September 4, 2025 • 61 mins
SEASON 4 EPISODE 10: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump ain't dead, and neither is his cover-up of the Epstein Files. The TRUMPStein Files. And if you gave him a script and told him what to do to RE-IGNITE the Trumpstein Tire Fire every time it begins to go out, it would start with: A) leak an anonymous statement to Republicans considering signing the Massie Discharge Petition to force release of the real files B) make sure that statement read as much likely a slightly sanded down threat from a mafia boss as possible, like, oooh, quote: "Helping Thomas Massie and Liberal Democrats with their attention-seeking, while the DOJ is fully supporting a more comprehensive file release effort from the Oversight Committee, would be viewed as a very hostile act to the administration. C) actually release only the same documents Pam Bondi released to the Libs of TikTok worm Chayik and the DC Draino dipshit in those $2.69 thin three-ring binders they bought at Staples in February D) send a military flyover to try to drown out the Epstein survivors’ news conference on the steps of the capitol E) choose THIS moment to ask the Supreme Court to overturn where the court found him GUILTY of being LIABLE FOR SEXUAL ABUSE of E. Jean Carroll and of DEFAMING a sexual abuse victim and of course F) sit there as THIS actual bona fide excellent comprehensive question is rolled out in front of world media when you can only come back with an answer that makes everybody think “wait, he said THAT? Maybe he IS dead and he just forgot to lie down.”
WHERE WAS TRUMP LAST WEEK? We know the media won't probe. We can assume the following: he wasn't dead. He also wasn't at a psychiatrist to help him get past these hallucinations that he 'turned the water on' in California or solved seven wars (including, no doubt, The War Of The Planet Of The Apes). He also wasn't at a political retreat figuring out what to do about New York other than pull Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa out of it to make sure it's a Trump Referendum in a city that's 75% registered Democrats. Plus, the unusual but all-too-plausible explanation for what is really behind the RFK Jr/MAGA hatred of the Covid vaccine that saved their lives but won't, next time.
B-Block (33:05) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: It's bad enough that Stephen A. Smith doesn't see he's risking his career by diving into politics. But in a time of rampant gun violence against children and politicians, he's chosen to name his new political show "STRAIGHT SHOOTER." A great line from a conservative about how Trump was just caught literally about losing his marbles. And Laura Loomer blasts the foreign-born judge who thwarted Trump's child-trafficking and demanding we have no more foreign-born judges. You mean like Aileen Cannon, moron?
C-Block (45:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The relentlessly principle-free Joe Scarborough has done it again: whored himself out to Trump, demanding JB Pritzer "partner up" with the dictator on militarizing the streets of Chicago. Scarborough has been getting away with this at MSNBC for 23 years. It's his life (if you call getting up at 4 AM every day to find some new part of democracy you can sell out for cash, a "life").
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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. Trump
(00:25):
is not dead, and neither is his cover up of
the Epstein files. Of the trump Stein files. Sorry if
you gave him a script and told him what to
do to reignite the Trumpstein tire fire. Every time it
begins to go out, that script would start with a
leak an anonymous statement to House Republicans considering signing the
(00:48):
Massy discharge petition to force release of the real files.
B make sure the statement reads as much like a
slightly sanded down threat from a mafia boss as possible.
Like quote helping Thomas Massey liberal Democrats with their attention
seeking while the DOJ is fully supporting a more comprehensive
(01:09):
file release effort from the Oversight Committee would be viewed
as a very hostile act to the administration. C actually
release only the same documents that Pam Bondi released to
the libs of TikTok worm Chayak and the DC Draino
dipshit in those two dollars sixty nine cent thin three
(01:32):
ring binders they bought at Staples in February, d send
a military flyover to try to drown out the Epstein
survivor's news conference on the steps of the Capitol yesterday.
E choose this moment, this moment to ask the Supreme
Court to overturn the verdict where the Court found Trump
(01:57):
guilty of being liable for sexual abuse of e. Gene
Carroll and of defaming a sexual abuse victim. Do that
right now, This is the right moment for it. And
of course f sit there staring, fuming as this actual
bona fide, excellent comprehensive question, first of the year, is
(02:20):
rolled out in front of world media when you can
only come back with an answer that makes everybody think, wait,
Trump said that maybe maybe he is dead and he
just forgot to lie down.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
There have been survivors, as Jeffery seeking at a press
conference on Capitol Hill, and they're calling for these case files,
these documents to realise.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
And Thomas Messi, who is thought who is.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Especially a discarded physician to get the House to vote
to Luis to the documents, says he hasn't be you're
advocated in these files, but many of your friends and
donors maybe, And he says that's why the Justice Farman
is redacting them and slow walking the release. Is a
Justice Farman protecting any friends or donors.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
So this is a Democrat hoax that never ends.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
You know.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
It reminds me.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
A little of the Kennedy situation.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
We gave him everything over and over again, more and
more and more, and nobody's ever satisfied. From what I understand,
I could check, but from what I understand, thousands of
pages of documents have been given. But it's really a
Democrat hoax because they're trying to get people to talk
about something that's totally irrelevant to the success that we've
(03:33):
had as a nation since I've been president.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Cool. Cool. Wherever Trump was the last week, it was
not at a retreat strategizing how to get him out
of whatever world ending revelation there is about him in
the Trump Stein files. Would work, was he Pam Bondi
says Trump is in the Epstein files. Elon Musk says
(03:58):
Trump is in the Epstein files. Countless others have said
previously Trump is in the Epstein files, and for legal reasons,
the survivors who spoke at the Capitol yesterday did not
name him, nor name names of their rapists and abusers.
But happily, Marjorie Taylor Green vowed to read the names
(04:19):
with the survivor's permission on the floor of the house
where speech is protected and nobody can sue and Billy
would she be in for a surprise. And also there
seems to be a direct connection here that the Trump
dictatorship has not figured out. Every time Trump calls trump
Stein a hoax, another real news outlet picks up the story.
(04:46):
Larberry time a munched on. It's a hoax. An angel
gets its wings, and another survivor comes forward and vows
never to be quiet again and to send Trump more messages. Listen.
I don't like to I don't want to send a
direct message to him. I'm already scared enough. Ye just
(05:08):
pass the vote. Listen to us. This is not a hoax.
Like it's not gonna go away. And like I said
on my speech earlier, we are not going to be
We're not going to be silenced anymore. We will be
speaking moving forward. Wherever we need to be, we will
be and we need to pass this. The survivor's message
to Trump is in short, tick tick tick tick tick
(05:31):
tick tick tick tick tick. Meanwhile, the other Trump cover
(05:57):
up the weekend at Bernie's, Trump and Commander Pike Trump
and Zombie Trump, and the media is supplime willingness to
just let a week pass in which a clinically compulsive
talker does not utter a word in public or appear
on video for perhaps the first time in his life.
(06:18):
The Trumpsters leaked a story to CNN about how he's
always had bruising on his hand. We've always been at
war with East Asia and always been self conscious about it,
which of course simply raises the follow up question, if
he's had bruising on his hand for longer than just
the last six months, how come he still insists on
trying to cover it up with makeup when he clearly
(06:39):
has no idea how to effing apply makeup and might
as well write on his hand in lipstick something like
ask me about my head. What was tragic was to
hear Trump and his MAGA hate thugs insist he had
an active Labor Day weekend, well Labor Day week and
(07:00):
have everybody just sort of accept that because he posted
on social media he says it was him and went
to his golf club and posted photos of himself at
his golf club that turned out to be from a
month ago, and played golf well He says he played golf,
there's no video or pictures of him playing golf, and
(07:23):
says he did an interview with The Daily Caller for which,
for some reason, the Daily Caller did not record audio
or video of all of which ended when he finally
got on the phone with CNN's new star Mincing Conservative
fop Scott Jennings Tuesday morning, and he sounded like he'd
just been gargling battery acid. This is precisely how much
(07:47):
we truly know about Trump and the week one of
our presidents was missing. He's not dead. Currently. We don't
know about last week. We do know he did not
go to a retreat to strategize about Trumpstein. We can
(08:07):
infer that. We can also infer he didn't go to
a retreat to strategize about how to make Andrew Cuomo
the next mayor of New York City. The Times reported
yesterday Trump is considering appointing New York Mayor Eric Adams
and appointing the Republican nominee to replace him. Curtis I
have acute hat sliwa to the Trump administration in order
(08:29):
to make the New York City mayor's race just Cuomo
versus the Democratic nominee who won in a landslide in
the primary, Zoran Mamdani. Now this is political genius because
it would force New York Republicans, who hate Cuomo more
than New York Democrats do and help to run him
(08:51):
out of office when he was governor, force New York
Republicans to vote for him when they think he is
as liberal as mam Donni and twenty times as guilty.
And and it allows Mandanni to spend the last two
months of his campaign correctly noting that Cuomo is Trump's
whore and the man Trump wants to see become mayor
(09:16):
so he can manipulate him by threatening to indict him
and reminding Democrats that the election is now a referendum
on Trump when seventy five percent of New York City
residents are registered Democrats. Genius, I tell you it may
be that Trump is secretly working for Mamdani. Here. I
(09:38):
don't think that's likely, but every time Trump does something
it becomes likely er. We also, no, Trump did not
spend the missing week at a psychiatrist's office trying to
address any of his two or three thousand mental problems.
He roared out of the gate insisting he has settled
seven wars. Seven wars. Again, he's got this idea in
(10:01):
his head. He's going to shove it down your throat.
George Conway wrote the best kind of satire about this,
A legit question that allows you to answer with snark.
He wrote, I wish somebody would ask him to specifically
list the seven or however many wars he claims to
have ended, and then hand him a map and ask
him to show us on it where the wars were.
(10:23):
I have offered George the following answer. Here are the
seven wars Trump has settled. War are the Roses, War
of Attrition, War of the Worlds, War of the Planet
of the Apes, War of the Rohirm, War of the
baseball Magnets, and of course War of world Craft. Well,
(10:51):
by the way, once again, if Trump were a paid
employee of Vladimir Putin, he could not be doing more
or better work for Putin. Let me read the Associated
Press story so you get the full, non hysterical version
of this, although hysteria would not be a bad idea
right now, Putin says Trump's quote administration is listening to
(11:13):
the Kremlin's justifications for its invasion of neighboring Ukraine and
claimed that Moscow and Washington have come to a quote
mutual understanding about the conflict. Putin said during a visit
to China that the Trump administration is listening to us unquote,
and he complained that former President Joe Biden paid Moscow's
arguments no heed quote. Now we see this mutual understanding,
(11:37):
it's noticeable, Putin said at a bilateral meeting with pro
Russian Slovak president Robert Fico after talks with Chinese leader
Jijinpang in Beijing. Quote, we are very happy about this
and hope this constructive dialogue will continue. Oh well, lad,
if you're happy, we're happy. Putin's apparatics on state TV
(12:00):
in Russia went further. They are saying Trump and Tulsey
Gabbard have followed Putin's instructions, which, to be fair, is
the first suggestion by anybody ever that Tulsey Gabbard is
that confident at anything. For Julia Davis of The Daily Beast,
Carril Benedictov, a highly honored Russian writer who wrote a
(12:21):
book about Trump, said quote, we don't know what happened
in Anchorage between Putin and Trump, We don't know what
they talked about, and it's unlikely we will find out
over the next few years, but we do know some things.
The meeting took place on August fifteen, and four days later,
on August nineteen, Director of National Intelligence Tulsea Gabbard authored
a memorandum. Oddly enough, she published it on x formerly Twitter.
(12:46):
It was about the firing of thirty seven agents of
intelligence agencies, including the CIA, and stripping them of their
security clearances unquote. Now, why would Gabbard do something like
fire all the intelligence officers critical of Putin and, as
it turned out, outing who was working under cover against
(13:06):
Russia to please Trump? Obviously, because everybody in her life
but Trump hates her and has for a long time.
Why would Trump do it? Well, we need to remember
something baseline here that's a lot simpler than trying to
understand what Russia has on Trump and has always had
on Trump, which is probably money and maybe blackmail, but money.
(13:29):
But there's something more baseline to this that it's useful
to remember at all times about everything Trump does, including
what I'm going to talk about next COVID nineteen and
RFK junior. We need to remember the baseline, Trump is
not motivated by trying to improve things. Trump does not
want better. He does not want to improve. He does
(13:53):
not want anybody to succeed. He wants whatever he can see,
whatever is before him, to be his. It may be
pretty good, and he may then turn it into shit,
or it may actually turn out okay, but it's his shit.
(14:13):
Destruction and construction are the same thing to Donald Trump,
as long as the rubble is imprinted in gold letters
with just one word Trump. Robert F. Kennedy Junior is
as big a health threat to this country as the
(14:34):
COVID pandemic was, maybe as big a threat as the
nineteen eighteen influenza pandemic was. He says we're going to
see dramatic changes in the rates of many chronic diseases
before Trump leaves office. Notice please. He does not say
if that change in the rate will be a decrease
or an increase. RFK Junior's behavior is somewhat easy to understand.
(14:57):
He's insane, he's a heroin addict, supposedly recovered. He's strung
out on steroids at least, and he hallucinates so much
that he says in public that he can see mitochondrial
damage in children just by looking at them. In short,
if there's somebody here with mitochondria or any other kind
(15:18):
of damage, it's him. Now. He started with an understandable
bent towards conspiracy theories. As a child he had to
see his uncle, the president, get his head blown off,
and then five years later his own father was shot
to death, and conspiracies about them then dominated the background
political conversation in this country for thirty years or more,
(15:40):
every damn day. I first met him in two thousand
and four. He called me the day after the day
after the election, when I had reported some inconsistencies in
voting in Ohio where they locked down the place where
they were counting the votes in one rural county on
an argument that al Qaeda was about to attack this
place in Warren County. I think it was Ohio. And
(16:03):
it was a report that suggested that maybe somebody was
trying to ensure a Bush vote in Ohio. But that
was it. It wasn't the election was fixed or that
Carry should have won. And he went on for twenty
five minutes about how this story that I reported was
the key that I was his hero because it was
going to open up the election and they'd overturn it
(16:23):
and carry had really won. And I began to wonder
if there was anything he had done that was good
for this country after he helped clean up the Hudson River.
And it turns out that the conspiracies that populate the
parts of the brain that were opened up when the
worm ate them in Kennedy's head, the conspiracy party is
(16:44):
at the core of this, and not just for Robert
Kennedy Junior. But the assumption that the conspiracy theory is
grassroots is really flawed. I have to confess I never
analyzed it deeply. It seemed to me that fear of
needles very underrated. Fear in this country, mixed with fear
of government, mixed with fear of doctors, mixed with fear
(17:05):
of death, mixed with fear of you know, intelligence is
a pretty pretty strong prescription for mass asininity. But that's
not what this is. Walker Bragman of the Accountability Journalism
Institute writes that he tried to listen to the Ezra
Kleine New York Times podcast recently. Well, there's your mistake
(17:28):
right there. No one is more overrated than Ezra Kleine.
I mean on Earth, no one is more overrated. Mister
Bragman wrote about this in a thread on Blue Sky
that was so eye opening I want to quote freely
from it and add a few probably unnecessary observations. Bragman
writes that it quickly became clear to him that Klein
(17:48):
and his guests quote really do not understand why how
the political right turned on vaccines. The COVID nineteen pandemic
undermined the right in several key ways. One it showed
us which workers are essential and empowered them. Two, it
showed that the markets can't solve everything. Three it threatened
(18:10):
GOP political prospects in a critical election. And four government
relief proved popular and effective. We forget about that it
was popular and clearly it was effective, and Trump got
credit for it. To continue from mister Bragman's points, if
(18:33):
you're on the side of capital interests, wealth as an
indicator of virtue, the value of one's societal contributions, free markets.
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are
I'm from the government and I'm here to help You're ft.
COVID just exposed you entirely. And if you don't want
anything to interfere with business. Well, the only thing to
(18:55):
do is end the crisis, at least end the public's
perception that there is a crisis. Remember Lieutenant Governor Dan
Patrick's tears in Texas about how the old like him
should die to protect the economy for their grandchildren. The
(19:17):
most important thing was the economy, not the possibility that
this thing could get worse and unchecked by any kind
of vaccine or treatment at that point, could wipe everybody out.
Very difficult to spend money when you're dead. He believed
that old folks, and by that he meant old folks
who worked jobs, not old folks who were using assumed
(19:40):
names to graduate from talk radio to being the lieutenant
governor of Texas. That old folks should die to protect
the economy for their grandchildren. This is your grandchild, Elon Musk,
protect him. He was ready to go. Dan Patrick said,
(20:02):
we're waiting Pal. So we saw right wing media and
dark money groups start messaging out bullshit like COVID is
not really a huge deal. Deaths are overcounted. Best to
pursue heard immunity through mass infection. COVID mitigation measures are
an assault on personal liberty. School closures are irreparable harm.
(20:24):
Mister Bragman does not go off on the subject of
school closures, but I will. The school closures thing immediately
made no sense to me, the argument that we should
not close schools. I mean, I understand that we should
not close schools. But the people who were saying this
were the right wingers. These are the people who have
(20:44):
been pushing for home schooling, who turned it, as I
said the other day, from what we used to call
it truan see. These are the people who gutted the
Department of Education. These are the ones attacking the universities,
particularly the Ivy League universities. School closures the positive side
(21:05):
effect for the right wing to COVID irreparable harm. What
they meant was it was inconvenient to have their kids
at home. To resume the quotation. Now, on the surface,
it doesn't make sense for the right to oppose the
COVID vaccines. Right they presented a way out of the pandemic.
They were created through Trump's Operation Warp Speed. But logic
(21:27):
doesn't apply here. Pure politics do again. As an aside,
the Wall Street Journal story last week about Trump's million
dollar fundraiser, the one last month where he's ruminating to
this room full of people who paid a million dollars
to get in there about how he could not take
credit for the vaccine because well, you know, with the
(21:48):
head of Pfizer in the crowd, having paid a million
dollars to get in there, a million dollars that he
in part earned from the COVID vaccines. Quote, Biden got
to roll out the vaccines and claim that victory. Of course,
the vaccines did dot end the crisis immediately. They took
a long time, and Biden dropping non pharmaceutical interventions meant
a lot of people died on his watch. Undermining the
(22:11):
vaccines meant undermining Biden and Dems. But that wasn't all.
Trump had pushed fake cures pre vax is it aside,
if you've forgotten the drinking, the cleaning elements. I don't
think he ever actually said bleach and putting light in
(22:31):
your body. He did not actually say do an uncle,
fester and put a light bulb in your mouth. That
was just the image that appeared in the minds of
everybody with an IQ larger than thirty. The people enlisted
in that effort did not go away. Folks like Simone
gold of America's front line doctors, which pushed Trump's fake
hydriat Carraqueen miracle COVID treatment. She ended up allying with
(22:56):
anti vaxer Robert Kennedy Junior again as an aside, who
made money off that crap directly or just by pushing
on their shows and getting a greater right wing audience.
Only every right winger with a show, Joe Rogan, Matt
Gates appeared in commercials for the horse Tonic Aaron Rodgers quote,
(23:23):
so we got the seeds for anti vax bullshit on
the right, with the embraceive fake cures like hydroxychloroquin and
later ivermectin. Also, the herd immunity crowd is a natural
ally for anti baxers, because they said we didn't need
a vaccine for herd immunity, just infection. I'll note here
(23:44):
that herd immunity also appealed to MAGA because they always
just assumed they were stronger and better and had better mitochondria,
and only Democrats would die of COVID. Ask Herman Kine
how that worked out for him. Herman, who never heard
of him quote, So we start seeing antibaxer in the
(24:05):
comment sections of posts by folks like Jay Batticharia of
the Great Barrington Declaration, and eventually these folks whose real
goal was undermining government and the pandemic response, embraced that
audience taking a step back. The embrace of the unregulated
wellness industry and anti vax hocum was probably inevitable for
(24:26):
the Right. As the representative of big business interests, it
has long had an antagonistic oppositional relationship with science and expertise.
Think tobacco and climate science. Very good, mister Bragman. The
anti vax thing is just the pro smoking and anti
climate change quote. With COVID vaccines, didn't matter that Trump
(24:51):
facilitated their production. It just mattered that they could be
used to undermine the right's favorite enemies government democrats, public
health authorities, teachers and schools, and appeal to their natural base,
affluent whites, while making inroads with new demographics. In anyone
skeptical of modern medicine and our healthcare system, which in
this country is a lot of effing people. Our healthcare
(25:12):
system breeds distrust. Millions don't have a primary care doctor.
Cost is prohibitive, lack of access is another issue. He continues.
Having covered this story in real time through various pieces,
it was weird watching each narrative become essential to the
Right even as they contradicted each other, Like the bioweapon
(25:34):
lab leaks stuff that I didn't get into in this
thread directly contradicts the anti vax and herd immunity stuff.
The Right, he postulates, has like a soup worldview. Anything
goes in the pot so long as it erodes demand
for and trust in government. Believe one part of it,
you'll eventually have to accept the others to stay relevant
(25:57):
within the Right, even if it's contradictory and the sum
of the parts doesn't make sense. Adding to the inevitability
of the herd immunity anti vax alliance, both camps falsely
claim their views were suppressed by the powers that be.
It adds a layer of conspiratorial appeal. Rather an amazing
(26:25):
thread from accounterbearnt ability journalism institutes Walter Bragman And if
you don't think that last part is true. R. K.
Junior is the Secretary of Health Health in Human Services.
He's in charge of the public response to everything that
relates to health, from food to swallowing light bulbs, and Bleach,
(26:50):
and he is still positioning himself as draining the swamp.
And the idiots who believe still think they are the
victims with no voice. I say they believe, I don't
know at least they say that. Who knows what they
(27:11):
believe or if they believe anything anymore. And frankly, who
cares doesn't matter what they believe, doesn't matter what they say.
The only issue for the rest of us now is
how to stop them. Also of interest here, Stephen A.
(27:31):
Smith keeps digging the name of his new politics show
We'll Turn Your Stomach, and speaking of that, Ja Scarborough
is added again on the network that used to be
MSNBC before they all broke it, siding with Trump, against
(27:52):
Democrats and against democracy and especially against any democratic official
who has the nerve to stand up to Joe Scarborough's boss,
Donald Trump. The history of Joe Scarborough scumbag. That's next.
This is countdown. This is countdown, with Keith Olberman still
(28:38):
ahead on this edition to countdown Joe Scarborough's done it
again went on the network formerly known as MSNBC Tuesday
morning and said that Illinois Governor JB. Pritzker should quote
Heartner it that would be partner up in American English
with Trump on Trump's violating of the Posse Comitatis Act,
(29:01):
and that Pritzker should go along with the plan to
use the National Guard in Chicago. This is because Joe
Scarborough is a fascist. Also, he's yet defined a principle,
including fascism, that he could not abandon at the first
sign of trouble. It is nearly a year now since
(29:23):
he and missus Idiot tried to get back on the
Trump death star by going to Mari Lago and prostrating themselves.
Joe Scarborough is a scumbag working for a scumbag network
run by scumbag management owned by a scumbag company. But
(29:45):
his willingness to personally prostitute himself in whatever way the
pimps who own him want him to has gotten him
a job for life. There if you call that show
at that hour every morning a life. The many times
I have been appalled by Joe Scarborough next in things
(30:10):
I promised not to tell first, those who always will
come in behind Joe Scarborough on the list of today's
other worst persons in the world, Lebron's worst Stephen Asmith.
Stephen Asmith announced the new weekly political show on a
(30:32):
satellite radio outfit. Apparently they announced it in the form
of an exclusive to The Washington Post so they could
get a feature length out article out of the reporter
Jeremy Barr And by the way, that's the Washington Post,
which is the Steven A. Smith of newspapers. To be fair,
Barr asked him about his friendship with Sean Hannity. The question,
(30:57):
you've said, you've gotten some criticism of your twenty year
long friendship with Fox News host Sean Hannity on who
show you a pure Casely has that given you any pause? Answer?
Not even a little bit. It's made my friendship with
him more resolute because you're not going to tell me
how to think. As an interjection, who would waste their
(31:19):
time trying to get him to think? And how I
should feel? You feel, how thick your wallet is, that's
all you feel. There's plenty of people that have friends
in their lives that don't agree with their politics. This
isn't politics. This is existential about America, and you're going
on the wrong side of it. Steve, all of a sudden,
(31:40):
because it's Sean Hannity, it's supposed to be different. I
don't want to hear that crap. It gets in the
way of Stephen making money. He doesn't want to hear it.
That's nonsense. Where does that say it will get me
more money? He's a die hard conservative. I wish he
believes in free market capitalism and close borders and strong
(32:01):
national security and stuff like that. Stuff like that in
the Hannity world is dictatorship. By the way. He's not
some white nationalist or anything like that. Oh okay, Sean
doesn't roll like that. Oh my god, you say you
(32:22):
know him twenty years how come this has only come
up five years ago that you knew him? He went
on his show. Sean doesn't roll like that. I worked
with Steven A. Smith as recently a twenty nineteen and
there was not one goddamn mention of him being friends
with Sean Hannity. I know him, so I don't worry
(32:43):
about that. Candace Owens. He knows Candace Owens too and
doesn't worry about her. And you know, if it's all
about friends being agreeable with one another, then what kind
of real friendship is that. Well, you're gonna try to
have a friendship that doesn't end your career Stephen Steven
Hannity is so much worse a person than you could
(33:04):
possibly know. Your friend is playing you, if he is
your friend, if he's anybody's friend. I also see nothing
in this interview about Candice Owens and Smith praising her.
Then again, I didn't read the whole thing because I
canceled my Washington Post subscription a year ago, two years ago,
and I don't notice anybody asking Smith or Serious how
(33:27):
in the world they could in this time of the
wholesale slaughter of our children in school, in church, in school,
the slaughter of those kids two guns and a year
removed from the attempted shooting of a presidential candidate, and
the nation still teetering daily on mass gun violence. I
(33:47):
don't see the guy from the Washington Post asking him
or Serious or he's Stephen A. Smith. Why would they
be cold enough to name their new show Stephen A Smith,
straight shooter, Stephen run like hell. Frankly, this could easily
(34:10):
destroy your media career easily and quickly. The runner up
worser the man who is behind all those such destructions,
Trump or whoever was writing his stuff for him during
that week in which he spent in the Cone of
Silence the week in which he was Commander Pike from
(34:32):
the Star Trek Pilot. Remember the video posted under his
name during the Cone of Silence, I used at the
White House the most beautiful marble and stone available anywhere.
Surfaces are very important to me as a builder. Also,
he can't comprehend anything besides surfaces. As everyone knows, I
built many great buildings and other things over the years.
(34:55):
Actually I lived in one of those buildings and length
the day the warranty ran out, the elevator stopped running
and some of the electricity shut off and water started
to come out of the walls. But they were great
buildings at the White House. I am very proud of
the beautiful stone work we did in the Rose Garden.
That's where they paved it over and made it look
like a parking lot or worse like Mary Lago, in
(35:17):
this case using limestone plus the Rose Garden is completed
and far more beautiful than anyone ever had in mind
when it was conceived of decades ago. Three days ago,
while admiring the stone work, I happened to notice a
huge gash in the limestone that extended more than twenty
five yards long. It was deep and nasty. I started
(35:37):
yelling blah blah blah. And it turns out this is
like three hundred words about the marble that was used
and how the marble got damaged and the marble contractor
screwed up and marble Marble marble, which got this response
quote Trump is worried about literally losing his marbles, unquote,
(35:58):
just showing that any writer will steal anything from anybody.
I am obliged here to say I just stole that
from the guy who wrote it. Dan McLaughlin at Baseball
Crank on Twitter of the National Review Online, one of
the most venomous and dense of the far right magass clowns.
But dam Trump is worried about literally losing his marbles
(36:21):
is a great line. But our winner, Laura Loomer the worst.
There is one secret flex, one weapon of self defense
that was, is and always will be on our side.
It is the fact that for the Magats, there is
no yesterday. They cannot forget, no tomorrow. They cannot not
foresee if it serves their purpose. They are all Joe
(36:44):
Scarborough only dumber. They are truly nihilists, so they can
pretend to believe one thing one day and its exact
opposite thing tomorrow, or ultimately, when they run out of
things that don't contradict what they used to believe, they
believe in nothing. But it's more than that. It seems
to be a requirement to never even consider that what
you are boastfully criticizing somebody for, or something you're threatening
(37:07):
to do to somebody else may apply twice as much
to you, or to your president, or to your hero
or largely, I think this is because the other fascists
forget as fast as the speakers do, as the lead
fascists do. But still, you would think that if you
portray yourself as the Trump whisterberer, as the secret personnel
(37:30):
director at the White House, you would google before you shoot,
so you don't say something like this, Not Laura Lomer, No, sir.
The US district judge who blocked the Trump trafficking of
unaccompanied children back to Guatemala because they were at risk
of physical harm if they were forced to go back
to Guatemala. That judge is named Judge Sparkle Supnanan. Now
(37:54):
that's an unusual name, although I worked forty years ago
with a woman who became a prominent writer in Canada,
whose given first name was Sparkle. Sparkle we worked together
at CNN, so Sparkle is not as unusual a name
as you might think. Anyway, Judge Suk Nanon was born
in the nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Her education Hofstra
(38:19):
and Brooklyn Law, so she's closer to being a Native
American than Lumer is, who is from Tucson and Miami.
The libs of TikTok idiot, the one who still doesn't
realize she was used by Trump and Bondi with the
Epstein file folder that had nothing in it that they
just released again yesterday, she complained about Judge soup Nanon's origins,
(38:43):
so Lumer went full racist xenophobe. I mean, she is
full racist cenophobe. She just decided to put it on
social media this time. Laura Lumer, why do we allow
for foreigners to be judges in the US. It should
be legal to hold office in the United States if
you were not from the US. I'm sick of woke
foreign born judges destroying the US. Go back to Trinidad, uh, Laura.
(39:06):
Quick word about Judge Aileen Cannon. Remember her Trump's concierge
Judge the one who fixed the espionage documents case for
Trump last year. Judge Cannon, the one who threw herself
in front of justice in the United States, Judge Aileen
Cannon born nineteen eighty one in let's see Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Calli, Columbia.
(39:41):
Aileen Cannon born nineteen eighty one, Calli, Columbia, not District
of Columbia, Columbia, col Ombia. You could have googled that, Loomer.
But now shoot from the hip. And when you shoot
from the hip, remember the odds are six to five,
(40:03):
you will blow off part of your own as So, yes, Laura,
no more foreigners can be judges in the US, not
Judge Supnanan and not Judge Eileen Cannon. But remember, because
you asked for it, Laura. Also you're phrasing, why do
we allow for foreigners to be judges? That's not exactly
(40:23):
American English. Glomer moron and today's other worst person and
(40:45):
Joe Scarborough and his latest wife began their morning chat
show on MSNBC with a simpering, cowardly transparent words salad
that might as well have literally been we for two,
welcome our new insect overlords only that would have been funny.
(41:06):
Let me again mention that, in half a century of
working in newsrooms ranging from international ones to high school ones,
Joe Scarborough is easily the worst person I have ever known. Easily.
And I worked with David Letterman's blackmailer, and I worked
with a guy who later extorted George Steinbrenner and threatened
(41:28):
to break his legs. Joe Scarborough is better than either
of them. He is unique the lack of morals, of principles,
of scruples. That's not the result of a fractured brain
like say Trump. It's not the result of money needs
like the guy who blackmailed Letterman or the guy who
(41:50):
extorted Steinbrenner. It's a tool Scarborough uses that he has
used for at least twenty five years. Joe Scarborough was
a newt gangrich whore. Then he became a far right
pro torture wannabee. Then he was the supposedly reasonable conservative
who's on air persona covered up his endless internal sabotage
(42:14):
of everybody who was better than him at NBC. Then
he was the moderate political salon host in the mornings.
Then he was the guy who tried to mainstream Trump
and literally traveled to Trump to advise him and was
Trump's guy on real TV. And then when Trump didn't
choose him to be vice president, Scarborough decided the real
(42:36):
money was in bashing Trump, and so he turned on
him and bashed him and bashed him and bashed him
and called him hitler more than a year ago. And
when he called him hitler, it was the first time
I'd ever agreed with Joey scars But I knew, in
my god, he was just selling another product. See, there
are people who went confronted in their lives by Nazis
suddenly find themselves choosing to join the government of VSH France.
(43:02):
That's Jeff Bezos. That's not Joe Scarborough. Joe Scarborough has
always been a VSHI in search of Nazis to serve.
And after seven years, he'd actually managed to erase his past.
He'd virtually erased from his audience's memory any sense that
(43:23):
he tried to ram Trump down America's throat. In twenty sixteen,
and then suddenly Monday, he was announcing he and Mika
Brizhinsky had gone to marri Lago to try to open
a dialogue with Trump, and he then produced an amazing
imaginary moronic dialogue in which somebody else asked him, why
the hell would you do that? With the ludicrous answer
(43:45):
why the hell wouldn't you. The rhetorical answer to that,
of course, was contained in Mika Brzhinsky's part of this speech,
which was as close to an actual hostage video as
I have ever seen on actual television. The practical answer is,
of course, you don't do that, because then you have
just turned your network into collaboration. If he's Hitler and
(44:07):
you are now saying we must make a deal with him,
you are VC MSNBC, and everybody who works there who
does not say this is VC MSNBC is just as
guilty Rachel. Anyway, there are three plausible explanations I guess
(44:28):
equal plausibility for this. I'm not sure which is true.
I'm not sure it matters. One NBC and MSNBC looked
at the post election Kamala Harris Saturday Night Live blowback
and the post election ratings, and since the networks are
run by people who do not understand news or political news,
and barely understand television, they panicked and told him to
(44:50):
do it. Or Scarborough looked at the ratings, and being
exactly as stupid as his bosses, he panicked and did
it himself. Or, as CNN reported Tuesday, he and the
misses genuinely assessed the threats by Trump and they were
vulnerable and they'd have to do something to assuage Trump.
And of course just going there and saying zay, that
(45:13):
would hardly do it. But if they also told Trump,
we'll go back to sinewashing your presidency, only they didn't
tell the audience that well that that would make more sense,
that would be pure cowardice. Of course, it's the actual
plot of George Orwell's nineteen eighty four. Maybe that last
one makes slightly more sense now in light of Tuesday
(45:33):
night's news that NBC is going to spin off its
news cable operations, finally separating the dead weight of NBC
News from what might still grow MSNBC and CNBC. I
begged them to do this as far back as nineteen
ninety seven, for god's sakes. Also, you're a listener to
this podcast, and I'm the guy who writes it and
(45:55):
reads it. The last few weeks, I haven't felt like
writing it and reading it, and you haven't felt like
listening to it, or at least not as much. We're
in mourning, we're in husbanding your resources mode, we're in recovery.
Of course, the ratings are going to be bad. Go
look at Fox News' ratings at the end of twenty
twenty and most of twenty twenty one. Did they fire
(46:17):
everybody and suddenly wind up with a Joe Biden show
in the morning? No, be professionals take the loss. Oh
your NBC. Oh MSNBC's only going to make a quarter
of a billion dollars. Oh, I'm so sorry. People should
be killed for that. Right, isn't that the law now?
(46:38):
Back at the Joey Scars level? The problem is, the
problems are Scarborough already burned down his anti Trump audience
in twenty fifteen and early twenty sixteen, Then he burned
down his new pro Trump audience in twenty sixteen and
twenty seventeen and all the years since, And now he's
(47:01):
gone back and burned down his anti Trump audience at Gin.
There's nobody left. The right never stopped hating him. The left,
which had just started to forget he was in Trump's
pocket for a year, hates him anew and now is
seeing that picture of him and Trump's standing there with
that idiotic thumb up their ass pose, which I keep
(47:24):
tweeting every day. Just a coincidence. Joe resolved this dilemma,
namely that nobody wants to watch him anymore or go
on his show by simply pretending none of it is
true and that everybody supports him, and anybody who disagrees
with him is disconnected from reality. And we have always
been at war with Ease Dansia. The other problem is
(47:48):
Joe Scarborough is a terrible person who has always thought
he could get away with it, often did always thought
he could blame somebody else, and has always done stuff
exactly like this. And I'll get to that in a moment.
First reminding you of the pre it'sipal problem by having
Nancy Faust remind you that just cause you call a
(48:09):
guy hitler, maybe it didn't mean that hitler. Maybe it
meant the other Hitler, the singing hitler, the dancing hitler,
the hitler with a song in his heart, Oh, Nancy.
(48:57):
Perhaps the most amazing thing about my ten years at
MSNBC was the fact that Joe Scarborough and his producers,
especially his chief henchmen ever got their own show on
the air, because nobody I have ever worked with in
radio or television, in sports or news in the twentieth
century or the twenty first ever spent more time trying
(49:21):
to screw with other programs on the same network than
did Joe Scarborough. And until just about the time I
left in twenty eleven, the guy he sent in to
do most of the sabotage for him was this henchman guy.
The reason this should matter to you now is Scarborough's
henchman was Chris Licked, the new president of CNN. And
(49:44):
if they scoured the nation to find the worst person
to run CNN in a time when democracy is threatened
by one political party and tepidly defended by another, it's
Chris Licked. I know, I know. You turn on the
TV and you see Joe Scarborough, and you see exactly
what I see. A blank day's darting, paranoid, no soul,
(50:07):
stupid check engine light. Look. But if you don't trust me,
trust my scars. My Joey Scars behind that vapid face
is a master saboteur. Early in two thousand and eight,
the late Tim Russert called me and warned me that
the GOP had upped its pressure on me. He said
(50:28):
he had heard from somebody in New York that somebody
in New York was going into the office of the
president of NBC News saying that Joe Scarborough couldn't get
his friend John McCain to come on to his new
Morning show because I was so critical of McCain on countdown.
Tim was not sure it was Scarborough, but if it wasn't,
(50:48):
who else could have gotten in to see the president
of NBC News other than Scarborough or his executive producer.
The evidence for the new CNN president, mister Licht, being
directly involved in interfering with programming to benefit somebody else's
friends or political cronies, was vague in two thousand and eight,
but not at all vague two years later. Early in
(51:10):
January twenty ten, the Republican candidate to fill the Senate
seat of a late Ted Kennedy, Scott Brown, the former
semi nude model, was at a rally when one of
his supporters talked about quote, shoving a curling iron up
the backside of the Democratic Senate candidate Martha Cokeley. Scott
Brown clearly heard the remark from the crowd and responded, quote,
(51:33):
we could do that. On January eighteenth, on Countdown, I
did a brief commentary about how unsuitable Brown was for
public office. I said he was quote and irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary,
ex nude model, t bagging, supporter of violence against women
and against politicians with whom he disagrees unquote. I had
(51:54):
quotes from Brown. I had videotape of him disparaging his
minority opponent in a local election to her face at
a debate to back up what I said. An hour later,
Joe Scarborough commenced a tweet storm against me. Quote Olberman
calls Brown a homophobic, racist, reactionary who supports violence against women.
(52:15):
How reckless and how sad. It's no longer enough to
simply disagree with someone. I'm sorry, I just fell into
my Scarborough impression. Just as when Beck called a president racist,
This sort of rhetorical extremism must be discouraged. It chapened
the debate. End quote and impression. Now, there was a
(52:36):
standing rule at MSNBC. You want to criticize another MSNBC personality,
go ahead, have a blast, but it must be on
the air. On MSNBC, and the other person must have
an opportunity to reply in real time in the same
show or in some kind of face to face way.
No hit and run, no Joe Scarborough tweetstorms. If you
(53:01):
criticize them by name or by inference in any other
medium newspaper, inner, radio, social media, you were to receive
an automatic suspension. The next day, January nineteenth, I called
the president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, and I asked how
long Joe Scarborough's automatic suspension was going to be. Griffin
asked me to come into the office a little earlier
(53:22):
than usual and to go see him. He said he
had already had a meeting about the tweets that morning
with Scarborough's executive producer, Chris Licht. Griffin explained that Scarborough,
according to Licht, considered Scott Brown a friend. More importantly,
Chris lickt warrened Griffin that if Griffin followed through and
(53:42):
enforced the suspension rule, Scarborough would have no other option
than to go to the press and tell reporters, especially
reporters at right wing websites like Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller,
that he Scarborough had been suspended because he Scarborough was
a conservative, but I was a liberal, and that I
(54:03):
and not Phil Griff ran MSNBC. What can I do?
Griffin was scared. I told him he could fire Scarborough
and Licked because they had just tried to blackmail him
and eventually he was going to have to fire them
both anyway, but that I knew he would not do this,
and that I knew now that he would not suspend
Scarborough either, And Griffin did not suspend him. Partial score
(54:27):
Scarborough's friends two MSNBC's rules of behavior nothing, but Phil
Griffin did send out a memo to the entire company
insisting that anybody who criticized another MSNBC show or host
in another medium would be suspended, except Scarborough, who had
just done exactly that and then threatened his own employers.
(54:51):
On January twenty fifth, Brian Stelter's old blog TV newser
got a copy of Griffin's memo. They wondered why Scarborough
had not been suspended, so they called the MSNBC president
and then they printed quote Griffin responded to TV news
or quote, an important rule was broken. I spoke to
Keith and he said, in the spirit of teamwork and
(55:12):
the free flow of ideas. He didn't think it warranted
punishment or suspension. I also talked to Joe and he
apologized to me. That's why I made the decision that
this didn't rise to the level of punishment, but I
felt it was necessary to reiterate my long standing policy
one hundred percent bull crap. Reiterate my long standing policy
(55:32):
which I just did not enforce against Joe Scarborough. The
whole thing was totally fabricated. Lickt and Scarborough had threatened
to smear their own bosses in the right wing echo chamber.
Should have been both fired on the spot. In May
twenty ten, Scarborough said something on the air about a
Democrat getting away with not being investigated for something. I
(55:53):
forget the details. I didn't bother to look it up.
You can if you want. Then Marcos Malitsus, the editor
of the Daily Coast website and not just a regular
contributor to Countdown, but somebody who had been voting the
show and the MSNBC brand on that website every day
for five years. Marcos sent a snarky but legitimate tweet
(56:14):
questioning Scarborough's credentials to criticize others who had not been
investigated for stuff. Marcos invoked the staffer who died in
an accident in Joe Scarborough's congressional office. Scarborough then attacked
Melitsus on Twitter, inaccurately claiming Malitsus had accused Scarborough of murder.
A few days after that, I got a phone call
(56:35):
from the MSNBC president, Phil Griffin. And if he got
a phone call rather than a call to come into
his office, you know he was really scared. Griffin told
me Chris lickt has been in to see me. Joe
won't put up with having Marcus Malitzus on his network anymore.
Not only that, but Lick says many of Joe's friends
who also appear in Dayside and Primetime won't come on
(56:57):
if Marcos Malitsus is permitted to continue. Here, Chris is
insisting that Marcos be banned from MSNBC immediately. Chris says
he's afraid that if we don't do that, Joe won't
come into work tomorrow. Upon hearing that, I laughed and
I congratulated Phil Griffin on the clear win win he'd
just been given. But Phil was very bad at enforcing
(57:21):
MSNBC's rules, but very good at creating new ones on
the spot. To protect Joe Scarborough and Chris Lickt and
their friends. I'm banning the Lizzes from any further appearances
on MSNBC. I said, Phil, he's a contributor to my show.
You are suspending my contributor who has driven hundreds of
(57:41):
thousands of viewers to count Down at MSNBC, and I
don't have any say in it. You are owned by
Joe Scarborough and Chris Lickt. What you now have to
worry about is whether I tell this story on the
air tonight or I just wait and tell it later.
Phil now got conciliatory because he was scared again and
said it could be just a suspension if I cooperated.
(58:05):
So I called Marcos. He said he enjoyed his contributions
to Countdown. He also did occasional appearances on the old
Ed Schultz MSNBC show, and he said if there were
chants at resuming them, he'd preferred to at least try that.
So Marcus and I went along with Griffin suspending Marcus Malitzus,
and to my knowledge, Marcus Malitzus has not been seen
(58:25):
on MSNBC since. I wish I had better notes on
some of my conversations from the two thousand and eight, nine,
ten eleven era about those conversations with the hosts and
the producers of the other shows like Schultz and Rachel
Maddow's show, and even Chris Matthews and Hardball. I must
have heard a variation of this statement a dozen times
(58:46):
from these people. Guess who was in Griffin's office explaining
that such and such as Joe's friend and Phil really
needs to make sure we lay off him Chris Licked.
It was usually an expletive in the middle between Chris
and lickt I remember one of my producers at the
MSNBC version of Countdown telling me that one of the
other producers told him that Licked had gone to NBC
News President Steve Kappus with an actual list of Republicans
(59:10):
that Mattow and Olberman needed to stop criticizing because they
were Joe's here's the word again friends, and we were
hurting morning. Joe. I've done all the damage I can
(59:35):
do here. Thank you for listening. Most of our Countdown
music was arranged, produced, and performed by Brian Ray and
John Phillips Chanel. They are the musical directors of Countdown.
It was produced by Tko Brothers, mister Ray on guitars,
bass and drums, mister Shanelle handling, orchestration and keyboards. Our
satirical and pithical again, for some reason, I want to
say satirical and pithical. Our satirical and pithy musical comments
(01:00:02):
are made by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust.
And maybe I need to get Nancy to read this
script next time instead of me. The Olderman theme from
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Is the sports music other music arranged and performed by
the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today is my
friend Larry David, and everything else was as always my fault.
(01:00:26):
That's Countdown for today, Day two hundred and twenty eight.
Of America held hostage just two hundred and forty four
days until the scheduled end of his lame duck and
lame brained term. Unless he is removed sooner by MAGA
and Jeffrey Epstein, or by the pavement on his hand
or my commander pike, they just leave him somewhere where
(01:00:48):
he can frolic The next scheduled countdown is Let's see
Monday till then. I'm Keith Olverman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(01:01:18):
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. Trump
(00:25):
is not dead, and neither is his cover up of
the Epstein files. Of the trump Stein files. Sorry if
you gave him a script and told him what to
do to reignite the Trumpstein tire fire. Every time it
begins to go out, that script would start with a
leak an anonymous statement to House Republicans considering signing the
(00:48):
Massy discharge petition to force release of the real files.
B make sure the statement reads as much like a
slightly sanded down threat from a mafia boss as possible.
Like quote helping Thomas Massey liberal Democrats with their attention
seeking while the DOJ is fully supporting a more comprehensive
(01:09):
file release effort from the Oversight Committee would be viewed
as a very hostile act to the administration. C actually
release only the same documents that Pam Bondi released to
the libs of TikTok worm Chayak and the DC Draino
dipshit in those two dollars sixty nine cent thin three
(01:32):
ring binders they bought at Staples in February, d send
a military flyover to try to drown out the Epstein
survivor's news conference on the steps of the Capitol yesterday.
E choose this moment, this moment to ask the Supreme
Court to overturn the verdict where the Court found Trump
(01:57):
guilty of being liable for sexual abuse of e. Gene
Carroll and of defaming a sexual abuse victim. Do that
right now, This is the right moment for it. And
of course f sit there staring, fuming as this actual
bona fide, excellent comprehensive question, first of the year, is
(02:20):
rolled out in front of world media when you can
only come back with an answer that makes everybody think, wait,
Trump said that maybe maybe he is dead and he
just forgot to lie down.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
There have been survivors, as Jeffery seeking at a press
conference on Capitol Hill, and they're calling for these case files,
these documents to realise.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
And Thomas Messi, who is thought who is.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Especially a discarded physician to get the House to vote
to Luis to the documents, says he hasn't be you're
advocated in these files, but many of your friends and
donors maybe, And he says that's why the Justice Farman
is redacting them and slow walking the release. Is a
Justice Farman protecting any friends or donors.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
So this is a Democrat hoax that never ends.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
You know.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
It reminds me.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
A little of the Kennedy situation.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
We gave him everything over and over again, more and
more and more, and nobody's ever satisfied. From what I understand,
I could check, but from what I understand, thousands of
pages of documents have been given. But it's really a
Democrat hoax because they're trying to get people to talk
about something that's totally irrelevant to the success that we've
(03:33):
had as a nation since I've been president.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Cool. Cool. Wherever Trump was the last week, it was
not at a retreat strategizing how to get him out
of whatever world ending revelation there is about him in
the Trump Stein files. Would work, was he Pam Bondi
says Trump is in the Epstein files. Elon Musk says
(03:58):
Trump is in the Epstein files. Countless others have said
previously Trump is in the Epstein files, and for legal reasons,
the survivors who spoke at the Capitol yesterday did not
name him, nor name names of their rapists and abusers.
But happily, Marjorie Taylor Green vowed to read the names
(04:19):
with the survivor's permission on the floor of the house
where speech is protected and nobody can sue and Billy
would she be in for a surprise. And also there
seems to be a direct connection here that the Trump
dictatorship has not figured out. Every time Trump calls trump
Stein a hoax, another real news outlet picks up the story.
(04:46):
Larberry time a munched on. It's a hoax. An angel
gets its wings, and another survivor comes forward and vows
never to be quiet again and to send Trump more messages. Listen.
I don't like to I don't want to send a
direct message to him. I'm already scared enough. Ye just
(05:08):
pass the vote. Listen to us. This is not a hoax.
Like it's not gonna go away. And like I said
on my speech earlier, we are not going to be
We're not going to be silenced anymore. We will be
speaking moving forward. Wherever we need to be, we will
be and we need to pass this. The survivor's message
to Trump is in short, tick tick tick tick tick
(05:31):
tick tick tick tick tick. Meanwhile, the other Trump cover
(05:57):
up the weekend at Bernie's, Trump and Commander Pike Trump
and Zombie Trump, and the media is supplime willingness to
just let a week pass in which a clinically compulsive
talker does not utter a word in public or appear
on video for perhaps the first time in his life.
(06:18):
The Trumpsters leaked a story to CNN about how he's
always had bruising on his hand. We've always been at
war with East Asia and always been self conscious about it,
which of course simply raises the follow up question, if
he's had bruising on his hand for longer than just
the last six months, how come he still insists on
trying to cover it up with makeup when he clearly
(06:39):
has no idea how to effing apply makeup and might
as well write on his hand in lipstick something like
ask me about my head. What was tragic was to
hear Trump and his MAGA hate thugs insist he had
an active Labor Day weekend, well Labor Day week and
(07:00):
have everybody just sort of accept that because he posted
on social media he says it was him and went
to his golf club and posted photos of himself at
his golf club that turned out to be from a
month ago, and played golf well He says he played golf,
there's no video or pictures of him playing golf, and
(07:23):
says he did an interview with The Daily Caller for which,
for some reason, the Daily Caller did not record audio
or video of all of which ended when he finally
got on the phone with CNN's new star Mincing Conservative
fop Scott Jennings Tuesday morning, and he sounded like he'd
just been gargling battery acid. This is precisely how much
(07:47):
we truly know about Trump and the week one of
our presidents was missing. He's not dead. Currently. We don't
know about last week. We do know he did not
go to a retreat to strategize about Trumpstein. We can
(08:07):
infer that. We can also infer he didn't go to
a retreat to strategize about how to make Andrew Cuomo
the next mayor of New York City. The Times reported
yesterday Trump is considering appointing New York Mayor Eric Adams
and appointing the Republican nominee to replace him. Curtis I
have acute hat sliwa to the Trump administration in order
(08:29):
to make the New York City mayor's race just Cuomo
versus the Democratic nominee who won in a landslide in
the primary, Zoran Mamdani. Now this is political genius because
it would force New York Republicans, who hate Cuomo more
than New York Democrats do and help to run him
(08:51):
out of office when he was governor, force New York
Republicans to vote for him when they think he is
as liberal as mam Donni and twenty times as guilty.
And and it allows Mandanni to spend the last two
months of his campaign correctly noting that Cuomo is Trump's
whore and the man Trump wants to see become mayor
(09:16):
so he can manipulate him by threatening to indict him
and reminding Democrats that the election is now a referendum
on Trump when seventy five percent of New York City
residents are registered Democrats. Genius, I tell you it may
be that Trump is secretly working for Mamdani. Here. I
(09:38):
don't think that's likely, but every time Trump does something
it becomes likely er. We also, no, Trump did not
spend the missing week at a psychiatrist's office trying to
address any of his two or three thousand mental problems.
He roared out of the gate insisting he has settled
seven wars. Seven wars. Again, he's got this idea in
(10:01):
his head. He's going to shove it down your throat.
George Conway wrote the best kind of satire about this,
A legit question that allows you to answer with snark.
He wrote, I wish somebody would ask him to specifically
list the seven or however many wars he claims to
have ended, and then hand him a map and ask
him to show us on it where the wars were.
(10:23):
I have offered George the following answer. Here are the
seven wars Trump has settled. War are the Roses, War
of Attrition, War of the Worlds, War of the Planet
of the Apes, War of the Rohirm, War of the
baseball Magnets, and of course War of world Craft. Well,
(10:51):
by the way, once again, if Trump were a paid
employee of Vladimir Putin, he could not be doing more
or better work for Putin. Let me read the Associated
Press story so you get the full, non hysterical version
of this, although hysteria would not be a bad idea
right now, Putin says Trump's quote administration is listening to
(11:13):
the Kremlin's justifications for its invasion of neighboring Ukraine and
claimed that Moscow and Washington have come to a quote
mutual understanding about the conflict. Putin said during a visit
to China that the Trump administration is listening to us unquote,
and he complained that former President Joe Biden paid Moscow's
arguments no heed quote. Now we see this mutual understanding,
(11:37):
it's noticeable, Putin said at a bilateral meeting with pro
Russian Slovak president Robert Fico after talks with Chinese leader
Jijinpang in Beijing. Quote, we are very happy about this
and hope this constructive dialogue will continue. Oh well, lad,
if you're happy, we're happy. Putin's apparatics on state TV
(12:00):
in Russia went further. They are saying Trump and Tulsey
Gabbard have followed Putin's instructions, which, to be fair, is
the first suggestion by anybody ever that Tulsey Gabbard is
that confident at anything. For Julia Davis of The Daily Beast,
Carril Benedictov, a highly honored Russian writer who wrote a
(12:21):
book about Trump, said quote, we don't know what happened
in Anchorage between Putin and Trump, We don't know what
they talked about, and it's unlikely we will find out
over the next few years, but we do know some things.
The meeting took place on August fifteen, and four days later,
on August nineteen, Director of National Intelligence Tulsea Gabbard authored
a memorandum. Oddly enough, she published it on x formerly Twitter.
(12:46):
It was about the firing of thirty seven agents of
intelligence agencies, including the CIA, and stripping them of their
security clearances unquote. Now, why would Gabbard do something like
fire all the intelligence officers critical of Putin and, as
it turned out, outing who was working under cover against
(13:06):
Russia to please Trump? Obviously, because everybody in her life
but Trump hates her and has for a long time.
Why would Trump do it? Well, we need to remember
something baseline here that's a lot simpler than trying to
understand what Russia has on Trump and has always had
on Trump, which is probably money and maybe blackmail, but money.
(13:29):
But there's something more baseline to this that it's useful
to remember at all times about everything Trump does, including
what I'm going to talk about next COVID nineteen and
RFK junior. We need to remember the baseline, Trump is
not motivated by trying to improve things. Trump does not
want better. He does not want to improve. He does
(13:53):
not want anybody to succeed. He wants whatever he can see,
whatever is before him, to be his. It may be
pretty good, and he may then turn it into shit,
or it may actually turn out okay, but it's his shit.
(14:13):
Destruction and construction are the same thing to Donald Trump,
as long as the rubble is imprinted in gold letters
with just one word Trump. Robert F. Kennedy Junior is
as big a health threat to this country as the
(14:34):
COVID pandemic was, maybe as big a threat as the
nineteen eighteen influenza pandemic was. He says we're going to
see dramatic changes in the rates of many chronic diseases
before Trump leaves office. Notice please. He does not say
if that change in the rate will be a decrease
or an increase. RFK Junior's behavior is somewhat easy to understand.
(14:57):
He's insane, he's a heroin addict, supposedly recovered. He's strung
out on steroids at least, and he hallucinates so much
that he says in public that he can see mitochondrial
damage in children just by looking at them. In short,
if there's somebody here with mitochondria or any other kind
(15:18):
of damage, it's him. Now. He started with an understandable
bent towards conspiracy theories. As a child he had to
see his uncle, the president, get his head blown off,
and then five years later his own father was shot
to death, and conspiracies about them then dominated the background
political conversation in this country for thirty years or more,
(15:40):
every damn day. I first met him in two thousand
and four. He called me the day after the day
after the election, when I had reported some inconsistencies in
voting in Ohio where they locked down the place where
they were counting the votes in one rural county on
an argument that al Qaeda was about to attack this
place in Warren County. I think it was Ohio. And
(16:03):
it was a report that suggested that maybe somebody was
trying to ensure a Bush vote in Ohio. But that
was it. It wasn't the election was fixed or that
Carry should have won. And he went on for twenty
five minutes about how this story that I reported was
the key that I was his hero because it was
going to open up the election and they'd overturn it
(16:23):
and carry had really won. And I began to wonder
if there was anything he had done that was good
for this country after he helped clean up the Hudson River.
And it turns out that the conspiracies that populate the
parts of the brain that were opened up when the
worm ate them in Kennedy's head, the conspiracy party is
(16:44):
at the core of this, and not just for Robert
Kennedy Junior. But the assumption that the conspiracy theory is
grassroots is really flawed. I have to confess I never
analyzed it deeply. It seemed to me that fear of
needles very underrated. Fear in this country, mixed with fear
of government, mixed with fear of doctors, mixed with fear
(17:05):
of death, mixed with fear of you know, intelligence is
a pretty pretty strong prescription for mass asininity. But that's
not what this is. Walker Bragman of the Accountability Journalism
Institute writes that he tried to listen to the Ezra
Kleine New York Times podcast recently. Well, there's your mistake
(17:28):
right there. No one is more overrated than Ezra Kleine.
I mean on Earth, no one is more overrated. Mister
Bragman wrote about this in a thread on Blue Sky
that was so eye opening I want to quote freely
from it and add a few probably unnecessary observations. Bragman
writes that it quickly became clear to him that Klein
(17:48):
and his guests quote really do not understand why how
the political right turned on vaccines. The COVID nineteen pandemic
undermined the right in several key ways. One it showed
us which workers are essential and empowered them. Two, it
showed that the markets can't solve everything. Three it threatened
(18:10):
GOP political prospects in a critical election. And four government
relief proved popular and effective. We forget about that it
was popular and clearly it was effective, and Trump got
credit for it. To continue from mister Bragman's points, if
(18:33):
you're on the side of capital interests, wealth as an
indicator of virtue, the value of one's societal contributions, free markets.
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are
I'm from the government and I'm here to help You're ft.
COVID just exposed you entirely. And if you don't want
anything to interfere with business. Well, the only thing to
(18:55):
do is end the crisis, at least end the public's
perception that there is a crisis. Remember Lieutenant Governor Dan
Patrick's tears in Texas about how the old like him
should die to protect the economy for their grandchildren. The
(19:17):
most important thing was the economy, not the possibility that
this thing could get worse and unchecked by any kind
of vaccine or treatment at that point, could wipe everybody out.
Very difficult to spend money when you're dead. He believed
that old folks, and by that he meant old folks
who worked jobs, not old folks who were using assumed
(19:40):
names to graduate from talk radio to being the lieutenant
governor of Texas. That old folks should die to protect
the economy for their grandchildren. This is your grandchild, Elon Musk,
protect him. He was ready to go. Dan Patrick said,
(20:02):
we're waiting Pal. So we saw right wing media and
dark money groups start messaging out bullshit like COVID is
not really a huge deal. Deaths are overcounted. Best to
pursue heard immunity through mass infection. COVID mitigation measures are
an assault on personal liberty. School closures are irreparable harm.
(20:24):
Mister Bragman does not go off on the subject of
school closures, but I will. The school closures thing immediately
made no sense to me, the argument that we should
not close schools. I mean, I understand that we should
not close schools. But the people who were saying this
were the right wingers. These are the people who have
(20:44):
been pushing for home schooling, who turned it, as I
said the other day, from what we used to call
it truan see. These are the people who gutted the
Department of Education. These are the ones attacking the universities,
particularly the Ivy League universities. School closures the positive side
(21:05):
effect for the right wing to COVID irreparable harm. What
they meant was it was inconvenient to have their kids
at home. To resume the quotation. Now, on the surface,
it doesn't make sense for the right to oppose the
COVID vaccines. Right they presented a way out of the pandemic.
They were created through Trump's Operation Warp Speed. But logic
(21:27):
doesn't apply here. Pure politics do again. As an aside,
the Wall Street Journal story last week about Trump's million
dollar fundraiser, the one last month where he's ruminating to
this room full of people who paid a million dollars
to get in there about how he could not take
credit for the vaccine because well, you know, with the
(21:48):
head of Pfizer in the crowd, having paid a million
dollars to get in there, a million dollars that he
in part earned from the COVID vaccines. Quote, Biden got
to roll out the vaccines and claim that victory. Of course,
the vaccines did dot end the crisis immediately. They took
a long time, and Biden dropping non pharmaceutical interventions meant
a lot of people died on his watch. Undermining the
(22:11):
vaccines meant undermining Biden and Dems. But that wasn't all.
Trump had pushed fake cures pre vax is it aside,
if you've forgotten the drinking, the cleaning elements. I don't
think he ever actually said bleach and putting light in
(22:31):
your body. He did not actually say do an uncle,
fester and put a light bulb in your mouth. That
was just the image that appeared in the minds of
everybody with an IQ larger than thirty. The people enlisted
in that effort did not go away. Folks like Simone
gold of America's front line doctors, which pushed Trump's fake
hydriat Carraqueen miracle COVID treatment. She ended up allying with
(22:56):
anti vaxer Robert Kennedy Junior again as an aside, who
made money off that crap directly or just by pushing
on their shows and getting a greater right wing audience.
Only every right winger with a show, Joe Rogan, Matt
Gates appeared in commercials for the horse Tonic Aaron Rodgers quote,
(23:23):
so we got the seeds for anti vax bullshit on
the right, with the embraceive fake cures like hydroxychloroquin and
later ivermectin. Also, the herd immunity crowd is a natural
ally for anti baxers, because they said we didn't need
a vaccine for herd immunity, just infection. I'll note here
(23:44):
that herd immunity also appealed to MAGA because they always
just assumed they were stronger and better and had better mitochondria,
and only Democrats would die of COVID. Ask Herman Kine
how that worked out for him. Herman, who never heard
of him quote, So we start seeing antibaxer in the
(24:05):
comment sections of posts by folks like Jay Batticharia of
the Great Barrington Declaration, and eventually these folks whose real
goal was undermining government and the pandemic response, embraced that
audience taking a step back. The embrace of the unregulated
wellness industry and anti vax hocum was probably inevitable for
(24:26):
the Right. As the representative of big business interests, it
has long had an antagonistic oppositional relationship with science and expertise.
Think tobacco and climate science. Very good, mister Bragman. The
anti vax thing is just the pro smoking and anti
climate change quote. With COVID vaccines, didn't matter that Trump
(24:51):
facilitated their production. It just mattered that they could be
used to undermine the right's favorite enemies government democrats, public
health authorities, teachers and schools, and appeal to their natural base,
affluent whites, while making inroads with new demographics. In anyone
skeptical of modern medicine and our healthcare system, which in
this country is a lot of effing people. Our healthcare
(25:12):
system breeds distrust. Millions don't have a primary care doctor.
Cost is prohibitive, lack of access is another issue. He continues.
Having covered this story in real time through various pieces,
it was weird watching each narrative become essential to the
Right even as they contradicted each other, Like the bioweapon
(25:34):
lab leaks stuff that I didn't get into in this
thread directly contradicts the anti vax and herd immunity stuff.
The Right, he postulates, has like a soup worldview. Anything
goes in the pot so long as it erodes demand
for and trust in government. Believe one part of it,
you'll eventually have to accept the others to stay relevant
(25:57):
within the Right, even if it's contradictory and the sum
of the parts doesn't make sense. Adding to the inevitability
of the herd immunity anti vax alliance, both camps falsely
claim their views were suppressed by the powers that be.
It adds a layer of conspiratorial appeal. Rather an amazing
(26:25):
thread from accounterbearnt ability journalism institutes Walter Bragman And if
you don't think that last part is true. R. K.
Junior is the Secretary of Health Health in Human Services.
He's in charge of the public response to everything that
relates to health, from food to swallowing light bulbs, and Bleach,
(26:50):
and he is still positioning himself as draining the swamp.
And the idiots who believe still think they are the
victims with no voice. I say they believe, I don't
know at least they say that. Who knows what they
(27:11):
believe or if they believe anything anymore. And frankly, who
cares doesn't matter what they believe, doesn't matter what they say.
The only issue for the rest of us now is
how to stop them. Also of interest here, Stephen A.
(27:31):
Smith keeps digging the name of his new politics show
We'll Turn Your Stomach, and speaking of that, Ja Scarborough
is added again on the network that used to be
MSNBC before they all broke it, siding with Trump, against
(27:52):
Democrats and against democracy and especially against any democratic official
who has the nerve to stand up to Joe Scarborough's boss,
Donald Trump. The history of Joe Scarborough scumbag. That's next.
This is countdown. This is countdown, with Keith Olberman still
(28:38):
ahead on this edition to countdown Joe Scarborough's done it
again went on the network formerly known as MSNBC Tuesday
morning and said that Illinois Governor JB. Pritzker should quote
Heartner it that would be partner up in American English
with Trump on Trump's violating of the Posse Comitatis Act,
(29:01):
and that Pritzker should go along with the plan to
use the National Guard in Chicago. This is because Joe
Scarborough is a fascist. Also, he's yet defined a principle,
including fascism, that he could not abandon at the first
sign of trouble. It is nearly a year now since
(29:23):
he and missus Idiot tried to get back on the
Trump death star by going to Mari Lago and prostrating themselves.
Joe Scarborough is a scumbag working for a scumbag network
run by scumbag management owned by a scumbag company. But
(29:45):
his willingness to personally prostitute himself in whatever way the
pimps who own him want him to has gotten him
a job for life. There if you call that show
at that hour every morning a life. The many times
I have been appalled by Joe Scarborough next in things
(30:10):
I promised not to tell first, those who always will
come in behind Joe Scarborough on the list of today's
other worst persons in the world, Lebron's worst Stephen Asmith.
Stephen Asmith announced the new weekly political show on a
(30:32):
satellite radio outfit. Apparently they announced it in the form
of an exclusive to The Washington Post so they could
get a feature length out article out of the reporter
Jeremy Barr And by the way, that's the Washington Post,
which is the Steven A. Smith of newspapers. To be fair,
Barr asked him about his friendship with Sean Hannity. The question,
(30:57):
you've said, you've gotten some criticism of your twenty year
long friendship with Fox News host Sean Hannity on who
show you a pure Casely has that given you any pause? Answer?
Not even a little bit. It's made my friendship with
him more resolute because you're not going to tell me
how to think. As an interjection, who would waste their
(31:19):
time trying to get him to think? And how I
should feel? You feel, how thick your wallet is, that's
all you feel. There's plenty of people that have friends
in their lives that don't agree with their politics. This
isn't politics. This is existential about America, and you're going
on the wrong side of it. Steve, all of a sudden,
(31:40):
because it's Sean Hannity, it's supposed to be different. I
don't want to hear that crap. It gets in the
way of Stephen making money. He doesn't want to hear it.
That's nonsense. Where does that say it will get me
more money? He's a die hard conservative. I wish he
believes in free market capitalism and close borders and strong
(32:01):
national security and stuff like that. Stuff like that in
the Hannity world is dictatorship. By the way. He's not
some white nationalist or anything like that. Oh okay, Sean
doesn't roll like that. Oh my god, you say you
(32:22):
know him twenty years how come this has only come
up five years ago that you knew him? He went
on his show. Sean doesn't roll like that. I worked
with Steven A. Smith as recently a twenty nineteen and
there was not one goddamn mention of him being friends
with Sean Hannity. I know him, so I don't worry
(32:43):
about that. Candace Owens. He knows Candace Owens too and
doesn't worry about her. And you know, if it's all
about friends being agreeable with one another, then what kind
of real friendship is that. Well, you're gonna try to
have a friendship that doesn't end your career Stephen Steven
Hannity is so much worse a person than you could
(33:04):
possibly know. Your friend is playing you, if he is
your friend, if he's anybody's friend. I also see nothing
in this interview about Candice Owens and Smith praising her.
Then again, I didn't read the whole thing because I
canceled my Washington Post subscription a year ago, two years ago,
and I don't notice anybody asking Smith or Serious how
(33:27):
in the world they could in this time of the
wholesale slaughter of our children in school, in church, in school,
the slaughter of those kids two guns and a year
removed from the attempted shooting of a presidential candidate, and
the nation still teetering daily on mass gun violence. I
(33:47):
don't see the guy from the Washington Post asking him
or Serious or he's Stephen A. Smith. Why would they
be cold enough to name their new show Stephen A Smith,
straight shooter, Stephen run like hell. Frankly, this could easily
(34:10):
destroy your media career easily and quickly. The runner up
worser the man who is behind all those such destructions,
Trump or whoever was writing his stuff for him during
that week in which he spent in the Cone of
Silence the week in which he was Commander Pike from
(34:32):
the Star Trek Pilot. Remember the video posted under his
name during the Cone of Silence, I used at the
White House the most beautiful marble and stone available anywhere.
Surfaces are very important to me as a builder. Also,
he can't comprehend anything besides surfaces. As everyone knows, I
built many great buildings and other things over the years.
(34:55):
Actually I lived in one of those buildings and length
the day the warranty ran out, the elevator stopped running
and some of the electricity shut off and water started
to come out of the walls. But they were great
buildings at the White House. I am very proud of
the beautiful stone work we did in the Rose Garden.
That's where they paved it over and made it look
like a parking lot or worse like Mary Lago, in
(35:17):
this case using limestone plus the Rose Garden is completed
and far more beautiful than anyone ever had in mind
when it was conceived of decades ago. Three days ago,
while admiring the stone work, I happened to notice a
huge gash in the limestone that extended more than twenty
five yards long. It was deep and nasty. I started
(35:37):
yelling blah blah blah. And it turns out this is
like three hundred words about the marble that was used
and how the marble got damaged and the marble contractor
screwed up and marble Marble marble, which got this response
quote Trump is worried about literally losing his marbles, unquote,
(35:58):
just showing that any writer will steal anything from anybody.
I am obliged here to say I just stole that
from the guy who wrote it. Dan McLaughlin at Baseball
Crank on Twitter of the National Review Online, one of
the most venomous and dense of the far right magass clowns.
But dam Trump is worried about literally losing his marbles
(36:21):
is a great line. But our winner, Laura Loomer the worst.
There is one secret flex, one weapon of self defense
that was, is and always will be on our side.
It is the fact that for the Magats, there is
no yesterday. They cannot forget, no tomorrow. They cannot not
foresee if it serves their purpose. They are all Joe
(36:44):
Scarborough only dumber. They are truly nihilists, so they can
pretend to believe one thing one day and its exact
opposite thing tomorrow, or ultimately, when they run out of
things that don't contradict what they used to believe, they
believe in nothing. But it's more than that. It seems
to be a requirement to never even consider that what
you are boastfully criticizing somebody for, or something you're threatening
(37:07):
to do to somebody else may apply twice as much
to you, or to your president, or to your hero
or largely, I think this is because the other fascists
forget as fast as the speakers do, as the lead
fascists do. But still, you would think that if you
portray yourself as the Trump whisterberer, as the secret personnel
(37:30):
director at the White House, you would google before you shoot,
so you don't say something like this, Not Laura Lomer, No, sir.
The US district judge who blocked the Trump trafficking of
unaccompanied children back to Guatemala because they were at risk
of physical harm if they were forced to go back
to Guatemala. That judge is named Judge Sparkle Supnanan. Now
(37:54):
that's an unusual name, although I worked forty years ago
with a woman who became a prominent writer in Canada,
whose given first name was Sparkle. Sparkle we worked together
at CNN, so Sparkle is not as unusual a name
as you might think. Anyway, Judge Suk Nanon was born
in the nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Her education Hofstra
(38:19):
and Brooklyn Law, so she's closer to being a Native
American than Lumer is, who is from Tucson and Miami.
The libs of TikTok idiot, the one who still doesn't
realize she was used by Trump and Bondi with the
Epstein file folder that had nothing in it that they
just released again yesterday, she complained about Judge soup Nanon's origins,
(38:43):
so Lumer went full racist xenophobe. I mean, she is
full racist cenophobe. She just decided to put it on
social media this time. Laura Lumer, why do we allow
for foreigners to be judges in the US. It should
be legal to hold office in the United States if
you were not from the US. I'm sick of woke
foreign born judges destroying the US. Go back to Trinidad, uh, Laura.
(39:06):
Quick word about Judge Aileen Cannon. Remember her Trump's concierge
Judge the one who fixed the espionage documents case for
Trump last year. Judge Cannon, the one who threw herself
in front of justice in the United States, Judge Aileen
Cannon born nineteen eighty one in let's see Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Calli, Columbia.
(39:41):
Aileen Cannon born nineteen eighty one, Calli, Columbia, not District
of Columbia, Columbia, col Ombia. You could have googled that, Loomer.
But now shoot from the hip. And when you shoot
from the hip, remember the odds are six to five,
(40:03):
you will blow off part of your own as So, yes, Laura,
no more foreigners can be judges in the US, not
Judge Supnanan and not Judge Eileen Cannon. But remember, because
you asked for it, Laura. Also you're phrasing, why do
we allow for foreigners to be judges? That's not exactly
(40:23):
American English. Glomer moron and today's other worst person and
(40:45):
Joe Scarborough and his latest wife began their morning chat
show on MSNBC with a simpering, cowardly transparent words salad
that might as well have literally been we for two,
welcome our new insect overlords only that would have been funny.
(41:06):
Let me again mention that, in half a century of
working in newsrooms ranging from international ones to high school ones,
Joe Scarborough is easily the worst person I have ever known. Easily.
And I worked with David Letterman's blackmailer, and I worked
with a guy who later extorted George Steinbrenner and threatened
(41:28):
to break his legs. Joe Scarborough is better than either
of them. He is unique the lack of morals, of principles,
of scruples. That's not the result of a fractured brain
like say Trump. It's not the result of money needs
like the guy who blackmailed Letterman or the guy who
(41:50):
extorted Steinbrenner. It's a tool Scarborough uses that he has
used for at least twenty five years. Joe Scarborough was
a newt gangrich whore. Then he became a far right
pro torture wannabee. Then he was the supposedly reasonable conservative
who's on air persona covered up his endless internal sabotage
(42:14):
of everybody who was better than him at NBC. Then
he was the moderate political salon host in the mornings.
Then he was the guy who tried to mainstream Trump
and literally traveled to Trump to advise him and was
Trump's guy on real TV. And then when Trump didn't
choose him to be vice president, Scarborough decided the real
(42:36):
money was in bashing Trump, and so he turned on
him and bashed him and bashed him and bashed him
and called him hitler more than a year ago. And
when he called him hitler, it was the first time
I'd ever agreed with Joey scars But I knew, in
my god, he was just selling another product. See, there
are people who went confronted in their lives by Nazis
suddenly find themselves choosing to join the government of VSH France.
(43:02):
That's Jeff Bezos. That's not Joe Scarborough. Joe Scarborough has
always been a VSHI in search of Nazis to serve.
And after seven years, he'd actually managed to erase his past.
He'd virtually erased from his audience's memory any sense that
(43:23):
he tried to ram Trump down America's throat. In twenty sixteen,
and then suddenly Monday, he was announcing he and Mika
Brizhinsky had gone to marri Lago to try to open
a dialogue with Trump, and he then produced an amazing
imaginary moronic dialogue in which somebody else asked him, why
the hell would you do that? With the ludicrous answer
(43:45):
why the hell wouldn't you. The rhetorical answer to that,
of course, was contained in Mika Brzhinsky's part of this speech,
which was as close to an actual hostage video as
I have ever seen on actual television. The practical answer is,
of course, you don't do that, because then you have
just turned your network into collaboration. If he's Hitler and
(44:07):
you are now saying we must make a deal with him,
you are VC MSNBC, and everybody who works there who
does not say this is VC MSNBC is just as
guilty Rachel. Anyway, there are three plausible explanations I guess
(44:28):
equal plausibility for this. I'm not sure which is true.
I'm not sure it matters. One NBC and MSNBC looked
at the post election Kamala Harris Saturday Night Live blowback
and the post election ratings, and since the networks are
run by people who do not understand news or political news,
and barely understand television, they panicked and told him to
(44:50):
do it. Or Scarborough looked at the ratings, and being
exactly as stupid as his bosses, he panicked and did
it himself. Or, as CNN reported Tuesday, he and the
misses genuinely assessed the threats by Trump and they were
vulnerable and they'd have to do something to assuage Trump.
And of course just going there and saying zay, that
(45:13):
would hardly do it. But if they also told Trump,
we'll go back to sinewashing your presidency, only they didn't
tell the audience that well that that would make more sense,
that would be pure cowardice. Of course, it's the actual
plot of George Orwell's nineteen eighty four. Maybe that last
one makes slightly more sense now in light of Tuesday
(45:33):
night's news that NBC is going to spin off its
news cable operations, finally separating the dead weight of NBC
News from what might still grow MSNBC and CNBC. I
begged them to do this as far back as nineteen
ninety seven, for god's sakes. Also, you're a listener to
this podcast, and I'm the guy who writes it and
(45:55):
reads it. The last few weeks, I haven't felt like
writing it and reading it, and you haven't felt like
listening to it, or at least not as much. We're
in mourning, we're in husbanding your resources mode, we're in recovery.
Of course, the ratings are going to be bad. Go
look at Fox News' ratings at the end of twenty
twenty and most of twenty twenty one. Did they fire
(46:17):
everybody and suddenly wind up with a Joe Biden show
in the morning? No, be professionals take the loss. Oh
your NBC. Oh MSNBC's only going to make a quarter
of a billion dollars. Oh, I'm so sorry. People should
be killed for that. Right, isn't that the law now?
(46:38):
Back at the Joey Scars level? The problem is, the
problems are Scarborough already burned down his anti Trump audience
in twenty fifteen and early twenty sixteen, Then he burned
down his new pro Trump audience in twenty sixteen and
twenty seventeen and all the years since, And now he's
(47:01):
gone back and burned down his anti Trump audience at Gin.
There's nobody left. The right never stopped hating him. The left,
which had just started to forget he was in Trump's
pocket for a year, hates him anew and now is
seeing that picture of him and Trump's standing there with
that idiotic thumb up their ass pose, which I keep
(47:24):
tweeting every day. Just a coincidence. Joe resolved this dilemma,
namely that nobody wants to watch him anymore or go
on his show by simply pretending none of it is
true and that everybody supports him, and anybody who disagrees
with him is disconnected from reality. And we have always
been at war with Ease Dansia. The other problem is
(47:48):
Joe Scarborough is a terrible person who has always thought
he could get away with it, often did always thought
he could blame somebody else, and has always done stuff
exactly like this. And I'll get to that in a moment.
First reminding you of the pre it'sipal problem by having
Nancy Faust remind you that just cause you call a
(48:09):
guy hitler, maybe it didn't mean that hitler. Maybe it
meant the other Hitler, the singing hitler, the dancing hitler,
the hitler with a song in his heart, Oh, Nancy.
(48:57):
Perhaps the most amazing thing about my ten years at
MSNBC was the fact that Joe Scarborough and his producers,
especially his chief henchmen ever got their own show on
the air, because nobody I have ever worked with in
radio or television, in sports or news in the twentieth
century or the twenty first ever spent more time trying
(49:21):
to screw with other programs on the same network than
did Joe Scarborough. And until just about the time I
left in twenty eleven, the guy he sent in to
do most of the sabotage for him was this henchman guy.
The reason this should matter to you now is Scarborough's
henchman was Chris Licked, the new president of CNN. And
(49:44):
if they scoured the nation to find the worst person
to run CNN in a time when democracy is threatened
by one political party and tepidly defended by another, it's
Chris Licked. I know, I know. You turn on the
TV and you see Joe Scarborough, and you see exactly
what I see. A blank day's darting, paranoid, no soul,
(50:07):
stupid check engine light. Look. But if you don't trust me,
trust my scars. My Joey Scars behind that vapid face
is a master saboteur. Early in two thousand and eight,
the late Tim Russert called me and warned me that
the GOP had upped its pressure on me. He said
(50:28):
he had heard from somebody in New York that somebody
in New York was going into the office of the
president of NBC News saying that Joe Scarborough couldn't get
his friend John McCain to come on to his new
Morning show because I was so critical of McCain on countdown.
Tim was not sure it was Scarborough, but if it wasn't,
(50:48):
who else could have gotten in to see the president
of NBC News other than Scarborough or his executive producer.
The evidence for the new CNN president, mister Licht, being
directly involved in interfering with programming to benefit somebody else's
friends or political cronies, was vague in two thousand and eight,
but not at all vague two years later. Early in
(51:10):
January twenty ten, the Republican candidate to fill the Senate
seat of a late Ted Kennedy, Scott Brown, the former
semi nude model, was at a rally when one of
his supporters talked about quote, shoving a curling iron up
the backside of the Democratic Senate candidate Martha Cokeley. Scott
Brown clearly heard the remark from the crowd and responded, quote,
(51:33):
we could do that. On January eighteenth, on Countdown, I
did a brief commentary about how unsuitable Brown was for
public office. I said he was quote and irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary,
ex nude model, t bagging, supporter of violence against women
and against politicians with whom he disagrees unquote. I had
(51:54):
quotes from Brown. I had videotape of him disparaging his
minority opponent in a local election to her face at
a debate to back up what I said. An hour later,
Joe Scarborough commenced a tweet storm against me. Quote Olberman
calls Brown a homophobic, racist, reactionary who supports violence against women.
(52:15):
How reckless and how sad. It's no longer enough to
simply disagree with someone. I'm sorry, I just fell into
my Scarborough impression. Just as when Beck called a president racist,
This sort of rhetorical extremism must be discouraged. It chapened
the debate. End quote and impression. Now, there was a
(52:36):
standing rule at MSNBC. You want to criticize another MSNBC personality,
go ahead, have a blast, but it must be on
the air. On MSNBC, and the other person must have
an opportunity to reply in real time in the same
show or in some kind of face to face way.
No hit and run, no Joe Scarborough tweetstorms. If you
(53:01):
criticize them by name or by inference in any other
medium newspaper, inner, radio, social media, you were to receive
an automatic suspension. The next day, January nineteenth, I called
the president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, and I asked how
long Joe Scarborough's automatic suspension was going to be. Griffin
asked me to come into the office a little earlier
(53:22):
than usual and to go see him. He said he
had already had a meeting about the tweets that morning
with Scarborough's executive producer, Chris Licht. Griffin explained that Scarborough,
according to Licht, considered Scott Brown a friend. More importantly,
Chris lickt warrened Griffin that if Griffin followed through and
(53:42):
enforced the suspension rule, Scarborough would have no other option
than to go to the press and tell reporters, especially
reporters at right wing websites like Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller,
that he Scarborough had been suspended because he Scarborough was
a conservative, but I was a liberal, and that I
(54:03):
and not Phil Griff ran MSNBC. What can I do?
Griffin was scared. I told him he could fire Scarborough
and Licked because they had just tried to blackmail him
and eventually he was going to have to fire them
both anyway, but that I knew he would not do this,
and that I knew now that he would not suspend
Scarborough either, And Griffin did not suspend him. Partial score
(54:27):
Scarborough's friends two MSNBC's rules of behavior nothing, but Phil
Griffin did send out a memo to the entire company
insisting that anybody who criticized another MSNBC show or host
in another medium would be suspended, except Scarborough, who had
just done exactly that and then threatened his own employers.
(54:51):
On January twenty fifth, Brian Stelter's old blog TV newser
got a copy of Griffin's memo. They wondered why Scarborough
had not been suspended, so they called the MSNBC president
and then they printed quote Griffin responded to TV news
or quote, an important rule was broken. I spoke to
Keith and he said, in the spirit of teamwork and
(55:12):
the free flow of ideas. He didn't think it warranted
punishment or suspension. I also talked to Joe and he
apologized to me. That's why I made the decision that
this didn't rise to the level of punishment, but I
felt it was necessary to reiterate my long standing policy
one hundred percent bull crap. Reiterate my long standing policy
(55:32):
which I just did not enforce against Joe Scarborough. The
whole thing was totally fabricated. Lickt and Scarborough had threatened
to smear their own bosses in the right wing echo chamber.
Should have been both fired on the spot. In May
twenty ten, Scarborough said something on the air about a
Democrat getting away with not being investigated for something. I
(55:53):
forget the details. I didn't bother to look it up.
You can if you want. Then Marcos Malitsus, the editor
of the Daily Coast website and not just a regular
contributor to Countdown, but somebody who had been voting the
show and the MSNBC brand on that website every day
for five years. Marcos sent a snarky but legitimate tweet
(56:14):
questioning Scarborough's credentials to criticize others who had not been
investigated for stuff. Marcos invoked the staffer who died in
an accident in Joe Scarborough's congressional office. Scarborough then attacked
Melitsus on Twitter, inaccurately claiming Malitsus had accused Scarborough of murder.
A few days after that, I got a phone call
(56:35):
from the MSNBC president, Phil Griffin. And if he got
a phone call rather than a call to come into
his office, you know he was really scared. Griffin told
me Chris lickt has been in to see me. Joe
won't put up with having Marcus Malitzus on his network anymore.
Not only that, but Lick says many of Joe's friends
who also appear in Dayside and Primetime won't come on
(56:57):
if Marcos Malitsus is permitted to continue. Here, Chris is
insisting that Marcos be banned from MSNBC immediately. Chris says
he's afraid that if we don't do that, Joe won't
come into work tomorrow. Upon hearing that, I laughed and
I congratulated Phil Griffin on the clear win win he'd
just been given. But Phil was very bad at enforcing
(57:21):
MSNBC's rules, but very good at creating new ones on
the spot. To protect Joe Scarborough and Chris Lickt and
their friends. I'm banning the Lizzes from any further appearances
on MSNBC. I said, Phil, he's a contributor to my show.
You are suspending my contributor who has driven hundreds of
(57:41):
thousands of viewers to count Down at MSNBC, and I
don't have any say in it. You are owned by
Joe Scarborough and Chris Lickt. What you now have to
worry about is whether I tell this story on the
air tonight or I just wait and tell it later.
Phil now got conciliatory because he was scared again and
said it could be just a suspension if I cooperated.
(58:05):
So I called Marcos. He said he enjoyed his contributions
to Countdown. He also did occasional appearances on the old
Ed Schultz MSNBC show, and he said if there were
chants at resuming them, he'd preferred to at least try that.
So Marcus and I went along with Griffin suspending Marcus Malitzus,
and to my knowledge, Marcus Malitzus has not been seen
(58:25):
on MSNBC since. I wish I had better notes on
some of my conversations from the two thousand and eight, nine,
ten eleven era about those conversations with the hosts and
the producers of the other shows like Schultz and Rachel
Maddow's show, and even Chris Matthews and Hardball. I must
have heard a variation of this statement a dozen times
(58:46):
from these people. Guess who was in Griffin's office explaining
that such and such as Joe's friend and Phil really
needs to make sure we lay off him Chris Licked.
It was usually an expletive in the middle between Chris
and lickt I remember one of my producers at the
MSNBC version of Countdown telling me that one of the
other producers told him that Licked had gone to NBC
News President Steve Kappus with an actual list of Republicans
(59:10):
that Mattow and Olberman needed to stop criticizing because they
were Joe's here's the word again friends, and we were
hurting morning. Joe. I've done all the damage I can
(59:35):
do here. Thank you for listening. Most of our Countdown
music was arranged, produced, and performed by Brian Ray and
John Phillips Chanel. They are the musical directors of Countdown.
It was produced by Tko Brothers, mister Ray on guitars,
bass and drums, mister Shanelle handling, orchestration and keyboards. Our
satirical and pithical again, for some reason, I want to
say satirical and pithical. Our satirical and pithy musical comments
(01:00:02):
are made by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust.
And maybe I need to get Nancy to read this
script next time instead of me. The Olderman theme from
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Is the sports music other music arranged and performed by
the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today is my
friend Larry David, and everything else was as always my fault.
(01:00:26):
That's Countdown for today, Day two hundred and twenty eight.
Of America held hostage just two hundred and forty four
days until the scheduled end of his lame duck and
lame brained term. Unless he is removed sooner by MAGA
and Jeffrey Epstein, or by the pavement on his hand
or my commander pike, they just leave him somewhere where
(01:00:48):
he can frolic The next scheduled countdown is Let's see
Monday till then. I'm Keith Olverman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(01:01:18):
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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