October 2, 2024 • 54 mins
SERIES 3 EPISODE 40: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:46) SPECIAL COMMENT: JD Vance blew an otherwise substantial debate with one remark that will echo through the history of presidential campaigns the way the spoofing of Gerald Ford in 1976 by Chevy Chase did ("It was my understanding there would be no math.")
Fact-checked once and only once by moderators Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan about the fact that the immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, are there legally, Vance seemingly summarized the entire premise of Trumpism - deceit and using it to hamstring a cowering media. He was terrified of fact-checking, enraged by fact-checking, and finally had his mike cut because he was angry and tried to dress down the moderators by saying: "The rules were you guys weren't gonna fact check."
Vance did a surprisingly smooth if not always effective job of sane-washing Trump but he could have won a debate in which Tim Walz was so nervous at the beginning that I had a brief spell of 1st Debate PTSD. But Vance ultimately had only one product to sell - Trump - and only so much lipstick to put on it, or eyeliner to put on himself.
As Walz regained himself, he was practical, eloquent, and managed to pull quotes out of the Bible and the Hardware Store ("my pro-tip for today is...") He warned Trump talking about crowd sizes was not what the country would need right now in the Middle East crisis (Vance barely answered; he chose instead to introduce himself; it was a tactical disaster). And he gave the top two answers of the night, insisting that Mike Pence's decision to be a "firewall" against Trump on January 6th was why Pence "isn't on this stage tonight" and then a moving, personal story about gun violence and its myriad causes that ended with "Sometimes, it's just the guns. It's just the guns."
IS IT BAD THAT KELLYANNE CONWAY THINKS HER VP CANDIDATE IS NAMED “JD WALTZ?” Is she mistaking Vance for Walz? Vance for actor J.D. Walsh? The late actor J.T. Walsh? Maybe for The Last Waltz?
MEANWHILE, TRUMP SEEMS TO ACCUSE KAMALA OF MURDER EXCEPT HE SCREWS UP THE PRONOUNS: He says she might as well have held a gun in a murder case. Except he says Harris let HER in and murdered HIM. He’s also continuing to take credit for “being first” on the scene in the post-Helene chaos even though nobody wanted him there and all he did was start a GoFundMe, take credit for money that other people gave – and he didn’t.
AND IN NUZZI NUDES NEWS: NUZZI DOOZY – COURT GETS UP IN LIZZA’S BIZZA – OVER RFK RIZZ(a). CNN reports that the latest in the RFK Junior/Olivia Nuzzi story is: she has sued, and in the filing, says that the source of the leaks that got her suspended by New York Magazine for an undisclosed personal relationship with the perviest of the Kennedys was her former fiancee Ryan Lizza of Politico. When Olivia and I lived together and she still worked for The Daily Beast she frequently traveled to DCC on stories and whenever come back she’d give me a big hug and say she was sorry she took me for granted because there was the creepy guy who stalked her every time she went to Washington. ‘Do you know him,’ she’d ask? ‘His name is Lizza.’
Gotta run. Gotta check I have enough popcorn
B-Block (25:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The WNBA players association and executive director Terry Carmichael Jackson has attacked one of the reporters who might be on the Mount Rushmore of Women’s Sports in this country, Christine Brennan. And over nothing. They’ve slandered her and tried to get her fired. We need to boycott the WNBA until there is an apology and the executive director is fired. There’s Elon Musk, who has decided that a barely intelligible video by somebody who’s never heard of Roe-V-Wade “proves” Trump cares more about women. And then there’s Rob Schneider, who decided to turn the heartbreaking loss of 58-year old hoops immortal Dikembe Mutumbo to brain cancer into an anti-va
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. I
did not see this coming. If JD. Vance and Trump
(00:27):
and their campaign had not been terrified of fact checking,
We're not enraged by fact checking. We're not enraged by facts.
If none of that were true, last night's vice presidential
debate would not have been headlined by Vance whining about
and yelling about and finally having his mic actually cut
(00:49):
because he was angry and yelled at the moderators over
fact checking.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Thank you, governor, and just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield,
Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who
have legal status, temporary protectives.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Well more, Thank you, senator.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
We had so much to get to.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I think it's.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Important turn out of the egonomy.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Thing, Margaret. The rules were that you got a fact check.
The rules were you guys weren't gonna fact check. We
actually saw one of the great cliches of American culture
spring to life. It was my understanding that there would
be no math. Still resonating often attributed to incumbent President
(01:33):
Gerald Ford, even believed to be one of the reasons
he lost a debate and an election to Jimmy Carter
forty eight years ago. Ford, of course never said that
it was chevy Chase portraying Ford on Saturday Night Live
on September eighteenth, nineteen seventy six. But when JD. Vance
did that last night, it was my understanding that there
(01:54):
would be no fact checking. That wasn't chevy Chase, that
wasn't bowhen Yang or anybody else portraying Vance. It was
Vance himself. And it's how he managed to lose a
debate in which Tim Walls came out of the gate
so nervous that for a while I was having a
little first debate. PTSD. Vance also lost this debate because
(02:17):
when asked about whether he would be the final voice
in the room approving an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran,
the first question of the debate, the most topical question
of the debate, he somehow managed to say, never mind
the Middle East. I'll get to that in a moment.
But first, my name is James D. Bowman. No, I'm
Jimmy Hamill, No, I'm J. D. Bantz. Well, whoever the
(02:38):
hell I am. I'm here to sell you some Amway products.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel
on Iran.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
You have two minutes, so Margot, I want to answer
the question. First of all, thanks Governor, thanks to CBS
for hosting the debate, and thanks most importantly the American
people who are watching this evening and caring enough about
this country to pay attention to this vice presidential debate.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
I want to answer the question, but.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
I want to actually give an introduction to myself a
little bit, as I recognize a lot of Americans don't
know who either one of us are. I was raised
in a working class family. My mother acquired food assistance
for periods of her life.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
My grandmother virtually everything Tim Walls said was substantial and
about policy and about facts, and virtually everything JD. Vance
said and did sounded like an infomercial. Occasionally that worked,
but he continually side eyed the camera and by extension,
the viewer, and that probably would have been the burn
(03:33):
he thought it was going to be if each knowing
glance each time he tried his version of the Sarah
pale and wink, it didn't emphasize the fact that he
was wearing eyeliner again. And my god, it is polite
to address by name the person asking you a question,
but Dvance did it so often and so phonally that
if you had Vance saying well Nora or yes Margaret
(03:56):
on your drinking bingo card, you are still unconscious. For
the first ten fifteen minutes the debate was a time
or maybe Vance was ahead. This was largely because for
that span it was entirely not a vice presidential debate.
It was a second presidential debate, but by proxy. Don't
(04:16):
get me wrong, Walls managed to do it too. He
took a dozen bites out of Trump. He pivoted on
the Iran question to how many Trump advisors insist Trump
should never be let near a crisis like this one Again,
he threw Vance's anti Trump quote against him. He said,
a nearly eighty year old Donald Trump talking about crowd
sizes is not what we need in this moment. He
(04:38):
quoted Trump's failure in Iran. He quoted Trump's dismissal of
injuries to US servicemen in Iran as headaches, a comment
that Trump made just hours earlier. Walls referenced Trump and
tweets referenced how climate change will give you more beachfront
property according to Trump. He scored by noting the bribes
Trump took from oil executives at Mari Lago, he scored
(05:01):
with Mexico paying for the wall, and especially with Trump
sinking the bipartisan border deal. Walls reminded the audience that
Vance and Trump had said, scientists don't know what they're
talking about, Economists don't know what they're talking about. Authorities
don't know what they're talking about. And Vance took debate
and insisted Trump believes in common sense, not experts. The
(05:24):
problem is that as smooth as Walls was, what he
was trying to defend ultimately was still Trump, and it
was putting lipstick on it. It was so much Vance
defending Trump, so much Vance attacking Harris. It was exhausting.
At one point, as Vance literally referred to our borders
are kamala Harris, he pointed at Tim Walls, I hate
(05:47):
to tell you, Senator, that's not Kamala Harris. But the
longer that debate went on and the more topics were
addressed and in greater depth, the more Walls warmed to
the process, and I think the more the audience warmed
to him when it stopped being a proxy fight and
started being about Vance and Walls. Vance didn't have anybody
(06:09):
to talk about anymore. Vance complained about fact checking, Walls
quoted the Bible about what we do for the least
among us, and then he offered my pro tip for
the day, My pro tip for the day. As well
as those things resonated. Walls did miss several opportunities to
bury Vance on the subject of Springfield, Ohio, including a
(06:32):
moment when Vance insisted millions of illegal immigrants were taking
over homes in Springfield, Ohio. Instead, he laid Vance skate
on that, just as certainly Walls danced and effectively, I
might add around the conflict between where he was and
where he has said or implied he was during the
Tiedenman Square uprising in China in nineteen eighty nine. Vance
(06:55):
could have crushed him then. Instead, for some reason, he
changed topics to something he had memorized. What Vance and
the Republicans will say was their victory in this debate,
and it will resonate because it's not entirely untrue, is
that Vance's primary job was to sane wash Trump for
people who are not paying attention or who are only
(07:17):
getting the sanitized versions of Trump. In the New York times,
Vance seemed perhaps wrong, but definitely reasonable. Frankly, Vance did
not seem likely to stab you, only to pick your pocket.
Noting that CBS News largely steered out of its ethical skid,
and while this was not the best of the debates,
(07:38):
it was twice as good as CNN's disaster. There is
one last point to both of their credits. Unlike Trump
in every debate he's ever done, they got two issues,
they got two guns, They got to January sixth, Vance
was wrong about all these things. But when Vance said
(07:59):
the only thing that Trump did wrong was that the
Russians bought five hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads
promoting Trump, walls picking his jaw off the floor, answered
January sixth was not Facebook ads, and he managed to
add of Mike Pence's refusal to overthrow the election on
Trump's behalf. That's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage.
Speaker 5 (08:23):
I see a candidate out there who refused and now
again and this, I'm pretty shocked by this.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
He lost the election.
Speaker 5 (08:30):
This is not a debate, It's not anything anywhere other
than in Donald Trump's world. Because look, when Mike Pence
made that decision, to certify that election. That's why Mike
Pence isn't on this stage. What I'm concerned about is
where is the firewall? With Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
On the other hand, the governor did fail to take
the priceless advice of Democratic strategist Ali Samarco, quoting all
Tim Wallas has to say tonight is I heard you're
here because the last guy got hung up and it's
over unquote. Lastly, when they addressed gun violence, Vance blamed
(09:12):
it exclusively on mental health and soft targets in schools
and insisted the answer was better door control. And that
was when Tim Walls gave the answer of the night.
Speaker 5 (09:26):
This idea of stigmatizing mental health. Just because you have
a mental health issue doesn't mean you're violent. And I
think what we end up doing is we start looking
for escapeboat. Sometimes it just is the guns. It's just
the guns.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
A couple of debate postscripts, or maybe more accurately, debate
prescripts in a story in which the cumulative IQ of
everybody involved is still in less than three digits total.
Trump went on Kelly an Conway's Fox Show and said,
of course Vance would beat Tim Walls last night because quote,
he's going up against a moron, a total moron, how
(10:01):
she picked him his unbelievable unquote. And then having heard this,
Kellyanne Conway went on Jesse Waters Fox Show and staid,
of the debate, quote, I have high expectations about J. D. Waltz. Well,
I was still trying to figure out if she meant JD.
Vance or Tim Walls or an entirely different other person
(10:22):
whose last name is Waltz, like in the last Waltz.
Kelly and Cohn Job came right back and said, quote,
the mainstream media and other Democrats did a really stupid
thing with J. D. Waltz. They tried to drown him
out in the first days after Trump picked him. So
there you have it, your twenty twenty four Republican ticket
(10:43):
per Kelly and Conway, Trump and J.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
D Waltz.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Unless she meant the actor J. D. Walsh from Two
and a Half Men or the late actor J. T.
Walsh from Nixon and Good Morning Vietnam. And the bottom
line here is it's Kelly Ann Conway. She could have
meant anything, and sadly, one of the reasons we are
in a world in which Kelly Ane Conway was not
(11:10):
laughed out of Washington in the year two thousand and
two is because the guard rails behind the guard rails
beyond the original guard rails also failed. Back to the
subject of fact checking, This was yesterday morning from Brian Stelter,
one of the last two or three media news critics
(11:33):
left alive. As the industry shrinks like a collapsing star.
He and the others are supposed to be calling out
cowardice in journalism. Instead, he turned the shrug emoji into
written form, and he needed sixty four words to do it.
Quoting facts unchecked. CBS News executives are signaling that Nora
(11:56):
O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan will not fact check flagrantly false
claims made on stage. Well, that's a filthy, flagrant falsehood.
The moderators will give the candidates the opportunity to fact
check each other in real time. CBS Senior Vice president
Claudia Milne told The New York Times, repeating what I
wrote last month. Moderators are damned if they fact check,
(12:19):
and damned if they don't. No, they aren't. No, they
aren't doing your job as a journalist describing reality to
your readers or viewers or newsletter recipients telling the truth,
calling a lie a lie up up and down down,
(12:41):
and then being threatened or abused for doing it. That
is not the same as serving as nothing more than
the debate timekeeper and the person who says we'll be
right back, and as a result, jeopardizing freedom of the
press and democracy itself. That is not damned if you do,
and damned if you don't. It's just plain old damned. Meanwhile,
(13:29):
back at the Looney Ranch, oh nothing, it's just Trump,
who's actually responsible by commission and omission for the deaths
of more than one million Americans because it is literally
insane mishandling of COVID. It's just Trump accusing the vice
president of murder and misidentifying the victim and conflating the
(13:50):
victim and the perpetrator.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
I'm outraged that she let in the savage who raped
and murdered Rachel Moran.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Kamala let her in letter in she murdered him.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
In my opinion, Kamala murdered him. It's like she did,
just like she had a gun in her hand.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Wait, he said him, he said, Kamala murdered him. And
Kamala Harris let her in the victim was a woman,
U syphilitic menace. Steal yourself for more of this. It
is just the beginning. I know you heard this quote yesterday.
We should all memorize it. Yale historian Tim Snyder. Trump
(14:29):
is in the classic dictatorial position. He needs to die
in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison.
This means that he will do whatever he can to
gain power, and once in power, will do all that
he can do to never let it go. This is
a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else. It is
entirely inconsistent with democracy. Please learn it. By the beginning
(14:54):
of the new week, Trump continued yesterday to pretend he
did something to alleviate post Helene distress in the South.
There were actually stories reading he was first to visit
the damage in person, and to note that he launched
a gofund me that had raised more than one million dollars.
Left out of each of these stories, though, the reality
(15:17):
that he claims to be a multi billionaire. He rages
when contradicted on this point, and he never stops boasting
about how much money he has, and instead of going
to George Jordan, North Carolina or anywhere else and giving
away just some of his own money. He launched a
go fund me to give away other people's money and
(15:38):
take credit for it. Oh and guess what the gofund me.
He didn't donate to it either. As to the origin
of some of Trump's billions, hundreds of millions, some millions,
surprising news from Senate Democrats, they did something about the
(15:59):
egypt bribe scandal. The majority on the Judiciary Committee has
now written to the watchdog the DOJ, the Inspector General,
asking him to investigate whether Trump appointees quote interfered with
and ultimately blocked the criminal probe into the findings of
our intelligence agencies that the Egyptian government gave or sought
to give Trump ten million dollars to boost his White
(16:22):
House campaign eight years ago. This is good, boys, but
you know you can also hold hearings. And one more
Trump note, A group called the Crooked and Obscene Project
has unveiled a giant marionette version of Dementia J. Trump.
(16:42):
It will begin its tour of the United States on
Apex Harbor Lane in Las Vegas. It is there right now,
darkening the sky. They say he's naked, made out of
rebar covered with foam and weighs approximately six thousand pounds
(17:04):
eight that's a marionette. Based on that description, that sounds
like him. And because I want you to be able
to enjoy my unique, weird, unearthly position on the fringes
(17:28):
of this next story as much frankly as I am,
CNN reports. The latest in the RFK Junior Olivia Newsy
story is she has sued her former fiance, Ryan Lizza
of Politico, and in the filing, she says that the
(17:49):
source of the leaks that got her suspended by New
York Magazine for an undisclosed personal relationship with the pervioust
of the Kennedys was Ryan of Politico. CNN quotes Livy
in the suit filed this week as claiming that Liza
quote explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me
(18:13):
to destroy my life, career and reputation, a threat he
has since carried out. CNN flesh this out a bit,
you should excuse the expression. Quoting its report, Newsy said
she believes Liza began his alleged harassment at the beginning
of July as a way to black mail her back
into a relationship with him and punish her when she
(18:36):
wouldn't acquiesce. She said. By the next month, Liza had
stolen a personal electronic device from her was hacking her devices,
then anonymously shopping information about her to the media. Some
of the information may have been doctored to hurt her more,
Newsy alleged, and she believes Liza impersonated an anonymous campaign
(18:58):
operative to give a political campaign information that would hurt
her further. According to the court recads, Newsy was granted
a temporary no contact order against Liza. The judge also
signed off CNN reports on her request to have police
accompany her when she attempts to get her possessions back
(19:22):
from Liza. The couple had lived together within the last year.
The court filing said, they are going to be cops.
Did you say, I'm sorry, I have to go and
I have to run to make sure I've got enough
popcorn for the rest of this I will add only
(19:46):
this detail to that headline, and the headline would be
Newsy Doozy. Court gets up in Liza's Bizza over rfk's Riz.
When Olivia and I lived together in New York and
she still worked for The Daily Beast, she frequently trapped
to DC on stories, and whenever she came back, she'd
(20:08):
give me a big hug and say she was sorry
for taking me for granted, because there was this creepy
guy who stalked her every time she went to Washington.
Do you know him? She'd ask? His name is Ryan?
Liza shrug emoji? Also of interest here, Well, nothing, nothing
(20:34):
compared to that obviously. Still, Pete Rose died Monday. People
seem to think he's not in the Baseball Hall of
Fame because he gambled on baseball while a player and
while a manager, and while a player manager. Actually, they
were just about to get beyond that, what with all
the betting in baseball now seven years ago. They were
(20:56):
about to let him in when that whole other thing
came up, the whole other thing everybody has forgotten about,
and almost no but he has mentioned since Pete Rose
died the other thing where he admitted in the court
documents that in the seventies, when he was married to
his first wife, he also had a mistress and the
mistress was fifteen years old. That's next. This is countdown.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
This is countdown with Keith Olberman, my crazy friend. There's
(21:47):
a reason.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
The announcer today is Tony Kornheiser of ESPN, formerly of
The Washington Post, still ahead of us on this edition
of Countdown the Death of Pete Rose. That's not the
reason I used to campaign against putting Pete Rose in
Baseball's Hall of Fame. Then I campaigned in favor of
putting him in Baseball's Hall of Fame. And then in
twoenty seventeen, the little other thing happened. Like I said,
(22:08):
that's when I started campaigning again for never putting him
in Baseball's Hall of Fame. You may recall in nineteen
eighty nine he'd been banned from baseball, and in twenty
seventeen Pete Rose sued the investigator whose work led up
to that banishment, and in discovery up popped this sworn
deposition from a woman who, to quote the Hollywood Reporter,
alleges that Rose had a relationship with her for several years,
(22:31):
beginning before she turned sixteen. Rose acknowledged in court documents
that he had sex with the woman, but thought she
was sixteen at the time. When you admit to sex
with a child, and your defense was, I thought she
was sixteen. You'd done That's why he's not in the
Hall of Fame and will never be in the Hall
(22:53):
of fame. All this in depth in things I promised
not to tell coming up first, there are still more
new idiots to talk about. A rollicking addition of the
daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and Dunning Kruger
effects better some meon's who constitute today's worst persons in
the world. And this is why Tony Kornheiser, formerly of
The Washington Post, is the announcer today the bronze worse
(23:16):
the WNBA Players Association Terry Carmichael Jackson President. One player
poked another player in the eye during a game. A
reporter from USA Today asked the poker politely and specifically
if it was deliberate or an accident. The player, to
her credit, did not get angry, did not go all snark,
but said hurting another player would never be part of
(23:38):
her game. She was just reaching for the ball. The
player and the reporter were both pros about it. There
were no angry words, there were no complaints. But the
injured player who got the finger in the eye was
the rookie who put the WNBA on the map this year.
Caitlin Clark, and the reporter was Christine Brennan, a fierce
advocate for women's sports, such a veteran that when she
(24:01):
joined The Washington Post alongside Tony Kornheiser, she had to
respond not just accusations, but assumptions that she had gotten
the job because she was sleeping with a Washington TV
sportscaster and for reasons yet to be explained. The WNBA
Players Association decided to respond to the extreme professionalism of
(24:24):
Chris Brennan and the player who is such a pro
I'm leaving her name out of this. Responded to this
by slandering Christine Brennan, quoting a message on behalf of
the one hundred and forty four that would be the
players in the union to unprofessional members of the media
like Christine Brennan, you are not fooling anyone. That so
(24:45):
called interview in the name of journalism was a blatant
attempt to bait a professional athlete into participating in a
narrative that is false and designed to fuel racist, homophobic,
and misogynistic vitriol on social media. You cannot hide behind
your tenure instead of demonstrating the cornerstones of journalism, ethic
like integrity, objectivity, and a fundamental commitment to truth. You
(25:08):
have chosen to be indecent and downright insincere. You have
abused your privileges and do not deserve the credentials issued
to you. This is the statement of the Players Union,
and you certainly are not entitled to any interviews with
the members of this union or any other athlete in sport.
Those credentials mean that you can ask anything, but they
also mean that you know the difference between what you
(25:30):
should and should not. We see you. Our relationship with
the media is a delicate one, and we will continue
to strengthen because the media is essential in growing the game.
No one knows that better than we do. But the
players are entitled to better. They are entitled to professionalism.
We call on USA Today Network to review its principles
(25:52):
of ethical conduct for newsrooms and address what we believe
is a violation of several core principles, including seeking and
reporting the truth. USA Today's Sports should explain why a
reporter with Klee bias and ulterior motives was assigned to
cover the league. We also urged the league to review
its policies and take measures to prevent such issues protecting
(26:15):
the integrity of the game at its players. Terry Carmichael Jackson,
Executive Director WNBPA, Yes, congratulations, we may have reached actual
equality in sports where the women athletes and their organizations
can be as big a set of jerks and idiots
and morons as male athletes. Perhaps we've even gone past
(26:38):
equality to women being in the lead in these areas
because they just trashed a woman who a mere thirty
years ago was being thrown out of sports locker rooms
because she was a woman, a woman who is one
of the people, without whom the only professional opportunities for
American women basketball stars in this country. The only opportunities
(26:59):
would not be in this country. They would be in
Russia still, or Europe or the Canary Islands. The WNBA
and its Players Association must immediately apologize to Christine Brennan
and WNBAPA President Terry Carmichael Jackson must resign or be fired.
She just made an asshole out of herself and every
(27:22):
one of her players. She's just set back her sport
and the gains it has made in the last few years.
If this is how the WNBPA is going to treat
its most loyal most honored reporters. Frankly, all news organizations
should boycott the WNBA, not even report the goddamn scores,
(27:42):
and networks like ESPN that Carrie WNBA games should refuse
to do so until the apology is made. The WNBA is,
by doing a press release like this, fabricating an environment
unsafe for media with exactly the same kind of deliberate
targeting of reporters done by the likes of Donald fing Trump,
(28:04):
and its history tells us that when a player's union
attacks the media, its next target will be the fans
it doesn't like. In other words, you and I are next.
Chris Brennan might be on the Mount Rushmore of the
builders of women's sports in this country, Terry Carmichael Jackson,
executive director of the WNBPA, is a bully and a
(28:27):
lawyer the runner up Leon, as Trump has called him.
I'd love to know what's wrong with Elon Musk based
on those profiles. My guest is he stoned. Look, he's
a fascist, he's a nut job, he's unstable, and as
somebody noted, all the spy movies of the sixties revolve
around a crazy billionaire who has the rockets and all
(28:48):
the communications systems and decides to take over the world. No,
I expect you to die. Mister bond Elmo's latest problem
is though, as he tries to take over the world,
he's making an extraordinary number of really stupid mistakes. He
has now posted one of these, right winger, I'm recording
this in my car idiot videos, and he wrote with it,
(29:12):
as this video describes, Trump supports women's rights far more
than Kabala. The video shows a young woman with dead
eyes and badly dyed hair who rambles on about how
Kamala Harris has already been president? Is that true? Did
I miss something? Am I coming out of a coma?
Was she president already? She wasn't okay? And that Trump
(29:33):
quote was already president? How many rights did you lose?
I don't mean to tell you your business, ladies, not after
that opening part of this segment, but a lot of them. Actually,
a lot of rights have already been lost. The narrator
is clearly unaware of the repeal of Roe v. Wade
or the Trump planned to institute abortion bands wherever he
(29:54):
can and punish the states where he can't. Leon put
this out without really listening to it. Didn't he because
Zempics but the worst our winner, Rob Schneider, idiot formerly
on Saturday Night Live, and apparently he was funny during
the audition. The basketball great to Kembe Mutumbo has died
(30:18):
after a long and terrible fight against brain cancer. And
Rob Schneider, who has gone over there to the fascist
Nicket night world where they'll all pretend your career isn't
over provided you support Trump, decided he had to say
something about it. Schneider posted a video of the late
beloved hoopstar mister Matumbo doing a video from Christmas of
(30:41):
twenty twenty one, urging people to get the COVID shot
so they could all get together, and he wrote above
it rest in peace. I'm sure this is just another coincidence,
but I took a pass on the JAB and I'm
not going to let anyone I know and who will
listen get it either. Well, there's this much to say
about Rob Schneider. The one advantage he has is he
(31:03):
never has to face the prospect of what Kembe Mtumbo
had to face in brain cancer. Rob as they say,
no pain, no gain, but no brain, no pain. Schneider
two days worst person in the Land to the number
(31:35):
one story on the countdown, and as promised yesterday, some
thoughts on the passing of Pete Rose, and I wanted
to take extra time to think about it because my
thoughts about Pete Rose are all over the map, and
through the history of my life, they are even further
all over the map. For twenty years I campaigned against
(31:56):
Pete Rose being in Baseball's Hall of Fame, and just
after I had an epiphany that said, no, I think
he should be in. Just after that came the scandal
that proved that he had had an ongoing sexual relationship
with an underage girl, and the Hall of Fame question
(32:17):
became academic. I will say that this issue of Pete
Rose and gambling, and Pete Rose and the all time
hit record in baseball, the man who made more base
hits than anybody else, the man who round out every
ground ball and every flyball and every walk. The Pete
Rose story really is summarized by the first thought I
(32:39):
had when the news was announced Monday evening that he
had died sometime during the day Monday. My thought was,
what did he have a bet down on that Mets
Braves game and it killed him? I knew Pete Rose
enough to know that he would have appreciated that joke.
He would not have appreciated the fact that he had
died without being put into the Baseball Hall of Fame,
(33:00):
because he said many times that he thought they were
waiting for him to die before they would put him in.
I don't know if he ever will go in. That
issue of the underage well, what it was child rape
will never go away. But that's why he's not in
the Hall of Fame. I believe everything was turning for
(33:23):
Pete Rose twy ten to twenty fifteen. He had gotten
back into baseball. He was a commentator on Fox Sports,
and particularly given the nature of Fox Sports and the
nature of the decline in baseball commentary, especially on the
national level, he was doing very well. And then came
the story in twenty seventeen, and he had not been
(33:43):
heard from since. It's ironic that baseball and gambling are
now in bed together so frequently, so visibly, so positively,
that what Pete Rose did while he managed and before
that played for the Cincinnati Reds is seen almost as
a series of misdemeanors. It's a little bit more than that.
(34:07):
Pete Rose and let me explain this as briefly and
not intricately as possible. Pete Rose gambled on some Cincinnati
Reds baseball games while he was the manager of the
team and in fact player and manager of the team,
but he did not gamble on other Cincinnati Reds games.
He was the first one to point out, even after
(34:27):
all of the dirt about the gambling came out, that
he never bet against his own team. That's the cardinal
sin in sports. If you bet against your own team,
why then you may have gone out there and tried
to lose, in which case you are done. That's the
whole premise of the nineteen nineteen World Series and the
eight great players led by Shuelas Joe Jackson, who were
(34:47):
never permitted to play again once their confessions and their
trial ended the year after the nineteen nineteen World Series.
Did That's not what Pete Rose was accused of, But
in a way he did the passive aggressive version of that.
Because if you are the manager of a baseball team
and you are placing bat that's in thousands of dollars
in amounts on some of the games. What about the
(35:10):
games you chose not to bet on? Did you manage
them differently, And after all, it is the manager who
decides which pitcher is starting the game, which pitcher is
coming in in the sixth inning, the game is five
to two, your team is losing. Are you using your
best relief pitcher in the seventh inning because you have
(35:31):
a bet on the game, or are you saving him
till tomorrow when you will have a bet on the game.
That was the crux for me of why I could
never support Pete Rose going into Baseball's Hall of Fame.
As much as my experience with him personally was similar
to what most people's was, he was very charming, he
was very likable, and certainly you could talk about the nuances,
(35:54):
subtleties and history of the game with Pete Rose as
you could with few other players. He didn't just know
everybody from his own era. He knew everybody who'd ever
played Major League baseball, at least seemingly. He knew the
details of the life of Ty Cobb, the man who
he supplanted as the all time leader in hits. He
knew about nineteenth century players, he knew about the original
(36:17):
Cincinnati Red Stockings of eighteen sixty nine, and he was
always fascinating and particularly if you were willing to pay him.
He was always good for an anecdote and autograph a
piece of memorabilia, which I'll circle back to in a moment,
because when I was a teenager, I knew something was
(36:37):
wrong with Pete Rose because of that issue of memorabilia.
The other reason my mind changed on whether or not
Rose should go to the Hall of Fame was, of course,
the advent of the ped scandal, the performance enhancing drugs
for steroids, and then the next wave of human growth hormone,
and then what I presume has been going on behind
(36:59):
the surface in baseball for a while, whatever came next. Unfortunately,
those fans who, after too long painful no these guys
are clean scandals has serious doubts that all these guys
are clean. How can we ever be sure?
Speaker 3 (37:19):
Again?
Speaker 1 (37:19):
But that's another subject. My experience with Pete Rose was
largely limited to the year nineteen eighty nine. I can
see in my mind's eye the cover of the Sports
Illustrated magazine in which the Rose scandal, which I had
been hearing about behind the scenes for more than a decade, broke.
(37:40):
I'm standing outside the Angels spring training facility, in Palm Springs, California,
doing a live shot for my television station in Los
Angeles from the parking lot of the library across the street,
and there's the sports illustrated with his picture on it.
The entirety of that year, from March of nineteen eighty
nine through August twenty fourth, nineteen eighty nine was what's
(38:03):
the latest in the Pete Rose scan. Finally, in August
it seemed to have stalled, although there was clear evidence
that they were trying to get rid of Pete Rose,
and that he might be suspended or banished or fired
as manager of the Cincinnati Reds, or something else would happen,
or he would be indicted for tax evasion or a
thousand rumors swirled. Finally, I had a couple of weeks
(38:25):
of vacation coming to me, and I went back to
New York. I was to leave for Los Angeles and
return to my job, I believe on a Friday morning,
Thursday afternoon, the story broke that Pete Rose was going
to be suspended or banished by the Commissioner of Baseball,
Bart Jimatti, actor Paul Jamatti's father. The next day, well,
(38:48):
my flight was leaving the next day, so I postponed
that and I went to that news conference, and I
have never seen anything quite like the performance of Commissioner Jamatti,
who was a baseball purist and believed in justice, and
believed in fair play, and believed more than those things,
(39:09):
he believed in baseball, and he was justice in baseball.
And he managed to end Pete Rose's baseball career, whether
Pete Rose knew that's what he was signing in the
document that he signed or not. And I was in
the crowd by sheer happenstance, sharing a crew with a
reporter from Channel two in New York, using Channel two
(39:30):
in New York's equipment for my report for Channel two
in Los Angeles, and I remember thinking as I watched
Bart Jimmatti in front of us, taking no questions but
making a speech. And he was the former president of Yale.
He could make a hell of a speech. And you
know what his son can do, Bart Jimotti standing there,
and I remember saying to the cameraman from the New
(39:51):
York station, I have never heard or seen anybody more
alive than the Commissioner of Baseball at this moment. He
died one week later on vacation a chainsmoker, and he
collapsed of a heart attack. One week later, one Friday,
Pete Rose is being banned, and the end of that saga,
(40:13):
as Jamati said that day, the story of mister Rose
is now over. Then a week later, Jamati's life was
extraordinary juxtaposition, very very sobering thing for a thirty year
old sportscaster to contemplate. In any event, My next face
(40:34):
to face experience with Pete Rose came in Cooperstown in
the year two thousand and nine. I was up there
with the broadcaster Tony Kubeck, who was going into the
Baseball Hall of Fame and his family. I had been
their favorite newscaster and a favorite sportscaster, and Tony Kubeck
had been a favorite sportscaster of mine when he did
the Baseball Game of the Week. And somehow Tony Kubeck's
(40:57):
son invited me to be an honorary member of the
family for the Hall of Fame week. And I went
up there and luxuriated in this town and upstate New York,
full of Victorian houses and what smelled like snow already coming,
and it was July. Had a great time, had a blast,
and there was Pete Rose. So I talked to him,
(41:18):
and Pete Rose told me off the record that he
was going to he had had a preliminary meeting with
the Commissioner of Baseball about what he had to do
to be reinstated, and that he'd come back as a
special instructor. There'd be all sorts of limits as to
what he could and couldn't do, but that once they
had tried this out ten years before, he had been banned,
(41:40):
but he had been named to the Baseball All Century
Team for the twentieth Century. And even though he could
not work in baseball and any players who associated with
him were subject to being fined or punished or warned,
Baseball was somehow able to bring him onto the field
at the World Series and at the All Star Game
and present him as a member of the All Century Team.
(42:02):
This was a little discordant, a little critical, and yet
it was the first step in the rehabilitation of Pete Rose.
Somewhere after the ped scandals broke and I said, well,
you know what, this is comparatively nothing what Rose did
compared to what these guys did. And then Baseball began
to accept the idea of gambling to perform its own
(42:26):
gambling adjacent services like Fantasy League Baseball run by Baseball,
providing the stats an edge ever closer to having an
official wagering sponsor of each team, which it does now.
As that moment came, it became clear that Pete Rose
was going to get back into the Baseball Hall of Fame,
(42:47):
and not because he had improved at all, not because
he had admitted that he had gambled on baseball, because
he did that rather quickly, because he could sign baseball's
for money. As long as he wrote I'm sorry, I
bet on baseball, he could get an extra twenty dollars.
There's the old joke about the rare to Pete Rose
items is the Pete Rose unautographed baseball in any event,
(43:13):
I believe. In twenty fourteen, Bob Lee and I did
a special about Pete Rose and his reinstatement and whether
or not it should happen. And it included an interview
with Pete Rose, and he was exceptional and frank, and
you could not listen to that and say, no, there's
(43:33):
no way I can let him back in. I had
already come out after years of arguing this, arguing against
my old partner Dan Patrick, who insisted Rose should be
in the Hall of Fame, arguing like we argued about
nothing else. I now suddenly jumped to the pro Pete
Rose side, And in a couple of years after that,
I'm doing an ESPN special about the reinstatement of Pete Rose,
(43:54):
and I say to him, I'm convinced. I don't think
what you did was right. I think it does not
require an eternal ban. I think they should put you
back in, but no, you can't manage it again. And
then came the story about the girl. I don't know
that he'll ever go in, but do not, as this
subject comes back to the forefront in the wake of
(44:17):
his sudden passing on Monday afternoon. Do not think that
he has been shunted aside because of the gambling. He
was shunted aside because of the gambling that was coming
to an end. He had been welcomed back, at least
to the degree that Baseball, which could have been very
easily said to Fox, No, you can't put him on
the baseball broadcasts, you can't put him on the studio shows.
(44:40):
You can't have him from center field during your World
Series telecast before and after the games themselves. You can't
do that. They could have easily said that. They never
did until that last scandal broke, and I don't know
if he ever recovers from that. And of course it
is tragic. It is somehow a tragic story, the way
(45:05):
a Shakespearean play is a tragic story, because the contrasts
between the good Pete Rose and the bad Pete Rose
looks so stark until you realize that it's the same guy,
and these are two aspects of the same guy. This
competitiveness that led him with good but not exceptional talents
to a mass more hits than anybody else in baseball history,
(45:27):
that led him to will a couple of teams into
the postseason, that allowed him to change from starting as
a second baseman, then becoming an outfielder, then becoming a
third baseman, then becoming a first baseman, each time to
improve the team that he was playing on. That will
was the same will that said I'm going to be
the greatest gambler of all time. The old joke was
(45:53):
Mickey Mantle told this story that his nickname Charlie Hustle,
which he embraced, was from an incident in a spring
training game where Mantle and Whitey Ford, his Yankee teammate,
were seated on the bench during the Cincinnati Reds New
York Yankees spring training game in March of perhaps nineteen
sixty three, and somebody hit a titanic home run far
(46:16):
into the right field stands. I mean a five hundred
foot home run that would have cleared the fence fifty
or sixty feet above the top of the outfield fence,
and they in their minds Mantle recalled Rose leaping above
the fence and coming only, you know, forty three feet
short of catching the home run. The problem is Pete
(46:40):
Rose was the second baseman then he did not play
the outfield in spring training or anywhere else until nineteen
sixty six or sixty seven. And the Charlie Hustle nickname
we know predates that. But the Charlie Hustle image is
that exactly false. Hustle, as the Saturday Night Live character
played by Gary Garrett Morris pointed out, Charlie Hustle, you
(47:03):
bet an ironic thing because that happened before we knew
about the gambling. So the Mantles story where he got
that nickname from is probably conflated with an actual event
in a World Series game, which is Saint Louis Cardinals
outfielder named Mike Shannon tried to catch Mantle's home run
that won Game three. I believe it was in the
(47:23):
nineteen sixty four World Series, landed in the upper deck,
and if you look carefully on the film, Mike Shannon,
perhaps two hundred feet below where the home run landed,
is leaping in hopes of catching the ball, which he
could not have caught even if he had been one
hundred and ninety feet tall. I believe Mantle conflated Shannon
(47:43):
and Pete Rose, so that Charlie Hustle thing was more
likely a Cincinnati Reds New York Yankees exhibition game in
which Pete Rose must have gotten a walk as a
rookie is an unknown rookie who have played the year
before in the lowest minor league rungs, and he ran
to first base, and Whitey Ford turned to Mickey Mann
and said get a load to Charlie Hussell, and Rose
(48:04):
took that and made money off of it. Pete Rose
was not a contradiction. He was one guy. He was
going to beat you. Unfortunately, like so many people for
whom that is a mantra. There are no rules. Ultimately,
they may stop themselves from doing illegal things for fear
(48:24):
of getting caught, or they may not stop themselves from
doing illegal things for fear of getting caught. Pete Rose
got caught. As a last note, I promised you that
I had found out about the Pete Rose scandals without
knowing what they could have been about. I knew there
was something wrong in my late teens. I was one
(48:45):
of the first of the baseball card collectors as a kid,
and so I was at all the primordial baseball card
conventions we called them in those days, and the traffic
was almost all in cards and to some degree autographs
and photos, but generally publicly accessible stuff magazines, score cards, yearbooks,
(49:05):
the stuff anybody could buy. Just these were the ones
that people hadn't thrown out, except there was a small
market in game worn baseball uniforms. They were prized beyond words.
I don't know that there were more than one hundred
of them in private hands in nineteen say seventy six,
And then suddenly everywhere you turned, at the card conventions
(49:29):
of nineteen seventy seven, there was a Pete Rose jersey available.
Every dealer in the New York Show in the spring
of nineteen seventy seven seemed to have an autographed, game worn,
authentic Pete Rose game used uniform. It made no sense,
and throughout his career, dating back to his rookie year,
(49:52):
which was at that point fourteen years earlier, made no sense. Well.
Of course, what was happening was Pete Rose was in
financial trouble, and we figured that out pretty quickly that
the only possible source for these uniforms was Pete Rose.
In the past, baseball uniforms had leaked out through charity events,
through teams selling extra uniforms from equipment managers, stealing them
(50:16):
and then selling them into the hobby. But Pete Roses,
we're so voluminous that they could have only come from
one source, Pete Rose. He did it for the money.
He would take his uniform off and take it home
and wear a different one the next day. There were
hundreds upon hundreds of Game Warren Pete Rose uniforms. There
may have been some point in the late seventies where
(50:38):
there were more Pete Rose Game Warn uniforms than all
the Game Warn uniforms of all the other players in
baseball history combined, so we knew in the hobby Pete
needs the money. The joke was this, and it is
the joke that I think, also in addition to the
one I already made, Pete Rose might have enjoyed. I
(50:59):
don't remember if I told him about it or not.
The joke was that the collector goes up to the
dealer in uniforms sometime in the late seventies or early
eighties and says, I'd like to buy a Pete Rose
Game Warren uniform and the dealer says great, Cincinnati, Philadelphia
(51:23):
or Montreal. And the collector is a little surprised that
he has these options Cincinnati flannel or double knit flannel,
full sleeve pinstripe or nineteen sixty three to sixty six
best style, the full sleeve pinstripe, Please okay? Home or away?
(51:55):
And the guy is now totally flamixed and says, uh home,
and the dealer says one other question for you, Yes,
what size would you like? I've done all the damage
(52:23):
I can do here. Thank you for listening. We're now
back to five episodes a week, posting nightly just after
midnight Eastern once again there is a Monday countdown. Please
send this podcast to somebody who does not yet know
that they need to be listening to it. Brian Ray
and John Phillip Shanelle, the musical directors, have Countdown Arrange,
produced and performed most of the music. Mister Chanelle handled
(52:44):
orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums.
The music was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and
pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever,
Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Oldriman theme from
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc.
Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
(53:07):
My announcer today is my friend Tony Kornheiser. Everything else,
as always, is pretty much my fault. So that's countdown
for today. Four weeks and six days until the twenty
twenty four presidential election, the one three hundred and sixty
sixth day since convicted felon drooling Jay Trump's first attempted
(53:27):
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Use the election, use the mental health system, use presidential
immunity if we have to to keep him from doing
it again while we still again. The next scheduled countdown
is tomorrow. Bull Upton says, the news requires Until then,
(53:50):
I'm Keith Olbrimman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck.
Speaker 4 (53:57):
The rules were that you got to get a fact check.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. I
did not see this coming. If JD. Vance and Trump
(00:27):
and their campaign had not been terrified of fact checking,
We're not enraged by fact checking. We're not enraged by facts.
If none of that were true, last night's vice presidential
debate would not have been headlined by Vance whining about
and yelling about and finally having his mic actually cut
(00:49):
because he was angry and yelled at the moderators over
fact checking.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Thank you, governor, and just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield,
Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who
have legal status, temporary protectives.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Well more, Thank you, senator.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
We had so much to get to.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I think it's.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Important turn out of the egonomy.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Thing, Margaret. The rules were that you got a fact check.
The rules were you guys weren't gonna fact check. We
actually saw one of the great cliches of American culture
spring to life. It was my understanding that there would
be no math. Still resonating often attributed to incumbent President
(01:33):
Gerald Ford, even believed to be one of the reasons
he lost a debate and an election to Jimmy Carter
forty eight years ago. Ford, of course never said that
it was chevy Chase portraying Ford on Saturday Night Live
on September eighteenth, nineteen seventy six. But when JD. Vance
did that last night, it was my understanding that there
(01:54):
would be no fact checking. That wasn't chevy Chase, that
wasn't bowhen Yang or anybody else portraying Vance. It was
Vance himself. And it's how he managed to lose a
debate in which Tim Walls came out of the gate
so nervous that for a while I was having a
little first debate. PTSD. Vance also lost this debate because
(02:17):
when asked about whether he would be the final voice
in the room approving an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran,
the first question of the debate, the most topical question
of the debate, he somehow managed to say, never mind
the Middle East. I'll get to that in a moment.
But first, my name is James D. Bowman. No, I'm
Jimmy Hamill, No, I'm J. D. Bantz. Well, whoever the
(02:38):
hell I am. I'm here to sell you some Amway products.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel
on Iran.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
You have two minutes, so Margot, I want to answer
the question. First of all, thanks Governor, thanks to CBS
for hosting the debate, and thanks most importantly the American
people who are watching this evening and caring enough about
this country to pay attention to this vice presidential debate.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
I want to answer the question, but.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
I want to actually give an introduction to myself a
little bit, as I recognize a lot of Americans don't
know who either one of us are. I was raised
in a working class family. My mother acquired food assistance
for periods of her life.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
My grandmother virtually everything Tim Walls said was substantial and
about policy and about facts, and virtually everything JD. Vance
said and did sounded like an infomercial. Occasionally that worked,
but he continually side eyed the camera and by extension,
the viewer, and that probably would have been the burn
(03:33):
he thought it was going to be if each knowing
glance each time he tried his version of the Sarah
pale and wink, it didn't emphasize the fact that he
was wearing eyeliner again. And my god, it is polite
to address by name the person asking you a question,
but Dvance did it so often and so phonally that
if you had Vance saying well Nora or yes Margaret
(03:56):
on your drinking bingo card, you are still unconscious. For
the first ten fifteen minutes the debate was a time
or maybe Vance was ahead. This was largely because for
that span it was entirely not a vice presidential debate.
It was a second presidential debate, but by proxy. Don't
(04:16):
get me wrong, Walls managed to do it too. He
took a dozen bites out of Trump. He pivoted on
the Iran question to how many Trump advisors insist Trump
should never be let near a crisis like this one Again,
he threw Vance's anti Trump quote against him. He said,
a nearly eighty year old Donald Trump talking about crowd
sizes is not what we need in this moment. He
(04:38):
quoted Trump's failure in Iran. He quoted Trump's dismissal of
injuries to US servicemen in Iran as headaches, a comment
that Trump made just hours earlier. Walls referenced Trump and
tweets referenced how climate change will give you more beachfront
property according to Trump. He scored by noting the bribes
Trump took from oil executives at Mari Lago, he scored
(05:01):
with Mexico paying for the wall, and especially with Trump
sinking the bipartisan border deal. Walls reminded the audience that
Vance and Trump had said, scientists don't know what they're
talking about, Economists don't know what they're talking about. Authorities
don't know what they're talking about. And Vance took debate
and insisted Trump believes in common sense, not experts. The
(05:24):
problem is that as smooth as Walls was, what he
was trying to defend ultimately was still Trump, and it
was putting lipstick on it. It was so much Vance
defending Trump, so much Vance attacking Harris. It was exhausting.
At one point, as Vance literally referred to our borders
are kamala Harris, he pointed at Tim Walls, I hate
(05:47):
to tell you, Senator, that's not Kamala Harris. But the
longer that debate went on and the more topics were
addressed and in greater depth, the more Walls warmed to
the process, and I think the more the audience warmed
to him when it stopped being a proxy fight and
started being about Vance and Walls. Vance didn't have anybody
(06:09):
to talk about anymore. Vance complained about fact checking, Walls
quoted the Bible about what we do for the least
among us, and then he offered my pro tip for
the day, My pro tip for the day. As well
as those things resonated. Walls did miss several opportunities to
bury Vance on the subject of Springfield, Ohio, including a
(06:32):
moment when Vance insisted millions of illegal immigrants were taking
over homes in Springfield, Ohio. Instead, he laid Vance skate
on that, just as certainly Walls danced and effectively, I
might add around the conflict between where he was and
where he has said or implied he was during the
Tiedenman Square uprising in China in nineteen eighty nine. Vance
(06:55):
could have crushed him then. Instead, for some reason, he
changed topics to something he had memorized. What Vance and
the Republicans will say was their victory in this debate,
and it will resonate because it's not entirely untrue, is
that Vance's primary job was to sane wash Trump for
people who are not paying attention or who are only
(07:17):
getting the sanitized versions of Trump. In the New York times,
Vance seemed perhaps wrong, but definitely reasonable. Frankly, Vance did
not seem likely to stab you, only to pick your pocket.
Noting that CBS News largely steered out of its ethical skid,
and while this was not the best of the debates,
(07:38):
it was twice as good as CNN's disaster. There is
one last point to both of their credits. Unlike Trump
in every debate he's ever done, they got two issues,
they got two guns, They got to January sixth, Vance
was wrong about all these things. But when Vance said
(07:59):
the only thing that Trump did wrong was that the
Russians bought five hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads
promoting Trump, walls picking his jaw off the floor, answered
January sixth was not Facebook ads, and he managed to
add of Mike Pence's refusal to overthrow the election on
Trump's behalf. That's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage.
Speaker 5 (08:23):
I see a candidate out there who refused and now
again and this, I'm pretty shocked by this.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
He lost the election.
Speaker 5 (08:30):
This is not a debate, It's not anything anywhere other
than in Donald Trump's world. Because look, when Mike Pence
made that decision, to certify that election. That's why Mike
Pence isn't on this stage. What I'm concerned about is
where is the firewall? With Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
On the other hand, the governor did fail to take
the priceless advice of Democratic strategist Ali Samarco, quoting all
Tim Wallas has to say tonight is I heard you're
here because the last guy got hung up and it's
over unquote. Lastly, when they addressed gun violence, Vance blamed
(09:12):
it exclusively on mental health and soft targets in schools
and insisted the answer was better door control. And that
was when Tim Walls gave the answer of the night.
Speaker 5 (09:26):
This idea of stigmatizing mental health. Just because you have
a mental health issue doesn't mean you're violent. And I
think what we end up doing is we start looking
for escapeboat. Sometimes it just is the guns. It's just
the guns.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
A couple of debate postscripts, or maybe more accurately, debate
prescripts in a story in which the cumulative IQ of
everybody involved is still in less than three digits total.
Trump went on Kelly an Conway's Fox Show and said,
of course Vance would beat Tim Walls last night because quote,
he's going up against a moron, a total moron, how
(10:01):
she picked him his unbelievable unquote. And then having heard this,
Kellyanne Conway went on Jesse Waters Fox Show and staid,
of the debate, quote, I have high expectations about J. D. Waltz. Well,
I was still trying to figure out if she meant JD.
Vance or Tim Walls or an entirely different other person
(10:22):
whose last name is Waltz, like in the last Waltz.
Kelly and Cohn Job came right back and said, quote,
the mainstream media and other Democrats did a really stupid
thing with J. D. Waltz. They tried to drown him
out in the first days after Trump picked him. So
there you have it, your twenty twenty four Republican ticket
(10:43):
per Kelly and Conway, Trump and J.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
D Waltz.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Unless she meant the actor J. D. Walsh from Two
and a Half Men or the late actor J. T.
Walsh from Nixon and Good Morning Vietnam. And the bottom
line here is it's Kelly Ann Conway. She could have
meant anything, and sadly, one of the reasons we are
in a world in which Kelly Ane Conway was not
(11:10):
laughed out of Washington in the year two thousand and
two is because the guard rails behind the guard rails
beyond the original guard rails also failed. Back to the
subject of fact checking, This was yesterday morning from Brian Stelter,
one of the last two or three media news critics
(11:33):
left alive. As the industry shrinks like a collapsing star.
He and the others are supposed to be calling out
cowardice in journalism. Instead, he turned the shrug emoji into
written form, and he needed sixty four words to do it.
Quoting facts unchecked. CBS News executives are signaling that Nora
(11:56):
O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan will not fact check flagrantly false
claims made on stage. Well, that's a filthy, flagrant falsehood.
The moderators will give the candidates the opportunity to fact
check each other in real time. CBS Senior Vice president
Claudia Milne told The New York Times, repeating what I
wrote last month. Moderators are damned if they fact check,
(12:19):
and damned if they don't. No, they aren't. No, they
aren't doing your job as a journalist describing reality to
your readers or viewers or newsletter recipients telling the truth,
calling a lie a lie up up and down down,
(12:41):
and then being threatened or abused for doing it. That
is not the same as serving as nothing more than
the debate timekeeper and the person who says we'll be
right back, and as a result, jeopardizing freedom of the
press and democracy itself. That is not damned if you do,
and damned if you don't. It's just plain old damned. Meanwhile,
(13:29):
back at the Looney Ranch, oh nothing, it's just Trump,
who's actually responsible by commission and omission for the deaths
of more than one million Americans because it is literally
insane mishandling of COVID. It's just Trump accusing the vice
president of murder and misidentifying the victim and conflating the
(13:50):
victim and the perpetrator.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
I'm outraged that she let in the savage who raped
and murdered Rachel Moran.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Kamala let her in letter in she murdered him.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
In my opinion, Kamala murdered him. It's like she did,
just like she had a gun in her hand.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Wait, he said him, he said, Kamala murdered him. And
Kamala Harris let her in the victim was a woman,
U syphilitic menace. Steal yourself for more of this. It
is just the beginning. I know you heard this quote yesterday.
We should all memorize it. Yale historian Tim Snyder. Trump
(14:29):
is in the classic dictatorial position. He needs to die
in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison.
This means that he will do whatever he can to
gain power, and once in power, will do all that
he can do to never let it go. This is
a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else. It is
entirely inconsistent with democracy. Please learn it. By the beginning
(14:54):
of the new week, Trump continued yesterday to pretend he
did something to alleviate post Helene distress in the South.
There were actually stories reading he was first to visit
the damage in person, and to note that he launched
a gofund me that had raised more than one million dollars.
Left out of each of these stories, though, the reality
(15:17):
that he claims to be a multi billionaire. He rages
when contradicted on this point, and he never stops boasting
about how much money he has, and instead of going
to George Jordan, North Carolina or anywhere else and giving
away just some of his own money. He launched a
go fund me to give away other people's money and
(15:38):
take credit for it. Oh and guess what the gofund me.
He didn't donate to it either. As to the origin
of some of Trump's billions, hundreds of millions, some millions,
surprising news from Senate Democrats, they did something about the
(15:59):
egypt bribe scandal. The majority on the Judiciary Committee has
now written to the watchdog the DOJ, the Inspector General,
asking him to investigate whether Trump appointees quote interfered with
and ultimately blocked the criminal probe into the findings of
our intelligence agencies that the Egyptian government gave or sought
to give Trump ten million dollars to boost his White
(16:22):
House campaign eight years ago. This is good, boys, but
you know you can also hold hearings. And one more
Trump note, A group called the Crooked and Obscene Project
has unveiled a giant marionette version of Dementia J. Trump.
(16:42):
It will begin its tour of the United States on
Apex Harbor Lane in Las Vegas. It is there right now,
darkening the sky. They say he's naked, made out of
rebar covered with foam and weighs approximately six thousand pounds
(17:04):
eight that's a marionette. Based on that description, that sounds
like him. And because I want you to be able
to enjoy my unique, weird, unearthly position on the fringes
(17:28):
of this next story as much frankly as I am,
CNN reports. The latest in the RFK Junior Olivia Newsy
story is she has sued her former fiance, Ryan Lizza
of Politico, and in the filing, she says that the
(17:49):
source of the leaks that got her suspended by New
York Magazine for an undisclosed personal relationship with the pervioust
of the Kennedys was Ryan of Politico. CNN quotes Livy
in the suit filed this week as claiming that Liza
quote explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me
(18:13):
to destroy my life, career and reputation, a threat he
has since carried out. CNN flesh this out a bit,
you should excuse the expression. Quoting its report, Newsy said
she believes Liza began his alleged harassment at the beginning
of July as a way to black mail her back
into a relationship with him and punish her when she
(18:36):
wouldn't acquiesce. She said. By the next month, Liza had
stolen a personal electronic device from her was hacking her devices,
then anonymously shopping information about her to the media. Some
of the information may have been doctored to hurt her more,
Newsy alleged, and she believes Liza impersonated an anonymous campaign
(18:58):
operative to give a political campaign information that would hurt
her further. According to the court recads, Newsy was granted
a temporary no contact order against Liza. The judge also
signed off CNN reports on her request to have police
accompany her when she attempts to get her possessions back
(19:22):
from Liza. The couple had lived together within the last year.
The court filing said, they are going to be cops.
Did you say, I'm sorry, I have to go and
I have to run to make sure I've got enough
popcorn for the rest of this I will add only
(19:46):
this detail to that headline, and the headline would be
Newsy Doozy. Court gets up in Liza's Bizza over rfk's Riz.
When Olivia and I lived together in New York and
she still worked for The Daily Beast, she frequently trapped
to DC on stories, and whenever she came back, she'd
(20:08):
give me a big hug and say she was sorry
for taking me for granted, because there was this creepy
guy who stalked her every time she went to Washington.
Do you know him? She'd ask? His name is Ryan?
Liza shrug emoji? Also of interest here, Well, nothing, nothing
(20:34):
compared to that obviously. Still, Pete Rose died Monday. People
seem to think he's not in the Baseball Hall of
Fame because he gambled on baseball while a player and
while a manager, and while a player manager. Actually, they
were just about to get beyond that, what with all
the betting in baseball now seven years ago. They were
(20:56):
about to let him in when that whole other thing
came up, the whole other thing everybody has forgotten about,
and almost no but he has mentioned since Pete Rose
died the other thing where he admitted in the court
documents that in the seventies, when he was married to
his first wife, he also had a mistress and the
mistress was fifteen years old. That's next. This is countdown.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
This is countdown with Keith Olberman, my crazy friend. There's
(21:47):
a reason.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
The announcer today is Tony Kornheiser of ESPN, formerly of
The Washington Post, still ahead of us on this edition
of Countdown the Death of Pete Rose. That's not the
reason I used to campaign against putting Pete Rose in
Baseball's Hall of Fame. Then I campaigned in favor of
putting him in Baseball's Hall of Fame. And then in
twoenty seventeen, the little other thing happened. Like I said,
(22:08):
that's when I started campaigning again for never putting him
in Baseball's Hall of Fame. You may recall in nineteen
eighty nine he'd been banned from baseball, and in twenty
seventeen Pete Rose sued the investigator whose work led up
to that banishment, and in discovery up popped this sworn
deposition from a woman who, to quote the Hollywood Reporter,
alleges that Rose had a relationship with her for several years,
(22:31):
beginning before she turned sixteen. Rose acknowledged in court documents
that he had sex with the woman, but thought she
was sixteen at the time. When you admit to sex
with a child, and your defense was, I thought she
was sixteen. You'd done That's why he's not in the
Hall of Fame and will never be in the Hall
(22:53):
of fame. All this in depth in things I promised
not to tell coming up first, there are still more
new idiots to talk about. A rollicking addition of the
daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and Dunning Kruger
effects better some meon's who constitute today's worst persons in
the world. And this is why Tony Kornheiser, formerly of
The Washington Post, is the announcer today the bronze worse
(23:16):
the WNBA Players Association Terry Carmichael Jackson President. One player
poked another player in the eye during a game. A
reporter from USA Today asked the poker politely and specifically
if it was deliberate or an accident. The player, to
her credit, did not get angry, did not go all snark,
but said hurting another player would never be part of
(23:38):
her game. She was just reaching for the ball. The
player and the reporter were both pros about it. There
were no angry words, there were no complaints. But the
injured player who got the finger in the eye was
the rookie who put the WNBA on the map this year.
Caitlin Clark, and the reporter was Christine Brennan, a fierce
advocate for women's sports, such a veteran that when she
(24:01):
joined The Washington Post alongside Tony Kornheiser, she had to
respond not just accusations, but assumptions that she had gotten
the job because she was sleeping with a Washington TV
sportscaster and for reasons yet to be explained. The WNBA
Players Association decided to respond to the extreme professionalism of
(24:24):
Chris Brennan and the player who is such a pro
I'm leaving her name out of this. Responded to this
by slandering Christine Brennan, quoting a message on behalf of
the one hundred and forty four that would be the
players in the union to unprofessional members of the media
like Christine Brennan, you are not fooling anyone. That so
(24:45):
called interview in the name of journalism was a blatant
attempt to bait a professional athlete into participating in a
narrative that is false and designed to fuel racist, homophobic,
and misogynistic vitriol on social media. You cannot hide behind
your tenure instead of demonstrating the cornerstones of journalism, ethic
like integrity, objectivity, and a fundamental commitment to truth. You
(25:08):
have chosen to be indecent and downright insincere. You have
abused your privileges and do not deserve the credentials issued
to you. This is the statement of the Players Union,
and you certainly are not entitled to any interviews with
the members of this union or any other athlete in sport.
Those credentials mean that you can ask anything, but they
also mean that you know the difference between what you
(25:30):
should and should not. We see you. Our relationship with
the media is a delicate one, and we will continue
to strengthen because the media is essential in growing the game.
No one knows that better than we do. But the
players are entitled to better. They are entitled to professionalism.
We call on USA Today Network to review its principles
(25:52):
of ethical conduct for newsrooms and address what we believe
is a violation of several core principles, including seeking and
reporting the truth. USA Today's Sports should explain why a
reporter with Klee bias and ulterior motives was assigned to
cover the league. We also urged the league to review
its policies and take measures to prevent such issues protecting
(26:15):
the integrity of the game at its players. Terry Carmichael Jackson,
Executive Director WNBPA, Yes, congratulations, we may have reached actual
equality in sports where the women athletes and their organizations
can be as big a set of jerks and idiots
and morons as male athletes. Perhaps we've even gone past
(26:38):
equality to women being in the lead in these areas
because they just trashed a woman who a mere thirty
years ago was being thrown out of sports locker rooms
because she was a woman, a woman who is one
of the people, without whom the only professional opportunities for
American women basketball stars in this country. The only opportunities
(26:59):
would not be in this country. They would be in
Russia still, or Europe or the Canary Islands. The WNBA
and its Players Association must immediately apologize to Christine Brennan
and WNBAPA President Terry Carmichael Jackson must resign or be fired.
She just made an asshole out of herself and every
(27:22):
one of her players. She's just set back her sport
and the gains it has made in the last few years.
If this is how the WNBPA is going to treat
its most loyal most honored reporters. Frankly, all news organizations
should boycott the WNBA, not even report the goddamn scores,
(27:42):
and networks like ESPN that Carrie WNBA games should refuse
to do so until the apology is made. The WNBA is,
by doing a press release like this, fabricating an environment
unsafe for media with exactly the same kind of deliberate
targeting of reporters done by the likes of Donald fing Trump,
(28:04):
and its history tells us that when a player's union
attacks the media, its next target will be the fans
it doesn't like. In other words, you and I are next.
Chris Brennan might be on the Mount Rushmore of the
builders of women's sports in this country, Terry Carmichael Jackson,
executive director of the WNBPA, is a bully and a
(28:27):
lawyer the runner up Leon, as Trump has called him.
I'd love to know what's wrong with Elon Musk based
on those profiles. My guest is he stoned. Look, he's
a fascist, he's a nut job, he's unstable, and as
somebody noted, all the spy movies of the sixties revolve
around a crazy billionaire who has the rockets and all
(28:48):
the communications systems and decides to take over the world. No,
I expect you to die. Mister bond Elmo's latest problem
is though, as he tries to take over the world,
he's making an extraordinary number of really stupid mistakes. He
has now posted one of these, right winger, I'm recording
this in my car idiot videos, and he wrote with it,
(29:12):
as this video describes, Trump supports women's rights far more
than Kabala. The video shows a young woman with dead
eyes and badly dyed hair who rambles on about how
Kamala Harris has already been president? Is that true? Did
I miss something? Am I coming out of a coma?
Was she president already? She wasn't okay? And that Trump
(29:33):
quote was already president? How many rights did you lose?
I don't mean to tell you your business, ladies, not after
that opening part of this segment, but a lot of them. Actually,
a lot of rights have already been lost. The narrator
is clearly unaware of the repeal of Roe v. Wade
or the Trump planned to institute abortion bands wherever he
(29:54):
can and punish the states where he can't. Leon put
this out without really listening to it. Didn't he because
Zempics but the worst our winner, Rob Schneider, idiot formerly
on Saturday Night Live, and apparently he was funny during
the audition. The basketball great to Kembe Mutumbo has died
(30:18):
after a long and terrible fight against brain cancer. And
Rob Schneider, who has gone over there to the fascist
Nicket night world where they'll all pretend your career isn't
over provided you support Trump, decided he had to say
something about it. Schneider posted a video of the late
beloved hoopstar mister Matumbo doing a video from Christmas of
(30:41):
twenty twenty one, urging people to get the COVID shot
so they could all get together, and he wrote above
it rest in peace. I'm sure this is just another coincidence,
but I took a pass on the JAB and I'm
not going to let anyone I know and who will
listen get it either. Well, there's this much to say
about Rob Schneider. The one advantage he has is he
(31:03):
never has to face the prospect of what Kembe Mtumbo
had to face in brain cancer. Rob as they say,
no pain, no gain, but no brain, no pain. Schneider
two days worst person in the Land to the number
(31:35):
one story on the countdown, and as promised yesterday, some
thoughts on the passing of Pete Rose, and I wanted
to take extra time to think about it because my
thoughts about Pete Rose are all over the map, and
through the history of my life, they are even further
all over the map. For twenty years I campaigned against
(31:56):
Pete Rose being in Baseball's Hall of Fame, and just
after I had an epiphany that said, no, I think
he should be in. Just after that came the scandal
that proved that he had had an ongoing sexual relationship
with an underage girl, and the Hall of Fame question
(32:17):
became academic. I will say that this issue of Pete
Rose and gambling, and Pete Rose and the all time
hit record in baseball, the man who made more base
hits than anybody else, the man who round out every
ground ball and every flyball and every walk. The Pete
Rose story really is summarized by the first thought I
(32:39):
had when the news was announced Monday evening that he
had died sometime during the day Monday. My thought was,
what did he have a bet down on that Mets
Braves game and it killed him? I knew Pete Rose
enough to know that he would have appreciated that joke.
He would not have appreciated the fact that he had
died without being put into the Baseball Hall of Fame,
(33:00):
because he said many times that he thought they were
waiting for him to die before they would put him in.
I don't know if he ever will go in. That
issue of the underage well, what it was child rape
will never go away. But that's why he's not in
the Hall of Fame. I believe everything was turning for
(33:23):
Pete Rose twy ten to twenty fifteen. He had gotten
back into baseball. He was a commentator on Fox Sports,
and particularly given the nature of Fox Sports and the
nature of the decline in baseball commentary, especially on the
national level, he was doing very well. And then came
the story in twenty seventeen, and he had not been
(33:43):
heard from since. It's ironic that baseball and gambling are
now in bed together so frequently, so visibly, so positively,
that what Pete Rose did while he managed and before
that played for the Cincinnati Reds is seen almost as
a series of misdemeanors. It's a little bit more than that.
(34:07):
Pete Rose and let me explain this as briefly and
not intricately as possible. Pete Rose gambled on some Cincinnati
Reds baseball games while he was the manager of the
team and in fact player and manager of the team,
but he did not gamble on other Cincinnati Reds games.
He was the first one to point out, even after
(34:27):
all of the dirt about the gambling came out, that
he never bet against his own team. That's the cardinal
sin in sports. If you bet against your own team,
why then you may have gone out there and tried
to lose, in which case you are done. That's the
whole premise of the nineteen nineteen World Series and the
eight great players led by Shuelas Joe Jackson, who were
(34:47):
never permitted to play again once their confessions and their
trial ended the year after the nineteen nineteen World Series.
Did That's not what Pete Rose was accused of, But
in a way he did the passive aggressive version of that.
Because if you are the manager of a baseball team
and you are placing bat that's in thousands of dollars
in amounts on some of the games. What about the
(35:10):
games you chose not to bet on? Did you manage
them differently, And after all, it is the manager who
decides which pitcher is starting the game, which pitcher is
coming in in the sixth inning, the game is five
to two, your team is losing. Are you using your
best relief pitcher in the seventh inning because you have
(35:31):
a bet on the game, or are you saving him
till tomorrow when you will have a bet on the game.
That was the crux for me of why I could
never support Pete Rose going into Baseball's Hall of Fame.
As much as my experience with him personally was similar
to what most people's was, he was very charming, he
was very likable, and certainly you could talk about the nuances,
(35:54):
subtleties and history of the game with Pete Rose as
you could with few other players. He didn't just know
everybody from his own era. He knew everybody who'd ever
played Major League baseball, at least seemingly. He knew the
details of the life of Ty Cobb, the man who
he supplanted as the all time leader in hits. He
knew about nineteenth century players, he knew about the original
(36:17):
Cincinnati Red Stockings of eighteen sixty nine, and he was
always fascinating and particularly if you were willing to pay him.
He was always good for an anecdote and autograph a
piece of memorabilia, which I'll circle back to in a moment,
because when I was a teenager, I knew something was
(36:37):
wrong with Pete Rose because of that issue of memorabilia.
The other reason my mind changed on whether or not
Rose should go to the Hall of Fame was, of course,
the advent of the ped scandal, the performance enhancing drugs
for steroids, and then the next wave of human growth hormone,
and then what I presume has been going on behind
(36:59):
the surface in baseball for a while, whatever came next. Unfortunately,
those fans who, after too long painful no these guys
are clean scandals has serious doubts that all these guys
are clean. How can we ever be sure?
Speaker 3 (37:19):
Again?
Speaker 1 (37:19):
But that's another subject. My experience with Pete Rose was
largely limited to the year nineteen eighty nine. I can
see in my mind's eye the cover of the Sports
Illustrated magazine in which the Rose scandal, which I had
been hearing about behind the scenes for more than a decade, broke.
(37:40):
I'm standing outside the Angels spring training facility, in Palm Springs, California,
doing a live shot for my television station in Los
Angeles from the parking lot of the library across the street,
and there's the sports illustrated with his picture on it.
The entirety of that year, from March of nineteen eighty
nine through August twenty fourth, nineteen eighty nine was what's
(38:03):
the latest in the Pete Rose scan. Finally, in August
it seemed to have stalled, although there was clear evidence
that they were trying to get rid of Pete Rose,
and that he might be suspended or banished or fired
as manager of the Cincinnati Reds, or something else would happen,
or he would be indicted for tax evasion or a
thousand rumors swirled. Finally, I had a couple of weeks
(38:25):
of vacation coming to me, and I went back to
New York. I was to leave for Los Angeles and
return to my job, I believe on a Friday morning,
Thursday afternoon, the story broke that Pete Rose was going
to be suspended or banished by the Commissioner of Baseball,
Bart Jimatti, actor Paul Jamatti's father. The next day, well,
(38:48):
my flight was leaving the next day, so I postponed
that and I went to that news conference, and I
have never seen anything quite like the performance of Commissioner Jamatti,
who was a baseball purist and believed in justice, and
believed in fair play, and believed more than those things,
(39:09):
he believed in baseball, and he was justice in baseball.
And he managed to end Pete Rose's baseball career, whether
Pete Rose knew that's what he was signing in the
document that he signed or not. And I was in
the crowd by sheer happenstance, sharing a crew with a
reporter from Channel two in New York, using Channel two
(39:30):
in New York's equipment for my report for Channel two
in Los Angeles, and I remember thinking as I watched
Bart Jimmatti in front of us, taking no questions but
making a speech. And he was the former president of Yale.
He could make a hell of a speech. And you
know what his son can do, Bart Jimotti standing there,
and I remember saying to the cameraman from the New
(39:51):
York station, I have never heard or seen anybody more
alive than the Commissioner of Baseball at this moment. He
died one week later on vacation a chainsmoker, and he
collapsed of a heart attack. One week later, one Friday,
Pete Rose is being banned, and the end of that saga,
(40:13):
as Jamati said that day, the story of mister Rose
is now over. Then a week later, Jamati's life was
extraordinary juxtaposition, very very sobering thing for a thirty year
old sportscaster to contemplate. In any event, My next face
(40:34):
to face experience with Pete Rose came in Cooperstown in
the year two thousand and nine. I was up there
with the broadcaster Tony Kubeck, who was going into the
Baseball Hall of Fame and his family. I had been
their favorite newscaster and a favorite sportscaster, and Tony Kubeck
had been a favorite sportscaster of mine when he did
the Baseball Game of the Week. And somehow Tony Kubeck's
(40:57):
son invited me to be an honorary member of the
family for the Hall of Fame week. And I went
up there and luxuriated in this town and upstate New York,
full of Victorian houses and what smelled like snow already coming,
and it was July. Had a great time, had a blast,
and there was Pete Rose. So I talked to him,
(41:18):
and Pete Rose told me off the record that he
was going to he had had a preliminary meeting with
the Commissioner of Baseball about what he had to do
to be reinstated, and that he'd come back as a
special instructor. There'd be all sorts of limits as to
what he could and couldn't do, but that once they
had tried this out ten years before, he had been banned,
(41:40):
but he had been named to the Baseball All Century
Team for the twentieth Century. And even though he could
not work in baseball and any players who associated with
him were subject to being fined or punished or warned,
Baseball was somehow able to bring him onto the field
at the World Series and at the All Star Game
and present him as a member of the All Century Team.
(42:02):
This was a little discordant, a little critical, and yet
it was the first step in the rehabilitation of Pete Rose.
Somewhere after the ped scandals broke and I said, well,
you know what, this is comparatively nothing what Rose did
compared to what these guys did. And then Baseball began
to accept the idea of gambling to perform its own
(42:26):
gambling adjacent services like Fantasy League Baseball run by Baseball,
providing the stats an edge ever closer to having an
official wagering sponsor of each team, which it does now.
As that moment came, it became clear that Pete Rose
was going to get back into the Baseball Hall of Fame,
(42:47):
and not because he had improved at all, not because
he had admitted that he had gambled on baseball, because
he did that rather quickly, because he could sign baseball's
for money. As long as he wrote I'm sorry, I
bet on baseball, he could get an extra twenty dollars.
There's the old joke about the rare to Pete Rose
items is the Pete Rose unautographed baseball in any event,
(43:13):
I believe. In twenty fourteen, Bob Lee and I did
a special about Pete Rose and his reinstatement and whether
or not it should happen. And it included an interview
with Pete Rose, and he was exceptional and frank, and
you could not listen to that and say, no, there's
(43:33):
no way I can let him back in. I had
already come out after years of arguing this, arguing against
my old partner Dan Patrick, who insisted Rose should be
in the Hall of Fame, arguing like we argued about
nothing else. I now suddenly jumped to the pro Pete
Rose side, And in a couple of years after that,
I'm doing an ESPN special about the reinstatement of Pete Rose,
(43:54):
and I say to him, I'm convinced. I don't think
what you did was right. I think it does not
require an eternal ban. I think they should put you
back in, but no, you can't manage it again. And
then came the story about the girl. I don't know
that he'll ever go in, but do not, as this
subject comes back to the forefront in the wake of
(44:17):
his sudden passing on Monday afternoon. Do not think that
he has been shunted aside because of the gambling. He
was shunted aside because of the gambling that was coming
to an end. He had been welcomed back, at least
to the degree that Baseball, which could have been very
easily said to Fox, No, you can't put him on
the baseball broadcasts, you can't put him on the studio shows.
(44:40):
You can't have him from center field during your World
Series telecast before and after the games themselves. You can't
do that. They could have easily said that. They never
did until that last scandal broke, and I don't know
if he ever recovers from that. And of course it
is tragic. It is somehow a tragic story, the way
(45:05):
a Shakespearean play is a tragic story, because the contrasts
between the good Pete Rose and the bad Pete Rose
looks so stark until you realize that it's the same guy,
and these are two aspects of the same guy. This
competitiveness that led him with good but not exceptional talents
to a mass more hits than anybody else in baseball history,
(45:27):
that led him to will a couple of teams into
the postseason, that allowed him to change from starting as
a second baseman, then becoming an outfielder, then becoming a
third baseman, then becoming a first baseman, each time to
improve the team that he was playing on. That will
was the same will that said I'm going to be
the greatest gambler of all time. The old joke was
(45:53):
Mickey Mantle told this story that his nickname Charlie Hustle,
which he embraced, was from an incident in a spring
training game where Mantle and Whitey Ford, his Yankee teammate,
were seated on the bench during the Cincinnati Reds New
York Yankees spring training game in March of perhaps nineteen
sixty three, and somebody hit a titanic home run far
(46:16):
into the right field stands. I mean a five hundred
foot home run that would have cleared the fence fifty
or sixty feet above the top of the outfield fence,
and they in their minds Mantle recalled Rose leaping above
the fence and coming only, you know, forty three feet
short of catching the home run. The problem is Pete
(46:40):
Rose was the second baseman then he did not play
the outfield in spring training or anywhere else until nineteen
sixty six or sixty seven. And the Charlie Hustle nickname
we know predates that. But the Charlie Hustle image is
that exactly false. Hustle, as the Saturday Night Live character
played by Gary Garrett Morris pointed out, Charlie Hustle, you
(47:03):
bet an ironic thing because that happened before we knew
about the gambling. So the Mantles story where he got
that nickname from is probably conflated with an actual event
in a World Series game, which is Saint Louis Cardinals
outfielder named Mike Shannon tried to catch Mantle's home run
that won Game three. I believe it was in the
(47:23):
nineteen sixty four World Series, landed in the upper deck,
and if you look carefully on the film, Mike Shannon,
perhaps two hundred feet below where the home run landed,
is leaping in hopes of catching the ball, which he
could not have caught even if he had been one
hundred and ninety feet tall. I believe Mantle conflated Shannon
(47:43):
and Pete Rose, so that Charlie Hustle thing was more
likely a Cincinnati Reds New York Yankees exhibition game in
which Pete Rose must have gotten a walk as a
rookie is an unknown rookie who have played the year
before in the lowest minor league rungs, and he ran
to first base, and Whitey Ford turned to Mickey Mann
and said get a load to Charlie Hussell, and Rose
(48:04):
took that and made money off of it. Pete Rose
was not a contradiction. He was one guy. He was
going to beat you. Unfortunately, like so many people for
whom that is a mantra. There are no rules. Ultimately,
they may stop themselves from doing illegal things for fear
(48:24):
of getting caught, or they may not stop themselves from
doing illegal things for fear of getting caught. Pete Rose
got caught. As a last note, I promised you that
I had found out about the Pete Rose scandals without
knowing what they could have been about. I knew there
was something wrong in my late teens. I was one
(48:45):
of the first of the baseball card collectors as a kid,
and so I was at all the primordial baseball card
conventions we called them in those days, and the traffic
was almost all in cards and to some degree autographs
and photos, but generally publicly accessible stuff magazines, score cards, yearbooks,
(49:05):
the stuff anybody could buy. Just these were the ones
that people hadn't thrown out, except there was a small
market in game worn baseball uniforms. They were prized beyond words.
I don't know that there were more than one hundred
of them in private hands in nineteen say seventy six,
And then suddenly everywhere you turned, at the card conventions
(49:29):
of nineteen seventy seven, there was a Pete Rose jersey available.
Every dealer in the New York Show in the spring
of nineteen seventy seven seemed to have an autographed, game worn,
authentic Pete Rose game used uniform. It made no sense,
and throughout his career, dating back to his rookie year,
(49:52):
which was at that point fourteen years earlier, made no sense. Well.
Of course, what was happening was Pete Rose was in
financial trouble, and we figured that out pretty quickly that
the only possible source for these uniforms was Pete Rose.
In the past, baseball uniforms had leaked out through charity events,
through teams selling extra uniforms from equipment managers, stealing them
(50:16):
and then selling them into the hobby. But Pete Roses,
we're so voluminous that they could have only come from
one source, Pete Rose. He did it for the money.
He would take his uniform off and take it home
and wear a different one the next day. There were
hundreds upon hundreds of Game Warren Pete Rose uniforms. There
may have been some point in the late seventies where
(50:38):
there were more Pete Rose Game Warn uniforms than all
the Game Warn uniforms of all the other players in
baseball history combined, so we knew in the hobby Pete
needs the money. The joke was this, and it is
the joke that I think, also in addition to the
one I already made, Pete Rose might have enjoyed. I
(50:59):
don't remember if I told him about it or not.
The joke was that the collector goes up to the
dealer in uniforms sometime in the late seventies or early
eighties and says, I'd like to buy a Pete Rose
Game Warren uniform and the dealer says great, Cincinnati, Philadelphia
(51:23):
or Montreal. And the collector is a little surprised that
he has these options Cincinnati flannel or double knit flannel,
full sleeve pinstripe or nineteen sixty three to sixty six
best style, the full sleeve pinstripe, Please okay? Home or away?
(51:55):
And the guy is now totally flamixed and says, uh home,
and the dealer says one other question for you, Yes,
what size would you like? I've done all the damage
(52:23):
I can do here. Thank you for listening. We're now
back to five episodes a week, posting nightly just after
midnight Eastern once again there is a Monday countdown. Please
send this podcast to somebody who does not yet know
that they need to be listening to it. Brian Ray
and John Phillip Shanelle, the musical directors, have Countdown Arrange,
produced and performed most of the music. Mister Chanelle handled
(52:44):
orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums.
The music was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and
pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever,
Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Oldriman theme from
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc.
Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
(53:07):
My announcer today is my friend Tony Kornheiser. Everything else,
as always, is pretty much my fault. So that's countdown
for today. Four weeks and six days until the twenty
twenty four presidential election, the one three hundred and sixty
sixth day since convicted felon drooling Jay Trump's first attempted
(53:27):
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Use the election, use the mental health system, use presidential
immunity if we have to to keep him from doing
it again while we still again. The next scheduled countdown
is tomorrow. Bull Upton says, the news requires Until then,
(53:50):
I'm Keith Olbrimman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck.
Speaker 4 (53:57):
The rules were that you got to get a fact check.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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Host
Keith Olbermann
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