May 10, 2024 • 48 mins
SERIES 2 EPISODE 173: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I don’t know much about the law but I do know the Trump Trial has confirmed one of the immutable truths of the field: Never hire an attorney with a rating of 3-1/2 stars.
Susan Necheles somehow managed to lose to Stormy Daniels during the second day of cross-examination in Trump-On-Trial yesterday; lose so badly and obviously that Trump’s team was forced to file for a desperation mistrial from the very thin ice of basically claiming Necklace forgot to object to something that Daniels said on TUESDAY.
All of a sudden the Trump defense was claiming – and leaking to every news organization, by the way – that Daniels had dog-whistled a subtext of rape or assault when she gave details about Trump standing in front of her, and not using a condom, and a bodyguard being out in the hallway – and we should just ignore that when she said all that, THREE DAYS AGO, Trump’s lawyer with the three-and-a-half stars rating Susan Necheles said… nothing. Not even the only thing you or I would remember to say if we woke up in some alternate universe where we were in that courtroom as Trump’s lawyer: “OBJECTION.”
And that might have been Necheles's best work.
Ms. Necheles: “You have experience in making up fake stories about sex?”
Ms. Daniels: “The sex is real. That’s why it’s not a B movie.”
Ms. Necheles: “NOW you have a story about having sex with President Trump, right?”
Ms. Daniels: “If that story was untrue, I would’ve written it to be a lot better.”
Ooops! There goes another half a star.
Ms. Necheles: “You had sex with a cameraman?”
Ms. Daniels: “I started dating him and he became my husband.”
A reminder: None of this needed to be heard by the jury. If Trump’s defense had stipulated, yeah, they had sex, she wouldn’t have been allowed to testify. Or they could have just asked her what she knew about Trump’s involvement in the non-disclosure agreement and the payoffs and she could have said “nothing” and Ms. Necheles could have said “nothing further, your honor.” This is a case – a relatively boring case with excruciating details about how routine company checks got sent to the White House for Trump to sign even as president and he never ignored a single detail that cost him more than 99 cents – a relatively boring case about falsified business records and the attempt to interfere with an election and Trump’s team turned it into wocka-wocka-wocka, and his credibility and their credibility against the credibility of a pornographic actress and guess what: the actress won.
ALSO: Oh by the way, last month Trump assembled around 20 of the nation's top oil and fossil fuel executives and offered them a deal. He'd sell them the world to destroy as quickly as they wanted - repeal all regulations and make Doug Burgum Secretary of Energy or VP or whatever - if they'd simply give him a billion dollars with which to get elected. So when you worry that democracy is on the ballot in November, just remember, no, it's worse than that: human EXISTENCE is on the ballot.
B-Block (23:10) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Mark Levin tries to get around calling Judge Juan Merchan "a pervert" because he was listening to Stormy Daniels' testimony. Failson Andrew Giuliani is "reporting" on the trial and puts me in an impossible position by blasting Lawrence O'Donnell. And Chuck Todd ISN'T gone after all. He has just written a masterpiece of nonsense: an Epic Poem of bothsidesism in which he concludes Biden and Trump both need to admit their mistakes. He spends one paragraph on Trump's mistakes and about a dozen on how Biden failed to bring the country together (while Trump was tearing it apart).
C-Block (34:00) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: No gentle reminiscences here. No prophetic tales of heroes who were actually schmoes. Thurber goes for the jugular vein of the famous Avantgarde artist Salvador Dali in "The Secret Life Of James Thurber."
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. I
don't know much about the law, but I do know
(00:25):
the Trump trial has confirmed one of the immutable truths
of the field. Never hire an attorney who has a
rating of three and a half stars. Susan Necklace somehow
managed to lose to Stormy Daniels during the second day
(00:45):
of cross examination in Trump on Trial yesterday. Lose so
badly and lose so obviously that Trump's team was reduced
to filing a desperation mistrial motion off the very thin ice,
basically claiming that Necklace forgot to object to something that
Stormy Daniels had said on Tuesday. All of a sudden,
(01:09):
the Trump defense was claiming and leaking to every news
organization by the way that Daniels had dog whistled a
subtext of rape or assault or something else involuntary when
she gave details about Trump standing in front of her
and not using a condom and a bodyguard being out
in the hallway, and we should just ignore that when
(01:31):
she said all that three days ago, Trump's lawyer with
the three and a half stars rating, Susan Necklace, said nothing,
not even the one thing you or I would remember
to say if we woke up in some alternate universe
where we were in that courtroom as Trump's lawyers, the
(01:52):
one thing we would remember to say, you know, objection,
Mss Necklace, and mister Todd blanche as in blanched visibly
then made it worse, demanding not only a mistrial but
also a revision to the gag order so that Trump
could go out and slander Daniels to the media and
(02:13):
call her horse face again, and lord knows what else,
because at the bottom line, Trump wants to be able
to answer her, but he is too much of a
coward to utilize the method provided for answering her, which
is to testify, which he vowed to do and which
he would now not do if it guaranteed him re
election as president, because the prosecution has nailed him to
(02:35):
the wall on this case. While Miss Necklace may soon
be looking back fondly on those days when her rating
was as high as three and a half stars, Miss Necklace,
you have experience in making up fake stories about sex,
Miss Daniels. The sex is real, That's why it's not
a B movie. Miss Necklace. Now you have a story
(02:57):
about having sex with President Trump, right, Miss Daniels, if
that story was untrue, I would have written it to
be a lot better. Woo, there goes another half star
in her rating, Miss Necklace, you had sex with a cameraman,
Miss Daniels, I started dating him and he became my husband.
(03:21):
And a reminder, none of this needed to be heard
by the jury. If Trump's defense had stipulated, yeah, they
had sex, she would not have been allowed to testify.
Or they could have just asked her what she knew
about Trump's involvement in the non disclosure agreement or in
the payoffs, and she could have said nothing, and Miss
(03:41):
Necklace could have said nothing. Further, you're on her. This
is a case, a relatively boring case with excruciatingly detailed
information about how routine company checks got sent by FedEx
to the White House for Trump to sign in sharpie
even while he was president, and he never ignored a
single detail that cost him more than ninety nine cents.
(04:02):
It's a relatively boring case about falsified business records that
led to the attempt to interfere with an election, and
Trump's legal team has turned it into Laca Waca Waca
and his credibility and their credibility against the credibility of
a pornographic actress and no offense to her profession. But
guess what the pornographic actress won and it's a shutout.
(04:27):
As the defense pushed for a mistrial denied, the prosecution
revealed it had decided to skip Karen McDougall as an
additional witness because it would have only served to embarrass
Trump further, the implication being they don't need her testimony
now and that they left half their questions for Stormy
Daniels in the briefcase because the answers were not necessary
(04:50):
and they would have only embarrassed Trump further. And a
prosecutor actually told the judge she was going to be asked,
did you feel anything different? And she was going to say,
I felt the skin of a sixty year old man,
as a single man who has recently been sixty years
(05:11):
old and has been dating for half a century. If
that had been said about me by a woman during
my trial, I would have been so humiliated that I
would have stood up and pleaded guilty just to get
out of the courtroom as quickly as possible. Then again,
mss necklace and mister blanche as in Blanched visibly got
(05:32):
the really important testimony out of Stormy Daniels, didn't They.
They asked her if Aaron Rodgers, Charles Barkley and Ben
Roethlisberger were also at that golf tournament where she met
Trump all those years ago, and when she said yes,
they then asked her to confirm that Trump was the
most famous celebrity there. And then they asked her to
(05:54):
confirm that Trump did really well at that golf tournament.
In fact, in a field of eighty in that golf tournament,
Trump finished sixty second, a couple of strokes behind Ray Romano,
Bruce McGill, who played d Day in the Animal House movie,
and behind Dan Patrick. Dan Patrick, my Dan Patrick. And
(06:19):
if that had been said about me by a woman
during my trial, I would have been so humiliated. I
would have stood up and pleaded guilty just to get
out of the courtroom as quickly as possible. I move
for a bad legal thingy. By the way, the Washington
(06:43):
Post is reporting that Trump has offered to sell the
planet to the oil industry for one billion dollars give
him a bribe of one billion, not legally a bribe
call it campaign fund donations. And the earth is literally yours.
For just one billion dollars, you oil executives, you get
(07:08):
to kill all the future generations you want. You Chevron, you, Exxon,
you Occidental, you the other twenty guys. You give me
the billion dollars. And that Biden freeze on permits for
new LNG liquefied natural gas exports, it goes away. You'll
get the LNG thing immediately. Trump quote, you'll get it
(07:32):
on the first day. You want to drill in Alaska
and the Arctic Wilderness. You've been waiting on a permit
for five years. One of those whose bribe was solicited
quotes Trump is saying, you'll get it on day one,
unquote for just one billion dollars. Gulf of Mexico. You
want to drill there, The auctions start day one. The price?
(07:54):
Did I mention? It's one billion dollars. Those Biden tail
pipe rules, the ones designed to make evs and hybrid's
two thirds of all cars, So by eight years from
now the thing Trump claims he was referring to when
he threatened a blood bath if Biden is reelected. Trump
called those rules ridiculous, offered to ban them. If see
(08:16):
if you can guess if those oil executives sitting with
him at the fundraiser at Mari Lago last month simply
gave him one billion dollars. You want your own state, guys.
You want a place like say North Dakota, to just
be trilleying and pipelines in rare earth extraction, and the
(08:37):
governor Doug Bergham, the guy with the eyebrows, to become
vice president or energy secretary, or hell, let's really do this,
let's make him head of Environmental Protection one billion dollars.
You want the official position of the United States to
be that climate change is a hoax and climate disaster
is an impossibility, and that anybody who says the combustion
(08:58):
engine threatens the continuation of our species is just crazy.
That'll be one billion dollars. In the reality of the
horizon immediately in front of us, dozens of tornado funnels growing,
speeding up, moving towards us, ready to lay waste to
(09:19):
everything we know about our lives and our freedom and
our democracy, the form of government Donald Trump has decided
must die so he can live with that in front
of us. We sometimes forget that behind that ominous, dark,
fatal view is another series of tornado funnels, not dozens,
(09:42):
but thousands, and not figures of speeches that would follow
once Trump has again seized power and destroyed what we
have discovered all too late are the far too few
safeguards and protections. And the difference is those are actual tornadoes.
Because what Trump would do for the two dozen or
so oil robber barons to whom Trump lent last month
(10:05):
at marri Lago, offered to sell the world for a
billion dollars, would end any remaining chance we have of
staving off or just reducing the coming climate disaster. These
decisions have to be made in the next five years,
and so for his billion dollars, you can be certain
(10:29):
that you, or your children, or your grandchildren, or in
a best case scenario, your great grandchildren, they will die
in one of those tornadoes, or that they will die
in a wildfire for which there is not enough water
to put it out, or that they will die in
the water after the hours of rain and the days
(10:51):
of rain, and the weeks of rain that does not stop.
Because what the billion dollars Trump wants comes for in
exchange for the fossil fuel companies to keep on destroying
the only atmosphere we have and the only ecosystem we have,
while they all maintain the arrogance and certainty and insanity
of the rich people on the Titanic. While other people
(11:12):
might die, but we won't. We are in first class.
We forget sometimes that part of the Trump will destroy
democracy deal is Trump will also destroy the planet your
cost one billion dollars. The Post report is spare and
(11:36):
non hysterical, and rather boringly written, and that makes it
all the worse. By the calculations the paper quotes from
the group Climate Power, those oil executives have donated heavily
to Trump already, but heavily turns out to mean only
about six million, four hundred thousand dollars over the first
quarter of this year. For the full apocalypse, Trump wants
(12:00):
just a little bit more, just another nine hundred ninety
three million, as he sees it, nine hundred and ninety
three million to end the campaign, as anybody who has
looked out a window in the last decade sees it. Knows,
(12:20):
to borrow a recent popular phrase, we all know intuitively
that money is in fact to end the world, and
thus the most chilling words in the post story about
the billions standing between US and climate armageddon are at
the end. Quote oil billionaire Harold Ham and others are
(12:42):
scheduling a fundraiser for Trump later this year, advisers said,
where they expect large checks to flow to his bid
to return to office. The money flows now, our blood
will flow later. Okay, come on down, get off the bridge,
(13:09):
off the ledge. Remember that while they have the power
to destroy the world immediately or in a literal slow burn,
these people are incredibly stupid and Trump has in fact
made them even more net stupid by now introducing complete
(13:30):
nepotism into this. And trust me, the smart members of
the Trump family, they have already been in the picture.
He is now at the bottom of the barrel. The
Florida Republican Committee has named as its chair of its
delegation to the Republican Convention, Eric Trump, the guy who
(13:52):
proved what your mother said to you so very long ago.
Stop making that face. One day your face will freeze
like that. Eric Trump. Gee will be the one who
will place his father's name in for nomination if he
(14:14):
remembers it. And that's numb nay shun. Eric. The Convention
starts in Milwaukee August nineteenth. You can count on your
fingers and toes how many days from now that is,
and you can spend them practicing those big words numb
nay shun. The Florida GOP has also named Trump's daughter
(14:37):
Tiffany and her husband, Mister Tiffany, as delegates at large
and also as a delegate at large Baron Trump. So
that gentleman's agreement, the one both sides, surprisingly enough pretty
much stuck to all this time that Baron was off
limits because he was just a high school kid. That's
(14:59):
over now. So is Baron's de facto status as being
on sestionably the smartest Trump ever because he had never
been in politics and he had never said a word
in public. Why do this well, Trump has tipped his
hand now. Like all would be dictators, he cannot really
(15:20):
conceive of anybody succeeding him. But at some level he
understands that even if his wildest schemes come true, he
will die someday and you'll have to hand the family
government over to somebody else, and it ain't gonna be
Jared Kushner. Whether he fully perceives it or not. This
(15:40):
is Trump's own attempt at setting up an American monarchy.
Of course, the problem is none of them seem to
have even Trump's cornered animal instincts for effectively vile behavior
and utter lack of conscience and guilt. They are also
each of them imbeciles. No matter what happens. Now that
(16:03):
he's on the public stage, I think Baron Trump remains
the smartest Trump ever because the competition is Junior and
Eric and Tiffany, and Junior's all artificial ingredients, fiance platform
Committee member Kim Gilfoyle, and dumbest of them all, the
(16:24):
one the only Republican National Committee co chair Eric's wife Lara,
and Lara makes Kim gilfoyl seem like Nancy Pelosi.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Next question, can you have President Trump go to a
grocery store and buy a cart of groceries and or
pump gas at a gas station and show how expensive
it is and how Bidenomics is a joke? I think
that would be so effective. Love this idea, Love that idea.
I'm going to pass it along. We'll see what we
can do on that.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
You want to give the world video of Trump at
a gas station with gas pumps, holding a gas handle
pumping gas, You, Lara Trump, want to connect your father
(17:21):
in law Trump with gas after the farting stories from
the trial, Trump and more gas. Once again, I note
that democracy survives not because of our efforts, but because
of the stupidity of those who seek to destroy it.
(17:43):
And also, once again I asked the same question about
yet another somebody close to the unoiled Trump decision making machine.
Is Lara Trump a democratic plant? And if not, what
kind of plant is she? Also of interest? Here? Good
(18:06):
news everyone. Our American political systemic crisis, the collapse of
our form of democracy, the perversion of the two party system,
because one party has stopped believing in voting and elections
and human rights and the constitution and reality. We have
a solution. The solution has come from the one man
(18:31):
to whom we have always turned in times of political crisis,
the one man who knows the way out, Chuck Todd.
Chuck Todd has saved America. Chuck Todd has a plan
and it starts with just a tiny little ask. All
(18:56):
Chuck wants is for Trump to publicly admit his mistakes.
And Chuck has even come up with a hashtag for this,
a hashtag to save democracy and Chuck Todd's hashtag is
(19:18):
Kalpa capana. Oh, for Christ's sake, that's next. This is countdown.
This is Countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead of us
(19:52):
on this edition of Countdown Fridays with Thurber, and it's
Thurber at his snarkiest. No nostalgic tales of the dogs
of the nineteenth century this week, No disturbing stories about
a man who wants to hide in a box. Here
he just goes after Salvador Dali and the pretense of
the artiste in the Secret Life of James Thurber. Next,
(20:17):
but first, as ever, there are still new idiots to
talk about. The daily roundup of the mis grants, morons
and dunning Krueger effect specimens who constitute today's worst persons
in the world. That's my Salvador Deli popping his never
mind the bronze worser Mark Levin, who for more than
(20:38):
a decade now has been like the fourteenth string fascist
on Fox quote news unquote. I believe the technical term
for him is dyspeptic. It is clear he has never
liked anything in his life, which I guess is fair
because it doesn't look like anybody or anything has ever
liked him. Levin's latest target is Justice Juan Mrshan. Levin
(20:59):
has a law degree, but his legal career appears to
have climax during his tenure as deputy the Assistant Secretary
for Elementary and Secondary Education in the US Department of Education. Anyway,
he's been reading the transcripts of the Trump trial and
going on the air and saying he knows Merschaun was
protecting Stormy Daniels, and he knows why, quoting Levin, although
(21:24):
I really can't do his deviated septum voice correctly, Wan
Khan John, because you can't understand the words, then Wan Khana,
don riansurpri watch how the judge tries to protect her
in what is the porno case of the century. Because
the judge appears to be really into this, listening attentively
to all the details. We used to call that a pervert.
(21:47):
Mark Levin says, I can't accuse the judge of being
a pervert. I don't know him, but I do wonder
if he's a pervert. Can I say, I wonder if
the judge is a pervert? Mister producer, how do I
know whether he's a pervert or not? Unquote. I don't know, Mark,
but if Mrson's about Stormy Daniels, what does that make Trump?
(22:08):
By the way, Levin hoaring himself out to Trump like this,
you know what that's gotten him. Trump always refers to
him and always calls him Levin. His name is Levin, Macklebin.
Levin is such a supplicant to dementia. J. Trump. I'm
surprised he hasn't changed his name to Levin just to
please the Master, the runner up worser, speaking of which
(22:31):
Andrew Giuliani. Now, to be fair, I've had it in
for this little toad ever since he used to get
in the way at Yankee Stadium when he was a kid.
The night of the Roger Clemens Mike Piazza bat incident
in the two thousand World Series, my live interview with
Clemens during the game broadcast on Fox was held up
for like four minutes because Andrew Giuliani had to use
(22:54):
the toilet in the Yankee Clubhouse, and Daddy had the
cops block the tunnel from there to the field so
Clemens could not get back to our camera. Now today
I hate Andrew Guliani because he's actually turned out to
be dumber than daddy. He is quote covering unquote the
Trump trial live on Twitter x and I can't get
(23:15):
audience totals, but his live report yesterday morning got like
one hundred and twenty five likes, so I don't think
he's got that many viewers, especially since he started that
Thursday morning report with the camera positioned wrong and showing
him only from his sport coat buttons at the bottom
up to his nose. Or maybe that wasn't a mistake,
maybe that's the plan. Okay, good thinking, Andrew. Anyway, he
(23:38):
also put out about one hundred tweets yesterday, including one
at four h nine pm which got him on this list.
Quote the DA's office walks slowly back into the room.
They look nearly as defeated as Lawrence O'Donnell, who is
saying in the second to the last row on the right, Ah,
(23:58):
thanks a lot, little handy. I got you who I loathe,
blasting od who I lose? Now I gotta choose, but
our winner, the worst and somebody we can all agree
on Chuck Todd. Yeah, I know you thought he'd left
(24:20):
the universe after he got fired from Meet the Press,
only to be replaced by somebody worse in Kristen allegedly Welker,
But no, Chuck is still there, still at NBC News,
still writing stuff, apparently still playing out his contract or something,
and most importantly, still showing that he has not the
(24:40):
vaguest idea what on earth has happened in this country
in the last decade? It is still for him in
nineteen eighty seven or something. Headline, Chuck Todd the missing
ingredient to win the twenty twenty four election. Ameya Kulpa analysis.
Voters don't have to imagine a Biden or Trump presidency,
but they might like to hear admissions of mistakes and
(25:03):
ideas about how a second term would be different. By
the way the headline there, that's the highlight. After twelve
paragraphs of introduction, Chuck finally gets to his point, which
is such a dumb point that would have been rejected
by a sixth grade debate class. Quote. There's a final
chunk of voters who I think are looking for one
(25:25):
or both of the candidates to do something else, admit
some failure in their tenures, and express regret for decisions
they did or didn't make. Ultimately, voters want to know
the candidates they support are actually listening and responding to
their concerns, even if those concerns change. Yes, Chuck, the
voters are expecting Trump to say he screwed up Trump,
(25:51):
who told Frank Luntz once that he had never asked
God for forgiveness because I think if I do something wrong,
I think I just try and make it right. I
don't bring God into that picture. I don't. It comes
to a major failure for both candidates. Chuck writes, there's
one obvious place to start, their inability to bring the
(26:12):
country together. I believe it's that fact that has kept
either gentlemen from taking anything more than a margin of
error lead in the polls. Yes, Biden's inability to bring
the country together while Trump is trying to get Biden
killed is entirely Biden's fault. Then there's one paragraph in
(26:32):
which Chuck writes, Donald Trump and Maya Culpas aren't something
that go together, like peanut butter and jelly. Peanut butter
and tuna fish. Maybe I bet Chuck spend a week
on that one, peanut butter and tuna fish. I finally
got it, Hey, peanut butter and tunafish. We can print
it now. That's the last we hear about Trump in
(26:53):
this story, which goes on and on and on and on,
except for Chuck's claim that Trump in fact did make
a maya culpa just before the twenty sixteen election. Do
you remember this, Do you remember him making an admission
of guilt or being wrong? Quote he finally acknowledged Obama
was born in the US. It was an important moment
(27:15):
at the end of the campaign. His advisors convinced Trump
he needed to show some humility about something, and the
birther issue was an obvious place to start. Humility. Trump
showing humility, We've hit rock bottom now right now. There
follows fifteen paragraphs on how it is Joe Biden who
(27:38):
has to do a maya culpa because, well, let me
again quote this great glowing Chuck Todd online turd quote.
I'm not convinced Biden is going to do a mea
culpa for his inability to bring the country together or
his inability to turn the page on Trump, even though
I think that was the central premise of his campaign,
(28:00):
at least for the last slice of voters who put
him over the top. So again, Chuck Todd, head of
NBC News Politics, host of Meet the Press and a
guy that both Tim Russert and I once actually thought
had some talent to him. Chuck Todd says, the problem
(28:23):
here is Joe Biden's inability to bring the country together
while Trump is trying to overthrow the democracy and establish
a dictatorship. But of course Chuck saves the article in
the end because he had a clever Twitter hashtag for it,
Kulpa Cabana. I have a hashtag for it as well,
(28:47):
hashtag Chuck Todd is an effing idiot, Chuck. It's Biden's
fault he didn't stop Trump's subversion of democracy and then
forgive him for it. Todd two Days Worst Stupidness Person
and Fridays with Thurber now and as I believe I mentioned,
(29:30):
Thurber stuck mostly too. Besides the cartoons and drawings that
made him famous in one part of the world, his
short stories and other works of fiction that made him
famous in the rest of the world. But every once
in a while he would get really ticked off by
something going on in real life. He would delve into
cultural criticism. He wrote pieces about how bad radio was
(29:53):
in the nineteen forties, particularly as we began to lose more
and more of his vision, and periodically he would have
at other authors, especially if he thought their work was crap.
And in that context I bring to you The Secret
Life of James Thurber by James Thurber. I have only
(30:17):
dipped here and there into Salvador Dhali's The Secret Life
of Salvador Dolli, with paintings by Salvador Dolli and photographs
of Salvador Dolli, because anyone afflicted with what my grandmother's
sister Abigail called the permanent jumps, should do no more
than skidder through such an autobiography, particularly in these melancholy times.
(30:41):
One does not have to skidder far before one comes
upon some vignette which gives the full shape and flavor
of a book. The youthful dreamer of dreams, biting a
sick bat or kissing a dead horse, the slender stripling
going into man's estate with the high hope and fond
(31:02):
desire of one day eating a lot I've but roasted turkey,
and sighing lover covering himself with goat dung and aspic,
that he might give off the true and noble odor
of the ram in My Flying trip through DOLLI I
caught other glimpses of the great man, Salvador adoring a
(31:25):
seed ball fallen from a plane tree, Salvador kicking a
tiny playmate off a bridge, Salvador caressing a crutch, Salvador
breaking the old family doctor's glasses with a leather thonged
mattress beater. There would appear to be only two things
in the world that revolt him, and I don't mean
(31:45):
a long dead hedgehog. He is squeamish about skeletons and grasshoppers.
Oh well, we all have our idiosyncrasies. Senor Dali's memories
have set me to thinking, I find myself muttering as
I shave, and onto as I have swung my crutch
(32:06):
at a little neighbor girl on my way to the
post office. Senor Dolly's book sales for six dollars. My
own published personal history, Harper and Brothers nineteen thirty three,
sold for a dollar seventy five at the time. I
complained briefly about this unusual figure, principally on the ground
that it represented only fifty cents more than the price
(32:28):
asked for a book called The Adventures of Horace. The Hedgehog,
published the same month. The publishers explained that the price
was a closely approximated vertical prefigured on the basis of
profitable sailing, which in turn was arrived at by taking
into consideration the effect on diminishing returns of the horizontal factor.
(32:54):
In those days, all heads of business firms adopted a
guarded kind of double talk, commonly expressed in low muffled tones,
because nobody knew what was going to happen, and nobody
understood what had. Big business had been frightened by a
sequence of economic phenomena which had clearly demonstrated that our
civilization was in greater danger of being turned off than
(33:16):
of gradually crumbling away. The upshot of it all was
that I accepted the price of one dollar and seventy
five cents. In so doing, I accepted the state of
the world as a proper standard by which the price
of books should be fixed. And now, with the world
in ten times as serious a condition as it was
in nineteen thirty three, Dolly's publishers set a price of
(33:36):
six dollars on his life story. This brings me to
the inescapable conclusion that the price fixing principle in the
field of literature is not global but personal trouble, quite
simply as that I told too much about what went
on in the house I lived in, and not enough
about what went on inside myself. Let me be the
(34:00):
first to admit that the naked truth about me is
to the naked truth about Salvador Dolly, as an old
ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree,
and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dolly has
the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and
describes in detail what it was like in the womb.
(34:24):
My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to
a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for
William McKinley. It was a drab and somewhat battered tin
shed set on wheels, and it was filled with guffawing
men and cigar smoke. All in all as far removed
from the paradisiacal placenta of Salvador Dolly's first recollection, as
(34:48):
could well be imagined, A fat jolly man dandled me
on his knee and said that I would soon be
old enough to vote against William Jennings Bryan. I thought
he meant that I could push a folded piece of
paper into the slot of the padlocked box as as
soon as my father was finished. When this turned out
not to be true, I had to be carried out
(35:10):
of the place, kicking and screaming. In my struggles I
knocked my father's derby off several times. The derby was
not a monstrously exciting love object to me, as practically
everything Salvador encountered was to him, and I doubt, if
I had that day to live over again, that I
could bring myself, even in the light of exotic dedication
(35:33):
as I now know it, to conceive an intense and
perverse affection for the derby. It remains obstinately in my
memory as a rather funny hat, a little too large
in the crown, which gave my father the appearance of
a tired, sensitive gentleman who had been persuaded against his
will to take part in a game of charades. We
(35:56):
lived on Champion Avenue at the time, and the voting
booth was on Mound Street. As I set down these names,
I begin to perceive an essential and important difference between
the infant Salvador and the infant me. This difference can
be stated in terms of environment. Salvador was brought up
in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal
(36:18):
el Greco and Servantes. I was brought up in Ohio,
a region steeped in the traditions of Coxey's Army, the
Anti Saloon League, and William Howard Taft. It is only
natural that the weather in little Salvador's soul should have
(36:39):
been stirred by stranger winds and enveloped in more fantastic
mists than the weather in my own soul. But enough
of muling apology for my lackluster early years. Let us
get back to my secret life, such as it was,
stopping just long enough to have another brief look at
Sennor Dolly on our way. Salvador Dolly's mind goes back
(37:04):
to a childhood half imagined and half real, in which
the edges of actuality were sometimes less sharp than the
edges of dream. He seems, somehow to have got the
idea that this sets him off from Harry Spencer, Charlie Doakes, I, Fineberg,
JJ mcnabo, William Faulkner, Herbert Hoover, and me. What Salvey
(37:26):
had that the rest of us kids didn't was the
perfect scenery, characters, and costumes for his desperate little rebellion
against the clean, the conventional, and the comfortable. He put
perfume on his hair, which would have cost him his
life in say Bayonne, New Jersey, or Youngstown, Ohio. He
(37:48):
owned a lizard with two tails. He wore silver buttons
on his shoes, and he knew or imagined he knew
little girls called Galuchka and Dulita. Thus he was born
halfway along the road to paranoia, oft expression of his prayers,
the melting oz of his oblations, the capital to put
(38:10):
it so that you can see what I'm trying to
say of his heart's desire, or so anyway it must
seem to a native of Columbus, Ohio, who has a youngster,
bought his twelve dollars suits at the F and R.
Lazarus Company, had his hair washed out with ivory soap,
owned a bull terrier with only one tail, and played
(38:32):
nicely and a bit diffidently with little girls named Irma
and Betty and Ruby. Another advantage that the young DOLLI
had over me from the standpoint of impetus towards paranoia
lay in the nature of the adults who peopled his
real world. There was in Dolly's hometown of Figeas a
(38:54):
family of artists named Pi, show musicians, painters, and poets,
all of whom adored the ground that the en Font
Terrible walked on. If one of them came upon him,
throwing himself from a high rock, a favorite relaxation of
our hero, or hanging by his feet with his head
immersed in a pail of water, the wild news was
(39:17):
spread about the town that greatness and genius had come
to figet Us. There was a woman who put on
a look of maternal interest when Salvador threw rocks at her.
The mayor of the town fell dead one day at
the boy's feet. A doctor in the community, not the
one he had horse whipped, was seized of a fit
and attempted to beat him up. The contention that the
(39:40):
doctor was out of his senses at the time of
the assault is Dolly's, not mine. The adults around me
when I was in short pants were neither so glamorous
nor so attentive. They consisted mainly of eleven maternal grain ants,
all Methodists, who were staunch believers in physic mustard, plasters
and scripture, and it was part of their dogma that
(40:03):
artistic tendencies should be treated in the same way as
hiccups or hysterics. None of them was an artist, unless
you can count at Lou, who wrote sixteen stress verse
with hit and miss rhymes in celebration of people's birthdays
or on occasion of great national disaster. Never occurred to
(40:23):
me to bite a bat in my aunt's presence, or
to throw stones at them. There was one escape though
my secret world of idiom. Two years ago, my wife
and I, looking for a house to buy, called on
a firm of real estate agents in New Milford. One
of the members of the firm, scrabbling through a metal
(40:46):
box containing many keys, looked up to say, the key
to the Roxbury House isn't here. His partner replied, it's
a common lock. A skeleton will let you in. I
was suddenly, once again five years old, with a wide
eye and open mouth. I pictured the Roxbury House as
(41:08):
I would have pictured it as a small boy, a
house of such dark and nameless horrors as have never
crossed the mind of our little batbier. It was of
sentences like that nonchalantly tossed off by real estate dealers,
great aunts, clergymen, and other such prosaic persons. That the
enchanted private world of my early boyhood was made. In
(41:31):
this world. Businessmen who phoned their wives to say that
they were tied up at the office, sat roped to
their swivel chairs and probably gagged, unable to move or speak,
except somehow miraculously to telephone. Hundreds of thousands of business
(41:51):
men tied to their chairs in hundreds of thousands of
offices in every city of my fantastic cosmos. An especially
fine note about the binding of all the businessmen in
all the cities was that whoever did it, always did
it around five o'clock in the afternoon. Then there was
(42:13):
the man who left town under a cloud. Sometimes I
saw him all wrapped up in the cloud and invisible,
like a cat in a burlap sack. That other times
it floated about the size of a sofa, three or
four feet above his head, following him wherever he went.
One could think about the man under the cloud before
going to sleep. An image of him wandering around from
(42:36):
town to town was as sure soporific. Not so the
mental picture of a certain Missus Houston, who had been
terribly cut up when her daughter died on the operating table.
I could see the doctors too vividly, just before they
set upon Missus Houston with their knives, and I could
hear them, now, Missus Houston, will we get up on
(42:58):
the table like a good girl, or will we have
to be put there? I could usually fight off Missus
Houston before I went to sleep, but she frequently got
into my dreams, and sometimes she still does. I remember
the grotesque creature that came to haunt my meditations when
one evening my father said to my mother, what did
(43:19):
missus Johnson say when you told her about Betty? And
my mother replied, as she was all ears. There were
many other wonderful figures in the secret surrealistic landscapes of
my youth. The old lady was always up in the air,
the husband who did not seem to be able to
(43:40):
put his foot down, the man who lost his head
during a fire but was still able to run out
of the house yelling. The young lady who was in
reality a soiled dove. It was a world that of
necessity one had to keep to oneself and brood over
in silence, because it would fall to pieces at the
touch of words. If you brought it out into the
(44:02):
light of actual day and put it to the test
of questions, your parents would try to laugh the miracles away,
or they would take your temperature and put you to bed.
Since I always ran a temperature, whenever it was taken,
I was put to bed and left there alone with
Missus Houston. Such a world as the world of my
childhood is alas not year proof. It is a ghost that,
(44:28):
to use Henley's words, gleams, flickers, vanishes away. I think
it must have been the time my little cousin Francis
came to visit us, that it began surely and forever
to dissolve. I came into the house one rainy dusk
and ask where Francis was. She is, said, our cook
(44:50):
up in the front room, crying her heart out. The
fact that a person could cry so hard that his
heart would come out of his body as perfectly shaped
and glossy as a red vel it pincushion was news
to me. For some reason, I had never heard the
(45:10):
expression so common in American families, whose hopes and dreams
run so often counter to attainment. I went upstairs and
opened the door of the front room. Francis, who was
three years older than I, jumped off the bed and
ran past me, sobbing, and down the stairs. My search
(45:30):
for her heart took some fifteen minutes. I tore the
bed apart and kicked up the rugs, and even looked
in the bureau drawers. It was no good. I looked
out the window at the rain and the darkening sky.
My cherished mental image of the man under the cloud
began to grow dim and fade away. I discovered that,
(45:55):
all alone in a room, I could face the thought
of missus Houston with cold equanimity. Downstairs, in the living room,
Francis was still crying. I began to laugh. Ah, there, Salvador,
(46:31):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Countdown. Musical directors Brian Ray and John
Phillips Chanel arranged, produced, and performed most of our music.
Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums. Mister Shanelle
handled orchestration and keyboards. It was produced by TKO Bros.
Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and
performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports music
(46:54):
is the Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch
Warren Davis and courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical and
pithy musical comments are by Nancy Faust. The best BA
Ball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today is my friend
Larry David and everything else was my fault. So that's
countdown for this the one hundred and eightieth day until
(47:15):
the twenty twenty four presidential election, and the two hundred
and twenty first day since Dictator Jay Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Use the legal system such as it is, use the
mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens, Use
the not regularly given elector objection option to stop him
(47:38):
from doing it again while we still can. The next
scheduled countdown is Tuesday. Bulletins as the news warrants till then,
I'm Keith Olberman, Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(48:18):
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. I
don't know much about the law, but I do know
(00:25):
the Trump trial has confirmed one of the immutable truths
of the field. Never hire an attorney who has a
rating of three and a half stars. Susan Necklace somehow
managed to lose to Stormy Daniels during the second day
(00:45):
of cross examination in Trump on Trial yesterday. Lose so
badly and lose so obviously that Trump's team was reduced
to filing a desperation mistrial motion off the very thin ice,
basically claiming that Necklace forgot to object to something that
Stormy Daniels had said on Tuesday. All of a sudden,
(01:09):
the Trump defense was claiming and leaking to every news
organization by the way that Daniels had dog whistled a
subtext of rape or assault or something else involuntary when
she gave details about Trump standing in front of her
and not using a condom and a bodyguard being out
in the hallway, and we should just ignore that when
(01:31):
she said all that three days ago, Trump's lawyer with
the three and a half stars rating, Susan Necklace, said nothing,
not even the one thing you or I would remember
to say if we woke up in some alternate universe
where we were in that courtroom as Trump's lawyers, the
(01:52):
one thing we would remember to say, you know, objection,
Mss Necklace, and mister Todd blanche as in blanched visibly
then made it worse, demanding not only a mistrial but
also a revision to the gag order so that Trump
could go out and slander Daniels to the media and
(02:13):
call her horse face again, and lord knows what else,
because at the bottom line, Trump wants to be able
to answer her, but he is too much of a
coward to utilize the method provided for answering her, which
is to testify, which he vowed to do and which
he would now not do if it guaranteed him re
election as president, because the prosecution has nailed him to
(02:35):
the wall on this case. While Miss Necklace may soon
be looking back fondly on those days when her rating
was as high as three and a half stars, Miss Necklace,
you have experience in making up fake stories about sex,
Miss Daniels. The sex is real, That's why it's not
a B movie. Miss Necklace. Now you have a story
(02:57):
about having sex with President Trump, right, Miss Daniels, if
that story was untrue, I would have written it to
be a lot better. Woo, there goes another half star
in her rating, Miss Necklace, you had sex with a cameraman,
Miss Daniels, I started dating him and he became my husband.
(03:21):
And a reminder, none of this needed to be heard
by the jury. If Trump's defense had stipulated, yeah, they
had sex, she would not have been allowed to testify.
Or they could have just asked her what she knew
about Trump's involvement in the non disclosure agreement or in
the payoffs, and she could have said nothing, and Miss
(03:41):
Necklace could have said nothing. Further, you're on her. This
is a case, a relatively boring case with excruciatingly detailed
information about how routine company checks got sent by FedEx
to the White House for Trump to sign in sharpie
even while he was president, and he never ignored a
single detail that cost him more than ninety nine cents.
(04:02):
It's a relatively boring case about falsified business records that
led to the attempt to interfere with an election, and
Trump's legal team has turned it into Laca Waca Waca
and his credibility and their credibility against the credibility of
a pornographic actress and no offense to her profession. But
guess what the pornographic actress won and it's a shutout.
(04:27):
As the defense pushed for a mistrial denied, the prosecution
revealed it had decided to skip Karen McDougall as an
additional witness because it would have only served to embarrass
Trump further, the implication being they don't need her testimony
now and that they left half their questions for Stormy
Daniels in the briefcase because the answers were not necessary
(04:50):
and they would have only embarrassed Trump further. And a
prosecutor actually told the judge she was going to be asked,
did you feel anything different? And she was going to say,
I felt the skin of a sixty year old man,
as a single man who has recently been sixty years
(05:11):
old and has been dating for half a century. If
that had been said about me by a woman during
my trial, I would have been so humiliated that I
would have stood up and pleaded guilty just to get
out of the courtroom as quickly as possible. Then again,
mss necklace and mister blanche as in Blanched visibly got
(05:32):
the really important testimony out of Stormy Daniels, didn't They.
They asked her if Aaron Rodgers, Charles Barkley and Ben
Roethlisberger were also at that golf tournament where she met
Trump all those years ago, and when she said yes,
they then asked her to confirm that Trump was the
most famous celebrity there. And then they asked her to
(05:54):
confirm that Trump did really well at that golf tournament.
In fact, in a field of eighty in that golf tournament,
Trump finished sixty second, a couple of strokes behind Ray Romano,
Bruce McGill, who played d Day in the Animal House movie,
and behind Dan Patrick. Dan Patrick, my Dan Patrick. And
(06:19):
if that had been said about me by a woman
during my trial, I would have been so humiliated. I
would have stood up and pleaded guilty just to get
out of the courtroom as quickly as possible. I move
for a bad legal thingy. By the way, the Washington
(06:43):
Post is reporting that Trump has offered to sell the
planet to the oil industry for one billion dollars give
him a bribe of one billion, not legally a bribe
call it campaign fund donations. And the earth is literally yours.
For just one billion dollars, you oil executives, you get
(07:08):
to kill all the future generations you want. You Chevron, you, Exxon,
you Occidental, you the other twenty guys. You give me
the billion dollars. And that Biden freeze on permits for
new LNG liquefied natural gas exports, it goes away. You'll
get the LNG thing immediately. Trump quote, you'll get it
(07:32):
on the first day. You want to drill in Alaska
and the Arctic Wilderness. You've been waiting on a permit
for five years. One of those whose bribe was solicited
quotes Trump is saying, you'll get it on day one,
unquote for just one billion dollars. Gulf of Mexico. You
want to drill there, The auctions start day one. The price?
(07:54):
Did I mention? It's one billion dollars. Those Biden tail
pipe rules, the ones designed to make evs and hybrid's
two thirds of all cars, So by eight years from
now the thing Trump claims he was referring to when
he threatened a blood bath if Biden is reelected. Trump
called those rules ridiculous, offered to ban them. If see
(08:16):
if you can guess if those oil executives sitting with
him at the fundraiser at Mari Lago last month simply
gave him one billion dollars. You want your own state, guys.
You want a place like say North Dakota, to just
be trilleying and pipelines in rare earth extraction, and the
(08:37):
governor Doug Bergham, the guy with the eyebrows, to become
vice president or energy secretary, or hell, let's really do this,
let's make him head of Environmental Protection one billion dollars.
You want the official position of the United States to
be that climate change is a hoax and climate disaster
is an impossibility, and that anybody who says the combustion
(08:58):
engine threatens the continuation of our species is just crazy.
That'll be one billion dollars. In the reality of the
horizon immediately in front of us, dozens of tornado funnels growing,
speeding up, moving towards us, ready to lay waste to
(09:19):
everything we know about our lives and our freedom and
our democracy, the form of government Donald Trump has decided
must die so he can live with that in front
of us. We sometimes forget that behind that ominous, dark,
fatal view is another series of tornado funnels, not dozens,
(09:42):
but thousands, and not figures of speeches that would follow
once Trump has again seized power and destroyed what we
have discovered all too late are the far too few
safeguards and protections. And the difference is those are actual tornadoes.
Because what Trump would do for the two dozen or
so oil robber barons to whom Trump lent last month
(10:05):
at marri Lago, offered to sell the world for a
billion dollars, would end any remaining chance we have of
staving off or just reducing the coming climate disaster. These
decisions have to be made in the next five years,
and so for his billion dollars, you can be certain
(10:29):
that you, or your children, or your grandchildren, or in
a best case scenario, your great grandchildren, they will die
in one of those tornadoes, or that they will die
in a wildfire for which there is not enough water
to put it out, or that they will die in
the water after the hours of rain and the days
(10:51):
of rain, and the weeks of rain that does not stop.
Because what the billion dollars Trump wants comes for in
exchange for the fossil fuel companies to keep on destroying
the only atmosphere we have and the only ecosystem we have,
while they all maintain the arrogance and certainty and insanity
of the rich people on the Titanic. While other people
(11:12):
might die, but we won't. We are in first class.
We forget sometimes that part of the Trump will destroy
democracy deal is Trump will also destroy the planet your
cost one billion dollars. The Post report is spare and
(11:36):
non hysterical, and rather boringly written, and that makes it
all the worse. By the calculations the paper quotes from
the group Climate Power, those oil executives have donated heavily
to Trump already, but heavily turns out to mean only
about six million, four hundred thousand dollars over the first
quarter of this year. For the full apocalypse, Trump wants
(12:00):
just a little bit more, just another nine hundred ninety
three million, as he sees it, nine hundred and ninety
three million to end the campaign, as anybody who has
looked out a window in the last decade sees it. Knows,
(12:20):
to borrow a recent popular phrase, we all know intuitively
that money is in fact to end the world, and
thus the most chilling words in the post story about
the billions standing between US and climate armageddon are at
the end. Quote oil billionaire Harold Ham and others are
(12:42):
scheduling a fundraiser for Trump later this year, advisers said,
where they expect large checks to flow to his bid
to return to office. The money flows now, our blood
will flow later. Okay, come on down, get off the bridge,
(13:09):
off the ledge. Remember that while they have the power
to destroy the world immediately or in a literal slow burn,
these people are incredibly stupid and Trump has in fact
made them even more net stupid by now introducing complete
(13:30):
nepotism into this. And trust me, the smart members of
the Trump family, they have already been in the picture.
He is now at the bottom of the barrel. The
Florida Republican Committee has named as its chair of its
delegation to the Republican Convention, Eric Trump, the guy who
(13:52):
proved what your mother said to you so very long ago.
Stop making that face. One day your face will freeze
like that. Eric Trump. Gee will be the one who
will place his father's name in for nomination if he
(14:14):
remembers it. And that's numb nay shun. Eric. The Convention
starts in Milwaukee August nineteenth. You can count on your
fingers and toes how many days from now that is,
and you can spend them practicing those big words numb
nay shun. The Florida GOP has also named Trump's daughter
(14:37):
Tiffany and her husband, Mister Tiffany, as delegates at large
and also as a delegate at large Baron Trump. So
that gentleman's agreement, the one both sides, surprisingly enough pretty
much stuck to all this time that Baron was off
limits because he was just a high school kid. That's
(14:59):
over now. So is Baron's de facto status as being
on sestionably the smartest Trump ever because he had never
been in politics and he had never said a word
in public. Why do this well, Trump has tipped his
hand now. Like all would be dictators, he cannot really
(15:20):
conceive of anybody succeeding him. But at some level he
understands that even if his wildest schemes come true, he
will die someday and you'll have to hand the family
government over to somebody else, and it ain't gonna be
Jared Kushner. Whether he fully perceives it or not. This
(15:40):
is Trump's own attempt at setting up an American monarchy.
Of course, the problem is none of them seem to
have even Trump's cornered animal instincts for effectively vile behavior
and utter lack of conscience and guilt. They are also
each of them imbeciles. No matter what happens. Now that
(16:03):
he's on the public stage, I think Baron Trump remains
the smartest Trump ever because the competition is Junior and
Eric and Tiffany, and Junior's all artificial ingredients, fiance platform
Committee member Kim Gilfoyle, and dumbest of them all, the
(16:24):
one the only Republican National Committee co chair Eric's wife Lara,
and Lara makes Kim gilfoyl seem like Nancy Pelosi.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Next question, can you have President Trump go to a
grocery store and buy a cart of groceries and or
pump gas at a gas station and show how expensive
it is and how Bidenomics is a joke? I think
that would be so effective. Love this idea, Love that idea.
I'm going to pass it along. We'll see what we
can do on that.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
You want to give the world video of Trump at
a gas station with gas pumps, holding a gas handle
pumping gas, You, Lara Trump, want to connect your father
(17:21):
in law Trump with gas after the farting stories from
the trial, Trump and more gas. Once again, I note
that democracy survives not because of our efforts, but because
of the stupidity of those who seek to destroy it.
(17:43):
And also, once again I asked the same question about
yet another somebody close to the unoiled Trump decision making machine.
Is Lara Trump a democratic plant? And if not, what
kind of plant is she? Also of interest? Here? Good
(18:06):
news everyone. Our American political systemic crisis, the collapse of
our form of democracy, the perversion of the two party system,
because one party has stopped believing in voting and elections
and human rights and the constitution and reality. We have
a solution. The solution has come from the one man
(18:31):
to whom we have always turned in times of political crisis,
the one man who knows the way out, Chuck Todd.
Chuck Todd has saved America. Chuck Todd has a plan
and it starts with just a tiny little ask. All
(18:56):
Chuck wants is for Trump to publicly admit his mistakes.
And Chuck has even come up with a hashtag for this,
a hashtag to save democracy and Chuck Todd's hashtag is
(19:18):
Kalpa capana. Oh, for Christ's sake, that's next. This is countdown.
This is Countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead of us
(19:52):
on this edition of Countdown Fridays with Thurber, and it's
Thurber at his snarkiest. No nostalgic tales of the dogs
of the nineteenth century this week, No disturbing stories about
a man who wants to hide in a box. Here
he just goes after Salvador Dali and the pretense of
the artiste in the Secret Life of James Thurber. Next,
(20:17):
but first, as ever, there are still new idiots to
talk about. The daily roundup of the mis grants, morons
and dunning Krueger effect specimens who constitute today's worst persons
in the world. That's my Salvador Deli popping his never
mind the bronze worser Mark Levin, who for more than
(20:38):
a decade now has been like the fourteenth string fascist
on Fox quote news unquote. I believe the technical term
for him is dyspeptic. It is clear he has never
liked anything in his life, which I guess is fair
because it doesn't look like anybody or anything has ever
liked him. Levin's latest target is Justice Juan Mrshan. Levin
(20:59):
has a law degree, but his legal career appears to
have climax during his tenure as deputy the Assistant Secretary
for Elementary and Secondary Education in the US Department of Education. Anyway,
he's been reading the transcripts of the Trump trial and
going on the air and saying he knows Merschaun was
protecting Stormy Daniels, and he knows why, quoting Levin, although
(21:24):
I really can't do his deviated septum voice correctly, Wan
Khan John, because you can't understand the words, then Wan Khana,
don riansurpri watch how the judge tries to protect her
in what is the porno case of the century. Because
the judge appears to be really into this, listening attentively
to all the details. We used to call that a pervert.
(21:47):
Mark Levin says, I can't accuse the judge of being
a pervert. I don't know him, but I do wonder
if he's a pervert. Can I say, I wonder if
the judge is a pervert? Mister producer, how do I
know whether he's a pervert or not? Unquote. I don't know, Mark,
but if Mrson's about Stormy Daniels, what does that make Trump?
(22:08):
By the way, Levin hoaring himself out to Trump like this,
you know what that's gotten him. Trump always refers to
him and always calls him Levin. His name is Levin, Macklebin.
Levin is such a supplicant to dementia. J. Trump. I'm
surprised he hasn't changed his name to Levin just to
please the Master, the runner up worser, speaking of which
(22:31):
Andrew Giuliani. Now, to be fair, I've had it in
for this little toad ever since he used to get
in the way at Yankee Stadium when he was a kid.
The night of the Roger Clemens Mike Piazza bat incident
in the two thousand World Series, my live interview with
Clemens during the game broadcast on Fox was held up
for like four minutes because Andrew Giuliani had to use
(22:54):
the toilet in the Yankee Clubhouse, and Daddy had the
cops block the tunnel from there to the field so
Clemens could not get back to our camera. Now today
I hate Andrew Guliani because he's actually turned out to
be dumber than daddy. He is quote covering unquote the
Trump trial live on Twitter x and I can't get
(23:15):
audience totals, but his live report yesterday morning got like
one hundred and twenty five likes, so I don't think
he's got that many viewers, especially since he started that
Thursday morning report with the camera positioned wrong and showing
him only from his sport coat buttons at the bottom
up to his nose. Or maybe that wasn't a mistake,
maybe that's the plan. Okay, good thinking, Andrew. Anyway, he
(23:38):
also put out about one hundred tweets yesterday, including one
at four h nine pm which got him on this list.
Quote the DA's office walks slowly back into the room.
They look nearly as defeated as Lawrence O'Donnell, who is
saying in the second to the last row on the right, Ah,
(23:58):
thanks a lot, little handy. I got you who I loathe,
blasting od who I lose? Now I gotta choose, but
our winner, the worst and somebody we can all agree
on Chuck Todd. Yeah, I know you thought he'd left
(24:20):
the universe after he got fired from Meet the Press,
only to be replaced by somebody worse in Kristen allegedly Welker,
But no, Chuck is still there, still at NBC News,
still writing stuff, apparently still playing out his contract or something,
and most importantly, still showing that he has not the
(24:40):
vaguest idea what on earth has happened in this country
in the last decade? It is still for him in
nineteen eighty seven or something. Headline, Chuck Todd the missing
ingredient to win the twenty twenty four election. Ameya Kulpa analysis.
Voters don't have to imagine a Biden or Trump presidency,
but they might like to hear admissions of mistakes and
(25:03):
ideas about how a second term would be different. By
the way the headline there, that's the highlight. After twelve
paragraphs of introduction, Chuck finally gets to his point, which
is such a dumb point that would have been rejected
by a sixth grade debate class. Quote. There's a final
chunk of voters who I think are looking for one
(25:25):
or both of the candidates to do something else, admit
some failure in their tenures, and express regret for decisions
they did or didn't make. Ultimately, voters want to know
the candidates they support are actually listening and responding to
their concerns, even if those concerns change. Yes, Chuck, the
voters are expecting Trump to say he screwed up Trump,
(25:51):
who told Frank Luntz once that he had never asked
God for forgiveness because I think if I do something wrong,
I think I just try and make it right. I
don't bring God into that picture. I don't. It comes
to a major failure for both candidates. Chuck writes, there's
one obvious place to start, their inability to bring the
(26:12):
country together. I believe it's that fact that has kept
either gentlemen from taking anything more than a margin of
error lead in the polls. Yes, Biden's inability to bring
the country together while Trump is trying to get Biden
killed is entirely Biden's fault. Then there's one paragraph in
(26:32):
which Chuck writes, Donald Trump and Maya Culpas aren't something
that go together, like peanut butter and jelly. Peanut butter
and tuna fish. Maybe I bet Chuck spend a week
on that one, peanut butter and tuna fish. I finally
got it, Hey, peanut butter and tunafish. We can print
it now. That's the last we hear about Trump in
(26:53):
this story, which goes on and on and on and on,
except for Chuck's claim that Trump in fact did make
a maya culpa just before the twenty sixteen election. Do
you remember this, Do you remember him making an admission
of guilt or being wrong? Quote he finally acknowledged Obama
was born in the US. It was an important moment
(27:15):
at the end of the campaign. His advisors convinced Trump
he needed to show some humility about something, and the
birther issue was an obvious place to start. Humility. Trump
showing humility, We've hit rock bottom now right now. There
follows fifteen paragraphs on how it is Joe Biden who
(27:38):
has to do a maya culpa because, well, let me
again quote this great glowing Chuck Todd online turd quote.
I'm not convinced Biden is going to do a mea
culpa for his inability to bring the country together or
his inability to turn the page on Trump, even though
I think that was the central premise of his campaign,
(28:00):
at least for the last slice of voters who put
him over the top. So again, Chuck Todd, head of
NBC News Politics, host of Meet the Press and a
guy that both Tim Russert and I once actually thought
had some talent to him. Chuck Todd says, the problem
(28:23):
here is Joe Biden's inability to bring the country together
while Trump is trying to overthrow the democracy and establish
a dictatorship. But of course Chuck saves the article in
the end because he had a clever Twitter hashtag for it,
Kulpa Cabana. I have a hashtag for it as well,
(28:47):
hashtag Chuck Todd is an effing idiot, Chuck. It's Biden's
fault he didn't stop Trump's subversion of democracy and then
forgive him for it. Todd two Days Worst Stupidness Person
and Fridays with Thurber now and as I believe I mentioned,
(29:30):
Thurber stuck mostly too. Besides the cartoons and drawings that
made him famous in one part of the world, his
short stories and other works of fiction that made him
famous in the rest of the world. But every once
in a while he would get really ticked off by
something going on in real life. He would delve into
cultural criticism. He wrote pieces about how bad radio was
(29:53):
in the nineteen forties, particularly as we began to lose more
and more of his vision, and periodically he would have
at other authors, especially if he thought their work was crap.
And in that context I bring to you The Secret
Life of James Thurber by James Thurber. I have only
(30:17):
dipped here and there into Salvador Dhali's The Secret Life
of Salvador Dolli, with paintings by Salvador Dolli and photographs
of Salvador Dolli, because anyone afflicted with what my grandmother's
sister Abigail called the permanent jumps, should do no more
than skidder through such an autobiography, particularly in these melancholy times.
(30:41):
One does not have to skidder far before one comes
upon some vignette which gives the full shape and flavor
of a book. The youthful dreamer of dreams, biting a
sick bat or kissing a dead horse, the slender stripling
going into man's estate with the high hope and fond
(31:02):
desire of one day eating a lot I've but roasted turkey,
and sighing lover covering himself with goat dung and aspic,
that he might give off the true and noble odor
of the ram in My Flying trip through DOLLI I
caught other glimpses of the great man, Salvador adoring a
(31:25):
seed ball fallen from a plane tree, Salvador kicking a
tiny playmate off a bridge, Salvador caressing a crutch, Salvador
breaking the old family doctor's glasses with a leather thonged
mattress beater. There would appear to be only two things
in the world that revolt him, and I don't mean
(31:45):
a long dead hedgehog. He is squeamish about skeletons and grasshoppers.
Oh well, we all have our idiosyncrasies. Senor Dali's memories
have set me to thinking, I find myself muttering as
I shave, and onto as I have swung my crutch
(32:06):
at a little neighbor girl on my way to the
post office. Senor Dolly's book sales for six dollars. My
own published personal history, Harper and Brothers nineteen thirty three,
sold for a dollar seventy five at the time. I
complained briefly about this unusual figure, principally on the ground
that it represented only fifty cents more than the price
(32:28):
asked for a book called The Adventures of Horace. The Hedgehog,
published the same month. The publishers explained that the price
was a closely approximated vertical prefigured on the basis of
profitable sailing, which in turn was arrived at by taking
into consideration the effect on diminishing returns of the horizontal factor.
(32:54):
In those days, all heads of business firms adopted a
guarded kind of double talk, commonly expressed in low muffled tones,
because nobody knew what was going to happen, and nobody
understood what had. Big business had been frightened by a
sequence of economic phenomena which had clearly demonstrated that our
civilization was in greater danger of being turned off than
(33:16):
of gradually crumbling away. The upshot of it all was
that I accepted the price of one dollar and seventy
five cents. In so doing, I accepted the state of
the world as a proper standard by which the price
of books should be fixed. And now, with the world
in ten times as serious a condition as it was
in nineteen thirty three, Dolly's publishers set a price of
(33:36):
six dollars on his life story. This brings me to
the inescapable conclusion that the price fixing principle in the
field of literature is not global but personal trouble, quite
simply as that I told too much about what went
on in the house I lived in, and not enough
about what went on inside myself. Let me be the
(34:00):
first to admit that the naked truth about me is
to the naked truth about Salvador Dolly, as an old
ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree,
and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dolly has
the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and
describes in detail what it was like in the womb.
(34:24):
My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to
a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for
William McKinley. It was a drab and somewhat battered tin
shed set on wheels, and it was filled with guffawing
men and cigar smoke. All in all as far removed
from the paradisiacal placenta of Salvador Dolly's first recollection, as
(34:48):
could well be imagined, A fat jolly man dandled me
on his knee and said that I would soon be
old enough to vote against William Jennings Bryan. I thought
he meant that I could push a folded piece of
paper into the slot of the padlocked box as as
soon as my father was finished. When this turned out
not to be true, I had to be carried out
(35:10):
of the place, kicking and screaming. In my struggles I
knocked my father's derby off several times. The derby was
not a monstrously exciting love object to me, as practically
everything Salvador encountered was to him, and I doubt, if
I had that day to live over again, that I
could bring myself, even in the light of exotic dedication
(35:33):
as I now know it, to conceive an intense and
perverse affection for the derby. It remains obstinately in my
memory as a rather funny hat, a little too large
in the crown, which gave my father the appearance of
a tired, sensitive gentleman who had been persuaded against his
will to take part in a game of charades. We
(35:56):
lived on Champion Avenue at the time, and the voting
booth was on Mound Street. As I set down these names,
I begin to perceive an essential and important difference between
the infant Salvador and the infant me. This difference can
be stated in terms of environment. Salvador was brought up
in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal
(36:18):
el Greco and Servantes. I was brought up in Ohio,
a region steeped in the traditions of Coxey's Army, the
Anti Saloon League, and William Howard Taft. It is only
natural that the weather in little Salvador's soul should have
(36:39):
been stirred by stranger winds and enveloped in more fantastic
mists than the weather in my own soul. But enough
of muling apology for my lackluster early years. Let us
get back to my secret life, such as it was,
stopping just long enough to have another brief look at
Sennor Dolly on our way. Salvador Dolly's mind goes back
(37:04):
to a childhood half imagined and half real, in which
the edges of actuality were sometimes less sharp than the
edges of dream. He seems, somehow to have got the
idea that this sets him off from Harry Spencer, Charlie Doakes, I, Fineberg,
JJ mcnabo, William Faulkner, Herbert Hoover, and me. What Salvey
(37:26):
had that the rest of us kids didn't was the
perfect scenery, characters, and costumes for his desperate little rebellion
against the clean, the conventional, and the comfortable. He put
perfume on his hair, which would have cost him his
life in say Bayonne, New Jersey, or Youngstown, Ohio. He
(37:48):
owned a lizard with two tails. He wore silver buttons
on his shoes, and he knew or imagined he knew
little girls called Galuchka and Dulita. Thus he was born
halfway along the road to paranoia, oft expression of his prayers,
the melting oz of his oblations, the capital to put
(38:10):
it so that you can see what I'm trying to
say of his heart's desire, or so anyway it must
seem to a native of Columbus, Ohio, who has a youngster,
bought his twelve dollars suits at the F and R.
Lazarus Company, had his hair washed out with ivory soap,
owned a bull terrier with only one tail, and played
(38:32):
nicely and a bit diffidently with little girls named Irma
and Betty and Ruby. Another advantage that the young DOLLI
had over me from the standpoint of impetus towards paranoia
lay in the nature of the adults who peopled his
real world. There was in Dolly's hometown of Figeas a
(38:54):
family of artists named Pi, show musicians, painters, and poets,
all of whom adored the ground that the en Font
Terrible walked on. If one of them came upon him,
throwing himself from a high rock, a favorite relaxation of
our hero, or hanging by his feet with his head
immersed in a pail of water, the wild news was
(39:17):
spread about the town that greatness and genius had come
to figet Us. There was a woman who put on
a look of maternal interest when Salvador threw rocks at her.
The mayor of the town fell dead one day at
the boy's feet. A doctor in the community, not the
one he had horse whipped, was seized of a fit
and attempted to beat him up. The contention that the
(39:40):
doctor was out of his senses at the time of
the assault is Dolly's, not mine. The adults around me
when I was in short pants were neither so glamorous
nor so attentive. They consisted mainly of eleven maternal grain ants,
all Methodists, who were staunch believers in physic mustard, plasters
and scripture, and it was part of their dogma that
(40:03):
artistic tendencies should be treated in the same way as
hiccups or hysterics. None of them was an artist, unless
you can count at Lou, who wrote sixteen stress verse
with hit and miss rhymes in celebration of people's birthdays
or on occasion of great national disaster. Never occurred to
(40:23):
me to bite a bat in my aunt's presence, or
to throw stones at them. There was one escape though
my secret world of idiom. Two years ago, my wife
and I, looking for a house to buy, called on
a firm of real estate agents in New Milford. One
of the members of the firm, scrabbling through a metal
(40:46):
box containing many keys, looked up to say, the key
to the Roxbury House isn't here. His partner replied, it's
a common lock. A skeleton will let you in. I
was suddenly, once again five years old, with a wide
eye and open mouth. I pictured the Roxbury House as
(41:08):
I would have pictured it as a small boy, a
house of such dark and nameless horrors as have never
crossed the mind of our little batbier. It was of
sentences like that nonchalantly tossed off by real estate dealers,
great aunts, clergymen, and other such prosaic persons. That the
enchanted private world of my early boyhood was made. In
(41:31):
this world. Businessmen who phoned their wives to say that
they were tied up at the office, sat roped to
their swivel chairs and probably gagged, unable to move or speak,
except somehow miraculously to telephone. Hundreds of thousands of business
(41:51):
men tied to their chairs in hundreds of thousands of
offices in every city of my fantastic cosmos. An especially
fine note about the binding of all the businessmen in
all the cities was that whoever did it, always did
it around five o'clock in the afternoon. Then there was
(42:13):
the man who left town under a cloud. Sometimes I
saw him all wrapped up in the cloud and invisible,
like a cat in a burlap sack. That other times
it floated about the size of a sofa, three or
four feet above his head, following him wherever he went.
One could think about the man under the cloud before
going to sleep. An image of him wandering around from
(42:36):
town to town was as sure soporific. Not so the
mental picture of a certain Missus Houston, who had been
terribly cut up when her daughter died on the operating table.
I could see the doctors too vividly, just before they
set upon Missus Houston with their knives, and I could
hear them, now, Missus Houston, will we get up on
(42:58):
the table like a good girl, or will we have
to be put there? I could usually fight off Missus
Houston before I went to sleep, but she frequently got
into my dreams, and sometimes she still does. I remember
the grotesque creature that came to haunt my meditations when
one evening my father said to my mother, what did
(43:19):
missus Johnson say when you told her about Betty? And
my mother replied, as she was all ears. There were
many other wonderful figures in the secret surrealistic landscapes of
my youth. The old lady was always up in the air,
the husband who did not seem to be able to
(43:40):
put his foot down, the man who lost his head
during a fire but was still able to run out
of the house yelling. The young lady who was in
reality a soiled dove. It was a world that of
necessity one had to keep to oneself and brood over
in silence, because it would fall to pieces at the
touch of words. If you brought it out into the
(44:02):
light of actual day and put it to the test
of questions, your parents would try to laugh the miracles away,
or they would take your temperature and put you to bed.
Since I always ran a temperature, whenever it was taken,
I was put to bed and left there alone with
Missus Houston. Such a world as the world of my
childhood is alas not year proof. It is a ghost that,
(44:28):
to use Henley's words, gleams, flickers, vanishes away. I think
it must have been the time my little cousin Francis
came to visit us, that it began surely and forever
to dissolve. I came into the house one rainy dusk
and ask where Francis was. She is, said, our cook
(44:50):
up in the front room, crying her heart out. The
fact that a person could cry so hard that his
heart would come out of his body as perfectly shaped
and glossy as a red vel it pincushion was news
to me. For some reason, I had never heard the
(45:10):
expression so common in American families, whose hopes and dreams
run so often counter to attainment. I went upstairs and
opened the door of the front room. Francis, who was
three years older than I, jumped off the bed and
ran past me, sobbing, and down the stairs. My search
(45:30):
for her heart took some fifteen minutes. I tore the
bed apart and kicked up the rugs, and even looked
in the bureau drawers. It was no good. I looked
out the window at the rain and the darkening sky.
My cherished mental image of the man under the cloud
began to grow dim and fade away. I discovered that,
(45:55):
all alone in a room, I could face the thought
of missus Houston with cold equanimity. Downstairs, in the living room,
Francis was still crying. I began to laugh. Ah, there, Salvador,
(46:31):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Countdown. Musical directors Brian Ray and John
Phillips Chanel arranged, produced, and performed most of our music.
Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums. Mister Shanelle
handled orchestration and keyboards. It was produced by TKO Bros.
Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and
performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports music
(46:54):
is the Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch
Warren Davis and courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical and
pithy musical comments are by Nancy Faust. The best BA
Ball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today is my friend
Larry David and everything else was my fault. So that's
countdown for this the one hundred and eightieth day until
(47:15):
the twenty twenty four presidential election, and the two hundred
and twenty first day since Dictator Jay Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Use the legal system such as it is, use the
mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens, Use
the not regularly given elector objection option to stop him
(47:38):
from doing it again while we still can. The next
scheduled countdown is Tuesday. Bulletins as the news warrants till then,
I'm Keith Olberman, Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(48:18):
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