March 5, 2024 • 56 mins
SEASON 2 EPISODE 134: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) Trump appears to be suffering from a condition called "Fluent Aphasia."
Victims can verbalize intricate long sentences, and appear to be answering questions or making coherent observations. But frequently all they have is the structure and the cadence of coherence; the rhythm of speech. They do not fully understand what they are hearing, cannot convey what they are trying to through speech, and are almost invariably the victims of strokes or head injuries. All attempts to explain "Fluent Aphasia" (or by its formal name, "Wernicke's Aphasia,") use the phrase "Word Salad."
And after a three-day series of speeches in which, on literally dozens of occasions, he said things that SOUNDED like sentences but were not, the evidence is mounting and the problem is accelerating: the Trump word salad is "Fluent Aphasia" and on top of all of Trump's other mental and ethical problems, it is disqualifying.
He cannot be president. His brain literally does not work correctly,
MEANWHILE: “Course I’m respectable,” says John Huston as Noah Cross in Chinatown to Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes in Chinatown. “I’m OLD. Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable, if they LAST long enough.” And then there’s what happens when you’re all three of those things - as the Supreme Court and its justices are all three of those things: Politicians pretending to be justices, working in an ugly building, and as Trump relied upon and was proved correct – they’re all whores.
“Because the Constitution makes Congress rather than the states responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal office holders and candidates, we reverse,” reads the Court's decision to not enforce the 14th Amendment denying insurrectionists the right to become president or hold other offices. 9-nothing. Except it DOESN’T do that. Section 3, as conservative scholar after conservative scholar has repeatedly stated, is SELF-enforcing. It is automatic. If you engaged in insurrection, you’re out. If you think you’re being ill-treated, Section 3 provides you an override mechanism: you can get the House AND the Senate to each CLEAR you, each by a two-thirds vote. Period. The constitution says NOTHING about an enforcement responsibility.
The Court betrayed democracy yesterday – again: this time by going faster to help Trump. On presidential immunity, it’s going SLOWER to help Trump. Its members, including Jackson and Kagan and Sotomayor, who before folding, stood up just long enough to wave BYE BYE to representative government, overruled one of the easiest parts of the constitution to understand for the benefit of one corrupt politician. Individually and as an entity they have proved themselves inept at basic reading comprehension. They have proved themselves to be corrupt and illegitimate. Its usefulness and relevance is at an end, and whatever replaces it, the immediate need is obvious: The Supreme Court must be dissolved.
The funny part, of course, is that these idiots have inadvertently given the current sitting president (a Mr. Biden, I believe) a kind of qualified, specific immunity from prosecution in case HE wants to illegally overturn an election.
B-Block (25:50) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Another reporter claims Trump is about to pivot and Trump promptly makes her look like an idiot. Trump's new vaccine promise: I'm here to kill your kids. Trump shortens his National Abortion Ban plan. Jack Smith says no, the DOJ 60-Day Secret Unwritten Rule does NOT apply to cases already filed against Trump. And farewell to my old friend Chris Mortensen go ESPN. (33:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Jesse Watters says Biden "licking ice cream" is unmanly and implies he has Alzheimer's. That's before they found the post from five years ago of Watters... licking ice cream. The would-be Republican nominee for governor of Missouri is suing because, he claims, h
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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 Course.
I'm respectable, says John Houston as Noah Cross in the
(00:25):
movie Chinatown to Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittis, I'm old. Politicians,
ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last
long enough. And then there is what happens when you
are all three of those things. As the Supreme Court
is all three of those things, politicians pretending to be
(00:47):
justices working in an ugly building, and as Trump relied
upon and yesterday was proven correct, they are all whores.
And I have lots to say about the Supreme Whares
and what they have done and what they might yet do,
which probably enough includes making Joe Biden into an instant
American king. Yet they are not the lead story, because
(01:11):
the lead story is after a weekend plus in which
he made more than two dozen astonishing verbal mistakes in
just two speeches and struggled through all the rest of
the speeches. The evidence is mounting that what Donald Trump
is suffering from is something called fluent aphasia. There are
(01:33):
two million Americans with aphasia, a kind of catch all
for a series of communication disorders ranging from the most
familiar in which the ability to speak or to understand
speech is eliminated or severely impaired, usually by a stroke
or a head injury, but fluent aphasia technically Wernicke's aphasia
(01:54):
may be the most terrifying, may be the most heartbreaking
of them all, because while the patient's ability to understand
speech and to make himself understood ya a speech may
be severely or totally limited, their ability to speak easily
and smoothly is not. The cadence is right, the grammar
(02:15):
is usually right. Long sentences are, at least at first,
no problem. Things that sound like answers to your questions
are there, except they are all with the wrong words.
It's Trump, That's what Trump has been doing that. And
(02:36):
obviously this is a layman asserting this. I could be
wildly wrong, but it is clear is something like this
that is what he's been doing. Wernicke's aphasia. Fluent aphasia
with growing frequency and an increasing tendency to bail out
of things when he gets lost. Byron Peterson is now
(02:57):
nearly eighty four years old. He lives in Nevada. He
has fluent aphasia, and he made a video for his therapists,
and it is still used to raise awareness for this condition,
which befell him not long after he hit his head
after a fall. The first tape is Byron Peterson. The
(03:18):
second tape is Donald Trump. Hi, Byron, how are you?
Speaker 2 (03:21):
I'm happy? Are you pretty? You look? Hutton?
Speaker 1 (03:24):
What are you doing today?
Speaker 3 (03:27):
We stayed with the water over here at the moment
and talked with the people for them over there.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
They're diving for them at the moment.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
They will save in the moment he held water soon
for him with luck for him.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
So we're on a cruise and we're about to we
will start it right here and they'll save their hands
right there for them.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Hello, Richmond, I'm thrilled to be back in the beautiful Virginia.
We love Virginia, and perhaps most importantly, we are a
nation that is no longer admired, respected or listened to
on the world stage in the United States. So we
call it migrant time.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I come.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
I came up with that name because I come up
with a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Of good names, don't I.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
And Putin, you know, has so little respect for Obama
that he's starting to throw around the nuclear word.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
You heard that nuclear?
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Did you just see Maduro Venezuelough.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
It's aid unbelievable.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
We will demolish the deep state.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
We will expel the Wallmongreves ding boom.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
This is me, I hear being.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
The red lights are starting to go off anytime I
start talking.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
They typed the red light off.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Biden borderwheel.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Well you know this right, the Biden border bill. Look,
he can't campaign, he can't campaign, he can't speak, he
can't walk.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
He looks like hell.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Adding on to the last two total it last Tuesday.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
They have pupils from foreign countries, from countries where they
don't even know what the language is. We have nobody
that even teaches it. These are languages that nobody ever
heard of. The in Saudi Arabian Russia will repeat.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee and presumptive fluent aphasia victim
cannot serve as president of the United States like that,
under any circumstances. As I first framed it nearly a
decade ago, his brain does not work correctly. He should
receive our empathy. We are not monsters here, and the
(05:33):
therapies that can improve quality of life as his fluent
aphasia or whichever form of aphasia or other brain injury
or disease. He has progresses, but he cannot serve as
president of the United States, and he should end his
candidacy immediately. And if this needed to be more dangerous
than it already appears, considered this. Trump's continued insistence that
(05:55):
he aced some kind of simple cognitive test, as if
that proved he had an IQ of three hundred and
fifty thousand, may not just be him lying his way
through yet more reality. He may have no idea that
he's this sick, and even if somebody around him had
the courage to tell him, he would not believe them,
(06:17):
because he's also been showing signs for years of another
brain injury or illness called annosagnosia, and Trump would not
be the first at this level of government to suffer
from it anno sugnosia, As the legendary David Dunning of
Dunning Krueger's Syndrome once wrote, an anosagnosic patient who is
(06:39):
paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If
you put a pencil in front of them and ask
them to pick up the pencil in front of their
left hand, they won't do it. And you ask them why,
and they'll say, while I'm tired or I don't need
a pencil. That pencil reference is not random. It mainlines
(07:02):
back to the president, who in his lifetime was credited
with saving the American pencil industry. Woodrow Wilson, and as
latter day experts use new medical knowledge to study the
stroke that Wilson suffered while on his famous cross country
tour to try to sell the League of Nations to
America over the heads of a disapproving Senate. The conclusion
(07:23):
has been widespread through the decades that whether or not
he had it earlier, after that stroke, President Wilson showed
all the signs of annosognosia. In the nineteen seventies, neuropsychiatrist
Edwin Weinstein was granted access to Woodrow Wilson's papers to
diagnose what happened to him, and he wrote quote following
(07:47):
his stroke, The outstanding feature of the President's behavior was
his denial of his incapacity. Denial of illness or annosagnosia
literally lack of knowledge of disease is a common sequel
of the type of brain injury received by Wilson. In
this condition, the patient denies or appears unaware of such
(08:08):
deficits as paralysis or blindness. To casual observers, anosugnosiac patients
may appear quite normal and even bright and witty when
not on the subject of their disability. They are quite rational,
and tests of their intelligence may show no deficit unquote Unfortunately,
(08:29):
when on the subject of his disability, President Wilson was
anything but rational. His Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, summoned
the cabinet to a meeting to discuss Wilson's illness. Wilson
or his wife forced the resignation of Secretary of State Lancing.
Doctors who challenged Wilson were dismissed. People who knew him
before his stroke were eased out or denied further access.
(08:50):
Wilson insisted until his death that whole yes, he had
had strokes, it only affected his walking and only a little.
So when you hear this and you realize Trump thinks
nobody is noticing him, just trailing off and sighing, think
fluent aphasia and annosognosia.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
Saudi Arabian Russia, Glory pet.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
I am indebted to the nation's leading authority on George Santos,
the reporter Jacqueline's Sweet were putting the topic of fluent
aphasia under my sometimes stuffed and incompetent knows, because God knows.
With Trump, we don't have enough to worry about with
him being crazy and evil and demented. We also need
to worry about him having had a stroke or something
(09:43):
creating an illness that makes it impossible for him to
understand that he's had a stroke or something. So Trump
(10:08):
may not have control of his own brain anymore, but
at least he has control of his own Supreme Court. Unsurprisingly,
the Court betrayed democracy yesterday again, this time by going
faster to help Trump on presidential immunity. Of course, it's
going slower to help Trump. It's a versatile set of
(10:32):
whoores its members, including Jackson and Kagan and Sodomayor, who,
before folding stood up just long enough to wave bye
bye to representative government in this country, overruled one of
the easiest parts of our constitution to understand, and did
so for the benefit of one corrupt politician. Individually and
(10:55):
as an entity, they have proved themselves inept at basic
reading comprehension. They have proved themselves to be corrupt and illegitimate.
The Court's usefulness and relevance is at an end, and
whatever replaces it, the immediate need is obvious. The Supreme
Court must be dissolved. Because the Supreme Court is not
(11:19):
just made up of whores, It's made up of incompetent whores. Quote.
Because the Constitution makes Congress rather than the States, responsible
for enforcing Section three against federal office holders and candidates,
we reverse reads their decision on enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment
(11:39):
denying insurrectionists the right to become president or hold other offices.
Nine nothing except it doesn't do that. Section three, as
conservative constitutional scholar after conservative constitutional scholar has repeatedly stated,
is self enforcing. It is automatic. If you engaged in insurrection,
(12:01):
you're out. If you think you are being ill treated
by this, Section three provides you with an override mechanism.
You can get the House and the Senate to each
clear you each by a two thirds vote period. The
Constitution says nothing about an enforcement responsibility. It's not given
(12:22):
to Congress, it's not given to the Supreme Court. It's
not given to me. The unsigned court decision, and of
course it's unsigned. Who wants to go into history as
Trump's primary whore. Reads in part, quote an evolving electoral map,
not your business, Justice X. This is not an electoral
(12:43):
map case quote could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties,
and states across the country in different ways and at
different times. Also, not your goddamn business. What the Constitution says,
that's your business, not whether you're worried about reactions to it.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
The disruption would be all the more acute and could
nullify the votes of millions and change the election result
if Section three enforcement were attempted after the nation has voted. Again,
Justice X, not asking you to do that. Nothing to
do with you. You have a job, you are bad
at it. It's reading the constitution. You're corrupt, You're stupid.
(13:26):
You should have just said Trump told us to do
it that way. Least show some self respect. Quote. Nothing
in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos arriving
at any time or different times up to and perhaps
beyond the inauguration Unquote ha, Yeah, what was that case
that Clarence Thomas was involved with, the one that forced
(13:49):
the nation to undergo chaos arriving at any time or
different times up till thirty nine days before the inauguration
of two thousand and one. What was that case called?
The Supreme Court is full of shit and fullest of
(14:11):
all is Amy Coney Barrett in my judgment. Now, that's
a bad start in my judgment, this is not the
time to amplify disagreement with stridency. She writes. That has
nothing to do with your job, ma'am. The Court has
settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of
(14:32):
a presidential election. You're not supposed to rule on seasons,
or politics or anything else of the moment. Didn't it
say that in the preface when they gave you your
copy of So you're a Supreme Court justice, what the
hell do you do now? Quote, particularly in this circumstances,
(14:54):
writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down,
not up. This is the same logic you will read
in the dread Scott decision which validated slavery. It is cowardly,
it is cheap, it is horrorsh and boy did Trump
get his money with this clown? The Court should turn
(15:14):
the national temperature down, not up, said Justice Amy Karen
Barrett as she voted to make sure a psychotic insurrectionist
who would try to stay in office past twenty twenty
nine remains on the twenty twenty four ballot, because that
will really turn the national temperature down. Yeah, turn it
(15:36):
down to seventy five degrees body temperature, at which all
of us die of hypothermia. As the Supreme Court reporter
and analyst Ellie Misstyle wrote, Amy Cony Barrett would really
like to speak to the Liberals manager over the rude
service she received. Ellie also wrote, the Supreme Court must
(15:58):
be stopped, God damned right. And oh, by the way,
you can read this decision as permission for any other
sitting president who's the president at the moment. By the way,
any sitting president can commit any act he likes without
risking the wrath of the Fourteenth Amendment mechanism composed by
(16:21):
better senators and better Congressmen and assented to by better
justices than we have today. Just saying, right now, the
Supreme Court has given out specific practical immunity for you know,
trying to overthrow the government. But I asked you last
(16:43):
week to think about it. And sorry, I didn't mean
it to sound like homework. I apologize, but I asked
you to think about what would happen if the Court
is not trying to manage the game like some out
of control egotistical hockey referees assessing a penalty against one team,
and the Court actually winds up pairing this nine to
nothing atrocity ruling for Trump on the fourteenth Amendment with
(17:05):
a six to three ruling also granting him presidential immunity
from prosecution for anything he did in office. There are
a million different answers to this, but of course the
most important one is even they cannot drag out that
ruling on immunity until next January twenty first or something.
Thus they'd have to do it before then, and thus
(17:27):
they would be granting presidential immunity not to Trump, but
to Joe Biden. Since we would then be faced with
the undeniable reality that the Supreme Court had made the
President into an absolute monarch. What King Joseph Robinette Biden
(17:47):
the second the first could then do, and, by the way,
if this really happens, should do what he could and
should then do is take away the chances there's going
to be a King Trump arrest the members of the
Supreme Court arrest Trump, arrest the Speaker in the House,
arrest all the other January sixth insurrectionists, and oh, by
(18:09):
the way, postpone the election. Because if the Supreme Court,
and honestly, individually or collectively, my dogs could do a
better job of being an Associate Justice than Amy Cony Barrett,
and at least two of my dogs could do a
better job than Chief Justice Roberts. Because if the Supreme
Court declares that all presidents are immune from prosecution no
(18:31):
matter what they do, we are, as of that moment,
we are living in a kingdom where everything in the
Constitution and all the laws and all the norms go
the way of what this Court just did to Section
three of the fourteenth Amendment. And if we are going
to be living under a king and we have a
choice of King Biden or King Trump, guess which one
(18:55):
I'm taking. And yet this does not seem to have
occurred to Trump, Well we have a pretty good idea
now what the name of the problem he has is
that it makes it not occur to Trump, But it
also doesn't seem to have occurred to any of his lawyers,
nor to his cult. He was still out there yesterday
(19:15):
demanding immunity because of course, that's all that matters to him.
And at this point you wonder if you could get
past the anosygnosia if you offered him a trade here
presidential immunity. You'll never go to jail. But Biden becomes king,
and there's no election until he says so. You wonder
if he'd take it. Justice save as sorrys Also, there'll
(19:39):
be no refunds on the legal fees. My original thought
was the Chief Justice and all the little justices and
the puddles into which Jackson and Kagan in Sotomayora dissolve yesterday,
along with Justice Amy Karen Barrett, they all attend the
State of the Union Thursday night. Biden should address them directly.
(20:01):
Why not? Justice Karen just decided that inter hearing in
the presidential election is the Court's job. Why shouldn't the
president be able to answer them? Originally I thought he
should say to them, Hey, guys and gals, I know
you've decided to stall the trials of the man to
whom at least three of you owe your jobs, and
judging by your work, they're the only jobs you'll ever get.
(20:24):
But as you ponder this question of presidential immunity, I'd
like to note, being president myself, that there has never
been such a thing, and there never should be, because
the first thing a president who could never face prosecution
for anything could do is disappear all the members of
the Supreme Court. So, you know, like the kids say, Rent,
(20:48):
don't buy That's what I thought President Biden should say
to the justices Thursday night. Now I'm not so sure.
Now I'm thinking he should not say a damn thing
about presidential immunity. He shouldn't say anything. He shouldn't even
acknowledge they are there. He should pretend nothing's going on.
That way, if these idiots who just erased an entire
(21:10):
clause from an amendment passed at the most precarious time
in this nation's history until now, if they then decide
to write their own new clause and invent something called
presidential immunity, the nation's surprise at their corruption would quickly
be exceeded by their surprise when King Biden arrests them.
(21:42):
So tune in Thursday for our live edition of Countdown
after the State of the Union on YouTube to find
out if the President let them in on the fact
that the metaphorical loaded gun. John Roberts and his clown
car riders are holding is not just pointed at Justice
and American representative government, it's also pointed at themselves. And
(22:04):
that also of interest here Trump's promised to bluntly get
your kids sick and kill many of them. And that
national abortion band. None of them is saying they want.
Trump again says he wants, and he just made it
earlier and in the good news, Jack Smith says the
DOJ sixty days until election rule does not apply to
(22:25):
any of this. Watch the Supreme Court overrule him on that. Plus,
my oldest enemy has returned for a final showdown, the
enemy of my youth, the enemy of my nightmares. The
auto train is alive and well, and somebody has a
(22:48):
reservation on it today.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Damn you tell auto train. That's next.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
And an all new edition of Countdown. This is Countdown
with Keith Olberman. Post scripts to the news, some headlines,
(23:16):
some updates, some snarks, some predictions. So much Trump news
it carried over past the first commercial dateline Washington. The
latest reporter to face plant on the spinning wheel of
this is when Trump really pivots his named Sophia cal
And she works for Axios. At about five am yesterday,
(23:37):
her piece went up, reading quote, top advisors are trying,
with some early success, to steer former President Trump to
focus more on the border and the economy and less
on old grievances and personal drama. In some recent speeches,
Trump has avoided his typical complaint that the twenty twenty
election he lost was quote stolen, and instead has said
(23:59):
we were interrupted or something very bad happened, another sign
of Trump toning things down a notch. In at least
one instance, he wanted to mention a salacious claim about
a rival's personal life, but co campaign manager Susie Wiles
persuaded him not to loll you mean, like the stuff
(24:20):
about Susie Wiles's daughter and her resume. Anyway. That was
at about five am, Trump pivots, Oh, Instead of rig stolen,
he said a bad thing happened just afternoon. Trump then
attacked quote deranged Jack Smith, called the judges Trump haters,
and attacked Fannie Willis. Here is a rule we need.
(24:42):
If you say Trump is pivoting or changing, and he
contradicts you within eight hours of your article or your
TV hit, you have to quit the business and go
into a Nunnery Tightline, Fort Pierce, Florida. Good Trump trial
news for a change, because it hasn't gotten to the
(25:04):
Supreme Court yet. In filings to Judge Eileen, if you
like Amy Cony Barrett, you're gonna love me. Cannon Jack
Smith has asserted that the Department of Justices infamous unofficial,
unwritten sixty day rule thou shalt not undertake investigations within
sixty days of an election, or maybe it's ninety or
(25:24):
one hundred and twenty, or maybe it's fourteen hundred, whatever
it is, it does not apply here and will not
apply to the prosecution of Trump for stealing classified documents
and you know, reading them to random passers. By the
premise here, says mister Smith. Once the case has begun,
the sixty day clock ends. Dateline, Richmond, Virginia. Of course,
(25:50):
only Barbara Comstock was paying attention. She used to be
a Clinton hunting congresswoman from Virginia, but she noticed that
in his speech there, Trump promised to take all federal
funds away from public schools that require that there's students
get vaccines. You know, polio vaccines, chicken pox vaccines, measles vaccines,
(26:12):
measles like in Florida, where they have a quack named Ladapo,
who is Ron DeSantis's surge in general. Remember Ron DeSantis. Anyway,
he's no longer enforcing the rules demanding vaccinations of public
school kids. And guess what, there's measles outbreaks in Florida.
So maybe President Biden can mention this on Thursday Night.
(26:36):
Mister Trump's parent new campaign slogan is HI, I'm Donald Trump,
and I'm here to kill your kids. Eight line inside
Trump's head. Don't wear your good shoes in here. Remember
that national abortion band. Republicans say they don't want but
then Trump said he wanted one, and he had chosen
(26:57):
sixteen weeks because it was a good round number and
it meant four months. Well, now he's changed it, telling
Sean Hannity, who knows something about abortions, that it's more
like three months. More and more I'm hearing about fifteen weeks.
It's the same words, sounad the same more and more
I'm hearing as the infamous Frederick Douglas birthday answer. It's
(27:22):
fluent aphasia and dateline Bristol, Connecticut. Chris Mortenson got to
ESPN a year before I did. He never left until
cancer claimed him Sunday. You have read about how he
invented the role of inside reporter, perfected it, saw it
spread throughout the National Football League and ultimately all sports coverage.
(27:45):
All that was true, and I don't want to minimize
any of it because it put him in the Football
Hall of Fame. But I need to tell you about
the man I worked with in all of my three
full time ten years at ESPN, who hugged me goodbye
the first time I left, and hugged me when I
came back the first time, and hugged me again when
I came back the second time. I used to play
(28:05):
pool with Chris Mortenson, though why I don't know. When
he wasn't focusing on the game, when he was working
on a story or he was in a mood to talk,
he would only run the table on the rest of
us once or twice in a row when he was
not distracted. There was absolutely no reason for anybody else
in the entire pool room to make the effort to
(28:27):
hold on to their cue. The best non professional pool
player I have ever seen. More importantly, Chris Mortensen had
the best professional journalistic ethics I have ever seen. I
happened to be with him one day, sitting next to
him in the seldom used ESPN radio work area. It
(28:47):
was quiet and unoccupied, and he was talking by phone
to Art Shell, than the coach of the then Los
Angeles Raiders, about an important story. I heard him reassure
Art Shell that it was off the record and he
would never quote him, nor give away his identity, nor
even hint that he had confirmed the story mort had
brought to him. And I was also in the studio
(29:09):
maybe a week later, as we carried live I think
Artchell's news conference, as he sat there next to the
team owner Al Davis and utterly denied the story which
he himself had confirmed to Chris Mortenson. And he called
Chris Mortenson out by name, and he insulted him. And
then they put mort on the air, and mort did
(29:31):
not do what I would have done, what almost anybody
in our professor would have done, and with good reason,
and explained what the truth was.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
There.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Later, I was in the hallway and I saw Mort
and I just put my hands out, palms up, wordlessly
in a gesture of astonishment. And Mort knew what I meant,
and he said just because he didn't live up to
his word, doesn't give me the right to not live
up to mine. That's who died Sunday. Chris Mortenson was
(30:03):
seventy two years old, still ahead of us on this
(30:27):
all new edition of Countdown. You ever heard of the
auto train? I've heard of the auto train. I survived
the auto train when I was thirteen years old, and
I've had a vendetta in for the auto train ever since.
And I read something in the eighties about how the
auto train didn't exist anymore.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
I'll guess what it was. A lie.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
The auto train is still running. It's running at this moment,
and somewhere on one of the auto trains, all of
the toilets are backing up. Coming up in things I
promised not to tell first, Yes, still more idiots to
talk about. The daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons
and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worse persons
(31:08):
in the world, The smell like backed up pilots, the
Bronze worse Jesse Waters, the one time Bill O'Reilly thug
who now continues the tradition of racism and stupidity that
Bill set on Fox after the Joe Biden Seth Meyers
ice cream viral video. Waters went on Fox and said
(31:29):
it wasn't manly to lick an ice cream cone in public.
Worse yet, he tried to imply that doing so was
evidence that Biden is impaired. Quote, you know who lights
up for ice cream? Children and the elderly. According to
the Alzheimer's Association, ice cream is a favorite for people
with diminished faculties. That's when The Daily Beast dug up
(31:49):
a Facebook post from August twenty nineteen with photos of
two employees at a place on the Jersey Shore called
Iceberg ice Cream posing with Jesse Waters. Jesse Waters holding
an ice cream cone. Caption, I'm Waters and this is
my world. Shout out to Jesse Waters for stopping in tonight.
(32:13):
Now I'm not saying Jesse Waters has Alzheimer's, but if
you're only forty five and you've already forgotten when you
got photographed in public licking some ice cream, you might
want to see a specialist. Happily, it's probably not an illist.
It's just that Jesse is a fricking moron. The runner
up worser Daryl Leon McClanahan, the third Now he is
(32:34):
hardly the favorite among the candidates in the primary for
the Republican nomination for the governor of Missouri, but he's
one of them, and a Missouri Republican reposted a twenty
nineteen photo of him found by the Anti Defamation League,
in which would be Missouri Governor McClanahan the third is
shown standing next to a guy who's in full Ku
(32:55):
Klux Klan hood and robe, and they are both giving
the Hitler Nazi salute and oh, by the way, just
to complete the image, standing in front of a burning cross. Now,
McClanahan has told a Saint Louis newspaper that he sued
the ADL because it said or implied that he was
(33:15):
a member of the Klan.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Not true.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Darrell Leon the third says in the lawsuit he only
had quote honorary memberships in the Ku Klux Klan.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Wow, that's better.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Plus I assume that way you don't have to buy
your own hood and robe. You can just rent them
like shoes at a bowling alley. Bowling alley that happens
to be in front of a burning cross. But our winner,
the worst, Kristin Welker, I would like to say, as
an aside that there is a report in the New
York Post from last night that a series of bedbugs
(33:46):
have been found at NBC News World headquarters.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
In New York.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
I assume that is a coincidence. We've been through all
this before. Of course, it's more evident than ever that
there was some kind of grand compromise at NBC News.
Chuck Todd would indeed leave meet the press claim it
was his own decision, but only if he was allowed
to choose his successor. And the successor that Chuck would
choose would be the one who would make everybody say, God,
(34:14):
we missed Chuck Todd, won't you please bring him back?
Speaker 2 (34:18):
The new one is unbelievably worse.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
There is no way of knowing if Kristin Welker wrote
this line herself. When I did NBC Nightly News a
couple of times, it was a half an hour show
with about three minutes of actual copy in it. They
had four writers, and the four writers were arguing over
whether to start one sentence with and two votes for
and and there were two votes for but they gave
(34:43):
me the decisive vote, and I said, it doesn't matter.
And I thought one of them would start crying, But
back to the point. I mean, even Chuck Todd covered
politics before he got his job with NBC News and
screwed up Meet the Press. Kristen Welker majored in history,
became a local newscaster in Providence and in Ready, California,
(35:05):
and was a weekend anchor in Philly when they started
bringing her in to do fill ins on like ninety
second newscasts that ran late nights at MSNBC and then boom,
White House carspotted. That is her training. One year at
NBC News and then twelve years as a White House correspondent,
So that means thirteen years of doing whatever her boss
(35:28):
has told her to do. So who knows if she
even understood what she was saying when she said on
Meet the Press in a voice perfectly suited to voice
over one of those smarmy lead in pieces on Dateline
that the Supreme Court was considering quote mister Trump's claim
that he's immune from criminal prosecution for allegedly trying to
(35:49):
overturn the twenty twenty election. Well, with a language like that,
she's got a Supreme Court job in her future, don't.
She allegedly allegedly tried to overturn the twenty twenty election.
He admits he did it. There's no allegedly, there's no
crime in this sentence. There's no reason to put it.
(36:09):
Allegedly he did it. He boasts about it, Allegedly like
allegedly the sun rises in the east, or allegedly Kristin
Welker and her bosses have all decided that they're going
to be damned if they lose their jobs if Trump
regains power, or allegedly Kristin Welker is an idiot. No
need for Allegedly Kristin Welker. The NBC president in charge
(36:31):
of Meet the Press is named Rebecca Blumenstein, the chairman
of NBC News is says our comde and the three
of them should all be fired. Allegedly two days worse person.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Hello, here's the number.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
One story on the countdown and things I promise not
to tell. And every once in a while something will
suddenly appear in the newspaper that you actually do not accept.
I find the number of these things has been diminishing
steadily since I started reading newspapers about nineteen sixty six.
But every once in a while something is utterly shocking.
(37:17):
I quote the Washington Post. Amtrak has thirty seven routes
that criss crossed the United States. Three of them are profitable.
Two of those, the Northeast Regional and the high speed
of Sella Traverse, the heavily populated territory between Boston and
the mid Atlantic. Like those trains, the third, according to
(37:41):
an Amtrak representative, is the auto train, which carries passengers
and their motor vehicles between Lorton, Virginia and Sanford, Florida.
Oo ooh oo, my earliest enemy.
Speaker 4 (38:10):
I thought you were dead, Auto Train. I thought you
were dead. Now you may wish you had been.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
The auto train might seem like an unlikely contender, the
post continues to be a money maker for Amtrak. It
operates on one single route in the Southeast region, not
known for a reliance on trains. It makes no true
stops on its approximately nine hundred mile journey. I thought
(38:47):
the auto train had gone out of business and the
rest of us were all safe, particularly me. And it
turns out, in reading the rest of the Washington Post article,
that in fact, sometime in the eighties, this bizarre train
did in fact stop running. It was no longer pro fitable.
It was run by a private company, and they went
out of business, and then they brought it back and
(39:11):
now it's the third most profitable of the three profitable
Amtrak routes in the country. And as I read this article,
I was flashed back to March of nineteen seventy two,
when I was thirteen years old and Dad announced, guess what, Keith,
we are going to Florida for spring training. I have
(39:32):
to go see my dad for something, and he lives
in Naples, Florida. So We're going to go down there
by train, and I'm going to take our car with us.
And I said, I heard nothing beyond the phrase we're
going to spring training. We would wind up eventually in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the then home of the New York Yankees,
(39:53):
the team of my youth, and the rest of it
was just detail. We drove from Westchester County, outside of
New York City to Lorton, Virginia, although I think it
was called something else then, or the actual destination point
where the auto train left from in Virginia was a
different city than Lorton. Because I would have thought of Horton,
(40:16):
and I would have thought of doctor Seuss, and then
I would have hated Doctor Seuss all these years. In
any way, a case, we were in Virginia somewhere and
it rained the whole trip five six thirty eighty hours
in the car, but Dad wanted to bring the car.
The car was a Cadillac, A big Cadillac. I would say,
(40:37):
it's the size of eight or ten SUVs. If you
sat in the back and wanted to talk to Dad,
you had to lean forward and yell. It was a
big car. And moreover, it meant everything to my dad,
and not because he was a car fanatic. My dad
grew up with his father, who we were going to
see via auto train in the Bronx in the nineteen thirties,
(41:02):
and often, as he said, they went a couple of
years without consistent hot water in their apartment. My grandfather,
who I may have mentioned once, had a city job,
got a promotion, came into work in his usual attire
of a open necked what we would now call a
kind of a soft shirt or a polo shirt. He
(41:23):
was told he had to wear a shirt and tie,
so he quit on the spot. And as Dad said,
they went from making about two thousand dollars a year
during the depression to making one hundred and eighty dollars
the next year from recycling comic books. Every once in
a while, either my grandmother or grandfather would show up
at school to pick my dad up and walk him
to their new apartment because they had moved out of
their apartment in his absence because they didn't have the
(41:45):
money to pay the rent. It was that kind of childhood.
My dad was offered a scholarship to Cornell Architecture. He
couldn't go because his father said, if you go, your
younger brother has to quit high school and go to work. Also,
I don't have the money to send you to Ethica,
New York on the bus. You'll have to hitchhike. That
was my father's childhood. He somehow managed to become an
(42:06):
architect without going to college. He had licenses in forty
states by nineteen seventy two, and he had a Cadillac,
and not only that, he leased it, So he had
a new Cadillac every other year and eventually every year.
And he loved that car and he wanted to show
it to his father, And so we took the auto train.
(42:26):
As we got into the car to go to wherever,
Virginia to get on the auto train, which you just
got out of your car and drove it up onto
a rack of some sort, and it got loaded into
the back of the train, and then you walked half
a mile to the front of the train where the
sleeping quarters and the cars the coaches were. As we
got into our car, our Cadillac, his Cadillac, Dad made
(42:51):
the big reveal. Now I couldn't get any sleeping compartments
on the way down, only on the way back. Yeah,
we'll be sleeping in coach. It's all right. Well, it
gets there very early in the morning. It's only a
couple of hours.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Well, again, I was only thinking about the going to
see the Yankees in spring training for the first time
in my life. Part. I did not hear that part.
So I had brought with me a couple of editions
of the Sporting News. I can still see the cover.
It was an article about fighting in hockey with a
picture of Dale Hoganson of the Montreal Canadian on the cover.
I brought my favorite pillow and we got on the
(43:30):
train and enjoyed the late March sits such as they
were in Virginia. And then it got dark, and then
we ate and then only as nine nine thirty ten
pm hit and we decided to go to sleep, did
I find out that A They did not turn all
(43:51):
the lights off on trains just because Keith wanted to
go to sleep. B People did not stop using the
aisle in the train just because I was trying to sleep,
and se I had no memory of ever trying to
sleep sitting up before. After a couple of hours of
not sleeping, my dad and I went and played cards
(44:14):
in the food car, and then we went to try
it again. And of course first I said, let me
use the bathroom before we go, And I went to
the toilet and it had been locked because it was broken.
So we went to the next car and that toilet
had overflowed and was broken. And we went to the
next car and that one was broken. There were no
(44:35):
operative toilets after ten pm. And guess what else? That
produced a very very nice smell throughout all of the cars.
I have no memory whatsoever of sleeping that night, just
getting angrier and angrier at the auto train, and my
dad said, it'll be entirely different on the way back.
We are going to have our own compartment. You will
(44:56):
have never noticed that just the way. All those people
sleeping in those compartments over there never noticed it, And
I said, why didn't we get one? He said they
didn't have any available. I said, how about some other year.
I was kind of upset. But Dad had his car
with him, so that was the important part. Well, I
don't remember many of the tales of getting off the train.
I like to think in retrospect, I may have waited
(45:17):
for it to slow down and I just jumped and
walked to Florida, but I don't think that happened. We
got to the area near Orlando Sanford, Florida, a place
I once went to again about nineteen ninety five or
so for ESPN, and I got cold, and it was
ninety degrees there, and I still got cold from the
memory of the auto train. And it turned out that
(45:40):
Dad had also not been completely transparent about why we
were going to see his father. It turned out the
trip was not really about spring training. It was about
showing the Cadillac to his father, and also being there
because my grandfather, my dad's father, was undergoing a serious
kidney operation that really was something of a risk to
(46:03):
his life. We went to this rather small hospital which
surprised me, and I can't remember if it was in
Naples or North Naples, which is where I think he lived,
in a parked truck of some kind with his second wife, Winnie,
who was appalling. Maybe it was a motor home. I
(46:24):
don't remember. It was not very impressive. Dad's Cadillac had
more room in it. It was, however, more impressive than
the auto train, and it took me two or three
days to stop making remarks about the auto train to
my father. In any event, we went there and it
was the day of my grandfather's surgery, and we were
waiting in the waiting room in this small hospital that
was small enough that the waiting room was on the
(46:48):
floor of the operating theaters. In fact, it was separated
only by swinging double doors, I think wooden swinging double
doors like wood paneling in somebody's basement from nineteen sixty two,
with big windows in them. So at one point my
father said, here he comes, and it wasn't my grandfather
(47:10):
he was referring to, It was the surgeon. The surgeon
came out and we stood to greet him and looked
through the windows of these swinging doors down towards the
operating theaters. I don't know, fifty yards away, forty yards away,
something distant but still visible. So we're all standing there,
and out comes the surgeon and he has still most
(47:33):
of his surgical attire on. I remember it bloodied. I
don't think it really was bloodied. But he came out
and he started with mister Alderman, and I'm very sorry
to tell you. There was an interesting series of reactions then.
I don't remember my sister, who then would have been
about four, having much of a reaction to this. I
(47:55):
think I saw a suppressed smile crossing my mother's face.
My father was impassive. The surgeon went on and I
went into shock to explain that my grandfather had died
on the operating table. So far, this was the best
trip we'd ever been on, right, And as he's going
on as to what happened and how they tried and
(48:17):
they were resuscitating, I was drawn to something I saw
in the distance over the surgeon's shoulder, through the windows
of those swinging double doors down towards the actual surgical theaters.
It was a nurse running towards us as fast as
she possibly could, And as the surgeon was solemnly saying
(48:39):
we were very sorry. On behalf of the hospital week,
provide you with a priest, or a minister, or a
rabbi or whatever your choice.
Speaker 5 (48:47):
The doors swing open and the nurse says, doctor, there's
a pulse, and he says he looks at her, looks
back at us, looks at her again, and goes, excuse me,
and runs down the hall with her.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
Two hours later, I was in my grandfather's room and
he was sitting there, and of course, being from the
Bronx from the early nineteen hundreds, he could not say
my name correctly. Neither of my grandfathers could pronounce thh
as an individual sound thh? Was it just another t
How you doing, Keith? And I said how are you doing?
(49:27):
He said, I'm all right, I'm a little foggy. I said,
so you were dead, that's good, they tell me. I said,
so what was it like? I think a lot of
people would like to know? And he said, what the
hell are you talking about? I was dead? We would
(49:48):
I know what it was like. I was dead. It
was nothing. They put me out, They wake me up,
and they tell me I was dead. Go ask your father.
You want to know what it's like when you're dead.
I never found out what that meant. So I did
go ask my father and I said, listen, what happened here.
He said, well, this is what they're telling us. They
(50:09):
tried to resuscitate him, and the surgeon came out and
they were about to put the sheet over him, and
they'd already put down the time of death. When that
nurse that we all saw, who I think. I appreciate
her enthusiasm, but maybe she could have handled it a
little differently because she just took five years off my life.
My father said, the nurse saw a pulse on the
(50:30):
blipper there, as he called it, and sure enough he
was back. Now, it's probable that they had been trying
to resuscitate him, and as they decided they had failed
and gave up, that was the moment it all clicked in,
and within a few seconds his heartbeat was visible. I
don't think what happened is what you think happened. And
(50:52):
I went, well, what I think happened the last time?
They gave the guy who did it his own religion.
And my father looked at me and he said, let's
just get out of here. He's fine. He saw my Cadillac,
and we don't want him having his own religion. The
rest of the trip was fairly uneventful, considering that I'd
(51:12):
just seen my own grandfather come back from the dead,
apparently without any help. We went to many spring training
games and got to see a lot of old ballparks
that don't exist anymore, like the old one in Saint
Petersburg where we saw the Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds.
And then we went cross state via the Okie Finoch Trails,
(51:36):
watt Nabi, the Wassada whatever the road is that goes
through that has all the alligators on it, the Alligator
Alley thing. So we're in the other side of Florida,
and we went to what was then beautiful Fort Lauderdale
Stadium Fort Lauderdale Yankee Stadium and saw about half a
dozen games, and I had been to spring training for
the first time in my life. And Jens, just to
top it off, we go back to the hotel and
(51:58):
my dad says, got a surprise for you. I bought
season tickets for the Yankee games this year, four tickets
to each Yankee home game in the year nineteen seventy two.
I was a happy guy. I had forgotten the nightmares
of death and even worse the auto train. By the way,
(52:22):
the tickets, four of them for eighty one Yankee home games,
many double headers, probably about seventy different days, maybe sixty
eight seventy different days, four tickets every game, one thousand
dollars parking, Well that was a little more. That was
another one hundred dollars for the whole season, reserved parking
(52:42):
right across the street from the stadium, in the front row.
A different world half a century ago. Well, now, all
the adventures of my first trip to Florida and my
first trip to baseball spring training, and my first and
last trip on the auto train were complete except for
(53:03):
the return trip. We drove back to Sandford, Florida, and
we had those sleeping compartments, and they made all the
difference in the world. We had a nice dinner on
the train. We checked all the bathrooms. We had a
little private bathroom in the two rooms sweet my father
had gotten for the occasion, so we didn't even need
(53:24):
to worry about whether or not the toilets would completely
fail and fill the cars with a combination of chemical
smell and the other smell you associate with bathrooms, and
everything was fine. We went to bed early, and then
I woke up around dawn freezing, and I mean freezing.
(53:44):
We had transported ourselves from Florida into Georgia and the
heat did not come on, and it did not come
on all the way to I don't think it was Lorton, Virginia.
I like to think of it as auto train Virginia,
and I like to think of it as a place
that has no permanent residence. But apparently that's where the
(54:07):
auto train still lives, waiting, waiting for me, waiting happily.
I don't drive, so screw you, auto train.
Speaker 2 (54:37):
The auto train is still running. Scroll your auto train.
Speaker 1 (54:43):
I can still smell the smell. I've done all the
damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown
Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on guitars,
bass and drums, and mister Chaneale handled orchestration and keyboards,
and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, some
(55:04):
of the Beethoven compositions were arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Olderman
theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy
of ESPN Inc. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are
by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our
announcer today is my friend Kenny Maine. Everything else was
(55:25):
pretty much my fault. That's countdown for today eight months
exactly until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the one
and fifty fifth day since dementia J Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Use the Fourteenth Amendment, the Insurrection Act, the justice system,
the mental health system, and if it happens, presidential immunity
(55:48):
to stop him from doing it again while we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Do not forget our
live YouTube special after the State of the Union Thursday Night,
sponsored by Auto Train. I made that part of up
Bulletins is the news warrants until next time. I'm Keith Alremman.
Good Morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown
(56:21):
with 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 Course.
I'm respectable, says John Houston as Noah Cross in the
(00:25):
movie Chinatown to Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittis, I'm old. Politicians,
ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last
long enough. And then there is what happens when you
are all three of those things. As the Supreme Court
is all three of those things, politicians pretending to be
(00:47):
justices working in an ugly building, and as Trump relied
upon and yesterday was proven correct, they are all whores.
And I have lots to say about the Supreme Whares
and what they have done and what they might yet do,
which probably enough includes making Joe Biden into an instant
American king. Yet they are not the lead story, because
(01:11):
the lead story is after a weekend plus in which
he made more than two dozen astonishing verbal mistakes in
just two speeches and struggled through all the rest of
the speeches. The evidence is mounting that what Donald Trump
is suffering from is something called fluent aphasia. There are
(01:33):
two million Americans with aphasia, a kind of catch all
for a series of communication disorders ranging from the most
familiar in which the ability to speak or to understand
speech is eliminated or severely impaired, usually by a stroke
or a head injury, but fluent aphasia technically Wernicke's aphasia
(01:54):
may be the most terrifying, may be the most heartbreaking
of them all, because while the patient's ability to understand
speech and to make himself understood ya a speech may
be severely or totally limited, their ability to speak easily
and smoothly is not. The cadence is right, the grammar
(02:15):
is usually right. Long sentences are, at least at first,
no problem. Things that sound like answers to your questions
are there, except they are all with the wrong words.
It's Trump, That's what Trump has been doing that. And
(02:36):
obviously this is a layman asserting this. I could be
wildly wrong, but it is clear is something like this
that is what he's been doing. Wernicke's aphasia. Fluent aphasia
with growing frequency and an increasing tendency to bail out
of things when he gets lost. Byron Peterson is now
(02:57):
nearly eighty four years old. He lives in Nevada. He
has fluent aphasia, and he made a video for his therapists,
and it is still used to raise awareness for this condition,
which befell him not long after he hit his head
after a fall. The first tape is Byron Peterson. The
(03:18):
second tape is Donald Trump. Hi, Byron, how are you?
Speaker 2 (03:21):
I'm happy? Are you pretty? You look? Hutton?
Speaker 1 (03:24):
What are you doing today?
Speaker 3 (03:27):
We stayed with the water over here at the moment
and talked with the people for them over there.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
They're diving for them at the moment.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
They will save in the moment he held water soon
for him with luck for him.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
So we're on a cruise and we're about to we
will start it right here and they'll save their hands
right there for them.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Hello, Richmond, I'm thrilled to be back in the beautiful Virginia.
We love Virginia, and perhaps most importantly, we are a
nation that is no longer admired, respected or listened to
on the world stage in the United States. So we
call it migrant time.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I come.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
I came up with that name because I come up
with a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Of good names, don't I.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
And Putin, you know, has so little respect for Obama
that he's starting to throw around the nuclear word.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
You heard that nuclear?
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Did you just see Maduro Venezuelough.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
It's aid unbelievable.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
We will demolish the deep state.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
We will expel the Wallmongreves ding boom.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
This is me, I hear being.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
The red lights are starting to go off anytime I
start talking.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
They typed the red light off.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Biden borderwheel.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Well you know this right, the Biden border bill. Look,
he can't campaign, he can't campaign, he can't speak, he
can't walk.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
He looks like hell.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Adding on to the last two total it last Tuesday.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
They have pupils from foreign countries, from countries where they
don't even know what the language is. We have nobody
that even teaches it. These are languages that nobody ever
heard of. The in Saudi Arabian Russia will repeat.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee and presumptive fluent aphasia victim
cannot serve as president of the United States like that,
under any circumstances. As I first framed it nearly a
decade ago, his brain does not work correctly. He should
receive our empathy. We are not monsters here, and the
(05:33):
therapies that can improve quality of life as his fluent
aphasia or whichever form of aphasia or other brain injury
or disease. He has progresses, but he cannot serve as
president of the United States, and he should end his
candidacy immediately. And if this needed to be more dangerous
than it already appears, considered this. Trump's continued insistence that
(05:55):
he aced some kind of simple cognitive test, as if
that proved he had an IQ of three hundred and
fifty thousand, may not just be him lying his way
through yet more reality. He may have no idea that
he's this sick, and even if somebody around him had
the courage to tell him, he would not believe them,
(06:17):
because he's also been showing signs for years of another
brain injury or illness called annosagnosia, and Trump would not
be the first at this level of government to suffer
from it anno sugnosia, As the legendary David Dunning of
Dunning Krueger's Syndrome once wrote, an anosagnosic patient who is
(06:39):
paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If
you put a pencil in front of them and ask
them to pick up the pencil in front of their
left hand, they won't do it. And you ask them why,
and they'll say, while I'm tired or I don't need
a pencil. That pencil reference is not random. It mainlines
(07:02):
back to the president, who in his lifetime was credited
with saving the American pencil industry. Woodrow Wilson, and as
latter day experts use new medical knowledge to study the
stroke that Wilson suffered while on his famous cross country
tour to try to sell the League of Nations to
America over the heads of a disapproving Senate. The conclusion
(07:23):
has been widespread through the decades that whether or not
he had it earlier, after that stroke, President Wilson showed
all the signs of annosognosia. In the nineteen seventies, neuropsychiatrist
Edwin Weinstein was granted access to Woodrow Wilson's papers to
diagnose what happened to him, and he wrote quote following
(07:47):
his stroke, The outstanding feature of the President's behavior was
his denial of his incapacity. Denial of illness or annosagnosia
literally lack of knowledge of disease is a common sequel
of the type of brain injury received by Wilson. In
this condition, the patient denies or appears unaware of such
(08:08):
deficits as paralysis or blindness. To casual observers, anosugnosiac patients
may appear quite normal and even bright and witty when
not on the subject of their disability. They are quite rational,
and tests of their intelligence may show no deficit unquote Unfortunately,
(08:29):
when on the subject of his disability, President Wilson was
anything but rational. His Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, summoned
the cabinet to a meeting to discuss Wilson's illness. Wilson
or his wife forced the resignation of Secretary of State Lancing.
Doctors who challenged Wilson were dismissed. People who knew him
before his stroke were eased out or denied further access.
(08:50):
Wilson insisted until his death that whole yes, he had
had strokes, it only affected his walking and only a little.
So when you hear this and you realize Trump thinks
nobody is noticing him, just trailing off and sighing, think
fluent aphasia and annosognosia.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
Saudi Arabian Russia, Glory pet.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
I am indebted to the nation's leading authority on George Santos,
the reporter Jacqueline's Sweet were putting the topic of fluent
aphasia under my sometimes stuffed and incompetent knows, because God knows.
With Trump, we don't have enough to worry about with
him being crazy and evil and demented. We also need
to worry about him having had a stroke or something
(09:43):
creating an illness that makes it impossible for him to
understand that he's had a stroke or something. So Trump
(10:08):
may not have control of his own brain anymore, but
at least he has control of his own Supreme Court. Unsurprisingly,
the Court betrayed democracy yesterday again, this time by going
faster to help Trump on presidential immunity. Of course, it's
going slower to help Trump. It's a versatile set of
(10:32):
whoores its members, including Jackson and Kagan and Sodomayor, who,
before folding stood up just long enough to wave bye
bye to representative government in this country, overruled one of
the easiest parts of our constitution to understand, and did
so for the benefit of one corrupt politician. Individually and
(10:55):
as an entity, they have proved themselves inept at basic
reading comprehension. They have proved themselves to be corrupt and illegitimate.
The Court's usefulness and relevance is at an end, and
whatever replaces it, the immediate need is obvious. The Supreme
Court must be dissolved. Because the Supreme Court is not
(11:19):
just made up of whores, It's made up of incompetent whores. Quote.
Because the Constitution makes Congress rather than the States, responsible
for enforcing Section three against federal office holders and candidates,
we reverse reads their decision on enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment
(11:39):
denying insurrectionists the right to become president or hold other offices.
Nine nothing except it doesn't do that. Section three, as
conservative constitutional scholar after conservative constitutional scholar has repeatedly stated,
is self enforcing. It is automatic. If you engaged in insurrection,
(12:01):
you're out. If you think you are being ill treated
by this, Section three provides you with an override mechanism.
You can get the House and the Senate to each
clear you each by a two thirds vote period. The
Constitution says nothing about an enforcement responsibility. It's not given
(12:22):
to Congress, it's not given to the Supreme Court. It's
not given to me. The unsigned court decision, and of
course it's unsigned. Who wants to go into history as
Trump's primary whore. Reads in part, quote an evolving electoral map,
not your business, Justice X. This is not an electoral
(12:43):
map case quote could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties,
and states across the country in different ways and at
different times. Also, not your goddamn business. What the Constitution says,
that's your business, not whether you're worried about reactions to it.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
The disruption would be all the more acute and could
nullify the votes of millions and change the election result
if Section three enforcement were attempted after the nation has voted. Again,
Justice X, not asking you to do that. Nothing to
do with you. You have a job, you are bad
at it. It's reading the constitution. You're corrupt, You're stupid.
(13:26):
You should have just said Trump told us to do
it that way. Least show some self respect. Quote. Nothing
in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos arriving
at any time or different times up to and perhaps
beyond the inauguration Unquote ha, Yeah, what was that case
that Clarence Thomas was involved with, the one that forced
(13:49):
the nation to undergo chaos arriving at any time or
different times up till thirty nine days before the inauguration
of two thousand and one. What was that case called?
The Supreme Court is full of shit and fullest of
(14:11):
all is Amy Coney Barrett in my judgment. Now, that's
a bad start in my judgment, this is not the
time to amplify disagreement with stridency. She writes. That has
nothing to do with your job, ma'am. The Court has
settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of
(14:32):
a presidential election. You're not supposed to rule on seasons,
or politics or anything else of the moment. Didn't it
say that in the preface when they gave you your
copy of So you're a Supreme Court justice, what the
hell do you do now? Quote, particularly in this circumstances,
(14:54):
writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down,
not up. This is the same logic you will read
in the dread Scott decision which validated slavery. It is cowardly,
it is cheap, it is horrorsh and boy did Trump
get his money with this clown? The Court should turn
(15:14):
the national temperature down, not up, said Justice Amy Karen
Barrett as she voted to make sure a psychotic insurrectionist
who would try to stay in office past twenty twenty
nine remains on the twenty twenty four ballot, because that
will really turn the national temperature down. Yeah, turn it
(15:36):
down to seventy five degrees body temperature, at which all
of us die of hypothermia. As the Supreme Court reporter
and analyst Ellie Misstyle wrote, Amy Cony Barrett would really
like to speak to the Liberals manager over the rude
service she received. Ellie also wrote, the Supreme Court must
(15:58):
be stopped, God damned right. And oh, by the way,
you can read this decision as permission for any other
sitting president who's the president at the moment. By the way,
any sitting president can commit any act he likes without
risking the wrath of the Fourteenth Amendment mechanism composed by
(16:21):
better senators and better Congressmen and assented to by better
justices than we have today. Just saying, right now, the
Supreme Court has given out specific practical immunity for you know,
trying to overthrow the government. But I asked you last
(16:43):
week to think about it. And sorry, I didn't mean
it to sound like homework. I apologize, but I asked
you to think about what would happen if the Court
is not trying to manage the game like some out
of control egotistical hockey referees assessing a penalty against one team,
and the Court actually winds up pairing this nine to
nothing atrocity ruling for Trump on the fourteenth Amendment with
(17:05):
a six to three ruling also granting him presidential immunity
from prosecution for anything he did in office. There are
a million different answers to this, but of course the
most important one is even they cannot drag out that
ruling on immunity until next January twenty first or something.
Thus they'd have to do it before then, and thus
(17:27):
they would be granting presidential immunity not to Trump, but
to Joe Biden. Since we would then be faced with
the undeniable reality that the Supreme Court had made the
President into an absolute monarch. What King Joseph Robinette Biden
(17:47):
the second the first could then do, and, by the way,
if this really happens, should do what he could and
should then do is take away the chances there's going
to be a King Trump arrest the members of the
Supreme Court arrest Trump, arrest the Speaker in the House,
arrest all the other January sixth insurrectionists, and oh, by
(18:09):
the way, postpone the election. Because if the Supreme Court,
and honestly, individually or collectively, my dogs could do a
better job of being an Associate Justice than Amy Cony Barrett,
and at least two of my dogs could do a
better job than Chief Justice Roberts. Because if the Supreme
Court declares that all presidents are immune from prosecution no
(18:31):
matter what they do, we are, as of that moment,
we are living in a kingdom where everything in the
Constitution and all the laws and all the norms go
the way of what this Court just did to Section
three of the fourteenth Amendment. And if we are going
to be living under a king and we have a
choice of King Biden or King Trump, guess which one
(18:55):
I'm taking. And yet this does not seem to have
occurred to Trump, Well we have a pretty good idea
now what the name of the problem he has is
that it makes it not occur to Trump, But it
also doesn't seem to have occurred to any of his lawyers,
nor to his cult. He was still out there yesterday
(19:15):
demanding immunity because of course, that's all that matters to him.
And at this point you wonder if you could get
past the anosygnosia if you offered him a trade here
presidential immunity. You'll never go to jail. But Biden becomes king,
and there's no election until he says so. You wonder
if he'd take it. Justice save as sorrys Also, there'll
(19:39):
be no refunds on the legal fees. My original thought
was the Chief Justice and all the little justices and
the puddles into which Jackson and Kagan in Sotomayora dissolve yesterday,
along with Justice Amy Karen Barrett, they all attend the
State of the Union Thursday night. Biden should address them directly.
(20:01):
Why not? Justice Karen just decided that inter hearing in
the presidential election is the Court's job. Why shouldn't the
president be able to answer them? Originally I thought he
should say to them, Hey, guys and gals, I know
you've decided to stall the trials of the man to
whom at least three of you owe your jobs, and
judging by your work, they're the only jobs you'll ever get.
(20:24):
But as you ponder this question of presidential immunity, I'd
like to note, being president myself, that there has never
been such a thing, and there never should be, because
the first thing a president who could never face prosecution
for anything could do is disappear all the members of
the Supreme Court. So, you know, like the kids say, Rent,
(20:48):
don't buy That's what I thought President Biden should say
to the justices Thursday night. Now I'm not so sure.
Now I'm thinking he should not say a damn thing
about presidential immunity. He shouldn't say anything. He shouldn't even
acknowledge they are there. He should pretend nothing's going on.
That way, if these idiots who just erased an entire
(21:10):
clause from an amendment passed at the most precarious time
in this nation's history until now, if they then decide
to write their own new clause and invent something called
presidential immunity, the nation's surprise at their corruption would quickly
be exceeded by their surprise when King Biden arrests them.
(21:42):
So tune in Thursday for our live edition of Countdown
after the State of the Union on YouTube to find
out if the President let them in on the fact
that the metaphorical loaded gun. John Roberts and his clown
car riders are holding is not just pointed at Justice
and American representative government, it's also pointed at themselves. And
(22:04):
that also of interest here Trump's promised to bluntly get
your kids sick and kill many of them. And that
national abortion band. None of them is saying they want.
Trump again says he wants, and he just made it
earlier and in the good news, Jack Smith says the
DOJ sixty days until election rule does not apply to
(22:25):
any of this. Watch the Supreme Court overrule him on that. Plus,
my oldest enemy has returned for a final showdown, the
enemy of my youth, the enemy of my nightmares. The
auto train is alive and well, and somebody has a
(22:48):
reservation on it today.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Damn you tell auto train. That's next.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
And an all new edition of Countdown. This is Countdown
with Keith Olberman. Post scripts to the news, some headlines,
(23:16):
some updates, some snarks, some predictions. So much Trump news
it carried over past the first commercial dateline Washington. The
latest reporter to face plant on the spinning wheel of
this is when Trump really pivots his named Sophia cal
And she works for Axios. At about five am yesterday,
(23:37):
her piece went up, reading quote, top advisors are trying,
with some early success, to steer former President Trump to
focus more on the border and the economy and less
on old grievances and personal drama. In some recent speeches,
Trump has avoided his typical complaint that the twenty twenty
election he lost was quote stolen, and instead has said
(23:59):
we were interrupted or something very bad happened, another sign
of Trump toning things down a notch. In at least
one instance, he wanted to mention a salacious claim about
a rival's personal life, but co campaign manager Susie Wiles
persuaded him not to loll you mean, like the stuff
(24:20):
about Susie Wiles's daughter and her resume. Anyway. That was
at about five am, Trump pivots, Oh, Instead of rig stolen,
he said a bad thing happened just afternoon. Trump then
attacked quote deranged Jack Smith, called the judges Trump haters,
and attacked Fannie Willis. Here is a rule we need.
(24:42):
If you say Trump is pivoting or changing, and he
contradicts you within eight hours of your article or your
TV hit, you have to quit the business and go
into a Nunnery Tightline, Fort Pierce, Florida. Good Trump trial
news for a change, because it hasn't gotten to the
(25:04):
Supreme Court yet. In filings to Judge Eileen, if you
like Amy Cony Barrett, you're gonna love me. Cannon Jack
Smith has asserted that the Department of Justices infamous unofficial,
unwritten sixty day rule thou shalt not undertake investigations within
sixty days of an election, or maybe it's ninety or
(25:24):
one hundred and twenty, or maybe it's fourteen hundred, whatever
it is, it does not apply here and will not
apply to the prosecution of Trump for stealing classified documents
and you know, reading them to random passers. By the
premise here, says mister Smith. Once the case has begun,
the sixty day clock ends. Dateline, Richmond, Virginia. Of course,
(25:50):
only Barbara Comstock was paying attention. She used to be
a Clinton hunting congresswoman from Virginia, but she noticed that
in his speech there, Trump promised to take all federal
funds away from public schools that require that there's students
get vaccines. You know, polio vaccines, chicken pox vaccines, measles vaccines,
(26:12):
measles like in Florida, where they have a quack named Ladapo,
who is Ron DeSantis's surge in general. Remember Ron DeSantis. Anyway,
he's no longer enforcing the rules demanding vaccinations of public
school kids. And guess what, there's measles outbreaks in Florida.
So maybe President Biden can mention this on Thursday Night.
(26:36):
Mister Trump's parent new campaign slogan is HI, I'm Donald Trump,
and I'm here to kill your kids. Eight line inside
Trump's head. Don't wear your good shoes in here. Remember
that national abortion band. Republicans say they don't want but
then Trump said he wanted one, and he had chosen
(26:57):
sixteen weeks because it was a good round number and
it meant four months. Well, now he's changed it, telling
Sean Hannity, who knows something about abortions, that it's more
like three months. More and more I'm hearing about fifteen weeks.
It's the same words, sounad the same more and more
I'm hearing as the infamous Frederick Douglas birthday answer. It's
(27:22):
fluent aphasia and dateline Bristol, Connecticut. Chris Mortenson got to
ESPN a year before I did. He never left until
cancer claimed him Sunday. You have read about how he
invented the role of inside reporter, perfected it, saw it
spread throughout the National Football League and ultimately all sports coverage.
(27:45):
All that was true, and I don't want to minimize
any of it because it put him in the Football
Hall of Fame. But I need to tell you about
the man I worked with in all of my three
full time ten years at ESPN, who hugged me goodbye
the first time I left, and hugged me when I
came back the first time, and hugged me again when
I came back the second time. I used to play
(28:05):
pool with Chris Mortenson, though why I don't know. When
he wasn't focusing on the game, when he was working
on a story or he was in a mood to talk,
he would only run the table on the rest of
us once or twice in a row when he was
not distracted. There was absolutely no reason for anybody else
in the entire pool room to make the effort to
(28:27):
hold on to their cue. The best non professional pool
player I have ever seen. More importantly, Chris Mortensen had
the best professional journalistic ethics I have ever seen. I
happened to be with him one day, sitting next to
him in the seldom used ESPN radio work area. It
(28:47):
was quiet and unoccupied, and he was talking by phone
to Art Shell, than the coach of the then Los
Angeles Raiders, about an important story. I heard him reassure
Art Shell that it was off the record and he
would never quote him, nor give away his identity, nor
even hint that he had confirmed the story mort had
brought to him. And I was also in the studio
(29:09):
maybe a week later, as we carried live I think
Artchell's news conference, as he sat there next to the
team owner Al Davis and utterly denied the story which
he himself had confirmed to Chris Mortenson. And he called
Chris Mortenson out by name, and he insulted him. And
then they put mort on the air, and mort did
(29:31):
not do what I would have done, what almost anybody
in our professor would have done, and with good reason,
and explained what the truth was.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
There.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Later, I was in the hallway and I saw Mort
and I just put my hands out, palms up, wordlessly
in a gesture of astonishment. And Mort knew what I meant,
and he said just because he didn't live up to
his word, doesn't give me the right to not live
up to mine. That's who died Sunday. Chris Mortenson was
(30:03):
seventy two years old, still ahead of us on this
(30:27):
all new edition of Countdown. You ever heard of the
auto train? I've heard of the auto train. I survived
the auto train when I was thirteen years old, and
I've had a vendetta in for the auto train ever since.
And I read something in the eighties about how the
auto train didn't exist anymore.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
I'll guess what it was. A lie.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
The auto train is still running. It's running at this moment,
and somewhere on one of the auto trains, all of
the toilets are backing up. Coming up in things I
promised not to tell first, Yes, still more idiots to
talk about. The daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons
and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worse persons
(31:08):
in the world, The smell like backed up pilots, the
Bronze worse Jesse Waters, the one time Bill O'Reilly thug
who now continues the tradition of racism and stupidity that
Bill set on Fox after the Joe Biden Seth Meyers
ice cream viral video. Waters went on Fox and said
(31:29):
it wasn't manly to lick an ice cream cone in public.
Worse yet, he tried to imply that doing so was
evidence that Biden is impaired. Quote, you know who lights
up for ice cream? Children and the elderly. According to
the Alzheimer's Association, ice cream is a favorite for people
with diminished faculties. That's when The Daily Beast dug up
(31:49):
a Facebook post from August twenty nineteen with photos of
two employees at a place on the Jersey Shore called
Iceberg ice Cream posing with Jesse Waters. Jesse Waters holding
an ice cream cone. Caption, I'm Waters and this is
my world. Shout out to Jesse Waters for stopping in tonight.
(32:13):
Now I'm not saying Jesse Waters has Alzheimer's, but if
you're only forty five and you've already forgotten when you
got photographed in public licking some ice cream, you might
want to see a specialist. Happily, it's probably not an illist.
It's just that Jesse is a fricking moron. The runner
up worser Daryl Leon McClanahan, the third Now he is
(32:34):
hardly the favorite among the candidates in the primary for
the Republican nomination for the governor of Missouri, but he's
one of them, and a Missouri Republican reposted a twenty
nineteen photo of him found by the Anti Defamation League,
in which would be Missouri Governor McClanahan the third is
shown standing next to a guy who's in full Ku
(32:55):
Klux Klan hood and robe, and they are both giving
the Hitler Nazi salute and oh, by the way, just
to complete the image, standing in front of a burning cross. Now,
McClanahan has told a Saint Louis newspaper that he sued
the ADL because it said or implied that he was
(33:15):
a member of the Klan.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Not true.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Darrell Leon the third says in the lawsuit he only
had quote honorary memberships in the Ku Klux Klan.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Wow, that's better.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Plus I assume that way you don't have to buy
your own hood and robe. You can just rent them
like shoes at a bowling alley. Bowling alley that happens
to be in front of a burning cross. But our winner,
the worst, Kristin Welker, I would like to say, as
an aside that there is a report in the New
York Post from last night that a series of bedbugs
(33:46):
have been found at NBC News World headquarters.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
In New York.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
I assume that is a coincidence. We've been through all
this before. Of course, it's more evident than ever that
there was some kind of grand compromise at NBC News.
Chuck Todd would indeed leave meet the press claim it
was his own decision, but only if he was allowed
to choose his successor. And the successor that Chuck would
choose would be the one who would make everybody say, God,
(34:14):
we missed Chuck Todd, won't you please bring him back?
Speaker 2 (34:18):
The new one is unbelievably worse.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
There is no way of knowing if Kristin Welker wrote
this line herself. When I did NBC Nightly News a
couple of times, it was a half an hour show
with about three minutes of actual copy in it. They
had four writers, and the four writers were arguing over
whether to start one sentence with and two votes for
and and there were two votes for but they gave
(34:43):
me the decisive vote, and I said, it doesn't matter.
And I thought one of them would start crying, But
back to the point. I mean, even Chuck Todd covered
politics before he got his job with NBC News and
screwed up Meet the Press. Kristen Welker majored in history,
became a local newscaster in Providence and in Ready, California,
(35:05):
and was a weekend anchor in Philly when they started
bringing her in to do fill ins on like ninety
second newscasts that ran late nights at MSNBC and then boom,
White House carspotted. That is her training. One year at
NBC News and then twelve years as a White House correspondent,
So that means thirteen years of doing whatever her boss
(35:28):
has told her to do. So who knows if she
even understood what she was saying when she said on
Meet the Press in a voice perfectly suited to voice
over one of those smarmy lead in pieces on Dateline
that the Supreme Court was considering quote mister Trump's claim
that he's immune from criminal prosecution for allegedly trying to
(35:49):
overturn the twenty twenty election. Well, with a language like that,
she's got a Supreme Court job in her future, don't.
She allegedly allegedly tried to overturn the twenty twenty election.
He admits he did it. There's no allegedly, there's no
crime in this sentence. There's no reason to put it.
(36:09):
Allegedly he did it. He boasts about it, Allegedly like
allegedly the sun rises in the east, or allegedly Kristin
Welker and her bosses have all decided that they're going
to be damned if they lose their jobs if Trump
regains power, or allegedly Kristin Welker is an idiot. No
need for Allegedly Kristin Welker. The NBC president in charge
(36:31):
of Meet the Press is named Rebecca Blumenstein, the chairman
of NBC News is says our comde and the three
of them should all be fired. Allegedly two days worse person.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Hello, here's the number.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
One story on the countdown and things I promise not
to tell. And every once in a while something will
suddenly appear in the newspaper that you actually do not accept.
I find the number of these things has been diminishing
steadily since I started reading newspapers about nineteen sixty six.
But every once in a while something is utterly shocking.
(37:17):
I quote the Washington Post. Amtrak has thirty seven routes
that criss crossed the United States. Three of them are profitable.
Two of those, the Northeast Regional and the high speed
of Sella Traverse, the heavily populated territory between Boston and
the mid Atlantic. Like those trains, the third, according to
(37:41):
an Amtrak representative, is the auto train, which carries passengers
and their motor vehicles between Lorton, Virginia and Sanford, Florida.
Oo ooh oo, my earliest enemy.
Speaker 4 (38:10):
I thought you were dead, Auto Train. I thought you
were dead. Now you may wish you had been.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
The auto train might seem like an unlikely contender, the
post continues to be a money maker for Amtrak. It
operates on one single route in the Southeast region, not
known for a reliance on trains. It makes no true
stops on its approximately nine hundred mile journey. I thought
(38:47):
the auto train had gone out of business and the
rest of us were all safe, particularly me. And it
turns out, in reading the rest of the Washington Post article,
that in fact, sometime in the eighties, this bizarre train
did in fact stop running. It was no longer pro fitable.
It was run by a private company, and they went
out of business, and then they brought it back and
(39:11):
now it's the third most profitable of the three profitable
Amtrak routes in the country. And as I read this article,
I was flashed back to March of nineteen seventy two,
when I was thirteen years old and Dad announced, guess what, Keith,
we are going to Florida for spring training. I have
(39:32):
to go see my dad for something, and he lives
in Naples, Florida. So We're going to go down there
by train, and I'm going to take our car with us.
And I said, I heard nothing beyond the phrase we're
going to spring training. We would wind up eventually in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the then home of the New York Yankees,
(39:53):
the team of my youth, and the rest of it
was just detail. We drove from Westchester County, outside of
New York City to Lorton, Virginia, although I think it
was called something else then, or the actual destination point
where the auto train left from in Virginia was a
different city than Lorton. Because I would have thought of Horton,
(40:16):
and I would have thought of doctor Seuss, and then
I would have hated Doctor Seuss all these years. In
any way, a case, we were in Virginia somewhere and
it rained the whole trip five six thirty eighty hours
in the car, but Dad wanted to bring the car.
The car was a Cadillac, A big Cadillac. I would say,
(40:37):
it's the size of eight or ten SUVs. If you
sat in the back and wanted to talk to Dad,
you had to lean forward and yell. It was a
big car. And moreover, it meant everything to my dad,
and not because he was a car fanatic. My dad
grew up with his father, who we were going to
see via auto train in the Bronx in the nineteen thirties,
(41:02):
and often, as he said, they went a couple of
years without consistent hot water in their apartment. My grandfather,
who I may have mentioned once, had a city job,
got a promotion, came into work in his usual attire
of a open necked what we would now call a
kind of a soft shirt or a polo shirt. He
(41:23):
was told he had to wear a shirt and tie,
so he quit on the spot. And as Dad said,
they went from making about two thousand dollars a year
during the depression to making one hundred and eighty dollars
the next year from recycling comic books. Every once in
a while, either my grandmother or grandfather would show up
at school to pick my dad up and walk him
to their new apartment because they had moved out of
their apartment in his absence because they didn't have the
(41:45):
money to pay the rent. It was that kind of childhood.
My dad was offered a scholarship to Cornell Architecture. He
couldn't go because his father said, if you go, your
younger brother has to quit high school and go to work. Also,
I don't have the money to send you to Ethica,
New York on the bus. You'll have to hitchhike. That
was my father's childhood. He somehow managed to become an
(42:06):
architect without going to college. He had licenses in forty
states by nineteen seventy two, and he had a Cadillac,
and not only that, he leased it, So he had
a new Cadillac every other year and eventually every year.
And he loved that car and he wanted to show
it to his father, And so we took the auto train.
(42:26):
As we got into the car to go to wherever,
Virginia to get on the auto train, which you just
got out of your car and drove it up onto
a rack of some sort, and it got loaded into
the back of the train, and then you walked half
a mile to the front of the train where the
sleeping quarters and the cars the coaches were. As we
got into our car, our Cadillac, his Cadillac, Dad made
(42:51):
the big reveal. Now I couldn't get any sleeping compartments
on the way down, only on the way back. Yeah,
we'll be sleeping in coach. It's all right. Well, it
gets there very early in the morning. It's only a
couple of hours.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Well, again, I was only thinking about the going to
see the Yankees in spring training for the first time
in my life. Part. I did not hear that part.
So I had brought with me a couple of editions
of the Sporting News. I can still see the cover.
It was an article about fighting in hockey with a
picture of Dale Hoganson of the Montreal Canadian on the cover.
I brought my favorite pillow and we got on the
(43:30):
train and enjoyed the late March sits such as they
were in Virginia. And then it got dark, and then
we ate and then only as nine nine thirty ten
pm hit and we decided to go to sleep, did
I find out that A They did not turn all
(43:51):
the lights off on trains just because Keith wanted to
go to sleep. B People did not stop using the
aisle in the train just because I was trying to sleep,
and se I had no memory of ever trying to
sleep sitting up before. After a couple of hours of
not sleeping, my dad and I went and played cards
(44:14):
in the food car, and then we went to try
it again. And of course first I said, let me
use the bathroom before we go, And I went to
the toilet and it had been locked because it was broken.
So we went to the next car and that toilet
had overflowed and was broken. And we went to the
next car and that one was broken. There were no
(44:35):
operative toilets after ten pm. And guess what else? That
produced a very very nice smell throughout all of the cars.
I have no memory whatsoever of sleeping that night, just
getting angrier and angrier at the auto train, and my
dad said, it'll be entirely different on the way back.
We are going to have our own compartment. You will
(44:56):
have never noticed that just the way. All those people
sleeping in those compartments over there never noticed it, And
I said, why didn't we get one? He said they
didn't have any available. I said, how about some other year.
I was kind of upset. But Dad had his car
with him, so that was the important part. Well, I
don't remember many of the tales of getting off the train.
I like to think in retrospect, I may have waited
(45:17):
for it to slow down and I just jumped and
walked to Florida, but I don't think that happened. We
got to the area near Orlando Sanford, Florida, a place
I once went to again about nineteen ninety five or
so for ESPN, and I got cold, and it was
ninety degrees there, and I still got cold from the
memory of the auto train. And it turned out that
(45:40):
Dad had also not been completely transparent about why we
were going to see his father. It turned out the
trip was not really about spring training. It was about
showing the Cadillac to his father, and also being there
because my grandfather, my dad's father, was undergoing a serious
kidney operation that really was something of a risk to
(46:03):
his life. We went to this rather small hospital which
surprised me, and I can't remember if it was in
Naples or North Naples, which is where I think he lived,
in a parked truck of some kind with his second wife, Winnie,
who was appalling. Maybe it was a motor home. I
(46:24):
don't remember. It was not very impressive. Dad's Cadillac had
more room in it. It was, however, more impressive than
the auto train, and it took me two or three
days to stop making remarks about the auto train to
my father. In any event, we went there and it
was the day of my grandfather's surgery, and we were
waiting in the waiting room in this small hospital that
was small enough that the waiting room was on the
(46:48):
floor of the operating theaters. In fact, it was separated
only by swinging double doors, I think wooden swinging double
doors like wood paneling in somebody's basement from nineteen sixty two,
with big windows in them. So at one point my
father said, here he comes, and it wasn't my grandfather
(47:10):
he was referring to, It was the surgeon. The surgeon
came out and we stood to greet him and looked
through the windows of these swinging doors down towards the
operating theaters. I don't know, fifty yards away, forty yards away,
something distant but still visible. So we're all standing there,
and out comes the surgeon and he has still most
(47:33):
of his surgical attire on. I remember it bloodied. I
don't think it really was bloodied. But he came out
and he started with mister Alderman, and I'm very sorry
to tell you. There was an interesting series of reactions then.
I don't remember my sister, who then would have been
about four, having much of a reaction to this. I
(47:55):
think I saw a suppressed smile crossing my mother's face.
My father was impassive. The surgeon went on and I
went into shock to explain that my grandfather had died
on the operating table. So far, this was the best
trip we'd ever been on, right, And as he's going
on as to what happened and how they tried and
(48:17):
they were resuscitating, I was drawn to something I saw
in the distance over the surgeon's shoulder, through the windows
of those swinging double doors down towards the actual surgical theaters.
It was a nurse running towards us as fast as
she possibly could, And as the surgeon was solemnly saying
(48:39):
we were very sorry. On behalf of the hospital week,
provide you with a priest, or a minister, or a
rabbi or whatever your choice.
Speaker 5 (48:47):
The doors swing open and the nurse says, doctor, there's
a pulse, and he says he looks at her, looks
back at us, looks at her again, and goes, excuse me,
and runs down the hall with her.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
Two hours later, I was in my grandfather's room and
he was sitting there, and of course, being from the
Bronx from the early nineteen hundreds, he could not say
my name correctly. Neither of my grandfathers could pronounce thh
as an individual sound thh? Was it just another t
How you doing, Keith? And I said how are you doing?
(49:27):
He said, I'm all right, I'm a little foggy. I said,
so you were dead, that's good, they tell me. I said,
so what was it like? I think a lot of
people would like to know? And he said, what the
hell are you talking about? I was dead? We would
(49:48):
I know what it was like. I was dead. It
was nothing. They put me out, They wake me up,
and they tell me I was dead. Go ask your father.
You want to know what it's like when you're dead.
I never found out what that meant. So I did
go ask my father and I said, listen, what happened here.
He said, well, this is what they're telling us. They
(50:09):
tried to resuscitate him, and the surgeon came out and
they were about to put the sheet over him, and
they'd already put down the time of death. When that
nurse that we all saw, who I think. I appreciate
her enthusiasm, but maybe she could have handled it a
little differently because she just took five years off my life.
My father said, the nurse saw a pulse on the
(50:30):
blipper there, as he called it, and sure enough he
was back. Now, it's probable that they had been trying
to resuscitate him, and as they decided they had failed
and gave up, that was the moment it all clicked in,
and within a few seconds his heartbeat was visible. I
don't think what happened is what you think happened. And
(50:52):
I went, well, what I think happened the last time?
They gave the guy who did it his own religion.
And my father looked at me and he said, let's
just get out of here. He's fine. He saw my Cadillac,
and we don't want him having his own religion. The
rest of the trip was fairly uneventful, considering that I'd
(51:12):
just seen my own grandfather come back from the dead,
apparently without any help. We went to many spring training
games and got to see a lot of old ballparks
that don't exist anymore, like the old one in Saint
Petersburg where we saw the Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds.
And then we went cross state via the Okie Finoch Trails,
(51:36):
watt Nabi, the Wassada whatever the road is that goes
through that has all the alligators on it, the Alligator
Alley thing. So we're in the other side of Florida,
and we went to what was then beautiful Fort Lauderdale
Stadium Fort Lauderdale Yankee Stadium and saw about half a
dozen games, and I had been to spring training for
the first time in my life. And Jens, just to
top it off, we go back to the hotel and
(51:58):
my dad says, got a surprise for you. I bought
season tickets for the Yankee games this year, four tickets
to each Yankee home game in the year nineteen seventy two.
I was a happy guy. I had forgotten the nightmares
of death and even worse the auto train. By the way,
(52:22):
the tickets, four of them for eighty one Yankee home games,
many double headers, probably about seventy different days, maybe sixty
eight seventy different days, four tickets every game, one thousand
dollars parking, Well that was a little more. That was
another one hundred dollars for the whole season, reserved parking
(52:42):
right across the street from the stadium, in the front row.
A different world half a century ago. Well, now, all
the adventures of my first trip to Florida and my
first trip to baseball spring training, and my first and
last trip on the auto train were complete except for
(53:03):
the return trip. We drove back to Sandford, Florida, and
we had those sleeping compartments, and they made all the
difference in the world. We had a nice dinner on
the train. We checked all the bathrooms. We had a
little private bathroom in the two rooms sweet my father
had gotten for the occasion, so we didn't even need
(53:24):
to worry about whether or not the toilets would completely
fail and fill the cars with a combination of chemical
smell and the other smell you associate with bathrooms, and
everything was fine. We went to bed early, and then
I woke up around dawn freezing, and I mean freezing.
(53:44):
We had transported ourselves from Florida into Georgia and the
heat did not come on, and it did not come
on all the way to I don't think it was Lorton, Virginia.
I like to think of it as auto train Virginia,
and I like to think of it as a place
that has no permanent residence. But apparently that's where the
(54:07):
auto train still lives, waiting, waiting for me, waiting happily.
I don't drive, so screw you, auto train.
Speaker 2 (54:37):
The auto train is still running. Scroll your auto train.
Speaker 1 (54:43):
I can still smell the smell. I've done all the
damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown
Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on guitars,
bass and drums, and mister Chaneale handled orchestration and keyboards,
and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, some
(55:04):
of the Beethoven compositions were arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Olderman
theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy
of ESPN Inc. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are
by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our
announcer today is my friend Kenny Maine. Everything else was
(55:25):
pretty much my fault. That's countdown for today eight months
exactly until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the one
and fifty fifth day since dementia J Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Use the Fourteenth Amendment, the Insurrection Act, the justice system,
the mental health system, and if it happens, presidential immunity
(55:48):
to stop him from doing it again while we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Do not forget our
live YouTube special after the State of the Union Thursday Night,
sponsored by Auto Train. I made that part of up
Bulletins is the news warrants until next time. I'm Keith Alremman.
Good Morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown
(56:21):
with 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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