March 27, 2024 • 56 mins
SEASON 2 EPISODE 147: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Those were Trump's marbles he just lost.
At 2:49 PM, Eastern Dementia Time: “I’m not running to terminate the ACA, as crooked Joe BUDEN… DIS-INFORMATES and MIS-INFORMATES all the time, I’m running to CLOSE THE BORDER..."
There is no such word as “Disinformate.”
There is also no such word as “MIS-informate.”
Also, unless I've been getting it wrong since 1973, "BUDEN" is not how the president spells his name. Trump's cheese has slid off his cracker.
It is impossible to say that he cannot possibly last like this, what with the forces of aphasia and dementia and narcissism and head injury and whatever else there is, pulling him apart… but of course he’s lasted in approximately this same space for months now – and in spaces not really that much BETTER than this one for years and decades and if the early anecdotes are correct, a lifetime. Still: inventing your own words, is a sign of a dozen different PHYSICAL problems, to say nothing of psychological ones like bipolarity and environmental ones like huffing D-Con Roach Room Fogger.
HELP ME RONNA, HELP HELP ME RONNA: And now she belongs to the ages. Five days, one show. Not the shortest tenure in television history nor the fastest-cancelled program (still held by an ABC comedy show from 1969, cancelled just before the first commercial). But NBC's decision to ax Ronna McDaniel - no matter how tortured, self-serving, and late the protests from its stars might have been, does offer some small hope.
The point of all this – and perhaps the value of this internal rebellion – is that perhaps the somnambulant American political media, especially the American TELEVISION political media – has awakened from its naïve stupor. I have been saying here for eighteen months that EVERY news organization in this country has had the same meeting: what do we do if Trump regains power. Not “what do we do journalistically” but what do we do to protect our profits – and what do we do so when Trump starts jailing reporters and TV executives, he’ll leave us alone. Or, more realistically, he’ll let us become one of his propaganda channels.
Remember, in the minds of its executives, television news isn’t a kind of NEWS, it’s a kind of TELEVISION. It is designed to fill the places between the commercials. If it serves some kind of public purpose, hey, great, as long as that doesn’t mean we have to go TOO many hours cancelling all those advertisements just because some POPE died or something.
Putting Trump on and taking Mehdi Hasan off and hiring Ronna McDaniel was INOCULATION, nothing more, nothing less. It was proving to Trump and the MAGAs that while no, we aren’t shuttering MSNBC and we’re not in favor of this whole “end the peaceful transfer of power” and “fascism is the new democracy” stuff – hey, go on… we’re listening.
American TV news isn’t going to save us from creeping fascism. But maybe – MAYBE – the scattered, largely selfish, righteous-ehhh-kinda righteous indignation at NBC means American TV news will stop HELPING fascism creep faster. Guard rail? No. Scattering spike strips across democracy’s highways? Uhh, ok, maybe we’ll stop.
Also, I sing. I mean: "Help Me Ronna"? I was supposed to RESTRAIN myself from THAT?
B-Block (30:57) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Congressman Tim Burchett sued by the Kansas City man he claimed was a) a Super Bowl parade shooter and b) an "illegal alien." He was neither. Ari Fleischer actually slams Biden for supporting George W. Bush's war in Iraq that Ari helped sell to a gullible America. And Maria Bartiromo, Nancy Mace, David Sabatini, Matt Schlapp, Glenn Thrush and a random named Rose Graham share the honors for spreading conspiracy theories about the Baltimore bridge accident.
C-Block (42:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I mentioned those tortured anti-Ronna comments from MSNBC. Lawrence O'Donnell was astonishingly wrong in his recap of how TV news in the old days didn't reward, say, Nixon's Watergate conspirators with gigs (other than Pat Buchanan, John Ehrlichmann, Robert Bork, Gordon Liddy, plus Ollie North from Iran-Contra and a series of ice cream commercials for Ehrlichmann). Since I've brought him up, I might as well tell you what a schmuck he is,
Like when he guest hosted Countdown and while I was out a few weeks, he tried to get me fired so he could take over the show and when that didn’t work he just stole a couple of the producers and got his own show. Oh, by the way, I WAS away for a couple weeks because my Dad was dying.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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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. That
was the bend he just went around. That was the
(00:25):
deep end. He just went off, And those were his marbles.
He just lost two forty nine pm Eastern Dementia time quote.
I'm not running to terminate the ACA as crooked Joe
Buden disinformates and miss informates all the time. I'm running
(00:46):
to close the border, et cetera. There is no such
word as disinformate. There is no such word as miss InformATE.
There is a Joe Buden, but he is not president.
He is a freelance finance specialist from the city of
(01:06):
Saudi Daisy, Tennessee. And when the name Saudi Daisy, Tennessee
is the one correct verb or proper noun in this
sorry situation, the facts are undeniable. Donald Trump is not
even close to still being all there. It is impossible
(01:28):
to say which moment of trump insanity, of his broken
bean hood is the worst. Could have been comparing himself
to Christ. Could have been repeatedly mistaking Obama and Biden
for one another and then saying he meant to do that.
Could be getting the year wrong, are abandoning tough words
in mid syllable, but this one buden misinformate, disinformate. That
(01:51):
has got to be top ten at least because he
wasn't finished. Trump added he wants to quote make the
ACA or Obamacare as it is known, much better, stronger,
and far less expensive. In other words, make the ACA
much much much better for far less money or cost.
(02:14):
Those aren't other words. Those are the same words. Don
If a relative of yours started doing stuff like this
on a daily basis, you would have them committed or
at least treated. It is impossible to say that he
cannot possibly last this way, what with the forces of
(02:35):
aphasia and dementia and narcissism and head injury and whatever
else there is pulling him apart. But of course he
has lasted in approximately this same space for months now,
and in space is not really that much better than
this one for years now and decades now, and if
the early anecdotes are correct, for a lifetime now. Still
(02:59):
inventing your own words is a sign of a dozen
different physical problems, to say nothing of psychological ones like bipolarity,
and environmental ones like huffing decon roach room, fogger, Joe
buden b U d E N. Who is miss informating
(03:26):
the populace? But no, Trump, You're right, Trump is the
vigorous alert one. Maybe maybe he meant platformate, He meant platformte,
not misinformate, platformte. The additive that Shell used to put
(03:47):
in its gasoline in the nineteen sixties that made it.
I don't remember what it did. Maybe it maybe it
burned the atmosphere faster. Maybe maybe maybe Don used to
huff huff that stuff. And of course Trump still does,
(04:28):
or seems to plan and accomplish complicated, even intricate schemes
like this adroit little move in the Stormy Daniel's hush
money and election suppression case yesterday. It is supposed to
start with jury selection two weeks from Monday. Trump's goal
in all of his cases is to stall, stall, so
(04:49):
yesterday morning he attacked the daughter of the judge Juan
Mershon online, claiming she worked at a company that works
for Congressman Adam Schiff, and within hours Judge Mershon hit
him with a gag order, preventing him from talking about
witnesses and attorneys and court staff and their families. Given
that Trump did not immediately rail against that gag order.
(05:11):
There is reason to speculate that he did this deliberately
to get that gag order. Mere Shawn gags Trump. Trump
appeals the gag order, the judge rejects the appeal, Trump
goes to an appellate court, and before you can say
misinformate that April fifteenth trial start date is on ice
until the appeal is heard, or he didn't plan it,
(05:36):
and those are his toys in his attic, as they
say stasis in the other Trump trials. But is co
defendant in Georgia who put the speed bump in the
case of the Trump seventeen may be in more trouble elsewhere.
Michael Roman, the former Trump campaign aid, has reportedly been
subpoened as part of the burgeoning investigation into the fake
(05:58):
Trump electors in Arizona. This is according to ABC News,
which previously reported that Kenny the Cheese Kenneth Chesbro was
already interviewed by the state attorney general there, who was
going for some indictments in Arizona. Quoting Chris Mays, we
will announce something in the relatively near future. Well, you
(06:20):
can't argue with that. In Trump Legal adjacent news guests
who propped up the Trump humping propaganda channel Newsmax right
in the middle of Trump's occupation of the White House,
a member of the royal family of Katar. According to
The Washington Post twenty nineteen and twenty twenty, this was
fifty million dollars into Newsmacks, not just to make sure
(06:43):
there was good Trump coverage, mind you, that Kataris also
wanted better pub for themselves during a squabble in the
Middle East over who supported terrorist groups and who didn't.
The Kataris are not particularly particular nor especially smart about
American television. They are the ones who bought the old
scam I worked for Current TV, than sued its chief
(07:05):
ass clown Joel Hyatt, the guy on whom the villain
in the movie Philadelphia was in part based. And then
ultimately they just shut the damn thing down because what's
fifty million dollars to these guys. And lastly, this is
where Trump is at the moment. Talk about misinformate and disinformate.
(07:25):
He is now selling Trump Bibles, Bible, Holy Bible. Well,
Trump endorsed Bibles. He did a three minute infomercial for it.
Or maybe that's a misinformate infomercial. It's actually a Lee
Greenwood Bible with the lyrics of God Bless the USA.
(07:48):
Added in along with it notes the Declaration of Independence,
the Pledge of Allegiance, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights,
even though don't tell them the Bill of Rights is
already in the Constitution. Your cost just fifty nine dollars
and ninety nine and sense for a Bible. No evidence.
(08:09):
Trump claims to have written the Bible. Then again, he
really did compare himself to Christ on Monday, So who
knows what's next with the pitch, Trump added this completely
authentic tell me you know nothing of the story of
Christ without telling me you know nothing of the story
of Christ line quote happy Holy Week, because of course,
(08:32):
the first emotion that comes with the whole crucifixion business.
That first emotion is happy, happy, joy Joy. Meanwhile, the
worst personnel fiasco at NBC News in nearly three months
(08:58):
is finally over. NBC News chairman Sesar Conde fired former
RNC chair and now eternal punchline Rona McDaniel at six
ZHO one Eastern last night. According to the memo, hey all,
Conde's memo begins and in so doing, it and he
tells you all you need to know about the state
(09:21):
of decay at NBC might as well have started it
to all you little people out there. I'll read the
memo and annotate it and translate it as we go on. Quote.
Hey all, there is no doubt that the last several
days have been difficult for the news group. After listening
(09:41):
to the legitimate concerns of many you view unquote, especially
the two hundred and thirty seven of you who said
something on the air resuming the quote, I have decided
that Ronal McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor.
No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is
(10:02):
cohesive and a line unquote. And we're still trying here
in year twenty nine of Msnbceingly, we haven't quite gotten
it straight yet. I know what the hell quoting again,
Over the last few days, it has become clear that
disappointment undermines that goal. I want to personally apologize to
(10:25):
our team members who felt we let them down. While
this was a collective recommendation by some members of our
leadership team unquote, that's Chairman Caesar's hint to Rebecca Blumenstein
and carry Butdoff Brown and Rashida Jones to update their
(10:45):
resumes before they get locked out of their computers again, quoting,
While this was a collective recommendation by some members of
our leadership team, I approved it and take full responsibility
for it unquote, And to use the lawn of the
great comedian and Nixon impersonator David Frye as the man
(11:09):
in charge, I of course accept full responsibility, but not
the blame. Let me explain the difference. People who are
to blame lose their jobs, people who are responsible do not.
Quoting yet again. Our initial decision was made because of
(11:29):
our deep commitment to presenting our audiences with a widely
diverse set of viewpoints and experiences, particularly during these consequential times. Unquote. Yeah,
we like to have both people who are lying and
people who are not lying on our newscasts. More quotes.
(11:53):
We continue to be committed to the principle that we
must have diverse viewpoints on our programs, and to that end,
we will read double our efforts to seek voices that
represent different parts of the political spectrum. Unquote. Translation, this
(12:14):
is your big chance, Nick Fuentes, quoting one last bit,
Take care Sayzar unquote yes. The backlash against the world's
worst television news hire since Bo Dietle was so great
(12:35):
that even NBC News chairman Sayesar Conde noticed. Just to
rub this in, The New York Times reports that CIA,
the talent agency that got McDaniel her three hundred thousand
dollars a year, well a day deal with the Peacock,
and had handled her bargaining with ABC and CNN, and
(12:58):
aren't they glad they finished second and third. CIA has
also dropped McDaniel as a client. The Time says McDaniel
is quote interviewing attorneys to engage with NBC on her behalf,
which would seem to imply that Seesar Conde is trying
to somehow get out from under the three hundred k
(13:18):
NBC offered her, and to which offer she said yes,
and to which contract they wrote their names. I have
absolutely no respect for nor interest in Ronna Romney McDaniel.
But she didn't do anything contractually wrong here. It's not
(13:39):
like she didn't tell them she used to be chair
of the RNC, or that she had a role in
trying to overthrow democracy. Trump campaign. One can imagine an
NBC attorney saying we thought that part of your resume.
Read Anchored News twelve Brooklyn. NBC has no grounds for
firing McDaniel for cause, which would mean they wouldn't have
(14:01):
to pay her, nor would one think it would want to,
so again poke its collective head into the collective hornet's
nest by trying to get out from under the price
it agreed to. Of course, that's what I would have
said a week ago if you had asked me if
even Sesar Kande would be stupid enough to hire Rona frickin' McDaniel.
(14:26):
It's equally true that she has no action against them,
despite bleatings from the likes of nitwits like Hugh Hewitt
about emotional distress and reputational damage. She was merely an
insurrectionist once, but now she has to live with the
terrible trauma of being a former NBC employee who knows.
(14:48):
With the rarest of exceptions, TV contracts all include one
primary clause, pay or play, which means as long as
the company pays you, it does not have to play you.
I had that deal for eight months at Fox in
the year two thousand and one, greatest god job I
ever had. So now she belongs to the ages five
(15:12):
days at NBC News, and true she was only on
for one show, but she was still with NBC News
after the first commercial break, so she did not earn
the honor of being the quickest thing ever canceled by
a major American TV network. That honor remains, and it
is seemingly unbeatable in the hands of the ABC Network's
(15:37):
surrealist comedy sketch show called turn On, which premiered on Wednesday,
February fifth, nineteen sixty nine, at eight thirty pm Eastern,
and was canceled on Wednesday, February fifth, nineteen sixty nine
at eight forty pm Eastern, just as the first commercial
break began. The ABC station in Cleveland did not even
(16:01):
let the show come back from that break, and some
on the West Coast did not show any of it.
I mean, even RNA got to twenty minutes anyway, out
of the TV weeds and back into the charred remains
of NBC News burned to the ground during her epic
five days or four commercial breaks, or the equivalent of
(16:23):
three turn Ons, or whichever yardstick you want to use,
the point of all this, and perhaps the value of
this internal rebellion is that maybe the somnambulent American political media,
especially the American television political media, has awakened from its
naive stupor. The crap that Chris licked got away with
(16:44):
for a year running CNN, sacking liberal reporters, sabotaging Don Lemon,
putting Trump on live, fighting to air Republican debates both sides,
ing everything he could get his hands on was not
some sort of aberration, and it didn't just happen at CNN,
and it was not some sort of X dream. I
(17:06):
have been saying here for the eighteen month life of
this podcast that every news organization in this country has
had the same meeting, what do we do if Trump
regains power? Not what you would hope they would be asking,
not what do we do journalistically or what do we
do to save the nation, but what do we do
(17:28):
to protect our phony boloney jobs and our profits? And
what do we do so when Trump starts jailing reporters
and TV executives, he'll leave us alone, or more realistically,
he'll let us become one of his authorized propaganda channels.
The entirety of that guy Lickt's career at CNN and
(17:50):
the bidding amongst CNN and ABC, and aren't they glad
they finished second and third? Thank God, Thank Jesus, thank Cale,
I think anybody you can think of. And the bidding
among CNN and ABC and NBC for Ronald McDaniel. It
all underscores the reality that in the minds of its
owners and its executives, it's legions of hot and cold running.
(18:10):
Caesar condeys, television news is not a kind of news.
It's a kind of television. It is designed to fill
the places between the commercials. If it serves some kind
of public purpose, Hey, great, as long as that doesn't
(18:32):
mean we have to go too many hours canceling all
those advertisements just because some pope died or something. Putting
Trump on and taking Mehdi Hassan off and hiring Roni
McDaniel was inoculation, nothing more, nothing less. It was proving
to Trump and the magas that while no we in
(18:54):
the media, we are not shuddering MSNBC and sending Rachel
Maddow to Alaska, and we're not in favor of this
whole and the peaceful transfer power thing and fascism is
the new democracy stuff. But hey, go on, we're listening.
(19:15):
Even most of the protests from within NBC and MSNBC
completely missed that point. Chuck Todd was the first to
get mad, not on behalf of America, but on behalf
of Kristin Welker. The pathetic I hope you'll reconsider from
first Joe Scarborough and then Rachel Maddow was the twenty
(19:37):
first century equivalent of Oliver Twist saying please, sir, I
want some more. Mattow has the power to veto any
higher at MSNBC, and she's used it. Trust me, I
know she could have stopped this last Friday, me or
her you pick, you have my number. Hell, even I
(19:57):
did that rodal McDaniel, the NBC publicists would have said, no, no, no, no,
We wrote Roddy goddamn spell check again. I mean, those
tortured rationales were kind of summed up by Lawrence O'Donnell,
who decided to play hey you kids, get off my
(20:19):
lawn and promptly got all the facts wrong while he
did it. O'Donnell decided this had happened not because he
has worked for and genuflected in front of a moral
corporate NBC humanoids since nineteen ninety six. But because they
were all so young and innocent that they didn't know
(20:39):
how real TV newsmen would have handled Rona McDaniel and
the other members of the Trump gang. They wouldn't have
done what they did after Watergate, when Walter and chet
and David and Harry Reasoner refused to hire all the
president's men, never gave any of them a dime, never
gave any of them the cloak of television respectability, like
(21:02):
that's a real thing, especially not that evil jailed Watergate
mastermind John Dean, who never went to jail only to
witness protection because of all the death threats, because he
was the one who did the right thing, and he
was the one who sank Nixon, and you smeared him, Lawrence,
and who, by the way, by nineteen ninety nine was
(21:24):
being paid by MSNBC Lawrence to sit next to Brian
Williams during the Bill Clinton impeachment. There's an easy way
to avoid the controversy. NBC News has stumbled into. Lawrence
O'Donnell said, don't hire anyone close to the crimes. That's
what happened to the Nixon gang. He said that Tuesday night,
(21:47):
And he could not have been more wrong as he
said it. John Dean was on with me on ms
in nineteen ninety eight. On My original show, I also
had to interview John Erlickman and Robert Bork. Robert Bork
who fired the special counsel who fired Archibald Cox when
the three guys ahead of him quit rather than do it.
(22:10):
Robert freaking Bork was an analyst on MSNBC in nineteen
ninety eight during the Clinton impeachment. I can't remember if
Erlickman and Bork were paid or not. I do remember
when John dene, a genuine American hero, came out against
Clinton's impeachment on my show one night, the word went
(22:32):
out at MSNBC that if we booked him again, we
also had to book a different Watergate figure for the
same show, a Watergate figure who was in favor of
Clinton's impeachment. We had Gordon Lyddy on. They wanted Gordon
Lyddy to do his own show. I mean, eventually they
(22:53):
had Oliver North from a different scandal do his own shows,
anchoring his own shows on MSNBC. I mean. Hell, Pat
Buchanan testified in Nixon's defense at the Senate Watergate hearings,
and when CNN went on in nineteen eighty, so did
Pat Buchanan's show. It was called Crossfire. Pat Buchanan was
on cable TV continuously from nineteen eighty until at least
(23:16):
twenty ten. He was on so long he wound up
being madows regular foil paid by MSNBC. But nobody in
our girl days ever hired anyone close to the crimes.
I mean, Gordon Goddamn, put your hand over the flame.
Liddy had his own radio show in Washington for twenty
five years. Sure nobody would touch John Erckman Lawrence, except
(23:42):
in nineteen eighty seven, fifteen years after the Watergate break in,
when Erckman was hired to do commercials for Dryers ice Cream,
part of a crazy ad campaign called Unbelievable Spokespeople for
an Unbelievable product. Dryers ice Cream had commercials featuring a
woman who said she'd encountered many UFOs and the guy
(24:03):
who faked the last will and testament of Howard Hughes
and some kid who kept getting blamed for everything, and
the consumer blowback was so bad that they kept the
Howard Hughes forger and the UFO lady and they fired
John Erlickman from the ice cream commercials, but go on, Lawrence. Okay,
(24:25):
enough of this sub brand about Lawrence o'donald, which I
will resume at the end of this podcast. Back to
the point, American TV News is not going to save
us from creeping fascism. But maybe maybe the scattered, largely
(24:45):
self absorbed and selfish, righteous kind of righteous indignation at NBC,
maybe it means American TV News will stop helping fascism
creep faster guardrail hell no bike strips scattered across democracies highways.
(25:09):
Uh well, maybe we could stop doing that. I guess
hope that's good enough. Does that mean we can't hire
Rudy Juliani to anchor at four o'clock with Katie So ultimately,
in a perverse way, Thank you, Rana McDaniel. You may
(25:30):
have helped in ways you'll never be smart enough to understand.
You helped me. Rana helped me. Rana help me, help me,
help me, Rana help me. Rana Wait a minute, Oh, Nancy.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Caesar Conde, say Caesar Condey hired, Rana ha hired, Rana
got yelled at, yelled at by mad Oh, she's the boss.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
So that was the death blow. Help me, Rana the
f of my TV.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Thank you Nancy Fast for me and all my brothers.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Also of interest, here I will tell all those O'Donnell's stories,
like when he guest hosted Countdown and while I was
out for a few weeks, he tried to get me
fired so he could take over the show, and when
that didn't work, he just stole a couple of the
producers instead and got his own show. Oh, by the way,
I was out for a couple of weeks because my
dad was dying at the time. Also, you know why
(26:41):
that bridge collapsed in Baltimore hit by a freighter? You
naive fool. It was DEI and Open Borders, and it
was to distract you from Kate Middleton's body double. That's next.
This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman still
(27:29):
ahead of us on this edition of Countdown since he's
in the news for completely butchering the story of the
post Watergate TV careers. Of all the Watergate figures, let
me has promised detail for you how much of a
jackass Lawrence O'Donnell is tried to steal my show? Did
steal my producers send a personal letter of mine to
(27:50):
Ann Coulter so she could write a column about it.
Just an a one schmuck in things I promised not
to t Well, the title doesn't hold up here. I
promised to tell this and I live up to my promises.
Next first, still more idiots to talk about. The daily
roundup of the mis grants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects
(28:10):
specimens who constitute two days Wor's persons in the world. First,
the Bronze the Worst Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee making
the list for the second time in three episodes, which
is a rare accomplishment and I'm sure he's very proud
of it, and he will send out a fundraising email
off of it. After the shooting at the Kansas City
(28:33):
Chiefs Super Bowl victory parade this year, mister Burchett, who
is that rare combination of having absolute confidence in his
judgment while having absolutely no judgment, posted a picture of
a man named Denton louder Mill Junior on his Twitter
x account, and Burchette wrote that this was quote one
of the Kansas City Chiefs victory parade shooters unquote, and
(28:57):
he added quote an illegal alien unquote A couple problems here.
Mister Loudermill isn't an alien, is not an illegal alien,
has never been either of those things. And he wasn't
a shooter, nor was he charged with anything. He was
handcuffed as police closed off the area near the shooting,
(29:19):
and he happened to get photographed during that brief period,
and that was it. Mister Loudermill was in fact a victim.
Congressman Burchett's smearing of mister loudermill was reposted more than
twenty one thousand times on Elon Musk's hell site, and
it had seven million views in the first three days.
(29:41):
It is still not clear that the congressman understands what
he did, because he's a bonehead. But after the lawsuit
I'm going to go out on a limb and say
mister Burchett will understand what he did. The runner up
worser Aarry Fleischer, who is actually he hasn't had an
actual job since he quit his George W. Bush's White
(30:03):
House Press secretary on the fifteenth of July two thousand
and three, though he has been a consultant to the
Saudi Live bon Saw Golf League Yesterday, Aery Fleischer slammed
President Biden's foreign policy record in a tweet, complaining that
he had quote opposed the First Gulf War, supported the
Second Gulf War. Aery, the Second Gulf War. That was yours,
(30:30):
that was Bush's, that was the one. Aery Fleischer spent
part of two thousand and one, all of two thousand
and two, the first half of two thousand and three
selling to the American public even though nearly everything that
he and Bush and Dick Cheney, then Colin Powell and
Fox Propaganda, then everybody in the government and everybody in
the Republican Party, everything they said about the Second Gulf
(30:51):
War was completely untrue, including that little issue of weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq and any connection whatsoever between
Sodom Hussein and nine to eleven. And suddenly Aery Fleischer
is criticizing Biden for I guess believing that a president
would never lie about something as important as whether or
(31:13):
not this country should attack a foreign nation and precipitate
a war in which we would be fully involved for
nearly a decade and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians
would die. Then I guess Aery Fleischer is critical of
Biden for assuming a presidential press secretary would also never
lie to the American public to the world about something
(31:36):
so important, especially when the Second Gulf War press secretary
was Aery Fleischer. But I'm burying the lead here, I
guess headline Aery Fleischer is now critical of people who
supported George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. But our winners
the worst. Let's see, it's quite a list. There's Congresswoman
(32:00):
Nancy Mace, Maria Bartiromo of Fox Florida can rectional candidate
David Sabatini, Matt new Intown, Fella Schlap, Glen Thrush of
the New York Times, and Rose Graham. As you know,
early yesterday morning, a freighter the size of an aircraft
carrier rammed the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Harbor
(32:23):
in Baltimore and collapsed it. The bridge did not have
structural problems, it wasn't part of any infrastructure crisis. Systems
did not fail as it approached one of the supports
of the bridge. The ship had a total power failure,
yet the crew managed to get a May Day signal
out in time for police to seal the entrances. So
(32:43):
that nobody else got onto it. They only had ninety
seconds to do that. They saved lives. Eight people were
missing initially, two recovered, one uninjured. Eight On the far
right though, the bridge disaster and actually it's the freighter
disaster is a reason to I don't know, declare martial law.
(33:05):
Congresswoman Mace, who is an idiot, immediately blamed it on
the Biden Infrastructure Bill, which she was last seen taking
credit for taking credit for the Biden infrastructure bill. Maria Bartiromo,
a Trump pr person who was once actually somehow mistaken
for an NBC journalist, blamed it on the wide open
(33:27):
port that's in English, the wide open border. Anthony Sabatini,
another Trump nut job, tweeted, DEI did this. Matt Schlapp
went on Newsmax and blamed it on COVID lockdowns and
drug addled employees, which sounds more like an accurate description
of his seapack organization, doesn't it. Glenn thresh thrush Thrash
(33:53):
of The Times tweeted a series of questions, including is
any bridge supposed to just fall down after a single impact? However,
big this is a news reporters half a dozen bridges
hit by objects as small as a tugboat have collapsed
in this country just since nineteen sixty seven, and each
of them resulted in at least thirty five deaths. The
(34:16):
two thousand and seven Minnesota Bridge collapsed without being hit
by anything. And then there's Rose Graham, a seemingly random
tweeter who has nearly five thousand followers, seems to be
from Arkansas, and she wrote what so many of the
conspiracy thumpers wrote yesterday, quote puff Daddy gets raided and
(34:36):
the Baltimore Bridge collapses, and just like that, people are
becoming no longer interested in Kate Middleton. It's always several
things going on at once to keep you busy. Trust
nothing and no one unquote because it's all a plot
to I'm not sure which part of it she thinks
(34:57):
is the plot, but trust no one except her. This
was an accident. It was the shipping line's fault. They
will ultimately pay for it. There is reason to question
whether such large watercraft should be allowed on inland waterways
without tugs escorting them, but otherwise there was not much
to prevent this from happening. And yet there are people
(35:18):
today who will die peacefully in their beds eighty years
from now, remaining convinced that the Baltimore Bridge collapse of
twenty twenty four happened because of drug addled DEI riding
the infrastructure bill in through wide open borders and it
was all just a distraction from Kate Middleton. And accidents
(35:40):
are illegal, aren't they? Thanks to Congresswoman Nancy Mace, Maria Bartiommo, Fox,
Florida congressional candidate David Sabatini, Matt new Intown Fellaslap, Glen
Thrush of The New York Times, and Rose Graham Rando,
who don't know what they're talking about, but that didn't
phase them in the least. And who are two days
(36:03):
worst person in the world. Kate Middleton, For God's I
wanted to tell you about Bloomberg's flagship podcast. It's called
The Big Take, and it should be part of your
daily routine. The Big Take brings you what's shaping the
(36:25):
world's economies with the smartest and most informed business reporters
around the world. Hosts David Gurra, Sarah Holder, and Salaiah
Mosen bring you the stories behind what's moving money and
markets and help you understand what's happening, what it means,
and why it matters every afternoon. Now, Look, David Gerr
(36:45):
went to Cornell and he majored in history there and
as near as I've been able to find out with
my research, he got good grades. So a lot of
people recommend podcasts to you without any kind of frame
of reference. And I'm telling you this guy survived four
winters in Ithaca, New York like I did. So if
(37:07):
he says he can help you understand what's happening, this
is tested by snow and cold. You can listen to
the Big Take on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or
wherever you get your podcasts. Now to the number one
(37:28):
story on the countdown on my favorite topic, me and
things I promised not to tell. Early on the afternoon
of Monday May twenty third, twenty sixteen, I bounced out
of my New York City apartment building, began to walk
past the tourist trap brunch spot in the lobby, and
froze there at one of the cramped outdoor tables. Staring
(37:50):
up at me in blank surprise that must have matched
my own staring down at him in blank surprise. Was
Laurence O'Donnell. I decided to go silly, Hey, get out
of my house. He laughed. I laughed. It didn't seem forced.
He introduced me to his companion, his daughter. This my
dear is Keith Ulderman. Keith started us all at MSNBC,
(38:14):
and then he left, and here Lawrence gave one of
his long pauses, and we crashed it. I wanted to
be generous, I started to politely contradict him, and I
just couldn't do it. Yeah, pretty much anyway, About thirty
seconds of courteous nothingness followed, and I wish the O'Donnell's well,
(38:37):
and then I left. It was the most pleasant experience
I ever had with Lawrence O'Donnell. In fact, it might
have been the only pleasant experience I ever had with
Lawrence O'Donnell. After I finally convinced and bullied and blackmailed
MSNBC management into letting Rachel Meadow become the regular guest
host for my show, and she aced it, and then
(38:58):
rightly got her own show, and she aced that and
became a star. Looking for a new guest host, my
first idea was a frequent guest we had named Chris Hayes.
I didn't get far. Management had its own idea and
my input was not required. They wanted former Vermont governor
and Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean. And Howard is a
(39:21):
really smart guy and great on TV. But Howard had
a bit of a teleprompter problem. One of my producers
swears that Howard once read good Evening, I'm Howard Dean,
former governor of Vermont. This is countdown. I do know.
Whatever he did on the air, it was bad enough
that one week when I was off and at the
(39:42):
Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and a
baseball news story broke and he was filling in for me.
My producers called me there and asked me to come
on from the streets of Cooperstown and be a guest
on my own show, just to help Howard Dean out. Anyway.
Their next idea was a guy who had been kicking
around MSNBC since its founding in nineteen ninety six. Lawrence
(40:06):
O'Donnell was one of the original MSNBC Friends, The MSNBC
Friends political pundits who sat on clearstools at a clear
table or in a set designed to look like a
booth at a coffee shop. No, I'm not making this up.
Among the friends were and Colter and Laura Ingram, if
(40:29):
you can believe it, once or twice an hour, the
rather CNN like all news coverage on MSNBC in its
first couple of years would pause and three or more
of these friends would appear, chew over the MSNBC headlines,
and then disappear. Lawrence O'Donnell was one of the friends.
(40:52):
It was as bad as it sounds. Then Lawrence o'donald
pretty much disappeared. You would see him on MSNBC as
a guest every once in a while, but mostly he
pursued his acting and producing. He played President Bartlett's father
on the West Wing, the one who beat him. Throughout college,
Lawrence was very convincing, and then around two thousand and eight,
(41:14):
we started getting pressure to bring him in as a
guest on Countdown, like once a week or twice a week.
I was not sure what that was all about, but
he had been a Senate staffer and he knew the
healthcare debate and other wonky stuff pretty well, so I
gave my assent for whatever that was worth. Not long
after that, Lawrence came into my office. He really needed
(41:35):
my support, he said, to get him more involved in MSNBC.
He knew I had gone to bat for Rachel and
before her, I'd gone to bat for Tom Brokaw and
for people like Chuck Todd and Chris Hayes and others
who are now getting steady incomes from NBC. I don't
remember his argument on his own behalf. I do remember
I didn't have much of a reason to say no,
(41:56):
and he wasn't asking me to do a lot, so
I said yes. The next thing I knew, I was
reading a memo announcing that Lawrence O'Donnell had been appointed
as the new full time guest host of Countdown. This
was in the winter of two thousand and nine twenty ten,
when my late dad was fighting so valiantly to stay
alive after colon cancer and more importantly, a series of infections.
(42:18):
Dad had the immune system of an alien. The average
white cell count in a healthy adult is between four
thousand and eleven thousand. One night, Dad's was at thirty
three thousand, and the doctors told me to prepare to
make the call to let him go. They had one
antibiotic left to try on him. The next morning, Dad's
white cell count, which had been thirty three thousand, was
(42:42):
eight thousand. Onward, he fought. Unfortunately, he was eighty years
old and he had not exercised since Harry Truman was president,
and eventually he ran out of Houdini tricks. I had
been visiting him twice a day for six months while
still doing Countdown and the NBC Sunday Night Football Show.
(43:02):
But now, as it hit late February of twenty ten,
his bright days became fewer and farther in between, and
the hope that was propelling me to keep being his
full time caregiver and Countdown's full time host both began
to fade. In the last two weeks of my dad's life,
as the doctors tried all the long shot things, I
asked MSNBC for a leave of absence. Finally the inevitability
(43:26):
became inarguable, and we let Dad go. On Saturday, March thirteenth,
twenty ten, my sister held his hand and I read
him his favorite Thurber story, and as soon as I
finished it, he exhaled deeply and peacefully, and he died.
I think I took another week off, maybe two, and
I vaguely recall emails from friends at Countdown that I
(43:49):
may have paid passing attention to, but I really didn't.
Most of the staff, including people who came up from Washington,
like Howard Feynman or Gene Robinson of the Washington Post,
always friends to me. They attended my dad's memorial service.
I believe Lawrence o'donald, who was of course filling in
for me on Countdown, was there too, but maybe not,
(44:10):
I do not remember. And then came the day when
I went back to the office full time and my
assistant grabbed me both hands on my wrist. You did
not answer my emails, she said, with a fervency she
rarely exhibited. For God's sake, do not ever leave me
alone with Laurence O'Donnell Again, I snapped back to attention.
(44:32):
Had he, you know, bothered her? Not that way, she said,
But he's a son of a bitch. He treats me
and everybody who was in a producer here like dirt.
And since you didn't read my emails, I just have
to tell you this. He's trying to get you fired
so he can take over Countdown. And if you think
he's nuts, one of your senior producers is in on
it too with him. I have to admit, even now,
(44:56):
of all the things I went through at that very
very strange place MSNBC, even now this story he still
shocks me. The senior producers of Countdown consisted of a
guy who'd been a producer who booked satellite transmissions for
MSNBC until I asked that he'd be promoted, and one
(45:18):
was a guest booker for the daytime shows until I
asked that she be promoted. Another was a line producer
who was well regarded only for his ability to time
a show until I asked for him to be promoted.
And then there was the old friend of mine who
had been blown out of ESPN and a sexual harassment
porn link email scandal and was headed back to college
to start his career all over again until I asked
(45:40):
that he'd be hired and then promoted. I did some
digging and I was going to confront O'Donnell about it
when somebody told me he had tweeted something negative about
me and about Countdown. So I got a hold of
him and I said this did not seem to be
in keeping with MSNBC traditions and rules, you know, the
ones about not peeing inside the tent, and he said,
what do you know about MSNBC traditions. I've been here
(46:03):
since nineteen nineteen. I never left and came back. So
I went to my boss, the president of the network,
Phil Griffin, the one who would not hire Rachel Maddow,
And before I could say they'd have to get rid
of him, Griffin said it was all academic. They were
preparing the press release as we spoke for Lawrence's new
show at ten o'clock called The Last Word, And oh,
(46:24):
by the way, Keith, two of your senior producers are
going with him to run his show. If this sounds
vaguely familiar to you, it is the plot of the
pilot for the old Aaron Sorkin HBO series Newsroom. I
was still friendly with Aaron then, so he actually asked.
As I related this to him in real time in
(46:46):
emails and phone calls, he asked if he could use
it in the plot rather than just what he often did,
which was to use it without asking. The problem was
none of this made any sense in the real world,
although it made a pretty good pilot for Aaron Sorkin
in going into the ten PM slot, Lawrence o'donod would
be replacing a rerun of Countdown, and even if O'Donnell
(47:09):
did much better in the ratings, much much better, there
was no way it could ever make enough money to
make the move make sense. O'Donnell's new show would necessarily
cost MSNBC between ten and fifteen million dollars to produce
every year. Didn't have anything to do with him. That
was the cost. The Countdown rerun cost, not ten fifteen
(47:32):
million dollars a year. It count however much they paid
the guy who pushed the play button that fired up
the videotape of the Countdown replay amortized. Later that day,
a sympathetic NBC executive called me up and explained the
move to me. First, Griffin was convinced O'Donnell was about
(47:53):
to leave US and sign with CNN. I said, well,
that's a good idea for everybody involved except CNN. Turned
out CNN had not even talked to him, but Griffin
and did not know that. More importantly, Comcast had already
finalized its agreement to buy NBC effective the following January,
and as part of the deal, they were entitled to
(48:14):
review what all the executives in the company had done,
and they had already looked at MSNBC president Phil Griffin
and discovered he had never done anything. In panic, Griffin
told colleagues he had to launch a new show of
his own immediately. This is the series Aaron Sorkin should
(48:34):
have made. As to the producers who left my show
to go with O'Donnell while my father was dying, one
of them told me a couple of years after she
left MSNBC for the last time, every day when I
went into that last word office, I realized you were
getting your revenge on me without even having to lift
a finger. Lots of people I've worked with, probably a
(48:57):
majority of people i've helped, have behaved like Lawrence O'Donnell, because,
remember it's television. It is a mental illness. The comparatively
healthy people are the ones who acknowledge it's a mental illness.
But Lawrence O'Donnell was something special. A year before my
dad died, almost to the day, in fact, I was
(49:17):
in Los Angeles appearing on Bill Maher's show, and one
of the other guests that night was the actress Kerrie Washington.
She was very nice to me, very sweet, a very
big fan, and she asked to stay in touch. Sure enough,
after my father died after the memorial, after I was
back at work, I had to go to his house
for the first time since he had passed away. It
was about as much fun as it sounds. In the
(49:41):
car on the way back into New York City. The
solemnity of it. Both my parents died within eleven months
of each other. It really hit me for some reason
for the first time, full force, and I was about
to lose it when the car approached a billboard overlooking
the West Side Highway in New York City. And whose
big smiling face was on the ad on that billboard,
(50:04):
Carrie Washington, And it flashed me right back to her
kindness in la and it helped me overcome this bump
in my morning. So I wanted to drop her a note,
nothing big, nothing suggestive. I wasn't hinting at asking her out.
Just you never know how you might help somebody in
a time of crisis. Thanks for letting me smile. That
(50:28):
was the whole message. I asked my assistant to figure
out how to get it to her, and that was
the end of it, except a week later, the fact
that I wrote her a note wound up in a
column written by an colter. I was astonished, how why?
And Colter it was her usual the brain doesn't quite
(50:53):
work right kind of stuff. She implied, I was hitting
on Carrie Washington and said how stupid I had to
be to not realize she was involved with somebody, and
on and on and on, no mention of my father's passing,
where the mar show or the billboard or her smiling face.
I went back to my assistant and I said, hey,
what on earth did you do with that note to
(51:14):
Carrie Washington? And she said, oh, I gave it to
this Lawrence O'Donnell guy. And I said, good god, why
did you do that? And she said, well, he's dating
Carrie Washington. I thought you knew that. I thought that's
why you asked me to get it to her. So
it wasn't hard to figure out from there. Lawrence had
(51:35):
called his old friend from the old MSNBC Friends of
nineteen ninety six and Colter and told her about the note,
inventing whatever motive his jealous little mind could dream up,
it should have gotten him fired from NBC, but unfortunately
his boss was just as much of a fourteen year
old emotionally as he was. And meanwhile, I had decided
to get out of MSNBC anyway when the time was ripe,
(51:58):
and as it turned out, it ripened in January twenty eleven.
I've told that story in other episodes, sixty of them.
It's kind of complicated, and since nobody ever actually asked
me why count Down the TV show ended, I've probably
got another sixty episodes worth of information about that anyway
in twenty fifteen. Since repeatedly over the following ten years,
(52:20):
there were overtures by both sides to bring Countdown and
Me back to MSNBC. In twenty fifteen, during the World Series,
in fact, the then president of NBC News Andy Lack,
asked me to come back and do a new show
at MSNBC and move to Los Angeles and have a
co host, a conservative, and not do any commentaries. And
(52:42):
actually this new show is somehow less appealing than it sounds.
But the punchline of all punchlines is contained in what
Lack wanted to call my new twenty fifteen MSNBC show
that never was. It tells you all you really need
to know about the last word with Lawrence O'Donnell and
MSNBC and O'Donnell's place in TV history. At its demise
(53:04):
and the end of MSNBC. NBC new president Lack was
brimming with enthusiasm about this name that he had come
up with for my new show of good the perfect title.
Lack told me, we're gonna call it The Last Word
with Keith Alderman. And I didn't laugh for guffaw. I
just said, Andy, you have a show called the Last Word,
(53:29):
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. Andy Lack now laughed, huh,
hopefully not for much longer. I don't. I've done all
(53:50):
the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown.
Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schaneale arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on
the guitars, the bass, and the drums, and mister Shanale
handled orchestration and keyboards. Produced by Tko Broms. Other music,
including some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by
the group No Horns Allowed. Let's pun say it. It's
(54:14):
all horns, No Horns. The sports music is the Olderman
theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis, Curtisy
ESPN Inc. And yes, I did just kind of mispronounce
my own name there, didn't I. Our satirical and pithy
musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium
organist ever. Our announcer today was my friend John Dean.
(54:36):
Everything else, including the mispronunciation of my own name, was
pretty much by faults. So that's countdown for this the
two hundred and twenty fourth day until the twenty twenty
four presidential election, and the one thou and seventy seventh
day since dementia Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the
democratically elected government of the United States. Use the fourteenth
(54:58):
Amendment and the not regularly given elector objection option. Use
the Insurrection Act, the to system, the mental health system
to stop him from disinformating everybody and from doing it
again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is
tomorrow bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Olderman,
(55:20):
Good morning, good afternoon, good night. Then good luck.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
Caesar con they say, Caeser Coon Hey hired Rana ha
hired Rana got yelled at, yelled at by mad Oh.
Speaker 1 (55:38):
She's the boss, so that was the death blow. Help me,
Ruana get the f of my TV. Thank you, Nancy
fast for me and all of my brothers. Countdown with
Keith Oldreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(55:58):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. That
was the bend he just went around. That was the
(00:25):
deep end. He just went off, And those were his marbles.
He just lost two forty nine pm Eastern Dementia time quote.
I'm not running to terminate the ACA as crooked Joe
Buden disinformates and miss informates all the time. I'm running
(00:46):
to close the border, et cetera. There is no such
word as disinformate. There is no such word as miss InformATE.
There is a Joe Buden, but he is not president.
He is a freelance finance specialist from the city of
(01:06):
Saudi Daisy, Tennessee. And when the name Saudi Daisy, Tennessee
is the one correct verb or proper noun in this
sorry situation, the facts are undeniable. Donald Trump is not
even close to still being all there. It is impossible
(01:28):
to say which moment of trump insanity, of his broken
bean hood is the worst. Could have been comparing himself
to Christ. Could have been repeatedly mistaking Obama and Biden
for one another and then saying he meant to do that.
Could be getting the year wrong, are abandoning tough words
in mid syllable, but this one buden misinformate, disinformate. That
(01:51):
has got to be top ten at least because he
wasn't finished. Trump added he wants to quote make the
ACA or Obamacare as it is known, much better, stronger,
and far less expensive. In other words, make the ACA
much much much better for far less money or cost.
(02:14):
Those aren't other words. Those are the same words. Don
If a relative of yours started doing stuff like this
on a daily basis, you would have them committed or
at least treated. It is impossible to say that he
cannot possibly last this way, what with the forces of
(02:35):
aphasia and dementia and narcissism and head injury and whatever
else there is pulling him apart. But of course he
has lasted in approximately this same space for months now,
and in space is not really that much better than
this one for years now and decades now, and if
the early anecdotes are correct, for a lifetime now. Still
(02:59):
inventing your own words is a sign of a dozen
different physical problems, to say nothing of psychological ones like bipolarity,
and environmental ones like huffing decon roach room, fogger, Joe
buden b U d E N. Who is miss informating
(03:26):
the populace? But no, Trump, You're right, Trump is the
vigorous alert one. Maybe maybe he meant platformate, He meant platformte,
not misinformate, platformte. The additive that Shell used to put
(03:47):
in its gasoline in the nineteen sixties that made it.
I don't remember what it did. Maybe it maybe it
burned the atmosphere faster. Maybe maybe maybe Don used to
huff huff that stuff. And of course Trump still does,
(04:28):
or seems to plan and accomplish complicated, even intricate schemes
like this adroit little move in the Stormy Daniel's hush
money and election suppression case yesterday. It is supposed to
start with jury selection two weeks from Monday. Trump's goal
in all of his cases is to stall, stall, so
(04:49):
yesterday morning he attacked the daughter of the judge Juan
Mershon online, claiming she worked at a company that works
for Congressman Adam Schiff, and within hours Judge Mershon hit
him with a gag order, preventing him from talking about
witnesses and attorneys and court staff and their families. Given
that Trump did not immediately rail against that gag order.
(05:11):
There is reason to speculate that he did this deliberately
to get that gag order. Mere Shawn gags Trump. Trump
appeals the gag order, the judge rejects the appeal, Trump
goes to an appellate court, and before you can say
misinformate that April fifteenth trial start date is on ice
until the appeal is heard, or he didn't plan it,
(05:36):
and those are his toys in his attic, as they
say stasis in the other Trump trials. But is co
defendant in Georgia who put the speed bump in the
case of the Trump seventeen may be in more trouble elsewhere.
Michael Roman, the former Trump campaign aid, has reportedly been
subpoened as part of the burgeoning investigation into the fake
(05:58):
Trump electors in Arizona. This is according to ABC News,
which previously reported that Kenny the Cheese Kenneth Chesbro was
already interviewed by the state attorney general there, who was
going for some indictments in Arizona. Quoting Chris Mays, we
will announce something in the relatively near future. Well, you
(06:20):
can't argue with that. In Trump Legal adjacent news guests
who propped up the Trump humping propaganda channel Newsmax right
in the middle of Trump's occupation of the White House,
a member of the royal family of Katar. According to
The Washington Post twenty nineteen and twenty twenty, this was
fifty million dollars into Newsmacks, not just to make sure
(06:43):
there was good Trump coverage, mind you, that Kataris also
wanted better pub for themselves during a squabble in the
Middle East over who supported terrorist groups and who didn't.
The Kataris are not particularly particular nor especially smart about
American television. They are the ones who bought the old
scam I worked for Current TV, than sued its chief
(07:05):
ass clown Joel Hyatt, the guy on whom the villain
in the movie Philadelphia was in part based. And then
ultimately they just shut the damn thing down because what's
fifty million dollars to these guys. And lastly, this is
where Trump is at the moment. Talk about misinformate and disinformate.
(07:25):
He is now selling Trump Bibles, Bible, Holy Bible. Well,
Trump endorsed Bibles. He did a three minute infomercial for it.
Or maybe that's a misinformate infomercial. It's actually a Lee
Greenwood Bible with the lyrics of God Bless the USA.
(07:48):
Added in along with it notes the Declaration of Independence,
the Pledge of Allegiance, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights,
even though don't tell them the Bill of Rights is
already in the Constitution. Your cost just fifty nine dollars
and ninety nine and sense for a Bible. No evidence.
(08:09):
Trump claims to have written the Bible. Then again, he
really did compare himself to Christ on Monday, So who
knows what's next with the pitch, Trump added this completely
authentic tell me you know nothing of the story of
Christ without telling me you know nothing of the story
of Christ line quote happy Holy Week, because of course,
(08:32):
the first emotion that comes with the whole crucifixion business.
That first emotion is happy, happy, joy Joy. Meanwhile, the
worst personnel fiasco at NBC News in nearly three months
(08:58):
is finally over. NBC News chairman Sesar Conde fired former
RNC chair and now eternal punchline Rona McDaniel at six
ZHO one Eastern last night. According to the memo, hey all,
Conde's memo begins and in so doing, it and he
tells you all you need to know about the state
(09:21):
of decay at NBC might as well have started it
to all you little people out there. I'll read the
memo and annotate it and translate it as we go on. Quote.
Hey all, there is no doubt that the last several
days have been difficult for the news group. After listening
(09:41):
to the legitimate concerns of many you view unquote, especially
the two hundred and thirty seven of you who said
something on the air resuming the quote, I have decided
that Ronal McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor.
No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is
(10:02):
cohesive and a line unquote. And we're still trying here
in year twenty nine of Msnbceingly, we haven't quite gotten
it straight yet. I know what the hell quoting again,
Over the last few days, it has become clear that
disappointment undermines that goal. I want to personally apologize to
(10:25):
our team members who felt we let them down. While
this was a collective recommendation by some members of our
leadership team unquote, that's Chairman Caesar's hint to Rebecca Blumenstein
and carry Butdoff Brown and Rashida Jones to update their
(10:45):
resumes before they get locked out of their computers again, quoting,
While this was a collective recommendation by some members of
our leadership team, I approved it and take full responsibility
for it unquote, And to use the lawn of the
great comedian and Nixon impersonator David Frye as the man
(11:09):
in charge, I of course accept full responsibility, but not
the blame. Let me explain the difference. People who are
to blame lose their jobs, people who are responsible do not.
Quoting yet again. Our initial decision was made because of
(11:29):
our deep commitment to presenting our audiences with a widely
diverse set of viewpoints and experiences, particularly during these consequential times. Unquote. Yeah,
we like to have both people who are lying and
people who are not lying on our newscasts. More quotes.
(11:53):
We continue to be committed to the principle that we
must have diverse viewpoints on our programs, and to that end,
we will read double our efforts to seek voices that
represent different parts of the political spectrum. Unquote. Translation, this
(12:14):
is your big chance, Nick Fuentes, quoting one last bit,
Take care Sayzar unquote yes. The backlash against the world's
worst television news hire since Bo Dietle was so great
(12:35):
that even NBC News chairman Sayesar Conde noticed. Just to
rub this in, The New York Times reports that CIA,
the talent agency that got McDaniel her three hundred thousand
dollars a year, well a day deal with the Peacock,
and had handled her bargaining with ABC and CNN, and
(12:58):
aren't they glad they finished second and third. CIA has
also dropped McDaniel as a client. The Time says McDaniel
is quote interviewing attorneys to engage with NBC on her behalf,
which would seem to imply that Seesar Conde is trying
to somehow get out from under the three hundred k
(13:18):
NBC offered her, and to which offer she said yes,
and to which contract they wrote their names. I have
absolutely no respect for nor interest in Ronna Romney McDaniel.
But she didn't do anything contractually wrong here. It's not
(13:39):
like she didn't tell them she used to be chair
of the RNC, or that she had a role in
trying to overthrow democracy. Trump campaign. One can imagine an
NBC attorney saying we thought that part of your resume.
Read Anchored News twelve Brooklyn. NBC has no grounds for
firing McDaniel for cause, which would mean they wouldn't have
(14:01):
to pay her, nor would one think it would want to,
so again poke its collective head into the collective hornet's
nest by trying to get out from under the price
it agreed to. Of course, that's what I would have
said a week ago if you had asked me if
even Sesar Kande would be stupid enough to hire Rona frickin' McDaniel.
(14:26):
It's equally true that she has no action against them,
despite bleatings from the likes of nitwits like Hugh Hewitt
about emotional distress and reputational damage. She was merely an
insurrectionist once, but now she has to live with the
terrible trauma of being a former NBC employee who knows.
(14:48):
With the rarest of exceptions, TV contracts all include one
primary clause, pay or play, which means as long as
the company pays you, it does not have to play you.
I had that deal for eight months at Fox in
the year two thousand and one, greatest god job I
ever had. So now she belongs to the ages five
(15:12):
days at NBC News, and true she was only on
for one show, but she was still with NBC News
after the first commercial break, so she did not earn
the honor of being the quickest thing ever canceled by
a major American TV network. That honor remains, and it
is seemingly unbeatable in the hands of the ABC Network's
(15:37):
surrealist comedy sketch show called turn On, which premiered on Wednesday,
February fifth, nineteen sixty nine, at eight thirty pm Eastern,
and was canceled on Wednesday, February fifth, nineteen sixty nine
at eight forty pm Eastern, just as the first commercial
break began. The ABC station in Cleveland did not even
(16:01):
let the show come back from that break, and some
on the West Coast did not show any of it.
I mean, even RNA got to twenty minutes anyway, out
of the TV weeds and back into the charred remains
of NBC News burned to the ground during her epic
five days or four commercial breaks, or the equivalent of
(16:23):
three turn Ons, or whichever yardstick you want to use,
the point of all this, and perhaps the value of
this internal rebellion is that maybe the somnambulent American political media,
especially the American television political media, has awakened from its
naive stupor. The crap that Chris licked got away with
(16:44):
for a year running CNN, sacking liberal reporters, sabotaging Don Lemon,
putting Trump on live, fighting to air Republican debates both sides,
ing everything he could get his hands on was not
some sort of aberration, and it didn't just happen at CNN,
and it was not some sort of X dream. I
(17:06):
have been saying here for the eighteen month life of
this podcast that every news organization in this country has
had the same meeting, what do we do if Trump
regains power? Not what you would hope they would be asking,
not what do we do journalistically or what do we
do to save the nation, but what do we do
(17:28):
to protect our phony boloney jobs and our profits? And
what do we do so when Trump starts jailing reporters
and TV executives, he'll leave us alone, or more realistically,
he'll let us become one of his authorized propaganda channels.
The entirety of that guy Lickt's career at CNN and
(17:50):
the bidding amongst CNN and ABC, and aren't they glad
they finished second and third? Thank God, Thank Jesus, thank Cale,
I think anybody you can think of. And the bidding
among CNN and ABC and NBC for Ronald McDaniel. It
all underscores the reality that in the minds of its
owners and its executives, it's legions of hot and cold running.
(18:10):
Caesar condeys, television news is not a kind of news.
It's a kind of television. It is designed to fill
the places between the commercials. If it serves some kind
of public purpose, Hey, great, as long as that doesn't
(18:32):
mean we have to go too many hours canceling all
those advertisements just because some pope died or something. Putting
Trump on and taking Mehdi Hassan off and hiring Roni
McDaniel was inoculation, nothing more, nothing less. It was proving
to Trump and the magas that while no we in
(18:54):
the media, we are not shuddering MSNBC and sending Rachel
Maddow to Alaska, and we're not in favor of this
whole and the peaceful transfer power thing and fascism is
the new democracy stuff. But hey, go on, we're listening.
(19:15):
Even most of the protests from within NBC and MSNBC
completely missed that point. Chuck Todd was the first to
get mad, not on behalf of America, but on behalf
of Kristin Welker. The pathetic I hope you'll reconsider from
first Joe Scarborough and then Rachel Maddow was the twenty
(19:37):
first century equivalent of Oliver Twist saying please, sir, I
want some more. Mattow has the power to veto any
higher at MSNBC, and she's used it. Trust me, I
know she could have stopped this last Friday, me or
her you pick, you have my number. Hell, even I
(19:57):
did that rodal McDaniel, the NBC publicists would have said, no, no, no, no,
We wrote Roddy goddamn spell check again. I mean, those
tortured rationales were kind of summed up by Lawrence O'Donnell,
who decided to play hey you kids, get off my
(20:19):
lawn and promptly got all the facts wrong while he
did it. O'Donnell decided this had happened not because he
has worked for and genuflected in front of a moral
corporate NBC humanoids since nineteen ninety six. But because they
were all so young and innocent that they didn't know
(20:39):
how real TV newsmen would have handled Rona McDaniel and
the other members of the Trump gang. They wouldn't have
done what they did after Watergate, when Walter and chet
and David and Harry Reasoner refused to hire all the
president's men, never gave any of them a dime, never
gave any of them the cloak of television respectability, like
(21:02):
that's a real thing, especially not that evil jailed Watergate
mastermind John Dean, who never went to jail only to
witness protection because of all the death threats, because he
was the one who did the right thing, and he
was the one who sank Nixon, and you smeared him, Lawrence,
and who, by the way, by nineteen ninety nine was
(21:24):
being paid by MSNBC Lawrence to sit next to Brian
Williams during the Bill Clinton impeachment. There's an easy way
to avoid the controversy. NBC News has stumbled into. Lawrence
O'Donnell said, don't hire anyone close to the crimes. That's
what happened to the Nixon gang. He said that Tuesday night,
(21:47):
And he could not have been more wrong as he
said it. John Dean was on with me on ms
in nineteen ninety eight. On My original show, I also
had to interview John Erlickman and Robert Bork. Robert Bork
who fired the special counsel who fired Archibald Cox when
the three guys ahead of him quit rather than do it.
(22:10):
Robert freaking Bork was an analyst on MSNBC in nineteen
ninety eight during the Clinton impeachment. I can't remember if
Erlickman and Bork were paid or not. I do remember
when John dene, a genuine American hero, came out against
Clinton's impeachment on my show one night, the word went
(22:32):
out at MSNBC that if we booked him again, we
also had to book a different Watergate figure for the
same show, a Watergate figure who was in favor of
Clinton's impeachment. We had Gordon Lyddy on. They wanted Gordon
Lyddy to do his own show. I mean, eventually they
(22:53):
had Oliver North from a different scandal do his own shows,
anchoring his own shows on MSNBC. I mean. Hell, Pat
Buchanan testified in Nixon's defense at the Senate Watergate hearings,
and when CNN went on in nineteen eighty, so did
Pat Buchanan's show. It was called Crossfire. Pat Buchanan was
on cable TV continuously from nineteen eighty until at least
(23:16):
twenty ten. He was on so long he wound up
being madows regular foil paid by MSNBC. But nobody in
our girl days ever hired anyone close to the crimes.
I mean, Gordon Goddamn, put your hand over the flame.
Liddy had his own radio show in Washington for twenty
five years. Sure nobody would touch John Erckman Lawrence, except
(23:42):
in nineteen eighty seven, fifteen years after the Watergate break in,
when Erckman was hired to do commercials for Dryers ice Cream,
part of a crazy ad campaign called Unbelievable Spokespeople for
an Unbelievable product. Dryers ice Cream had commercials featuring a
woman who said she'd encountered many UFOs and the guy
(24:03):
who faked the last will and testament of Howard Hughes
and some kid who kept getting blamed for everything, and
the consumer blowback was so bad that they kept the
Howard Hughes forger and the UFO lady and they fired
John Erlickman from the ice cream commercials, but go on, Lawrence. Okay,
(24:25):
enough of this sub brand about Lawrence o'donald, which I
will resume at the end of this podcast. Back to
the point, American TV News is not going to save
us from creeping fascism. But maybe maybe the scattered, largely
(24:45):
self absorbed and selfish, righteous kind of righteous indignation at NBC,
maybe it means American TV News will stop helping fascism
creep faster guardrail hell no bike strips scattered across democracies highways.
(25:09):
Uh well, maybe we could stop doing that. I guess
hope that's good enough. Does that mean we can't hire
Rudy Juliani to anchor at four o'clock with Katie So ultimately,
in a perverse way, Thank you, Rana McDaniel. You may
(25:30):
have helped in ways you'll never be smart enough to understand.
You helped me. Rana helped me. Rana help me, help me,
help me, Rana help me. Rana Wait a minute, Oh, Nancy.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Caesar Conde, say Caesar Condey hired, Rana ha hired, Rana
got yelled at, yelled at by mad Oh, she's the boss.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
So that was the death blow. Help me, Rana the
f of my TV.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Thank you Nancy Fast for me and all my brothers.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Also of interest, here I will tell all those O'Donnell's stories,
like when he guest hosted Countdown and while I was
out for a few weeks, he tried to get me
fired so he could take over the show, and when
that didn't work, he just stole a couple of the
producers instead and got his own show. Oh, by the way,
I was out for a couple of weeks because my
dad was dying at the time. Also, you know why
(26:41):
that bridge collapsed in Baltimore hit by a freighter? You
naive fool. It was DEI and Open Borders, and it
was to distract you from Kate Middleton's body double. That's next.
This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman still
(27:29):
ahead of us on this edition of Countdown since he's
in the news for completely butchering the story of the
post Watergate TV careers. Of all the Watergate figures, let
me has promised detail for you how much of a
jackass Lawrence O'Donnell is tried to steal my show? Did
steal my producers send a personal letter of mine to
(27:50):
Ann Coulter so she could write a column about it.
Just an a one schmuck in things I promised not
to t Well, the title doesn't hold up here. I
promised to tell this and I live up to my promises.
Next first, still more idiots to talk about. The daily
roundup of the mis grants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects
(28:10):
specimens who constitute two days Wor's persons in the world. First,
the Bronze the Worst Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee making
the list for the second time in three episodes, which
is a rare accomplishment and I'm sure he's very proud
of it, and he will send out a fundraising email
off of it. After the shooting at the Kansas City
(28:33):
Chiefs Super Bowl victory parade this year, mister Burchett, who
is that rare combination of having absolute confidence in his
judgment while having absolutely no judgment, posted a picture of
a man named Denton louder Mill Junior on his Twitter
x account, and Burchette wrote that this was quote one
of the Kansas City Chiefs victory parade shooters unquote, and
(28:57):
he added quote an illegal alien unquote A couple problems here.
Mister Loudermill isn't an alien, is not an illegal alien,
has never been either of those things. And he wasn't
a shooter, nor was he charged with anything. He was
handcuffed as police closed off the area near the shooting,
(29:19):
and he happened to get photographed during that brief period,
and that was it. Mister Loudermill was in fact a victim.
Congressman Burchett's smearing of mister loudermill was reposted more than
twenty one thousand times on Elon Musk's hell site, and
it had seven million views in the first three days.
(29:41):
It is still not clear that the congressman understands what
he did, because he's a bonehead. But after the lawsuit
I'm going to go out on a limb and say
mister Burchett will understand what he did. The runner up
worser Aarry Fleischer, who is actually he hasn't had an
actual job since he quit his George W. Bush's White
(30:03):
House Press secretary on the fifteenth of July two thousand
and three, though he has been a consultant to the
Saudi Live bon Saw Golf League Yesterday, Aery Fleischer slammed
President Biden's foreign policy record in a tweet, complaining that
he had quote opposed the First Gulf War, supported the
Second Gulf War. Aery, the Second Gulf War. That was yours,
(30:30):
that was Bush's, that was the one. Aery Fleischer spent
part of two thousand and one, all of two thousand
and two, the first half of two thousand and three
selling to the American public even though nearly everything that
he and Bush and Dick Cheney, then Colin Powell and
Fox Propaganda, then everybody in the government and everybody in
the Republican Party, everything they said about the Second Gulf
(30:51):
War was completely untrue, including that little issue of weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq and any connection whatsoever between
Sodom Hussein and nine to eleven. And suddenly Aery Fleischer
is criticizing Biden for I guess believing that a president
would never lie about something as important as whether or
(31:13):
not this country should attack a foreign nation and precipitate
a war in which we would be fully involved for
nearly a decade and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians
would die. Then I guess Aery Fleischer is critical of
Biden for assuming a presidential press secretary would also never
lie to the American public to the world about something
(31:36):
so important, especially when the Second Gulf War press secretary
was Aery Fleischer. But I'm burying the lead here, I
guess headline Aery Fleischer is now critical of people who
supported George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. But our winners
the worst. Let's see, it's quite a list. There's Congresswoman
(32:00):
Nancy Mace, Maria Bartiromo of Fox Florida can rectional candidate
David Sabatini, Matt new Intown, Fella Schlap, Glen Thrush of
the New York Times, and Rose Graham. As you know,
early yesterday morning, a freighter the size of an aircraft
carrier rammed the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Harbor
(32:23):
in Baltimore and collapsed it. The bridge did not have
structural problems, it wasn't part of any infrastructure crisis. Systems
did not fail as it approached one of the supports
of the bridge. The ship had a total power failure,
yet the crew managed to get a May Day signal
out in time for police to seal the entrances. So
(32:43):
that nobody else got onto it. They only had ninety
seconds to do that. They saved lives. Eight people were
missing initially, two recovered, one uninjured. Eight On the far
right though, the bridge disaster and actually it's the freighter
disaster is a reason to I don't know, declare martial law.
(33:05):
Congresswoman Mace, who is an idiot, immediately blamed it on
the Biden Infrastructure Bill, which she was last seen taking
credit for taking credit for the Biden infrastructure bill. Maria Bartiromo,
a Trump pr person who was once actually somehow mistaken
for an NBC journalist, blamed it on the wide open
(33:27):
port that's in English, the wide open border. Anthony Sabatini,
another Trump nut job, tweeted, DEI did this. Matt Schlapp
went on Newsmax and blamed it on COVID lockdowns and
drug addled employees, which sounds more like an accurate description
of his seapack organization, doesn't it. Glenn thresh thrush Thrash
(33:53):
of The Times tweeted a series of questions, including is
any bridge supposed to just fall down after a single impact? However,
big this is a news reporters half a dozen bridges
hit by objects as small as a tugboat have collapsed
in this country just since nineteen sixty seven, and each
of them resulted in at least thirty five deaths. The
(34:16):
two thousand and seven Minnesota Bridge collapsed without being hit
by anything. And then there's Rose Graham, a seemingly random
tweeter who has nearly five thousand followers, seems to be
from Arkansas, and she wrote what so many of the
conspiracy thumpers wrote yesterday, quote puff Daddy gets raided and
(34:36):
the Baltimore Bridge collapses, and just like that, people are
becoming no longer interested in Kate Middleton. It's always several
things going on at once to keep you busy. Trust
nothing and no one unquote because it's all a plot
to I'm not sure which part of it she thinks
(34:57):
is the plot, but trust no one except her. This
was an accident. It was the shipping line's fault. They
will ultimately pay for it. There is reason to question
whether such large watercraft should be allowed on inland waterways
without tugs escorting them, but otherwise there was not much
to prevent this from happening. And yet there are people
(35:18):
today who will die peacefully in their beds eighty years
from now, remaining convinced that the Baltimore Bridge collapse of
twenty twenty four happened because of drug addled DEI riding
the infrastructure bill in through wide open borders and it
was all just a distraction from Kate Middleton. And accidents
(35:40):
are illegal, aren't they? Thanks to Congresswoman Nancy Mace, Maria Bartiommo, Fox,
Florida congressional candidate David Sabatini, Matt new Intown Fellaslap, Glen
Thrush of The New York Times, and Rose Graham Rando,
who don't know what they're talking about, but that didn't
phase them in the least. And who are two days
(36:03):
worst person in the world. Kate Middleton, For God's I
wanted to tell you about Bloomberg's flagship podcast. It's called
The Big Take, and it should be part of your
daily routine. The Big Take brings you what's shaping the
(36:25):
world's economies with the smartest and most informed business reporters
around the world. Hosts David Gurra, Sarah Holder, and Salaiah
Mosen bring you the stories behind what's moving money and
markets and help you understand what's happening, what it means,
and why it matters every afternoon. Now, Look, David Gerr
(36:45):
went to Cornell and he majored in history there and
as near as I've been able to find out with
my research, he got good grades. So a lot of
people recommend podcasts to you without any kind of frame
of reference. And I'm telling you this guy survived four
winters in Ithaca, New York like I did. So if
(37:07):
he says he can help you understand what's happening, this
is tested by snow and cold. You can listen to
the Big Take on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or
wherever you get your podcasts. Now to the number one
(37:28):
story on the countdown on my favorite topic, me and
things I promised not to tell. Early on the afternoon
of Monday May twenty third, twenty sixteen, I bounced out
of my New York City apartment building, began to walk
past the tourist trap brunch spot in the lobby, and
froze there at one of the cramped outdoor tables. Staring
(37:50):
up at me in blank surprise that must have matched
my own staring down at him in blank surprise. Was
Laurence O'Donnell. I decided to go silly, Hey, get out
of my house. He laughed. I laughed. It didn't seem forced.
He introduced me to his companion, his daughter. This my
dear is Keith Ulderman. Keith started us all at MSNBC,
(38:14):
and then he left, and here Lawrence gave one of
his long pauses, and we crashed it. I wanted to
be generous, I started to politely contradict him, and I
just couldn't do it. Yeah, pretty much anyway, About thirty
seconds of courteous nothingness followed, and I wish the O'Donnell's well,
(38:37):
and then I left. It was the most pleasant experience
I ever had with Lawrence O'Donnell. In fact, it might
have been the only pleasant experience I ever had with
Lawrence O'Donnell. After I finally convinced and bullied and blackmailed
MSNBC management into letting Rachel Meadow become the regular guest
host for my show, and she aced it, and then
(38:58):
rightly got her own show, and she aced that and
became a star. Looking for a new guest host, my
first idea was a frequent guest we had named Chris Hayes.
I didn't get far. Management had its own idea and
my input was not required. They wanted former Vermont governor
and Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean. And Howard is a
(39:21):
really smart guy and great on TV. But Howard had
a bit of a teleprompter problem. One of my producers
swears that Howard once read good Evening, I'm Howard Dean,
former governor of Vermont. This is countdown. I do know.
Whatever he did on the air, it was bad enough
that one week when I was off and at the
(39:42):
Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and a
baseball news story broke and he was filling in for me.
My producers called me there and asked me to come
on from the streets of Cooperstown and be a guest
on my own show, just to help Howard Dean out. Anyway.
Their next idea was a guy who had been kicking
around MSNBC since its founding in nineteen ninety six. Lawrence
(40:06):
O'Donnell was one of the original MSNBC Friends, The MSNBC
Friends political pundits who sat on clearstools at a clear
table or in a set designed to look like a
booth at a coffee shop. No, I'm not making this up.
Among the friends were and Colter and Laura Ingram, if
(40:29):
you can believe it, once or twice an hour, the
rather CNN like all news coverage on MSNBC in its
first couple of years would pause and three or more
of these friends would appear, chew over the MSNBC headlines,
and then disappear. Lawrence O'Donnell was one of the friends.
(40:52):
It was as bad as it sounds. Then Lawrence o'donald
pretty much disappeared. You would see him on MSNBC as
a guest every once in a while, but mostly he
pursued his acting and producing. He played President Bartlett's father
on the West Wing, the one who beat him. Throughout college,
Lawrence was very convincing, and then around two thousand and eight,
(41:14):
we started getting pressure to bring him in as a
guest on Countdown, like once a week or twice a week.
I was not sure what that was all about, but
he had been a Senate staffer and he knew the
healthcare debate and other wonky stuff pretty well, so I
gave my assent for whatever that was worth. Not long
after that, Lawrence came into my office. He really needed
(41:35):
my support, he said, to get him more involved in MSNBC.
He knew I had gone to bat for Rachel and
before her, I'd gone to bat for Tom Brokaw and
for people like Chuck Todd and Chris Hayes and others
who are now getting steady incomes from NBC. I don't
remember his argument on his own behalf. I do remember
I didn't have much of a reason to say no,
(41:56):
and he wasn't asking me to do a lot, so
I said yes. The next thing I knew, I was
reading a memo announcing that Lawrence O'Donnell had been appointed
as the new full time guest host of Countdown. This
was in the winter of two thousand and nine twenty ten,
when my late dad was fighting so valiantly to stay
alive after colon cancer and more importantly, a series of infections.
(42:18):
Dad had the immune system of an alien. The average
white cell count in a healthy adult is between four
thousand and eleven thousand. One night, Dad's was at thirty
three thousand, and the doctors told me to prepare to
make the call to let him go. They had one
antibiotic left to try on him. The next morning, Dad's
white cell count, which had been thirty three thousand, was
(42:42):
eight thousand. Onward, he fought. Unfortunately, he was eighty years
old and he had not exercised since Harry Truman was president,
and eventually he ran out of Houdini tricks. I had
been visiting him twice a day for six months while
still doing Countdown and the NBC Sunday Night Football Show.
(43:02):
But now, as it hit late February of twenty ten,
his bright days became fewer and farther in between, and
the hope that was propelling me to keep being his
full time caregiver and Countdown's full time host both began
to fade. In the last two weeks of my dad's life,
as the doctors tried all the long shot things, I
asked MSNBC for a leave of absence. Finally the inevitability
(43:26):
became inarguable, and we let Dad go. On Saturday, March thirteenth,
twenty ten, my sister held his hand and I read
him his favorite Thurber story, and as soon as I
finished it, he exhaled deeply and peacefully, and he died.
I think I took another week off, maybe two, and
I vaguely recall emails from friends at Countdown that I
(43:49):
may have paid passing attention to, but I really didn't.
Most of the staff, including people who came up from Washington,
like Howard Feynman or Gene Robinson of the Washington Post,
always friends to me. They attended my dad's memorial service.
I believe Lawrence o'donald, who was of course filling in
for me on Countdown, was there too, but maybe not,
(44:10):
I do not remember. And then came the day when
I went back to the office full time and my
assistant grabbed me both hands on my wrist. You did
not answer my emails, she said, with a fervency she
rarely exhibited. For God's sake, do not ever leave me
alone with Laurence O'Donnell Again, I snapped back to attention.
(44:32):
Had he, you know, bothered her? Not that way, she said,
But he's a son of a bitch. He treats me
and everybody who was in a producer here like dirt.
And since you didn't read my emails, I just have
to tell you this. He's trying to get you fired
so he can take over Countdown. And if you think
he's nuts, one of your senior producers is in on
it too with him. I have to admit, even now,
(44:56):
of all the things I went through at that very
very strange place MSNBC, even now this story he still
shocks me. The senior producers of Countdown consisted of a
guy who'd been a producer who booked satellite transmissions for
MSNBC until I asked that he'd be promoted, and one
(45:18):
was a guest booker for the daytime shows until I
asked that she be promoted. Another was a line producer
who was well regarded only for his ability to time
a show until I asked for him to be promoted.
And then there was the old friend of mine who
had been blown out of ESPN and a sexual harassment
porn link email scandal and was headed back to college
to start his career all over again until I asked
(45:40):
that he'd be hired and then promoted. I did some
digging and I was going to confront O'Donnell about it
when somebody told me he had tweeted something negative about
me and about Countdown. So I got a hold of
him and I said this did not seem to be
in keeping with MSNBC traditions and rules, you know, the
ones about not peeing inside the tent, and he said,
what do you know about MSNBC traditions. I've been here
(46:03):
since nineteen nineteen. I never left and came back. So
I went to my boss, the president of the network,
Phil Griffin, the one who would not hire Rachel Maddow,
And before I could say they'd have to get rid
of him, Griffin said it was all academic. They were
preparing the press release as we spoke for Lawrence's new
show at ten o'clock called The Last Word, And oh,
(46:24):
by the way, Keith, two of your senior producers are
going with him to run his show. If this sounds
vaguely familiar to you, it is the plot of the
pilot for the old Aaron Sorkin HBO series Newsroom. I
was still friendly with Aaron then, so he actually asked.
As I related this to him in real time in
(46:46):
emails and phone calls, he asked if he could use
it in the plot rather than just what he often did,
which was to use it without asking. The problem was
none of this made any sense in the real world,
although it made a pretty good pilot for Aaron Sorkin
in going into the ten PM slot, Lawrence o'donod would
be replacing a rerun of Countdown, and even if O'Donnell
(47:09):
did much better in the ratings, much much better, there
was no way it could ever make enough money to
make the move make sense. O'Donnell's new show would necessarily
cost MSNBC between ten and fifteen million dollars to produce
every year. Didn't have anything to do with him. That
was the cost. The Countdown rerun cost, not ten fifteen
(47:32):
million dollars a year. It count however much they paid
the guy who pushed the play button that fired up
the videotape of the Countdown replay amortized. Later that day,
a sympathetic NBC executive called me up and explained the
move to me. First, Griffin was convinced O'Donnell was about
(47:53):
to leave US and sign with CNN. I said, well,
that's a good idea for everybody involved except CNN. Turned
out CNN had not even talked to him, but Griffin
and did not know that. More importantly, Comcast had already
finalized its agreement to buy NBC effective the following January,
and as part of the deal, they were entitled to
(48:14):
review what all the executives in the company had done,
and they had already looked at MSNBC president Phil Griffin
and discovered he had never done anything. In panic, Griffin
told colleagues he had to launch a new show of
his own immediately. This is the series Aaron Sorkin should
(48:34):
have made. As to the producers who left my show
to go with O'Donnell while my father was dying, one
of them told me a couple of years after she
left MSNBC for the last time, every day when I
went into that last word office, I realized you were
getting your revenge on me without even having to lift
a finger. Lots of people I've worked with, probably a
(48:57):
majority of people i've helped, have behaved like Lawrence O'Donnell, because,
remember it's television. It is a mental illness. The comparatively
healthy people are the ones who acknowledge it's a mental illness.
But Lawrence O'Donnell was something special. A year before my
dad died, almost to the day, in fact, I was
(49:17):
in Los Angeles appearing on Bill Maher's show, and one
of the other guests that night was the actress Kerrie Washington.
She was very nice to me, very sweet, a very
big fan, and she asked to stay in touch. Sure enough,
after my father died after the memorial, after I was
back at work, I had to go to his house
for the first time since he had passed away. It
was about as much fun as it sounds. In the
(49:41):
car on the way back into New York City. The
solemnity of it. Both my parents died within eleven months
of each other. It really hit me for some reason
for the first time, full force, and I was about
to lose it when the car approached a billboard overlooking
the West Side Highway in New York City. And whose
big smiling face was on the ad on that billboard,
(50:04):
Carrie Washington, And it flashed me right back to her
kindness in la and it helped me overcome this bump
in my morning. So I wanted to drop her a note,
nothing big, nothing suggestive. I wasn't hinting at asking her out.
Just you never know how you might help somebody in
a time of crisis. Thanks for letting me smile. That
(50:28):
was the whole message. I asked my assistant to figure
out how to get it to her, and that was
the end of it, except a week later, the fact
that I wrote her a note wound up in a
column written by an colter. I was astonished, how why?
And Colter it was her usual the brain doesn't quite
(50:53):
work right kind of stuff. She implied, I was hitting
on Carrie Washington and said how stupid I had to
be to not realize she was involved with somebody, and
on and on and on, no mention of my father's passing,
where the mar show or the billboard or her smiling face.
I went back to my assistant and I said, hey,
what on earth did you do with that note to
(51:14):
Carrie Washington? And she said, oh, I gave it to
this Lawrence O'Donnell guy. And I said, good god, why
did you do that? And she said, well, he's dating
Carrie Washington. I thought you knew that. I thought that's
why you asked me to get it to her. So
it wasn't hard to figure out from there. Lawrence had
(51:35):
called his old friend from the old MSNBC Friends of
nineteen ninety six and Colter and told her about the note,
inventing whatever motive his jealous little mind could dream up,
it should have gotten him fired from NBC, but unfortunately
his boss was just as much of a fourteen year
old emotionally as he was. And meanwhile, I had decided
to get out of MSNBC anyway when the time was ripe,
(51:58):
and as it turned out, it ripened in January twenty eleven.
I've told that story in other episodes, sixty of them.
It's kind of complicated, and since nobody ever actually asked
me why count Down the TV show ended, I've probably
got another sixty episodes worth of information about that anyway
in twenty fifteen. Since repeatedly over the following ten years,
(52:20):
there were overtures by both sides to bring Countdown and
Me back to MSNBC. In twenty fifteen, during the World Series,
in fact, the then president of NBC News Andy Lack,
asked me to come back and do a new show
at MSNBC and move to Los Angeles and have a
co host, a conservative, and not do any commentaries. And
(52:42):
actually this new show is somehow less appealing than it sounds.
But the punchline of all punchlines is contained in what
Lack wanted to call my new twenty fifteen MSNBC show
that never was. It tells you all you really need
to know about the last word with Lawrence O'Donnell and
MSNBC and O'Donnell's place in TV history. At its demise
(53:04):
and the end of MSNBC. NBC new president Lack was
brimming with enthusiasm about this name that he had come
up with for my new show of good the perfect title.
Lack told me, we're gonna call it The Last Word
with Keith Alderman. And I didn't laugh for guffaw. I
just said, Andy, you have a show called the Last Word,
(53:29):
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. Andy Lack now laughed, huh,
hopefully not for much longer. I don't. I've done all
(53:50):
the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown.
Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schaneale arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on
the guitars, the bass, and the drums, and mister Shanale
handled orchestration and keyboards. Produced by Tko Broms. Other music,
including some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by
the group No Horns Allowed. Let's pun say it. It's
(54:14):
all horns, No Horns. The sports music is the Olderman
theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis, Curtisy
ESPN Inc. And yes, I did just kind of mispronounce
my own name there, didn't I. Our satirical and pithy
musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium
organist ever. Our announcer today was my friend John Dean.
(54:36):
Everything else, including the mispronunciation of my own name, was
pretty much by faults. So that's countdown for this the
two hundred and twenty fourth day until the twenty twenty
four presidential election, and the one thou and seventy seventh
day since dementia Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the
democratically elected government of the United States. Use the fourteenth
(54:58):
Amendment and the not regularly given elector objection option. Use
the Insurrection Act, the to system, the mental health system
to stop him from disinformating everybody and from doing it
again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is
tomorrow bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Olderman,
(55:20):
Good morning, good afternoon, good night. Then good luck.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
Caesar con they say, Caeser Coon Hey hired Rana ha
hired Rana got yelled at, yelled at by mad Oh.
Speaker 1 (55:38):
She's the boss, so that was the death blow. Help me,
Ruana get the f of my TV. Thank you, Nancy
fast for me and all of my brothers. Countdown with
Keith Oldreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(55:58):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
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