December 15, 2023 • 44 mins
SEASON 2 EPISODE 91: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: After spending their lives as bullies, Donald John Trump and Rudolph William Louis Giuliani will go out as cowards. Guess who did NOT testify yesterday as testimony ended in the Ruby Freeman/Shay Moss/Rudy Giuliani case? Yes, the defendant, who had promised after court Monday and Tuesday that he would testify, prove that he was telling the truth about them, and that they were lying about him.
Instead, his lawyer was reduced to painting Giuliani as a pathetic "flat-earther" who could never process reality. Giuliani said nothing as the case concluded and the jury deliberated for three hours what he should make out the check for - and they didn't reach a conclusion. When it takes jurors more than one day to decide how much money you owe the people you lied about, guess what: you’re going to owe the people you lied about… eleventy billion dollars.
It has been quite the week for Trumpian cowardice, led by Trump himself, because if the whole Giuliani "I'll prove I'm right" posturing sounds familiar, Trump did the SAME THING this week. He vowed to tell the truth – under oath - about the New York Business Fraud judge and the clerk and the attorney general and then suddenly, he vanished.
Cowardice was on sale at popular prices in Trump-land this week. In ATLANTA yesterday the letters of apology required for the plea deals for Trump 19 confessed conspirators Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesbro were obtained through a Public Records Act motion and combined they stretched to just 26 words.
The importance of Giuliani and Trump wimping out is that it underscores that when the spit hits the fan, the bullies ARE the first to run. The lesson in this is simple: hit them. Hit them every day. Hit them with every lawsuit, every indictment, every protest, every public mockery, every embarrassment. Hit them with everything you have, every day, for the rest of their lives. Because what Trump proved by NOT being in a New York courtroom Monday, and what Giuliani proved by squirming at the defense table yesterday, is that you CAN break them. Both of them. Maybe not all at once, maybe not permanently. But they cannot bullshit their way out of EVERYTHING.
ALSO: You'll never believe how bad Vivek Ramaswamy's CNN ratings were. Or Charles Barkley's. And guess what else is back? Cajun Congressman Clay Higgins' "Ghost Buses" delusion. Except now they're MISSING! Complete with an interview by delusional ex-reporter Lara Logan. And her show literally opens with video of Logan playing in traffic.
B-Block (23:48) IN SPORTS: Gene Carr, "The New Kid In Town," and Ken MacKenzie of the 1962 Mets, in memoriam (29:19) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Elon Musk says an anti-fraud law is a violation of the 1st Amendment. Kevin McCarthy puts the artificial in Artificial Intelligence. And what kind of act could the New York GOP find to follow George Santos? How about a registered Democrat whose name is spelled Nazi - only with an "M."
C-Block (35:00) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: An extraordinary Minnesota rescue is in danger of losing everything: 9 dogs and 130 more animals from Emus to Silky Chickens. (36:05) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: Man versus machine, reduced to Man versus Medicine Cabinet: "Nine Needles." And man versus transportation, reduced to mice: "The Mouse Who Went To The Country."
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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. After
spending most of his life as a bully, Rudolph William
(00:27):
Lewis Giuliani will go out as a coward when it
takes the jury more than one day to decide how
much money you owe the people you lied about. Guess
what you're going to owe the people you lied about
about eleventy billion dollars? Because guess what did not happen yesterday?
(00:48):
As testimony ended in the Ruby Freeman, Shane Moss Rudy
Giuliani case, I.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Was proven to be telling this ruth and they were
proven to be liars.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Once again. That will happen when I justify to get
the whole story, and it will be definitively clear that
what I said was true and that whatever happened to.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Them, which is it's.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Unfortunate if other people overreacting, but everything I said about
them is.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
True, and Rudy never testified must have been laryngitis. To
defend him, Giuliani's attorney, Joe Sibley basically had to force
Giuliani not to testify, and Sibley basically had to turn
to an insanity plea He compared Giuliani to a flat
earther who will never believe the truth. His own client
(01:43):
begged the jurors to remember that Giuliani did great things
on nine to eleven. Spoiler alert, he didn't do great
things on nine to eleven. Before the pyre had even
started to die down, Rudy Giuliani was trying to leverage
two thousand dead New Yorkers into an extra constitutional extension
of his term as mayor of the City of New York.
The empathying a politician reading the room and feigning that
(02:09):
he cared funny. Rudy missed the opportunity to go under
oath and finally prove that Ruby Freeman and Shane Moss
stole the election from his master dementia j Trump, them
and the dead president of Venezuela and the Chinese and
I don't know, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the National
(02:30):
Football League Players Association. Funny. He said nothing in his
own defense or to prove his case. Actually, it'll be
funny if Freeman and Moss do not file a second
defamation case against Giuliani for what he said. After court
adjourned the first two days of this past week. As
(02:51):
to this case. The jury deliberated three and a half
hours yesterday without telling Giuliani how much to make the
check for. It has been quite the week for trumpy
and cowardice, led by Trump himself, because if the whole Juliani,
this is my chance to prove to you I am right.
The election was stolen and they lied about me. Uh,
(03:11):
I'm leaving because my grandmother is on fire. Thing sounds familiar.
Trump did the same thing this week. He vowed to
tell the truth under oath about the New York Business
Broad judge and his clerk and the Attorney General and
I don't know the bodder Minehoff gang and the Visiting
(03:32):
Nurse Association, and then slight change of plans instead of
having what Trump would call a Perry Mason moment since
it is the year nineteen sixty six. In all, Trump
turned out was not revealing all telling all. He was
skipping the rest of the trial. There are all kinds
of terrible and even bigoted things that one might call
(03:53):
what Giuliani and Trump did, But the worst things to
call Giuliani and Trump are Giuliani and Trump. Cowardice was
also on sale at popular prices throughout trump Land this week.
In Atlanta yesterday, the letters of apology required for the
plea deals for Trump nineteen confessed conspirators Sidney Powell and
(04:14):
Kenneth Chesbro were obtained through a Public Records Act motion
by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Powell's videotape profer may
have been illuminating, but she and Chesbro spared the court
and the citizens of Georgia and the United States of
America any troublesome, complicated, or lengthy remorse. Quote. I apologize
(04:36):
to the citizens of the State of Georgia and of
Fulton County for my involvement in count fifteen of the indictment,
wrote Kenny the Cheese Wow twenty three whole words Ken,
I've gotten fortune cookies longer than that. Still, Chesbrow looked verbose,
(04:57):
by contrast to the Kraken Lady quote, I apologize for
my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County.
Words must have been up all night editing that down. Huh,
sid you might say, so what The apologies are insincere?
The letters are formalities, and of course Giuliani wasn't going
(05:17):
to stick to his beliefs, no matter how crazy they were,
and of course Trump would back out or waddle out.
Words don't count to him because he's allowed to lie
whenever he needs to in both directions at the same time,
because all of the rest of us are just extras
in his movie Dementia, j Trump's autobiographical history of the Universe.
But here listen carefully, because it'll be the first and
(05:39):
probably in the last time I do this. I will
invoke and praise Jenna Ellis, who also had to write
one of those Chesbro Powell apology letters, and who, even
if she still defines the lawyer representing themselves, who has
the fool for the client. She wrote two hundred and
fifty really painful words and had the guts or at
(06:04):
least the strategic intelligence to sit there and read it
herself to the judge on tape, complete with tears. And
as much as I would like to think those tears
were fake, they weren't. The importance of Giuliani and Trump
whimping out is that it underscores that when the spit
hits the fan, the bullies are the first to run.
(06:27):
The lesson in this is simple. Hit them, Hit them
every day, Hit them with every lawsuit, every indictment, every protest,
every public mockery, every embarrassment, every joke. Hit them with
everything you have, every day for the rest of their lives.
(06:48):
Because what Trump proved by not being in a New
York courtroom Monday, and what Giuliani proved by squirming at
the defense table yesterday is that you can break them,
both of them, maybe not all at once and maybe
not permanently, but they cannot bullshit their way out of everything.
(07:12):
People watching the movie Classic Citizen Kin go to the
dying Charles Foster Caine gurgling out his dying word rosebud
as the quote from an eminently quotable film. But for me,
it has always been the scene in which the crooked
politician Boss Getty's catches Cain in an apartment with a
woman who is not his wife. And by the way,
(07:35):
for context, this is in the pre Moms for Liberty days,
when that wasn't okay even if your wife was also there.
Getties offers Cain a chance to withdraw from their race
for governor of New York rather than subject his family
to the subsequent scandal about the apartment and the woman
who's not his wife. Cain screams threats about sending Getties
(07:58):
to sing Sing Sing Getties. Getti's presented by actor Ray
Collins as the definition of the banality of evil, answers
him flatly, You're the greatest fool I've ever known, Cain.
If it was anybody else, I'd say, what's gonna happen
to you? Would be a lesson to you. Only you're
(08:20):
gonna need more than one lesson, and you're gonna get
more than one lesson. Still gives me chills. It should
give Trump chills more eminently, probably today. It should give
Rudy Giuliani chills. It probably even would if either of
them had any nerve endings left. They'll feel it later,
(08:42):
because we must make twenty twenty four the year in
which Trump and Giuliani and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller
and Cash Patel and all of them who need more
than one lesson. We must make twenty twenty four the
year in which they get more than one lesson. By
(09:08):
the way, before moving on to how much nobody cared about,
Vivek Ramaswami in a CNN town hall Wednesday to say
nothing about volume three of the Charles Barkley Gaale King
witness Relocation hour. Just to tie off that you're going
to get more than one lesson quote from Citizen Kane
for the benefit of one particular listener, mister dementia. Jay
(09:30):
Trump I mentioned the actor who delivered that line, portraying
Boss Jim W. Getty's. He was Ray Collins, and boy
has he never gotten the do he deserves? Just spectacular
in Citizen Kane and in the other Orson Wells masterpiece,
The Magnificent Amberson's. He played in the Wells radio events,
(09:51):
still controversial to this day, War of the Worlds. He
was unforgettable in Touch of Evil, and in the Best
Years of Our Lives, even in a bunch of soppy
baseball pictures. But Ray Collins ended his career in a
recurring role in a television series. He was the diligent
but a little too boastful LA Police flat foot Lieutenant
(10:13):
Arthur Trag who always got tripped up in cross examination
by the star of the show, the attorney Perry Mason,
the one Trump keeps talking about, you're gonna need more
than one lesson, and you're gonna get more than one
lesson Perry Mason. And that's true also for Vivike Ramaswami
(10:36):
and CNN the town Hall Wednesday Night with the only
man who might be able to Outlie Trump in a
battle to the death, and how I wish they would
try that. V Bake Ramswami. The total number of viewers
in primetime on CNN five hundred and ninety one thousand.
(10:56):
I mean, television news is dying, but it's not dying
that fast. That's five episodes of this podcast. Whatever CNN
thought it was gaining putting that paranoid manure salesman on,
I can only guess. Ramaswami even drew thirty one thousand
fewer viewers than Ron DeSantis did on Tuesday. He drew
(11:19):
fewer viewers than his lead in Anderson Cooper did five
hundred and ninety one thousand viewers. Good God. Even Aaron
Burnett had six hundred and fifty nine thousand. And since
we are on this subject, after Ramaswami right afterwards comes
episode three out of a complete series of three of
(11:40):
King Charles Chris Lickt's Last and Stupidest IDEA four one
hundred and fifty three thousand viewers for a news show
in which Charles Barkley and Gail King talk about something
and it actually lost a quarter of vv Ramaswami's invisible audience,
(12:05):
and King Charles is somehow down ten percent from its
disastrous launch ratings happily, and this brings us back to
Trump and politics and a culture in which you don't
like reality. Just call it a liar. You want it
to be day and it's night. You can just shout
loudly enough that it really is day, and you and
(12:25):
only you can see the fact that it's day. Barkley
responded to his humiliating failure the first night of this
show by blaming the ratings company. I want to tell
my team man, these Nielsen people are the biggest clowns
in the world, he said. The ratings can't be right,
(12:46):
he implied, because he doesn't know anybody with a Nielsen box.
And you may recall when he was still interesting, Charles
Barkley speculated about running for governor of Alabama as a Republican. Chuck,
you're not good at this, nobody's interested in you doing it,
(13:09):
and you're not honest about it with yourself or anybody else.
So let me ask you this. Do you own a
shell company? Did you loan your own brother two hundred
thousand dollars and then he paid you back. And if so,
could you still shout at the son of a president
from the other party for having a shell company or
at his father for loaning money, Chuck? If so, you
would be perfect for today's GOP. Also, I wouldn't worry
(13:33):
about having to tell your team anything for much longer.
Some headlines Trump has sold the rooms rancid stakes, and
universities that didn't teach, and magazines that didn't sell, and
airlines that didn't fly. But I have rarely seen him
(13:54):
sell anything as hard, especially anything that literally does not
exist as this presidential immunity thing. He stumbled through a
reference to a plea deal from the Supreme Court about it,
whatever that means, and he posted and reposted and re
reposted the same rant yesterday on the important matter of
(14:18):
presidential immunity, something which is so basic to America that
it should be automatic. Trump does not say why it
would be basic to America, or why if it's so automatic,
and if it exists, that the Supreme Court would not
rule that he's right about it. But he is selling
(14:40):
this hard. This underscores the fact that Trump has only
to say it to validate it with his cult. I
doubt anybody would bother. But I guarantee you if you
polled Dementia Jay's slaves, they would insist by ninety or
ninety five percent that no, No, he had testified this
week in the New York Business broad case. I saw him.
(15:01):
And then if he came out and said no, he
did not testify because he was being unfairly gagged, ninety
or ninety five percent would then say he had not testified.
I do not know what to do about these people.
I do know they are incompatible with a free society,
(15:21):
with a representative form of government, and if it has
to be that or them, it's going to have to
be that. By the way, Trump lost again, this time
before a three judge state appeals panel in another attempt
to overturn the gag order so he can resume trying
to get Judge Arthur Engeron's family and his clerk killed.
(15:46):
It is striking that, amid more legal activity than the
apocryphal law firm of Engulf and Devour, Trump has never
once turned to America First Legal Stephen Miller's supposed conservative
counterpoint to the ACLU. It is now trying to find
people who believe they were unfairly not hired becase because
they were white and wont to sue IBM. The Daily
(16:09):
Beast now says in the year twenty twenty two, this
nonprofit reported forty four million dollars in contributions. It spent
thirty five million. Of that, two million, seven hundred thousand
went to salaries, one and a half million was spent
on lawsuits and other legal services. Thirty million, thirty million
(16:30):
dollars eighty five percent of its expenses went to advertising.
Advertising that was mostly about things like Joe Biden. Even
though as a nonprofit, Stephen Miller's America First Legal is
barred from participating in any political activity. Wait, so you're
(16:53):
saying Stephen Miller is a con man and a fraud bending,
if not flat out breaking the law, and not just
the paranoid hate monger whose dreams of ethnic cleansing in
America are driven because a girl of Hispanic heritage humiliated
him back in high school. Mister Miller, you're going to
(17:15):
need more than one lesson, and you're going to get
more than one lesson. And lastly, today, guess what's back,
Oh ghost buses?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Those buses were removed from the Union station, and we're
going to document all of that. So you believe that
those buses held undercover offices, not informants, correct. I feel very,
very confident that everybody that was on those two buses
were FBI assets, and I have a high degree of
(17:54):
belief that they were actual FBI agents. And I'm sorry
to say, man, my objective conclusion is that, as senior
official at the FBI, were deeply involved there.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Yes, Congressman Kay Higgins, disgraced former cop in Opahalusa's city, Louisiana,
interviewed by disgraced former sixty Minutes correspondent Lara Logan. A
lot of disgrace, not a lot of functioning cortexes. So
now the ghost buses are missing ghost buses. They're missing
(18:34):
that would make them ghosts ghost buses. This interview was
on Lara Logan's streaming show, which literally and I had
to look at it four times to make sure this
was not just my wishful thinking manifesting itself before my eyes.
Her show literally starts with Lara Logan playing in traffic
(18:59):
and then a shot of her writing in penn in
your ninth grade composition class notebook and big loony looking
letters the rest of the story. There is, however, one
thing missing, Lara Logan's. The rest of the story with
(19:21):
crazy Clay Higgins is missing a theme song. If I
may suggest one, Oh Nancy.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Into something parked at your insurrection?
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Who you gonna call? Go? Thank you, Nancy Faust. You
know what occurs to me. If she had called the
series Lara Logan playing in traffic, people might have watched.
Also of interest here, just when you thought the Republican
(20:05):
Party had reached some kind of apogee of cynicism and
corruption in George Santos, Wait till you see who they
have lined up to run for the House seat he
had to resign in what passes for Republican shame. First hint,
she's a registered Democrat. That's next. This is countdown. This
(20:29):
is countdown with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 4 (20:44):
This is Sports Senate. Wait, check that not anymore. This
is countdown with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
In Sports Dateline Los Angeles. Not all the heroes are
actually great players. Gene Carr has died, and in some
hockey circles he is being mourned as if he were
a Hall of Famer. The fourth pick in the NHL
draft in nineteen seventy one. He made the Saint Louis
Blues opening night roster as a twenty year old with
(21:19):
no professional experience, and he broke into the league as
perhaps the fastest skating player of his generation. His father
had played briefly in the NHL. Gene Carr's mother was
a championship speed skater. In the NHL of nineteen seventy one,
not everybody was even a good skater, and almost nobody
(21:41):
wore a helmet. So Gene Carr, young, blonde haired, long haired,
going from end to end of the rink, his locks
flowing behind him, looked like a superstar. Fourteen games into
his NHL career, the New York Rangers traded four top
prospects to Saint Louis for him, and Broadway welcomed Gene
(22:02):
Carr as a hero. And in the next one hundred
and thirty nine games with the New York Rangers, Gene
Carr scored eighteen goals. That's not a lot. It became
the subtext of games at Madison Square Garden. Gene Carr
could skate from one net to the other in about
four seconds, but if you gave him four minutes in
(22:25):
front of the opposing net, he still could not score
a goal. As the legendary New York born referee and
Rangers announcer Bill Chadwick once lamented, more in sympathy than
in anger, Jean Carr couldn't put the puck in the
ocean and if he was standing on the pier. The
Rangers eventually gave up and traded Gen Carr to the
Los Angeles Kings in nineteen seventy four, still just twenty
(22:48):
three years old and playing in a totally no pressure
hockey environment, meaning there were about nine thousand regular Kings
fans in those days. Carr played well, He learned to
fight a little bit. He scored fifteen goals one season,
and he fell in with the celebrity crowd. One day
he brought some friends to a King's home game at
the Fabulous Forum. His friends were the Eagles, the Eagles,
(23:12):
Glenn Fry and Don Henley and everybody and whatever else
Gene Carr had or had not done when he died
this week, he will last as long as Rock and
roll does. Because if you've ever heard the Eagles song
new Kid in Town, the new Kid in Town, the
guy they wrote that song about reportedly anyway was Gene Carr.
(23:36):
Gene Carr seventy nine career NHL goals and a number
one hit on the charts was seventy two years old.
(24:19):
Thank You, Nancy Faust, State Line, Guildford, Connecticut. Much in
the same manner, Ken McKenzie became a star with the
original New York Mets. The team lost one hundred and
twenty out of the one hundred and sixty games it
played in its first season of existence nineteen sixty two,
but mackenzie, and unassuming, bespectacled left handed reliever from Canada
(24:41):
by way of Yale, won five games and lost four,
which made him the only one of the seventeen pitchers
on the nineteen sixty two Mets to finish with a
winning record. In fact, the next year, he won three
games and lost only one, making him the only pitcher
on the nineteen sixty three Mets to finish with a
(25:03):
winning record. In fact, no other Mets pitcher would have
a winning record until nineteen sixty five. Others suffered through
the early years of the Mets. Ken McKenzie, later the
baseball coach at Yale, then an alumni executive at the university,
reveled in them. He made it to the Mets twenty
twenty two Old Timers Day in a wheelchair. His license
(25:26):
plate on his car read nineteen sixty two met and
his humor was consistent for sixty years. At one point
somebody pointed out that he had the highest ra on
the team, to which Mackenzie answered, yes, but I have
the lowest salary of anybody in the Yale class of
nineteen fifty six. Ken Mackenzie died at his home yesterday morning.
(25:49):
He was eighty nine years old. Still to come on
(26:13):
Countdown Fridays with Thurber and Mann versus machine, with the
machine reduced to the seemingly benign but anything but benign
Medicine Cabinet nine needles. Next first time for the daily
roundup of the miss grants, morons and Dunning Kruger effect
specimens who constitute two days waste persons in the world,
(26:36):
insteading on the pier the bronze the worst elon Musk.
When your self driving cars keep crashing, what do you do?
Do you improve them? No, you do not. You try
to prevent the government from telling people that they keep crashing.
This is the kind of headline that could bankrupt a company,
and it is live on the website of Ours Technica. Quote.
(27:00):
Tesla claims California false advertising law violate First Amendment. Tesla
fights DMB complaint that Autopilot is falsely advertised as autonomous
unquote nice. Free speech advocacy Free speech boy. The runner
up worser, Kevin McCarthy, the already ex speaker soon to
(27:23):
be ex congressman, has decided he is in demand. McCarthy
says he is open to serving in a Trump administration.
I mean why not. McCarthy has already proved to Trump
his willingness to pore himself out for Trump, but a
far greater interest. McCarthy tells Axios he'd like to work
with his pal Elon Musk in artificial intelligence. And once again,
(27:47):
why not. I mean, when I think artificial the first
person who comes to mind is Kevin McCarthy. Intelligence not
so much, but our winner, the Republican leadership of Queens
and Nassau Counties in New York. These are the people
who brought us George Santos, Congressman at Large, in drag
(28:14):
their new idea to run for the seat that Santos
has just had to resign from in disgrace. They have
nominated a county legislator with no public platform other than
support for Israel. How does she feel about abortion? Nowbody
knows Trump, nowbody knows democracy. Nobody knows anything else about
(28:35):
President Biden. Nobody knows. Her name is Mazi Melissa Pilip,
and she was born in Ethiopia and she served in
the Israeli Defense Forces. She checks interesting boxes. She's black,
she's a veteran, and there are a couple of drawbacks
thrown in. She has a really difficult accent. She makes
(28:57):
George Santos sound like a generic voiceover announcer. And her
name is pronounced Mazi, but it's spelled m Azi, you know,
like Nazi, but with an M. Her only tenuous connection
to Congress is she campaigned alongside and called a quote
amazing friend, George Santos. On one more little detail, the
(29:21):
new Republican candidate for the House, Ms Mazi Malaysa Pilip
is a registered Democrat. NASA and Queen's County Republicans just
nominated a Democrat for Congress. Hey, you know, Santos is
hugely popular on that cameo thing. Think of his name recognition,
(29:43):
give him some time to cool off. Maybe we can
run them again. The NASA and Queens County leadership of
the Republican Party. Two days worst persons in the World.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
Like Nazi, but with an m.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Just ahead Fridays with Thurber and a double header including
one of his fables, word for word, the funniest and
most incisive stuff ever written. The City Mouse goes to
the country next first time for more dogs you can help.
Every dog has its day In fact, nine dogs and
eleven cats, nine ducks, two EMUs, three rabbits, a parrot,
(30:34):
twenty four silky chickens, and ninety rescue chickens. They are
at National Boxer Rescue in Pierce, Minnesota, and the county
board there is about to vote to take the land
away from them and close this rescue. They're thirty thousand
dollars in debt with almost no donations coming in and
no idea where the animals will go if they have
(30:55):
to close. If you think placing rescue dogs is tough,
imagine rescue chickens and rescue EMUs. And crazy as it sounds,
many of them are special needs. Sounds crazy until you
picture them, and then it sounds heartbreaking. Anyway we can help.
They have a fundraiser on cuddly dot com. I'll tweet
out the link, or just go to cuddly dot com
(31:17):
and type National Boxer in the search bar. The Chickens,
thank you, the Silky Chickens, thank you, the nine Dogs,
thank you, and I thank you to the number one
story on the countdown. And it's Fridays with Thurber and
a lot of his work details the fundamental clash between people,
(31:38):
husband and wife, he and various relatives, a guy in
a bed and a seal, two animals representing any two
humans in conflict. But some of the most magical writing
is the stuff that is just about one person alone
against life. One of his stories ends with a great
(31:59):
grandmother struggling with a butter churn and screaming into the void,
why doesn't somebody this goddamn thing away from me? A
line which I think could be the start of a
national anthem somewhere. Such a story is nine Needles this
week's selection. As you will see, it is a little
short for our usual time frames here, so I'll give
you a bonus another man versus life story afterwards, in
(32:23):
the form of one of Thurber's Fables for our time
The mouse who went to the country. But first, it's
unlikely this event has ever happened to you, but the
anxiety that should be immediately familiar. Nine Needles by James Thurber.
One of the more spectacular minor happenings of the past
(32:45):
few years, which I am sorry that I missed, took
place in the Columbus, Ohio home of some friends of
a friend of mine. It seems that a mister Albatross,
while looking for something in his medicine cabinet one morning,
discovered a bottle of a kind of patent medicine which
his wife had been taking for a stomach element. Now,
mister Albatross is one of those apprehensive men who are
(33:08):
afraid of patent medicines and of almost everything else. Some
weeks before, he had encountered a paragraph in a consumer's
research bulletin which announced that this particular medicine was bad
for you. He had thereupon ordered his wife to throw
out what was left of her supply of the stuff
and never buy any more, she had promised, And here
(33:28):
now was another bottle of the perilous liquid. Mister Albatross,
a man given to quick rages, shouted the conclusion of
the story at my friend. I threw the bottle out
the bathroom window, and the medicine chest after it. It
seems to me that must have been a spectacle worth
(33:49):
going a long way to see. I am sure that
many a husband has wanted to wrench the family medicine
cabinet off the wall and throw it out the window,
if only because the average medicine cabinet is so filled
with mysterious bottles and unidentifiable objects of all kinds, that
it is a source of constant bewilderment and exasperation to
(34:11):
the American male. Surely, the British medicine cabinet, and the
French medicine cabinet, all the other medicine cabinets must be
simpler and better ordered than ours. It may be that
the American habit of saving everything and never throwing anything away,
even empty bottles, causes the domestic medicine cabinet to become
(34:33):
as cluttered in its small way as the American attic
becomes cluttered in its major way. I have encountered few
medicine cabinets in this country which were not packed jammed
with something between one hundred and fifty and two hundred
different items, from dental floss to boracic acid, from razor
blades to sodium perborate, from adhesive tape to coconut oil.
(34:59):
Even the neatest wife will put off clearing out the
medicine cabinet on the ground that she he has something
else to do that is more important at that moment,
or more diverting. It was in the apartment of such
a wife and her husband that I became enormously involved
with a medicine cabinet. One morning, not long ago, I
had spent the weekend with this couple. They live on
(35:20):
East tenth Street, near Fifth Avenue. Such a weekend as
left me reluctant to rise up on Monday morning with
bright and shining face and go to work. They got
up and went to work, but I didn't. I didn't
get up until about to two thirty in the afternoon.
I had my face all lathered for shaving, and the
(35:43):
wash bowl was full of hot water, when suddenly I
cut myself with the razor. I cut my ear. Very
few men cut their ears with razors, but I do,
possibly because I was taught the old Spencerian free risk
movements by my writing teacher in the grammar grades. The
ear bleeds rather profusely when cut with a razor, and
(36:04):
is difficult to get at. More angry than hurt, I
jerked open the door of the medicine cabinet to see
if I could find a stiptick pencil, and out fell
from the top shelf a little black paper packet containing
nine needles. It seems that his wife kept a little
paper packet containing nine needles on the top shelf of
(36:24):
the medicine cabinet. The packet fell into the soapy water
of the wash bowl, where the paper rapidly disintegrated, leaving
nine needles at large in the bowl. I was, naturally enough,
not in the best condition, either physical or mental, to
recover nine needles from a wash bowl. No gentleman who
(36:46):
has lather on his face and whose ear is bleeding
is in the best condition for anything, even something involving
the handling of nine large, blunt objects. It did not
seem wise to me to pull the plug out of
the wash bowl and let the needles go down the drain.
I had visions of clogging up the plumbing system of
the house, and also a vague fear of causing short
(37:10):
circuits somehow or other. I know very little about electricity,
and I don't want to have it explained to me. Finally,
I groped very gently around the bowl, and eventually had
four of the needles in the palm of one hand
and three in the palm of the other. Two I
couldn't find. If I had thought quickly and clearly, I
(37:32):
wouldn't have done that. A lathered man whose ear is bleeding,
and who has four wet needles in one hand and
three in the other may be said to have reached
the lowest known point of human efficiency. There is nothing
he can do but stand there. I tried transferring the
needles in my left hand to the palm of my
right hand, but I couldn't get off my left hand
(37:54):
wet needles cling to you. In the end, I wiped
the needles off onto a bath towel, which was hanging
on a row above the bath tub. It was the
only towel that I could find. I had to dry
my hands afterward on the bath mat. Then I tried
to find the needles in the towel. Hunting for seven
(38:16):
needles in a bath towel is the most tedious occupation
I have ever engaged in. I could find only five
of them, with the two that had been left in
the bowl. That meant there were four needles in all, missing,
two in the wash bowl, and two others lurking in
the towel or lying in the bathtub under the towel.
(38:36):
Frightful thoughts came to me of what might happen to
anyone who used that towel, or washed his face in
the bowl, or got into the tub if I didn't
find the missing needles. Well, I didn't find them. I
sat down on the edge of the tub to think,
and I decided finally that the only thing to do
was to wrap up the towel in a newspaper and
(38:57):
take it away with me. I also decided to leave
a note for my friends, explaining as clearly as I
could that I would I was afraid there were two
needles in the bathtub and two needles in the wash bowl,
and that they better be careful. I looked everywhere in
the apartment, but I could not find a pencil or
a pen or a typewriter. I could find pieces of paper,
(39:20):
but nothing with which to write on them. I don't
know what gave me the idea a movie I had seen,
perhaps or a story I had read. But I suddenly
thought of writing a message with lipstick. The wife might
have an extra lipstick lying around, and if so, I
concluded it would be in the medicine cabinet. I went
(39:41):
back to the medicine cabinet and began poking around in
it for a lipstick. I saw what I thought looked
like the metal tip of one, and I got two
fingers around it began to pull gently. It was under
a lot of things. Every object in the medicine cabinet
began to slide. Bottles broke in the wash bowl and
on the floor, red, brown, and white liquids, spurted, nail files, scizzors,
(40:05):
razor blades, and miscellaneous objects sang and clattered and tinkled.
I was covered with perfume, peroxide, and cold cream. It
took me half an hour to get all the debris
all together in the middle of the bathroom floor. I
made no attempt to put anything back in the medicine cabinet.
(40:28):
I knew it would take a steadier hand than mine
and a less shattered spirit. Before I went away only
partly shaved and abandoned the shambles. I left a note
saying that I was afraid there were needles in the
bathtub and the washbowl, and that I had taken their towel,
and that I would call up and tell them everything.
I wrote it in iodine with the end of a toothbrush.
(40:52):
I have not yet called up. I'm sorry to say
I've neither found the courage nor thought up the words
to explain what happened. I suppose my friends believe that
I deliberately smashed up their bathroom and stole their towel.
I don't know for sure, because they have not yet
called me up either. Nine Needles by James Thurber, and
(41:18):
as I suggested in a broad sense on the same subject,
from his Fables for our Time and famous poems illustrated.
The Mouse who Went to the Country by James Thurber.
Once upon a Sunday there was a city mouse who
(41:39):
went to visit a country mouse. He hid away on
a train the country mouse had told him to take,
only to find that on Sundays it did not stop
at Beddington. Hence the city mouse could not get off
at Bettington and catch a bus for Cybert's Junction. Where
he was to be met by the country mouse. The
city mouse, in fact, was carried on to Middleburg, where
(41:59):
he waited three hours for a train to take him back.
When he got back to Beddington, he found out that
the last bus for Siebert's Junction had just left, so
he ran, and he ran, and he ran, and he
finally caught the bus and crept aboard, only to find
that it was not the bus for Sebert's Junction at all,
but was going in the opposite direction through Pells Hollow
(42:20):
and Grum to a place called Wimberbee. When the bus
finally stopped, the city mouse got out into a heavy
rain and found that there were no more buses that
night going anywhere. To the hell with it, said the
city mouse, and he walked back to the city.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Moral.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
Stay where you are. You're sitting pretty The Mouse who
went to the Country by James Thurber. I've done all
(43:00):
the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Jimmy is solid, and tell everybody who doesn't listen to
to listen. In fact, post it on your Facebook wall.
I'm not on Facebook. I think that's part of the issue.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
Here.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Countdown has come to you from the Vin Scully Studios
at the Olderman Broadcasting Empire in New York. There's a
video that I do every night promoting this thing. You
could put that on your wall. Put that on your wall.
Downtown Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums,
(43:34):
and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including
some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is courtesy ESPN, Inc.
It was written by Mitch Warren Davis. We call it
the Olberman theme from ESPN two. Our satirical and pithy
musical comments are by Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium
organist ever. Our announcer today was my friend Stevie van
(43:57):
zandt Everything else was pretty much my fault. That's countdown
for this the one tho seventy fourth day since dementia
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Use the Insurrection Act against him and them.
While we still can. The next scheduled countdown is Tuesday.
Bulletins as the news warrant till then, I'm Keith Olderman.
(44:19):
Good Morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
(44:40):
Keith Oldreman 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. After
spending most of his life as a bully, Rudolph William
(00:27):
Lewis Giuliani will go out as a coward when it
takes the jury more than one day to decide how
much money you owe the people you lied about. Guess
what you're going to owe the people you lied about
about eleventy billion dollars? Because guess what did not happen yesterday?
(00:48):
As testimony ended in the Ruby Freeman, Shane Moss Rudy
Giuliani case, I.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Was proven to be telling this ruth and they were
proven to be liars.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Once again. That will happen when I justify to get
the whole story, and it will be definitively clear that
what I said was true and that whatever happened to.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Them, which is it's.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Unfortunate if other people overreacting, but everything I said about
them is.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
True, and Rudy never testified must have been laryngitis. To
defend him, Giuliani's attorney, Joe Sibley basically had to force
Giuliani not to testify, and Sibley basically had to turn
to an insanity plea He compared Giuliani to a flat
earther who will never believe the truth. His own client
(01:43):
begged the jurors to remember that Giuliani did great things
on nine to eleven. Spoiler alert, he didn't do great
things on nine to eleven. Before the pyre had even
started to die down, Rudy Giuliani was trying to leverage
two thousand dead New Yorkers into an extra constitutional extension
of his term as mayor of the City of New York.
The empathying a politician reading the room and feigning that
(02:09):
he cared funny. Rudy missed the opportunity to go under
oath and finally prove that Ruby Freeman and Shane Moss
stole the election from his master dementia j Trump, them
and the dead president of Venezuela and the Chinese and
I don't know, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the National
(02:30):
Football League Players Association. Funny. He said nothing in his
own defense or to prove his case. Actually, it'll be
funny if Freeman and Moss do not file a second
defamation case against Giuliani for what he said. After court
adjourned the first two days of this past week. As
(02:51):
to this case. The jury deliberated three and a half
hours yesterday without telling Giuliani how much to make the
check for. It has been quite the week for trumpy
and cowardice, led by Trump himself, because if the whole Juliani,
this is my chance to prove to you I am right.
The election was stolen and they lied about me. Uh,
(03:11):
I'm leaving because my grandmother is on fire. Thing sounds familiar.
Trump did the same thing this week. He vowed to
tell the truth under oath about the New York Business
Broad judge and his clerk and the Attorney General and
I don't know the bodder Minehoff gang and the Visiting
(03:32):
Nurse Association, and then slight change of plans instead of
having what Trump would call a Perry Mason moment since
it is the year nineteen sixty six. In all, Trump
turned out was not revealing all telling all. He was
skipping the rest of the trial. There are all kinds
of terrible and even bigoted things that one might call
(03:53):
what Giuliani and Trump did, But the worst things to
call Giuliani and Trump are Giuliani and Trump. Cowardice was
also on sale at popular prices throughout trump Land this week.
In Atlanta yesterday, the letters of apology required for the
plea deals for Trump nineteen confessed conspirators Sidney Powell and
(04:14):
Kenneth Chesbro were obtained through a Public Records Act motion
by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Powell's videotape profer may
have been illuminating, but she and Chesbro spared the court
and the citizens of Georgia and the United States of
America any troublesome, complicated, or lengthy remorse. Quote. I apologize
(04:36):
to the citizens of the State of Georgia and of
Fulton County for my involvement in count fifteen of the indictment,
wrote Kenny the Cheese Wow twenty three whole words Ken,
I've gotten fortune cookies longer than that. Still, Chesbrow looked verbose,
(04:57):
by contrast to the Kraken Lady quote, I apologize for
my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County.
Words must have been up all night editing that down. Huh,
sid you might say, so what The apologies are insincere?
The letters are formalities, and of course Giuliani wasn't going
(05:17):
to stick to his beliefs, no matter how crazy they were,
and of course Trump would back out or waddle out.
Words don't count to him because he's allowed to lie
whenever he needs to in both directions at the same time,
because all of the rest of us are just extras
in his movie Dementia, j Trump's autobiographical history of the Universe.
But here listen carefully, because it'll be the first and
(05:39):
probably in the last time I do this. I will
invoke and praise Jenna Ellis, who also had to write
one of those Chesbro Powell apology letters, and who, even
if she still defines the lawyer representing themselves, who has
the fool for the client. She wrote two hundred and
fifty really painful words and had the guts or at
(06:04):
least the strategic intelligence to sit there and read it
herself to the judge on tape, complete with tears. And
as much as I would like to think those tears
were fake, they weren't. The importance of Giuliani and Trump
whimping out is that it underscores that when the spit
hits the fan, the bullies are the first to run.
(06:27):
The lesson in this is simple. Hit them, Hit them
every day, Hit them with every lawsuit, every indictment, every protest,
every public mockery, every embarrassment, every joke. Hit them with
everything you have, every day for the rest of their lives.
(06:48):
Because what Trump proved by not being in a New
York courtroom Monday, and what Giuliani proved by squirming at
the defense table yesterday is that you can break them,
both of them, maybe not all at once and maybe
not permanently, but they cannot bullshit their way out of everything.
(07:12):
People watching the movie Classic Citizen Kin go to the
dying Charles Foster Caine gurgling out his dying word rosebud
as the quote from an eminently quotable film. But for me,
it has always been the scene in which the crooked
politician Boss Getty's catches Cain in an apartment with a
woman who is not his wife. And by the way,
(07:35):
for context, this is in the pre Moms for Liberty days,
when that wasn't okay even if your wife was also there.
Getties offers Cain a chance to withdraw from their race
for governor of New York rather than subject his family
to the subsequent scandal about the apartment and the woman
who's not his wife. Cain screams threats about sending Getties
(07:58):
to sing Sing Sing Getties. Getti's presented by actor Ray
Collins as the definition of the banality of evil, answers
him flatly, You're the greatest fool I've ever known, Cain.
If it was anybody else, I'd say, what's gonna happen
to you? Would be a lesson to you. Only you're
(08:20):
gonna need more than one lesson, and you're gonna get
more than one lesson. Still gives me chills. It should
give Trump chills more eminently, probably today. It should give
Rudy Giuliani chills. It probably even would if either of
them had any nerve endings left. They'll feel it later,
(08:42):
because we must make twenty twenty four the year in
which Trump and Giuliani and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller
and Cash Patel and all of them who need more
than one lesson. We must make twenty twenty four the
year in which they get more than one lesson. By
(09:08):
the way, before moving on to how much nobody cared about,
Vivek Ramaswami in a CNN town hall Wednesday to say
nothing about volume three of the Charles Barkley Gaale King
witness Relocation hour. Just to tie off that you're going
to get more than one lesson quote from Citizen Kane
for the benefit of one particular listener, mister dementia. Jay
(09:30):
Trump I mentioned the actor who delivered that line, portraying
Boss Jim W. Getty's. He was Ray Collins, and boy
has he never gotten the do he deserves? Just spectacular
in Citizen Kane and in the other Orson Wells masterpiece,
The Magnificent Amberson's. He played in the Wells radio events,
(09:51):
still controversial to this day, War of the Worlds. He
was unforgettable in Touch of Evil, and in the Best
Years of Our Lives, even in a bunch of soppy
baseball pictures. But Ray Collins ended his career in a
recurring role in a television series. He was the diligent
but a little too boastful LA Police flat foot Lieutenant
(10:13):
Arthur Trag who always got tripped up in cross examination
by the star of the show, the attorney Perry Mason,
the one Trump keeps talking about, you're gonna need more
than one lesson, and you're gonna get more than one
lesson Perry Mason. And that's true also for Vivike Ramaswami
(10:36):
and CNN the town Hall Wednesday Night with the only
man who might be able to Outlie Trump in a
battle to the death, and how I wish they would
try that. V Bake Ramswami. The total number of viewers
in primetime on CNN five hundred and ninety one thousand.
(10:56):
I mean, television news is dying, but it's not dying
that fast. That's five episodes of this podcast. Whatever CNN
thought it was gaining putting that paranoid manure salesman on,
I can only guess. Ramaswami even drew thirty one thousand
fewer viewers than Ron DeSantis did on Tuesday. He drew
(11:19):
fewer viewers than his lead in Anderson Cooper did five
hundred and ninety one thousand viewers. Good God. Even Aaron
Burnett had six hundred and fifty nine thousand. And since
we are on this subject, after Ramaswami right afterwards comes
episode three out of a complete series of three of
(11:40):
King Charles Chris Lickt's Last and Stupidest IDEA four one
hundred and fifty three thousand viewers for a news show
in which Charles Barkley and Gail King talk about something
and it actually lost a quarter of vv Ramaswami's invisible audience,
(12:05):
and King Charles is somehow down ten percent from its
disastrous launch ratings happily, and this brings us back to
Trump and politics and a culture in which you don't
like reality. Just call it a liar. You want it
to be day and it's night. You can just shout
loudly enough that it really is day, and you and
(12:25):
only you can see the fact that it's day. Barkley
responded to his humiliating failure the first night of this
show by blaming the ratings company. I want to tell
my team man, these Nielsen people are the biggest clowns
in the world, he said. The ratings can't be right,
(12:46):
he implied, because he doesn't know anybody with a Nielsen box.
And you may recall when he was still interesting, Charles
Barkley speculated about running for governor of Alabama as a Republican. Chuck,
you're not good at this, nobody's interested in you doing it,
(13:09):
and you're not honest about it with yourself or anybody else.
So let me ask you this. Do you own a
shell company? Did you loan your own brother two hundred
thousand dollars and then he paid you back. And if so,
could you still shout at the son of a president
from the other party for having a shell company or
at his father for loaning money, Chuck? If so, you
would be perfect for today's GOP. Also, I wouldn't worry
(13:33):
about having to tell your team anything for much longer.
Some headlines Trump has sold the rooms rancid stakes, and
universities that didn't teach, and magazines that didn't sell, and
airlines that didn't fly. But I have rarely seen him
(13:54):
sell anything as hard, especially anything that literally does not
exist as this presidential immunity thing. He stumbled through a
reference to a plea deal from the Supreme Court about it,
whatever that means, and he posted and reposted and re
reposted the same rant yesterday on the important matter of
(14:18):
presidential immunity, something which is so basic to America that
it should be automatic. Trump does not say why it
would be basic to America, or why if it's so automatic,
and if it exists, that the Supreme Court would not
rule that he's right about it. But he is selling
(14:40):
this hard. This underscores the fact that Trump has only
to say it to validate it with his cult. I
doubt anybody would bother. But I guarantee you if you
polled Dementia Jay's slaves, they would insist by ninety or
ninety five percent that no, No, he had testified this
week in the New York Business broad case. I saw him.
(15:01):
And then if he came out and said no, he
did not testify because he was being unfairly gagged, ninety
or ninety five percent would then say he had not testified.
I do not know what to do about these people.
I do know they are incompatible with a free society,
(15:21):
with a representative form of government, and if it has
to be that or them, it's going to have to
be that. By the way, Trump lost again, this time
before a three judge state appeals panel in another attempt
to overturn the gag order so he can resume trying
to get Judge Arthur Engeron's family and his clerk killed.
(15:46):
It is striking that, amid more legal activity than the
apocryphal law firm of Engulf and Devour, Trump has never
once turned to America First Legal Stephen Miller's supposed conservative
counterpoint to the ACLU. It is now trying to find
people who believe they were unfairly not hired becase because
they were white and wont to sue IBM. The Daily
(16:09):
Beast now says in the year twenty twenty two, this
nonprofit reported forty four million dollars in contributions. It spent
thirty five million. Of that, two million, seven hundred thousand
went to salaries, one and a half million was spent
on lawsuits and other legal services. Thirty million, thirty million
(16:30):
dollars eighty five percent of its expenses went to advertising.
Advertising that was mostly about things like Joe Biden. Even
though as a nonprofit, Stephen Miller's America First Legal is
barred from participating in any political activity. Wait, so you're
(16:53):
saying Stephen Miller is a con man and a fraud bending,
if not flat out breaking the law, and not just
the paranoid hate monger whose dreams of ethnic cleansing in
America are driven because a girl of Hispanic heritage humiliated
him back in high school. Mister Miller, you're going to
(17:15):
need more than one lesson, and you're going to get
more than one lesson. And lastly, today, guess what's back,
Oh ghost buses?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Those buses were removed from the Union station, and we're
going to document all of that. So you believe that
those buses held undercover offices, not informants, correct. I feel very,
very confident that everybody that was on those two buses
were FBI assets, and I have a high degree of
(17:54):
belief that they were actual FBI agents. And I'm sorry
to say, man, my objective conclusion is that, as senior
official at the FBI, were deeply involved there.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Yes, Congressman Kay Higgins, disgraced former cop in Opahalusa's city, Louisiana,
interviewed by disgraced former sixty Minutes correspondent Lara Logan. A
lot of disgrace, not a lot of functioning cortexes. So
now the ghost buses are missing ghost buses. They're missing
(18:34):
that would make them ghosts ghost buses. This interview was
on Lara Logan's streaming show, which literally and I had
to look at it four times to make sure this
was not just my wishful thinking manifesting itself before my eyes.
Her show literally starts with Lara Logan playing in traffic
(18:59):
and then a shot of her writing in penn in
your ninth grade composition class notebook and big loony looking
letters the rest of the story. There is, however, one
thing missing, Lara Logan's. The rest of the story with
(19:21):
crazy Clay Higgins is missing a theme song. If I
may suggest one, Oh Nancy.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Into something parked at your insurrection?
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Who you gonna call? Go? Thank you, Nancy Faust. You
know what occurs to me. If she had called the
series Lara Logan playing in traffic, people might have watched.
Also of interest here, just when you thought the Republican
(20:05):
Party had reached some kind of apogee of cynicism and
corruption in George Santos, Wait till you see who they
have lined up to run for the House seat he
had to resign in what passes for Republican shame. First hint,
she's a registered Democrat. That's next. This is countdown. This
(20:29):
is countdown with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 4 (20:44):
This is Sports Senate. Wait, check that not anymore. This
is countdown with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
In Sports Dateline Los Angeles. Not all the heroes are
actually great players. Gene Carr has died, and in some
hockey circles he is being mourned as if he were
a Hall of Famer. The fourth pick in the NHL
draft in nineteen seventy one. He made the Saint Louis
Blues opening night roster as a twenty year old with
(21:19):
no professional experience, and he broke into the league as
perhaps the fastest skating player of his generation. His father
had played briefly in the NHL. Gene Carr's mother was
a championship speed skater. In the NHL of nineteen seventy one,
not everybody was even a good skater, and almost nobody
(21:41):
wore a helmet. So Gene Carr, young, blonde haired, long haired,
going from end to end of the rink, his locks
flowing behind him, looked like a superstar. Fourteen games into
his NHL career, the New York Rangers traded four top
prospects to Saint Louis for him, and Broadway welcomed Gene
(22:02):
Carr as a hero. And in the next one hundred
and thirty nine games with the New York Rangers, Gene
Carr scored eighteen goals. That's not a lot. It became
the subtext of games at Madison Square Garden. Gene Carr
could skate from one net to the other in about
four seconds, but if you gave him four minutes in
(22:25):
front of the opposing net, he still could not score
a goal. As the legendary New York born referee and
Rangers announcer Bill Chadwick once lamented, more in sympathy than
in anger, Jean Carr couldn't put the puck in the
ocean and if he was standing on the pier. The
Rangers eventually gave up and traded Gen Carr to the
Los Angeles Kings in nineteen seventy four, still just twenty
(22:48):
three years old and playing in a totally no pressure
hockey environment, meaning there were about nine thousand regular Kings
fans in those days. Carr played well, He learned to
fight a little bit. He scored fifteen goals one season,
and he fell in with the celebrity crowd. One day
he brought some friends to a King's home game at
the Fabulous Forum. His friends were the Eagles, the Eagles,
(23:12):
Glenn Fry and Don Henley and everybody and whatever else
Gene Carr had or had not done when he died
this week, he will last as long as Rock and
roll does. Because if you've ever heard the Eagles song
new Kid in Town, the new Kid in Town, the
guy they wrote that song about reportedly anyway was Gene Carr.
(23:36):
Gene Carr seventy nine career NHL goals and a number
one hit on the charts was seventy two years old.
(24:19):
Thank You, Nancy Faust, State Line, Guildford, Connecticut. Much in
the same manner, Ken McKenzie became a star with the
original New York Mets. The team lost one hundred and
twenty out of the one hundred and sixty games it
played in its first season of existence nineteen sixty two,
but mackenzie, and unassuming, bespectacled left handed reliever from Canada
(24:41):
by way of Yale, won five games and lost four,
which made him the only one of the seventeen pitchers
on the nineteen sixty two Mets to finish with a
winning record. In fact, the next year, he won three
games and lost only one, making him the only pitcher
on the nineteen sixty three Mets to finish with a
(25:03):
winning record. In fact, no other Mets pitcher would have
a winning record until nineteen sixty five. Others suffered through
the early years of the Mets. Ken McKenzie, later the
baseball coach at Yale, then an alumni executive at the university,
reveled in them. He made it to the Mets twenty
twenty two Old Timers Day in a wheelchair. His license
(25:26):
plate on his car read nineteen sixty two met and
his humor was consistent for sixty years. At one point
somebody pointed out that he had the highest ra on
the team, to which Mackenzie answered, yes, but I have
the lowest salary of anybody in the Yale class of
nineteen fifty six. Ken Mackenzie died at his home yesterday morning.
(25:49):
He was eighty nine years old. Still to come on
(26:13):
Countdown Fridays with Thurber and Mann versus machine, with the
machine reduced to the seemingly benign but anything but benign
Medicine Cabinet nine needles. Next first time for the daily
roundup of the miss grants, morons and Dunning Kruger effect
specimens who constitute two days waste persons in the world,
(26:36):
insteading on the pier the bronze the worst elon Musk.
When your self driving cars keep crashing, what do you do?
Do you improve them? No, you do not. You try
to prevent the government from telling people that they keep crashing.
This is the kind of headline that could bankrupt a company,
and it is live on the website of Ours Technica. Quote.
(27:00):
Tesla claims California false advertising law violate First Amendment. Tesla
fights DMB complaint that Autopilot is falsely advertised as autonomous
unquote nice. Free speech advocacy Free speech boy. The runner
up worser, Kevin McCarthy, the already ex speaker soon to
(27:23):
be ex congressman, has decided he is in demand. McCarthy
says he is open to serving in a Trump administration.
I mean why not. McCarthy has already proved to Trump
his willingness to pore himself out for Trump, but a
far greater interest. McCarthy tells Axios he'd like to work
with his pal Elon Musk in artificial intelligence. And once again,
(27:47):
why not. I mean, when I think artificial the first
person who comes to mind is Kevin McCarthy. Intelligence not
so much, but our winner, the Republican leadership of Queens
and Nassau Counties in New York. These are the people
who brought us George Santos, Congressman at Large, in drag
(28:14):
their new idea to run for the seat that Santos
has just had to resign from in disgrace. They have
nominated a county legislator with no public platform other than
support for Israel. How does she feel about abortion? Nowbody
knows Trump, nowbody knows democracy. Nobody knows anything else about
(28:35):
President Biden. Nobody knows. Her name is Mazi Melissa Pilip,
and she was born in Ethiopia and she served in
the Israeli Defense Forces. She checks interesting boxes. She's black,
she's a veteran, and there are a couple of drawbacks
thrown in. She has a really difficult accent. She makes
(28:57):
George Santos sound like a generic voiceover announcer. And her
name is pronounced Mazi, but it's spelled m Azi, you know,
like Nazi, but with an M. Her only tenuous connection
to Congress is she campaigned alongside and called a quote
amazing friend, George Santos. On one more little detail, the
(29:21):
new Republican candidate for the House, Ms Mazi Malaysa Pilip
is a registered Democrat. NASA and Queen's County Republicans just
nominated a Democrat for Congress. Hey, you know, Santos is
hugely popular on that cameo thing. Think of his name recognition,
(29:43):
give him some time to cool off. Maybe we can
run them again. The NASA and Queens County leadership of
the Republican Party. Two days worst persons in the World.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
Like Nazi, but with an m.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Just ahead Fridays with Thurber and a double header including
one of his fables, word for word, the funniest and
most incisive stuff ever written. The City Mouse goes to
the country next first time for more dogs you can help.
Every dog has its day In fact, nine dogs and
eleven cats, nine ducks, two EMUs, three rabbits, a parrot,
(30:34):
twenty four silky chickens, and ninety rescue chickens. They are
at National Boxer Rescue in Pierce, Minnesota, and the county
board there is about to vote to take the land
away from them and close this rescue. They're thirty thousand
dollars in debt with almost no donations coming in and
no idea where the animals will go if they have
(30:55):
to close. If you think placing rescue dogs is tough,
imagine rescue chickens and rescue EMUs. And crazy as it sounds,
many of them are special needs. Sounds crazy until you
picture them, and then it sounds heartbreaking. Anyway we can help.
They have a fundraiser on cuddly dot com. I'll tweet
out the link, or just go to cuddly dot com
(31:17):
and type National Boxer in the search bar. The Chickens,
thank you, the Silky Chickens, thank you, the nine Dogs,
thank you, and I thank you to the number one
story on the countdown. And it's Fridays with Thurber and
a lot of his work details the fundamental clash between people,
(31:38):
husband and wife, he and various relatives, a guy in
a bed and a seal, two animals representing any two
humans in conflict. But some of the most magical writing
is the stuff that is just about one person alone
against life. One of his stories ends with a great
(31:59):
grandmother struggling with a butter churn and screaming into the void,
why doesn't somebody this goddamn thing away from me? A
line which I think could be the start of a
national anthem somewhere. Such a story is nine Needles this
week's selection. As you will see, it is a little
short for our usual time frames here, so I'll give
you a bonus another man versus life story afterwards, in
(32:23):
the form of one of Thurber's Fables for our time
The mouse who went to the country. But first, it's
unlikely this event has ever happened to you, but the
anxiety that should be immediately familiar. Nine Needles by James Thurber.
One of the more spectacular minor happenings of the past
(32:45):
few years, which I am sorry that I missed, took
place in the Columbus, Ohio home of some friends of
a friend of mine. It seems that a mister Albatross,
while looking for something in his medicine cabinet one morning,
discovered a bottle of a kind of patent medicine which
his wife had been taking for a stomach element. Now,
mister Albatross is one of those apprehensive men who are
(33:08):
afraid of patent medicines and of almost everything else. Some
weeks before, he had encountered a paragraph in a consumer's
research bulletin which announced that this particular medicine was bad
for you. He had thereupon ordered his wife to throw
out what was left of her supply of the stuff
and never buy any more, she had promised, And here
(33:28):
now was another bottle of the perilous liquid. Mister Albatross,
a man given to quick rages, shouted the conclusion of
the story at my friend. I threw the bottle out
the bathroom window, and the medicine chest after it. It
seems to me that must have been a spectacle worth
(33:49):
going a long way to see. I am sure that
many a husband has wanted to wrench the family medicine
cabinet off the wall and throw it out the window,
if only because the average medicine cabinet is so filled
with mysterious bottles and unidentifiable objects of all kinds, that
it is a source of constant bewilderment and exasperation to
(34:11):
the American male. Surely, the British medicine cabinet, and the
French medicine cabinet, all the other medicine cabinets must be
simpler and better ordered than ours. It may be that
the American habit of saving everything and never throwing anything away,
even empty bottles, causes the domestic medicine cabinet to become
(34:33):
as cluttered in its small way as the American attic
becomes cluttered in its major way. I have encountered few
medicine cabinets in this country which were not packed jammed
with something between one hundred and fifty and two hundred
different items, from dental floss to boracic acid, from razor
blades to sodium perborate, from adhesive tape to coconut oil.
(34:59):
Even the neatest wife will put off clearing out the
medicine cabinet on the ground that she he has something
else to do that is more important at that moment,
or more diverting. It was in the apartment of such
a wife and her husband that I became enormously involved
with a medicine cabinet. One morning, not long ago, I
had spent the weekend with this couple. They live on
(35:20):
East tenth Street, near Fifth Avenue. Such a weekend as
left me reluctant to rise up on Monday morning with
bright and shining face and go to work. They got
up and went to work, but I didn't. I didn't
get up until about to two thirty in the afternoon.
I had my face all lathered for shaving, and the
(35:43):
wash bowl was full of hot water, when suddenly I
cut myself with the razor. I cut my ear. Very
few men cut their ears with razors, but I do,
possibly because I was taught the old Spencerian free risk
movements by my writing teacher in the grammar grades. The
ear bleeds rather profusely when cut with a razor, and
(36:04):
is difficult to get at. More angry than hurt, I
jerked open the door of the medicine cabinet to see
if I could find a stiptick pencil, and out fell
from the top shelf a little black paper packet containing
nine needles. It seems that his wife kept a little
paper packet containing nine needles on the top shelf of
(36:24):
the medicine cabinet. The packet fell into the soapy water
of the wash bowl, where the paper rapidly disintegrated, leaving
nine needles at large in the bowl. I was, naturally enough,
not in the best condition, either physical or mental, to
recover nine needles from a wash bowl. No gentleman who
(36:46):
has lather on his face and whose ear is bleeding
is in the best condition for anything, even something involving
the handling of nine large, blunt objects. It did not
seem wise to me to pull the plug out of
the wash bowl and let the needles go down the drain.
I had visions of clogging up the plumbing system of
the house, and also a vague fear of causing short
(37:10):
circuits somehow or other. I know very little about electricity,
and I don't want to have it explained to me. Finally,
I groped very gently around the bowl, and eventually had
four of the needles in the palm of one hand
and three in the palm of the other. Two I
couldn't find. If I had thought quickly and clearly, I
(37:32):
wouldn't have done that. A lathered man whose ear is bleeding,
and who has four wet needles in one hand and
three in the other may be said to have reached
the lowest known point of human efficiency. There is nothing
he can do but stand there. I tried transferring the
needles in my left hand to the palm of my
right hand, but I couldn't get off my left hand
(37:54):
wet needles cling to you. In the end, I wiped
the needles off onto a bath towel, which was hanging
on a row above the bath tub. It was the
only towel that I could find. I had to dry
my hands afterward on the bath mat. Then I tried
to find the needles in the towel. Hunting for seven
(38:16):
needles in a bath towel is the most tedious occupation
I have ever engaged in. I could find only five
of them, with the two that had been left in
the bowl. That meant there were four needles in all, missing,
two in the wash bowl, and two others lurking in
the towel or lying in the bathtub under the towel.
(38:36):
Frightful thoughts came to me of what might happen to
anyone who used that towel, or washed his face in
the bowl, or got into the tub if I didn't
find the missing needles. Well, I didn't find them. I
sat down on the edge of the tub to think,
and I decided finally that the only thing to do
was to wrap up the towel in a newspaper and
(38:57):
take it away with me. I also decided to leave
a note for my friends, explaining as clearly as I
could that I would I was afraid there were two
needles in the bathtub and two needles in the wash bowl,
and that they better be careful. I looked everywhere in
the apartment, but I could not find a pencil or
a pen or a typewriter. I could find pieces of paper,
(39:20):
but nothing with which to write on them. I don't
know what gave me the idea a movie I had seen,
perhaps or a story I had read. But I suddenly
thought of writing a message with lipstick. The wife might
have an extra lipstick lying around, and if so, I
concluded it would be in the medicine cabinet. I went
(39:41):
back to the medicine cabinet and began poking around in
it for a lipstick. I saw what I thought looked
like the metal tip of one, and I got two
fingers around it began to pull gently. It was under
a lot of things. Every object in the medicine cabinet
began to slide. Bottles broke in the wash bowl and
on the floor, red, brown, and white liquids, spurted, nail files, scizzors,
(40:05):
razor blades, and miscellaneous objects sang and clattered and tinkled.
I was covered with perfume, peroxide, and cold cream. It
took me half an hour to get all the debris
all together in the middle of the bathroom floor. I
made no attempt to put anything back in the medicine cabinet.
(40:28):
I knew it would take a steadier hand than mine
and a less shattered spirit. Before I went away only
partly shaved and abandoned the shambles. I left a note
saying that I was afraid there were needles in the
bathtub and the washbowl, and that I had taken their towel,
and that I would call up and tell them everything.
I wrote it in iodine with the end of a toothbrush.
(40:52):
I have not yet called up. I'm sorry to say
I've neither found the courage nor thought up the words
to explain what happened. I suppose my friends believe that
I deliberately smashed up their bathroom and stole their towel.
I don't know for sure, because they have not yet
called me up either. Nine Needles by James Thurber, and
(41:18):
as I suggested in a broad sense on the same subject,
from his Fables for our Time and famous poems illustrated.
The Mouse who Went to the Country by James Thurber.
Once upon a Sunday there was a city mouse who
(41:39):
went to visit a country mouse. He hid away on
a train the country mouse had told him to take,
only to find that on Sundays it did not stop
at Beddington. Hence the city mouse could not get off
at Bettington and catch a bus for Cybert's Junction. Where
he was to be met by the country mouse. The
city mouse, in fact, was carried on to Middleburg, where
(41:59):
he waited three hours for a train to take him back.
When he got back to Beddington, he found out that
the last bus for Siebert's Junction had just left, so
he ran, and he ran, and he ran, and he
finally caught the bus and crept aboard, only to find
that it was not the bus for Sebert's Junction at all,
but was going in the opposite direction through Pells Hollow
(42:20):
and Grum to a place called Wimberbee. When the bus
finally stopped, the city mouse got out into a heavy
rain and found that there were no more buses that
night going anywhere. To the hell with it, said the
city mouse, and he walked back to the city.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Moral.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
Stay where you are. You're sitting pretty The Mouse who
went to the Country by James Thurber. I've done all
(43:00):
the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Jimmy is solid, and tell everybody who doesn't listen to
to listen. In fact, post it on your Facebook wall.
I'm not on Facebook. I think that's part of the issue.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
Here.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Countdown has come to you from the Vin Scully Studios
at the Olderman Broadcasting Empire in New York. There's a
video that I do every night promoting this thing. You
could put that on your wall. Put that on your wall.
Downtown Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums,
(43:34):
and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including
some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is courtesy ESPN, Inc.
It was written by Mitch Warren Davis. We call it
the Olberman theme from ESPN two. Our satirical and pithy
musical comments are by Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium
organist ever. Our announcer today was my friend Stevie van
(43:57):
zandt Everything else was pretty much my fault. That's countdown
for this the one tho seventy fourth day since dementia
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Use the Insurrection Act against him and them.
While we still can. The next scheduled countdown is Tuesday.
Bulletins as the news warrant till then, I'm Keith Olderman.
(44:19):
Good Morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
(44:40):
Keith Oldreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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