies can bone appetite boys.
But wait, there's more. Not only did Sidney Powell throw
Gjuliani under the bus, but she confirmed what has only
been reported previously. Remember this will be sworn witness testimony now,

(22:31):
not somebody like John Carl reporting it, or even something
like the January sixth Committee reporting it. This is sworn
witness testimony by the person most directly affected that Trump
was ready to name her, Sidney crazy ass Powell, who
admits on the tape she knows nothing of election law.

(22:52):
Name her special counsel in charge of investigating the election,
and her orders were to seize the voting machines. And
she was there when Trump was told you lost.

Speaker 6 (23:05):
What was President Trump's sense of what you would do
as special counsel?

Speaker 4 (23:13):
I guess he assumed, And I would have thought that
I would have looked at putting into effect a provision
of one three eight four eight that would have allowed
the machines to be secured in four or five states.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
How did you choose which states that you would pard?

Speaker 4 (23:33):
How would I have chosen that by the ones where
there were the most statistical anomalies miss power.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
Were you ever around when someone, anyone told Donald Trump
that he had lost the election?

Speaker 4 (23:49):
Oh yeah, who? Pat Sibaloni, Eric Kirshman, Derek Lyons all
thought he had lost?

Speaker 1 (23:57):
Was that in the seventy eighteenth comuty.

Speaker 4 (23:58):
Yes.

Speaker 6 (23:59):
What was President Trump's reaction when this cadre of advisors
would say you lost?

Speaker 4 (24:08):
It was like, well, they would say that, and then
they'd walk out, and He'd go, See, this is what
I deal with all the time.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
These are not smoking guns, but they are useful tools.
Because even with the absolute terror of the last week,
as Trump morphed fully into Hitler, our cliched toolbox is
suddenly overflowing, and even reporters are beginning to listen, and
more importantly, to worry that they are about to be scooped.

(24:39):
Because Washington's hottest new beat is Trump is Hitler. Well,
what to do about it? As James Earl Jones says
in Field of Dreams, reaching for a tire iron after
Kevin Costner has tried to kidnap him with a non
existent gun, there are rules here, Oh no, there are
no rules here. Unfortunately, we are still sticking to the rules.

(25:05):
The most efficient next step would be for Homeland Security
to declare the Federalist Society a terrorist organization and arrest
all of its leaders. That would turn Agenda forty seven
into Agenda make a plea deal. But we are not them,
so we will not do that. Unfortunately, I will suggest that,

(25:29):
however slowly, they work. Words do work. We've just seen
that in the last few days. They are not the solution,
but they open doors to the solution, and they can
create a tidal wave. It was last September nineteenth, not
twenty twenty three, but twenty twenty two, when Trump was
telling Moe Brooks to demand an immediate new election. It

(25:53):
was September nineteenth, twenty twenty two, on this podcast that
I began by saying, we must face the reality that
Trump is America's Hitler. We must use the real words.
There are no more dog whistles as of now, as
of this weekend, as of this morning, they have begun
to salute him as others saluted Hitler. They've begun to
play the music and chant the slogans of Q and on.
They have begun to weave in the sing song melodies

(26:15):
of the televangelists and the Christo fascists. They have stopped pretending,
so too must we stop pretending. America's Hitler is here.
Took a while four one hundred and twenty nine days
to be precise, but now even the Washington Post has
begun to sit up and take notice. Maybe the New

(26:37):
York Times, which first covered Trump's complete morphing into Hitler
in New Hampshire with the headline Trump takes Veterans Day
speech in a very different direction and then changed it
to the more accurate about three percent more accurate. In
Veterans Day speech, Trump promises to quote root out the left.

(26:58):
Maybe the New York Times may be stirring out of
its coma. But the thing is all the stuff the
Times dismissed over the weekend it dismissed fourteen months ago.
The evocations of hitlarian cadence are nothing new. This right now,

(27:18):
this is literally from September seventeenth, twenty twenty two. Does
this sound familiar to you?

Speaker 3 (27:27):
We are one movement, one people, one family, and one
glorious American nation.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
So he said that again Saturday, and some folks new
to you know hearing murderers threatened to murder you, they said,
Did you hear what he said? All right, we can
criticize them later. Right now, just say welcome aboard, and
let's all slowly break it to them. Just how late

(27:52):
it really is, just how long they have let it go,
Just how starkly it is midnight in America. The White
House put out a statement yesterday about Trump and vermin
and rooting out. The White House said something, It's not
a bad statement, but it has been stuffed through the

(28:14):
proverbial deflavorizing machine. Trump's language quote would be unrecognizable to
our founders, but horrifyingly recognizable to American veterans who put
on their country's uniform in the nineteen forties. The quote
isn't bad, although it will require a lot of people
to think, wait, what happened in nineteen forties big band music?

(28:38):
He's talking about Glenn Miller, Pearl Harbor, Nazis, oh Nazis.
Also the quote was from spokesperson Andrew Bates. The speaker
next time needs to be the President of the United States.
Joe Biden needs to call Trump hitler, or at least

(28:59):
call him a Nazi. Mister Bates should not be opaque
about this as he was in that quote. Mister Biden
can be the President can say Trump has I don't
know every right to be a Nazi. There's not much
you and I can do to stop him from being
a Nazi. If he wants to be a Nazi, if

(29:20):
his supporters want to be Nazis, that's their choice. All
we can do, President Biden can say is do the
people's business and vote blue, you know, vote for the
side that's fighting Nazis. Something like that workshopping. You have
my number, mister President. As to the rest of us,
I really think the time has arrived when perhaps we

(29:42):
should use these terms openly. Hell. Hillary Clinton made the
comp last week on the View, making the comparison without
that nagging suspicion that we are violating Godwin's law, that
whoever invokes Hitler and the Nazis first loses the argument,
and that nagging suspicion that we are more importantly violating

(30:03):
the survivor's law. There is only one Hitler, and that
was Hitler. But the point of that is to make
sure that that statement remains valid, that there was only

(30:23):
one Hitler, because there is one warming up in our Bullpen.
Once the comparison between Trump and Hitler could be misinterpreted
as hyperbole and alarmism and political science fiction. It was
Godwin's Law wearing orange makeup. And while some of us
who actually knew Trump said, as those of us who

(30:47):
knew that in nineteen ninety his first wife and the
guy who gave it to him confirmed Trump kept a
book of Hitler's speeches in a nightstand in his bedroom.
We knew that in him there were all the elements
of mass murder and dictatorship. So many others thought those
guard rails that have saved us since Aaron Frickin' Burr
made it so that no man, no matter how insane,

(31:10):
no matter how power mad, no matter how diseased, no
matter how devoid of the slightest concern or understanding of
anyone but himself, anything but himself, that no man could
ever erase democracy in America. We who saw horror hoped

(31:31):
those who saw aberration that they were right and we
were wrong. But we were not wrong. We must use
the real words. We have to face the reality that
Trump is America's Hitler. Our Hitler is here. Now call
him Hitler, Call them Nazis, if you squirm with unease,

(31:55):
I get it. I did once I squirmed with unease.
I knew Trump. He wrote me a fan letter. I
can't believe I shook this guy's frickin hand. If it's easier,

(32:16):
call him baby hitler. We have to use the word.
Make it easier for President Biden to use the word too,
because we are there. He is our hitler. We have
to stop him because he's got all he needs in

(32:38):
place ready to go, except for two things, re election
and the uniforms. So we leave our discussion of our
hitler for a moment because also of interest here, the
Supreme Court just established a code of ethics, only it's

(33:01):
not really a code, and there's nobody but the Justice
reviewing the Justice's conduct. And there's basically no way to
break the code anyway, because the ethics code is almost
completely devoid of ethics. I'll use the James Earl Jones
quote once again. There are rules here. Oh no, there
are no rules here. That's next. This is countdown.

Speaker 4 (33:24):
This is countdown.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
With Keith Olberman still ahead of us on countdown, there

(33:51):
is not going to be a rush to buy the
twenty twenty four calendars from American Maltese Association Rescue. But
maybe there should be two years now since he's gone,
and there are actually new developments in the story of
my late hospice pup Meshu and how in death he
may have helped other dogs to live. And he is

(34:15):
on the cover of the twenty twenty four calendar first
time for the daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons,
and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons
in the world Worst. Fox News old familiar favorite Jason
Donner was a Capitol Hill reporter and producer there for

(34:35):
twelve years. First, after the twenty twenty election, Donner fact
checked the Rudy Giuliani Four Seasons landscaping press conference embarrassment
on Twitter. Then on January sixth, twenty twenty one, Donner
happened to be in the Capitol at his job as
hell broke loose, and by a talk back to the
control room, he listened in astonishment as Fox anchors and

(34:58):
guests explained that the protests were peaceful. Man wished to
understandable that they were disappointed, and you know, the bear
spray was just in case there was suddenly an influx
of bears, He said, he told the execs quote, I'm
your Capitol Hill producer inside the Capitol, where tear gas
is going off on the second floor, Rioters are storming

(35:20):
the building, reports of shots fired outside the house chamber.
I don't want to hear any of this effing spit
on our air ever again, because you're going to get
us all killed. Later in the year, he confined about
much of the Tucker Carlson fantasy stories about January sixth
shock of shocks, Donner says, last year Fox News fired him. Well,

(35:44):
of course they fired Tucker Carlson too. But Donner is suing,
claiming he was fired because he attempted to report the
truth like his contract said he was supposed to, and
his rights were violated. As if to provide fresh evidence,
the same day Donner sues, a Fox commentator brought up
our hitler referring to his opponents as vermin and John

(36:06):
Roberts supposedly an anchor there but ever increasingly just as
shrill and crazy as the rest of them, replied, as
if reading from the official both sides handbook, John Roberts said,
quote Hillary Clinton called her opponents deplorable. At one point,
so there's language on both sides. Deplorable vermin to be

(36:30):
rooted out.

Speaker 4 (36:31):
Deplorable, Well, it's deplorable.

Speaker 1 (36:35):
John Roberts is an idiot. It goes with the name
worser Brandon Herrera. He's one of those guys who thinks
your standard Republican congressman is too liberal. Brandon Herrera is
primary ing Tony Gonzalez from the Texas twenty third and
he decided the best way to do this was to
recreate the assassination of Martin Luther King on video. He's

(36:59):
a trumpist. He posted a selfie with our hitler and
in the video he does recreate the assassination to see
if he can make the same wounds via the same
shot angles. And when he was done with that, he
walks up to the lifel like Martin Luther King dummy
and shoots it in the head several times and laughs.
Herrera is also an idiot. During his isis level cringeworthy video,

(37:22):
Herrara explained that Martin Luther King was the reason kids
get out of school in February. The King Holiday is
the third Monday in January. On the other hand, if
you are sexually aroused by guns like this guy Herrera
clearly is I guess a month off is actually surprisingly
close to reality. But our winners the worst the Supreme

(37:47):
Court of the United States of America, John Roberts, the
other John Roberts, not the Fox guy, although they have
equal sway over the Court justices, don't they none John Roberts,
Chief Justice Harlan Crow, owner and operator. After two years
of unres obmitting scandals involving these conservative nut jobs on

(38:07):
the Court whose main concern in life is keeping men
from wearing dresses while they themselves wear flowing robes, the
Court has now issued a voluntary code of ethics. A
code of ethics, among other things, it's not just voluntary,
as in, we are volunteering to do this, even though

(38:28):
nowhere does it say we have to, and Congress did
not ask us to. It is also voluntary among the
nine justices, meaning these are not actually rules. The current
nine justices have simply said, Okay, we're going to do this,
and we won't do this. New justices could come onto
the Court and just ignore the damn thing. By the way,

(38:51):
there is also almost no we won't do this in
the whole damn thing. Item four C, specifically permits justices
to participate in fundraising for law related nonprofit. In other words,
it will now be written down that Sam the sham
Alito can do galas for the Federalist Society. It's not

(39:15):
wrong with dala luncheons and Clarence Thomas can raffle off,
you know, rulings on cases, just as long as the
criminal or terrorist organization that Sam and Clarence give the
money to is nonprofit. And oh, by the way, there
is no enforcement you break the rules of the New
Code of Ethics, and there is no outside group monitoring

(39:40):
your behavior or punishing you in any way. You can
do whatever you want. They can't even make you wear
your gown over your head for an hour or something
as punishment. The Supreme Court and its ethics rules, codifying
for all time the rules that will protect its tradition
of having no ethics. Two days worse persons and the world.

(40:04):
Oh to the number one story on the countdown and
my favorite topic, me and things I promised not to tell.
Not an egotistical reminiscence of my career this time, but
a story that I first told you about a year ago.

(40:27):
The anniversary was Sunday. I could not honor him again.
He is with me every day and there are actually
some important developments in the aftermath of his time with me,
so I want to tell you about him again. His
name was Mishu. I have mentioned I never had a
dog until the year twenty and twelve. I was allergic

(40:50):
as a kid. I still am allergic to the big
fur dogs, and I was repeatedly warned by my allergists
as a kid, as an adult, as a soon to
be really old man, that hypoallergenic dogs were not necessarily
a thing, and if you had a minor reaction to
the hair of a Poodle or a Westie or a
Maltese or another hypoallergenic dog, you were lucky if you

(41:16):
did not have a minor reaction. If you had a
major reaction, what you would have with that would be heartbreak.
Well I did not. I did not have heartbreak. I
was blessed by the opposite of heartbreak related to dogs,
and rapidly I realized, no dogs, I had wasted the
first fifty three years of my life. So I have

(41:39):
tried to make up for that ever since. My gal
Stevie and I just celebrated the eleventh anniversary of having
adopted one another. Rose's birthday is next month, her tenth
the Big one.

Speaker 4 (41:51):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
I had often looked into getting a third dog, and
I had gotten heavily involved in rescue work, and then
in twenty eighteen, those two paths crossed. I got a
call from my friend Sue Levitt, who runs the rescue
part of American Maltese Association for the entire company. Now
she is the president of the operation. And she said,

(42:14):
we have something special and challenging, and if you don't
want to do it, understood, but we really think you
might be the best. Well, flattery will get you everywhere.
And she said, he's a three month old Maltese Popenny
has a terrible, terrible heart condition and they are not
sure if he will make it past ten months. I
thought about it for about five seconds. I said yes,

(42:38):
and soon there he was in my apartment. Spaghetti was
his name, and he was trying to boss Stevie and
Rose around, and I knew he needed to stay, and
I knew he needed a real good new name. And
if you rename a dog, you're supposed to try to
make it something that sounds like the other name, so
you don't overly confuse them. Spaghetti, Getty, Teddy Ted my

(43:05):
dad's name perfect. I was so prepared for the worst
with Ted that it was July and I did not
buy him any stuff for winter because there was no
reason to assume he was going to see winter. Then
I took him to the Animal Medical Center here in
New York, and the cardiologist Dennis Trafney said, well, he's
got a heavy valve in there, and if we don't

(43:26):
do anything, he's got five to seven years. But he said,
with medication that'd be like seven to ten years. But
I can operate on him and probably give him a
normal lifespan. And I can thread this filament I'm holding
in through his jugular vein and into his heart, and
then we stop his heart electricically for three seconds, and

(43:47):
I push this button on this filament, and on the
other end of the filament is a tiny balloon and
it pushes the valve open, and you just keep doing
it as long as he can stand it. And it's
like knocking the rust off a hinge, just by opening
the door again and again. And I said, wait, go
back to the filament part. I don't see any filament,
and he said sorry, and he moved it in front

(44:07):
of a black background card and there it was, and
I said great. And then I said, well, why did
the vet who got the exam and the electro cardiogram
and all the visuals, why did he think that Ted
here would not make it past ten months? And doctor
Trafney said, well, if you are a vet, you might

(44:29):
see this condition once in your career. I operate on
it three times a month. Ted is now five and
a half years old. He is sitting at my feet
as I speak. He is a five and a half
year old boy in a dog's body, and every once
in a while he likes to come in here and
record the show with me. On walks, Ted flirts with

(44:52):
every human girl he can find. He hunts them. He
looks for them, preferably in groups are three or four
sitting on blankets in Central Park. I tell people this
story and they don't believe it. And when I leave
a group of girls who are sitting on a blanket
whom Ted has visited, I say, just watch what happens next.

(45:12):
Sure enough, he knows the difference. He is a little boy.
Ted barks at all dogs who are bigger than he is,
and then he goes up and says hi to them.
He has enemies. Though the printer oh the scripts for
this show, none has ever been printed out that Ted
was not furious about. He hates the plunger. If I

(45:35):
open the door that the plunger used to be behind,
he goes crazy. He hates thunder, he hates fireworks, and
he hates at least a dozen television commercials. Now. He
does not react as many dogs due to scary things.
By being scared, he confronts them. Ted is a piece
of work. One other note, he also hates the theme

(45:59):
music from the NHL Network, possibly because they have animation
of the various animals for whom the NHL teams are
named coming towards him. Anyway, as you can probably guess
that operation went so well that they were an hour
late giving Ted back to me, because, as the surgical
resident with the bemused look on his face said, he

(46:21):
had had to do all the tests a second time
because he was worried he'd screwed up the first set
of results because the results were too good. If I
could have gotten luckier given the prognosis with which Ted arrived,
I don't know how I did right. Ted Teddy, Well,

(46:42):
I've already put him to sleep, not an uncommon reaction
to listeners to this program. Since then, ted has twice
been joined by a fourth dog in our family. As
I said, I'm trying to make up for lost time.
I really do think four is the limit, although there
have been several days when I've been convinced I was
about to bring in a fifth and give it a shot.

(47:04):
Current fourth slot on my roster is occupied by a
wonderful geriatric rescue named Minee. That's French for kitty. Lord
knows the confusion of the first fifteen years of his
life as the dog of a French teacher in Hell's
Kitchen in New York. He's named Kitty. Minee is the
one who came to me supposedly with dementia. I've told

(47:27):
you his story before, and he's a little confused. He's
sixteen now, Hell, I'm a little confused, and I'm not
even sixty five. Mine is the one who did not
have dementia. He had bad teeth. We took them all out,
and literally from the time he woke up from the
anesthesia and every day since, in the sixteen months he's

(47:47):
been here, he's gotten a little younger, like every three
or four hours. Best dog on a walk I have
ever met, let alone lived with. He knows you are
going to slow down before you do. If he's walking
with another dog, he matches them stride for stride. When
they stopped, he stops. I've never heard him issue a

(48:08):
cross sound to another dog. He is serene and content
at home under any circumstances. Outdoors, now he has begun
to leap over all curbs and often over the stripes
on the crosswalks or even narrow drains or lines on sidewalks.

(48:30):
For the longest time, I thought that was a sign
of dementia, that he was doing it out of confusion.
But he now flies over twenty or thirty of them
every single walk. And I bought a selfie stick and
humiliated myself with a selfie stick to take pictures of
him in slow motion to see exactly what was going on.
And it's clear there are two different leaps. He has

(48:53):
one leap for when he is going over a curb,
and there's a different one with a different sort of
stance for when he's just going over a flat surface
that he wants to leap over it because there's a
line there. It's pretty clear he does this because he
still can. I don't know who sent him to me.

(49:13):
I have suspicions it was Mishu, but Minee clearly is
here to teach me that lesson every day, do it
because you still can. Mine has a little kidney issue,
and he's good with the pad. He tries all the time,
and sometimes he gets on the pad and he's off

(49:34):
the pad. He has a little kidney issue. He also
has one eye that isn't very much good anymore. But
otherwise he is in startlingly good health. He eats like
a horse. He eats more than the young dogs. He
eats twice as much as the young dogs. He's gained
four pounds since he's with me, And if you know
your Maltese is that's about half a Maltese. He is

(49:55):
the happiest dog outdoors I have ever seen. But that
fourth roster spot before me, Nay, that was Mishu. When
my friend Sue from Malty's Rescue called again in August
of twenty twenty one, she said, I have a really,
really tough case this time, and I do not think

(50:16):
there is a chance that there could be an unexpectedly
positive outcome, like the one you've had with Ted. She said,
this is a puppy. He's barely three months old. The
family loves him, they adore him. But there are two
young kids, and frankly, the mother believes accurately that they
are just too young to watch this little dog die.

(50:36):
His name was Mishu. They were a Polish family. Polish
for little bear is Mishu. And the disease he had
was tetrology of fallow. That sounds at all familiar to you.
In a human child, it can be repaired now. It
used to kill children by the time they were ten,
but in a human child they can now do surgery.

(50:58):
But the surgery lasts about twelve hours. Jimmy Kimmel's son
had it, talked about it a lot when he was
talking about the healthcare system in this country. In dogs,
there have been some early experiments in surgery, almost exclusively
for bigger dogs. As of Mishu's time, they really had
not succeeded on any dog less than say, twenty or

(51:20):
twenty five pounds. If you've ever seen the drawings of
mc escher, the famous illustrator, where the same staircase goes
up and down at the same time. That's what a
heart afflicted with tetrology of fallow looks like. There are
arteries going over the heart and under it, and others
that take the oxygenated blood in the wrong direction. The

(51:46):
sufferer of tetrology of fellow never gets enough oxygen. In
August twenty twenty one, Mishu arrived. It's easy to romanticize
things like this, especially in retrospect. There was something magical
about him. Though he was very, very sick. His tongue
and gums were purple from the lack of oxygen. He

(52:09):
was tiny, dwarfed by my other three dogs, and because
he was three months old, and yet he would start
trouble with them, silently charging ted or going up and
yapping at Stevie, and soon getting all three of them
playing and fighting with each other. And that's all the
strength he had. A minute of this tops and he

(52:30):
had to sit down and simply watch the chaos he
had created and clearly loved to create, and he also
clearly loved them. If two of the dogs were lying
near each other but not together, he would lie in
the empty space between them, deliberately so that his head
rested on one and his pack paws on or against

(52:54):
the other, and soon they would respond to his presence
by arranging themselves and cuddling together with a space for him.
They had not done that before Michu came. Once I
was stretched out, legs up on my couch, and the
four of them climbed in two by my feet, two
by my knees. I called Mishu's name, and he turned,

(53:15):
and he looked at me, and then the four of
them almost simultaneously fell asleep. It was such a simple thing,
yet easily it remains one of the most extraordinary and
wonderful moments of my life. And I prayed that night,
and not for the last time, that if there was
no miracle meant for Mishu, that at least when he

(53:35):
left us, he would be in my arms when he went.
Bishu was an athlete. He just was an athlete who
had no stamina. In the pen, I'd keep him in
for his own safety. When I had to go out,
he would get up on his hind legs and stand.
I would come back and see him standing in his pen,
or try to get out of his pen. Once he

(53:57):
did get out of his pen, I came home and
he was marching around the house. And he did that
confidently around the place, and he loved to move and
to run and to play, and then he would have
to stop. Mishu also enjoyed food as much as any
dog I have ever known, more even than mine. He

(54:20):
gained almost a pound a month while he was with me.
If you approached him with a treat, he would literally
punch the air with one of his front legs, like
an athlete celebrating a success, often with one and then
the other, a little one two punch like a boxer.
And the sheer joy of that never failed to make
me smile and laugh, and I often go back to

(54:41):
look at the video when I need to smile or laugh.
Put him on his back next to you, jab a
finger at his paws, and you'd be in a boxing
match with a four pound puppy who exulted in douking
it out with you, and you always knew when the
fight was over. Misch would stop throwing hands or throwing pause,
and he would simply take his front paws and grab

(55:02):
onto your finger and hold he wants to this for
a solid minute. I have never felt more as if
I were truly communicating with a dog than when Mishu
would hold my finger. Knowing his attitude, I really am
surprised he didn't pull my finger. He was an extraordinary

(55:23):
happy puppy, even when he felt bad physically. Those were
harrowing times. Mishu would be sitting on my lap, or
walking on the floor, or just chilling with the other
pups when he would suddenly tense up, sometimes letting out
a cry. Twice. That cry was exactly like that of

(55:44):
a young human boy. It was such a startling sound,
so clear, so unmistakable, so unbelievable, that the other dogs
would stop and stare with what could genuinely be described
as a look of alarm. Most times, the tensing was
my cue to grab him and hold him as tight
as I could, because that inability to get oxygen to

(56:07):
all the parts of his body, particularly the brain, of course,
would cause his body to contract and writhe and if
he was on any surface other than the ground or
the floor, it could literally throw him off a couch
to the floor it was rigid, and then he would snap,
and then he would fall. The first time he did that,

(56:29):
my veterinarian was here, and she said, you may now
have to take him to the emergency room. She said,
that's essentially what a dog does just before he faints,
but then within seconds it would stop. His body would
relax more or less. By accident, I discovered that after
one of these seizures he seemed to be soothed if
I would carry him and walk him around, gently rocking

(56:50):
him in my arms and talking to him. As I
did so, Mishu and I solved a lot of the
world's problems in those little walks out in the fresh air,
on the balcony or just around the house. He would
often doze off, but just as often he would within
minutes be ready to start playing again. And so I

(57:12):
had in my little flock of four lovely dogs, a sweet, wise, serene,
playful puppy who liked to grasp my finger with his
paws and loved everything about life, who was wise beyond
his years, and he was dying well. I could not
not try to find out if there was something to

(57:34):
be done to make his life longer or happier. What
we tried to do. When I resume the story of Mishu. Next,

(57:59):
resuming the story of my Maltese puppy, Mishu, his heart
so bad it pumped oxen genated blood the wrong way
and limited him to brief bursts of energy. And he
never really knew how sick he was, or that he
had been dealt a bad hand. He just took the
life he was given and loved and was loved. Of course,

(58:21):
I knew what sadness this was, this extraordinary soul trapped
in a body that would betray him at any time,
but certainly, no matter when that happened, it would be
before his time. So I had to at least try
to see if something could keep him here longer, or
at least make him feel better. While he was with us,

(58:41):
we went to see the city's top cardiologist for dogs,
and there was not. Although he thought keeping those cans
of a minute's worth of oxygen you sometimes see football
players breathing from on the sidelines, he thought that might
help a little relieve the pain. Soon, I had dozens
of those cans of oxygen in a hall closet, and

(59:01):
I was discussing building him an oxygen tent. But the
problem wasn't his breathing. He got all the oxygen he
would normally need. It was finding some way to get
the oxygen pumped by his fatally flawed heart to carry
the oxygen around his body. It's fine if you have

(59:23):
all the cabs in the world and there are no roads. Well,
there was no way to fix this the median age
of survival with dogs with tetrology. A fellow was just
about two years. His cardiologist brought up his case on
a board of international experts in canine cardiac care, and

(59:43):
they agreed there was no chance he would survive any operation,
let alone the experimental surgery for this devastating malformation. Thus,
the visits to the hospital turned out to be more
about letting people meet him and hold him. There was
an extraordinary soothing quality too holding Mishu. I heard it

(01:00:08):
again and again from people at an animal hospital, what
a special little soul, and he loved to be held.
I took him everywhere they would let me take him.
He was a regular at my weekly physical therapy for
my arthritic joints. My therapist adored him. She'd just hold
him and tell him stories. That took him to the

(01:00:30):
apple store once. I am happy to say he did
not like that at all. He went with me and
the other dogs for walks. He didn't walk. He was
always in a bag draped over my shoulder. He did
not have the stamina to walk for very long. I
never saw him fall asleep on a walk, though the
world fascinated him. The inevitable finally came at this time

(01:00:53):
of year in twenty twenty one. Throughout the last week,
the little pre feints increased. Mishu's happiness did not decrease.
Two days before the end, I approached him with a
treat with my camera phone rolling he punched with the
left and then he punched with the right, and he
ate the treat, and he licked his purple lips, and
when I surprised him with a second treat, he did

(01:01:14):
it all over again. On the afternoon of the twelfth
of November twenty twenty one, I was holding Mishu in
my lap as I sat and looked at the peak
foliage in Central Park, and with no warning, he suddenly
let out that near human cry, and I held him
and I stood up, and I walked him around the

(01:01:35):
balcony again, and then I had to sit him down
in his pen for a second, and I was just
picking him back up when he tensed up just like
all the other times, and died. Died as I picked
him back up. The special little soul was gone. His
body was getting cold with stunning rapidity, and something inside

(01:01:58):
me calmly said, hmm, not yet. I just don't think
he's ready. And with no training and absolutely no clue
what I was doing, I tried CPR on him. You
have to try, you have to try. I had so
little idea what on earth I was doing that. After

(01:02:20):
breathing air in and out of his lifeless body, I
moved my face away as if I were going to
spit out water, before reminding myself, no, dummy, that would
be for drowning. He didn't drown. He had a stroke
or a heart attack. I must have done five or
six breaths, and was thinking, how long do I do
this before I say goodbye? When I heard him exhale,

(01:02:47):
I waited for it to stop, or to be a
false alarm or some I don't know, some sort of
physical oddity caused by all the air I had pushed
into his lungs. But it wasn't any of that. Damned,
if this little dog had not somehow taught me how
to resuscitate him, he was alive. Then he was dead

(01:03:07):
and getting cold. Now he was alive again with a
regular breath and for him a regular heartbeat. It was
rush hour on Friday afternoon, and there was a bottleneck
and a bridge approach between Mishu and I and the hospital,
and I had visions of being stuck in traffic for

(01:03:28):
half an hour or an hour or lord knows how long,
and almost nothing they could do for him. Then if
we somehow got there in time, but you have to try.
If he didn't teach me that lesson, then mine told
me that lesson, you have to try. I loaded a
bag full of those cans of oxygen, and I got

(01:03:48):
in the car, and the driver realized my distress, and
he asked what he could do to help, and I said, listen,
don't run any lights, but if somebody wants to duck
in in front of you in traffic, don't let them.
Don't stop unless you have to. And when you do stop,
help me unwrap the plastic from these oxygen cans are
keeping him alive. And very calmly, he did that, and

(01:04:10):
I kept blowing the oxygen into Mishu's mouth and nose,
and we made it there in eleven minutes, faster than
the record time I'd ever made it to the hospital.
The streets literally parted for Mishu. At the hospital, somehow

(01:04:30):
I handed him off to the emergency room doctor, saying
with an evenness, I could not believe I could muster.
My dog is dying. He has tetrology of fallow. And
then they rushed him off. And then I briefed a
second doctor on everything, including the human like cry from
Mishu and his resuscitation. And I told her he had
been seen by a cardiologist there and told her which one,

(01:04:53):
and she said, he's still here. I just saw him.
I'll get him. So now Mishu was being worked on
by one of the leading experts in canine cardiology in
the world, and yet so I knew there was no hope.
As they examined him. I managed to text Sue from

(01:05:14):
the Maltese Rescue and she came to the hospital too,
and three of the people from other departments in the
hospital who had met me Shu came down to the
emergency room, not for my sake but for his. It
was heartbreaking and yet uplifting at the same time. One

(01:05:36):
of the er doctors said, I think we should let
him go, and I said, not in anger, not in competition,
and certainly not boasting. I said, look, I understand that.
I'd just like to note, with no training, I just
brought him back from the dead. I suspect you guys
are way better at this than I am. And I

(01:05:56):
brought him somehow back from he was getting called just
give him half an hour, and they all looked at
me and said yes. About half an hour later, his doctor,
the cardiologist, came out to me and he said, he's alive,
but if you took him out of this hospital, you'd
get as far as the parking garage and then you'd

(01:06:17):
have to bring him back. What you heard when he
cried out that was him having a stroke. The oxygen
deprivation was finally too much, and the doctor began to
prepare me for the question about letting him go, and
I stopped him and I said, I know we've all
done everything we can, especially him, specially Miishu. I'm ready

(01:06:40):
when you are. And they brought him back to me,
and there was a drip attached to his arm, and
when that toggle on the drip was be thrown, the
medication in the container would end his life. He was
as warm and as soft as ever in my arms.
And yet I knew he was no longer in there.

(01:07:03):
Sue held him for a while well, and then she
left me alone with him. I said, what you would
expect somebody to say in such a circumstance about love
and happiness, And then I heard myself saying things about gratitude,
gratitude to him for teaching me. Then in the face
of death, the point is to know when to try

(01:07:26):
and when to say enough. And then he had taught
me how to confront death and crisis and urgency, but
with evenness and practicality, and to be able to say,
I know you had a happy life. Then it seems
like that, and not the fact that you had a

(01:07:49):
happy life but tragically not a long one. It seemed
like the happy life was all that mattered to you.
This cardiologist and the nurse came back into the room,
and I said I was ready, And as the toggle
was turned, I said, I knew that if there was
a place for him to go now, I was confident

(01:08:09):
he would be the first one they let in. And
I just hoped they'd let me visit him there someday,
and that I hoped he would remember us. I said,
good night, sweet prints and flights of angels sing thee

(01:08:29):
to thy rest, and he was gone again. And as
I had prayed when he died, he died in my arms.
He died in my arms twice. There are some postscripts

(01:08:52):
new since the first time I told you his story.
His cardiologists very solemnly and respectfully said that of those
other international experts who had reviewed me Shu's case, only
two out of a couple of dozens of them had
actually ever seen and been able to study a small
dog with tetrology. A fellow and Mishu might have one
final blessing yet to bestow upon the rest of us,

(01:09:15):
if they could keep and study his poor little heart.
And without hesitation, I said yes, because in that instant
I saw him positioning his head on Stevie's head, and
his back paws on Rose's back legs, so that the
three of them were cuddling together, whether they liked it
or not, and I knew, as I had always known,

(01:09:37):
that this truly was a dog who cared about and
loved other dogs. The hospital wound up recalibrating some of
the cameras they had in the hospital to photograph the
smallest teeth in the smallest dogs, so they could get
every imaginable image of Mishu's heart and maybe someday use

(01:09:57):
them to fix this nightmare in some other dog. And
since sometime I think in twenty twenty two, Mishu has
been in the veterinary textbooks. Moreover, in a casual conversation
with someone from that cardiology department at the animal hospital
over the summer, he mentioned Mishu. He recognized my name

(01:10:19):
because of Mishu, and we talked about this awful disease
tetrology of fellow, and he said they had just months
earlier in that hospital finally been able to successfully complete
a surgery on a small dog who had that same
fateful construction that took Meshu so young. If I remember
what he told me correctly, they built this little dog

(01:10:40):
a new aorta. Now, I'm not crazy or arrogant enough
to draw a straight line from letting them keep Mishu's
heart to that successful surgery, but I have no doubt
that his heart continued the advance of knowledge of what
science can do for cardiac patients and not just canine

(01:11:00):
cardiac patients. When I first got Stevie, the fellow who
literally handed her to me at the pet shop was
named Jeffrey. About seven years later, I saw Jeffrey again,
same shop, and he said he'd just gone back to
work after months off out sick after heart surgery. And

(01:11:20):
he said they did some experimental stuff on me, and
then he laughed. Stuff they had tried out first on dogs.
Isn't that amazing? Well, that's always the case. You don't
wait to see if the drugs work on dogs because

(01:11:40):
their lives are so short anyway, and you don't wait
to do the surgery because their lives are so short anyway,
And so you find new ways for dogs and for humans.
I like to think Mishu will save other dogs, help
save that one that the cardiologist mentioned, and save other
kids too. Secondly, Mishu's parents had another litter late in

(01:12:05):
the same year he died, and their human was kind
enough to offer me either of the brothers Mishu would
never know. Each was eerily reminiscent of him, but healthy,
so healthy that they were little devils. There's no other
way to describe them. Sweet innocent. Little Mishu was in
some way sweet and innocent because he didn't have the

(01:12:28):
strength to be a little devil like his brothers were.
They were menaces to my other three dogs. I had
each of them live a week with us, and I
would have been fine with each They were great just
with me. But each of them bit ted in the genitals,
and then Stevie in the genitals, and Rose in the genitals,

(01:12:48):
and one of them bit me in the genitals. You
got to draw a line somewhere. They were crazy. And
the second one, remember I mentioned how Mishu used to
stand in his pen. The second one, Snowy, got into
that same pen and managed to climb up the side
of it and down the outside of it like an

(01:13:09):
Olympic gymnast. They are now living happy lives as only
dogs in other homes. So when Sue from Malty's Rescue
reached out again in June of twenty twenty two and said,
I've got another special case, fifteen year old, perfect health,

(01:13:30):
but he's got rotting teeth and dementia. His human got
sick and she died. Who's going to adopt a fifteen
year old? I was able to raise my hand, and
that was when mine joined us. He's in the other
room now, he's curled up in a bed he adores.
He sleeps in it like he's in the womb. He
sleeps in it sometimes with his back legs up in

(01:13:52):
the air and his head on the floor and his
tongue hanging out because he doesn't have any teeth. Mine
is resting because tomorrow we will be out leaping over
the sidewalk again, and he needs to build up his
reserves for that or he might be awake. If so,
I'm going to have to go out now and get
him some more food, because he'll eat all day. Bless him.

(01:14:16):
There's a third PostScript. I got Mishu's tattoo a month
after he died, and his pensive, half smiling little face
looks up at me from near the crook of my
elbow where he used to sit when I would carry
him around after one of those pre feints, and it
is a remarkable likeness. There's one guy in the village

(01:14:40):
who can absolutely do a portrait of your dog on
your arm. To me, the tattoo means exactly what you
would think it would mean. It comforts me greatly. It
means Mishu is always with me and always will be.
And now, with this being the week of this unwonted

(01:15:03):
but no not tragic anniversary, Meshu, I hope will also
always be with you. I'll be back tomorrow. Countdown with
Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts

(01:15:26):
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