November 22, 2022 • 40 mins
EPISODE 81: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Tucker Carlson, who has spent months conflating LGBTQ issues with "sex crimes" and "castrating children" and two months ago demanded his viewers not "put up with this, for one second, no matter what the law says," last night insisted stochastic terrorism is impossible and no one could be indoctrinated by his or others' words while repeating that gay and trans people and doctors and teachers were indoctrinating children and then throwing to a commercial for Golden Corral because OF COURSE things said on television can't influence you to do ANYTHING. (8:49) And the right wing continues its attempt to get others to act violently: GOP presidential wannabe Mike Pompeo insists "The most dangerous person in the world is (American Federation of Teachers leader) Randi Weingarten" because of "the filth they're teaching our kids."
B-Block (15:23) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Cottage and Sheff (16:36) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Comer Scandal-latest. Bob Iger returns; I will repeat the best advice I've ever gotten in my life, which Iger gave me in March 1979! (20:16) IN SPORTS: US "loses" World Cup opener 1-1; Iran's brave players win the day while the cowardly captains of Belgium, Denmark, England, Germany, The Netherlands, and Wales lose it. The new baseball Hall of Fame ballot is out and once again the top new candidate will be excluded because of a cheating scandal (24:03) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: 32 paragraphs of Trump Special Counsel/GOP BS Biden Investigations bothsidesism from CNN, competing with Cesar "Crisis of Confidence" Conde of NBC News and ex-Press Secretary Kayleigh "I Dunno How To Say This Name" McEnany for the dishonors.
C-Block (28:53) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL. It is 59 years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and I may be the youngest person you know with a distinct memory of that terrible day and the days that followed. From the adults crying to the cancellation of all the cartoons to the muted Thanksgiving Day Parade, it made its impression on me, two months shy of my fifth birthday.
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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 I Heart Radio,
having spent weeks and months falsely defining countless lgbt Q
(00:29):
issues as sex crimes against children. Tucker Carlson began his
Fox News program last night with a pious, almost serious,
borderline concerned mention of the mass shooting at Club Q
in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Saturday night on Sunday morning, and
he said, quote, violence and cruelty should always horrify us.
(00:52):
That is what Tucker Carlson said last night. On the
night of September nine, however, Tucker Carlson told his viewers
to fight back against the l g b t Q community.
He invoked together drag shows and transgendering and the castration
of children, and he said, quote, no parents should put
(01:12):
up with this for one second, no matter what the
law says. Your duty, your moral duty, is to defend
your children, unquote, no matter what the law says. This
was only the starkest of his attempts to instigate violence
against gays and transgenders, and doctors and schools and teachers,
the ones he claims are perpetrators of sex crimes. Only
(01:35):
the starkest of hundreds of such slanderous commentaries because he
is trying to attract an audience of conspiracy theorists whose bleak,
distorted world leads them to believe Fox News and to
believe in cabals, of cannibals and pedophiles, because if they
watch his show, he makes more money. And Tucker Carlson
(02:00):
has never spent a moment of his life being concerned
about actual victims of child abuse, or of any of
the kind of abuse, or if any victims were indeed
of anything or anyone except him and how much money
he can make. Last night, Tucker Carlson identified the real
victims of Colorado Springs himself and his viewers. He said
they were all under attacked by those quote who have
(02:22):
a deeply unhealthy fixation on the sexuality of children, which
might better describe somebody like Tucker Carlson who goes on
national television and fixates at least once every week about
the sexuality of children. Carlson dismissed the assertion that he
contributed in any way, starcastically, or otherwise to the shootings
(02:43):
in Colorado Springs and the other assaults on the LGBTQ community,
and he said it was an excuse to defend that
quote unhealthy fixation on the sexuality of children, which every
time Carlson says it, and he says it a lot,
sounds more and more like a disturbing admission, and suggests
the authority should be investigating Tucker Carlson. The premise, of course,
(03:06):
is that a television program like Carlson's, which Carlson and
his employers, a company called News Corp. As dangerous to
this country's survival as any terrorist organization, have defended in
court by saying, nobody should really believe that what Carlson
is saying on that show is actually true. The premise
(03:27):
of all of the Tucker Carlson's throughout history is that
they can't be guilty of indoctrinating people to believe that
every LGBTQ person or ally, or doctor or teacher is
a quote groomer. They can't be influencing people in that way,
as if by remote control to shoot up gay bars
in Colorado, because television can have that kind of influence
(03:48):
on people. This is while they are telling you that
drag queens and teachers and transgendered people, they they are
the ones who are able to indoctrinate people remotely. Television can't,
Tucker Carlson can't. A man dressed as Britney Spears can
indoctrinate children into altering gender. But Tucker Carlson telling the
(04:12):
people who watch his show, perhaps a total of half
a billion times a year, that dressing up as Britney
Spears is a sex crime, he can't indoctrinate anybody. Television
can't make people do things, and that's why Tucker Carlson's
ravings are interrupted by commercials from Golden Corral and Bass
(04:33):
Pro shops and the telecaster of the Soccer World Cup.
Because television can't make people do things. Maybe Tucker Carlson
believes that, maybe that is why he doubled down on
his self martyring victimhood and his attack on the LGBTQ
community while they are still cleaning up the carnage at
(04:54):
Club Q. And somebody, somebody out there is planning to
respond to this intentional hysteria in this nation by attacking
the next gay or transvestite or transgend entered person he sees.
And where's that next person easiest to find? If not
at a public club or parade or other events. I
worked with Tucker Carlson. To my knowledge, he believes in nothing.
(05:18):
He has no principles, no scruples, no beliefs, no red line,
no morals except his desire for money and revenge. He
was the mainstream Republican willing to share the stage with
liberals on Crossfire on CNN, and got fired. So then
(05:38):
he became the reasonable face of deliberate conservatism on MSNBC
and got fired. So then he was the intellectual far
right contributor on Fox News and got nowhere. So then
he turned into a polished version of a q and
on chat room, selling Trump and replacement theory and transphobia,
insisting to his audience that no parents should put up
(06:00):
with this for one second, no matter what the law says.
And he got his own at Lee show at eight
pm every night and the top ratings in cable news.
No parents should put up with this for one second,
no matter what the law says. That is not his creed,
that is his brand. He is worse than the creature
who shot up the club in Colorado. Because Tucker Carlson
(06:22):
may or may not believe a single word he says.
He only believes in those words ability to make him money,
he is a whore, God damn him to hell, and
would that it were just Tucker Carlson. But it's not.
(06:42):
Whenever there is a mass shooting and one of us says,
but guns, the far right always responds, Oh, it's too soon,
or how dare you politicize death and grief? So thoughts
and prayers. But if you will notice, after a shooting
with a clearly defined hate basis, like in Colorado Springs,
those on the right don't even slow down or say
(07:03):
it's too soon to I'm back in spew more stochastic
terrorism into the Swiss cheese minds of their viewers and
supporters sometimes though they change it up a little bit.
In the aftermath of the shooting, an interview appeared at
the news site Semaphore with Mike Pompeo, former Defense secretary,
former Secretary of State under Trump. Hard to believe, but
(07:26):
it really happened. They asked Pompeo to identify the central
issues that any Republican presidential candidate should run on in
he's trying to be that candidate, and he answered, quote,
making sure we don't teach our kids crap in schools,
which we are at the center of doing. Pompeo did
(07:48):
not specify the crap on the right. Generally, the crap
includes anything positive about minorities, especially lgbt Q, or anything
negative about white Americans. Quoting Pompeo again, I get asked,
who's the most dangerous person in the world. Is it
Chairman Kim Jong Oon? Is it Sijan Pang? The most
(08:11):
dangerous person in the world is Randy wine Garden. It's
not a close call. If you ask who's the most
likely to take this republic down, it would be the teachers,
unions and the filth they're teaching our kids. End quote. Firstly,
(08:31):
that is as dumb a thing as any human being
over the age of six could say to almost anybody.
It is literally by itself disqualifying for public office. And
yet this baboon Pompeo is also the clown who once
yelled at a reporter do you think Americans care about Ukraine?
(08:53):
He also insisted there would be a smooth transition in
November to a second Trump term, and he's running for president.
But more importantly, it's just the same thing Tucker Carlson
said is saying, will say with the gun sight, the
stochastic gun sight moved over slightly to one direction, back
(09:17):
to invoking words like kids and filth and danger and teaching,
putting a target now on the head of the American
Federation of Teachers Chief and of every teacher in this country,
men and women who have for generations in this country,
for centuries in this country, been underpaid, even the ones
(09:38):
in the religious indoctrination schools are underpaid. Teachers who for
the last two years have had to try to do
their jobs for no money, in the middle of a pandemic,
with the lives of kids literally in their hands because
of school shooters and disease, or the futures of kids,
still their responsibilities, though they are miles away and interconnected
(09:59):
only by computer screens, the filth they're teaching our kids.
Mike Pompeo, you are a braver man than I am.
If I had said that about teachers, I would have
disappeared from this country before morning, because the teachers now
(10:20):
are the next targets. That means, when something happens, Mike
Pompeo can dismiss the idea that his words could possibly
have contributed to it. Of course not. I couldn't indoctrinate
the stupid people of this country. And he will say
that while somebody is working on his next Mike Pompeo
(10:44):
campaign ad to run on television, even though Tucker Carlson
has reassured us that words on television cannot possibly actually
influence anybody to do something they wouldn't otherwise do. As
Tucker Carlson throws to a commercial for Tommy Coppery still ahead,
(11:15):
Bob Iger returns to run Disney, meaning I can return
to the advice he gave me in March nine, and
it's still the best advice I have ever gotten in
my life. Courage and cowardice. At Soccer's World Cup, Iran's
players protest by refusing to sing their national anthem, but
(11:36):
the captains of six European squads give in to the
homophobic hosts in Qatar. And this day used to be
as mournful and reflective a day as there was on
the American calendar, a day everybody knew the anniversary of
the assassination of President Kennedy. I am just old enough
to be able to remember what us four and five
(11:58):
year olds that day I thought was happening fifty nine
years ago. This after noon, that's next. This is Countdown
is five four, three to one. This is Countdown with
(12:21):
Keith Openman still ahead on Countdown. It's fifty nine years
now since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Back then,
US kids knew something was wrong. We couldn't be sure
what because there were no cartoons on TV and all
the adults were crying the story of that awful day
(12:42):
coming up first. In each edition of Countdown, we feature
a dog in need you can help. Every dog has
its day. Let me repeat Elaine Boosler's wonderful offer about
the kill list at the New York Pound here and
ask if there's somebody who can do something very special
from her charity Tales of Joy. Elaine says, anybody who
adopts a dog from the New York shelter on the
kill list gets a year's worth of food and GILR
(13:04):
vet care and other supplies. We have two beautiful bonded
dogs whom they are ready to kill. They are both
on that list. Cottage is the girl, Chef is the boy.
They are big shepherd mixes and they will need work
and training, but half their problems will be alleviated the
moment they get out of prison. And your big expenses
will be covered by Elane. Look for them on my
(13:27):
Twitter feed for dogs in need at Tom Jumbo Grumbo,
I thank you, and cottage and Chef thank you. Poscripts
to the news some headlines, some updates, some snarks, some predictions.
(13:49):
Date line Louisville. No change in the James Comer scandal.
He is the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee
and has promised investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden, but
will not comment on whether or not he will investigate
the claims of his college girlfriend, Maryland tom Us that
he beat her, threatened her life, and tried to cover
up his own role in aborting their child by trying
(14:11):
to force her to not use his name on the
paperwork Stateline, Los Angeles. Two years after retiring, the retired
Disney chairman Bob Iger did a Jay leno and replaced
the man who replaced him, Bob Japeck. Rumors swirl Iger
may spin off ESPN or buy Netflix or both. The
ESPN thing is ironic, as you will hear shortly, because
(14:33):
I wanted to mention that Bob Iger gave me the
single best piece of advice I have ever received. He
gave it to me in nineteen seventy nine, and nobody
has topped it that I have passed it along to
others at least a thousand times. When I was a
senior in college, people I had worked with at my
internship at Channel five in New York sent me to
see him for job getting advice. He was then the
(14:56):
husband of one of the news assignment editors at the station,
and he was a vice president of ABC's Wide World
of Sports program. Plus he had gone to Ithaca College
and I was at Cornell, so there was the upstate
New York geography thing. Bob recounted that while he was
in school, he had freelanced as a television sportscaster in
the area, and that was his career goal. He said
(15:19):
that as he graduated, he was offered two jobs. One
was as a sportscaster on the weekends at Channel five
in Syracuse for ten thousand dollars a year. The other,
after his internship there, was as production assistant at Wide
World of Sports for ten thousand, five hundred dollars a year.
Tiger told me he thought long and hard about this
(15:40):
decision and decided on the Wide World of Sports job
because one it was in New York and not Syracuse,
and he was from New York, and to five dollars
was a lot of money in ninety three and three.
He figured once he established himself, he could move laterally
from being a producer or similar to being on the air.
(16:01):
In fact, Bob told me when I met him a
scant forty four years ago, next Fair March, oh my goodness,
because I had been on TV so much, he said.
I was soon promoted a chief production assistant, then to
associate producer. Then they found out I'd take an economics
classes at Ithaca College, and somebody asked if I could
help out with the budgets. Next thing I know, I'm
(16:23):
vice president of budgeting for Wide World of Sports. I
still want to be a sportscaster, but it's six years later,
and if I want to do it, I still have
to go to Syracuse, where they are now paying eleven
thousand a year. But I have a wife and a
child now to take care of, and the job i'd
have to quit here at ABC pays me six figures.
So here's my advice to you. If you want to
(16:43):
be on the air, be on the air. Don't take
some other kind of job in radio or TV just
because it pays better, or you can live in New
York or live with your parents be on the air.
Tremendous advice. Good luck, Bob. This is Sports Center. Wait
(17:16):
check that not anymore. This is countdown with Keith in
sports Day three of the World Cup. Dawns and temporary
soccer fans here can probably put away the words pitch,
nil and kit for another few years, as the joke goes.
The US lost to Wales one to one. Wales is
(17:39):
the size of Iowa. More importantly, two days in Qatar,
and the thing is already a train wreck. The members
of the Iranian team took the field against England yesterday
and when Iran's national anthem played, the players did not
sing it. They had done this before in September, before
the protests in their homeland turned to cute and the
dictatorship's reactions savage and bestial. Iranian players risked everything by
(18:02):
not seeing their anthem at the World Up. On the
other hand, the captains of England, the Welsh, Belgium, Denmark,
Germany and the Dutch were going to wear anti discrimination
arm bands in their opening World Cup games. Simple bright
bands on one sleeve saying one Love. Just before play began,
FIFA soccer's international governing body, Open Seven for Bribes, warned
(18:26):
that any player wearing the arm band would be given
a yellow card by the referee. It would be considered
a violation not of tournament rules, which would lead to
a fine, but of game rules, which would lead to
a punishment to yellow cards. And you are ejected here
you would get one for just wearing this arm band.
The six captains and their countries promptly chickened out because
(18:49):
they're losers. The Iranians put their lives at risk for
what mattered to them, but the captains of six liberal
democracies immediately folded, giving way to the homophobia written into
the laws of the host country, Qatar, which should not
be the host country of this or anything else. They
did so instead of saying something like, oh, no arm bands,
(19:10):
then we're not playing the game. Only England came out
of all this with even a measure of self respect. Intact.
Alex Scott, a former member of the English women's national
team who was now part of the announcing crew for
the BBC war The One Love arm Band Anyway Live
on TV from the sidelines Also in sports, yesterday, Baseball's
(19:32):
Hall of Fame ballot was announced. There is only one
serious candidate among fourteen newly eligible X players, or there
would be, but he is Carlos Beltron, whose career wins
above replacement total puts him in the Gary Carter, Larry Walker,
John Smoltz range. But Beltron was so heavily implicated in
the Houston Astros signed stealing scandal in two thousand seventeen
(19:54):
that when it hit, he was fired by the New
York Mets, who had just hired him as manager. This
would usually leave the field clear for holdovers, but the
only series also rans there last year did not seem
to be on trajectories for election. Scott Roland, the third baseman,
Billy Wagner, the relief picture, Todd Hilton, the slugging of
first baseman of the Rockies. I think Roland is a
(20:16):
Hall of Famer, Maybe Wagner. I will never have a vote.
Other newcomers on the ballot this year are a fan
favorites like Jason Worth, Bronson Arroyo, Matt Caine, and Jacoby Ellsbury.
And after fifty six seasons as a fan, I am
beginning to think my baseball affection is slipping. I could
have sworn until I read that he's now on the
Hall of Fame ballot, that Jacoby Ellsbury was still on
(20:38):
the roster of the New York Yankees on the injured list.
I had there is a date somewhere in our history.
Everybody born before that date knows what today is. The
anniversary of everybody after it might or might be reminded
(21:01):
of it, or might never understand it. I am just
old enough to be able to tell you what we
kids thought fifty nine years ago today when JFK was assassinated. Next, first,
the daily roundup of the miscrants, morons and donning cruder
effect specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world.
The Bronze CNN Stephen Collinson, identified as a senior political
(21:24):
reporter there and clearly out to prove both sides is
um is in charge in the paste eating world of
New Boss Chris licked the headline on Collinson's piece on
the CNN website, quote dueling probes into Trump and Biden
could define the four campaign thirty two paragraphs of this
crap quote, A storm of investigations targeting leaders of both
(21:47):
political parties will shape the campaign, but risks angering voters
who just showed their frustration with the priorities being ignored.
Thirty two paragraphs, which equate the appointment of a special
counsel to decide about prosecuting Trump for mishandling documents or
espionage or treason or inciting the January six coup attempt.
(22:11):
And that's the same as Kevin McCarthy's appointment of committee
heads to investigate Joe Biden in order to generate SoundBite,
s fort Fox News. Not one word about the impact
of either of the quote dueling probes on you know,
the future of representative government in this country. Hey, Licht,
this Collinson guy, he's a keeper. You can have an
(22:34):
anchor at nine runner up another old friends, Saysar Conde,
chairman of NBC News. The Daily Beasts Confider media newsletter
reports quote a crisis of confidence at thirty Rock with
two causes. First one hired in Conde pledge to have
a fift diverse workforce, Yet in the last month he
has abruptly fired an African American anchor, Tiffany Cross of
(22:57):
MSNBC and an lgbt Q anchor, Shepherd Smith of CNBC
the Second Cause, quoting Confider. Another bone of contention has
been Conde's decision to pay Rachel Maadow thirty million dollars
to work less, a move that the staffers said had
been particularly galling at a time when many NBC employees
(23:17):
enter the holidays fearing they'll soon face layoffs. How could
you have a crisis of confidence in Caesar Conde? You
had confidence in him in the first place. But our winner,
Kaylee mcinaney a Fox nudes. Yes, that's right. I've completed
the cable news hat trick, CNN, n MAC and now Fox.
The Fascist channel has yet to launch its annual telethon
(23:40):
against the War on Christmas because it is yet to
finish its new telethon against the War on Thanksgiving. It's
Monday edition of Outnumbered, who was devoted to attacking the
actor John Leguizamo for tweeting Happy Indigenous Survivor's Day f Thanksgiving.
Kaylee Mcinaney's contribution to this she described Leguizamo as quote
(24:02):
a man named John whose name I cannot pronounce us. Hey, Kaylee,
we all saw you when you were Trump's White House
propaganda secretary. All names are names. You cannot pronounce Kaylee mcinnati,
or is Joe Rogan called her Kaylee McKenney today's worst person?
(24:23):
How did you pronounce this next word in the world?
Uh to the number one story on the countdown and
things I promised not to tell. And I am probably
one of the youngest people you know who has a
(24:46):
distinct memory of the Kennedy assassination. On this sad anniversary.
Understand how old this memory is. Me telling it to
you now is the equivalent of somebody on that day
fifty nine years ago, November twenty, nineteen sixty three telling
me of his childhood memory is of the nineteen o
(25:07):
four election, or somebody in nineteen five going on about
the Civil War, or more appropriately, the day Lincoln was shot.
On November twenty, nineteen sixty three, I was two months
and five days shy of my fifth birthday. I was
in kindergarten and we finished every Friday around noon, and
I was already home and in my room. And the
reason I can see it so distinctly is that just
(25:29):
weeks before, my folks had bought a new television black
and white, of course, crystal clear picture, or so we thought,
and it was the first new one they had bought
in eight years. And they took the old television, a
gigantic thing that required its own rolling stand, and had
a speaker the size and the tan color of a
(25:49):
high fire record player, and had the giant rabbit ear
antennas that you hear about in satires these days. And
they rolled that thing into my room and set it
up speaking of rabbits under my giant bugs bunny wall clock,
with the ears pointing to all the characters in the cartoons.
I was in my room watching cartoons, luxuriating in my
(26:09):
newfound television ownership. No other kid I knew had their
own TV. And my mother was out in our tiny
living room in our tiny house in Hastings on Hudson,
New York, when I heard her shout. Now, not long
after I heard the phone ring. It was in the kitchen,
the phone, and it had a chord so long that
it could stretch into the living room. And it was
(26:30):
quickly apparent that if my mother was not crying, she
seemed about to. I came out and stood next to her,
and she said, your father wants you to go in
the room and close the door and watch the cartoons.
He will be home soon. This made no sense. I
was a kid, I was not an idiot. I was
still aware of time. It was the middle of the afternoon,
(26:52):
and Dad would not be home on the train from
New York before six, at least he wasn't supposed to be.
But I went back into my room. I did not
fully close the door because I was something of a sneak,
and soon I heard my mother tell my father to
be careful and hurry back home. The next thing I
heard was her back in the kitchen dialing the phone.
And these were the days of the rotary phones, where
(27:13):
if you had to dial the number nine, it took
several seconds to move the rotary dial clockwise and even
longer for it to rebound to the starting point counterclockwise.
And each time you did this it made so much noise.
It sounded like somebody trying to start the electric lawnmower
or maybe a prop plane. Given enough quiet on the street,
(27:34):
you could hear it from outside. Well, that noise gave
me cover to sneak back into the hallway about halfway
between my room and the living room, and I heard
my mother saying, my god, Barbara, did you see Kennedy
has been shot. What's going to happen next? It was
her sister in law, my uncle Bill's wife, Barbara. Barbara
and Bill lived in Connecticut at that time. This was
a long distance call. I am not sure if they
(27:57):
got off the phone before my dad got home more
than an hour later. I am confident my mother told
Aunt Barbara that she heard Walter Cronkite say three men
shot Kennedy, and she would insist that for the rest
of her life. Now I went back to my room
and started changing the channel. Another feat of strength. In
nineteen sixty three, unity literally changed the dial. I settled
(28:22):
on Channel two and Yes, at age four, I occasionally
watched the news. I certainly had an idea who the
president was and who John F. Kennedy was, And although
it is lodged in my memory that fifty nine years
ago today, I was not sure that they were one
in the same person. But what I could tell was
that either Kennedy or the President, or both of them,
(28:42):
or they were the same person had been shot in
some place called Dallas. I didn't know what the president
did per se, but I had figured out a lot earlier,
mostly because of the coverage of John Glenn and the
other early astronauts that anything on television that wasn't a
cartoon or a comedy or a western, or a ball
game or a thing with doctors, or something designed to
(29:04):
scare the crap out of me, like the Twilight Zone
or the Outer Limits, anything but that was necessarily important,
often very important. The rest of that day is largely
a blank, except for dinner. I ate my parents did not.
I have some memory of them putting me to bed
impossibly early for a Friday night, with the excuse being
(29:25):
that we were going to see the Carls the next
day in New Jersey. The Carl's were friends of my folks.
I think my mother knew her from a bank she
had worked at. They lived in Westfield, New Jersey, an
hour away across the George Washington Bridge and everything, and
maybe every three or four weeks or so, either we
would go see them or they would come see us,
and our trip had long since been planned. The Carl's
(29:47):
had two boys, one a couple of years older than me,
one just slightly younger. I can remember the trip only
because one of my joys at the age of four
and five was looking for all the different kinds of cars,
and on that Saturday I was sorely disappointed. There weren't
any cars. The roads were deserted. First, my folks didn't
(30:09):
eat today, they didn't talk. And now there was nobody
on the streets or the parkways or the bridge. Something
was really wrong. We got to the Carl's faster than
I could recall ever having done so. Ordinarily, Mr Carl
loved quiz me about the cars I had seen, but
on that Saturday and he and his wife simply said
a quick hello to me, and then their boys and
(30:31):
I were rushed into their room, and for all I know,
they locked us in. I last saw these two guys
around nine. Their dad was in the petroleum industry, and
they had lived in Venezuela, and I think they went
back there, so forgive me, I don't remember their names.
But as soon as Mrs Carl slammed their door shut,
the older one said to me, all right, what's wrong
(30:51):
with the grown ups? Why are they all crying? I
remember telling them that Kennedy had been shot, and I
thought Kennedy was the president, and the older one gulped
and asked, shot with a gun? We put on the
ancient black and white TV and went looking for something
to watch, and there was nothing on except men sitting
at desks looking ashen, even on the black and white
(31:13):
TVs of nineteen But I'm confident we did not realize
that they were talking about Kennedy and the assassination. We
just knew they were not supposed to be there on
our TVs. Saturday morning belonged to kids. On a Saturday morning,
the only two of the seven New York television stations
would not ordinarily be wall to wall with cartoons until
(31:36):
eleven AM or noon or later. One was the educational station,
Channel thirteen. The other was Channel five, and they had
a kid's show with a live studio audience full of
kids and games and clowns and whatever. On the others,
we could rely on quick Draw McGraw and bugs and
the like. But on this Saturday morning, they were playing
what sounded like church music, and the only thing they
(31:57):
displayed was their channel number and the call letters of
the station. Maybe they ran out of cartoons, said the
younger of the Karl brothers. Even at age four, I
understood television better than I did. Assassinations. They don't run out,
I said, They just play the same ones. Over and
over again, haven't you noticed? It amazed me that he
(32:18):
hadn't noticed, And it was at this point that I
began to really worry about what was happening. Any time
one of us left the brother's room to use the bathroom,
the adults who had stopped talking, they were stopping in
mid word. I Meanwhile, the three of us kids had
played every board game the brothers had, and the older
of them asked their parents to let us go outside
and play, and he came back shaken because they had said, no,
(32:41):
they always want us out of the house. What's wrong?
On the way home to Hastings and I think we
had been there long enough that it was getting dark already,
my parents finally filled me in at some point later
before I went to college. I remember asking my mother
what she told me and when, and she said they
had waited until the second day because they believed there
(33:02):
was a chance Kennedy had been killed by the Russians
and that there would be a war. And remember we
had almost had a war, almost a nuclear war, thirteen
months earlier that I have no memory of. I guessed
that it was easier to tell me in the car
because they didn't have to hide their faces from me
so I would not see if they were crying. My
(33:25):
mother did say she was amazed that I had figured
out what had happened, and that it had shocked all
the adults without really understanding what any of it meant.
She thought, by Saturday evening it was pretty clear the
Russians had not killed President Kennedy, and as bad as
it was, it was not going to get worse, so
they might as well tell me what I could understand,
and they decided it was safe enough to let me
go outside and play again. This, my mom was pretty confident,
(33:47):
meant that I was sitting there with them on Sunday,
probably over lunch, when Lee Harvey Oswald was himself assassinated
on live television. I think she's right. I recall them
changing the channel away from CBS, which they rarely did,
for once because they had just started to run some
sort of report from Roger Mud. My folks could not
(34:08):
abide Roger Mud no offense, they just couldn't. Only ABC
and NBC showed the murder of Oswald live. I'd love
to recount my reaction or my folks. I can't remember it.
I also have no idea what happened in school that
following short week. It was Thanksgiving coming up, and for
all I know, they canceled the three days worth of classes.
(34:30):
I do remember that as the shock of the assassination
wore off, my father was angry about something comparatively trivial.
He had, for the first time in his life as
a native New Yorker, got an actual reserved bleacher seats
for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Thirty four years He
(34:50):
had waited for this, but now it was obvious that
there were only two choices. Either they would cancel the
parade outright, or they would make it the briefest, grimmest
parade in New York City history. They chose the latter.
My memory is that my dad took me, but my
mom stayed home. Our location was at Broadway and around
fiftieth Straight, and I asked my dad what all the
black stuff was on a couple of the buildings. It
(35:13):
was morning crepe. Some of the buildings were adorned with
black morning crepe, as if we were there for Kennedy's
funeral procession, not the ceremonial first seasonal appearance of Santa Claus.
At one point, a group marched by with a huge
American flag wrapped in morning crepe, bigger than the flags themselves.
(35:35):
A year ago I found the box of slides that
my dad and inveterate photographer took of that parade. It
is amazing that the sense of shock at of people
pretending to be happy to be at a parade is
either retained by the images from that November or it
sparks my own emotional memories of the weird, disturbing experience.
(35:56):
There were the traditional Thanksgiving balloons. By the time Donald
Duck got to us, he was losing air rapidly, had
gotten punctured. How if you want a metaphor for November
nineteen sixty three, there were bands, There was Santa and
it was warm. It was sixty degrees. Coats were open,
hats were off. But more than anything else, it was
almost silent. You could hear kids throughout, the younger, the louder,
(36:22):
but you could hear them from the other side of
the parade. It was as if you went to a
ballgame and the public address system didn't work. It's actually
quite a relief. For the first few minutes, I am
convinced I could hear the shoes of the band members
hit the pavement as they walked past me. There is
(36:44):
only one other thing from my childhood about the Kennedy
assassination that I remember carrying the kind of shock like
those first few days of observing all the disoriented and
as my friend in Jersey noted, crying adults in nineteen
seventy might have been seventy one, but I'm pretty sure
it was nineteen seventy. When I was in the eighth grade,
(37:05):
all of our classes were canceled late one morning and
we were gathered in the school chapel for a special assembly.
We had a lot of assemblies there, but never as
late as eleven am. Some guy came in, and I
have thought and asked and researched and have figured out
nothing about who he was. But he had a copy
of something almost none of us, and by us, I
(37:27):
mean Americans of vent had ever seen before. It had
been on television local television a couple of times, but
it would not be shown on national television in whole
for another five years. The speaker called it the Zapruder film,
and as much other assorted film from that day as
(37:50):
any JFK documentary I saw before I was an adult.
He showed that too, And while I do not remember
him espousing any of the conspiracy theories that by then
had become a constant in our country, that might be
because he showed us the Repruter film the way Kevin
Costner showed it in the Oliver Stone film JFK. We
(38:12):
must have seen the fatal shots twenty times, at every
speed slower than real time. I think we were all
ordered back into our respective history classes, where shocked students
listen to even more shocked teachers, and we asked the
same questions the Carls and I did on November three?
(38:37):
What's wrong with the grown ups? I've done all the
damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. If
you're not following or subscribed or whatever to the podcast,
(38:58):
please do so and stop a passer by in the
street and get them too as well. Here are our credits.
Most of the music, including our theme here from Beethoven's
Ninth Arrange, produced and performed by Brian Ray and John
Philip Shanelle The Countdown musical directors, All orchestration and keyboards
by John Philip s Chanelle, guitarist Bassed and drums by
Brian Ray. Produced by t k O Brothers. Other Beethoven
(39:18):
selections have been arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed.
The sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two.
It was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Musical comments by Nancy Faust. The best baseball stadium organist ever.
Our announcer today was Stevie Van's Aunt, and everything else
is pretty much my fault. So let's countdown for this,
the six eighty six day since Donald Trump's first attempted
(39:42):
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Arrest him now while we still can. There'll be a
new episode tomorrow. Until then, I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning,
good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith
Olderman is a production of I heart Radio. For more
(40:03):
podcasts from I heart rate, do you visit the I
heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of I Heart Radio,
having spent weeks and months falsely defining countless lgbt Q
(00:29):
issues as sex crimes against children. Tucker Carlson began his
Fox News program last night with a pious, almost serious,
borderline concerned mention of the mass shooting at Club Q
in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Saturday night on Sunday morning, and
he said, quote, violence and cruelty should always horrify us.
(00:52):
That is what Tucker Carlson said last night. On the
night of September nine, however, Tucker Carlson told his viewers
to fight back against the l g b t Q community.
He invoked together drag shows and transgendering and the castration
of children, and he said, quote, no parents should put
(01:12):
up with this for one second, no matter what the
law says. Your duty, your moral duty, is to defend
your children, unquote, no matter what the law says. This
was only the starkest of his attempts to instigate violence
against gays and transgenders, and doctors and schools and teachers,
the ones he claims are perpetrators of sex crimes. Only
(01:35):
the starkest of hundreds of such slanderous commentaries because he
is trying to attract an audience of conspiracy theorists whose bleak,
distorted world leads them to believe Fox News and to
believe in cabals, of cannibals and pedophiles, because if they
watch his show, he makes more money. And Tucker Carlson
(02:00):
has never spent a moment of his life being concerned
about actual victims of child abuse, or of any of
the kind of abuse, or if any victims were indeed
of anything or anyone except him and how much money
he can make. Last night, Tucker Carlson identified the real
victims of Colorado Springs himself and his viewers. He said
they were all under attacked by those quote who have
(02:22):
a deeply unhealthy fixation on the sexuality of children, which
might better describe somebody like Tucker Carlson who goes on
national television and fixates at least once every week about
the sexuality of children. Carlson dismissed the assertion that he
contributed in any way, starcastically, or otherwise to the shootings
(02:43):
in Colorado Springs and the other assaults on the LGBTQ community,
and he said it was an excuse to defend that
quote unhealthy fixation on the sexuality of children, which every
time Carlson says it, and he says it a lot,
sounds more and more like a disturbing admission, and suggests
the authority should be investigating Tucker Carlson. The premise, of course,
(03:06):
is that a television program like Carlson's, which Carlson and
his employers, a company called News Corp. As dangerous to
this country's survival as any terrorist organization, have defended in
court by saying, nobody should really believe that what Carlson
is saying on that show is actually true. The premise
(03:27):
of all of the Tucker Carlson's throughout history is that
they can't be guilty of indoctrinating people to believe that
every LGBTQ person or ally, or doctor or teacher is
a quote groomer. They can't be influencing people in that way,
as if by remote control to shoot up gay bars
in Colorado, because television can have that kind of influence
(03:48):
on people. This is while they are telling you that
drag queens and teachers and transgendered people, they they are
the ones who are able to indoctrinate people remotely. Television can't,
Tucker Carlson can't. A man dressed as Britney Spears can
indoctrinate children into altering gender. But Tucker Carlson telling the
(04:12):
people who watch his show, perhaps a total of half
a billion times a year, that dressing up as Britney
Spears is a sex crime, he can't indoctrinate anybody. Television
can't make people do things, and that's why Tucker Carlson's
ravings are interrupted by commercials from Golden Corral and Bass
(04:33):
Pro shops and the telecaster of the Soccer World Cup.
Because television can't make people do things. Maybe Tucker Carlson
believes that, maybe that is why he doubled down on
his self martyring victimhood and his attack on the LGBTQ
community while they are still cleaning up the carnage at
(04:54):
Club Q. And somebody, somebody out there is planning to
respond to this intentional hysteria in this nation by attacking
the next gay or transvestite or transgend entered person he sees.
And where's that next person easiest to find? If not
at a public club or parade or other events. I
worked with Tucker Carlson. To my knowledge, he believes in nothing.
(05:18):
He has no principles, no scruples, no beliefs, no red line,
no morals except his desire for money and revenge. He
was the mainstream Republican willing to share the stage with
liberals on Crossfire on CNN, and got fired. So then
(05:38):
he became the reasonable face of deliberate conservatism on MSNBC
and got fired. So then he was the intellectual far
right contributor on Fox News and got nowhere. So then
he turned into a polished version of a q and
on chat room, selling Trump and replacement theory and transphobia,
insisting to his audience that no parents should put up
(06:00):
with this for one second, no matter what the law says.
And he got his own at Lee show at eight
pm every night and the top ratings in cable news.
No parents should put up with this for one second,
no matter what the law says. That is not his creed,
that is his brand. He is worse than the creature
who shot up the club in Colorado. Because Tucker Carlson
(06:22):
may or may not believe a single word he says.
He only believes in those words ability to make him money,
he is a whore, God damn him to hell, and
would that it were just Tucker Carlson. But it's not.
(06:42):
Whenever there is a mass shooting and one of us says,
but guns, the far right always responds, Oh, it's too soon,
or how dare you politicize death and grief? So thoughts
and prayers. But if you will notice, after a shooting
with a clearly defined hate basis, like in Colorado Springs,
those on the right don't even slow down or say
(07:03):
it's too soon to I'm back in spew more stochastic
terrorism into the Swiss cheese minds of their viewers and
supporters sometimes though they change it up a little bit.
In the aftermath of the shooting, an interview appeared at
the news site Semaphore with Mike Pompeo, former Defense secretary,
former Secretary of State under Trump. Hard to believe, but
(07:26):
it really happened. They asked Pompeo to identify the central
issues that any Republican presidential candidate should run on in
he's trying to be that candidate, and he answered, quote,
making sure we don't teach our kids crap in schools,
which we are at the center of doing. Pompeo did
(07:48):
not specify the crap on the right. Generally, the crap
includes anything positive about minorities, especially lgbt Q, or anything
negative about white Americans. Quoting Pompeo again, I get asked,
who's the most dangerous person in the world. Is it
Chairman Kim Jong Oon? Is it Sijan Pang? The most
(08:11):
dangerous person in the world is Randy wine Garden. It's
not a close call. If you ask who's the most
likely to take this republic down, it would be the teachers,
unions and the filth they're teaching our kids. End quote. Firstly,
(08:31):
that is as dumb a thing as any human being
over the age of six could say to almost anybody.
It is literally by itself disqualifying for public office. And
yet this baboon Pompeo is also the clown who once
yelled at a reporter do you think Americans care about Ukraine?
(08:53):
He also insisted there would be a smooth transition in
November to a second Trump term, and he's running for president.
But more importantly, it's just the same thing Tucker Carlson
said is saying, will say with the gun sight, the
stochastic gun sight moved over slightly to one direction, back
(09:17):
to invoking words like kids and filth and danger and teaching,
putting a target now on the head of the American
Federation of Teachers Chief and of every teacher in this country,
men and women who have for generations in this country,
for centuries in this country, been underpaid, even the ones
(09:38):
in the religious indoctrination schools are underpaid. Teachers who for
the last two years have had to try to do
their jobs for no money, in the middle of a pandemic,
with the lives of kids literally in their hands because
of school shooters and disease, or the futures of kids,
still their responsibilities, though they are miles away and interconnected
(09:59):
only by computer screens, the filth they're teaching our kids.
Mike Pompeo, you are a braver man than I am.
If I had said that about teachers, I would have
disappeared from this country before morning, because the teachers now
(10:20):
are the next targets. That means, when something happens, Mike
Pompeo can dismiss the idea that his words could possibly
have contributed to it. Of course not. I couldn't indoctrinate
the stupid people of this country. And he will say
that while somebody is working on his next Mike Pompeo
(10:44):
campaign ad to run on television, even though Tucker Carlson
has reassured us that words on television cannot possibly actually
influence anybody to do something they wouldn't otherwise do. As
Tucker Carlson throws to a commercial for Tommy Coppery still ahead,
(11:15):
Bob Iger returns to run Disney, meaning I can return
to the advice he gave me in March nine, and
it's still the best advice I have ever gotten in
my life. Courage and cowardice. At Soccer's World Cup, Iran's
players protest by refusing to sing their national anthem, but
(11:36):
the captains of six European squads give in to the
homophobic hosts in Qatar. And this day used to be
as mournful and reflective a day as there was on
the American calendar, a day everybody knew the anniversary of
the assassination of President Kennedy. I am just old enough
to be able to remember what us four and five
(11:58):
year olds that day I thought was happening fifty nine
years ago. This after noon, that's next. This is Countdown
is five four, three to one. This is Countdown with
(12:21):
Keith Openman still ahead on Countdown. It's fifty nine years
now since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Back then,
US kids knew something was wrong. We couldn't be sure
what because there were no cartoons on TV and all
the adults were crying the story of that awful day
(12:42):
coming up first. In each edition of Countdown, we feature
a dog in need you can help. Every dog has
its day. Let me repeat Elaine Boosler's wonderful offer about
the kill list at the New York Pound here and
ask if there's somebody who can do something very special
from her charity Tales of Joy. Elaine says, anybody who
adopts a dog from the New York shelter on the
kill list gets a year's worth of food and GILR
(13:04):
vet care and other supplies. We have two beautiful bonded
dogs whom they are ready to kill. They are both
on that list. Cottage is the girl, Chef is the boy.
They are big shepherd mixes and they will need work
and training, but half their problems will be alleviated the
moment they get out of prison. And your big expenses
will be covered by Elane. Look for them on my
(13:27):
Twitter feed for dogs in need at Tom Jumbo Grumbo,
I thank you, and cottage and Chef thank you. Poscripts
to the news some headlines, some updates, some snarks, some predictions.
(13:49):
Date line Louisville. No change in the James Comer scandal.
He is the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee
and has promised investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden, but
will not comment on whether or not he will investigate
the claims of his college girlfriend, Maryland tom Us that
he beat her, threatened her life, and tried to cover
up his own role in aborting their child by trying
(14:11):
to force her to not use his name on the
paperwork Stateline, Los Angeles. Two years after retiring, the retired
Disney chairman Bob Iger did a Jay leno and replaced
the man who replaced him, Bob Japeck. Rumors swirl Iger
may spin off ESPN or buy Netflix or both. The
ESPN thing is ironic, as you will hear shortly, because
(14:33):
I wanted to mention that Bob Iger gave me the
single best piece of advice I have ever received. He
gave it to me in nineteen seventy nine, and nobody
has topped it that I have passed it along to
others at least a thousand times. When I was a
senior in college, people I had worked with at my
internship at Channel five in New York sent me to
see him for job getting advice. He was then the
(14:56):
husband of one of the news assignment editors at the station,
and he was a vice president of ABC's Wide World
of Sports program. Plus he had gone to Ithaca College
and I was at Cornell, so there was the upstate
New York geography thing. Bob recounted that while he was
in school, he had freelanced as a television sportscaster in
the area, and that was his career goal. He said
(15:19):
that as he graduated, he was offered two jobs. One
was as a sportscaster on the weekends at Channel five
in Syracuse for ten thousand dollars a year. The other,
after his internship there, was as production assistant at Wide
World of Sports for ten thousand, five hundred dollars a year.
Tiger told me he thought long and hard about this
(15:40):
decision and decided on the Wide World of Sports job
because one it was in New York and not Syracuse,
and he was from New York, and to five dollars
was a lot of money in ninety three and three.
He figured once he established himself, he could move laterally
from being a producer or similar to being on the air.
(16:01):
In fact, Bob told me when I met him a
scant forty four years ago, next Fair March, oh my goodness,
because I had been on TV so much, he said.
I was soon promoted a chief production assistant, then to
associate producer. Then they found out I'd take an economics
classes at Ithaca College, and somebody asked if I could
help out with the budgets. Next thing I know, I'm
(16:23):
vice president of budgeting for Wide World of Sports. I
still want to be a sportscaster, but it's six years later,
and if I want to do it, I still have
to go to Syracuse, where they are now paying eleven
thousand a year. But I have a wife and a
child now to take care of, and the job i'd
have to quit here at ABC pays me six figures.
So here's my advice to you. If you want to
(16:43):
be on the air, be on the air. Don't take
some other kind of job in radio or TV just
because it pays better, or you can live in New
York or live with your parents be on the air.
Tremendous advice. Good luck, Bob. This is Sports Center. Wait
(17:16):
check that not anymore. This is countdown with Keith in
sports Day three of the World Cup. Dawns and temporary
soccer fans here can probably put away the words pitch,
nil and kit for another few years, as the joke goes.
The US lost to Wales one to one. Wales is
(17:39):
the size of Iowa. More importantly, two days in Qatar,
and the thing is already a train wreck. The members
of the Iranian team took the field against England yesterday
and when Iran's national anthem played, the players did not
sing it. They had done this before in September, before
the protests in their homeland turned to cute and the
dictatorship's reactions savage and bestial. Iranian players risked everything by
(18:02):
not seeing their anthem at the World Up. On the
other hand, the captains of England, the Welsh, Belgium, Denmark,
Germany and the Dutch were going to wear anti discrimination
arm bands in their opening World Cup games. Simple bright
bands on one sleeve saying one Love. Just before play began,
FIFA soccer's international governing body, Open Seven for Bribes, warned
(18:26):
that any player wearing the arm band would be given
a yellow card by the referee. It would be considered
a violation not of tournament rules, which would lead to
a fine, but of game rules, which would lead to
a punishment to yellow cards. And you are ejected here
you would get one for just wearing this arm band.
The six captains and their countries promptly chickened out because
(18:49):
they're losers. The Iranians put their lives at risk for
what mattered to them, but the captains of six liberal
democracies immediately folded, giving way to the homophobia written into
the laws of the host country, Qatar, which should not
be the host country of this or anything else. They
did so instead of saying something like, oh, no arm bands,
(19:10):
then we're not playing the game. Only England came out
of all this with even a measure of self respect. Intact.
Alex Scott, a former member of the English women's national
team who was now part of the announcing crew for
the BBC war The One Love arm Band Anyway Live
on TV from the sidelines Also in sports, yesterday, Baseball's
(19:32):
Hall of Fame ballot was announced. There is only one
serious candidate among fourteen newly eligible X players, or there
would be, but he is Carlos Beltron, whose career wins
above replacement total puts him in the Gary Carter, Larry Walker,
John Smoltz range. But Beltron was so heavily implicated in
the Houston Astros signed stealing scandal in two thousand seventeen
(19:54):
that when it hit, he was fired by the New
York Mets, who had just hired him as manager. This
would usually leave the field clear for holdovers, but the
only series also rans there last year did not seem
to be on trajectories for election. Scott Roland, the third baseman,
Billy Wagner, the relief picture, Todd Hilton, the slugging of
first baseman of the Rockies. I think Roland is a
(20:16):
Hall of Famer, Maybe Wagner. I will never have a vote.
Other newcomers on the ballot this year are a fan
favorites like Jason Worth, Bronson Arroyo, Matt Caine, and Jacoby Ellsbury.
And after fifty six seasons as a fan, I am
beginning to think my baseball affection is slipping. I could
have sworn until I read that he's now on the
Hall of Fame ballot, that Jacoby Ellsbury was still on
(20:38):
the roster of the New York Yankees on the injured list.
I had there is a date somewhere in our history.
Everybody born before that date knows what today is. The
anniversary of everybody after it might or might be reminded
(21:01):
of it, or might never understand it. I am just
old enough to be able to tell you what we
kids thought fifty nine years ago today when JFK was assassinated. Next, first,
the daily roundup of the miscrants, morons and donning cruder
effect specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world.
The Bronze CNN Stephen Collinson, identified as a senior political
(21:24):
reporter there and clearly out to prove both sides is
um is in charge in the paste eating world of
New Boss Chris licked the headline on Collinson's piece on
the CNN website, quote dueling probes into Trump and Biden
could define the four campaign thirty two paragraphs of this
crap quote, A storm of investigations targeting leaders of both
(21:47):
political parties will shape the campaign, but risks angering voters
who just showed their frustration with the priorities being ignored.
Thirty two paragraphs, which equate the appointment of a special
counsel to decide about prosecuting Trump for mishandling documents or
espionage or treason or inciting the January six coup attempt.
(22:11):
And that's the same as Kevin McCarthy's appointment of committee
heads to investigate Joe Biden in order to generate SoundBite,
s fort Fox News. Not one word about the impact
of either of the quote dueling probes on you know,
the future of representative government in this country. Hey, Licht,
this Collinson guy, he's a keeper. You can have an
(22:34):
anchor at nine runner up another old friends, Saysar Conde,
chairman of NBC News. The Daily Beasts Confider media newsletter
reports quote a crisis of confidence at thirty Rock with
two causes. First one hired in Conde pledge to have
a fift diverse workforce, Yet in the last month he
has abruptly fired an African American anchor, Tiffany Cross of
(22:57):
MSNBC and an lgbt Q anchor, Shepherd Smith of CNBC
the Second Cause, quoting Confider. Another bone of contention has
been Conde's decision to pay Rachel Maadow thirty million dollars
to work less, a move that the staffers said had
been particularly galling at a time when many NBC employees
(23:17):
enter the holidays fearing they'll soon face layoffs. How could
you have a crisis of confidence in Caesar Conde? You
had confidence in him in the first place. But our winner,
Kaylee mcinaney a Fox nudes. Yes, that's right. I've completed
the cable news hat trick, CNN, n MAC and now Fox.
The Fascist channel has yet to launch its annual telethon
(23:40):
against the War on Christmas because it is yet to
finish its new telethon against the War on Thanksgiving. It's
Monday edition of Outnumbered, who was devoted to attacking the
actor John Leguizamo for tweeting Happy Indigenous Survivor's Day f Thanksgiving.
Kaylee Mcinaney's contribution to this she described Leguizamo as quote
(24:02):
a man named John whose name I cannot pronounce us. Hey, Kaylee,
we all saw you when you were Trump's White House
propaganda secretary. All names are names. You cannot pronounce Kaylee mcinnati,
or is Joe Rogan called her Kaylee McKenney today's worst person?
(24:23):
How did you pronounce this next word in the world?
Uh to the number one story on the countdown and
things I promised not to tell. And I am probably
one of the youngest people you know who has a
(24:46):
distinct memory of the Kennedy assassination. On this sad anniversary.
Understand how old this memory is. Me telling it to
you now is the equivalent of somebody on that day
fifty nine years ago, November twenty, nineteen sixty three telling
me of his childhood memory is of the nineteen o
(25:07):
four election, or somebody in nineteen five going on about
the Civil War, or more appropriately, the day Lincoln was shot.
On November twenty, nineteen sixty three, I was two months
and five days shy of my fifth birthday. I was
in kindergarten and we finished every Friday around noon, and
I was already home and in my room. And the
reason I can see it so distinctly is that just
(25:29):
weeks before, my folks had bought a new television black
and white, of course, crystal clear picture, or so we thought,
and it was the first new one they had bought
in eight years. And they took the old television, a
gigantic thing that required its own rolling stand, and had
a speaker the size and the tan color of a
(25:49):
high fire record player, and had the giant rabbit ear
antennas that you hear about in satires these days. And
they rolled that thing into my room and set it
up speaking of rabbits under my giant bugs bunny wall clock,
with the ears pointing to all the characters in the cartoons.
I was in my room watching cartoons, luxuriating in my
(26:09):
newfound television ownership. No other kid I knew had their
own TV. And my mother was out in our tiny
living room in our tiny house in Hastings on Hudson,
New York, when I heard her shout. Now, not long
after I heard the phone ring. It was in the kitchen,
the phone, and it had a chord so long that
it could stretch into the living room. And it was
(26:30):
quickly apparent that if my mother was not crying, she
seemed about to. I came out and stood next to her,
and she said, your father wants you to go in
the room and close the door and watch the cartoons.
He will be home soon. This made no sense. I
was a kid, I was not an idiot. I was
still aware of time. It was the middle of the afternoon,
(26:52):
and Dad would not be home on the train from
New York before six, at least he wasn't supposed to be.
But I went back into my room. I did not
fully close the door because I was something of a sneak,
and soon I heard my mother tell my father to
be careful and hurry back home. The next thing I
heard was her back in the kitchen dialing the phone.
And these were the days of the rotary phones, where
(27:13):
if you had to dial the number nine, it took
several seconds to move the rotary dial clockwise and even
longer for it to rebound to the starting point counterclockwise.
And each time you did this it made so much noise.
It sounded like somebody trying to start the electric lawnmower
or maybe a prop plane. Given enough quiet on the street,
(27:34):
you could hear it from outside. Well, that noise gave
me cover to sneak back into the hallway about halfway
between my room and the living room, and I heard
my mother saying, my god, Barbara, did you see Kennedy
has been shot. What's going to happen next? It was
her sister in law, my uncle Bill's wife, Barbara. Barbara
and Bill lived in Connecticut at that time. This was
a long distance call. I am not sure if they
(27:57):
got off the phone before my dad got home more
than an hour later. I am confident my mother told
Aunt Barbara that she heard Walter Cronkite say three men
shot Kennedy, and she would insist that for the rest
of her life. Now I went back to my room
and started changing the channel. Another feat of strength. In
nineteen sixty three, unity literally changed the dial. I settled
(28:22):
on Channel two and Yes, at age four, I occasionally
watched the news. I certainly had an idea who the
president was and who John F. Kennedy was, And although
it is lodged in my memory that fifty nine years
ago today, I was not sure that they were one
in the same person. But what I could tell was
that either Kennedy or the President, or both of them,
(28:42):
or they were the same person had been shot in
some place called Dallas. I didn't know what the president
did per se, but I had figured out a lot earlier,
mostly because of the coverage of John Glenn and the
other early astronauts that anything on television that wasn't a
cartoon or a comedy or a western, or a ball
game or a thing with doctors, or something designed to
(29:04):
scare the crap out of me, like the Twilight Zone
or the Outer Limits, anything but that was necessarily important,
often very important. The rest of that day is largely
a blank, except for dinner. I ate my parents did not.
I have some memory of them putting me to bed
impossibly early for a Friday night, with the excuse being
(29:25):
that we were going to see the Carls the next
day in New Jersey. The Carl's were friends of my folks.
I think my mother knew her from a bank she
had worked at. They lived in Westfield, New Jersey, an
hour away across the George Washington Bridge and everything, and
maybe every three or four weeks or so, either we
would go see them or they would come see us,
and our trip had long since been planned. The Carl's
(29:47):
had two boys, one a couple of years older than me,
one just slightly younger. I can remember the trip only
because one of my joys at the age of four
and five was looking for all the different kinds of cars,
and on that Saturday I was sorely disappointed. There weren't
any cars. The roads were deserted. First, my folks didn't
(30:09):
eat today, they didn't talk. And now there was nobody
on the streets or the parkways or the bridge. Something
was really wrong. We got to the Carl's faster than
I could recall ever having done so. Ordinarily, Mr Carl
loved quiz me about the cars I had seen, but
on that Saturday and he and his wife simply said
a quick hello to me, and then their boys and
(30:31):
I were rushed into their room, and for all I know,
they locked us in. I last saw these two guys
around nine. Their dad was in the petroleum industry, and
they had lived in Venezuela, and I think they went
back there, so forgive me, I don't remember their names.
But as soon as Mrs Carl slammed their door shut,
the older one said to me, all right, what's wrong
(30:51):
with the grown ups? Why are they all crying? I
remember telling them that Kennedy had been shot, and I
thought Kennedy was the president, and the older one gulped
and asked, shot with a gun? We put on the
ancient black and white TV and went looking for something
to watch, and there was nothing on except men sitting
at desks looking ashen, even on the black and white
(31:13):
TVs of nineteen But I'm confident we did not realize
that they were talking about Kennedy and the assassination. We
just knew they were not supposed to be there on
our TVs. Saturday morning belonged to kids. On a Saturday morning,
the only two of the seven New York television stations
would not ordinarily be wall to wall with cartoons until
(31:36):
eleven AM or noon or later. One was the educational station,
Channel thirteen. The other was Channel five, and they had
a kid's show with a live studio audience full of
kids and games and clowns and whatever. On the others,
we could rely on quick Draw McGraw and bugs and
the like. But on this Saturday morning, they were playing
what sounded like church music, and the only thing they
(31:57):
displayed was their channel number and the call letters of
the station. Maybe they ran out of cartoons, said the
younger of the Karl brothers. Even at age four, I
understood television better than I did. Assassinations. They don't run out,
I said, They just play the same ones. Over and
over again, haven't you noticed? It amazed me that he
(32:18):
hadn't noticed, And it was at this point that I
began to really worry about what was happening. Any time
one of us left the brother's room to use the bathroom,
the adults who had stopped talking, they were stopping in
mid word. I Meanwhile, the three of us kids had
played every board game the brothers had, and the older
of them asked their parents to let us go outside
and play, and he came back shaken because they had said, no,
(32:41):
they always want us out of the house. What's wrong?
On the way home to Hastings and I think we
had been there long enough that it was getting dark already,
my parents finally filled me in at some point later
before I went to college. I remember asking my mother
what she told me and when, and she said they
had waited until the second day because they believed there
(33:02):
was a chance Kennedy had been killed by the Russians
and that there would be a war. And remember we
had almost had a war, almost a nuclear war, thirteen
months earlier that I have no memory of. I guessed
that it was easier to tell me in the car
because they didn't have to hide their faces from me
so I would not see if they were crying. My
(33:25):
mother did say she was amazed that I had figured
out what had happened, and that it had shocked all
the adults without really understanding what any of it meant.
She thought, by Saturday evening it was pretty clear the
Russians had not killed President Kennedy, and as bad as
it was, it was not going to get worse, so
they might as well tell me what I could understand,
and they decided it was safe enough to let me
go outside and play again. This, my mom was pretty confident,
(33:47):
meant that I was sitting there with them on Sunday,
probably over lunch, when Lee Harvey Oswald was himself assassinated
on live television. I think she's right. I recall them
changing the channel away from CBS, which they rarely did,
for once because they had just started to run some
sort of report from Roger Mud. My folks could not
(34:08):
abide Roger Mud no offense, they just couldn't. Only ABC
and NBC showed the murder of Oswald live. I'd love
to recount my reaction or my folks. I can't remember it.
I also have no idea what happened in school that
following short week. It was Thanksgiving coming up, and for
all I know, they canceled the three days worth of classes.
(34:30):
I do remember that as the shock of the assassination
wore off, my father was angry about something comparatively trivial.
He had, for the first time in his life as
a native New Yorker, got an actual reserved bleacher seats
for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Thirty four years He
(34:50):
had waited for this, but now it was obvious that
there were only two choices. Either they would cancel the
parade outright, or they would make it the briefest, grimmest
parade in New York City history. They chose the latter.
My memory is that my dad took me, but my
mom stayed home. Our location was at Broadway and around
fiftieth Straight, and I asked my dad what all the
black stuff was on a couple of the buildings. It
(35:13):
was morning crepe. Some of the buildings were adorned with
black morning crepe, as if we were there for Kennedy's
funeral procession, not the ceremonial first seasonal appearance of Santa Claus.
At one point, a group marched by with a huge
American flag wrapped in morning crepe, bigger than the flags themselves.
(35:35):
A year ago I found the box of slides that
my dad and inveterate photographer took of that parade. It
is amazing that the sense of shock at of people
pretending to be happy to be at a parade is
either retained by the images from that November or it
sparks my own emotional memories of the weird, disturbing experience.
(35:56):
There were the traditional Thanksgiving balloons. By the time Donald
Duck got to us, he was losing air rapidly, had
gotten punctured. How if you want a metaphor for November
nineteen sixty three, there were bands, There was Santa and
it was warm. It was sixty degrees. Coats were open,
hats were off. But more than anything else, it was
almost silent. You could hear kids throughout, the younger, the louder,
(36:22):
but you could hear them from the other side of
the parade. It was as if you went to a
ballgame and the public address system didn't work. It's actually
quite a relief. For the first few minutes, I am
convinced I could hear the shoes of the band members
hit the pavement as they walked past me. There is
(36:44):
only one other thing from my childhood about the Kennedy
assassination that I remember carrying the kind of shock like
those first few days of observing all the disoriented and
as my friend in Jersey noted, crying adults in nineteen
seventy might have been seventy one, but I'm pretty sure
it was nineteen seventy. When I was in the eighth grade,
(37:05):
all of our classes were canceled late one morning and
we were gathered in the school chapel for a special assembly.
We had a lot of assemblies there, but never as
late as eleven am. Some guy came in, and I
have thought and asked and researched and have figured out
nothing about who he was. But he had a copy
of something almost none of us, and by us, I
(37:27):
mean Americans of vent had ever seen before. It had
been on television local television a couple of times, but
it would not be shown on national television in whole
for another five years. The speaker called it the Zapruder film,
and as much other assorted film from that day as
(37:50):
any JFK documentary I saw before I was an adult.
He showed that too, And while I do not remember
him espousing any of the conspiracy theories that by then
had become a constant in our country, that might be
because he showed us the Repruter film the way Kevin
Costner showed it in the Oliver Stone film JFK. We
(38:12):
must have seen the fatal shots twenty times, at every
speed slower than real time. I think we were all
ordered back into our respective history classes, where shocked students
listen to even more shocked teachers, and we asked the
same questions the Carls and I did on November three?
(38:37):
What's wrong with the grown ups? I've done all the
damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. If
you're not following or subscribed or whatever to the podcast,
(38:58):
please do so and stop a passer by in the
street and get them too as well. Here are our credits.
Most of the music, including our theme here from Beethoven's
Ninth Arrange, produced and performed by Brian Ray and John
Philip Shanelle The Countdown musical directors, All orchestration and keyboards
by John Philip s Chanelle, guitarist Bassed and drums by
Brian Ray. Produced by t k O Brothers. Other Beethoven
(39:18):
selections have been arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed.
The sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two.
It was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Musical comments by Nancy Faust. The best baseball stadium organist ever.
Our announcer today was Stevie Van's Aunt, and everything else
is pretty much my fault. So let's countdown for this,
the six eighty six day since Donald Trump's first attempted
(39:42):
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Arrest him now while we still can. There'll be a
new episode tomorrow. Until then, I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning,
good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith
Olderman is a production of I heart Radio. For more
(40:03):
podcasts from I heart rate, do you visit the I
heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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