March 6, 2023 • 41 mins
EPISODE 147: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:42) SPECIAL COMMENT: Donald Trump is this close to declaring himself God. His announcement to his ever-grieved angry real-victim-here Cult of Karens -- "I AM YOUR RETRIBUTION" illustrates that even his eight-year long terrorist attack on this country had at least one more level to go. Trump has now imbued the 2024 GOP race with vengeance and vendetta. And a vote for Trump in 2024 is a vote for retribution and vengeance - and bloodshed.
And thanks to a failed actor who looks disturbingly like the cartoon character "Quagmire" from "Family Guy," Michael Knowles, we now know the first targets of Trump's mob. "Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life, entirely." While Knowles tries the fascist trick of saying he never said transgender PEOPLE must be eradicated, most people have missed the key word in that hateful utterance. It's not "eradicated" it's "entirely," and it renders Knowles's hairsplitting meaningless.
B-Block (16:45) IN SPORTS: One of the best of baseball's announcers, Dave Wills of the Tampa Bay Rays, has died suddenly, and the sport is grieving. (23:13) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Russian prime minister gets laughed at, a Florida Republican does something so dumb Newt Gingrich slams him, and Mr. Non-Opinion Journalism at Fox "News," Bret Baier, turns out to be just as bad as the rest of them.
C-Block (30:48) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Brothers Brooklyn and Butter (31:49) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: One minute I was ruminating on the unappreciated beauty of the Hudson River as seen from a commuter train. The next they were prying me loose from the window I had become frozen to.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. We
are this close to Donald Trump declaring himself to be God.
(00:29):
I am your warrior, I am your jestice. And for
those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.
I am your retribution. I have said all this before,
and you at least have thought all this before. Trump
is manifestly insane, worse now even than twenty sixteen. Having
touched ultimate power and received unconditional support from his cultists,
(00:52):
he lives only to gain it again. If it is
granted to him. He will not voluntarily give it up
in his lifetime. He is our hitler, the Hitler of
nineteen thirty three, not of nineteen forty, not yet. And
that statement about retribution wreaking either of the twisted mind
of Stephen Miller or someone trying to one up Stephen
(01:14):
Miller escalates Trump's eight year long terrorist attack on this
nation to a different level to one of Dorothy Parker's
fresh hells. If this country permits him to be nominated
for president, if we permit him to be nominated for president,
if you and I permit him to be nominated for president,
by that action, we will be setting the stage not
(01:35):
just for the vengeance and vendettas and bloodthirst's. Trump has
vowed to enact theoretically on behalf of his cult, but
in reality, on behalf of himself and the largest ego,
the least burdened by conscience of any person living. But
just another Trump campaign would again magnify and multiply the
(01:57):
obsession with political violence on the right and within the
Republican Party. Since the monster said these words Saturday night
at Seepack, they have become the fascist new rallying cry,
I am your retribution, saying America has had the audacity
to vote them all out to beat their brains in
(02:19):
when they resorted to violence. We have arrested them, We
have prosecuted them, We have searched the home of their
deified leader. We have accused him of crimes, and most
certainly will prosecute him for crimes. And we most importantly
have refused to bend to their will, their certainty, their
theocratic madness, their whiteness. And we will be punished you
(02:44):
and I because a vote for Trump in twenty twenty
four is a vote for retribution, four vengeance for bloodshed.
Trump's targets have always been obvious. They're always the same
in any state which descend into fascism and dictatorship and
(03:06):
worship of the chosen one. It can be argued, with
some success that the victimization and scapegoating of the other
that Trump promised in twenty sixteen was never fully executed, because,
no matter how much the system failed to isolate him
and prosecute him and remove him from office for his
hundreds of crimes, the bureaucracy did drag him down. What
(03:29):
he could not do himself immediately, what he did not
know how to do himself immediately, was immediately impeded by
everything from people around him with weak consciences, but consciences nonetheless,
and in the final acts of madness and rebellion and
insubordination by the sheer incompetence of the idiots he chose
(03:49):
to do it for him. In short, for nearly all
of Trump's presidency, he was on defense. Do you want
to give him another chance to play offense? Do you
want to give him another chance to focus that violence
and the need of his cultists to blame and persecute
and identify the other and kill them. Do you want
(04:15):
to give him another chance to make the calculation that
there are two kinds of people in this world, and
there are enough of the latter in this country. The
escapegoats and bullies and targets and kills enough of one
minority group or another which they hate. They will support
him when he tries to stay in power, because we
(04:36):
already know the first group he'll target. At that same
conservative political action conference, the one dedicated to true American values,
the one run by the married guy being sued for
groping another conservative man during a conservative campaign, the essence
of the last year of fascist attacks on LGBTQ people,
(04:59):
on trans people, on medicine, on science, on supporters, allies,
and in the fascist mind, that's all one thing, even
though in reality it is not all one thing. The
essence of where I am. Your retribution will be directed
first where this year priming the cult to hate and
(05:20):
threaten and ultimately kill quote groomers unquote is going to
lead him and the cult. All that was focused and
directed by a child named Michael Knowles, a failed actor
with a disturbing resemblance to the loathsome family guy cartoon
character Quagmire, an individual who has found his own loathsome
(05:44):
calling as a salesman of hate to those who live
to hate. Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,
the whole preposterous ideology at every level, to an America
rightly horrified by the call for genocide, Knowles tried the
(06:07):
oldest conservative trick in the book. He didn't say that
he's going to sue. He never said eradicate people who
are transgender. He said transgender ism must be eradicated. The
debate which has followed has been performative and largely irrelevant.
Listen again to that clip and recognize with me for
(06:28):
a moment that the keyword he spits out in it
is not eradicated. It is a different word, and that
word renders this debate about what he really meant meaningless.
Transgenderism that must be eradicated from public life entirely, the
whole preposterous ideology at every level. The keyword is not eradicated.
(06:54):
The keyword is entirely. He said transgenderism must be eradicated
from public life entirely, and entirely means entirely, completely, exclusively, totally, holy.
If I am going to eradicate something entirely that means
(07:16):
everything connected to it, not just the idea of it,
nor the process, nor the acceptance, nor the science, nor
the future nor the past, but the people who defend
the idea and the people who are involved with the process,
and the people who encourage the acceptance, and the people
who participate in the science. The word is entirely, and
if you say that something must be eradicated entirely, entirely
(07:39):
excludes nothing. It has been suggested that if you want
to know what Knolls really meant, you should just substitute
a word or phrase for transgenderism and rewrite that sentence
a word like blackness or judaism, and imagine the reaction.
Then I suggest you try the word trumpism. What would
(08:01):
happen if a Knolls got up there and said Trumpism
must be aradicated from public life entirely, as Knowels and
his fellow putred, opportunistic, amoral, arrested development scumbags have already
attacked transgenderism. Have they not attacked transgender people? Have they
(08:28):
not attacked doctors, counselors, schools, hospitals, supporters, politicians? Have they
not already shown what Michael Knowles meant when he said
transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely. Did they
issue some sort of asterisk saying only attacked the idea,
not any of the people involved. And we all missed that.
(08:50):
All of us missed it, including the fascists who killed
more than thirty transgender people in this country last year,
and more than three hundred in the ten years since
the Human Rights Campaign began tracking this nightmare, and entirely
the genocidal word there is entirely. Oh and if you
(09:11):
somehow miss that point Noel's real point, don't forget, he
added later, quote at every level, I am your retribution.
Trump has not yet grasped the scythe his imitators have
begun to swing at those whose genders and sexuality they
(09:32):
do not understand, or they fear, or they hate, or
they see in themselves and don't want to. But he
will against what group? Has he not? This is a
creature who has managed to defend anti Semitism and defend
the new theocratical fascists of Israel, sometimes in the same speech.
On Saturday, though, Trump's stuck to a more familiar target,
(09:54):
and they will be the victims of I Am your retribution.
His original favorite hate groups. Under my leadership, we will
use all necessary stay, local, federal, and military resources to
carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.
And we will pick them up, and we will throw
(10:17):
them out of our country. And there will be no
questions asked, no questions asked, so no laws, no appeals,
nothing but trucks driving people to the border. This time,
Trump is cleverly insisting that he means only gang members
here illegally. But if you can unilaterally deport somebody because
(10:38):
you say he is a gang member, you can also
unilaterally say what defines a gang. I often wonder as
I watch the vanity campaigns spring up, even on the
Republican side, about the people who, in the present climate
of Trump and DeSantis and this infant Gnols and this
(11:00):
idiot Marjorie Taylor Green and the other merchants of prejudice
and hate and retribution, all these people who could never
get ten percent support in the current climate for the
Republican nomination. Nicky Hailey, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, vibek Ramaswamy,
and man, does he not understand the party he's allied
(11:20):
himself with. I think about them often, and I wonder
if the light has ever flashed above their heads, even
just momentarily. Do they hear what I just said that
in the present climate of Trump and Descantis, not one
of them could ever get ten percent. Do they think
even for a moment, Well, yeah, that's true, because if
(11:40):
something happened to Trump and Descantis, somebody else would step
up and run as Trump could be Trump Junior could
be Stephen Millard. Lord knows who'd be willing to do
it and who they would be willing to follow. Do
they ever think, Yeah, I can't win in this climate,
and thus my only chance is to change the climate,
to change the climate somehow. If not for this nomination,
(12:02):
then for the next one. What would happen if Haley
or Pompeio or even Pence stood up and said, Donald
Trump is insane, he is without principles or beliefs. I
know him, I worked for him. You do not matter
to him. Only he matters to him. He would kill
(12:24):
you to become president. He is a terrorist. He is
our hitler. What if one of them said that, or
if that is far too strong, and I suspect it
would be in each case I have mentioned, could one
of them simply stand in front of the evangelicals, the
alleged Christians, the self pronounced God fearing people, and point
(12:45):
out that Trump Saturday Night has now declared himself to
be retribution, when there God has already said, vengeance is mine,
(13:10):
still ahead of us. In this edition of Countdown, a
Republican idea is so bad, so Unamerican, that even newt
Gingrich thinks it's Unamerican. There is great sadness in baseball
today as one of the most popular local broadcasters of
the game dies suddenly, and a city and a sport
week and in an all new edition of Things, I
promised not to tell the day the conductor had to
(13:33):
help me prime my face off the window of the
twelve fifty three to Grand Central because it had frozen there.
That's next, this Ciscountdown. This is Countdown with Keith over me.
(13:54):
There is a great sadness in baseball today and in
one of its major league cities. That sadness will continue
for literally decades to come. Odds are probably pretty good.
You never heard Dave Wills broadcast baseball game, and I
am sorry about that. He was just terrific at it.
(14:15):
Dave Wills began with the Chicago White Sox, and since
two thousand and five he had done the games of
the Tampa Bay Rays. And he had one of those gigantic,
larger than life radio voices that all of them used
to have that I had envied since I was a kid.
It was strong and broad and yet welcoming and friendly,
with the happy side effect of imparting any game or
(14:35):
any team with that big game flavor. Dave did the
Tampa games for eighteen years. He broadcast Saturday's exhibition game
against the Yankees at George Steinbrenner Field in Tampa with
his partner For all of those years, Andy Freed. The
voice boomed Saturday, hearty and with sixcinct descriptions and just
(14:56):
that edge of acerbity and doubt that made it clear
he covered that team, He liked that team, He was
paid by that team. But he would never, ever, ever
lie just to make that team look better than it deserved.
Most importantly, the booming voice this spring had seemingly reassured
everybody who got so scared last September that, at age
(15:16):
fifty eight, Dave Wills was just fine. There had been
a spell of tachycardia last year rapid irregular heartbeat. He
had been hospitalized in Toronto. He missed about two weeks,
but Dave was back for the playoffs and he'd had
a good winter. Sometime early Sunday morning, Dave Wills died
in his sleep, in his bed in his home with
(15:38):
his family in LUTs, Florida. There's no official word yet,
but it seems almost certain it had something to do
with his heart. But who knows, And ultimately that is
not the point. I had wanted to be a play
by play baseball announcer from the age of eight, right
after I realized I would never get over my fear
of getting hit in the head with the ball through
(15:58):
the same set of circumstances that gave me so many
extraordinary great breaks in my career. Ever even got a
chance to find out if it was worth the slog
that the job requires to be good enough for the
big leagues. That would be three years driving around the
Carolina League or the Midwest League or the California State League,
working by yourself and wondering if anybody was listening, and
(16:21):
after you said something really dumb, hoping nobody was anyway.
I had done one play by play game in my
life baseball on TV for ESPN in nineteen ninety three,
and it was okay. And then I went into news
and went to other networks and I didn't do any
more play by play. But when I went back to
(16:42):
ESPN in twenty eighteen, part of the deal was, and
it was half their idea and half mine, that we
should find out if maybe, at the age of fifty nine,
I could, after all I had done in baseball break
in as a rookie play by play man. I did.
I think five games, one on TV, four on radio,
and more were scheduled, but I had a health issue
(17:02):
that kept me from traveling, and then the pandemic in
twenty twenty made the whole thing academic. And to be fair,
I had flashes of brilliance. Absolutely some of my play
by play, especially in that TV game, was really really good.
On the other hand, every mistake that I would have
made in those three years I did not spend driving
(17:25):
around the Carolina League I made during those five games.
I think I could do it, and do it really well,
even just starting now, and I need to go to
the Carolina League for at least a year. Opening day
is April sixth, and I'm sixty four years old. And
I mentioned all this here in an obituary because the
(17:49):
first game I did for ESPN Radio June fourteenth, twenty eighteen,
was at Yankee Stadium here in New York, and the
visiting team was the Tampa Bay Rays and their announcers
Andy Freed and Dave Wills. My out of body experience
began sometime on the twelfth or the thirteenth. I think
(18:11):
it was amplified by my realization as I walked into
the Yankee Stadium that afternoon that the fact that I
had not spent three days in the Carolina League, let
alone three years, was likely to come out at some point.
Jim Bowden did the game with me. He was a
great help. John Sterling and Susan Waldman, the Yankees announcers
friends for decades, could not have been more supportive. But
(18:33):
the guy who talked me back into my body that day,
reminding me of all the broadcast I had done in
other fields that were way more like baseball play by
play than I had ever thought or realized. The man
who did that was Dave Wills. I can still see
him sitting across from me at dinner in the Yankee
Stadium press room. As my anxiety was growing, just remember
(18:58):
to say what you see. If you don't see it,
tell the audience that if it's funny, laugh, if it's sad, cry,
just be honest with your listener. And if it goes
really bad, well, hell, just tap on the glass between
your booth and our booth and either Andy or I
will come over and we'll fill in for you while
you go get sick in the bathroom. I still don't
(19:24):
know if that broadcast I did was any good or not.
Still haven't listened to it. I know it was not
as good as Dave Wills, and I do know that
his joke about getting sick gave me a laugh that
made me pretty much myself again. If it's funny, laugh,
if it's sad, cry, Dave Wills is gone and a
(19:49):
lot of us are crying today. Okay. I had one
(20:09):
moment I was ruminating on the underrated beauty of the
Hudson River. The next moment, I was trying to dislodge
myself from the train window to which I had become stuck.
Next first time for the daily roundup of the miscrants,
morons and Donning Kruger Effect, specimens who constitute today's worst
persons in the world. The bronze Sergei Lavrov, the slime
(20:31):
bucket who happens to be Foreign Minister of Russia. I
presume you have seen this, but sometimes it's better when
you're only hearing the audio. This is what happens when
you forget you are not talking to people as gullible
or as cowed as Russians, that you're outside your own bubble.
I would have thought Lavrov would have noticed this because
he was speaking English and not Russian. But no, not
(20:52):
so much. This was Friday in New Delhi at the
Racina Dialogue multinational conference in India. You know the war
we show we are trying to stop and which was
lunched against us using the Ukrainian people. Of course, it influenced, influenced,
(21:18):
influenced the policy of Russia, including energy policy. I assume
the bell there was them ordering him off the stage
like on the Old Gong Show with Chuck Barris, the
runner up Florida State Senator Jason Brodure And what have
you been up to? Jason? He's the bozo who introduced
(21:41):
the legislation I mentioned the other day that would require
bloggers who write about Ron de Fascist or other members
of his regime to register with the State of Florida
and find them up to twenty five hundred dollars per
blog post if they failed to report, if they had
been paid for writing about him, and if so by whom.
How fascist is Senator Brodure's idea, how pathetic, how outside
(22:03):
anything resembled in the mainstream, how un american quote. The
idea that bloggers criticizing a politician should register with the
government is insane, writes one critic. It is an embarrassment
that it is a Republican state legislator in Florida who
introduced a bill to that effect. He should withdraw it immediately.
Who wrote that note? Gangridge wrote that, Jason, you just
(22:27):
defended Newt Gingridge's sense of the freedom of the press.
Newt Gingridge one for posts suspending parts of the First
Amendment to stop terrorists from using emails. But our winner,
Brett Bear Fox quote news unquote. I also mentioned this
last week when I listed ten life hacks to destroy
(22:49):
that channel, some of which you can try at home.
Years ago, at a White House Correspondence dinner, Brett Bear
came up to me and very nicely, very earnestly, as
if I didn't understand or had never been told this.
He explained that at Fox there were really two networks,
the opinion one that O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and the
new guy they'd just hired after we'd fired him, Tucker
(23:09):
Carlson and the others worked at, and then the non
opinion network where he Brett Baer and Chris Wallace and
some other people worked at. See I smiled and shook
his hand and went, I don't think he understands well.
Sure enough, what pops up in The New York Times
over the weekend a play by play account of the
recording of a Fox quote news unquote zoom call after
(23:31):
the twenty twenty elections, some of which Peter Baker of
The Times I'd put in one of those. I saved
this stuff till I got the publisher's advance books, and
some of which he had not. Also, there were other
internal communications from inside the castle. Rupert and who were
the two people quoted most extensively, not just moaning about
the damage Fox did to itself by being the first
(23:53):
outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden, but suggesting the
call should be reversed. Tucker Carlson now, Sean Hannity now,
Maria Bardaromo, Martha McCallum, the Fox non opinion clown who
on January sixth had congratulated the insurrectionists on their victory
(24:16):
and how they had quote disrupted the system, and Bret Bair.
Baker's piece in The Times quotes an email Bear sent
two days after the election to Fox executive Jay Wallace.
It's hurting us, mister journalism, wrote of calling Arizona for Biden.
The sooner we pull it, even if it gives us
major egg, and put it back in his column. The
(24:39):
better we are, in my opinion, end quote from Brett Bear.
Everything that is wrong with Fox, how people who might
have been journalists, even you know, ordinary biased conservative journalists,
how they were poisoned by the perpetuation of the big
lie is in one part of Brett Bear's email. There,
(25:00):
the sooner we pull the call of Arizona for Biden
and put it back in his Trump's column the better.
Of course, Arizona was never in Trump's column. It never
would be. Trump lost Arizona. And here is Fox's primary
supposed news anchor and he cannot conceive that Trump could
have lost, or that the neutral default position should be
(25:21):
that nobody had won Arizona. If you changed the call
in Arizona would mean nobody had won it to Brett Bear.
Neutrality journalism non opinion was to assume that Trump had won.
Brett just as bad as the rest of them. Bear
Today's worst parson and still ahead on countdown. So what
(25:57):
my face stuck to the side of the train and
they had to help break me free, Like that's never
happened to you? An all new edition of Things I
promised not to tell. Coming up first. In each you
just to countdown, we feature a dog in need you
can help. Every dog has its day. Two of them today,
Brooklyn and Butter. They are brothers. More carnage at the
(26:21):
New York Pound. These are big canaid Corsos. They're only
brought in last Thursday. They're already on the kill list.
They came in relaxed, affectionate, respectful to adults, kids and
other dogs alike. Now already they are stressed and terrified
and too dangerous to be let out of their kennels.
According to the pound handlers, in five days in the
(26:41):
care of the City of New York. This happened. Your
pledges to save Brooklyn and Butter can prevent this unnecessary tragedy.
They will help a rescue group pull them out and
save them and train them. Look for Brooklyn and Butter
on my Twitter feed and retweet them if you can.
I thank you and Brooklyn and Butter. Thank you to
(27:17):
the number one story on the Countdown and things I
promised not to tell. And this is anything but an
important career story. But I was reminded of it recently
and I laughed like hell, so I thought, maybe you
should too. I haven't seen all of them in this country,
but to my mind, the most underrated of American rivers
is the one I grew up along. The Hudson gets
a bad rap because it's associated with New York City
(27:39):
and the deteriorating remnants of the city's once dominant piers,
some of which have been unused and rotting for half
a century now. But further upstate, literally just past the
city line, the Hudson is a magnificent river just to watch,
never mind ride on. This is particularly true during a
stretch in which the western side of the river is
(28:00):
fronted by a series of sheer cliffs called the Palisades,
brownish black and striated carved as the river took shape
millions of years ago, but always looking like they had
been carefully designed for esthetic effect. Unfortunately, they are best
seen from the commuter railroad that runs along the Hudson
into Westchester County, New York, instead of a series of
(28:22):
parks or even private palaces. Our forefathers had the presence
of mind to build factories and copper processing plants and
other nightmares right on the Hudson because of the obvious
transportation benefits the Hudson provided, and so the train tracks
were laid out next to the river because that made
it even easier to get stuff to and from the
big city. And damn the views or the ability to
(28:44):
appreciate life on the water or the pollution. Still, if
you ever find yourself now taking a train from Grand
Central Station into the western half of Westchester, get a
window seat on the left side of the trainer. Better yet,
when you come back into New York City, sit on
the right side, on the river side, and you will
(29:05):
get fifteen minutes or more of the most magnificent view
imaginable out the big windows. Winters, spring summer or fall,
the palisades provide the Hudson with a magnificent frame that's
almost like a miniature Grand Canyon. I remember thinking of
all this that one day early in nineteen eighty I
(29:26):
was finally feeling a little better thanks to doctor Cecilini.
Doctor Cecillini had been my physician since I was a boy,
and he was the school doctor, and he'd been the
town doctor since about nineteen forty four, and he always
name dropped other patients I'd never heard of. And as
I finished my last growth spurt at the end of
my twentieth year, I had frequent back pain, no fun
(29:47):
at all, and sleeping on the floor helped a little,
but not enough. And finally Cellini, who had been a
hospital doctor during World War Two and had seen everything,
said hey, just get this prescription filled. Take one on
them every day for the next week. It's called a
muscle relaxing. No solos up your back, all this lessen
the pain. Well, bet, just don't you know, don't operate
(30:11):
any heavy machinery. You operate heavy machinery, and you do
those sportscast arts. Keith had a patient try to run
a processor at the Copper factory. While I took this
nineteen fifty seven lost three fingers. Leonardo ben Venuti. You
know what ben venutis used to live on William Street,
I laughed. This was him every time, the ben Venuti's
(30:34):
on William Street, the Smiths on William Street, the Williams
on Smith Street. Anyway, back to the muscle relaxings, I
don't think I had ever heard of them before, let
alone taken one. I took my barking back to the
pharmacy in my hometown of Hastings on Hudson, New York.
I got the prescription filled, I bought a soda at
the pizza parlor across the street, and I ambled down
(30:56):
the tiny village's picturesque business district. It's three blocks long,
past the statue our old neighbor Jacques Lipschitz donated, and
the ultra modern library, and right into the train station.
It was January. It was about twelve degrees and as
I waited for the train to make its forty minute
trip into the city and my job as a sportscaster
for the radio network of United Press International, I took
(31:18):
the pill what were they called again, muscle muscle relaxants
that doctor C had given me and given his other patient,
Rico Randazzo, Or was that some guy he mentioned in
nineteen sixty six to me? I worked the night shift
at UPI, so the train was almost always empty, and
thus I almost always had my choice of window seats.
(31:40):
Midday and midwinter combined to make the sun glistened with
extra sparkle off the magnificent Hudson, and the sun's angle
was such that the palisades behind them gleamed brightly as well.
And I was thinking about just how gorgeous they were,
and how underrated the Hudson was, and I felt myself
(32:03):
drifting away. I felt two hands, one on each shoulder,
shaking me violently. Hey buddy, Hey, Hey, hey, hey buddy.
I fought to open my eyes and to avoid the
bad breath now enveloping my face. As I finally came around,
I realized it was the conductor who had just taken
my ticket. The train wasn't moving. In fact, only half
(32:25):
of the lights were on in the train. The palisades
were long gone, not the Hudson nor the palisades, but
darkness came in through the windows. I was completely confused
and I'd shake it off. You got to get out
of here. This is as far as we go. Train's
going out of service. You don't get off now, you'll
be parked under thirty seventh straight for the rest of
the day. Through my fog and my haze, I finally
(32:48):
began to understand what had happened and where I was,
and I began to try to stand when a horrifying
awareness overtook me. I could not move the right side
of my face. What was worse, I could barely feel
the right side of my face. Good God, what had
happened to me? Was this like that haunting episode of
(33:08):
Alfred Hitchcock where the woman is struggling to wake up
and remembered the details of the accident out on San
Francisco Bay the night before, only as it finally comes
back to her, it turns out the accident had drowned
her boyfriend, and the reason it was so difficult to
remember was, as she realized only when she got up
and saw her reflection in a mirror, that the accident
hadn't happened last night, but it had happened in nineteen
(33:30):
oh five, and she'd been in an insane asylum for
half a century? Was that what had happened to me? No, Actually,
as I discovered when my struggle finally freed my face
from the train window to which it had stuck, because
I had drooled for like thirty five consecutive minutes, because
I had taken the muscle relaxing, because I had taken
(33:52):
an honest empty stomach, because I knew nothing about muscle relaxins.
Because I was out cold with my mouth open, pressed
up against the train window on a twelve degree day,
and I had gotten froze into the glass. Looked it
was not quite half a century in an insane asylum,
but certainly more embarrassing. It seemed like it took me
(34:15):
half a century to pull all of this together. I
stood up wobbly. I apologized to the conductor, and I
mumbled back back pain, new new drug. And as I
banked from one side of the doorway to the other
and bounced out onto the platform, the conductor shouted after me,
only take him at night, Huh that little saga? Yeah, Doc,
(34:41):
my back is better, But I left half the skin
on my right cheek frozen into the one twenty from
Hastings the Grand Central, He'd probably say, yeah, that happened
to another patient of mine, Carlo Johambardo. That reminded me
of a much later story from doctor Cecilini, and I
don't want to leave the wrong impression here. Edward Cellini
was a terrific doctor. He practiced into his nineties. He
(35:04):
used to tell me to come visit him at his
practice in his home on Farragut Parkway. Anytime I was
up from the city visiting my folks, well, I just
shout the raise and he'd tell me about something about
treating Umberto Flambini in the Army Hospital in nineteen forty four.
And he'd asked me if I went to school with
Marco Bartellini, and then say he had to go. He
was taking a course over at Suny Purchase about the
(35:26):
latest computer aided diagnostic tool. The man was ninety years old.
He never stopped learning. Great man, and did he howl
at the muscle relaxing story. So sorry I didn't warn you.
Oh wow, I just tell him at night. I had
another patient through that nineteen seventeen or in anyway. Now
(35:47):
it's nineteen ninety five and I'm working at ESPN and
I'm supposed to fly to Vancouver to do a cameo
in an Adam Sandler golf movie, which I suppose was
Happy Gilmour, and I didn't want to try to fly
to Chicago and then change for Vancouver after going the
two hours from the middle of Connecticut to JFK. So
I came in to my folks house the day before
(36:07):
I took the folks out to dinner. I stayed over
in the spare room to leave from their house to
the airport in the morning, and at some point in
the middle of the night, I began to have chest pains.
Literally the top of my ribs hurt and my breathing
was constricted, and I couldn't get back to sleep. And
now I'm thinking, I don't know what's wrong, but something
is wrong. So I canceled the trip and I head
up to doctor Cecilimini as soon as he's opened up
(36:30):
shop and he's eighty five now, and he gives me
the big welcome as usual, and I tell him the
story and he says, oh, yeah, to think it's not
gonna worry about, but we wish you get this on
the record just case your movie company gets fissy with
you about canceling. Dad happened to another friend of mine,
patient Francesco Lola Bridgeta. I had a cameo and Moby
Dick in nineteen fifty six. He had cancel. They wanted it, soume,
(36:53):
how about you get your dad, just drive you up
to the hospital Dobbs Ferry, and I'll meet you there
and I'll like half an hour hour and a half
something like that. Let me just run a couple of
tests on you when we got you up. There's no
run whatsoever. What's our now? He stares off into space
for a second, and he looks back and he says,
I gotta I got an idea a little simpler. I
(37:13):
have to go there later up to drop off some
paperwork on some other guy, Frisco Gaspucci. No, Frisco any
just give me a second. I'll call him. I'll tell
him we're coming up, and I just you just hop
in the car with me and go out and waiting room.
I'm gonna call him about Frisco. And I gotta worry
about doctor patient confidentiality. But about Frisco Gaspucci, Sai, you
know I gotta worry about that. So I don't want
(37:34):
you to listening. So now ed Cecily and he's driving
me to Dobbs Ferry Hospital and I'm thinking about how
much he defines the idea of a really dedicated doctor,
and how every other patient he's ever mentioned to me,
I've never heard of one of them. And we get
to the hospital, I don't know. We talked about baseball
or my folks or something, and he drives right up
to the er and we walk in like it's nothing,
(37:55):
and he waves to the admitting nurse. Hi, Shi, how's
your son Shilla? And he points at me says he's
the guy, and he says, like it was absolutely the
way they do at every hospital. You can go all
his info from him after we run this little check
on him, all right, And we go right into the
room and two nurses are in there and they say hi,
and one of them tells me to take off my shirt.
The other starts shaving places on my chest, and before
(38:18):
I know what's happening, I've got electrodes on me and
they're hooking me up to an EKG and they're drawing
blood in CELINI reads the start of the EKJ print
out and he smiles at me, says, I'm sorry. I
scammed you. But the way you described your chest pains,
I thought it was fifty fifty had had a heart attack.
Last thing I wanted to do is tell you that,
jessin case you had had a heart attack and then
you had another one that happened to another patient of mine,
(38:39):
Bernardo Petya Sante. You know Bernardo. Oh, well, I letly this. Ah,
you're fine, Let me just wait on the blood gases,
double check that, go out there and do the paperwork
ship at the desk. I think it's just a muscle problem.
The son of a gun had not only made sure
I didn't know it might be serious, it might be
(39:01):
heart attack serious, but he conned me into going to
the emergency room without alarming me or even letting me
know that was his plan all along. And as I'm
brushing the shaved hairs off my chest and putting my
shirt on, I say thanks, And then it hits me, Hey,
another thing, Doc, Bernardo Pietra Sante and Umberto Flambini and
(39:23):
all these other patients you've mentioned all these years. They
don't really exist, do they? And he says, oh, you
got me about that. I'll learn a long time ago.
Make sure your patient never feels like they're the first
idiot to have done this to themselves. Come on, I'll
give you a lift back to your folks. Might look
in and see how your dad's doing. If he's gotten moment,
(39:56):
how I missed. Doctor Cecilini should be a snatchoo to
him in Hastings. Thank you for listening. Countdown has come
to you from the studios of the Old Woman Broadcasting
Empire High Top, its headquarters in the Sports Capsule Building
here in New York. Executive director in Berto Flambini. Here
are the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced
and performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Channel, who
(40:18):
are the Countdown musical directors. Produced by t Ko Brothers.
All orchestration and keyboards by John Philip Channel. Guitars based
on drums by Brian Ray. Other Beetsoven selections have been
arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music
is the Olderman theme from ESPN two and it was
written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical
comments by Nancy Fauss. The best baseball stadium organist ever
(40:41):
our announcer today was Stevie Van's aunt. Everything else is
pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this, the
seven hundred and ninetieth day since Donald Trump's first attempted
COO against the democratically elected government in the United States.
Arrest him now while we still can. The next scheduled
countdown is tomorrow. Until then, I'm Keith Oldruman. Good morning,
good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith
(41:09):
Alerman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. We
are this close to Donald Trump declaring himself to be God.
(00:29):
I am your warrior, I am your jestice. And for
those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.
I am your retribution. I have said all this before,
and you at least have thought all this before. Trump
is manifestly insane, worse now even than twenty sixteen. Having
touched ultimate power and received unconditional support from his cultists,
(00:52):
he lives only to gain it again. If it is
granted to him. He will not voluntarily give it up
in his lifetime. He is our hitler, the Hitler of
nineteen thirty three, not of nineteen forty, not yet. And
that statement about retribution wreaking either of the twisted mind
of Stephen Miller or someone trying to one up Stephen
(01:14):
Miller escalates Trump's eight year long terrorist attack on this
nation to a different level to one of Dorothy Parker's
fresh hells. If this country permits him to be nominated
for president, if we permit him to be nominated for president,
if you and I permit him to be nominated for president,
by that action, we will be setting the stage not
(01:35):
just for the vengeance and vendettas and bloodthirst's. Trump has
vowed to enact theoretically on behalf of his cult, but
in reality, on behalf of himself and the largest ego,
the least burdened by conscience of any person living. But
just another Trump campaign would again magnify and multiply the
(01:57):
obsession with political violence on the right and within the
Republican Party. Since the monster said these words Saturday night
at Seepack, they have become the fascist new rallying cry,
I am your retribution, saying America has had the audacity
to vote them all out to beat their brains in
(02:19):
when they resorted to violence. We have arrested them, We
have prosecuted them, We have searched the home of their
deified leader. We have accused him of crimes, and most
certainly will prosecute him for crimes. And we most importantly
have refused to bend to their will, their certainty, their
theocratic madness, their whiteness. And we will be punished you
(02:44):
and I because a vote for Trump in twenty twenty
four is a vote for retribution, four vengeance for bloodshed.
Trump's targets have always been obvious. They're always the same
in any state which descend into fascism and dictatorship and
(03:06):
worship of the chosen one. It can be argued, with
some success that the victimization and scapegoating of the other
that Trump promised in twenty sixteen was never fully executed, because,
no matter how much the system failed to isolate him
and prosecute him and remove him from office for his
hundreds of crimes, the bureaucracy did drag him down. What
(03:29):
he could not do himself immediately, what he did not
know how to do himself immediately, was immediately impeded by
everything from people around him with weak consciences, but consciences nonetheless,
and in the final acts of madness and rebellion and
insubordination by the sheer incompetence of the idiots he chose
(03:49):
to do it for him. In short, for nearly all
of Trump's presidency, he was on defense. Do you want
to give him another chance to play offense? Do you
want to give him another chance to focus that violence
and the need of his cultists to blame and persecute
and identify the other and kill them. Do you want
(04:15):
to give him another chance to make the calculation that
there are two kinds of people in this world, and
there are enough of the latter in this country. The
escapegoats and bullies and targets and kills enough of one
minority group or another which they hate. They will support
him when he tries to stay in power, because we
(04:36):
already know the first group he'll target. At that same
conservative political action conference, the one dedicated to true American values,
the one run by the married guy being sued for
groping another conservative man during a conservative campaign, the essence
of the last year of fascist attacks on LGBTQ people,
(04:59):
on trans people, on medicine, on science, on supporters, allies,
and in the fascist mind, that's all one thing, even
though in reality it is not all one thing. The
essence of where I am. Your retribution will be directed
first where this year priming the cult to hate and
(05:20):
threaten and ultimately kill quote groomers unquote is going to
lead him and the cult. All that was focused and
directed by a child named Michael Knowles, a failed actor
with a disturbing resemblance to the loathsome family guy cartoon
character Quagmire, an individual who has found his own loathsome
(05:44):
calling as a salesman of hate to those who live
to hate. Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,
the whole preposterous ideology at every level, to an America
rightly horrified by the call for genocide, Knowles tried the
(06:07):
oldest conservative trick in the book. He didn't say that
he's going to sue. He never said eradicate people who
are transgender. He said transgender ism must be eradicated. The
debate which has followed has been performative and largely irrelevant.
Listen again to that clip and recognize with me for
(06:28):
a moment that the keyword he spits out in it
is not eradicated. It is a different word, and that
word renders this debate about what he really meant meaningless.
Transgenderism that must be eradicated from public life entirely, the
whole preposterous ideology at every level. The keyword is not eradicated.
(06:54):
The keyword is entirely. He said transgenderism must be eradicated
from public life entirely, and entirely means entirely, completely, exclusively, totally, holy.
If I am going to eradicate something entirely that means
(07:16):
everything connected to it, not just the idea of it,
nor the process, nor the acceptance, nor the science, nor
the future nor the past, but the people who defend
the idea and the people who are involved with the process,
and the people who encourage the acceptance, and the people
who participate in the science. The word is entirely, and
if you say that something must be eradicated entirely, entirely
(07:39):
excludes nothing. It has been suggested that if you want
to know what Knolls really meant, you should just substitute
a word or phrase for transgenderism and rewrite that sentence
a word like blackness or judaism, and imagine the reaction.
Then I suggest you try the word trumpism. What would
(08:01):
happen if a Knolls got up there and said Trumpism
must be aradicated from public life entirely, as Knowels and
his fellow putred, opportunistic, amoral, arrested development scumbags have already
attacked transgenderism. Have they not attacked transgender people? Have they
(08:28):
not attacked doctors, counselors, schools, hospitals, supporters, politicians? Have they
not already shown what Michael Knowles meant when he said
transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely. Did they
issue some sort of asterisk saying only attacked the idea,
not any of the people involved. And we all missed that.
(08:50):
All of us missed it, including the fascists who killed
more than thirty transgender people in this country last year,
and more than three hundred in the ten years since
the Human Rights Campaign began tracking this nightmare, and entirely
the genocidal word there is entirely. Oh and if you
(09:11):
somehow miss that point Noel's real point, don't forget, he
added later, quote at every level, I am your retribution.
Trump has not yet grasped the scythe his imitators have
begun to swing at those whose genders and sexuality they
(09:32):
do not understand, or they fear, or they hate, or
they see in themselves and don't want to. But he
will against what group? Has he not? This is a
creature who has managed to defend anti Semitism and defend
the new theocratical fascists of Israel, sometimes in the same speech.
On Saturday, though, Trump's stuck to a more familiar target,
(09:54):
and they will be the victims of I Am your retribution.
His original favorite hate groups. Under my leadership, we will
use all necessary stay, local, federal, and military resources to
carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.
And we will pick them up, and we will throw
(10:17):
them out of our country. And there will be no
questions asked, no questions asked, so no laws, no appeals,
nothing but trucks driving people to the border. This time,
Trump is cleverly insisting that he means only gang members
here illegally. But if you can unilaterally deport somebody because
(10:38):
you say he is a gang member, you can also
unilaterally say what defines a gang. I often wonder as
I watch the vanity campaigns spring up, even on the
Republican side, about the people who, in the present climate
of Trump and DeSantis and this infant Gnols and this
(11:00):
idiot Marjorie Taylor Green and the other merchants of prejudice
and hate and retribution, all these people who could never
get ten percent support in the current climate for the
Republican nomination. Nicky Hailey, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, vibek Ramaswamy,
and man, does he not understand the party he's allied
(11:20):
himself with. I think about them often, and I wonder
if the light has ever flashed above their heads, even
just momentarily. Do they hear what I just said that
in the present climate of Trump and Descantis, not one
of them could ever get ten percent. Do they think
even for a moment, Well, yeah, that's true, because if
(11:40):
something happened to Trump and Descantis, somebody else would step
up and run as Trump could be Trump Junior could
be Stephen Millard. Lord knows who'd be willing to do
it and who they would be willing to follow. Do
they ever think, Yeah, I can't win in this climate,
and thus my only chance is to change the climate,
to change the climate somehow. If not for this nomination,
(12:02):
then for the next one. What would happen if Haley
or Pompeio or even Pence stood up and said, Donald
Trump is insane, he is without principles or beliefs. I
know him, I worked for him. You do not matter
to him. Only he matters to him. He would kill
(12:24):
you to become president. He is a terrorist. He is
our hitler. What if one of them said that, or
if that is far too strong, and I suspect it
would be in each case I have mentioned, could one
of them simply stand in front of the evangelicals, the
alleged Christians, the self pronounced God fearing people, and point
(12:45):
out that Trump Saturday Night has now declared himself to
be retribution, when there God has already said, vengeance is mine,
(13:10):
still ahead of us. In this edition of Countdown, a
Republican idea is so bad, so Unamerican, that even newt
Gingrich thinks it's Unamerican. There is great sadness in baseball
today as one of the most popular local broadcasters of
the game dies suddenly, and a city and a sport
week and in an all new edition of Things, I
promised not to tell the day the conductor had to
(13:33):
help me prime my face off the window of the
twelve fifty three to Grand Central because it had frozen there.
That's next, this Ciscountdown. This is Countdown with Keith over me.
(13:54):
There is a great sadness in baseball today and in
one of its major league cities. That sadness will continue
for literally decades to come. Odds are probably pretty good.
You never heard Dave Wills broadcast baseball game, and I
am sorry about that. He was just terrific at it.
(14:15):
Dave Wills began with the Chicago White Sox, and since
two thousand and five he had done the games of
the Tampa Bay Rays. And he had one of those gigantic,
larger than life radio voices that all of them used
to have that I had envied since I was a kid.
It was strong and broad and yet welcoming and friendly,
with the happy side effect of imparting any game or
(14:35):
any team with that big game flavor. Dave did the
Tampa games for eighteen years. He broadcast Saturday's exhibition game
against the Yankees at George Steinbrenner Field in Tampa with
his partner For all of those years, Andy Freed. The
voice boomed Saturday, hearty and with sixcinct descriptions and just
(14:56):
that edge of acerbity and doubt that made it clear
he covered that team, He liked that team, He was
paid by that team. But he would never, ever, ever
lie just to make that team look better than it deserved.
Most importantly, the booming voice this spring had seemingly reassured
everybody who got so scared last September that, at age
(15:16):
fifty eight, Dave Wills was just fine. There had been
a spell of tachycardia last year rapid irregular heartbeat. He
had been hospitalized in Toronto. He missed about two weeks,
but Dave was back for the playoffs and he'd had
a good winter. Sometime early Sunday morning, Dave Wills died
in his sleep, in his bed in his home with
(15:38):
his family in LUTs, Florida. There's no official word yet,
but it seems almost certain it had something to do
with his heart. But who knows, And ultimately that is
not the point. I had wanted to be a play
by play baseball announcer from the age of eight, right
after I realized I would never get over my fear
of getting hit in the head with the ball through
(15:58):
the same set of circumstances that gave me so many
extraordinary great breaks in my career. Ever even got a
chance to find out if it was worth the slog
that the job requires to be good enough for the
big leagues. That would be three years driving around the
Carolina League or the Midwest League or the California State League,
working by yourself and wondering if anybody was listening, and
(16:21):
after you said something really dumb, hoping nobody was anyway.
I had done one play by play game in my
life baseball on TV for ESPN in nineteen ninety three,
and it was okay. And then I went into news
and went to other networks and I didn't do any
more play by play. But when I went back to
(16:42):
ESPN in twenty eighteen, part of the deal was, and
it was half their idea and half mine, that we
should find out if maybe, at the age of fifty nine,
I could, after all I had done in baseball break
in as a rookie play by play man. I did.
I think five games, one on TV, four on radio,
and more were scheduled, but I had a health issue
(17:02):
that kept me from traveling, and then the pandemic in
twenty twenty made the whole thing academic. And to be fair,
I had flashes of brilliance. Absolutely some of my play
by play, especially in that TV game, was really really good.
On the other hand, every mistake that I would have
made in those three years I did not spend driving
(17:25):
around the Carolina League I made during those five games.
I think I could do it, and do it really well,
even just starting now, and I need to go to
the Carolina League for at least a year. Opening day
is April sixth, and I'm sixty four years old. And
I mentioned all this here in an obituary because the
(17:49):
first game I did for ESPN Radio June fourteenth, twenty eighteen,
was at Yankee Stadium here in New York, and the
visiting team was the Tampa Bay Rays and their announcers
Andy Freed and Dave Wills. My out of body experience
began sometime on the twelfth or the thirteenth. I think
(18:11):
it was amplified by my realization as I walked into
the Yankee Stadium that afternoon that the fact that I
had not spent three days in the Carolina League, let
alone three years, was likely to come out at some point.
Jim Bowden did the game with me. He was a
great help. John Sterling and Susan Waldman, the Yankees announcers
friends for decades, could not have been more supportive. But
(18:33):
the guy who talked me back into my body that day,
reminding me of all the broadcast I had done in
other fields that were way more like baseball play by
play than I had ever thought or realized. The man
who did that was Dave Wills. I can still see
him sitting across from me at dinner in the Yankee
Stadium press room. As my anxiety was growing, just remember
(18:58):
to say what you see. If you don't see it,
tell the audience that if it's funny, laugh, if it's sad, cry,
just be honest with your listener. And if it goes
really bad, well, hell, just tap on the glass between
your booth and our booth and either Andy or I
will come over and we'll fill in for you while
you go get sick in the bathroom. I still don't
(19:24):
know if that broadcast I did was any good or not.
Still haven't listened to it. I know it was not
as good as Dave Wills, and I do know that
his joke about getting sick gave me a laugh that
made me pretty much myself again. If it's funny, laugh,
if it's sad, cry, Dave Wills is gone and a
(19:49):
lot of us are crying today. Okay. I had one
(20:09):
moment I was ruminating on the underrated beauty of the
Hudson River. The next moment, I was trying to dislodge
myself from the train window to which I had become stuck.
Next first time for the daily roundup of the miscrants,
morons and Donning Kruger Effect, specimens who constitute today's worst
persons in the world. The bronze Sergei Lavrov, the slime
(20:31):
bucket who happens to be Foreign Minister of Russia. I
presume you have seen this, but sometimes it's better when
you're only hearing the audio. This is what happens when
you forget you are not talking to people as gullible
or as cowed as Russians, that you're outside your own bubble.
I would have thought Lavrov would have noticed this because
he was speaking English and not Russian. But no, not
(20:52):
so much. This was Friday in New Delhi at the
Racina Dialogue multinational conference in India. You know the war
we show we are trying to stop and which was
lunched against us using the Ukrainian people. Of course, it influenced, influenced,
(21:18):
influenced the policy of Russia, including energy policy. I assume
the bell there was them ordering him off the stage
like on the Old Gong Show with Chuck Barris, the
runner up Florida State Senator Jason Brodure And what have
you been up to? Jason? He's the bozo who introduced
(21:41):
the legislation I mentioned the other day that would require
bloggers who write about Ron de Fascist or other members
of his regime to register with the State of Florida
and find them up to twenty five hundred dollars per
blog post if they failed to report, if they had
been paid for writing about him, and if so by whom.
How fascist is Senator Brodure's idea, how pathetic, how outside
(22:03):
anything resembled in the mainstream, how un american quote. The
idea that bloggers criticizing a politician should register with the
government is insane, writes one critic. It is an embarrassment
that it is a Republican state legislator in Florida who
introduced a bill to that effect. He should withdraw it immediately.
Who wrote that note? Gangridge wrote that, Jason, you just
(22:27):
defended Newt Gingridge's sense of the freedom of the press.
Newt Gingridge one for posts suspending parts of the First
Amendment to stop terrorists from using emails. But our winner,
Brett Bear Fox quote news unquote. I also mentioned this
last week when I listed ten life hacks to destroy
(22:49):
that channel, some of which you can try at home.
Years ago, at a White House Correspondence dinner, Brett Bear
came up to me and very nicely, very earnestly, as
if I didn't understand or had never been told this.
He explained that at Fox there were really two networks,
the opinion one that O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and the
new guy they'd just hired after we'd fired him, Tucker
(23:09):
Carlson and the others worked at, and then the non
opinion network where he Brett Baer and Chris Wallace and
some other people worked at. See I smiled and shook
his hand and went, I don't think he understands well.
Sure enough, what pops up in The New York Times
over the weekend a play by play account of the
recording of a Fox quote news unquote zoom call after
(23:31):
the twenty twenty elections, some of which Peter Baker of
The Times I'd put in one of those. I saved
this stuff till I got the publisher's advance books, and
some of which he had not. Also, there were other
internal communications from inside the castle. Rupert and who were
the two people quoted most extensively, not just moaning about
the damage Fox did to itself by being the first
(23:53):
outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden, but suggesting the
call should be reversed. Tucker Carlson now, Sean Hannity now,
Maria Bardaromo, Martha McCallum, the Fox non opinion clown who
on January sixth had congratulated the insurrectionists on their victory
(24:16):
and how they had quote disrupted the system, and Bret Bair.
Baker's piece in The Times quotes an email Bear sent
two days after the election to Fox executive Jay Wallace.
It's hurting us, mister journalism, wrote of calling Arizona for Biden.
The sooner we pull it, even if it gives us
major egg, and put it back in his column. The
(24:39):
better we are, in my opinion, end quote from Brett Bear.
Everything that is wrong with Fox, how people who might
have been journalists, even you know, ordinary biased conservative journalists,
how they were poisoned by the perpetuation of the big
lie is in one part of Brett Bear's email. There,
(25:00):
the sooner we pull the call of Arizona for Biden
and put it back in his Trump's column the better.
Of course, Arizona was never in Trump's column. It never
would be. Trump lost Arizona. And here is Fox's primary
supposed news anchor and he cannot conceive that Trump could
have lost, or that the neutral default position should be
(25:21):
that nobody had won Arizona. If you changed the call
in Arizona would mean nobody had won it to Brett Bear.
Neutrality journalism non opinion was to assume that Trump had won.
Brett just as bad as the rest of them. Bear
Today's worst parson and still ahead on countdown. So what
(25:57):
my face stuck to the side of the train and
they had to help break me free, Like that's never
happened to you? An all new edition of Things I
promised not to tell. Coming up first. In each you
just to countdown, we feature a dog in need you
can help. Every dog has its day. Two of them today,
Brooklyn and Butter. They are brothers. More carnage at the
(26:21):
New York Pound. These are big canaid Corsos. They're only
brought in last Thursday. They're already on the kill list.
They came in relaxed, affectionate, respectful to adults, kids and
other dogs alike. Now already they are stressed and terrified
and too dangerous to be let out of their kennels.
According to the pound handlers, in five days in the
(26:41):
care of the City of New York. This happened. Your
pledges to save Brooklyn and Butter can prevent this unnecessary tragedy.
They will help a rescue group pull them out and
save them and train them. Look for Brooklyn and Butter
on my Twitter feed and retweet them if you can.
I thank you and Brooklyn and Butter. Thank you to
(27:17):
the number one story on the Countdown and things I
promised not to tell. And this is anything but an
important career story. But I was reminded of it recently
and I laughed like hell, so I thought, maybe you
should too. I haven't seen all of them in this country,
but to my mind, the most underrated of American rivers
is the one I grew up along. The Hudson gets
a bad rap because it's associated with New York City
(27:39):
and the deteriorating remnants of the city's once dominant piers,
some of which have been unused and rotting for half
a century now. But further upstate, literally just past the
city line, the Hudson is a magnificent river just to watch,
never mind ride on. This is particularly true during a
stretch in which the western side of the river is
(28:00):
fronted by a series of sheer cliffs called the Palisades,
brownish black and striated carved as the river took shape
millions of years ago, but always looking like they had
been carefully designed for esthetic effect. Unfortunately, they are best
seen from the commuter railroad that runs along the Hudson
into Westchester County, New York, instead of a series of
(28:22):
parks or even private palaces. Our forefathers had the presence
of mind to build factories and copper processing plants and
other nightmares right on the Hudson because of the obvious
transportation benefits the Hudson provided, and so the train tracks
were laid out next to the river because that made
it even easier to get stuff to and from the
big city. And damn the views or the ability to
(28:44):
appreciate life on the water or the pollution. Still, if
you ever find yourself now taking a train from Grand
Central Station into the western half of Westchester, get a
window seat on the left side of the trainer. Better yet,
when you come back into New York City, sit on
the right side, on the river side, and you will
(29:05):
get fifteen minutes or more of the most magnificent view
imaginable out the big windows. Winters, spring summer or fall,
the palisades provide the Hudson with a magnificent frame that's
almost like a miniature Grand Canyon. I remember thinking of
all this that one day early in nineteen eighty I
(29:26):
was finally feeling a little better thanks to doctor Cecilini.
Doctor Cecillini had been my physician since I was a boy,
and he was the school doctor, and he'd been the
town doctor since about nineteen forty four, and he always
name dropped other patients I'd never heard of. And as
I finished my last growth spurt at the end of
my twentieth year, I had frequent back pain, no fun
(29:47):
at all, and sleeping on the floor helped a little,
but not enough. And finally Cellini, who had been a
hospital doctor during World War Two and had seen everything,
said hey, just get this prescription filled. Take one on
them every day for the next week. It's called a
muscle relaxing. No solos up your back, all this lessen
the pain. Well, bet, just don't you know, don't operate
(30:11):
any heavy machinery. You operate heavy machinery, and you do
those sportscast arts. Keith had a patient try to run
a processor at the Copper factory. While I took this
nineteen fifty seven lost three fingers. Leonardo ben Venuti. You
know what ben venutis used to live on William Street,
I laughed. This was him every time, the ben Venuti's
(30:34):
on William Street, the Smiths on William Street, the Williams
on Smith Street. Anyway, back to the muscle relaxings, I
don't think I had ever heard of them before, let
alone taken one. I took my barking back to the
pharmacy in my hometown of Hastings on Hudson, New York.
I got the prescription filled, I bought a soda at
the pizza parlor across the street, and I ambled down
(30:56):
the tiny village's picturesque business district. It's three blocks long,
past the statue our old neighbor Jacques Lipschitz donated, and
the ultra modern library, and right into the train station.
It was January. It was about twelve degrees and as
I waited for the train to make its forty minute
trip into the city and my job as a sportscaster
for the radio network of United Press International, I took
(31:18):
the pill what were they called again, muscle muscle relaxants
that doctor C had given me and given his other patient,
Rico Randazzo, Or was that some guy he mentioned in
nineteen sixty six to me? I worked the night shift
at UPI, so the train was almost always empty, and
thus I almost always had my choice of window seats.
(31:40):
Midday and midwinter combined to make the sun glistened with
extra sparkle off the magnificent Hudson, and the sun's angle
was such that the palisades behind them gleamed brightly as well.
And I was thinking about just how gorgeous they were,
and how underrated the Hudson was, and I felt myself
(32:03):
drifting away. I felt two hands, one on each shoulder,
shaking me violently. Hey buddy, Hey, Hey, hey, hey buddy.
I fought to open my eyes and to avoid the
bad breath now enveloping my face. As I finally came around,
I realized it was the conductor who had just taken
my ticket. The train wasn't moving. In fact, only half
(32:25):
of the lights were on in the train. The palisades
were long gone, not the Hudson nor the palisades, but
darkness came in through the windows. I was completely confused
and I'd shake it off. You got to get out
of here. This is as far as we go. Train's
going out of service. You don't get off now, you'll
be parked under thirty seventh straight for the rest of
the day. Through my fog and my haze, I finally
(32:48):
began to understand what had happened and where I was,
and I began to try to stand when a horrifying
awareness overtook me. I could not move the right side
of my face. What was worse, I could barely feel
the right side of my face. Good God, what had
happened to me? Was this like that haunting episode of
(33:08):
Alfred Hitchcock where the woman is struggling to wake up
and remembered the details of the accident out on San
Francisco Bay the night before, only as it finally comes
back to her, it turns out the accident had drowned
her boyfriend, and the reason it was so difficult to
remember was, as she realized only when she got up
and saw her reflection in a mirror, that the accident
hadn't happened last night, but it had happened in nineteen
(33:30):
oh five, and she'd been in an insane asylum for
half a century? Was that what had happened to me? No, Actually,
as I discovered when my struggle finally freed my face
from the train window to which it had stuck, because
I had drooled for like thirty five consecutive minutes, because
I had taken the muscle relaxing, because I had taken
(33:52):
an honest empty stomach, because I knew nothing about muscle relaxins.
Because I was out cold with my mouth open, pressed
up against the train window on a twelve degree day,
and I had gotten froze into the glass. Looked it
was not quite half a century in an insane asylum,
but certainly more embarrassing. It seemed like it took me
(34:15):
half a century to pull all of this together. I
stood up wobbly. I apologized to the conductor, and I
mumbled back back pain, new new drug. And as I
banked from one side of the doorway to the other
and bounced out onto the platform, the conductor shouted after me,
only take him at night, Huh that little saga? Yeah, Doc,
(34:41):
my back is better, But I left half the skin
on my right cheek frozen into the one twenty from
Hastings the Grand Central, He'd probably say, yeah, that happened
to another patient of mine, Carlo Johambardo. That reminded me
of a much later story from doctor Cecilini, and I
don't want to leave the wrong impression here. Edward Cellini
was a terrific doctor. He practiced into his nineties. He
(35:04):
used to tell me to come visit him at his
practice in his home on Farragut Parkway. Anytime I was
up from the city visiting my folks, well, I just
shout the raise and he'd tell me about something about
treating Umberto Flambini in the Army Hospital in nineteen forty four.
And he'd asked me if I went to school with
Marco Bartellini, and then say he had to go. He
was taking a course over at Suny Purchase about the
(35:26):
latest computer aided diagnostic tool. The man was ninety years old.
He never stopped learning. Great man, and did he howl
at the muscle relaxing story. So sorry I didn't warn you.
Oh wow, I just tell him at night. I had
another patient through that nineteen seventeen or in anyway. Now
(35:47):
it's nineteen ninety five and I'm working at ESPN and
I'm supposed to fly to Vancouver to do a cameo
in an Adam Sandler golf movie, which I suppose was
Happy Gilmour, and I didn't want to try to fly
to Chicago and then change for Vancouver after going the
two hours from the middle of Connecticut to JFK. So
I came in to my folks house the day before
(36:07):
I took the folks out to dinner. I stayed over
in the spare room to leave from their house to
the airport in the morning, and at some point in
the middle of the night, I began to have chest pains.
Literally the top of my ribs hurt and my breathing
was constricted, and I couldn't get back to sleep. And
now I'm thinking, I don't know what's wrong, but something
is wrong. So I canceled the trip and I head
up to doctor Cecilimini as soon as he's opened up
(36:30):
shop and he's eighty five now, and he gives me
the big welcome as usual, and I tell him the
story and he says, oh, yeah, to think it's not
gonna worry about, but we wish you get this on
the record just case your movie company gets fissy with
you about canceling. Dad happened to another friend of mine,
patient Francesco Lola Bridgeta. I had a cameo and Moby
Dick in nineteen fifty six. He had cancel. They wanted it, soume,
(36:53):
how about you get your dad, just drive you up
to the hospital Dobbs Ferry, and I'll meet you there
and I'll like half an hour hour and a half
something like that. Let me just run a couple of
tests on you when we got you up. There's no
run whatsoever. What's our now? He stares off into space
for a second, and he looks back and he says,
I gotta I got an idea a little simpler. I
(37:13):
have to go there later up to drop off some
paperwork on some other guy, Frisco Gaspucci. No, Frisco any
just give me a second. I'll call him. I'll tell
him we're coming up, and I just you just hop
in the car with me and go out and waiting room.
I'm gonna call him about Frisco. And I gotta worry
about doctor patient confidentiality. But about Frisco Gaspucci, Sai, you
know I gotta worry about that. So I don't want
(37:34):
you to listening. So now ed Cecily and he's driving
me to Dobbs Ferry Hospital and I'm thinking about how
much he defines the idea of a really dedicated doctor,
and how every other patient he's ever mentioned to me,
I've never heard of one of them. And we get
to the hospital, I don't know. We talked about baseball
or my folks or something, and he drives right up
to the er and we walk in like it's nothing,
(37:55):
and he waves to the admitting nurse. Hi, Shi, how's
your son Shilla? And he points at me says he's
the guy, and he says, like it was absolutely the
way they do at every hospital. You can go all
his info from him after we run this little check
on him, all right, And we go right into the
room and two nurses are in there and they say hi,
and one of them tells me to take off my shirt.
The other starts shaving places on my chest, and before
(38:18):
I know what's happening, I've got electrodes on me and
they're hooking me up to an EKG and they're drawing
blood in CELINI reads the start of the EKJ print
out and he smiles at me, says, I'm sorry. I
scammed you. But the way you described your chest pains,
I thought it was fifty fifty had had a heart attack.
Last thing I wanted to do is tell you that,
jessin case you had had a heart attack and then
you had another one that happened to another patient of mine,
(38:39):
Bernardo Petya Sante. You know Bernardo. Oh, well, I letly this. Ah,
you're fine, Let me just wait on the blood gases,
double check that, go out there and do the paperwork
ship at the desk. I think it's just a muscle problem.
The son of a gun had not only made sure
I didn't know it might be serious, it might be
(39:01):
heart attack serious, but he conned me into going to
the emergency room without alarming me or even letting me
know that was his plan all along. And as I'm
brushing the shaved hairs off my chest and putting my
shirt on, I say thanks, And then it hits me, Hey,
another thing, Doc, Bernardo Pietra Sante and Umberto Flambini and
(39:23):
all these other patients you've mentioned all these years. They
don't really exist, do they? And he says, oh, you
got me about that. I'll learn a long time ago.
Make sure your patient never feels like they're the first
idiot to have done this to themselves. Come on, I'll
give you a lift back to your folks. Might look
in and see how your dad's doing. If he's gotten moment,
(39:56):
how I missed. Doctor Cecilini should be a snatchoo to
him in Hastings. Thank you for listening. Countdown has come
to you from the studios of the Old Woman Broadcasting
Empire High Top, its headquarters in the Sports Capsule Building
here in New York. Executive director in Berto Flambini. Here
are the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced
and performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Channel, who
(40:18):
are the Countdown musical directors. Produced by t Ko Brothers.
All orchestration and keyboards by John Philip Channel. Guitars based
on drums by Brian Ray. Other Beetsoven selections have been
arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music
is the Olderman theme from ESPN two and it was
written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical
comments by Nancy Fauss. The best baseball stadium organist ever
(40:41):
our announcer today was Stevie Van's aunt. Everything else is
pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this, the
seven hundred and ninetieth day since Donald Trump's first attempted
COO against the democratically elected government in the United States.
Arrest him now while we still can. The next scheduled
countdown is tomorrow. Until then, I'm Keith Oldruman. Good morning,
good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith
(41:09):
Alerman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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