February 20, 2024 • 54 mins
SERIES 2 EPISODE 126: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: How many times would YOU be permitted to threaten mass violence if you didn’t get your way before Homeland Security came and dragged your ass, off somewhere? I think Trump is now in triple digits. It’s time to drag him off. “All political prosecutions of your favorite president, me, must stop immediately… this is election interference and must be immediately stopped… Our country will not stand for it.”
This is the by-now standard Trump stochastic threat: if the government does not bend to my will my supporters will kill you all. It’s megalomania and as often as he does it and as dulled as we become to it, it’s unspeakably dangerous. It is not just shouting fire in a crowded theater, it’s shouting fire in a crowded theater full of gun-crazed nutjobs. And I’ll go back to my first point here: how often would YOU get away with it?
Oh by the way, I think he also has to stop with this nauseating “your favorite president – me” schtick. If you hadn’t heard – in the new Presidents’ Day poll of 154 historians, Trump was again ranked the worst president ever, with only half the marks of the next-worst, James Buchanan.
PLUS: The Biden Campaign "re-set?" Knock it out of the park at The State of the Union. Good - but how about a million ads simply stating Trump WILL INSTITUTE A NATIONAL ABORTION BAN?
And the story of the day: I don’t know how the hell you could’ve missed this but a 22-page report on the trial of a Union civilian employee during the Civil War who defended himself with a pocket-knife, produces the astonishing fact that in 1864 Abraham Lincoln PARDONED Joe Biden’s great great grandfather. The best part? "In imploring Lincoln to pardon him, the friends of Moses J. Robinette, described him as “ardent and influential… in opposing traitors and their schemes to destroy the government.”
Talk about destiny!
B-BLOCK (22:30) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: No, I don't know how a woman I lived with for three years wound up telling the audience for her MSNBC show how a man who tried to get the crowds at his rallies to kill her, wound up an "icon" in her eyes, and why she asked if it were "fair" to prosecute him - but I have a theory. The Self-Destruction of Katy Tur. (32:53) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Two guys having sex atop a moving New York subway train gives me the chance to quote the subway spokesman who preceded me as sports director of WVBR radio at Cornell, Tim Minton. Brian Kilmeade does a stupid, and spells it wrong. And the perfect joke about the Trump Sneakers.
C-BLOCK (39:17) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: 40 years ago this month I was beginning the shortest, weirdest job I ever had. And by coincidence I had to re-tell the story over the weekend. The Short Unhappy Boston Career of Keith Olbermann.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
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. How
many times would you be permitted to threaten mass violence
(00:25):
if you did not get your way before Homeland Security
or the FBI or somebody came and dragged your ass
off somewhere? I think Trump is now in triple digits.
It is time to drag his ass off somewhere. All
political prosecutions of your favorite president me must stop immediately.
(00:49):
This is election interference and must be immediately stopped. Our
country will not stand for it. This is the by
now standard Trump stochastic threat. If the government does not
bend to my will, my supporters will kill you. It
is megalomania. And as often as he does it, and
(01:09):
as dulled as we are thus become to it, it
is unspeakably dangerous. It is not just shouting fire in
a crowded theater. It's shouting fire in a crowded theater
full of gun crazed nut jobs. And I will go
back to my first point here, how often would you
get away with it? Send him to Gitmo, just go
(01:30):
to his next court appearance. I think they are now
printed on most calendars, and I think they list them
on all the schedules next to the upcoming NBA games,
go to his next court appearance and arrest him. And oh,
by the way, I think at minimum he has to
stop with this nauseating your favorite president me stick if
(01:52):
you had not heard. In the New President's Date poll
of one hundred and fifty four historians, Trump was again
ranked the worst president ever, with only half the marks
of the next world first James Buchanan. Somehow, and consider
how nearly impossible this is. Somehow, he is also ranked
(02:15):
both the worst president of all time and the seventh
most overrated president of all time. How on the hell
you pull that off? They have gone nuts on the
right because while Trump was last, Obama is seventh, Biden fourteenth. Frankly,
(02:36):
I think they should cut their losses and join me
in this. I am surprised Trump finished as high up
as he did, but seriously, folks, on day thirty seven
of Trump's dementia crisis, more evidence that the dumbwaiter doesn't
go up to the top floor any longer in his
apartment building. As I always acknowledge here in learning how
(02:58):
to imitate human behavior, Trump has in his seventy seven
years developed some clever tricks, usually ingenious ripoffs imitations, indicating
a dim but for the dimness of his clientele sufficient
awareness of what others are doing. Biden goes on TikTok
one week. Trump tries to get to the kids by
(03:19):
showing off his shoe game the next. And most especially,
he has an ability to turn anything that happens anywhere
in the world to anybody, into something he can claim
credit for, or to say would not have happened if
he had been there to stop it, or to blame
someone else for having happened, or to turn into a
(03:39):
rationale for his own misconduct or self martyrdom. And it
is in that last area in which he just slipped.
In addition to the social media stochastic terrorism threat, yesterday,
Trump finally said something about how his boss Putin murdered Alexeydervalni.
But it doesn't make any sense. I mean even for Trump,
(04:01):
it doesn't make any sense because he made no effort
whatsoever to connect it to what followed in his own statement. Obviously,
Trump was not going to criticize Putin, but his ren
fields had long since insisted that Navalni was the Russian
Trump the opponent unfairly prosecuted by the incumbent president. Nonsensical,
(04:25):
but it works for that crowd. Clearly, Trump cannot say
that either. What is that if not just a different
kind of criticism of Putin? What do you mean unfairly prosecuted?
We all know that whatever the punishment is that Putin
would inflict on him, it would be something, and Trump
has lived the last decade at least terrified of it happening.
(04:48):
So faced with this conundrum, Trump yesterday simply mentioned Nevalni,
then jumped to something utterly unrelated and pretended that it
all made sense. Quote, the sudden death of Lexay Nevalni
has made me more and more aware of what is
happening in our country. It is a slow, steady progression,
with crooked radical left politicians, prosecutors and judges leading us
(05:13):
down a path to destruction, open borders, rigged elections, nation
and decline magots. What in the hell does Alexey Navalni
have to do with open borders? He might as well
have written the sudden death of Frederick Douglass has made
me more and more aware of what is happening in
our country. It is mortifying to think that Trump looks
(05:35):
at this sees it through whatever haze he lives in
and thinks it makes sense. It is as if he
is drunk all the time, or on opioids, or brain
damaged or everything everywhere all at once. Also on the
dementia French Apparently, Trump thinks the word indictment starts with
(05:56):
an end. You got indicted. Now, in my whole life,
I didn't know what the I didn't know what indictment meant.
You got indicted. So he can't spell indict and doesn't
know what it means, and Marjorie Taylor Green can't pronounce it.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
This historical evidence is overwhelming that the founding fathers intended.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Impeachment to be used to deal.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
With the commission of indictable crimes and the abuse of power.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Ah the classics among those presidents not finishing last all time.
Axios out with a big insider piece about the Biden campaign,
assessment that they have a big reset opportunity coming as
the President heads to California to work the rooms in
La San Fran and Los Altos Hills through Thursday of
this week. They think the State of the Union address
(06:49):
March seventh will be his big chance, maybe his last
chance to knock down what Politico aptly named the Biden
age plot. Quoting from the Axios report, everyone around him
is well aware of the need to jack this campaign up.
That is a quote from an unnamed source supposedly close
to Biden. For the President to be out there, the
(07:10):
source goes on to be visible, to be strong of
presence and strong of voice. Fair enough, But if the
campaign is resting its hopes on merely answering the age plot,
it will not work. This has to be a multi
pronged offense. Yes, show what they called half seriously during
(07:31):
the Kennedy presidency Viga, but at the same time we
have to see the most pointed, searing, annihilating, ubiquitous advertising
campaign against Trump. The only complexity in this is which
campaign themes Trump has handed them to choose from. Obviously
(07:53):
all the dictatorship ones, the insanity ones, Trump's cognition crisis,
the insurrection ones, and the new one that it looks
to me like Democrats are not seeing for the easy
campaign kills shot. It really is. Since the New York
Times story late last week about Trump privately saying he
likes the idea of a sixteen week national abortion ban,
(08:17):
with some exceptions. Much of the talk has been about
the length, about the sixteen weeks and how he's trying
to look moderate by saying sixteen weeks, and his terrifying
imbecility that he likes sixteen weeks because it's a nice
even number, and his quote in the Times article, you
know what I like about sixteen it's even, it's four months,
(08:41):
and as stupid and as terrifying as that is, we're
missing the point. The Republican presidential candidate favors a national
abortion ban. No more tap dancing, like every Republican dating
back to Gerald Ford, no more of the states should
(09:02):
make the call. V Wade the same stuff Trump himself
boasted about national abortion ban Alabama, Texas, Missouri, New York, California.
I take a thirty second TV spot. It's a black screen.
(09:22):
There's a tiny picture of Trump in the middle, growing
ever larger by the second. Silence, no voiceover, no music,
nothing for ten seconds. Then an announcer says Donald Trump
says he will institute a national abortion ban. Silence for
ten more seconds. Then as the picture of Trump hits
(09:44):
the full screen. I'm Joe Biden, and I approved this
message because I won't back briefly to the Axios story
on the reset, I'll just quote this. Mark Zandi and
his fellow Moody's analytics experts said in a paper last
month that although a bi Trump rematch would be a
(10:06):
nail bier, they feel confident in their state by state
model's prediction of a Biden win. In fact, they say
economic swings could alter the model considerably, and if Republican
turnout in the swing States grows even modestly, Trump might
win two seventy one to two sixty seven. But with
(10:29):
average turnout Biden three hundred and eight, Trump two thirty.
I'll take it. Also. I don't know how the hell
you could have missed this in the Washington Post. But
hero of the day is Abraham Lincoln. Historian and history
(10:49):
instructor David J. Gerlman of George Mason University in Virginia,
And all he did was thumb through a twenty two
page report on the trial of a union civilian employee
during the Civil War to discover the astonishing fact that
in eighteen sixty four, Abraham Lincoln pardoned Joe Biden's great
great grandfather, Moses J. Robinette, a civilian hired as a
(11:17):
veterinary surgeon to take care of Union horses in Virginia.
He got into a knife fight with another civilian working
with the Federal Army, a man named John Jay. Alexander
Robinette made some sort of wise crack about the much
bigger Alexander to the female cook at the army camp.
I like this guy already, and feel as if I
met him. Alexander threatened him, and in his own defense,
(11:42):
he claimed Robinette drew his pocket knife and cut him,
not seriously, but because that was considered a weapon, Army
Reggs required that attempt to kill be included in the charges,
and he got two years at hard labor on the
Dry Tortugas off Florida, which is where President Lincoln comes in.
(12:03):
Apparently everybody loved Moses J. Robinette, described as full of fun,
always lively and joking. Again, I feel like I met him.
Three military figures petitioned to have President Lincoln pardon Moses J. Robinette,
and a month after arriving at the Dry Tortugas, Lincoln
(12:26):
wrote on the appeal pardon for unexecuted part of punishment A.
Lincoln September one, eighteen sixty four.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Moses Robinette, who lived until nineteen o three, had a
granddaughter named Mary Elizabeth Robinette. She married Joseph Harry Biden.
Their son was Joseph Robinette Biden, Senior, and his son
is the President. But the best part of this remains
(12:59):
one quote dug up in Professor Gerlman's research. In imploring
Lincoln to pardon him, the friends of Moses J. Robinett
described him as quote ardent and influential in opposing traitors
(13:22):
and their schemes to destroy the government. Wow. By the way,
Congressman James Comer and Trump thug Robert Hurr have just
found out about Lincoln pardoning Biden's great great grandfather, so
that'll be starting the impeachment hearing on it on Friday.
(13:47):
I made that up. I probably shouldn't have. I don't
want to give them any ideas. I wish I were
making this up. There is another potential campaign issue here,
and it is isolationism, and we are seeing it play
out with deadly seriousness. The cowardice of Senator JD. Vance.
This is the clown who was running forth in the
(14:09):
Ohio senatorial primary when he sold his ass to Trump.
For an endorsement, and he is now not just senator,
but the ranking member on the Senate Checks Notes, Beard
Trimming and Facial Grooming Committee. The useless, vile, vacuous performance
(14:30):
artist think ted Cruz without the podcast. For the same
reasons a YouTuber would go there. JD. Vance went to
the Munich Security Conference. Julia naval Naya went there as well.
She went there as the wife of the imprisoned Alexe
Navalni and while she was there she found out she
(14:51):
had become his widow. Not an hour or two later,
she addressed the conference with dignity, with bravery, and with heartbreak.
From this country we sent this isolationist putts Vance. He
stood around giving snarky comments to American political reporters gullible
enough to platform him. He insisted, the US does not
(15:12):
have the resources to fight multifront wars, so we need
to tell Ukraine to seed territory to Putin. How many
more Ukrainians get killed before we get there, he asked,
of course, if we get there, if we get to
that point, we will have no choice but to soon
summon the resources to actually fight a multifront war in Europe,
(15:33):
because Putin will take our willingness to negotiate away part
of Ukraine as exactly what Hitler understood the European Democracy's
willingness to negotiate away Czechoslovakia and Poland to be in
nineteen thirty eight nineteen thirty nine. Appeasement. Jd Vance is
an appeaser. Jd Vance would have appeased Hitler. The West
doesn't make enough munitions to support an indefinite war. Vance belched,
(15:58):
Ukraine doesn't have enough manpower to support an indefinite war.
We have to be realistic. Unquote, we are being realistic, Beard, Oh,
very realistic. Ukraine is fighting Russia in Russia, so we
don't have to because if we have to fight a
(16:18):
madman dictator like Putin, we wouldn't know if we could
control it, and the risk of genuine conflict, even nuclear
conflict with Russia begins to escalate with just one mentally
unbalanced authoritarian holding his finger on the button, let alone
returning a second one into this equation in Trump, jd
(16:39):
Vance will never understand, or he is prostituting himself to
pretend to not understand, that we are not helping Ukraine.
Ukraine is helping us, so we don't have to summon
the munitions to support an indefinite war against Putin or
to summon the troops. Then, of course there is Vance's
(17:01):
personal cowardice. He's not just an appeaser. Well, I was
going to say something else, but I'll skip it. He's
not just an appeaser. He was invited to attend a
meeting with President Zelenski of Ukraine. He said that while
his position was underrepresented in Munich, you know, give the
world to Putin and betray our allies. He didn't want
(17:25):
to go to meet Zelenski because he didn't think he
would learn anything new. Of course, in this he is correct.
There is no evidence that Jay d Vantz has learned
anything new since he got out of diapers, if he did,
and of course there is no evidence that at its
core his Republican Party has learned anything new since the
(17:46):
original America firsters and Charles Lindberg and William Borra tried
to take over this country and demonize Jewish Americans in
order to appease Hitler in nineteen forty. They were a
cancer on our land then, and Trump is a cancer
on our land now. And I do not think it
is entirely a coincidence that when Nebl Chamberlain, the Prime
(18:08):
Minister of the United Kingdom, attempted and in fact gave
away Czechoslovakia to Hitler in nineteen thirty eight, the deal
was made in Munich and JD. Vance is willing to
give away Ukraine to Putin and made this statement in Munich,
(18:32):
rhyming with Unich also of interest here. I know her
nearly eighteen years now, and no, I don't know what
happened to Katie Turr on MSNBC last week, or how
she went from being somebody I cared deeply about who
used to help me with the special comments about George
(18:54):
Bush on MSNBC, somebody in twenty sixteen who Donald Trump
tried to get killed. How she went from that to
becoming somebody calling him a New York and asking on
her program on her newscast if it was fair to
prosecute him, and doing it on a television network I built.
(19:17):
I don't know what has happened to Katie Terr, but
I do have a theory that's next. This is an
all new edition of Countdown.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
This is Countdown with Keith Olbermant.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Postscripts to the news some headlines, some updates, some snark,
some prediction, stateline thirty Rock Manhattan. Okay, I'm confused, as
everybody else is. For a year and a half after
he came down that escalator, Donald Trump tried to get
(19:58):
Katie Turr killed, called her out repeatedly at his campaign speeches,
pointed her out to his mobs sooner rather than later.
They had to get her Secret Service protection. Last Friday
on MSNBC, Katie carried so much water so quickly for
Trump that she was still trending for it on Saturday,
(20:19):
and she was the headline story on nearly every right
wing propaganda website. Not good. She insisted he was a
legend in New York City. Trump is synonymous with New York.
She then posited that there were no true victims in
the business fraud case, for which Trump must now pay
three hundred and fifty five million dollars in fines. She
(20:41):
asked a panel of startled guests, is this fair to
go after Donald Trump like this in this environment?
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Ah?
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Don't know where to begin here. I am beginning to
suspect sort of late flossoming Stockholm syndrome or blackmail maybe,
or something else unknown in this equation when they asked
Katie to go cover Trump's announcement that he was running.
She was working out of NBC's London bureau and was
(21:15):
only back here in the city for a few days
to meet her new boss and stop by and visit
her old friends and me. She told me she did
not want anything to do with American politics. She had
gotten an interview with him when she eventually went to
cover his announcement. He knew that she and I had
lived together in one of his buildings. The interview was good,
(21:36):
It was contentious in many respects. It was the last
solid interview anybody ever did with Trump, and NBC immediately
saw that and asked her to cover his campaign full time,
figuring it would sput her out at some point, but
that she had access to him. She told me she
didn't want anything to do with that either, and I
suggested that was probably the wrong answer and that I'd
(21:58):
help her get through it, that it could make her
career so off she went. She would send me her
NBC Dotory scripts to edit or rewrite for her, and
as the threats continued against her, I just tried to
be supportive and reassuring I had broken up with her
seven years earlier, but we had parted it as friends.
I had never had any reason to doubt that that
would continue. And then one day I attacked Kelly and
(22:20):
Conway on Twitter. I know, not a very high bar,
but still I did it. The next thing I know,
I'm getting a text from Katie Turr and then a
phone call, and she's really angry at me, saying Conway
called her up about what I had tweeted, and that
I needed to remember that there were decent people on
both sides and bad ones, and everybody got threats, and
(22:42):
it was really inappropriate for me to contribute to the
quote dangers Kelly and Conway faced, I said something about, well, yeah,
I'm sure there are decent people on both sides, but
she's not one of them. I said to her, Kelly
and Conway, you're worried about about Kelly and Conway. She's
part of a gang that has spent the last year
(23:03):
trying to get you killed, killed, not inconvenience, not fired,
killed enough that the Secret Service stepped in. Are you nuts? Well?
It turned out Kelly n. Conway was one of Katie's sources.
In fact, she might have been the main source for
the networks and the big newspapers during the twenty sixteen
(23:25):
campaign and beyond. Apparently she cannot stop talking. But even so,
Katie's attitude towards her and against me was out of
the blue and really offensive. Anyway, it passed, and maybe
two months later I got a text from her at
nine to fourteen PM on December eleven, and twenty sixteen.
This is called having the receipts. Trump had won. Our
(23:48):
nightmare had begun, and Katie had gotten a book deal
about her experience. I'd been keeping a document in my
laptop with hundreds of pages of Trump stories and links
and commentaries that I used for the Resistance video series
for GQ. It was my Trump doc, and given that
Katie was writing that book, I'd offered to give her
a copy of it so she had something chronological to
(24:10):
use as research as she wrote her book, because she
hadn't really been keeping notes, she'd just been trying not
to get killed. I still have her text. It reads,
do you still want to share your Trump dock with me?
I joked back, sure, how much? And she joked back
ten twenty dollars, And while we were texting, I emailed
her the doc and I said, no charge, but don't
forget my one demand. Do not leave me out of
(24:32):
your acknowledgments in your book. More than a month later,
at two thirty five pm on Sunday, January twenty second,
twenty seventeen, I was just back from la and I
had just done Bill Maher's show for the last time,
and Katie ter texted me about why they had never
invited her to be on Bill Maher's show, and then
(24:54):
she switched topics. Quote, want to write this book, I
wrote back at five point thirty two. What You're not serious?
How would that work? That's when she phoned. She was
about to give the advanced money back to the publisher.
I can't write a book. I'm like fifty thousand words
short and it's terrible. I'll give you half the money.
I'll give you more than half the money. I pointed
(25:16):
out to her that I had written or rewritten dozens
of her stories for NBC News and MSNBC, and it
was not the question of the money. It was a
question of what we could get away with no viewer,
and maybe only one producer in a million would ever
notice that one sentence or one paragraph of one script
in her two minute report was actually written by me
(25:37):
or even sounded like me. First of all, she was
the one saying it each time I wrote or re
wrote in her name for NBC. It was a fireable
offense for her, but one that nobody would ever think
to look for, even though there is necessarily an email
trail ten miles long. But a book, a book about
Trump in my writing style, not hers in print. I
(26:01):
have a fairly distinct writing style, and I'm not good
at hide it. Somebody would notice. Her publisher might cancel
it or even sue, or if it got published, NBC
might notice it and fire her. This was not just
a bad idea, I pointed out to her, and very
dubious ethically, but it stood an excellent chance of destroying
her career and maybe damaging mine. She said okay, And
(26:26):
she told me she was going to talk it over
with her boyfriend Tony from CBS that night, and her
thought was to give back the advance and cancel the book.
And I said, did you think about a ghostwriter? And
she said, like who? And I said, I had no idea.
I tried to joke her out of these grim prospects
by reminding her that at least for a several thousand
dollars worth of research I gave her, I had cut
the price to no dollars and no sense, and all
(26:48):
I wanted was to not be left out of the acknowledgments.
The next thing I knew the book had been published.
She didn't give the money back. There was not a
paragraph of it that reads like the rest of her writing,
and the three years we lived together is reduced to
about four paragraphs in which she tells the story of
(27:10):
the day Kelly an Kahn Job called her to complain
about me. The book dismissed me as somebody she dated
briefly in her twenties. I mean I paid off her
student loans. I rented an apartment for her after we
broke up for a year so she could continue to
(27:31):
work in this city and punchline of all punchlines. Remember
my one request to her, don't leave me out of
the acknowledgments. She left me out of the acknowledgments. There
were later problems. She talked me out of doing an
interview with the Washington Post that wanted to interview me
about her, saying she wasn't going to participate in the
(27:51):
story and it was sexist to call her ex boyfriend,
and she hoped I wouldn't do it either, and I
agreed it was sexist. Then the article came out and
she had done the interview for it, and the article reads,
her former boyfriend Keith Overman, refused to comment for this article,
and I look like a schmuck. Then a month or
two later, there's a New York Times article about her
(28:12):
and the book, and it says I had refused the
writer's request to comment to the Times. And not only
did nobody from the Times ever request to comment, but
I didn't even recognize the writer's name. So I find
it call her up and I say, have we ever
spoken before? And she says no. But I asked Katie
to ask you for a comment. And she called me
back and she said she'd spoken to you and asked
(28:33):
you to do the interview with me, and you said no,
And I said, bad news. She never called me, the
writer gasped, But the problems at the Times this is
a subject of an entirely different commentary. So that was
the last time I had any contact with Katie. Chair
I told her that that was it for the friendship.
She said she was sorry, she was a terrible person. Well,
(28:57):
at least for all of us, Katie, me, for guests,
the viewers who saw her go over the Trump side
last week, we can agree on that she sure is
a terrible person. Still ahead of us on this all
(29:38):
new edition of Countdown Things I promised not to tell,
and for reasons I'll explain, I spent part of the
weekend reliving the weirdest, briefest job I ever had. Six
months is one of the top TV sportscasters in Boston,
and it literally ended with one of those you can't
quit me, I'm firing you moments with my boss, My
boss who twenty five years later started sending me fan mail.
(30:00):
Coming up first, Yes, the daily roundup of the miscrants,
morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute two days
worse parsons in the world. The Bronze the worse. An
unidentified couple guys photographed on top of a moving subway
train along an elevated part of the Seven Line over
(30:20):
Queens Here in Fun City. This is called subway surfing,
and it's been going on for seventy five years at least.
My friend Kareem Abdul Jabbar says he did it when
he was a kid, and he is amazed he lived
to tell about it, especially when the train would go
back into the tunnel. But these guys on the seven train,
(30:40):
they've elevated the game. They appeared to be having sex
on top of the moving train. Is this the local
or the Express? Actually it can be worse. I once
rode into work on an F train in the nineteen
eighties and there was a guy sprawled across one whole
row of seats with a copy of the New York
Post covering his face. When I went home that night,
(31:00):
sure enough, I happened to get on exactly the same
train car, and exactly the same guy was still there,
still sprawled over the same seats because he was dead. Anyway,
I'm only really telling this story so I can get
in the quote from the communications director of the New
York Metropolitan Transit Authority quote. They's reckless clowns aren't thinking
(31:24):
about the mess cleaners and other subway workers will have
to deal with when their stupid stunt goes tragically wrong,
said Tim Minton. Tim Minton was the sports director of
WVBRFM at Cornell briefly before they got rid of him,
and I succeeded him. We were freshmen there together. This
(31:46):
was in nineteen seventy six. Happily, Tim and I have
almost moved past this event. Maybe he has the bronze
worse here. I've said it before and I'll say it again.
There are a lot of dumb people at Fox. That's
why they were hired. But I cannot think of anybody
more dumb for more years in a row than Brian
kill me. After the Trump New York fraud ruling, he tweeted,
(32:08):
this three hundred and fifty four million dollar penalty only
makes Trump stronger. Never had a chance with this comic
book character Judge Engern. Bad news for Nicky Haley and
Joe Biden. First of all, it's not. It's not bad
news for Nicky Haley or Joe Biden. They don't have
to sell property at a loss to pay all or
(32:30):
most of the three hundred and fifty five million dollar
fine into escrow within thirty days just to appeal to
find Alena Hobbas says, they actually have to pay more
than three hundred and fifty five million. It's not bad
news for Haley, It's not bad for Biden. It's bad
news for Trump. He's out three hundred and fifty five
million dollars. Even Trump knows what that is. But that's
(32:50):
not the point. Kill Mead's gonna kill Mead. It's his spelling.
How could you have misspelled the first five words of
that tweet? How can you misspell three hundred and fifty
four million? He made it into one word, and then
three hundred and fifty four million dollar penalty. He misspelled
penally penalty pe n e lt y. But the winner
(33:17):
the worst, that new shoe magnate Trump himself. I mean, look,
if you could get one thousand pairs of cheap generic
versions of Chuck Taylor's spray, paint them with rustolium number
three four h six four seven, and sell them for
four hundred bucks a pair to these psychos who think
that they will get into heaven or something because they
(33:37):
bought these crappy shoes, you'd do it right. You wouldn't
bless you anyway. A lot of good obvious jokes like
mine trump sneakers for the guy trying to run away
from the draft. Paul mcgalla is about they're good if
you have bone spurs. That meme in which Dorothy's House
(33:58):
from the Wizard of Oz has just fallen on top
of the wicked Witch of the East. Only the shoes
sticking out from under the house are these crappy Trump
gold ones. But the joke was by comedy writer Mark Age,
who hit one hundred in a beautiful sixcinct dry creation quote.
Tried hooping in these, but all I could do was
(34:21):
draw charges. I mean, how could you ever top that?
Trump and his shoe community. Try hooping in these, but
all you can do is draw charges. Two days worst Persons.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
And finally to the proverbial top of the countdown and
things I promised not to tell.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
And I actually spent part of the weekend trying to
help a young guy get started in television news. And
no I didn't. I didn't tell him, don't do it.
He's a college senior in Boston and he wants to
work there. So I found myself reviewing my very interesting
but very brief career in Boston with him, and with
(35:19):
the fellow I sent him to, who, by coincidence, now
holds exactly the same job I held starting for six
fabulous months starting forty years ago this April, Now.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
News Center five Tonight You're complete News Update with Natalie Jacobson,
Chet Curtis, meteorologist Dick Albert, and Keith Oberman on sports
recording live from New England's News Center. Natalie Jacobson and
Chet Curtis.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Good evening, we're interrupting our network. At Boston Red Sox
spring training in nineteen eighty three, a fellow named Bob
Clark introduced himself as the sports producer at this Boston
State and said they were all fans of my CNN
work and that there would be a job opening that
summer as sports anchor, and could he go to his
bosses and say I was interested? And I said sure,
And in fact, if he wanted me to go with
him to tell his bosses that, or if he needed
(36:18):
me to carry him to go tell his bosses that,
I was ready. Things advanced so quickly that by Monday,
July eighteenth, nineteen eighty three, I found myself flying up
from New York with my agent, and as Boston appeared
out the window of the plane, she said, you will
own this town. Not so much maybe later I went
(36:38):
out to the station's headquarters in a barren suburb called
Needham and interviewed with everybody, sports producers, the news director,
finally the general manager. Everybody beamed at me and all
was going great, having laughed at several of my jokes
and told me he loved my tape. The general manager
a man named Coppersmith, who was about to usher me
out of his office with a big hand on my
(37:00):
shoulder when I made a terrible, terrible mistake. I told
him we had met before, when I was a TV
intern and he was the general manager of his parent
company station in New York. I remember him looking at
me quizically, and only later did I find out that
all of his people had lied to him without telling me,
(37:20):
and they had told him I was twenty eight years old.
They did not tell me that since I was twenty
four years old. Copper Smith's last year at Channel five
in New York had been nineteen seventy eight, and even
giving me the benefit of the aged out, he decided
I was no longer anything older than twenty six, and
(37:41):
ultimately he thought that was too young to be a
sports anchor in a major television market, back when those
used to be important jobs that paid important money. Their sportscasters.
Since the station had gone on the air in the
nineteen fifties had been an avuncular, pleasant, gifted man named
Don Gillis, but he was cutting back where they had
decided to cut him back to special feature Judy. The
(38:04):
next day, back in New York City, I went out
to find out if the Boston newspapers had found anything
out about my surreptitious trip there. I went to a
place so wonderful and now so impossible to explain to anybody,
the out of town newspaper and magazine shop in the
lobby of the pan Am building, adjacent to the Grand
Central train station. This was one of the smaller of
(38:27):
the out of town newsstands in New York. It carried
about two hundred different American newspapers, dozens more from around
the world, and every imaginable international magazine was always packed.
Its entire glory has been wiped out by the Internet anyway.
I bought the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald from
(38:48):
the same day, and there it was on page thirty
two of the Globe, a headline over a feature by
the TV sports columnist Jack Craig. Gillis departing soon on
Horizon Olderman's credentials, Good Young Keith Olberman of Cable News
Network CNN reportedly was very favorably interviewed at Channel five yesterday,
(39:08):
possibly signaling the end of the Don Gillis era more
quickly than anticipated. I was young then, but look credentials good,
it said in the headline. This was it the start
of my TV career for real. No more having to
explain to doubting athletes, doubting colleagues, doubting relatives, doubting team
(39:29):
executives that there really was a TV place called Cable
News Network parenthesis CNN, big money and big fame in
one of the best sports cities in the nation. As
even the Globes article noted, there is a hitch. Alderman's
contract with CNN does not expire until next May, and
whether he would be let out for Channel five is uncertain. Well,
sure it was, but CNN would be nice guys about it, right.
(39:52):
This was real TV, not some perpetual verge of bankruptcy
cable thing. It was really just a big delusion by
Ted Turner. And they needed eight cameras in New York,
but that can only afford seven being used in the
field for ten hours. One cameraman would have to lash
his camera to a tripod for the wide shot shot
for the nightly Sandy Freeman audio talk show. Even after
(40:16):
the inevitable occurred one night and the overworked camera burst
into flames on live TV, CNN would understand by the way,
Sandy Freeman was replaced about a year later by Larry King.
That's how long ago this actually was. Anyway, CNN's less
than happy reaction to this was academic. I had unwitningly
(40:40):
blown it when I revealed to that guy Coppersmith that
I was not twenty eight years old. Sure enough. On
August fifteenth, WCBB Channel five Boston announced the hiring of
a Miami sportscaster named Lee Webb to succeed Don Gillis.
Webb was a lot of things, and he wasn't a
lot of other things, but hot damn. He was thirty
years old, and that made him the man in the
(41:01):
eyes of the general manager, mister Coppersmith. On the other hand,
copper Smith thought his station should still hire me as
a reporter. The news director, a man who went by
the imposing name of Philip Scribner Balboni, offered me a
spot as a feature news reporter a producer, and I
would look for offbeat, on usual unique stories and go
cover them. It was not the sports anchor's job, but
(41:24):
it wasn't CNN either. WCBB would also wait until CNN
finally accepted that it was over between the two of us.
Whenever that was then, three more things happened in quick succession.
Channel five hired a new sports director, a producer who
would run the department and set its editorial tone. His
name was Mike Frnandi's, and even after working with him
(41:45):
for six months, the only thing I knew about him
was that he had no sense of humor. He understood
that I was making jokes, but he never got one
of them. And his principal interest in sports was apparently
determining which players were Don Jan's so he could refer
to them endlessly in the office as quote swordsman. The
second thing that happened was that the sports reporter at
(42:07):
Channel five, Bob Ryan, already very famous at the Boston
Globe later even more so nationally at ESPN, told management
he just could not do both the TV and newspaper
jobs anymore and he needed to quit. Mind you, this
was how important sports was on local TV in Boston
in nineteen eighty three, they had an on air sportscast,
you're a weekend sportscast, you're a sportscast, you're emeritus, and
(42:29):
an on air sports reporter, plus all the producers and
the off air sports director. Often the sportscast in the
hour long six o'clock news, and there was only the
one hour of news. The sportscast lasted ten minutes. So now,
having already offered me the feature news reporting job, news
director Philip Scribner Balboni offered me my choice of that
(42:50):
job or Bob Ryan's sports reporting job. And while I
was debating that, I managed to resist all efforts to
turn me into a newsman for fifteen years. While I
was debating that, another Boston station suddenly jumped into the fray.
Channel seven was a perennial also ran compared to Channel five,
whose newscasts were among the best, if not the best,
(43:12):
in the country. Without as much as asking me to
even come visit, Channel seven offered me the job as
its sports director, anchored the sports at six and eleven,
run the department, and get much more money than Channel five.
It offered me, and I turned it down out of
loyalty to Channel five, because they asked first, I turned
(43:32):
it down. Moren Channel five was out in the as
I said, barn suburbs. Channel seven was in downtown Boston.
I would be making like one hundred thousand a year
at age twenty five, with no responsibilities, living and working
in downtown Boston in nineteen eighty four. Moren So anyway,
(43:56):
I get to Boston at the end of April nineteen
eighty four at Channel five, and on my first day
out in the barren suburbs, I walk up a c
were staircase to the sports department office and I hit
my head on the staircase and bled so much they
all thought I was going to need stitches. And I
went back to the half a house I had moved to,
one of exactly two rental properties in the entire town
(44:19):
of Nita, Massachusetts, and I thought, what the hell have
I done? No things improved. I was not just in
the field. I did a lot of substitute anchoring, especially
on weekends, and the first time I did that, Susan Warnick,
one of our reporters and the wife of the big
sportscaster in town, Bob Lobell from Channel four. Susan came
(44:39):
up to me in the office on Monday and gave
me a big wet kiss on the lips and said,
you were terrific. Lo bell Is scared Crapless, I love you.
The first time I did a live shot before Celtics
game at Boston Garden, I wandered around the arena without
being recognized. Once two weeks later, I went back to
the Garden and I went to get a hot dog
(45:00):
and turned to find a crowd of several dozen viewers,
all shouting at me in the the angular language of
the Boston sports fan. On Monday, June eleventh, nineteen eighty four, Balboni,
the news director, called me in and said he wanted
me to start anchoring every night on the eleven o'clock news.
Lee Web would continue on the six. But the intimation
was if it went the way he thought it was
going to, I would get that show too. But the
(45:24):
problem was, and I don't know if you've noticed this,
but occasionally I like to make jokes, Okay, I need
to make jokes. And several of the executives at the
station were real fans of the Red Sox and Celtics
and Patriots and Bruins, and they did not like the jokes.
Even if the viewers liked the jokes, they didn't. One day,
(45:47):
I was supposed to go with a cameraman to shoot
a piece in which I pretended to interview the Green Monster,
the famed leftfield wall at Fenway Park. The punchline was
it would turn out the Green Monster didn't like baseball.
Not a bad idea for nineteen eighty four. Just as
we're leaving the station, the sports director for now, and
he said, change of plans. Needs to go to Smithfield.
(46:08):
That was where the football team held its training camp.
Patriots just put their back up middle lineback on waivers,
go get some sound. He didn't need any sound. The
executives who didn't like my jokes had gotten the executive
who didn't get my jokes to stop giving me the
chance to do my jokes. It was an hour and
a half to Smithfield. I was done for the day.
(46:29):
I went home for a little trip to New York.
In early September, met with my agent, told her that
after all the time and all the energy we had
spent to get that job, this was the most impossible
to imagine outcome. But it was the wrong station in
the wrong suburb. In the right town, and I didn't
know how we could ever fix it. She agreed. She
said I should go in and tell the news director
(46:50):
I wanted to quit, and then I'd stay as long
as he needed me. But that if they weren't going
to let me do the jokes, what was the point.
I was an okay reporter, I was an okay sportscaster.
But only with the jokes was I me So September tenth,
teen eighty four, a Monday, the news director was not happy.
He offered, in fact, to fire Lee Webb on the
spot and give me the six o'clock show immediately, like
(47:13):
that night. Like Lee, Lee web out of the building
that minute. But I told him that would mean he
would be keeping somebody who wanted to leave and firing
somebody who wanted to stay. He angrily agreed, and I
became a secret leam duck, and I stayed on getting
fewer and fewer chances to be me, although they stuck
to their end of it. They sent me to cover
the World Series in San Diego and Detroit, where the
(47:34):
guy next to me in the press box covering it
for Channel seven. The place I should have gone to
work was their new sports reporter, a just retired Red
Sox Hall of Fame player named Carl Yastremsky. I hit
a ball over here, I hit a ball over there.
I hit three balls over that roof. Then, when I
got back from the World Series, it happened on Friday
(47:55):
October nineteenth, nineteen eighty four, that TV sports columnist from
the Boston Globe, Jack Craig, called me up at home
and told me Channel five was firing me because of
bad ratings at eleven o'clock. I didn't have bad ratings
at eleven o'clock. In fact, I had great ratings, and
six weeks earlier they'd offered me the six o'clock show
as well. I hung up with Craig to call my agent,
(48:17):
and instead of a dial tone, I heard the voice
of the TV sports columnist from the Boston Herald, Jim Baker.
I had answered his call fort rang. He told me
Channel five was firing me and Lee Webb so it
could instead hire Ken the Hawk Harrelson, the former Red
Sox star and TV announcer who had moved to Chicago.
(48:37):
So now I call my agent. She says, your deal
with Channel five is off. They want to make it
look like you stink. They want to make it look
like they just fired you. You called Jim Baker and
Jack Craig right now and tell them the whole story.
Wherever you go next, it has to be clear that
you weren't fired, you quit and you stayed on because
you're a pro, which you know was true. So I called.
(48:59):
I told both writers everything, and two minutes after I
got off the phone with Jack Craig from The Globe,
the phone and it was Jim Baker from The Harold
calling back, and he says, you'll never believe this. Their
negotiations with Hawk Harrelson are dead. Apparently he wanted four
hundred thousand dollars a year and to guarantee that he
only had to come in five minutes before each show
(49:20):
to get makeup and then read the script that somebody
else wrote. So you are now our lead story. Sure enough.
Backpage of the Boston Harald, Saturday, October twenty, nineteen eighty four,
above the masthead Overman quits Channel five at the same
hour I was supposed to go to Morgantown, West Virginia,
(49:42):
the place that was designed simply to make that lovely
town of Needham Massachusetts look like I don't know the Riviera.
I was supposed to go to Morgantown to cover Doug
Flute and Boston College against the University of West Virginia.
Since I lived between the television station and the airport,
the cameraman was going to swing by my house to
pick me up. Do it like seven am I ever showed?
(50:05):
By this point, I'm thinking I just had to call
my lying boss's liars in both Boston newspapers that are
on every newsstand in the city and the surrounding area.
Why am I going to race the clock to get
to the airport on my own when this idiot cameraman
forgot to come get me. When we had made the
arrangements the day before, the cameraman had gotten my name
(50:26):
wrong and called me Dick. At least that's why I
thought he'd called me Dick. Anyway, I was twenty five.
I went back to bed, and while I was asleep,
Channel five fired me from a job that I had
not only quit, but I had quit twice, including on
the front page of the newspapers that morning. The Channel
five people were furious. I put up a brave front,
(50:48):
but beneath the surface I was a little scared until
two more things happened before I could move back to
New York. The news director Phil Balboni told Craig of
the Globe that it was all too bad because quote
Keith was potentially such a major talent. Ooh ooh. And
then the general manager, Coppersmith, was so angry that he
(51:09):
sold my agent he will never again work in this business.
I am not a big believer in motivational quotes, but
those two those really worked. Number one and two on
my all time list, and as always, beyond that, there's
a punchline. In two thousand and seven, an email popped
(51:31):
into my inbox at MSNBC. It was glowing and warm
and lovely, and it indicated the writer was a huge fan.
It was signed You're old Channel five news director Phil Balboni.
His email did not mention that I was potentially such
a major talent. Also, I am now now informed that
(52:05):
they have taken down that spiral staircase, so if I
ever have to go back there, I'm safe, probably, But
they didn't even put up a monument or anything to
my head wound. I've done all the damage I can
do here. Thank you for listening. Tell somebody about this
award nominated show. Get somebody to subscribe. If you like
(52:27):
the show, people say nice things about the show, get
somebody else to subscribe. I'll make a little extra thanks
for listening. Countdown. Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip
schaneil Arrange produced and performed most of our music. Mister
Ray on guitars, bass and drums, Mister Shanelle handling, of course,
orchestration and keyboards produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including
(52:47):
some Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the group No
Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Ulberman theme from
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc.
Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss,
the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was
keeping with the Boston theme my friend Dennis Leary. Everything
(53:08):
else was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for
this the two hundred and sixtieth day until the twenty
twenty four United States presidential election, but thirty ninth days
since Dementia J. Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically
elected government of the United States use the Fourteenth Amendment,
the Insurrection Act, the Justice system, the mental health system,
(53:30):
anti terrorism statutes to stop him from doing it again
while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow.
Boltons is the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Olderman.
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
(54:03):
Keith Olderman is a product 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. How
many times would you be permitted to threaten mass violence
(00:25):
if you did not get your way before Homeland Security
or the FBI or somebody came and dragged your ass
off somewhere? I think Trump is now in triple digits.
It is time to drag his ass off somewhere. All
political prosecutions of your favorite president me must stop immediately.
(00:49):
This is election interference and must be immediately stopped. Our
country will not stand for it. This is the by
now standard Trump stochastic threat. If the government does not
bend to my will, my supporters will kill you. It
is megalomania. And as often as he does it, and
(01:09):
as dulled as we are thus become to it, it
is unspeakably dangerous. It is not just shouting fire in
a crowded theater. It's shouting fire in a crowded theater
full of gun crazed nut jobs. And I will go
back to my first point here, how often would you
get away with it? Send him to Gitmo, just go
(01:30):
to his next court appearance. I think they are now
printed on most calendars, and I think they list them
on all the schedules next to the upcoming NBA games,
go to his next court appearance and arrest him. And oh,
by the way, I think at minimum he has to
stop with this nauseating your favorite president me stick if
(01:52):
you had not heard. In the New President's Date poll
of one hundred and fifty four historians, Trump was again
ranked the worst president ever, with only half the marks
of the next world first James Buchanan. Somehow, and consider
how nearly impossible this is. Somehow, he is also ranked
(02:15):
both the worst president of all time and the seventh
most overrated president of all time. How on the hell
you pull that off? They have gone nuts on the
right because while Trump was last, Obama is seventh, Biden fourteenth. Frankly,
(02:36):
I think they should cut their losses and join me
in this. I am surprised Trump finished as high up
as he did, but seriously, folks, on day thirty seven
of Trump's dementia crisis, more evidence that the dumbwaiter doesn't
go up to the top floor any longer in his
apartment building. As I always acknowledge here in learning how
(02:58):
to imitate human behavior, Trump has in his seventy seven
years developed some clever tricks, usually ingenious ripoffs imitations, indicating
a dim but for the dimness of his clientele sufficient
awareness of what others are doing. Biden goes on TikTok
one week. Trump tries to get to the kids by
(03:19):
showing off his shoe game the next. And most especially,
he has an ability to turn anything that happens anywhere
in the world to anybody, into something he can claim
credit for, or to say would not have happened if
he had been there to stop it, or to blame
someone else for having happened, or to turn into a
(03:39):
rationale for his own misconduct or self martyrdom. And it
is in that last area in which he just slipped.
In addition to the social media stochastic terrorism threat, yesterday,
Trump finally said something about how his boss Putin murdered Alexeydervalni.
But it doesn't make any sense. I mean even for Trump,
(04:01):
it doesn't make any sense because he made no effort
whatsoever to connect it to what followed in his own statement. Obviously,
Trump was not going to criticize Putin, but his ren
fields had long since insisted that Navalni was the Russian
Trump the opponent unfairly prosecuted by the incumbent president. Nonsensical,
(04:25):
but it works for that crowd. Clearly, Trump cannot say
that either. What is that if not just a different
kind of criticism of Putin? What do you mean unfairly prosecuted?
We all know that whatever the punishment is that Putin
would inflict on him, it would be something, and Trump
has lived the last decade at least terrified of it happening.
(04:48):
So faced with this conundrum, Trump yesterday simply mentioned Nevalni,
then jumped to something utterly unrelated and pretended that it
all made sense. Quote, the sudden death of Lexay Nevalni
has made me more and more aware of what is
happening in our country. It is a slow, steady progression,
with crooked radical left politicians, prosecutors and judges leading us
(05:13):
down a path to destruction, open borders, rigged elections, nation
and decline magots. What in the hell does Alexey Navalni
have to do with open borders? He might as well
have written the sudden death of Frederick Douglass has made
me more and more aware of what is happening in
our country. It is mortifying to think that Trump looks
(05:35):
at this sees it through whatever haze he lives in
and thinks it makes sense. It is as if he
is drunk all the time, or on opioids, or brain
damaged or everything everywhere all at once. Also on the
dementia French Apparently, Trump thinks the word indictment starts with
(05:56):
an end. You got indicted. Now, in my whole life,
I didn't know what the I didn't know what indictment meant.
You got indicted. So he can't spell indict and doesn't
know what it means, and Marjorie Taylor Green can't pronounce it.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
This historical evidence is overwhelming that the founding fathers intended.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Impeachment to be used to deal.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
With the commission of indictable crimes and the abuse of power.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Ah the classics among those presidents not finishing last all time.
Axios out with a big insider piece about the Biden campaign,
assessment that they have a big reset opportunity coming as
the President heads to California to work the rooms in
La San Fran and Los Altos Hills through Thursday of
this week. They think the State of the Union address
(06:49):
March seventh will be his big chance, maybe his last
chance to knock down what Politico aptly named the Biden
age plot. Quoting from the Axios report, everyone around him
is well aware of the need to jack this campaign up.
That is a quote from an unnamed source supposedly close
to Biden. For the President to be out there, the
(07:10):
source goes on to be visible, to be strong of
presence and strong of voice. Fair enough, But if the
campaign is resting its hopes on merely answering the age plot,
it will not work. This has to be a multi
pronged offense. Yes, show what they called half seriously during
(07:31):
the Kennedy presidency Viga, but at the same time we
have to see the most pointed, searing, annihilating, ubiquitous advertising
campaign against Trump. The only complexity in this is which
campaign themes Trump has handed them to choose from. Obviously
(07:53):
all the dictatorship ones, the insanity ones, Trump's cognition crisis,
the insurrection ones, and the new one that it looks
to me like Democrats are not seeing for the easy
campaign kills shot. It really is. Since the New York
Times story late last week about Trump privately saying he
likes the idea of a sixteen week national abortion ban,
(08:17):
with some exceptions. Much of the talk has been about
the length, about the sixteen weeks and how he's trying
to look moderate by saying sixteen weeks, and his terrifying
imbecility that he likes sixteen weeks because it's a nice
even number, and his quote in the Times article, you
know what I like about sixteen it's even, it's four months,
(08:41):
and as stupid and as terrifying as that is, we're
missing the point. The Republican presidential candidate favors a national
abortion ban. No more tap dancing, like every Republican dating
back to Gerald Ford, no more of the states should
(09:02):
make the call. V Wade the same stuff Trump himself
boasted about national abortion ban Alabama, Texas, Missouri, New York, California.
I take a thirty second TV spot. It's a black screen.
(09:22):
There's a tiny picture of Trump in the middle, growing
ever larger by the second. Silence, no voiceover, no music,
nothing for ten seconds. Then an announcer says Donald Trump
says he will institute a national abortion ban. Silence for
ten more seconds. Then as the picture of Trump hits
(09:44):
the full screen. I'm Joe Biden, and I approved this
message because I won't back briefly to the Axios story
on the reset, I'll just quote this. Mark Zandi and
his fellow Moody's analytics experts said in a paper last
month that although a bi Trump rematch would be a
(10:06):
nail bier, they feel confident in their state by state
model's prediction of a Biden win. In fact, they say
economic swings could alter the model considerably, and if Republican
turnout in the swing States grows even modestly, Trump might
win two seventy one to two sixty seven. But with
(10:29):
average turnout Biden three hundred and eight, Trump two thirty.
I'll take it. Also. I don't know how the hell
you could have missed this in the Washington Post. But
hero of the day is Abraham Lincoln. Historian and history
(10:49):
instructor David J. Gerlman of George Mason University in Virginia,
And all he did was thumb through a twenty two
page report on the trial of a union civilian employee
during the Civil War to discover the astonishing fact that
in eighteen sixty four, Abraham Lincoln pardoned Joe Biden's great
great grandfather, Moses J. Robinette, a civilian hired as a
(11:17):
veterinary surgeon to take care of Union horses in Virginia.
He got into a knife fight with another civilian working
with the Federal Army, a man named John Jay. Alexander
Robinette made some sort of wise crack about the much
bigger Alexander to the female cook at the army camp.
I like this guy already, and feel as if I
met him. Alexander threatened him, and in his own defense,
(11:42):
he claimed Robinette drew his pocket knife and cut him,
not seriously, but because that was considered a weapon, Army
Reggs required that attempt to kill be included in the charges,
and he got two years at hard labor on the
Dry Tortugas off Florida, which is where President Lincoln comes in.
(12:03):
Apparently everybody loved Moses J. Robinette, described as full of fun,
always lively and joking. Again, I feel like I met him.
Three military figures petitioned to have President Lincoln pardon Moses J. Robinette,
and a month after arriving at the Dry Tortugas, Lincoln
(12:26):
wrote on the appeal pardon for unexecuted part of punishment A.
Lincoln September one, eighteen sixty four.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Moses Robinette, who lived until nineteen o three, had a
granddaughter named Mary Elizabeth Robinette. She married Joseph Harry Biden.
Their son was Joseph Robinette Biden, Senior, and his son
is the President. But the best part of this remains
(12:59):
one quote dug up in Professor Gerlman's research. In imploring
Lincoln to pardon him, the friends of Moses J. Robinett
described him as quote ardent and influential in opposing traitors
(13:22):
and their schemes to destroy the government. Wow. By the way,
Congressman James Comer and Trump thug Robert Hurr have just
found out about Lincoln pardoning Biden's great great grandfather, so
that'll be starting the impeachment hearing on it on Friday.
(13:47):
I made that up. I probably shouldn't have. I don't
want to give them any ideas. I wish I were
making this up. There is another potential campaign issue here,
and it is isolationism, and we are seeing it play
out with deadly seriousness. The cowardice of Senator JD. Vance.
This is the clown who was running forth in the
(14:09):
Ohio senatorial primary when he sold his ass to Trump.
For an endorsement, and he is now not just senator,
but the ranking member on the Senate Checks Notes, Beard
Trimming and Facial Grooming Committee. The useless, vile, vacuous performance
(14:30):
artist think ted Cruz without the podcast. For the same
reasons a YouTuber would go there. JD. Vance went to
the Munich Security Conference. Julia naval Naya went there as well.
She went there as the wife of the imprisoned Alexe
Navalni and while she was there she found out she
(14:51):
had become his widow. Not an hour or two later,
she addressed the conference with dignity, with bravery, and with heartbreak.
From this country we sent this isolationist putts Vance. He
stood around giving snarky comments to American political reporters gullible
enough to platform him. He insisted, the US does not
(15:12):
have the resources to fight multifront wars, so we need
to tell Ukraine to seed territory to Putin. How many
more Ukrainians get killed before we get there, he asked,
of course, if we get there, if we get to
that point, we will have no choice but to soon
summon the resources to actually fight a multifront war in Europe,
(15:33):
because Putin will take our willingness to negotiate away part
of Ukraine as exactly what Hitler understood the European Democracy's
willingness to negotiate away Czechoslovakia and Poland to be in
nineteen thirty eight nineteen thirty nine. Appeasement. Jd Vance is
an appeaser. Jd Vance would have appeased Hitler. The West
doesn't make enough munitions to support an indefinite war. Vance belched,
(15:58):
Ukraine doesn't have enough manpower to support an indefinite war.
We have to be realistic. Unquote, we are being realistic, Beard, Oh,
very realistic. Ukraine is fighting Russia in Russia, so we
don't have to because if we have to fight a
(16:18):
madman dictator like Putin, we wouldn't know if we could
control it, and the risk of genuine conflict, even nuclear
conflict with Russia begins to escalate with just one mentally
unbalanced authoritarian holding his finger on the button, let alone
returning a second one into this equation in Trump, jd
(16:39):
Vance will never understand, or he is prostituting himself to
pretend to not understand, that we are not helping Ukraine.
Ukraine is helping us, so we don't have to summon
the munitions to support an indefinite war against Putin or
to summon the troops. Then, of course there is Vance's
(17:01):
personal cowardice. He's not just an appeaser. Well, I was
going to say something else, but I'll skip it. He's
not just an appeaser. He was invited to attend a
meeting with President Zelenski of Ukraine. He said that while
his position was underrepresented in Munich, you know, give the
world to Putin and betray our allies. He didn't want
(17:25):
to go to meet Zelenski because he didn't think he
would learn anything new. Of course, in this he is correct.
There is no evidence that Jay d Vantz has learned
anything new since he got out of diapers, if he did,
and of course there is no evidence that at its
core his Republican Party has learned anything new since the
(17:46):
original America firsters and Charles Lindberg and William Borra tried
to take over this country and demonize Jewish Americans in
order to appease Hitler in nineteen forty. They were a
cancer on our land then, and Trump is a cancer
on our land now. And I do not think it
is entirely a coincidence that when Nebl Chamberlain, the Prime
(18:08):
Minister of the United Kingdom, attempted and in fact gave
away Czechoslovakia to Hitler in nineteen thirty eight, the deal
was made in Munich and JD. Vance is willing to
give away Ukraine to Putin and made this statement in Munich,
(18:32):
rhyming with Unich also of interest here. I know her
nearly eighteen years now, and no, I don't know what
happened to Katie Turr on MSNBC last week, or how
she went from being somebody I cared deeply about who
used to help me with the special comments about George
(18:54):
Bush on MSNBC, somebody in twenty sixteen who Donald Trump
tried to get killed. How she went from that to
becoming somebody calling him a New York and asking on
her program on her newscast if it was fair to
prosecute him, and doing it on a television network I built.
(19:17):
I don't know what has happened to Katie Terr, but
I do have a theory that's next. This is an
all new edition of Countdown.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
This is Countdown with Keith Olbermant.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Postscripts to the news some headlines, some updates, some snark,
some prediction, stateline thirty Rock Manhattan. Okay, I'm confused, as
everybody else is. For a year and a half after
he came down that escalator, Donald Trump tried to get
(19:58):
Katie Turr killed, called her out repeatedly at his campaign speeches,
pointed her out to his mobs sooner rather than later.
They had to get her Secret Service protection. Last Friday
on MSNBC, Katie carried so much water so quickly for
Trump that she was still trending for it on Saturday,
(20:19):
and she was the headline story on nearly every right
wing propaganda website. Not good. She insisted he was a
legend in New York City. Trump is synonymous with New York.
She then posited that there were no true victims in
the business fraud case, for which Trump must now pay
three hundred and fifty five million dollars in fines. She
(20:41):
asked a panel of startled guests, is this fair to
go after Donald Trump like this in this environment?
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Ah?
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Don't know where to begin here. I am beginning to
suspect sort of late flossoming Stockholm syndrome or blackmail maybe,
or something else unknown in this equation when they asked
Katie to go cover Trump's announcement that he was running.
She was working out of NBC's London bureau and was
(21:15):
only back here in the city for a few days
to meet her new boss and stop by and visit
her old friends and me. She told me she did
not want anything to do with American politics. She had
gotten an interview with him when she eventually went to
cover his announcement. He knew that she and I had
lived together in one of his buildings. The interview was good,
(21:36):
It was contentious in many respects. It was the last
solid interview anybody ever did with Trump, and NBC immediately
saw that and asked her to cover his campaign full time,
figuring it would sput her out at some point, but
that she had access to him. She told me she
didn't want anything to do with that either, and I
suggested that was probably the wrong answer and that I'd
(21:58):
help her get through it, that it could make her
career so off she went. She would send me her
NBC Dotory scripts to edit or rewrite for her, and
as the threats continued against her, I just tried to
be supportive and reassuring I had broken up with her
seven years earlier, but we had parted it as friends.
I had never had any reason to doubt that that
would continue. And then one day I attacked Kelly and
(22:20):
Conway on Twitter. I know, not a very high bar,
but still I did it. The next thing I know,
I'm getting a text from Katie Turr and then a
phone call, and she's really angry at me, saying Conway
called her up about what I had tweeted, and that
I needed to remember that there were decent people on
both sides and bad ones, and everybody got threats, and
(22:42):
it was really inappropriate for me to contribute to the
quote dangers Kelly and Conway faced, I said something about, well, yeah,
I'm sure there are decent people on both sides, but
she's not one of them. I said to her, Kelly
and Conway, you're worried about about Kelly and Conway. She's
part of a gang that has spent the last year
(23:03):
trying to get you killed, killed, not inconvenience, not fired,
killed enough that the Secret Service stepped in. Are you nuts? Well?
It turned out Kelly n. Conway was one of Katie's sources.
In fact, she might have been the main source for
the networks and the big newspapers during the twenty sixteen
(23:25):
campaign and beyond. Apparently she cannot stop talking. But even so,
Katie's attitude towards her and against me was out of
the blue and really offensive. Anyway, it passed, and maybe
two months later I got a text from her at
nine to fourteen PM on December eleven, and twenty sixteen.
This is called having the receipts. Trump had won. Our
(23:48):
nightmare had begun, and Katie had gotten a book deal
about her experience. I'd been keeping a document in my
laptop with hundreds of pages of Trump stories and links
and commentaries that I used for the Resistance video series
for GQ. It was my Trump doc, and given that
Katie was writing that book, I'd offered to give her
a copy of it so she had something chronological to
(24:10):
use as research as she wrote her book, because she
hadn't really been keeping notes, she'd just been trying not
to get killed. I still have her text. It reads,
do you still want to share your Trump dock with me?
I joked back, sure, how much? And she joked back
ten twenty dollars, And while we were texting, I emailed
her the doc and I said, no charge, but don't
forget my one demand. Do not leave me out of
(24:32):
your acknowledgments in your book. More than a month later,
at two thirty five pm on Sunday, January twenty second,
twenty seventeen, I was just back from la and I
had just done Bill Maher's show for the last time,
and Katie ter texted me about why they had never
invited her to be on Bill Maher's show, and then
(24:54):
she switched topics. Quote, want to write this book, I
wrote back at five point thirty two. What You're not serious?
How would that work? That's when she phoned. She was
about to give the advanced money back to the publisher.
I can't write a book. I'm like fifty thousand words
short and it's terrible. I'll give you half the money.
I'll give you more than half the money. I pointed
(25:16):
out to her that I had written or rewritten dozens
of her stories for NBC News and MSNBC, and it
was not the question of the money. It was a
question of what we could get away with no viewer,
and maybe only one producer in a million would ever
notice that one sentence or one paragraph of one script
in her two minute report was actually written by me
(25:37):
or even sounded like me. First of all, she was
the one saying it each time I wrote or re
wrote in her name for NBC. It was a fireable
offense for her, but one that nobody would ever think
to look for, even though there is necessarily an email
trail ten miles long. But a book, a book about
Trump in my writing style, not hers in print. I
(26:01):
have a fairly distinct writing style, and I'm not good
at hide it. Somebody would notice. Her publisher might cancel
it or even sue, or if it got published, NBC
might notice it and fire her. This was not just
a bad idea, I pointed out to her, and very
dubious ethically, but it stood an excellent chance of destroying
her career and maybe damaging mine. She said okay, And
(26:26):
she told me she was going to talk it over
with her boyfriend Tony from CBS that night, and her
thought was to give back the advance and cancel the book.
And I said, did you think about a ghostwriter? And
she said, like who? And I said, I had no idea.
I tried to joke her out of these grim prospects
by reminding her that at least for a several thousand
dollars worth of research I gave her, I had cut
the price to no dollars and no sense, and all
(26:48):
I wanted was to not be left out of the acknowledgments.
The next thing I knew the book had been published.
She didn't give the money back. There was not a
paragraph of it that reads like the rest of her writing,
and the three years we lived together is reduced to
about four paragraphs in which she tells the story of
(27:10):
the day Kelly an Kahn Job called her to complain
about me. The book dismissed me as somebody she dated
briefly in her twenties. I mean I paid off her
student loans. I rented an apartment for her after we
broke up for a year so she could continue to
(27:31):
work in this city and punchline of all punchlines. Remember
my one request to her, don't leave me out of
the acknowledgments. She left me out of the acknowledgments. There
were later problems. She talked me out of doing an
interview with the Washington Post that wanted to interview me
about her, saying she wasn't going to participate in the
(27:51):
story and it was sexist to call her ex boyfriend,
and she hoped I wouldn't do it either, and I
agreed it was sexist. Then the article came out and
she had done the interview for it, and the article reads,
her former boyfriend Keith Overman, refused to comment for this article,
and I look like a schmuck. Then a month or
two later, there's a New York Times article about her
(28:12):
and the book, and it says I had refused the
writer's request to comment to the Times. And not only
did nobody from the Times ever request to comment, but
I didn't even recognize the writer's name. So I find
it call her up and I say, have we ever
spoken before? And she says no. But I asked Katie
to ask you for a comment. And she called me
back and she said she'd spoken to you and asked
(28:33):
you to do the interview with me, and you said no,
And I said, bad news. She never called me, the
writer gasped, But the problems at the Times this is
a subject of an entirely different commentary. So that was
the last time I had any contact with Katie. Chair
I told her that that was it for the friendship.
She said she was sorry, she was a terrible person. Well,
(28:57):
at least for all of us, Katie, me, for guests,
the viewers who saw her go over the Trump side
last week, we can agree on that she sure is
a terrible person. Still ahead of us on this all
(29:38):
new edition of Countdown Things I promised not to tell,
and for reasons I'll explain, I spent part of the
weekend reliving the weirdest, briefest job I ever had. Six
months is one of the top TV sportscasters in Boston,
and it literally ended with one of those you can't
quit me, I'm firing you moments with my boss, My
boss who twenty five years later started sending me fan mail.
(30:00):
Coming up first, Yes, the daily roundup of the miscrants,
morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute two days
worse parsons in the world. The Bronze the worse. An
unidentified couple guys photographed on top of a moving subway
train along an elevated part of the Seven Line over
(30:20):
Queens Here in Fun City. This is called subway surfing,
and it's been going on for seventy five years at least.
My friend Kareem Abdul Jabbar says he did it when
he was a kid, and he is amazed he lived
to tell about it, especially when the train would go
back into the tunnel. But these guys on the seven train,
(30:40):
they've elevated the game. They appeared to be having sex
on top of the moving train. Is this the local
or the Express? Actually it can be worse. I once
rode into work on an F train in the nineteen
eighties and there was a guy sprawled across one whole
row of seats with a copy of the New York
Post covering his face. When I went home that night,
(31:00):
sure enough, I happened to get on exactly the same
train car, and exactly the same guy was still there,
still sprawled over the same seats because he was dead. Anyway,
I'm only really telling this story so I can get
in the quote from the communications director of the New
York Metropolitan Transit Authority quote. They's reckless clowns aren't thinking
(31:24):
about the mess cleaners and other subway workers will have
to deal with when their stupid stunt goes tragically wrong,
said Tim Minton. Tim Minton was the sports director of
WVBRFM at Cornell briefly before they got rid of him,
and I succeeded him. We were freshmen there together. This
(31:46):
was in nineteen seventy six. Happily, Tim and I have
almost moved past this event. Maybe he has the bronze
worse here. I've said it before and I'll say it again.
There are a lot of dumb people at Fox. That's
why they were hired. But I cannot think of anybody
more dumb for more years in a row than Brian
kill me. After the Trump New York fraud ruling, he tweeted,
(32:08):
this three hundred and fifty four million dollar penalty only
makes Trump stronger. Never had a chance with this comic
book character Judge Engern. Bad news for Nicky Haley and
Joe Biden. First of all, it's not. It's not bad
news for Nicky Haley or Joe Biden. They don't have
to sell property at a loss to pay all or
(32:30):
most of the three hundred and fifty five million dollar
fine into escrow within thirty days just to appeal to
find Alena Hobbas says, they actually have to pay more
than three hundred and fifty five million. It's not bad
news for Haley, It's not bad for Biden. It's bad
news for Trump. He's out three hundred and fifty five
million dollars. Even Trump knows what that is. But that's
(32:50):
not the point. Kill Mead's gonna kill Mead. It's his spelling.
How could you have misspelled the first five words of
that tweet? How can you misspell three hundred and fifty
four million? He made it into one word, and then
three hundred and fifty four million dollar penalty. He misspelled
penally penalty pe n e lt y. But the winner
(33:17):
the worst, that new shoe magnate Trump himself. I mean, look,
if you could get one thousand pairs of cheap generic
versions of Chuck Taylor's spray, paint them with rustolium number
three four h six four seven, and sell them for
four hundred bucks a pair to these psychos who think
that they will get into heaven or something because they
(33:37):
bought these crappy shoes, you'd do it right. You wouldn't
bless you anyway. A lot of good obvious jokes like
mine trump sneakers for the guy trying to run away
from the draft. Paul mcgalla is about they're good if
you have bone spurs. That meme in which Dorothy's House
(33:58):
from the Wizard of Oz has just fallen on top
of the wicked Witch of the East. Only the shoes
sticking out from under the house are these crappy Trump
gold ones. But the joke was by comedy writer Mark Age,
who hit one hundred in a beautiful sixcinct dry creation quote.
Tried hooping in these, but all I could do was
(34:21):
draw charges. I mean, how could you ever top that?
Trump and his shoe community. Try hooping in these, but
all you can do is draw charges. Two days worst Persons.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
And finally to the proverbial top of the countdown and
things I promised not to tell.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
And I actually spent part of the weekend trying to
help a young guy get started in television news. And
no I didn't. I didn't tell him, don't do it.
He's a college senior in Boston and he wants to
work there. So I found myself reviewing my very interesting
but very brief career in Boston with him, and with
(35:19):
the fellow I sent him to, who, by coincidence, now
holds exactly the same job I held starting for six
fabulous months starting forty years ago this April, Now.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
News Center five Tonight You're complete News Update with Natalie Jacobson,
Chet Curtis, meteorologist Dick Albert, and Keith Oberman on sports
recording live from New England's News Center. Natalie Jacobson and
Chet Curtis.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Good evening, we're interrupting our network. At Boston Red Sox
spring training in nineteen eighty three, a fellow named Bob
Clark introduced himself as the sports producer at this Boston
State and said they were all fans of my CNN
work and that there would be a job opening that
summer as sports anchor, and could he go to his
bosses and say I was interested? And I said sure,
And in fact, if he wanted me to go with
him to tell his bosses that, or if he needed
(36:18):
me to carry him to go tell his bosses that,
I was ready. Things advanced so quickly that by Monday,
July eighteenth, nineteen eighty three, I found myself flying up
from New York with my agent, and as Boston appeared
out the window of the plane, she said, you will
own this town. Not so much maybe later I went
(36:38):
out to the station's headquarters in a barren suburb called
Needham and interviewed with everybody, sports producers, the news director,
finally the general manager. Everybody beamed at me and all
was going great, having laughed at several of my jokes
and told me he loved my tape. The general manager
a man named Coppersmith, who was about to usher me
out of his office with a big hand on my
(37:00):
shoulder when I made a terrible, terrible mistake. I told
him we had met before, when I was a TV
intern and he was the general manager of his parent
company station in New York. I remember him looking at
me quizically, and only later did I find out that
all of his people had lied to him without telling me,
(37:20):
and they had told him I was twenty eight years old.
They did not tell me that since I was twenty
four years old. Copper Smith's last year at Channel five
in New York had been nineteen seventy eight, and even
giving me the benefit of the aged out, he decided
I was no longer anything older than twenty six, and
(37:41):
ultimately he thought that was too young to be a
sports anchor in a major television market, back when those
used to be important jobs that paid important money. Their sportscasters.
Since the station had gone on the air in the
nineteen fifties had been an avuncular, pleasant, gifted man named
Don Gillis, but he was cutting back where they had
decided to cut him back to special feature Judy. The
(38:04):
next day, back in New York City, I went out
to find out if the Boston newspapers had found anything
out about my surreptitious trip there. I went to a
place so wonderful and now so impossible to explain to anybody,
the out of town newspaper and magazine shop in the
lobby of the pan Am building, adjacent to the Grand
Central train station. This was one of the smaller of
(38:27):
the out of town newsstands in New York. It carried
about two hundred different American newspapers, dozens more from around
the world, and every imaginable international magazine was always packed.
Its entire glory has been wiped out by the Internet anyway.
I bought the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald from
(38:48):
the same day, and there it was on page thirty
two of the Globe, a headline over a feature by
the TV sports columnist Jack Craig. Gillis departing soon on
Horizon Olderman's credentials, Good Young Keith Olberman of Cable News
Network CNN reportedly was very favorably interviewed at Channel five yesterday,
(39:08):
possibly signaling the end of the Don Gillis era more
quickly than anticipated. I was young then, but look credentials good,
it said in the headline. This was it the start
of my TV career for real. No more having to
explain to doubting athletes, doubting colleagues, doubting relatives, doubting team
(39:29):
executives that there really was a TV place called Cable
News Network parenthesis CNN, big money and big fame in
one of the best sports cities in the nation. As
even the Globes article noted, there is a hitch. Alderman's
contract with CNN does not expire until next May, and
whether he would be let out for Channel five is uncertain. Well,
sure it was, but CNN would be nice guys about it, right.
(39:52):
This was real TV, not some perpetual verge of bankruptcy
cable thing. It was really just a big delusion by
Ted Turner. And they needed eight cameras in New York,
but that can only afford seven being used in the
field for ten hours. One cameraman would have to lash
his camera to a tripod for the wide shot shot
for the nightly Sandy Freeman audio talk show. Even after
(40:16):
the inevitable occurred one night and the overworked camera burst
into flames on live TV, CNN would understand by the way,
Sandy Freeman was replaced about a year later by Larry King.
That's how long ago this actually was. Anyway, CNN's less
than happy reaction to this was academic. I had unwitningly
(40:40):
blown it when I revealed to that guy Coppersmith that
I was not twenty eight years old. Sure enough. On
August fifteenth, WCBB Channel five Boston announced the hiring of
a Miami sportscaster named Lee Webb to succeed Don Gillis.
Webb was a lot of things, and he wasn't a
lot of other things, but hot damn. He was thirty
years old, and that made him the man in the
(41:01):
eyes of the general manager, mister Coppersmith. On the other hand,
copper Smith thought his station should still hire me as
a reporter. The news director, a man who went by
the imposing name of Philip Scribner Balboni, offered me a
spot as a feature news reporter a producer, and I
would look for offbeat, on usual unique stories and go
cover them. It was not the sports anchor's job, but
(41:24):
it wasn't CNN either. WCBB would also wait until CNN
finally accepted that it was over between the two of us.
Whenever that was then, three more things happened in quick succession.
Channel five hired a new sports director, a producer who
would run the department and set its editorial tone. His
name was Mike Frnandi's, and even after working with him
(41:45):
for six months, the only thing I knew about him
was that he had no sense of humor. He understood
that I was making jokes, but he never got one
of them. And his principal interest in sports was apparently
determining which players were Don Jan's so he could refer
to them endlessly in the office as quote swordsman. The
second thing that happened was that the sports reporter at
(42:07):
Channel five, Bob Ryan, already very famous at the Boston
Globe later even more so nationally at ESPN, told management
he just could not do both the TV and newspaper
jobs anymore and he needed to quit. Mind you, this
was how important sports was on local TV in Boston
in nineteen eighty three, they had an on air sportscast,
you're a weekend sportscast, you're a sportscast, you're emeritus, and
(42:29):
an on air sports reporter, plus all the producers and
the off air sports director. Often the sportscast in the
hour long six o'clock news, and there was only the
one hour of news. The sportscast lasted ten minutes. So now,
having already offered me the feature news reporting job, news
director Philip Scribner Balboni offered me my choice of that
(42:50):
job or Bob Ryan's sports reporting job. And while I
was debating that, I managed to resist all efforts to
turn me into a newsman for fifteen years. While I
was debating that, another Boston station suddenly jumped into the fray.
Channel seven was a perennial also ran compared to Channel five,
whose newscasts were among the best, if not the best,
(43:12):
in the country. Without as much as asking me to
even come visit, Channel seven offered me the job as
its sports director, anchored the sports at six and eleven,
run the department, and get much more money than Channel five.
It offered me, and I turned it down out of
loyalty to Channel five, because they asked first, I turned
(43:32):
it down. Moren Channel five was out in the as
I said, barn suburbs. Channel seven was in downtown Boston.
I would be making like one hundred thousand a year
at age twenty five, with no responsibilities, living and working
in downtown Boston in nineteen eighty four. Moren So anyway,
(43:56):
I get to Boston at the end of April nineteen
eighty four at Channel five, and on my first day
out in the barren suburbs, I walk up a c
were staircase to the sports department office and I hit
my head on the staircase and bled so much they
all thought I was going to need stitches. And I
went back to the half a house I had moved to,
one of exactly two rental properties in the entire town
(44:19):
of Nita, Massachusetts, and I thought, what the hell have
I done? No things improved. I was not just in
the field. I did a lot of substitute anchoring, especially
on weekends, and the first time I did that, Susan Warnick,
one of our reporters and the wife of the big
sportscaster in town, Bob Lobell from Channel four. Susan came
(44:39):
up to me in the office on Monday and gave
me a big wet kiss on the lips and said,
you were terrific. Lo bell Is scared Crapless, I love you.
The first time I did a live shot before Celtics
game at Boston Garden, I wandered around the arena without
being recognized. Once two weeks later, I went back to
the Garden and I went to get a hot dog
(45:00):
and turned to find a crowd of several dozen viewers,
all shouting at me in the the angular language of
the Boston sports fan. On Monday, June eleventh, nineteen eighty four, Balboni,
the news director, called me in and said he wanted
me to start anchoring every night on the eleven o'clock news.
Lee Web would continue on the six. But the intimation
was if it went the way he thought it was
going to, I would get that show too. But the
(45:24):
problem was, and I don't know if you've noticed this,
but occasionally I like to make jokes, Okay, I need
to make jokes. And several of the executives at the
station were real fans of the Red Sox and Celtics
and Patriots and Bruins, and they did not like the jokes.
Even if the viewers liked the jokes, they didn't. One day,
(45:47):
I was supposed to go with a cameraman to shoot
a piece in which I pretended to interview the Green Monster,
the famed leftfield wall at Fenway Park. The punchline was
it would turn out the Green Monster didn't like baseball.
Not a bad idea for nineteen eighty four. Just as
we're leaving the station, the sports director for now, and
he said, change of plans. Needs to go to Smithfield.
(46:08):
That was where the football team held its training camp.
Patriots just put their back up middle lineback on waivers,
go get some sound. He didn't need any sound. The
executives who didn't like my jokes had gotten the executive
who didn't get my jokes to stop giving me the
chance to do my jokes. It was an hour and
a half to Smithfield. I was done for the day.
(46:29):
I went home for a little trip to New York.
In early September, met with my agent, told her that
after all the time and all the energy we had
spent to get that job, this was the most impossible
to imagine outcome. But it was the wrong station in
the wrong suburb. In the right town, and I didn't
know how we could ever fix it. She agreed. She
said I should go in and tell the news director
(46:50):
I wanted to quit, and then I'd stay as long
as he needed me. But that if they weren't going
to let me do the jokes, what was the point.
I was an okay reporter, I was an okay sportscaster.
But only with the jokes was I me So September tenth,
teen eighty four, a Monday, the news director was not happy.
He offered, in fact, to fire Lee Webb on the
spot and give me the six o'clock show immediately, like
(47:13):
that night. Like Lee, Lee web out of the building
that minute. But I told him that would mean he
would be keeping somebody who wanted to leave and firing
somebody who wanted to stay. He angrily agreed, and I
became a secret leam duck, and I stayed on getting
fewer and fewer chances to be me, although they stuck
to their end of it. They sent me to cover
the World Series in San Diego and Detroit, where the
(47:34):
guy next to me in the press box covering it
for Channel seven. The place I should have gone to
work was their new sports reporter, a just retired Red
Sox Hall of Fame player named Carl Yastremsky. I hit
a ball over here, I hit a ball over there.
I hit three balls over that roof. Then, when I
got back from the World Series, it happened on Friday
(47:55):
October nineteenth, nineteen eighty four, that TV sports columnist from
the Boston Globe, Jack Craig, called me up at home
and told me Channel five was firing me because of
bad ratings at eleven o'clock. I didn't have bad ratings
at eleven o'clock. In fact, I had great ratings, and
six weeks earlier they'd offered me the six o'clock show
as well. I hung up with Craig to call my agent,
(48:17):
and instead of a dial tone, I heard the voice
of the TV sports columnist from the Boston Herald, Jim Baker.
I had answered his call fort rang. He told me
Channel five was firing me and Lee Webb so it
could instead hire Ken the Hawk Harrelson, the former Red
Sox star and TV announcer who had moved to Chicago.
(48:37):
So now I call my agent. She says, your deal
with Channel five is off. They want to make it
look like you stink. They want to make it look
like they just fired you. You called Jim Baker and
Jack Craig right now and tell them the whole story.
Wherever you go next, it has to be clear that
you weren't fired, you quit and you stayed on because
you're a pro, which you know was true. So I called.
(48:59):
I told both writers everything, and two minutes after I
got off the phone with Jack Craig from The Globe,
the phone and it was Jim Baker from The Harold
calling back, and he says, you'll never believe this. Their
negotiations with Hawk Harrelson are dead. Apparently he wanted four
hundred thousand dollars a year and to guarantee that he
only had to come in five minutes before each show
(49:20):
to get makeup and then read the script that somebody
else wrote. So you are now our lead story. Sure enough.
Backpage of the Boston Harald, Saturday, October twenty, nineteen eighty four,
above the masthead Overman quits Channel five at the same
hour I was supposed to go to Morgantown, West Virginia,
(49:42):
the place that was designed simply to make that lovely
town of Needham Massachusetts look like I don't know the Riviera.
I was supposed to go to Morgantown to cover Doug
Flute and Boston College against the University of West Virginia.
Since I lived between the television station and the airport,
the cameraman was going to swing by my house to
pick me up. Do it like seven am I ever showed?
(50:05):
By this point, I'm thinking I just had to call
my lying boss's liars in both Boston newspapers that are
on every newsstand in the city and the surrounding area.
Why am I going to race the clock to get
to the airport on my own when this idiot cameraman
forgot to come get me. When we had made the
arrangements the day before, the cameraman had gotten my name
(50:26):
wrong and called me Dick. At least that's why I
thought he'd called me Dick. Anyway, I was twenty five.
I went back to bed, and while I was asleep,
Channel five fired me from a job that I had
not only quit, but I had quit twice, including on
the front page of the newspapers that morning. The Channel
five people were furious. I put up a brave front,
(50:48):
but beneath the surface I was a little scared until
two more things happened before I could move back to
New York. The news director Phil Balboni told Craig of
the Globe that it was all too bad because quote
Keith was potentially such a major talent. Ooh ooh. And
then the general manager, Coppersmith, was so angry that he
(51:09):
sold my agent he will never again work in this business.
I am not a big believer in motivational quotes, but
those two those really worked. Number one and two on
my all time list, and as always, beyond that, there's
a punchline. In two thousand and seven, an email popped
(51:31):
into my inbox at MSNBC. It was glowing and warm
and lovely, and it indicated the writer was a huge fan.
It was signed You're old Channel five news director Phil Balboni.
His email did not mention that I was potentially such
a major talent. Also, I am now now informed that
(52:05):
they have taken down that spiral staircase, so if I
ever have to go back there, I'm safe, probably, But
they didn't even put up a monument or anything to
my head wound. I've done all the damage I can
do here. Thank you for listening. Tell somebody about this
award nominated show. Get somebody to subscribe. If you like
(52:27):
the show, people say nice things about the show, get
somebody else to subscribe. I'll make a little extra thanks
for listening. Countdown. Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip
schaneil Arrange produced and performed most of our music. Mister
Ray on guitars, bass and drums, Mister Shanelle handling, of course,
orchestration and keyboards produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including
(52:47):
some Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the group No
Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Ulberman theme from
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc.
Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss,
the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was
keeping with the Boston theme my friend Dennis Leary. Everything
(53:08):
else was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for
this the two hundred and sixtieth day until the twenty
twenty four United States presidential election, but thirty ninth days
since Dementia J. Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically
elected government of the United States use the Fourteenth Amendment,
the Insurrection Act, the Justice system, the mental health system,
(53:30):
anti terrorism statutes to stop him from doing it again
while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow.
Boltons is the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Olderman.
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
(54:03):
Keith Olderman is a product of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!