October 9, 2025 • 48 mins
SEASON 4 EPISODE 23: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Here we go again.
Trump is talking about his own mortality or career mortality or heaven or all of the above… AGAIN at the same time he’s talking about declaring insurrections and jailing more political opponents, like Mayor Johnson and Governor Pritzker and any one of a dozen judges including at least one he appointed – not prosecuting them, just jailing them - and, as if it could GET any worse, he specifically segued from the issue of wanting to prove to God that he’s been good to how great all those weapons are at his naval base.
The missiles are flying, hallelujah, hallelujah.
Plus he's written: “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also." Look, you and I know it should be TRUMP in jail because he’s not only broken laws, he’s nearly COLLECTED THE COMPLETE SET of broken laws. But the process of convincing Trump that he's not crazy, that his predictions are coming true, that Portland is ablaze, is how Stephen Miller and the others manipulate him into eroding American democracy a little more every damn day. And this has worked since at least 2016 and I was told about it by Ed Rollins in 2017. It's the Trump personal feedback loop.
And when the interruptors in that loop get in the way, they get bought out and destroyed. CNN first, The Washington Post, and now CBS News and the "B" stands for "Bari Weiss" who once told The Federalist Society that it was ok if it didn't believe her and her wife's marriage was legal because they all shared what really mattered: a desire for lower taxes. Let me expand upon the death of CBS News and her disastrous debut at its helm by retelling the story of the miniature version enacted at the CBS flagship station in LA when I worked there in 1991: The Mystery Of The Broken Number 3 CBS Pencils.
B-Block (37:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: What is wrong with these dweeb MAGAs? Ken Paxton can't keep his pants on, every other day there's some new story causing his wife to again decide to divorce him, and he's just announced "undercover operations" against leftists. Hey, Pal, if you did anything BESIDES undercover operations you wouldn't be dismissed as a sex pest. Poor Derrick Van Orden continues his descent: now he's yelling at people for not learning how the Senate votes the way he learned about it in the 4th Grade (all of what he learned was wrong). And the Bad Bunny Super Bowl blowback reaches Marjorie Taylor Greene who demands a law making English the official language which is going to be trouble for her since she doesn't speak it.
C-Block (45:00) THURSDAYS WITH THURBER: It's one of those weeks, plus my back is gone, one of my eyes is fighting me: it's time to bring back the first Thurber story I ever read aloud to an audience, the oddly soothing "A Box To Hide In."
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 Now.
I don't want to leave the incorrect impression that I
(00:26):
am opposed to this. But Trump is talking about his
own mortality, or his own career mortality, or going to
heaven or all of the above again. At the same time,
he's talking about declaring insurrections and jailing more political opponents
like Mayor Johnson and Governor Pritzker and any one of
(00:46):
a dozen judges, including at least one he appointed. Not
prosecuting them this time, just jailing them. And as if
it could get any worse, he specifically segued from the
issue of wanting to prove to God that he's been
good to how great all those missiles are at his
naval base. Honestly, I don't know why the few remaining
(01:11):
news organizations do not have entire departments devoted to analysis
about which heart of Trump's insanity is in charge today.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
It'll be very hard to be a good country. You know,
there's no reason to be good. I want to be
good because you want to prove to God that you're good,
so you go to that next step, right, So that's
very important to me. I think it's really very important.
And yesterday was amazing. We went out, we went to
the naval base, largest in the world actually, and I
(01:43):
saw things that were incredible, the level.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Of uh.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I don't want to use the word weapons, but.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
They are weapons. The missiles are flying. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Quote
Chicago mayor should be in jail for failing to protect
ice officers. Governor Pritzker also unquote. You could read that
as saying that the Chicago mayor should be in jail
(02:10):
for failing to protect Governor Pritzker, but I don't think
that's what Trump meant. Then again, who knows you? And
I know it should be Trump in jail because he's
not only broken laws, he's nearly collected the complete set
of broken laws already, to say nothing of him being
in some kind of psychiatric facility, because whatever is wrong
(02:31):
with him, it's going faster to say nothing of his
ren Field Stephen Miller, who talk about having news departments
devoted to studying what's wrong with him Today Stephen Miller
is manipulating Trump's untetheredness to reality and convincing Trump there
really are insurrections. Then that Cash Pittzel isn't crazy when
he says five percent of Chicago residents are active gang members,
(02:54):
and Trump has long been one of those. Does what
the last person to talk to him tells him? People.
Miller has refined this into a self fulfilling prophecy machine.
Tell Trump there is an insurrection in Portland. No, no, Chicago,
Chicago turns out is easier right now. Tell him there's
(03:17):
ice agents imperiled. Get him to send troops to Chicago.
What troops? Who knows which ones are the worst, the
most paranoid, the least traceable. Get the troops to try
to provoke Chicago residents, and if they succeed, show that
to Trump on Fox News and get him to declare
whatever the residents do to be an insurrection, and poof,
(03:40):
Steven Miller has just fabricated an insurrection out of nothing
in Chicago. This formula is how they get Trump to
do anything. Really, the whole mechanism of jailing his opponents
has never been clearer than right now. You keep firing
prosecutors until somebody, the one who won Miss Uncongeniality in
(04:02):
the Beauty pageant is willing to the documents and bang
James Comy is indicted, and you can say, see, mister President,
he's been indicted. It's on Fox News. Even though ABC
reported yesterday that Trump's main government witness will testify that
Komy told him not to leak to the media, and
this witness will almost certainly be branded a hostile witness.
(04:26):
And the motion to dismiss will be filed by Komy's
defense by a week from next Monday, the twentieth, as
will the motion to unseat the fraudulently appointed HAIRD prosecutor.
And the judge yesterday said, no, we're not slow tracking
this process just so you can keep telling Trump. Look,
the Komy trials now three months long. Your damn indictment
(04:48):
was a page and a half. What Miller and Patel
and Pam Bondi do. And once again my judgment was
proved correct. From two thousand and six, I think it
was when Pam Bondy hit on me outside men's room
in the PBS station in Tampa. I think I said, dere,
(05:11):
I'm just getting in the car. I gotta go to
the airport to go to the moon. Anyway, what they
all do when the judge rules in favor of the
motion to dismiss the indictment of James Comy. I'm not sure.
Maybe just pull Trump's TVs out of the wall. I've
(05:33):
never understood why they didn't just set up their own
version of Fox News in the White House basement or
something and Taylor twenty four hours of programming just to him.
I mean, Laura Ingram would work there instead in a heartbeat.
I mean for the same money, maybe less. Only one
demand would, which would be that you'd have to give
Laura three hours instead of one. I guess they don't
(05:55):
need a fake Fox News of their own when they
have the fake Fox News that Rupert Murdoch gives them
for free. Although they are always running the risks, something
will happen to the real world that Fox will have
to report anyway, and Trump will see it, which is
why you will still see these spasms of rage by
him against Fox. Still, it's largely a good and efficient system,
(06:17):
and it's not very much larger nor more original in
scope than the means by which the Maga cult itself
is manipulated. Decide what you want the outcome to be,
create a phony news narrative that supports it, especially if
you can work in paranoia and racism and disguise them
as something else. Have some faithful maga Republicans say it
(06:40):
while a fax camera is on him or on her.
Put that on Fox. Trump sees it, the cult sees it.
It becomes their reality. There are pitfalls. What do you
do when Fox lies and CNN or the Washington Post
tell the truth? Well, sir, you buy CNN and the
(07:01):
Washington Post and you convert them to maga parrots. Yeah,
all that. What do you do about CBS News? Oh,
you buy CBS News and you convert it, and you
put an actual parrot named Barry Weiss in charge, which
I will get to at length in a moment with
the mystery of the broken number three CBS pencils story. Anyway,
(07:25):
when the process creates an uncomfortable clash for one of
Trump's slaves, like Speaker Mike Tiny Johnson, between Trump reality
and reality reality, Johnson can then just employ the universal solvent,
the three monkeys process. I didn't see it, I didn't
hear it. I didn't say it. Should Mayor Johnson of
(07:47):
Chicago and Governor Pritzker of Illinois be in prison? Speaker Johnson,
Mayor of Should they be in prison? Should the mayor
of Chicago and the governor of Illinois be in prison.
I'm not the attorney general. I'm the Speaker of the House,
and I'm trying to manage the chaos here. I'm not
(08:09):
following the day to day on that sure, Trump's invading cities,
threatening elected officials, and like every eleventh of those officials
is somebody Trump once appointed or favored or defended. You
remember Mike Pence, don't you, Mike Johnson? What are you
going to do on that day when you were Mike Pence?
(08:29):
But you're not following the day to day. We're all
day to day, Mike Johnson. Mike, of course, then proceeded
to go into the details of the day to day,
because like everything else, it's bullshit multiplied by stupidity. And unfortunately,
most of our Trump infested nation either doesn't understand or
doesn't know about it. And then there's that tiny sliver
(08:50):
that actually supports it, which looks sometimes like a majority,
because we forget the majority actually has no idea about this,
because it's got nothing to do with entertainment news or
sports news. Oh, Ronaldo is worth a billion dollars, Yes,
I know who he is. Why do I care how
much money he has, Why don't you do a segment
(09:10):
on instead, whether or not at forty he's still any
good at the soccer. Mike Johnson actually blew that one.
Mike Johnson should have said, I'm not following the day
to day. In fact, this morning I spent in retreat praying,
and I took a vow of silence and a vow
to not follow the day to day. Amen, thank you Jesus.
The missiles are flying. Hallelujah, Hallelujah. The idea that they
(09:37):
all know Trump's nuts and they believe they have simply
learned to ride that wave and not drown is in
fact part of the Trump origin story. In February twenty seventeen,
I looked it up February thirteenth, twenty seventeen. I was,
(09:58):
if you can imagine this, one of three guests in
the Bloomberg building here in Funds City on the Charlie
Rose Show, which used to run on PBS and Bloomberg
before Charlie's little problem with knowing where his pants and
hands were at a given moment. When that cropped up,
(10:20):
there was a guest host, Judd Apatow, and this lineup,
if you can imagine Republican strategist Ed Rollins, with whom
I had shared grudging respect and a glimmer of like
for about twenty years by that point, and Maggie Haberman,
for God's sake and me Rollins and Apatow took me seriously.
(10:43):
Haberman was condescending and dents I mentioned several times during
the taping that we were all kind of missing the
big picture, that all the analysis of what Trump had
done was discounting this fact that there had been nothing
in Trump's first three or four weeks in office that
contradicted the idea that he was crazy. And I made
(11:03):
a few references to the piece that I read here
last week, which had been written the year before. Could
Trump pass a sanity test? Well? As we finished this
surprisingly informative and non violent show, even though Maggie Haberman
was there and cameras were powered down and Mike's put away,
Ed Rollins extended his hand and smiled and it looked sincere,
and he said he always enjoyed our conversations, even though
(11:26):
he often thought I was crazy. He then laughed and said,
but you know about crazy about your Trump sanity test.
There was a long pause, and then Ed Rollins said,
you know, he is crazy. Ed Rollins gathered his belongings
(11:48):
and made for the studio exit door. Of course he's crazy, Keith,
I don't know why you need a test. Every once
(12:17):
in a while, the degradation and deterioration of American society
and particularly American journalism just sort of seeps into the
background and we stop looking at how remarkable it actually is.
At any other point in our history, if the daughter
in law of the President of the United States had
her own nominal news show on a cable news channel,
(12:39):
it would be a scandal of unbelievable proportions, even if
she were qualified. Lara Trump is qualified in the sense
that she's almost as stupid as a native born Trump,
but we no longer notice these things. I was thinking
of Lara Trump because she is wonderfully incompetent, even in
(13:01):
her role as propagandist on Fox News, lobbing softballs at
people who are barely able to answer softballs. On behalf
of her father in law. She is both the question
and the answer. But I was thinking about her because
I was trying to find somebody in my mind who
would be worse than Barry Weiss. To run CBS News.
(13:24):
Barry Weiss, if you don't know who she is, has
failed upwards from being the naivete and dumbing down editor
of New York Times Opinions. She was encouraged to leave
and left and formed a new place called the Free Press,
which is, of course, like everything else with a name
on it in media today, it is the exact opposite
(13:47):
of its title. It is not the free Press. It
is not free. There's nothing to do with freedom of
the press in it. It is just another rationalization for
fascism blog and for some reason, because it has been
dumbed down, it is essentially a substack for idiots. It
was worth one hundred and fifty million dollars to the
Ellison people, partially because they are still trying to curry
(14:11):
favor with Trump, and this was another way of lifting
up fascists who don't get enough help in this society.
As you know, there is no oppressed group in this
country today like fascists, except short, unappealing fascists. They are
even in worse positions than regular fascists. So in any event,
(14:32):
Barry Weiss was bought out for about one hundred and
fifty million dollars that's one of the reports of her
free press site. And as part of the deal, she
was put in charge of CBS News. And I was
just thinking, would Lara Trump be worse or better for
CBS News. Well, Lara Trump has now about a year's
worth of experience in television, so she'd be better qualified
(14:54):
than Barry Wise. We are watching once again those organizations
in the news when they are needed the most in
the history of this country, not only failing but voluntarily
jumping off cliffs. Here's the first step. You build up
a center and left intelligence audience that has come to
(15:19):
depend upon you over the decades, as The Washington Post did,
as CNN did. You make no bones about the fact
that the thing probably does tend to lean a little
bit liberal, because well, facts, as they say, do lean
a little bit liberal, but money leans in both directions,
(15:41):
and especially leans on liberals. And so no matter the
news organization or its origins, or its history or its
importance at the moment, if it can be sold, it
will be sold, and usually to the wrong person, even
to a person who does the right thing at first
and then figures, oh no, this is hurting my other products.
And also it's encouraging Trump to blackmail me. Hi, Jeff
(16:04):
Bezos talking to you. Bezos apparently got away with it
the first time he announced that he was being blackmailed
and he wasn't going to subject himself to it or
his now ex wife. And he stood up nobly in
the Washington Post. Was there to say that democracy dies
in darkness, and it was going to shine the light.
And then something else happened, and we don't know what
it is. But then he got married to Lauren Sanchez,
(16:26):
and all the fascists came to the wedding, and the
next thing you know, the Washington Post is throwing all
of its traditions and all of its readers out the
effing window. There is a report from the invaluable and
irreplaceable Oliver Darcy of status, formerly of CNN, who is
so important that I would expect him to be bought
(16:47):
by an Ellison anytime now, about more changes at the
Washington Post this week. Benji sorrowin the editor he reports
is gone. Benji used to work with me. He was
on countdown and several other people, according to people familiar
with the matter, are out. Contractors were not spared. He
says the legendary journalist Mark Fisher is out, who'd been
(17:09):
with the Post for nearly four decades. The Pulitzer Prize
winner David Hoffman has gone. Jack Schaefer, who I know
the media critic, is gone, and the economic columnist Heather
Long all out at the Washington Post. This while the
aforementioned Barry Weiss is taking over CBS News. Actually it's
Larry Ellison and my old friend Jeff Shell, who having
(17:30):
been basically career ended at NBC by Oh, Jeff Shell
got another chance and now we'll do whatever the fascist wants.
He is now running CBS News along with the Ellisons
and Barry Weiss, who I believe has the following experience
in television. She's managed to turn a set on once.
(17:52):
And the statement from Larry Ellison going into this debacle
in which CBS News will be what remains of it
totally dismantled and destroyed, and everybody who works there forever
have this stink of being in at the end in
which the place was killed from the inside deliberately so
that it would be silenced. Not that CBS News is
(18:13):
the leader in anything, but it is part of the firmament,
part of that remaining now porous c through skeleton of
American journalism. It's also its value, like in some respects
recently the Washington Post is more symbolic than anything else.
It's as if the Democratic Congressional Committee were now run
(18:33):
by Hawlly of Missouri. Well, he looks better in the
pictures we name. I know he's not a Democrat, but
he's really good. Larry Ellison, who made money in tech,
did a Wall Street Journal interview Monday in which he said, quote,
we want CBS to speak to that seventy percent of
(18:55):
the audience that would really define themselves at center left
to center right. Wow, you do see nobody ever thought
about that, trying to maximize the audience. Nobody in American
media ever thought once about trying to maximize the audience. Well,
what a genius Larry Ellison is. He's going to go
(19:16):
for a larger audience. Reminds me of the Bob and
Ray character from their political sketch. The guy's running for
president and they said, which party of these nomination you're
going for? And he went, I figured out a mistake
that they've all made. I'm going for both of them.
That way I can get all the votes we want
CBS to speak to that seventy percent of the audience
that would really define themselves at setter left to Setter right.
(19:38):
Mister Ellison, I understand you don't know any of this
because you've spent the last couple of decades simply counting money.
And if you're willing to spend your entire life dealing
with money, you can make all the money in the
world and miss everything else that happens in it, like
the fact that all those people at Ceter left no
longer want to talk to all those people at Ceter
(20:00):
right and vice versa. And more importantly, they do not respect,
nor understand nor eve acknowledge the existence of the other
sides institutions like CBS News, like The Washington Post, like CNN.
So what Ellison is doing at CBS with Barry Weiss
is to replace everything that exists in the history of
(20:24):
CBS News, from Edward R. Murrow to Dan Rather to
Katie Kirk. For God's sakes, everything in that entire roster, good, bad,
and okay will be replaced by right wing sewer droppings
like Barry Weise, and then just magically assume because you
(20:44):
have dumbed it down and made it available to right
wing and center right people that they will now start
watching it too. I mean, where are those left wing
people going to go. It's not like there are other
news networks. CNN did this and self destructed. The ratings
at CNN were competitive with MSNBC three years ago. Then
(21:07):
we all got licked. Chris licked as this podcast began,
so too did his reign of terror inside CNN. We
saw what happened. Everybody thought what a failure that was.
Now it was a total success. They brought him in
there to do that, to discredit everything that CNN did,
to destroy everything that worked well, to take people off
(21:29):
the air who were functioning in unusual positions because they
were kind of protected, like Don Lemon, who had a
purpose in this media ferment and who they immediately put
in a position where he could not be comfortable with
the people he was working with. Is that Don Lemon's
fault on a personal basis, Yes, But anybody who would
look at that situation and say, we're getting our money's
worth out of Don Lemon, let's move him into a
(21:51):
position where we can't possibly get thirty five cents out
of him, it's their fault. Then CNN did it, The
Washington Post did it, million and a half cancelations, something
like that in subscriptions and NOWBS under Barry Weiss, the
former naivete and dumbing down editor from New York Times Opinions,
(22:13):
a quote that The New York Times a little too
late used in its profile of mis Weiss. As she
ascended to the throne at CBS News, she told the
Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal group, you know, like
the way the Luftwaffa was influential, she told them. According
(22:33):
to The Times in twenty twenty three, ms Weiss, who
is married to a woman, quote, I know that there
are some people in this room who don't believe that
my marriage should have been legal. And that's okay because
we're all Americans who want lower taxes. Sure you don't
(22:53):
have to respect my human rights as long as we
all keep more money. This is the creature now running
CBS News as editor in chief. Sure we'll send these
people to prison camps. Sure we'll raid their homes and
march their children naked into vans while pretending we are
(23:17):
opposed to pedophilia. Sure we'll do that as long as
our taxes come down. That's my job as the editor
in chief of CBS News because I've got my marriage
and it's okay, and you guys are going to leave
me alone because I'm doing your bidding here. I believe,
(23:38):
if you look carefully, Ms Weiss, the deal you have
made is not with CBS News and the Allisons, but
with the devil. I close from something that Oliver Darcy
again wrote, and sometimes I feel as if I should
just read his piece, his newsletter when it comes to
the media. I'm quoting him, quoting Max Tanney from Semaphore.
(23:59):
Barry Weiss met apparently with the employees of CBS News
as they sat there trying to figure out what else
they could do for a living, or at least where
else they could do it, and her last line to them.
Her exhortation to them was, according to Tanny of Semaphore,
let's do the fucking news. Unquote the line, as mister
(24:21):
Darcy writes, seemingly intended as a hip rally and cry
hit the wrong note, you think, instead, leaving a number
of staffers cringing as the independents justin Barragona reported, One
CBS staffer told our Natalie Koratch that they actually laughed
at the remark. Suffice to say, if Weiss wants to
(24:43):
actually win over the hearts and minds of the staffers,
she now leads, she's going to need to do a
lot better than that. Well, that's almost unnecessary. She told
the people at CBS News, the people who have helped
to maintain CBS News in an environment that is anti news,
anti intelligence, anti washing your clothes, anti not smelling like conservatives,
(25:10):
they have kept this place together, and she's telling them,
let's do the fucking news. As if you have ever
done anything connected to news in your life, you immoral,
total loser Barry Weiss. But some things never change. The
(25:31):
last time I worked for CBS and CBS News was
nineteen ninety one. I was the lame duck sports director
of Channel two case CBS in Los Angeles owned and
operated station. Our sports cast usually finished second in the ratings,
but the newscast finished third, and they were paying me
quite a lot of money, and they had an option
for another two years of quite a lot of money,
(25:53):
about five hundred thousand dollars a year. And they had
a newscaster who wasn't very good at it who they
thought they could make back into the sportscaster and thus
just eliminate my position, not just get rid of me
and get somebody, but literally zero out the cost of
Keith Oulverman save five hundred thousand dollars. In their position,
I probably would have not picked up the option too,
(26:16):
I had been notified of this, but because it was CBS,
and because I actually am a professional and always have been,
and I've always been in this position trusted to stay
on even after my employers have told me, now we're
going to fire you in three months, we'd like you
to continue to do things. I stayed at CBS and
among other things. There was a day in late nineteen
(26:37):
ninety one when I had already been a lame duck
and had already I think, negotiated a deal to go
to ESPN. In the beginning of the new year of
nineteen ninety two, I went to the Los Angeles Forum,
the then home of the LA Lakers, and anchored from
the field in a space that was the smallest place
I've ever actually anchored from Magic Johnson's news conference in
(27:00):
which he announced he had HIV. And nothing can permit
me to explain to you what that was like, because
that was presumed at that point by everybody in that
room except Magic Johnson, to be a death sentence. If
you look at the videotapes of every station and everybody
on the air and everybody they interviewed, we're all white
as sheets, and it's not some sort of interference with
(27:22):
the signal from the basement of the LA Forum. It
was a death sentence, except he didn't make so, and
he was right and we were all wrong. And now,
just on top of everything else, God bless him. He
owns the entire town of Los Angeles, he owns half
the Dodgers, he owns every theater in Los Angeles. Bless him.
(27:44):
I always like Buck. I called him that because he said,
call me Buck. My friends call me Buck. Okay, So
now I'm the Lane Duck Sports director and the station's
in third place again, and it's kind of a golden
time for me. It was the time I enjoyed the
job the most because there really wasn't anything I could
screw up, and so if there were any restraints on
(28:05):
what I was saying on the CBS Channel two Action
News in Los Angeles, they all went away. I just said,
what I felt, and so I'm called into a meeting
in the news director's office. Now, this was I think
the fourth news director who I worked for at CBS
in LA and his name was Jose Rios, and he
was a very successful news director, though not at Channel two. Then.
(28:29):
He had just been promoted from managing editor of the
newscast after the last guy had been marched out because
he was not all there in the office. I believe
they'd had something like fifteen news directors in eighteen years.
And the woman who served as the assistant to all
of them said one of them used to sit in
the closet in the news director's office without his pants on.
(28:52):
I said, how long did he last? And she just
laughed at me. I did not realize that I had
produced a double entendre. So this is the office we're in.
It had been the control room years and years earlier.
So it was a giant office, beautifully appointed by the
news director who hired me there. And now two news
directors later, the guy who's sort of overseeing the waning
(29:13):
weeks of the Keith Olberman experience has got all of
us in the newsroom. The ratings have come out. We're
even further in third place behind NBC and ABC than
we have before. The station has been in third place
for sixteen years, ever since the suits in New York
decided that winning every ratings book between nineteen fifty four
and nineteen seventy five was insufficient, and when they finished
(29:33):
tied for second or tied for first in the spring
of nineteen seventy five, at just eleven o'clock, they wanted
six and they were tied for first at eleven. They
had to fire all the anchors, who all then dispersed
to the other stations, and all of their viewers went
with them, because that's what happens when you get rid
of the people that people are used to watching, as
Barry Weiss will soon discover, and the Ellisons and Jeff Schell.
(29:58):
So this is nineteen ninety one. This is before these
decisions were based on what you felt politically. This was
simply a matter of what the ratings looked like and
how much money you were paying for the ratings, and
whether or not they could get the ratings with somebody cheaper.
So I'm sitting in this meeting and at the beginning
of it, the assistant to Jose Rios and as I said,
(30:19):
he went on to a very successful career as the
news director at Channel eleven, and I loved working with him.
This is not about him. Somebody told him to do this.
He came in and decided to do one of these.
I was flashed back to the movie The Natural, in
which a hypnotherapist is brought in to try to convince
Robert Redford's baseball team that losing is a disease as
(30:43):
contagious as bubonic plague, that kind of thing. We did
a little exercise in trying to break the third place habit,
and so what he did, Jose's assistant, I believe her
name was Sherry Friese, handed us all number three pencils. Pencils,
not number two pencils, but number three pencil They had
(31:05):
boxes and boxes of these things, and they handed them
to everybody in the room, probably seventy to one hundred staffers,
and on que we were all supposed to break the
pencil when Jose said three two one, we were supposed
to snap the pencils in half and break the number
(31:29):
three habit. You get it. I believe I was the
only person in that room who knew they would not
be working there for certain in six or seven weeks time.
And so guess what, I didn't break the pencil, and
people looked at me like I had just destroyed the magic.
(31:49):
You didn't break the pencil, and I went, my pencil
is just fine. Thank you very much to Chas. Change
to slemm shows quote, let's do the fucking news to
(32:10):
professionals from an utter amateur. Let's do the effing news,
because I guess CBS no longer has a whole big
supply of number three pencils. Also of interest here, the
bad Bunny blowback has reached congress Woman Barney Rubble. Marjorie's
(32:34):
stupid Green wants to make English the official language in
response to Bad Bunny being selected to perform at the
Super Bowl. Which English the official language, I guess means
Marjorie Taylor Green is no longer allowed to talk ever again,
because whatever that is she's speaking, it ain't English. That's next.
(32:58):
This is countdown, George Crowing. Pleasure to have you here,
Thank you. This is the best news show. However, I
told that to one of your producers, and I want
you to know that I've seen them all and it's
just for especially the first thirty five minutes. Thank you.
It's just unparalleled. I got bad news between you and I.
We got six minutes to completely strom that in the back. Yeah,
that's good. Thank you George from wherever you are. I
(33:43):
needed that today. Still ahead on this editional countdown. I
haven't done Thurber in a while. Thursdays with Thurber, and
I want to go back to the piece that most
bizarrely gives me the most comforting times like these, which
turn out pretty much to be twenty four to seven
at the moment, a box to hide in. Next first,
(34:05):
believe it or not, there's still more new idiots to
talk about. The roundup of the miss Greens, morons and
Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's other worst persons
in the world. The runner up worse Texas Attorney General
Ken Paxton, the cockroach of the judiciary breaking. I'm launching
(34:27):
undercover operations to infiltrate and uproot leftist terror cells in Textas.
Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger. I
should have pronounced it in Texan. Leftist political terrorism a
clear present dinger. There can be no compromise with those
who want us dead. Well, Number one, that's your wife.
(34:53):
You're talking about right, those who want you dead because
this is undercover operations? Is this going to be different, Ken,
from what you normally do? I mean you're normally you're
undercover operations result in your wife suing you for divorce.
Keep your eye on the prize, Ken, Runner up everybody's
(35:16):
favorite Congressman from the CTE district, Derek van Orden. He
uses a bad word in here and also shows some
serious brain damage, so stand well back from your listening device.
Civix one oh one. The Senate requires sixty votes to
pass a bill. There are only fifty three Republicans in
the Senate. That means seven Democrats would have to vote
(35:39):
for the bill, or six could vote for it and
jd Vance would cast the tiebreaker. Follow me for more
shit you should have learned in fourth grade. Well, evidently
Derek dropped out in the third grade. That's sixty. That's
only for cloture. Cloture votes no, not cloak not closure
(36:02):
c L O t U R E. Should I spell
it for you? Things like nominations, budget reconciliations, house rules,
house rules changes. The meat and potatoes of the Senate
still simple majority fifty one forty nine or fifty one
to fifty. That's why the vice president can break a
(36:24):
fifty to fifty tie deck. Only there isn't one at
the moment, so no vance can't vote to create a
sixtieth vote. See how this works now, Civics one oh one.
My god, he failed the course to get into Civics
(36:44):
one oh one. Honestly, congressman, I'm confident there is a
walk in clinic somewhere in Wisconsin where they can take
you right now and scan your brain and see if
whatever it is is reversible. It could easily be the
onset of something serious. Your brain does not work correctly. Please,
(37:12):
here's the frightening reality. There's somebody in Congress worse than him.
Our winner, Marjorie Stupid Green, never mind the fact that
she figured out that Obamacare is necessary to keep the
cost of her own families medical premiums from doubling, has
just one burst of intelligence in a sea of gurgling crap.
(37:39):
Bad Bunny says America has four months to learn Spanish
before his perverse, unwonted performance at Super Bowl halftime. By
the way, speaker Johnson wants Lee Greenwood to perform Lee
Greenwood one hit Wonder eighty three years old. Ninety nine
percent of the country has no idea who he is
(38:00):
or that he's alive. Bad Bunny says America has four
months to learn Spanish before perverse unwanted performance at the
Super Bowl half time. It would be a good time
to pass my bill to make English the official language
of America. And the NFL needs to stop having demonic
sexual performances during its halftime shows. I know, madam, we
(38:20):
need to leave the demonic sexual performances to you in
the privacy of your own gym. But Marjorie Taylor Green,
you want to make English the official language. When you
said that we were being pushed around by the Gaspacho police,
when you said rights were being fragrantly violated, when you
(38:43):
insisted that something was like a peachtree dish, Marge, if
you make English the official language, you'll have to go
to jail because that's not what you're speaking. Dim bulb
Marjorie Taylor. She fails English and Van Orden fails fourth
(39:03):
grade social study. He's Green. Today's other worst person been
the Gyspatcho Police. It's been a long week, and every
(39:30):
time I find myself thinking it's been a long week,
I like to turn to my book of James Thurber,
and it's Fridays with Thurber. And it's been a few
fridays since I've done any James Thurber. And so let's
start at the beginning. As I've mentioned many times, I
read this story first aloud in a class in college
in nineteen seventy nine, and a friend of mine came
(39:50):
up to me and said, you should forget that sportscasting thing.
You should read Thurber for a living, And I said, yeah,
that'll ever happen. This is, for some reason, salvation for me, Catharsis,
and every other emotion that is appropriate after it has
been a long week. A Box to Hide In by
(40:13):
James Thurber. I waited till the large woman with the
awful hat took up her sack of groceries and went out,
peering at the tomatoes and the lettuce on her way.
The clerk asked me what mine was. Have you got
(40:34):
a box, I asked, A large box. I want a
box to hide in. You want a box, he asked,
I want a box to hide in. I said, what
do you mean? He said, you mean a big box?
I said, I meant a big box big enough to
hold me. I haven't got any boxes, he said, only
(40:55):
cottons that cans come in. I tried several other groceries
and none of them had a box big enough for
me to hide in. There was nothing for it but
to face life out. I didn't feel strong, and I'd
had this overpowering desire to hide in a box for
a long time. Well, what do you mean you want
(41:20):
to hide in this box, one grocer asked me. It's
a form of escape. I told him, hiding in a box.
It circumscribes your worries in the range of your anguish.
You don't see people either. How the hell do you
eat when you're in this box? Asked the grocer. How
don't the hell do you get anything to eat? I
(41:42):
said I had never been in a box and didn't know,
but that that would take care of itself. Well, he said, finally,
I haven't got any boxes, only some pasteboard cartons that
cans come in. It was the same every place. I
gave up when it got dark and the groceries closed,
and hid in my room again. I turned out the
(42:05):
light and lay on the bed. You feel better when
it gets dark. I could have hit in a closet,
I suppose, but people are always opening doors. Somebody would
find you in a closet. They would be startled, and
you'd have to tell them why you're in the closet.
Nobody pays attention to a big box lying on the floor.
(42:27):
You could stay in it for days and nobody'd think
to look in it, not even the cleaning woman. My
cleaning woman came the next morning and woke me up,
and I was still feeling bad. I asked her if
she knew where I could get a large box. How
(42:47):
big a box you want, she asked, I want a
box big enough for me to get inside of, I said.
She looked at me with big, dim eyes. There's something
wrong with her glands. She's awful, but she has a
big heart, which makes it worse. She's unbearable. Her husband
(43:08):
is sick, and her children are sick, and she is
sick too. I got to thinking how pleasant it would
be if I were in a box now and didn't
have to see her. I'd be in a box right
there in the room, and she wouldn't know. I wondered
if you had a desire to bark or laugh when
someone who doesn't know walks by the box you were in.
(43:28):
Maybe she would have a spell with her heart. If
I did that would die right there. The officers and
the elevator man and mister Grammage would find us funny,
dog gone thing happened at the building last night. The
doorman would say to his wife, I led in this
woman to clean up tenf and she never come out.
See she's never in there more in an hour, but
(43:48):
she never come out. See. So when it got time
for me to go off duty, why, I says to Credit,
who was on the elevator, I says, what the hell
you suppose has happened to that woman cleans tenf? He
says he didn't know. He says he never seen her
after he took her up. So I spoke to mister
Grammage about it. Sorry to bother you, mister Grammage, I says,
but there's something funny about that woman cleans ten f.
(44:10):
So I told him. So he said we better have
a look, and we all three goes up and knuts
on the door and rings the bells, seeing nobody answers,
so he said we'd have to walk in. So Credit
opened the door and we walked in, and here was
this woman cleans the apartment dead as a herring on
the floor, and the gentleman that lives there was in
(44:32):
a box. The cleaning woman kept looking at me. It
was hard to realize she wasn't dead. It's a form
of escape, I murmured, wat say. She asked, Dully, you
don't know of any large packing boxes, do you? I asked, now,
(44:56):
I don't. She said, I haven't found one yet. But
I still have this overpowering urge to hide in a box.
Maybe it will go away, maybe I'll be all right,
Maybe it will get worse. It's hard to say. Forty
(45:30):
six years since I first read that in public, I
still didn't get any better at it. I've done all
the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Most of our Countdown music was arranged, produced, and performed
by Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel. Our musical directors
have Countdown. It was produced by Tko Brothers. Mister Ray
was on the guitars, bass and drums. Mister Chanelle handled
(45:53):
orchestration and keyboards. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are
by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The
Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis
is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. That's the sports music when
we do sports. Other music arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today was my late
(46:14):
friend and inspiration, George Carlin. Everything else was, as always
my fault. That's countdown for today. Day two hundred and
sixty three of America held hostage again, but just twelve
hundred days, even twelve hundred until the scheduled end of
Trump's lame duck and lame brain term unless he is
(46:34):
removed sooner by MAGA and Jeffrey Epstein, or that pavement
patch on his hand, or some stuck escalator somewhere, or
the psychopathy test or Tailan Hall, or that judge guy
he doesn't like, or that judge girl or some Illinois
politician list lengthens, or the next scheduled countdown is Monday.
(46:59):
I'll warn you right here. I may take this off.
I don't know if you noticed a certain struggle recently,
but in addition to the fact that I'm having some
vision problems, it's not permanent. It's just as you don't
want to know what it is, but it's temporary. It's
just lasting longer than it should. In addition to that,
my back went out. It's like, oh my god, what
am I an old Yes? I am an old man.
(47:21):
Oh well, I may take the day off. We'll see.
The next scheduled countdown is Monday. Maybe maybe not till
then or whenever. I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is
(48:06):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio Now.
I don't want to leave the incorrect impression that I
(00:26):
am opposed to this. But Trump is talking about his
own mortality, or his own career mortality, or going to
heaven or all of the above again. At the same time,
he's talking about declaring insurrections and jailing more political opponents
like Mayor Johnson and Governor Pritzker and any one of
(00:46):
a dozen judges, including at least one he appointed. Not
prosecuting them this time, just jailing them. And as if
it could get any worse, he specifically segued from the
issue of wanting to prove to God that he's been
good to how great all those missiles are at his
naval base. Honestly, I don't know why the few remaining
(01:11):
news organizations do not have entire departments devoted to analysis
about which heart of Trump's insanity is in charge today.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
It'll be very hard to be a good country. You know,
there's no reason to be good. I want to be
good because you want to prove to God that you're good,
so you go to that next step, right, So that's
very important to me. I think it's really very important.
And yesterday was amazing. We went out, we went to
the naval base, largest in the world actually, and I
(01:43):
saw things that were incredible, the level.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Of uh.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I don't want to use the word weapons, but.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
They are weapons. The missiles are flying. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Quote
Chicago mayor should be in jail for failing to protect
ice officers. Governor Pritzker also unquote. You could read that
as saying that the Chicago mayor should be in jail
(02:10):
for failing to protect Governor Pritzker, but I don't think
that's what Trump meant. Then again, who knows you? And
I know it should be Trump in jail because he's
not only broken laws, he's nearly collected the complete set
of broken laws already, to say nothing of him being
in some kind of psychiatric facility, because whatever is wrong
(02:31):
with him, it's going faster to say nothing of his
ren Field Stephen Miller, who talk about having news departments
devoted to studying what's wrong with him Today Stephen Miller
is manipulating Trump's untetheredness to reality and convincing Trump there
really are insurrections. Then that Cash Pittzel isn't crazy when
he says five percent of Chicago residents are active gang members,
(02:54):
and Trump has long been one of those. Does what
the last person to talk to him tells him? People.
Miller has refined this into a self fulfilling prophecy machine.
Tell Trump there is an insurrection in Portland. No, no, Chicago,
Chicago turns out is easier right now. Tell him there's
(03:17):
ice agents imperiled. Get him to send troops to Chicago.
What troops? Who knows which ones are the worst, the
most paranoid, the least traceable. Get the troops to try
to provoke Chicago residents, and if they succeed, show that
to Trump on Fox News and get him to declare
whatever the residents do to be an insurrection, and poof,
(03:40):
Steven Miller has just fabricated an insurrection out of nothing
in Chicago. This formula is how they get Trump to
do anything. Really, the whole mechanism of jailing his opponents
has never been clearer than right now. You keep firing
prosecutors until somebody, the one who won Miss Uncongeniality in
(04:02):
the Beauty pageant is willing to the documents and bang
James Comy is indicted, and you can say, see, mister President,
he's been indicted. It's on Fox News. Even though ABC
reported yesterday that Trump's main government witness will testify that
Komy told him not to leak to the media, and
this witness will almost certainly be branded a hostile witness.
(04:26):
And the motion to dismiss will be filed by Komy's
defense by a week from next Monday, the twentieth, as
will the motion to unseat the fraudulently appointed HAIRD prosecutor.
And the judge yesterday said, no, we're not slow tracking
this process just so you can keep telling Trump. Look,
the Komy trials now three months long. Your damn indictment
(04:48):
was a page and a half. What Miller and Patel
and Pam Bondi do. And once again my judgment was
proved correct. From two thousand and six, I think it
was when Pam Bondy hit on me outside men's room
in the PBS station in Tampa. I think I said, dere,
(05:11):
I'm just getting in the car. I gotta go to
the airport to go to the moon. Anyway, what they
all do when the judge rules in favor of the
motion to dismiss the indictment of James Comy. I'm not sure.
Maybe just pull Trump's TVs out of the wall. I've
(05:33):
never understood why they didn't just set up their own
version of Fox News in the White House basement or
something and Taylor twenty four hours of programming just to him.
I mean, Laura Ingram would work there instead in a heartbeat.
I mean for the same money, maybe less. Only one
demand would, which would be that you'd have to give
Laura three hours instead of one. I guess they don't
(05:55):
need a fake Fox News of their own when they
have the fake Fox News that Rupert Murdoch gives them
for free. Although they are always running the risks, something
will happen to the real world that Fox will have
to report anyway, and Trump will see it, which is
why you will still see these spasms of rage by
him against Fox. Still, it's largely a good and efficient system,
(06:17):
and it's not very much larger nor more original in
scope than the means by which the Maga cult itself
is manipulated. Decide what you want the outcome to be,
create a phony news narrative that supports it, especially if
you can work in paranoia and racism and disguise them
as something else. Have some faithful maga Republicans say it
(06:40):
while a fax camera is on him or on her.
Put that on Fox. Trump sees it, the cult sees it.
It becomes their reality. There are pitfalls. What do you
do when Fox lies and CNN or the Washington Post
tell the truth? Well, sir, you buy CNN and the
(07:01):
Washington Post and you convert them to maga parrots. Yeah,
all that. What do you do about CBS News? Oh,
you buy CBS News and you convert it, and you
put an actual parrot named Barry Weiss in charge, which
I will get to at length in a moment with
the mystery of the broken number three CBS pencils story. Anyway,
(07:25):
when the process creates an uncomfortable clash for one of
Trump's slaves, like Speaker Mike Tiny Johnson, between Trump reality
and reality reality, Johnson can then just employ the universal solvent,
the three monkeys process. I didn't see it, I didn't
hear it. I didn't say it. Should Mayor Johnson of
(07:47):
Chicago and Governor Pritzker of Illinois be in prison? Speaker Johnson,
Mayor of Should they be in prison? Should the mayor
of Chicago and the governor of Illinois be in prison.
I'm not the attorney general. I'm the Speaker of the House,
and I'm trying to manage the chaos here. I'm not
(08:09):
following the day to day on that sure, Trump's invading cities,
threatening elected officials, and like every eleventh of those officials
is somebody Trump once appointed or favored or defended. You
remember Mike Pence, don't you, Mike Johnson? What are you
going to do on that day when you were Mike Pence?
(08:29):
But you're not following the day to day. We're all
day to day, Mike Johnson. Mike, of course, then proceeded
to go into the details of the day to day,
because like everything else, it's bullshit multiplied by stupidity. And unfortunately,
most of our Trump infested nation either doesn't understand or
doesn't know about it. And then there's that tiny sliver
(08:50):
that actually supports it, which looks sometimes like a majority,
because we forget the majority actually has no idea about this,
because it's got nothing to do with entertainment news or
sports news. Oh, Ronaldo is worth a billion dollars, Yes,
I know who he is. Why do I care how
much money he has, Why don't you do a segment
(09:10):
on instead, whether or not at forty he's still any
good at the soccer. Mike Johnson actually blew that one.
Mike Johnson should have said, I'm not following the day
to day. In fact, this morning I spent in retreat praying,
and I took a vow of silence and a vow
to not follow the day to day. Amen, thank you Jesus.
The missiles are flying. Hallelujah, Hallelujah. The idea that they
(09:37):
all know Trump's nuts and they believe they have simply
learned to ride that wave and not drown is in
fact part of the Trump origin story. In February twenty seventeen,
I looked it up February thirteenth, twenty seventeen. I was,
(09:58):
if you can imagine this, one of three guests in
the Bloomberg building here in Funds City on the Charlie
Rose Show, which used to run on PBS and Bloomberg
before Charlie's little problem with knowing where his pants and
hands were at a given moment. When that cropped up,
(10:20):
there was a guest host, Judd Apatow, and this lineup,
if you can imagine Republican strategist Ed Rollins, with whom
I had shared grudging respect and a glimmer of like
for about twenty years by that point, and Maggie Haberman,
for God's sake and me Rollins and Apatow took me seriously.
(10:43):
Haberman was condescending and dents I mentioned several times during
the taping that we were all kind of missing the
big picture, that all the analysis of what Trump had
done was discounting this fact that there had been nothing
in Trump's first three or four weeks in office that
contradicted the idea that he was crazy. And I made
(11:03):
a few references to the piece that I read here
last week, which had been written the year before. Could
Trump pass a sanity test? Well? As we finished this
surprisingly informative and non violent show, even though Maggie Haberman
was there and cameras were powered down and Mike's put away,
Ed Rollins extended his hand and smiled and it looked sincere,
and he said he always enjoyed our conversations, even though
(11:26):
he often thought I was crazy. He then laughed and said,
but you know about crazy about your Trump sanity test.
There was a long pause, and then Ed Rollins said,
you know, he is crazy. Ed Rollins gathered his belongings
(11:48):
and made for the studio exit door. Of course he's crazy, Keith,
I don't know why you need a test. Every once
(12:17):
in a while, the degradation and deterioration of American society
and particularly American journalism just sort of seeps into the
background and we stop looking at how remarkable it actually is.
At any other point in our history, if the daughter
in law of the President of the United States had
her own nominal news show on a cable news channel,
(12:39):
it would be a scandal of unbelievable proportions, even if
she were qualified. Lara Trump is qualified in the sense
that she's almost as stupid as a native born Trump,
but we no longer notice these things. I was thinking
of Lara Trump because she is wonderfully incompetent, even in
(13:01):
her role as propagandist on Fox News, lobbing softballs at
people who are barely able to answer softballs. On behalf
of her father in law. She is both the question
and the answer. But I was thinking about her because
I was trying to find somebody in my mind who
would be worse than Barry Weiss. To run CBS News.
(13:24):
Barry Weiss, if you don't know who she is, has
failed upwards from being the naivete and dumbing down editor
of New York Times Opinions. She was encouraged to leave
and left and formed a new place called the Free Press,
which is, of course, like everything else with a name
on it in media today, it is the exact opposite
(13:47):
of its title. It is not the free Press. It
is not free. There's nothing to do with freedom of
the press in it. It is just another rationalization for
fascism blog and for some reason, because it has been
dumbed down, it is essentially a substack for idiots. It
was worth one hundred and fifty million dollars to the
Ellison people, partially because they are still trying to curry
(14:11):
favor with Trump, and this was another way of lifting
up fascists who don't get enough help in this society.
As you know, there is no oppressed group in this
country today like fascists, except short, unappealing fascists. They are
even in worse positions than regular fascists. So in any event,
(14:32):
Barry Weiss was bought out for about one hundred and
fifty million dollars that's one of the reports of her
free press site. And as part of the deal, she
was put in charge of CBS News. And I was
just thinking, would Lara Trump be worse or better for
CBS News. Well, Lara Trump has now about a year's
worth of experience in television, so she'd be better qualified
(14:54):
than Barry Wise. We are watching once again those organizations
in the news when they are needed the most in
the history of this country, not only failing but voluntarily
jumping off cliffs. Here's the first step. You build up
a center and left intelligence audience that has come to
(15:19):
depend upon you over the decades, as The Washington Post did,
as CNN did. You make no bones about the fact
that the thing probably does tend to lean a little
bit liberal, because well, facts, as they say, do lean
a little bit liberal, but money leans in both directions,
(15:41):
and especially leans on liberals. And so no matter the
news organization or its origins, or its history or its
importance at the moment, if it can be sold, it
will be sold, and usually to the wrong person, even
to a person who does the right thing at first
and then figures, oh no, this is hurting my other products.
And also it's encouraging Trump to blackmail me. Hi, Jeff
(16:04):
Bezos talking to you. Bezos apparently got away with it
the first time he announced that he was being blackmailed
and he wasn't going to subject himself to it or
his now ex wife. And he stood up nobly in
the Washington Post. Was there to say that democracy dies
in darkness, and it was going to shine the light.
And then something else happened, and we don't know what
it is. But then he got married to Lauren Sanchez,
(16:26):
and all the fascists came to the wedding, and the
next thing you know, the Washington Post is throwing all
of its traditions and all of its readers out the
effing window. There is a report from the invaluable and
irreplaceable Oliver Darcy of status, formerly of CNN, who is
so important that I would expect him to be bought
(16:47):
by an Ellison anytime now, about more changes at the
Washington Post this week. Benji sorrowin the editor he reports
is gone. Benji used to work with me. He was
on countdown and several other people, according to people familiar
with the matter, are out. Contractors were not spared. He
says the legendary journalist Mark Fisher is out, who'd been
(17:09):
with the Post for nearly four decades. The Pulitzer Prize
winner David Hoffman has gone. Jack Schaefer, who I know
the media critic, is gone, and the economic columnist Heather
Long all out at the Washington Post. This while the
aforementioned Barry Weiss is taking over CBS News. Actually it's
Larry Ellison and my old friend Jeff Shell, who having
(17:30):
been basically career ended at NBC by Oh, Jeff Shell
got another chance and now we'll do whatever the fascist wants.
He is now running CBS News along with the Ellisons
and Barry Weiss, who I believe has the following experience
in television. She's managed to turn a set on once.
(17:52):
And the statement from Larry Ellison going into this debacle
in which CBS News will be what remains of it
totally dismantled and destroyed, and everybody who works there forever
have this stink of being in at the end in
which the place was killed from the inside deliberately so
that it would be silenced. Not that CBS News is
(18:13):
the leader in anything, but it is part of the firmament,
part of that remaining now porous c through skeleton of
American journalism. It's also its value, like in some respects
recently the Washington Post is more symbolic than anything else.
It's as if the Democratic Congressional Committee were now run
(18:33):
by Hawlly of Missouri. Well, he looks better in the
pictures we name. I know he's not a Democrat, but
he's really good. Larry Ellison, who made money in tech,
did a Wall Street Journal interview Monday in which he said, quote,
we want CBS to speak to that seventy percent of
(18:55):
the audience that would really define themselves at center left
to center right. Wow, you do see nobody ever thought
about that, trying to maximize the audience. Nobody in American
media ever thought once about trying to maximize the audience. Well,
what a genius Larry Ellison is. He's going to go
(19:16):
for a larger audience. Reminds me of the Bob and
Ray character from their political sketch. The guy's running for
president and they said, which party of these nomination you're
going for? And he went, I figured out a mistake
that they've all made. I'm going for both of them.
That way I can get all the votes we want
CBS to speak to that seventy percent of the audience
that would really define themselves at setter left to Setter right.
(19:38):
Mister Ellison, I understand you don't know any of this
because you've spent the last couple of decades simply counting money.
And if you're willing to spend your entire life dealing
with money, you can make all the money in the
world and miss everything else that happens in it, like
the fact that all those people at Ceter left no
longer want to talk to all those people at Ceter
(20:00):
right and vice versa. And more importantly, they do not respect,
nor understand nor eve acknowledge the existence of the other
sides institutions like CBS News, like The Washington Post, like CNN.
So what Ellison is doing at CBS with Barry Weiss
is to replace everything that exists in the history of
(20:24):
CBS News, from Edward R. Murrow to Dan Rather to
Katie Kirk. For God's sakes, everything in that entire roster, good, bad,
and okay will be replaced by right wing sewer droppings
like Barry Weise, and then just magically assume because you
(20:44):
have dumbed it down and made it available to right
wing and center right people that they will now start
watching it too. I mean, where are those left wing
people going to go. It's not like there are other
news networks. CNN did this and self destructed. The ratings
at CNN were competitive with MSNBC three years ago. Then
(21:07):
we all got licked. Chris licked as this podcast began,
so too did his reign of terror inside CNN. We
saw what happened. Everybody thought what a failure that was.
Now it was a total success. They brought him in
there to do that, to discredit everything that CNN did,
to destroy everything that worked well, to take people off
(21:29):
the air who were functioning in unusual positions because they
were kind of protected, like Don Lemon, who had a
purpose in this media ferment and who they immediately put
in a position where he could not be comfortable with
the people he was working with. Is that Don Lemon's
fault on a personal basis, Yes, But anybody who would
look at that situation and say, we're getting our money's
worth out of Don Lemon, let's move him into a
(21:51):
position where we can't possibly get thirty five cents out
of him, it's their fault. Then CNN did it, The
Washington Post did it, million and a half cancelations, something
like that in subscriptions and NOWBS under Barry Weiss, the
former naivete and dumbing down editor from New York Times Opinions,
(22:13):
a quote that The New York Times a little too
late used in its profile of mis Weiss. As she
ascended to the throne at CBS News, she told the
Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal group, you know, like
the way the Luftwaffa was influential, she told them. According
(22:33):
to The Times in twenty twenty three, ms Weiss, who
is married to a woman, quote, I know that there
are some people in this room who don't believe that
my marriage should have been legal. And that's okay because
we're all Americans who want lower taxes. Sure you don't
(22:53):
have to respect my human rights as long as we
all keep more money. This is the creature now running
CBS News as editor in chief. Sure we'll send these
people to prison camps. Sure we'll raid their homes and
march their children naked into vans while pretending we are
(23:17):
opposed to pedophilia. Sure we'll do that as long as
our taxes come down. That's my job as the editor
in chief of CBS News because I've got my marriage
and it's okay, and you guys are going to leave
me alone because I'm doing your bidding here. I believe,
(23:38):
if you look carefully, Ms Weiss, the deal you have
made is not with CBS News and the Allisons, but
with the devil. I close from something that Oliver Darcy
again wrote, and sometimes I feel as if I should
just read his piece, his newsletter when it comes to
the media. I'm quoting him, quoting Max Tanney from Semaphore.
(23:59):
Barry Weiss met apparently with the employees of CBS News
as they sat there trying to figure out what else
they could do for a living, or at least where
else they could do it, and her last line to them.
Her exhortation to them was, according to Tanny of Semaphore,
let's do the fucking news. Unquote the line, as mister
(24:21):
Darcy writes, seemingly intended as a hip rally and cry
hit the wrong note, you think, instead, leaving a number
of staffers cringing as the independents justin Barragona reported, One
CBS staffer told our Natalie Koratch that they actually laughed
at the remark. Suffice to say, if Weiss wants to
(24:43):
actually win over the hearts and minds of the staffers,
she now leads, she's going to need to do a
lot better than that. Well, that's almost unnecessary. She told
the people at CBS News, the people who have helped
to maintain CBS News in an environment that is anti news,
anti intelligence, anti washing your clothes, anti not smelling like conservatives,
(25:10):
they have kept this place together, and she's telling them,
let's do the fucking news. As if you have ever
done anything connected to news in your life, you immoral,
total loser Barry Weiss. But some things never change. The
(25:31):
last time I worked for CBS and CBS News was
nineteen ninety one. I was the lame duck sports director
of Channel two case CBS in Los Angeles owned and
operated station. Our sports cast usually finished second in the ratings,
but the newscast finished third, and they were paying me
quite a lot of money, and they had an option
for another two years of quite a lot of money,
(25:53):
about five hundred thousand dollars a year. And they had
a newscaster who wasn't very good at it who they
thought they could make back into the sportscaster and thus
just eliminate my position, not just get rid of me
and get somebody, but literally zero out the cost of
Keith Oulverman save five hundred thousand dollars. In their position,
I probably would have not picked up the option too,
(26:16):
I had been notified of this, but because it was CBS,
and because I actually am a professional and always have been,
and I've always been in this position trusted to stay
on even after my employers have told me, now we're
going to fire you in three months, we'd like you
to continue to do things. I stayed at CBS and
among other things. There was a day in late nineteen
(26:37):
ninety one when I had already been a lame duck
and had already I think, negotiated a deal to go
to ESPN. In the beginning of the new year of
nineteen ninety two, I went to the Los Angeles Forum,
the then home of the LA Lakers, and anchored from
the field in a space that was the smallest place
I've ever actually anchored from Magic Johnson's news conference in
(27:00):
which he announced he had HIV. And nothing can permit
me to explain to you what that was like, because
that was presumed at that point by everybody in that
room except Magic Johnson, to be a death sentence. If
you look at the videotapes of every station and everybody
on the air and everybody they interviewed, we're all white
as sheets, and it's not some sort of interference with
(27:22):
the signal from the basement of the LA Forum. It
was a death sentence, except he didn't make so, and
he was right and we were all wrong. And now,
just on top of everything else, God bless him. He
owns the entire town of Los Angeles, he owns half
the Dodgers, he owns every theater in Los Angeles. Bless him.
(27:44):
I always like Buck. I called him that because he said,
call me Buck. My friends call me Buck. Okay, So
now I'm the Lane Duck Sports director and the station's
in third place again, and it's kind of a golden
time for me. It was the time I enjoyed the
job the most because there really wasn't anything I could
screw up, and so if there were any restraints on
(28:05):
what I was saying on the CBS Channel two Action
News in Los Angeles, they all went away. I just said,
what I felt, and so I'm called into a meeting
in the news director's office. Now, this was I think
the fourth news director who I worked for at CBS
in LA and his name was Jose Rios, and he
was a very successful news director, though not at Channel two. Then.
(28:29):
He had just been promoted from managing editor of the
newscast after the last guy had been marched out because
he was not all there in the office. I believe
they'd had something like fifteen news directors in eighteen years.
And the woman who served as the assistant to all
of them said one of them used to sit in
the closet in the news director's office without his pants on.
(28:52):
I said, how long did he last? And she just
laughed at me. I did not realize that I had
produced a double entendre. So this is the office we're in.
It had been the control room years and years earlier.
So it was a giant office, beautifully appointed by the
news director who hired me there. And now two news
directors later, the guy who's sort of overseeing the waning
(29:13):
weeks of the Keith Olberman experience has got all of
us in the newsroom. The ratings have come out. We're
even further in third place behind NBC and ABC than
we have before. The station has been in third place
for sixteen years, ever since the suits in New York
decided that winning every ratings book between nineteen fifty four
and nineteen seventy five was insufficient, and when they finished
(29:33):
tied for second or tied for first in the spring
of nineteen seventy five, at just eleven o'clock, they wanted
six and they were tied for first at eleven. They
had to fire all the anchors, who all then dispersed
to the other stations, and all of their viewers went
with them, because that's what happens when you get rid
of the people that people are used to watching, as
Barry Weiss will soon discover, and the Ellisons and Jeff Schell.
(29:58):
So this is nineteen ninety one. This is before these
decisions were based on what you felt politically. This was
simply a matter of what the ratings looked like and
how much money you were paying for the ratings, and
whether or not they could get the ratings with somebody cheaper.
So I'm sitting in this meeting and at the beginning
of it, the assistant to Jose Rios and as I said,
(30:19):
he went on to a very successful career as the
news director at Channel eleven, and I loved working with him.
This is not about him. Somebody told him to do this.
He came in and decided to do one of these.
I was flashed back to the movie The Natural, in
which a hypnotherapist is brought in to try to convince
Robert Redford's baseball team that losing is a disease as
(30:43):
contagious as bubonic plague, that kind of thing. We did
a little exercise in trying to break the third place habit,
and so what he did, Jose's assistant, I believe her
name was Sherry Friese, handed us all number three pencils. Pencils,
not number two pencils, but number three pencil They had
(31:05):
boxes and boxes of these things, and they handed them
to everybody in the room, probably seventy to one hundred staffers,
and on que we were all supposed to break the
pencil when Jose said three two one, we were supposed
to snap the pencils in half and break the number
(31:29):
three habit. You get it. I believe I was the
only person in that room who knew they would not
be working there for certain in six or seven weeks time.
And so guess what, I didn't break the pencil, and
people looked at me like I had just destroyed the magic.
(31:49):
You didn't break the pencil, and I went, my pencil
is just fine. Thank you very much to Chas. Change
to slemm shows quote, let's do the fucking news to
(32:10):
professionals from an utter amateur. Let's do the effing news,
because I guess CBS no longer has a whole big
supply of number three pencils. Also of interest here, the
bad Bunny blowback has reached congress Woman Barney Rubble. Marjorie's
(32:34):
stupid Green wants to make English the official language in
response to Bad Bunny being selected to perform at the
Super Bowl. Which English the official language, I guess means
Marjorie Taylor Green is no longer allowed to talk ever again,
because whatever that is she's speaking, it ain't English. That's next.
(32:58):
This is countdown, George Crowing. Pleasure to have you here,
Thank you. This is the best news show. However, I
told that to one of your producers, and I want
you to know that I've seen them all and it's
just for especially the first thirty five minutes. Thank you.
It's just unparalleled. I got bad news between you and I.
We got six minutes to completely strom that in the back. Yeah,
that's good. Thank you George from wherever you are. I
(33:43):
needed that today. Still ahead on this editional countdown. I
haven't done Thurber in a while. Thursdays with Thurber, and
I want to go back to the piece that most
bizarrely gives me the most comforting times like these, which
turn out pretty much to be twenty four to seven
at the moment, a box to hide in. Next first,
(34:05):
believe it or not, there's still more new idiots to
talk about. The roundup of the miss Greens, morons and
Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's other worst persons
in the world. The runner up worse Texas Attorney General
Ken Paxton, the cockroach of the judiciary breaking. I'm launching
(34:27):
undercover operations to infiltrate and uproot leftist terror cells in Textas.
Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger. I
should have pronounced it in Texan. Leftist political terrorism a
clear present dinger. There can be no compromise with those
who want us dead. Well, Number one, that's your wife.
(34:53):
You're talking about right, those who want you dead because
this is undercover operations? Is this going to be different, Ken,
from what you normally do? I mean you're normally you're
undercover operations result in your wife suing you for divorce.
Keep your eye on the prize, Ken, Runner up everybody's
(35:16):
favorite Congressman from the CTE district, Derek van Orden. He
uses a bad word in here and also shows some
serious brain damage, so stand well back from your listening device.
Civix one oh one. The Senate requires sixty votes to
pass a bill. There are only fifty three Republicans in
the Senate. That means seven Democrats would have to vote
(35:39):
for the bill, or six could vote for it and
jd Vance would cast the tiebreaker. Follow me for more
shit you should have learned in fourth grade. Well, evidently
Derek dropped out in the third grade. That's sixty. That's
only for cloture. Cloture votes no, not cloak not closure
(36:02):
c L O t U R E. Should I spell
it for you? Things like nominations, budget reconciliations, house rules,
house rules changes. The meat and potatoes of the Senate
still simple majority fifty one forty nine or fifty one
to fifty. That's why the vice president can break a
(36:24):
fifty to fifty tie deck. Only there isn't one at
the moment, so no vance can't vote to create a
sixtieth vote. See how this works now, Civics one oh one.
My god, he failed the course to get into Civics
(36:44):
one oh one. Honestly, congressman, I'm confident there is a
walk in clinic somewhere in Wisconsin where they can take
you right now and scan your brain and see if
whatever it is is reversible. It could easily be the
onset of something serious. Your brain does not work correctly. Please,
(37:12):
here's the frightening reality. There's somebody in Congress worse than him.
Our winner, Marjorie Stupid Green, never mind the fact that
she figured out that Obamacare is necessary to keep the
cost of her own families medical premiums from doubling, has
just one burst of intelligence in a sea of gurgling crap.
(37:39):
Bad Bunny says America has four months to learn Spanish
before his perverse, unwonted performance at Super Bowl halftime. By
the way, speaker Johnson wants Lee Greenwood to perform Lee
Greenwood one hit Wonder eighty three years old. Ninety nine
percent of the country has no idea who he is
(38:00):
or that he's alive. Bad Bunny says America has four
months to learn Spanish before perverse unwanted performance at the
Super Bowl half time. It would be a good time
to pass my bill to make English the official language
of America. And the NFL needs to stop having demonic
sexual performances during its halftime shows. I know, madam, we
(38:20):
need to leave the demonic sexual performances to you in
the privacy of your own gym. But Marjorie Taylor Green,
you want to make English the official language. When you
said that we were being pushed around by the Gaspacho police,
when you said rights were being fragrantly violated, when you
(38:43):
insisted that something was like a peachtree dish, Marge, if
you make English the official language, you'll have to go
to jail because that's not what you're speaking. Dim bulb
Marjorie Taylor. She fails English and Van Orden fails fourth
(39:03):
grade social study. He's Green. Today's other worst person been
the Gyspatcho Police. It's been a long week, and every
(39:30):
time I find myself thinking it's been a long week,
I like to turn to my book of James Thurber,
and it's Fridays with Thurber. And it's been a few
fridays since I've done any James Thurber. And so let's
start at the beginning. As I've mentioned many times, I
read this story first aloud in a class in college
in nineteen seventy nine, and a friend of mine came
(39:50):
up to me and said, you should forget that sportscasting thing.
You should read Thurber for a living, And I said, yeah,
that'll ever happen. This is, for some reason, salvation for me, Catharsis,
and every other emotion that is appropriate after it has
been a long week. A Box to Hide In by
(40:13):
James Thurber. I waited till the large woman with the
awful hat took up her sack of groceries and went out,
peering at the tomatoes and the lettuce on her way.
The clerk asked me what mine was. Have you got
(40:34):
a box, I asked, A large box. I want a
box to hide in. You want a box, he asked,
I want a box to hide in. I said, what
do you mean? He said, you mean a big box?
I said, I meant a big box big enough to
hold me. I haven't got any boxes, he said, only
(40:55):
cottons that cans come in. I tried several other groceries
and none of them had a box big enough for
me to hide in. There was nothing for it but
to face life out. I didn't feel strong, and I'd
had this overpowering desire to hide in a box for
a long time. Well, what do you mean you want
(41:20):
to hide in this box, one grocer asked me. It's
a form of escape. I told him, hiding in a box.
It circumscribes your worries in the range of your anguish.
You don't see people either. How the hell do you
eat when you're in this box? Asked the grocer. How
don't the hell do you get anything to eat? I
(41:42):
said I had never been in a box and didn't know,
but that that would take care of itself. Well, he said, finally,
I haven't got any boxes, only some pasteboard cartons that
cans come in. It was the same every place. I
gave up when it got dark and the groceries closed,
and hid in my room again. I turned out the
(42:05):
light and lay on the bed. You feel better when
it gets dark. I could have hit in a closet,
I suppose, but people are always opening doors. Somebody would
find you in a closet. They would be startled, and
you'd have to tell them why you're in the closet.
Nobody pays attention to a big box lying on the floor.
(42:27):
You could stay in it for days and nobody'd think
to look in it, not even the cleaning woman. My
cleaning woman came the next morning and woke me up,
and I was still feeling bad. I asked her if
she knew where I could get a large box. How
(42:47):
big a box you want, she asked, I want a
box big enough for me to get inside of, I said.
She looked at me with big, dim eyes. There's something
wrong with her glands. She's awful, but she has a
big heart, which makes it worse. She's unbearable. Her husband
(43:08):
is sick, and her children are sick, and she is
sick too. I got to thinking how pleasant it would
be if I were in a box now and didn't
have to see her. I'd be in a box right
there in the room, and she wouldn't know. I wondered
if you had a desire to bark or laugh when
someone who doesn't know walks by the box you were in.
(43:28):
Maybe she would have a spell with her heart. If
I did that would die right there. The officers and
the elevator man and mister Grammage would find us funny,
dog gone thing happened at the building last night. The
doorman would say to his wife, I led in this
woman to clean up tenf and she never come out.
See she's never in there more in an hour, but
(43:48):
she never come out. See. So when it got time
for me to go off duty, why, I says to Credit,
who was on the elevator, I says, what the hell
you suppose has happened to that woman cleans tenf? He
says he didn't know. He says he never seen her
after he took her up. So I spoke to mister
Grammage about it. Sorry to bother you, mister Grammage, I says,
but there's something funny about that woman cleans ten f.
(44:10):
So I told him. So he said we better have
a look, and we all three goes up and knuts
on the door and rings the bells, seeing nobody answers,
so he said we'd have to walk in. So Credit
opened the door and we walked in, and here was
this woman cleans the apartment dead as a herring on
the floor, and the gentleman that lives there was in
(44:32):
a box. The cleaning woman kept looking at me. It
was hard to realize she wasn't dead. It's a form
of escape, I murmured, wat say. She asked, Dully, you
don't know of any large packing boxes, do you? I asked, now,
(44:56):
I don't. She said, I haven't found one yet. But
I still have this overpowering urge to hide in a box.
Maybe it will go away, maybe I'll be all right,
Maybe it will get worse. It's hard to say. Forty
(45:30):
six years since I first read that in public, I
still didn't get any better at it. I've done all
the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Most of our Countdown music was arranged, produced, and performed
by Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel. Our musical directors
have Countdown. It was produced by Tko Brothers. Mister Ray
was on the guitars, bass and drums. Mister Chanelle handled
(45:53):
orchestration and keyboards. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are
by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The
Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis
is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. That's the sports music when
we do sports. Other music arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today was my late
(46:14):
friend and inspiration, George Carlin. Everything else was, as always
my fault. That's countdown for today. Day two hundred and
sixty three of America held hostage again, but just twelve
hundred days, even twelve hundred until the scheduled end of
Trump's lame duck and lame brain term unless he is
(46:34):
removed sooner by MAGA and Jeffrey Epstein, or that pavement
patch on his hand, or some stuck escalator somewhere, or
the psychopathy test or Tailan Hall, or that judge guy
he doesn't like, or that judge girl or some Illinois
politician list lengthens, or the next scheduled countdown is Monday.
(46:59):
I'll warn you right here. I may take this off.
I don't know if you noticed a certain struggle recently,
but in addition to the fact that I'm having some
vision problems, it's not permanent. It's just as you don't
want to know what it is, but it's temporary. It's
just lasting longer than it should. In addition to that,
my back went out. It's like, oh my god, what
am I an old Yes? I am an old man.
(47:21):
Oh well, I may take the day off. We'll see.
The next scheduled countdown is Monday. Maybe maybe not till
then or whenever. I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is
(48:06):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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