October 1, 2024 • 51 mins
SERIES 3 EPISODE 39: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:48) SPECIAL COMMENT: CBS must either agree to fact-check the Vice Presidential candidates in tonight's debate, or cancel it. Its entire history and reputation is at stake and so is much of the chance of saving the democracy, even for the amoral cowards like CBS ownership.
But of course CBS won't cancel the debate: they've already spent more than $100 on it.
So, to Plan B: Tim Walz must politely acknowledge the first question, ignore it, and take the debate over. Immediately tell the television audience that J.D. Vance is a compulsive and pathological liar. Tell them that he is Trump’s deputy liar. Tell them as forcefully and as non-Midwesternly as possible, that this man is personally and indelibly responsible for death threats against white, Republican, small businessmen in Springfield Ohio because it is he, J.D. Vance, who personally and completely fabricated the Haitian immigrant story.
Tell them about Jamie McGregor of McGregor Metal, Trump voter. Tell them that all Jamie McGregor did was say that his thirty Haitian-born employees “come to work every day, they don’t cause drama, they’re on time” and within hours the death threats started. Tell them that Jamie McGregor got so many death threats that they had to have a lockdown at his factory. Tell them that there are MAGA posters around town calling him, a MAGA guy, a traitor. Tell them that Jamie McGregor had vowed to never have guns in his house and now the family is taking firearms training and he just bought a Glock and it’s for his daughter - his 14-YEAR OLD daughter.
Tell them, Tim, that MAGA isn’t just a threat to immigrants or people of color or Democrats. Tell them, that MAGA is a threat to the people IN MAGA because MAGA isn’t about making ANYTHING great – it’s about hatred and violence and cruelty. Tell them that Jamie McGregor’s wife said “we’re being hunted like animals.” TELL THEM that the latest person to be threatened with death is Jamie McGregor’s 80-year old mother.
And TELL THEM that this is all – all of it – the fault of, the personal responsibility of, the creation of, the goal of, this scumbag J.D. Vance. Point at him and tell him to get down on his knees and pray to his creator for forgiveness because he isn’t getting any from Jamie McGregor or America. Put him on the floor in a pool of his own urine, and then metaphorically… gut him like a fish.
B-Block (24:22) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Hey, Derrick Anderson, Republican nominee for Congress from the Virginia 7th, In your campaign photos! Great looking wife and kids! Whose are they? Annie Linskey, the same reporter who mocked Biden going to the family graveyard, now creates a new fascist talking point by falsely accusing Biden of being "testy" with a fool reporter Biden didn't suffer gladly. And it's the anniversary of the most patriotic idea John Roberts ever had and the one he never acted on.
C-Block (37:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Hours before the death of Pete Rose, Baseball had one of its greatest meaningful games in history yesterday. 3-0 Braves in the 8th, ends 8-7 Mets and they go to the playoffs where they only need to win...eleven more games to win the World Series? We are destroying a sport to create a 90-second highlight package. It flashed me back to when the long season sent teams almost directly to the ultimate sporting event: the Mets and the 1969 World Series.
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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. Cancel
the Vice presidential debate tonight. CBS News should cancel it,
(00:28):
or Tim Walls should cancel it, or the Harris campaign
should cancel it because journalistic principles have been so thoroughly
removed from it that it is going to amount to
nothing more than an ad for Trump and Vance and
fascism and lying. To Wendy McMahon, the new president of
CBS News, I urge you, before it is too late,
(00:51):
fact check jd Vance or get your company out of
the news business, because if you let this proceed as planned,
you will burn the reputation of CBS News to the ground.
Murrow gone, Cronkite gone see it now devotes its entire
(01:11):
half hour to a report on Senator McCarthy gone the
news apparently official gone Nixon to rather, are you running
for something, no, sir, mister President, or you gone? Don Hollenbeck,
gone Heywood fing hail brun gone ashes. You are putting
(01:32):
on a professional liar in order to let him lie
to America for ninety minutes in primetime. This is the
exact opposite of news. You are now actively contributing to
the gaslighting of this country and its potential destruction. This time,
(01:59):
CBS News is siding with the McCarthy in the equation.
This time you are lying alongside Nixon. This time you
are selling out the truth for the sake of the
revenue from two four minute commercial breaks. And if in
(02:24):
your negotiations with the Trump campaign to get Advance to attend,
if they included either an offer from you to exclude
fact checking or the acceptance of their demand to exclude
fact checking, you have gone further into the morass. Still.
You have deliberately frauded the American public for ratings, and
(02:44):
you have prostituted yourselves. Find somebody in the building with
a moral or journalistic compass and put them in charge
of CBS News. Right now, because guess who is going
to quote fact check unquote your CBS News Vice president
(03:04):
cidential debate on this the last day of CBS News quote.
I will be doing the personal play by play of
the debate between the brilliant jd Vance and the highly
inarticulate tampon Tim Walls. I hope that cognitively challenged lion
(03:27):
Kamala Harris will be listening so that she can again
show the world how she will make up false facts
and stories in order to change around an administrative failure. Unquote,
that is the side you are on, CBS. That is
(03:47):
the side Desmond Tutuo ment when he wrote, if you
are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the
side of the oppressor. CBS News will, of course, not
cancel the debate. Its masters, President McMahon included, will not
(04:09):
tell Vance that the rules have changed. He can accept
live fact checking or it's off. I've worked for CBS News.
The retrenchment in news spending in television began with them
in nineteen eighty six. Now, if they have already spent
one hundred dollars, they're not writing that off. That's serious money.
(04:29):
They're not canceling nothing. Besides, they have doubled down on
their secret weapon of truth here and in so doing,
hung this poor chief of the CBS News confirmed unit
Claudia Milne out to dry. We quote will provide fact
checking and analysis on our live blog during the debate.
(04:55):
As pathetic as that sounds, honest to god, I'm surprised
Trump and Vance are still letting them do that. No,
CBS is not going to cancel the debate. It will
be neutral in this situation of injustice, and it has
chosen the oppressor. So plan b Tim Walls. Tim Walls,
(05:18):
I need you to take the debate over. Forgive me Nora.
I'll always love you, politely and metaphorically. Governor you have
to push Nora and Margaret Brennan out of the way
and take the debate over. Acknowledge Norah's first question, and
(05:39):
then let it rip. Tell the television audience that JD.
Vance is a compulsive and pathological liar. Tell them that
there is no side of any debate or issue that
he has not already taken, then rejected, then taken again.
Tell them that he is Trump's deputy liar. Tell them,
and tell them as forcefully and as non midwesternly as possible,
(06:02):
that this man, this individual over here, is personally and
indelibly responsible for death threats against white Republican small businessmen
in Springfield, Ohio, because it is he JD Vance who
personally and completely fabricated the Haitian immigrant story. And then
(06:25):
Governor Walls tell that audience about Jamie McGregor of McGregor Metal.
Tell them about this Trump supporter, this man who voted
for Trump in twenty sixteen, this man who again voted
for Trump in twenty twenty. Tell them about the tractor
parts that Jamie McGregor makes in Springfield, Ohio. Tell them
(06:46):
that all Jamie McGregor did was say that his thirty
odd Haitian born employees come to work every day, they
don't cause drama, they're on time, and within hours the
death threats against Jamie McGregor began. Tell them that Jamie
McGregor got so many death threats that they had to
have a lockdown a factory. Tell them that there are
Maga posters around town calling him a Maga guy, a traitor.
(07:13):
Tell them that Jamie McGregor had vowed to never have
guns in his own home, and now his family is
taking firearms training and he just bought a glock and
it's for his daughter. Tell them Governor that Jamie McGregor's
daughter is fourteen fing years old. Tell them tim Tell
(07:35):
them that Maga isn't just a threat to immigrants or
a threat to people of color, or a threat to Democrats.
Tell them that Maga is a threat to the people
in Maga because Trump and Maga. It's not about making
anything great, it's about hatred and violence and cruelty. Tell
(07:57):
them that Jamie McGregor's wife said, we are being hunted
like animals. Tell them that the latest person to be
threatened in Springfield, Ohio with death is Jamie McGregor's eighty
year old mother. And tell them that this is all,
(08:17):
all of it, the fault of the personal responsibility, of
the creation, of the goal of the point of this
scum bag j. D. Vance. Point at him and tell
him to get down on his goddamn knees and to
start praying to his creator for forgiveness because he's not
going to get any from Jamie McGregor or from America Governor.
(08:47):
CBS News said, it is your job to fact check
this lying son of a bitch. They just provide the
Mike's and the coffee. Do it. Start the debate by
doing it. Put Vance on the floor in a pool
(09:07):
of his own urine, and then then you can do
a little Midwestern not him. Then you can metaphorically gut
him like.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
A fish like a fish, or we could do the
(09:50):
fact checking thing, but no, CBS, you know what you're
doing because when you don't fact check Vance's lies and
for that matter.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
When you don't fact check anything Governor Walls gets wrong,
what you'll get from Trump will be silence, blessed silence,
no complaints for a day, or a week, or a month,
there may be a year, and then someday, sooner or late,
he will forget about that, and he will circle back
to you at CBS and you will get the Google
treatment from last week. Well, instead of where it said Google,
(10:20):
it'll say CBS News, where he announces. It has been
determined that CBS News has illegally used a system of
only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump,
some made up for this purpose, while at the same
time only revealing good stories about whoever he doesn't like
that day. This is an illegal activity and the Justice
(10:43):
Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant interference of elections.
If not, and subject to the laws of our country,
I will request their prosecution. But don't worry about it, CBS.
There's always the chance that despite the fact that you
are on the wrong side of the famous quote that
(11:03):
the famous eighteenth entry British politician Edmund Burke famously did
not say that the only thing necessary for the triumph
of evil is for good men to do nothing. Maybe
what you are not doing, the nothing you are doing,
maybe it won't help Trump regain power and put all
(11:26):
of you in prison. Anyway, were there any doubt, it
is now official. Trump's campaign is about lying. That it
is only about lying. In the wake of Hurricane Helene,
(11:48):
Trump goes to Valdosta, Georgia. They built him a little
stage out of bricks that fell off a building there.
Franklin Graham, an asshole, dragged some of his cultists out
to stand there and bark like seals. There were as
many of them, and as many of the first responders
(12:10):
present diverted to protect him as there were residents, a
couple of dozen of each. Maybe Trump then existed. Nobody
saw this coming because it's past hurricane season, which actually
goes to November, same as every year. And this all
took some of us back to twenty nineteen and the
Hurricane Dorian map, and the madness inside his brain so
(12:34):
complete and insanity so untreatable that when he lied and
said that the hurricane had been projected to hit Alabama,
instead of just replacing that lie with a milder lie
like I was given bad info, he actually drew on
the map with a sharpie to extend the path of
the hurricane, to make it look like he was right
(12:55):
and everybody else in the world was wrong. And he
got to Georgia and he lied. But it was a
triple saturation lie. He began by posting lies online about
supposed non response from the Biden administration and a Katrina
like situation in the wake of the storm, and then
he added to the lie a second dimension by telling
(13:17):
that news conference quote, as you know, our country is
in the final weeks of a hard fought national election.
At a time like this, when a crisis hits, when
our fellow citizens cry out and need, none of that matters.
We're not talking about politics now. We have to all
get together and get this solved. And then he proceeded
to lie about the response, lie about the president, lie
about the governor of Georgia, and reduce this tragedy to
(13:39):
yet another Trump lies like other people's sweat moment, and
a Trump will turn anything into a photo op moment,
And having just said he's not talking about politics now,
he will turn any photo op into an opportunity to
lie about politics.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Now moment, the governor needs to he's been trying to
get them, and I'm sure they're going to come through.
But he's been calling the President, hasn't been able to
get him, hasn't this called.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
Me yesterday afternoon. I missed him and I called him
right back and he just said, hey, what do you need?
And I told him, you know, we got what we need.
We'll work through the federal process. He offered that if
there's other things we need, just to call him directly.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
That second voice you heard was Governor Kemp saying, no,
he didn't. He didn't call President Biden for help because
Biden had called him first. And how did this most
obvious and appalling of Trump's exploitations of American suffering in
the last few weeks at least go over exactly as
(14:41):
it always does. Some idiot on television news bought it completely.
Yesterday's idiot turned out to be Kristin Holmes, National correspondent
of CNN, and to the Trump lie about oh, I'm
not here to talk politics, she actually said Trump was
quote on the ground, tried to show he is there
(15:03):
in support of the people on the ground in Georgia.
And of course this comes as he is again offering
a message of unity. He has spent the last several
days slamming Kamala Harris's rival for not being on the ground,
for not helping with this storm. Surprisingly enough, despite what
has to be to some degree her shame, Kristin Holmes
(15:28):
is expected to show up for work today at CNN
rather than retire to the Andes on a religious retreat.
The good news is Kristin Holmes was one of CNN's
voter integrity correspondents during the twenty twenty election. Not reporter integrity.
(15:52):
Voter integrity again. From the Yale historian Tim Snyder via
The New York Times, Trump is in the classic dictatorial position.
He needs to i in bed holding all executive power
to stay out of prison. This means that he will
do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power,
(16:14):
will do all that he can to never let it go.
This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else.
It is entirely inconsistent with democracy. Timothy Snyder of Yale
in that context, cancel the debate or Governor Walls metaphorically
(16:44):
gut him like a fish. I'll leave you leavened with
two kickers. Clarity campaign polling, which works for various Democratic
groups has produced this rather startling national poll result. Ready
(17:04):
Kala Harris fifty eight percent, JD Vance thirty seven percent.
Wait what Harris fifty eight Vance thirty seven After hours
of searching, I cannot find any other explanation for this.
It's not a personal approval disapproval rating comparison between the
(17:28):
presidential candidate of one party and the vice presidential candidate
of the other. It does not seem to be some
sort of typo. I can only conclude that they took
a poll actually asking people. It says more than a
thousand likely voters who they would vote for for president
Harris or Vance, and then in that matchup, she's ahead
by twenty one goddamn points, which is nice to know
(17:53):
in case in the next five weeks Trump really does
what I've suggested to him constantly since twenty sixteen, Trump
really does in the next five weeks flee to Moscow
and to circle back to the vice presidential debate. I'll
confess I only saw this in a clip online. I
(18:15):
cannot recall the last time I actually watched the network
in question. It might have been twenty twenty one, But
there is a promo box in the corner on MSNBC
and technical jargon. It's called a bug promoting the network's
preview show for the debate tonight. And it's got Rachel
Meadow's face on it and a flag and a big
(18:35):
MSNBC logo and vance versus Walls and the time and
then the title of the show she is hosting before
the debate, and the title of the show is Debate Countdown,
and under that it says MSNBC. So it says countdown
(18:58):
on MSNBC. Wait a minute, I've seen this part of
this movie already. This is where I came in, Meadow
filling in on Countdown on MSNBC. Yeah, put that on
(19:21):
the list of deja vus. Also of interest here. I
will have to wait until tomorrow so I can gather
my thoughts because they are multilayered on the death of
baseball's Pete Rose, the only athlete I know of who
managed to fully embrace the words famous and infamous simultaneously
(19:43):
for decades. As for today, Hey Republican candidate for the
House from the Virginia seventh in your campaign photos, that's
a lovely wife and kids you've got there. Who's are they?
That's next? This is Countdown. This is Countdown, with Keith
(20:06):
Olberman still ahead of us on this edition of Countdown.
(20:29):
The Braves led the Mets three nothing in the top
of the eighth, then the Mets led the Braves six
to three in the bottom of the eighth, Then the
Braves led the Mets seven to six in the top
of the ninth. Then the Mets led the Braves eight
to seven in the bottom of the ninth, then won
the game to reach the playoffs. And it was rightly
considered one of the all time most exciting baseball games.
(20:50):
And it still doesn't reflect that games like that just
thirty years ago meant you were four wins away from
playing for its championship, playing in the World Series. Now
it's like a month from now. Is the thrill of
one game, the sort of artificial environment that creates a
game like that worth the continuing downsizing of what used
(21:13):
to be a stretch in which it felt like they
were playing the Super Bowl every day for ten days.
A reminiscence about going to see the Mets, the nineteen
sixty nine Mets in the World Series ahead in things
I promised not to tell first, there are still more
new idiots talk about the daily roundup of the Miss
Grant's morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens, who constitute today's
(21:39):
worse persons in the world. Worse Derek Anderson, former Green Beret,
now running for the House from the Virginia seventh. How
Annie Carney and Katie Edmondson the reporters got this through
The New York Times, deflavorizing and both sizzing machines. I
will never know. Maybe they deliberately wrote this boring opening line.
(22:05):
Wives are hitting the airwaves across the country. Three quarters
of readers were asleep before the second the in that sentence,
lives are hitting the airwaves across the But what the
Times reporters revealed in the story is that Republican candidate
(22:26):
Anderson in the Virginia seventh well quote, has posted footage
of him posing with a woman and her three daughters
in what looks like a photo that might be used
for an annual holiday card. In another scene filmed for
potential use in a campaign ad, mister Anderson is seated
around the dining room table with the same woman and
three girls, chatting and smiling. But the people are not relatives.
(22:49):
They are the wife and children of a longtime friend.
Mister Anderson, who announced this month that he was engaged,
does not have any children of his own. His campaign
website says he lives with his dog and does not
display any of the photos. Are you saying there's something
(23:09):
wrong with displaying photos of a man and his dog.
A spokesman for mister Anderson criticized the New York Times
decision to focus on the footage and said that Derek's
opponent and every other candidate in America are in similar
pictures and video with supporters of all kinds. The spokesman
said the video simply showed mister Anderson quote with female
(23:29):
supporters and their kids rent to kids. The guy got
rent to kids for a commercial like JV Vance got
to rent a dog like Trump got to rent a
third wife. Is there anybody anybody at all in the
Republican Party who is on the level anybody? Is it
(23:52):
just hucksters? Now? Is there anybody with any self respect? Okay,
I'll stop. We knew it the day Mitt Romney went
to dinner to beg Trump for a job. The answers
to my questions are no, no, no, no, and new
the runner up worser annie Lynskey. Hey, it's Annie Day.
Annie Lynskey works for the Wall Street Journal. They call
(24:15):
her a reporter. I would, but she's not. She's just
a bitter employee. Her job there is to take shots
at Joe Biden whenever she can, gratuitous, irrelevant, invariably quickly
disproven shots at Joe Biden. She was one of the
authors of the hit piece last spring about his health,
the one that only quoted Republicans and even then didn't
(24:38):
quote Kevin McCarthy of all people, saying he never saw
any slowness in the president, the one that the media
thinks they got right because Yeah, Biden withdrew from the
race because he was having trouble making public appearances. He
didn't slow down, hasn't slowed down as president. There's nothing
wrong with his presidency anyway. This Annie Lynskey is back
(25:02):
back before the Washington Post report, or the Washington Post
rather got rid of her. She was the reporter there
who mocked Biden. Quote walking through a graveyard, That was
Annie Lynsky quote. Biden goes to a church and walks
through a graveyard in Wilmington, as his legislative agenda is
dying in Washington. That was October third, twenty twenty one.
(25:24):
That was three years ago. At face value, it was
tasteless as it was, but annie Lynskey either didn't know
enough about her own job, or didn't care enough, or
did it deliberately one way or the other. She evinced
no knowledge that the graveyard in Wilmington was the one
in which the president's late son, and his late daughter
(25:44):
and his first wife are all buried. Well, yes, annie
Lynsky's back. Yesterday, Biden, suffering from a cold, became testy
when asked why he was in Delaware over the weekend
amid the storm. I understand she now works for a
fascist Murdock propaganda sheet. But what I will never understand
is and all the right wingers picked this up too,
(26:07):
thanks to people like annie Lynsky. How at her age,
she has not yet figured out that people record audio
and video of these things. I mean, I know that's new.
The handheld cassette tape recorder just came onto the market
in nineteen sixty six, and they didn't have walk bands
(26:28):
that you could hold in your hand and record anything
until like nineteen seventy nine, and that iPhone at brand
you can still have your new iPhone from two thousand
and seven. Here is the President of the United States
not becoming testy, even though Annie Lynsky lied that he
became testy.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Why byn't she and Vice President Harris Sharon Washington commanding
this just be had I was getting it.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
I was on the phone for at least two hours
yesterday in the day before as well.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
I commend this all the telephone. It's all my security.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
It's an order for the country to see.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
That's the President of the United States exit stage right,
closing the door on that idiot reporter. And I tried it.
I've been unable to reveal who that is. I'll get
it eventually. That is called Joe Biden calling out a
lie from a liar posing as a reporter. He didn't swear,
he didn't mock, he didn't become testy, he didn't shoot
(27:29):
the guy a dirty look. But what he also didn't
do was bow and curtsey to the guy or the
annie Lynskys of this world. And what you saw in
this story Biden became testy is half of the essence
of the problem with our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying news media.
The only things most of them really pay attention to
(27:52):
are when somebody in power makes them feel good, or
when they can make somebody in power feel bad. Say
something snotty and factually erroneous to the President of the
United States, as the reporter who asked that question did,
and if he's Biden and he doesn't defer to you,
and I know him a long time, he doesn't defer
(28:13):
to you, and so you then after he leaves, you
go take the opportunity to scurry back into your rat
hole and you tweet something mean about how testy he is.
You know who's testy here, Annie Lynsky, you're testy. Now.
If you say something like that about Trump, you'll get fired,
or if he's reelected, you'll have your new Trump journalism
(28:36):
license revoked. Annie, first offense, second offense, you go to
Trump journalistic re education camp. I hate people like this.
I hate them all. We could fire all the reporters
except for like the top three percent in this country
tomorrow and replace them either with the average sports reporter
(28:57):
or the average college senior or post grad student in
journalism in this country, and the quality ofjournalism in this
nation tomorrow first day would improve by five to ten percent. Immediately,
but the winner the worst. John Roberts, Chief Justice of
the United States of America. Oh, you want to tales right,
(29:21):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The anniversary is Thursday. It's forty
one years now. But the leaf Lever News podcast master
Plan mentioned this the other day. It's a memo to
Reagan advisor Fred Fielding. We used to work for a
friend of mine in the Nixon White House, Dean somebody.
It was from one of the young in this case,
twenty eight year old lawyers, one of the associates in
(29:42):
the Office of White House Counsel Under Reagan. There is
a proposal in the Senate in nineteen eighty three, as
this is written, a bill that would launch a constitutional
amendment to end lifetime appointments for federal judges and limit
them to ten years on the bench. Fielding is asked
for an analysis and advice because Reagan wants the Department
(30:04):
of Justice to publicly oppose the proposed amendment, because of
course he's coming up for election and the idea of
term limits or age limits was going to be really
bad for Ronald Reagan in nineteen eighty four. Yes, we
need somebody's less than two hundred and six or unf
President Reagan, I need to see you. But this kid
in the Council's office who's writing to Fred Fielding, he's
(30:25):
not so sure that this is that bad an idea.
This is what he wrote. The Justice report is similar
to other reports it has filed in recent years, and
I do not propose to object to it. I would
point out, however, that there is much to be said
for changing life tenure to a term of years without
possibility of reappointment. The Framers adopted life tenure at a
(30:49):
time when people simply did not live as long as
they do now. A judge insulated from the normal currents
of life for twenty five or thirty years was a
rarity then, but is becoming commonplace today. Setting a term
of say, fifteen years, would ensure that federal judges would
not lose all touch with reality through decades of Ivory
(31:13):
Tower existence. It would also provide a more regular and
greater degree of turnover among the judges. Both developments would,
in my view, be healthy ones. Denying reappointment would eliminate
any significant threat to judicial independence. The memos suggesting hey,
you know what, the federal judges and the Supreme Court
(31:34):
justices just aren't dying as fast as they used to.
Was sent to Reagan advisor Fred Fielding forty one years
ago Thursday by John Roberts, who, if it had been adopted,
would have retired this week as Chief Justice this week
in twenty twenty, like Thomas would have retired from the
(31:54):
bench of the Supreme Court in two thousand and six
Alito in twenty twenty one. Hell, if this had been
passed nine years from next week, we'd be having the
farewell party for Brett f and Kavanaugh. Don't bother to
b Yob, John, Always go with your first idea, Roberts
(32:17):
two days worst person. Hello, the number one story on
(32:38):
the Countdown now and it's my favorite topic. Me and
things I promised not to tell. I was ten years old,
and I'm not sure that this was the last week
that baseball was more important than nearly everything else in
this country. But if not, the chronology is pretty close
by legend in my hometown, Miss Barton had been standing
on Farragut Parkway when they decided to put the school
(33:00):
there in nineteen oh five, so they just built it
around her. In fact, she had only been at the
head of her homeroom since nineteen forty two, but for
us seventh graders of the year nineteen sixty nine, the
year nineteen forty two might as well have been a
date from the reign of Julius Caesar. Miss Barton was
friendly but formidable, and what if any connection she had
(33:25):
to the world outside school eluded us In retrospect, it
took a good deal of courage for me to have
handed her the note my mother had scribbled asking her
permission for me to miss school on October fifteenth, nineteen
sixty nine. She read it, and she looked up at
me with unalloyed shock, and I knew my plans were doomed.
(33:48):
And then she smiled broadly and warmly. It was not
the last time any of us sought, but it probably
was the first time we had seen her smile. You're
going to the World Series? Have you got an extra ticket?
They were all like that. Mister Madolinski, the science teacher,
(34:09):
who looked like nothing less than a proto Nathan Lane,
had not only accepted my carrying a transistor, radio and
an earphone into class, but he had periodically called on
me during science class for the score. Mister bub the
hard assed phized teacher who once fended off twenty seven
(34:29):
kids who tried to force him into the showers on
the last day of school, suggested that when I went
to Game four, I should bring a movie camera with
me and we could watch the highlights instead of Jim
whenever the film got back from the developers. The social
studies teacher, my favorite missus Rice, the first love of
(34:49):
my life, out did them all. She moved my chair
up next to the blackboard and turned a corner of
that blackboard into a makeshift scoreboard. Every half inning, and
in those days you could cram a lot of half
into your average seventh grade social studies class, not just
like one or two half innings. I would add a
(35:11):
digit to the line score Baltimore zero zero three, Mets
zero zero zero. My dad got somewhere two tickets for
Game four. It turned out to be the Tom Seaverer game.
It ended in JC Martin's bunt thrown away down the
first baseline by relief fitcher Pete Rickord of Baltimore, with
(35:33):
pinch runner Rod Gasbar of the Mets scoring the winning
run in the tenth I got to know all those
guys I sent Rod Gasbar some previously unseen photos of
him crossing the plate. He sent one back, autographed, inscribed Keith,
thanks for attending Game four of the nineteen sixty nine
World Series, Please drive home safely. My dad and I
(35:55):
in fact took the train in from Westchester. I think
we went first, at his insistence, to Barney's, which was
then exclusively a men's clothing store in Union's Square. That's
where I got my first adult style suit with a
tailor and everything. And then up to Times Square to
change trains, where we were nearly run over by the
(36:16):
Moratorium Day protesters. That was Moratorium Day, the first big
nationwide protest against the Vietnam War, October fifteenth, nineteen sixty nine.
We changed trains and then out to Chase Stadium by
the number seven. The seats on that perfect crystal day
were in distant left field, but I had brought my binoculars,
(36:37):
really my dad's, and they brought me into the game.
I could see the Commissioner of Baseball clearly, and stand
Musials sitting next to him, and sitting next to the
Mets dugout, and I could see the sweat on Tom
Seever's face as he delivered strike after strike and the
emotion I had when I got home that night, a
temporary Mets fan because the Orioles always beat up my Yankees,
(37:00):
that emotion was simple. Whatever else would happen in my life,
I had done it. I had been to a World
Series game. I was the envy of my classmates for months.
The previous school year, they had herded us all into
the vast Cobwebby auditorium at the top of the school
(37:23):
to watch Richard Nixon's first inauguration. Several times. They had
done the same thing for Gemini and the Pollo space launches,
but those had tangible, albeit to us vague connections to
you know, actual school work. The World Series, however, was
apparently more important than school work. It was more important
(37:46):
than school. I don't remember anything else that adults would
admit was more important than school all these years later,
and hearing those words world and Series still sends a
chill through me as reflexively as the loudest Pavlovian bell.
I could not have known then I was part of
the last generation to be so indoctrinated. I assumed it
(38:09):
had always been that way, and it always would be,
and it no longer is the twenty twenty two World
Series was the third worst rated in television history, not
quite as bad as twenty twenty one, which itself was
not quite as bad as twenty twenty. There's a myriad
of causes. I have about five hundred and seventeen more
(38:32):
television and streaming channels to choose from than I did
in October nineteen sixty nine. I mean, we didn't even
have the color TV yet in October nineteen sixty nine,
at least not an our house. I have at least
five times more TV channels than I did in October
two thousand and one. And similarly, baseball no longer dwarfs
the sports landscape, even just for the World Series. The
(38:54):
de nationalizing of baseball was symbolized by the presence of
two geographically homogeneous teams. Formerly a boon ratings now a curse.
This was the two thousand World Series, the Mets and
the Yankees, the dream of every New York sports fan,
(39:18):
and nobody cared outside of New York the beginning of
the end. Yet the underlying cost of baseball's malaise is that,
like me, the owners just assumed it would always be
the way it was in nineteen sixty nine. I had
an excuse for believing that I was ten. Their excuse
that mentally they're all ten is insufficient. All but a
(39:38):
few of the owners have failed to understand television in
any way other than as a revenue source. They have
never recognized its function as merchandising, even as a mechanism
for proselytizing. They didn't know about miss Barton and mister
Madolinsky and missus Rice, and they did not care about them.
They didn't know about the kids with their cheesy white
plastic earplugs and their scratchy transistor radios. They didn't cultivate
(40:02):
the tradition they had been given by their forebears in
the first half of the twentieth century. They let the
World Series become less important than schools, and less important
than the NBA, and less important than Taylor Swift. That's
what they needed. They needed to get Taylor Swift to
(40:24):
go with Travis Kelcey to that playoff game. It takes
a certain foresight to say to a television executive, no,
we can't play the whole World Series at night because
the kids won't be able to watch. We can't bend
to society and prime time and the other sports and demographics.
Because to do that is to lessen the obligation to
(40:48):
watch the World Series. We have to play some day games.
Here's some of the money back. It would take a
certain foresight and reproductive organs the size of I don't know,
fill in the analogy yourself. As evidenced by well everything.
(41:09):
Baseball owners don't have them or the foresight to plan
for the twelve inning of a game, let alone twelve
years from now. They did not write off the few
million less NBC would have paid them as seed money
for this. Instead, it's the World Series that has gone
to seed, sometimes being reduced to being the symbolic filler
between Fox's next two promos for this year's implausible sitcom.
(41:33):
As I've discussed here previously, Baseball's owners never noticed that
the separation and isolation of the two leagues had assured
that while the audience might be divided among the fans
of sixteen, then twenty, then twenty four then twenty six
different teams, it also meant that nearly all of them
also divided into two groups, American League fans and National
(41:55):
League fans, so that even if their quote own team
unquote was not in the World Series, they still had
a rooting interest in the World Series and a re
to watch to see their league win or, as in
my case as an American League fan when I was
ten years old, to see their league lose because it
was the Baltimore Orioles and they beat the crap out
of my Yankees. I was not rooting for the Mets
(42:17):
in the nineteen sixty nine World Series. I was rooting
against the hated Baltimore Orioles. TV usually takes the sole
blame when this subject is introduced, but I know from
my own experience when the executives who make the nuts
and bolts decisions about televising baseball seeing them actually do it,
(42:37):
that they have done everything but beg the owners to
return daylight to the series, and not just when the
games have to start at five pm Pacific for the
sake of the East Coast audience. One of my bosses,
Dick eversaw, the head of NBC Sports, sat there rejiggering
the first pitch times for one series. No, no tell, buddy,
(43:02):
he has to start Wednesday at eight thirty seven and
not eight o seven. He knows that we've got a
sitcom premiering on Wednesday. He told me about offering to
split the difference in the revenue lost because of a
late afternoon start on a Saturday. I told Buddy, think
of the future. He kept saying, think of the money.
(43:23):
It isn't just the sizzle, of course, there are now
severe problems with the stake as well. In Bob Costas's
memorable phrase, as my friend put it, the wild card
has indeed turned the series into the MLB Finals. The
viewers were way ahead of the Cognizani on this celebration
of mediocrity. Amid all the explanations for the ever plummeting ratings,
(43:43):
the simplest one inevitably gets bypassed. If you're scoring at home,
or even if you're just by yourself. This just isn't
very good baseball played by not really that good baseball teams.
Five hundred foot homers and no hitters with multiple pitchers
in them and seventeen strikeout games. They are impressed, But
(44:05):
if they happen every night, they take on the falsity
of the plot twists in pro wrestling, and in a
sports world full to overflowing with last second touchdowns, buzzer
beaters from the popcorn stand. All offense, all the time
is no longer enough to hide the fact that to
be watchable baseball has to be a balance of hitting
(44:25):
and pitching. In one year, the number of World Series
starting pitchers who lasted seven innings or more dropped from
nine to none. One day, all the runs in the
world next day, a no hitter. Same two teams, same
two lineups. In the old days, the pretenders, one dimensional
(44:48):
teams like last year's Phillies, were eliminated in the slow
but fair crucible of the regular season. If the best
team in baseball occasionally had a bad week and undeservedly
lost the World Series, that merely served to create endless
spodder for the off season, something for people to talk
about until March. Now the candidates for best team in
twenty twenty two. That was the Braves, the Dodgers, even
(45:10):
the Mets. They can be eliminated almost by chance at
two levels, even before they stagger into a sometimes anti
climactic World Series. There are now two nightmare scenarios for
the television ratings. If they had continued to decline at
the rate they did in the ten years after nineteen
ninety one, ratings for the World Series of twenty twenty
(45:33):
five would be about a tenth of what they were
in nineteen ninety one. The collapse slowed, however, great news
twenty twenty two ratings were one quarter what they had
been in nineteen ninety one. That they weren't one tenth
is the good news. It is no coincidence that the
(45:55):
three worst rated World Series of all times have all
occurred since twenty twenty. The regular season has already been
new to even the teams given new free stadiums are
beginning to fail. The owners know this, and they floated
an obvious solution. They added more wildcard teams. Throughout the
(46:21):
eighteen eighties, the nascent World Series it was called the
World's Championship Series. It was the World Series was mismanaged
completely from an instant attention grabber in eighteen eighty four
where the winners of the American Association and the National
League said, hey, we should have a series to determine
which of US's best. From that explosive big bang berth,
(46:44):
it was turned into an endless traveling freak show by
eighteen eighty seven. In eighteen eighty seven, they played best
eight out of fifteen, and they kept playing it in
different cities. It wasn't just the two cities of the
two teams in it, Detroit and Saint Louis. The eighteen
eighty seven World Series was played in ten different cities,
(47:05):
and the denumont of labor wars and over expansion came
in eighteen ninety. The eighteen ninety World Series pitted the
Louisville Cyclones, who had risen from worst to first in
the American Association, which was a major League, against the
Brooklyn Bridegrooms, who had won the American Association pennant the
year before eighteen eighty nine, and then the franchise just
(47:28):
jumped into the National League for eighteen ninety and won
that pennant. There were storylines of plenty, but so full
of rancor and devoid of talent was the eighteen ninety
World Series that, even though the host Brooklyn Bridegrooms entered
Game seven leading Louisville three games to two, Game three
had been a tie, they needed just two more wins
(47:48):
for the title. The crowd the crowd for that game
Game seven of the World Series in Brooklyn three hundred fans.
Louisville then tied the series in that game three wins
apiece and a tie, and they would need a decisive
eighth game and the rest of the series, and they
(48:12):
never played it. They abandoned the World Series tied three
and three and one quote. There is scarcely enough interest
in the series, noted a writer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.
To induce the people to read the scores. The most
(48:38):
frightening part about that quote that's from eighteen ninety. I
felt that way the last three octobers during the World Series.
The world has made itself over a thousand times. Since
that sobering revolt by the board against the boring baseball's
resiliency reminds us that the World Series broadcast might still
(49:01):
inspire another generation wearing not transistor plugs but buds hooked
up to a live stream. Or like that unhappy eighteen
ninety classic, the whole thing could wind up getting canceled,
and this time it'll be canceled by TV executives. I've
(49:33):
done all the damage I can do here. Thank you
for listening. We're now back to five episodes a week,
posting nightly just after midnight Easter. Once again, there is
a Monday countdown and tell the others. Please send this
podcast to somebody who does not listen yet but could
benefit from my analysis of stuff. Brian Ray and John
Phillip Shanelle, the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced, and
(49:57):
performed most of our music. Mister Schanale handled orchestration and keyboards.
Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums. It was
produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and fifty musical comments
are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faus.
The sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two,
written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy of ESPN Inc. Other
(50:18):
music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
My announcer today was my friend John Dean. Everything else
was as usual, pretty much my fault. That's countdown for today.
Five weeks until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the
one three hundred and sixty fifth day since convicted felon
(50:39):
drooling Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected
government of the United States. Use the election, use the
mental health system, use presidential immunity if we have to
to keep him from doing it again. Wow, we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news requires.
(50:59):
Until then, I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(51:21):
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. Cancel
the Vice presidential debate tonight. CBS News should cancel it,
(00:28):
or Tim Walls should cancel it, or the Harris campaign
should cancel it because journalistic principles have been so thoroughly
removed from it that it is going to amount to
nothing more than an ad for Trump and Vance and
fascism and lying. To Wendy McMahon, the new president of
CBS News, I urge you, before it is too late,
(00:51):
fact check jd Vance or get your company out of
the news business, because if you let this proceed as planned,
you will burn the reputation of CBS News to the ground.
Murrow gone, Cronkite gone see it now devotes its entire
(01:11):
half hour to a report on Senator McCarthy gone the
news apparently official gone Nixon to rather, are you running
for something, no, sir, mister President, or you gone? Don Hollenbeck,
gone Heywood fing hail brun gone ashes. You are putting
(01:32):
on a professional liar in order to let him lie
to America for ninety minutes in primetime. This is the
exact opposite of news. You are now actively contributing to
the gaslighting of this country and its potential destruction. This time,
(01:59):
CBS News is siding with the McCarthy in the equation.
This time you are lying alongside Nixon. This time you
are selling out the truth for the sake of the
revenue from two four minute commercial breaks. And if in
(02:24):
your negotiations with the Trump campaign to get Advance to attend,
if they included either an offer from you to exclude
fact checking or the acceptance of their demand to exclude
fact checking, you have gone further into the morass. Still.
You have deliberately frauded the American public for ratings, and
(02:44):
you have prostituted yourselves. Find somebody in the building with
a moral or journalistic compass and put them in charge
of CBS News. Right now, because guess who is going
to quote fact check unquote your CBS News Vice president
(03:04):
cidential debate on this the last day of CBS News quote.
I will be doing the personal play by play of
the debate between the brilliant jd Vance and the highly
inarticulate tampon Tim Walls. I hope that cognitively challenged lion
(03:27):
Kamala Harris will be listening so that she can again
show the world how she will make up false facts
and stories in order to change around an administrative failure. Unquote,
that is the side you are on, CBS. That is
(03:47):
the side Desmond Tutuo ment when he wrote, if you
are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the
side of the oppressor. CBS News will, of course, not
cancel the debate. Its masters, President McMahon included, will not
(04:09):
tell Vance that the rules have changed. He can accept
live fact checking or it's off. I've worked for CBS News.
The retrenchment in news spending in television began with them
in nineteen eighty six. Now, if they have already spent
one hundred dollars, they're not writing that off. That's serious money.
(04:29):
They're not canceling nothing. Besides, they have doubled down on
their secret weapon of truth here and in so doing,
hung this poor chief of the CBS News confirmed unit
Claudia Milne out to dry. We quote will provide fact
checking and analysis on our live blog during the debate.
(04:55):
As pathetic as that sounds, honest to god, I'm surprised
Trump and Vance are still letting them do that. No,
CBS is not going to cancel the debate. It will
be neutral in this situation of injustice, and it has
chosen the oppressor. So plan b Tim Walls. Tim Walls,
(05:18):
I need you to take the debate over. Forgive me Nora.
I'll always love you, politely and metaphorically. Governor you have
to push Nora and Margaret Brennan out of the way
and take the debate over. Acknowledge Norah's first question, and
(05:39):
then let it rip. Tell the television audience that JD.
Vance is a compulsive and pathological liar. Tell them that
there is no side of any debate or issue that
he has not already taken, then rejected, then taken again.
Tell them that he is Trump's deputy liar. Tell them,
and tell them as forcefully and as non midwesternly as possible,
(06:02):
that this man, this individual over here, is personally and
indelibly responsible for death threats against white Republican small businessmen
in Springfield, Ohio, because it is he JD Vance who
personally and completely fabricated the Haitian immigrant story. And then
(06:25):
Governor Walls tell that audience about Jamie McGregor of McGregor Metal.
Tell them about this Trump supporter, this man who voted
for Trump in twenty sixteen, this man who again voted
for Trump in twenty twenty. Tell them about the tractor
parts that Jamie McGregor makes in Springfield, Ohio. Tell them
(06:46):
that all Jamie McGregor did was say that his thirty
odd Haitian born employees come to work every day, they
don't cause drama, they're on time, and within hours the
death threats against Jamie McGregor began. Tell them that Jamie
McGregor got so many death threats that they had to
have a lockdown a factory. Tell them that there are
Maga posters around town calling him a Maga guy, a traitor.
(07:13):
Tell them that Jamie McGregor had vowed to never have
guns in his own home, and now his family is
taking firearms training and he just bought a glock and
it's for his daughter. Tell them Governor that Jamie McGregor's
daughter is fourteen fing years old. Tell them tim Tell
(07:35):
them that Maga isn't just a threat to immigrants or
a threat to people of color, or a threat to Democrats.
Tell them that Maga is a threat to the people
in Maga because Trump and Maga. It's not about making
anything great, it's about hatred and violence and cruelty. Tell
(07:57):
them that Jamie McGregor's wife said, we are being hunted
like animals. Tell them that the latest person to be
threatened in Springfield, Ohio with death is Jamie McGregor's eighty
year old mother. And tell them that this is all,
(08:17):
all of it, the fault of the personal responsibility, of
the creation, of the goal of the point of this
scum bag j. D. Vance. Point at him and tell
him to get down on his goddamn knees and to
start praying to his creator for forgiveness because he's not
going to get any from Jamie McGregor or from America Governor.
(08:47):
CBS News said, it is your job to fact check
this lying son of a bitch. They just provide the
Mike's and the coffee. Do it. Start the debate by
doing it. Put Vance on the floor in a pool
(09:07):
of his own urine, and then then you can do
a little Midwestern not him. Then you can metaphorically gut
him like.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
A fish like a fish, or we could do the
(09:50):
fact checking thing, but no, CBS, you know what you're
doing because when you don't fact check Vance's lies and
for that matter.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
When you don't fact check anything Governor Walls gets wrong,
what you'll get from Trump will be silence, blessed silence,
no complaints for a day, or a week, or a month,
there may be a year, and then someday, sooner or late,
he will forget about that, and he will circle back
to you at CBS and you will get the Google
treatment from last week. Well, instead of where it said Google,
(10:20):
it'll say CBS News, where he announces. It has been
determined that CBS News has illegally used a system of
only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump,
some made up for this purpose, while at the same
time only revealing good stories about whoever he doesn't like
that day. This is an illegal activity and the Justice
(10:43):
Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant interference of elections.
If not, and subject to the laws of our country,
I will request their prosecution. But don't worry about it, CBS.
There's always the chance that despite the fact that you
are on the wrong side of the famous quote that
(11:03):
the famous eighteenth entry British politician Edmund Burke famously did
not say that the only thing necessary for the triumph
of evil is for good men to do nothing. Maybe
what you are not doing, the nothing you are doing,
maybe it won't help Trump regain power and put all
(11:26):
of you in prison. Anyway, were there any doubt, it
is now official. Trump's campaign is about lying. That it
is only about lying. In the wake of Hurricane Helene,
(11:48):
Trump goes to Valdosta, Georgia. They built him a little
stage out of bricks that fell off a building there.
Franklin Graham, an asshole, dragged some of his cultists out
to stand there and bark like seals. There were as
many of them, and as many of the first responders
(12:10):
present diverted to protect him as there were residents, a
couple of dozen of each. Maybe Trump then existed. Nobody
saw this coming because it's past hurricane season, which actually
goes to November, same as every year. And this all
took some of us back to twenty nineteen and the
Hurricane Dorian map, and the madness inside his brain so
(12:34):
complete and insanity so untreatable that when he lied and
said that the hurricane had been projected to hit Alabama,
instead of just replacing that lie with a milder lie
like I was given bad info, he actually drew on
the map with a sharpie to extend the path of
the hurricane, to make it look like he was right
(12:55):
and everybody else in the world was wrong. And he
got to Georgia and he lied. But it was a
triple saturation lie. He began by posting lies online about
supposed non response from the Biden administration and a Katrina
like situation in the wake of the storm, and then
he added to the lie a second dimension by telling
(13:17):
that news conference quote, as you know, our country is
in the final weeks of a hard fought national election.
At a time like this, when a crisis hits, when
our fellow citizens cry out and need, none of that matters.
We're not talking about politics now. We have to all
get together and get this solved. And then he proceeded
to lie about the response, lie about the president, lie
about the governor of Georgia, and reduce this tragedy to
(13:39):
yet another Trump lies like other people's sweat moment, and
a Trump will turn anything into a photo op moment,
And having just said he's not talking about politics now,
he will turn any photo op into an opportunity to
lie about politics.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Now moment, the governor needs to he's been trying to
get them, and I'm sure they're going to come through.
But he's been calling the President, hasn't been able to
get him, hasn't this called.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
Me yesterday afternoon. I missed him and I called him
right back and he just said, hey, what do you need?
And I told him, you know, we got what we need.
We'll work through the federal process. He offered that if
there's other things we need, just to call him directly.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
That second voice you heard was Governor Kemp saying, no,
he didn't. He didn't call President Biden for help because
Biden had called him first. And how did this most
obvious and appalling of Trump's exploitations of American suffering in
the last few weeks at least go over exactly as
(14:41):
it always does. Some idiot on television news bought it completely.
Yesterday's idiot turned out to be Kristin Holmes, National correspondent
of CNN, and to the Trump lie about oh, I'm
not here to talk politics, she actually said Trump was
quote on the ground, tried to show he is there
(15:03):
in support of the people on the ground in Georgia.
And of course this comes as he is again offering
a message of unity. He has spent the last several
days slamming Kamala Harris's rival for not being on the ground,
for not helping with this storm. Surprisingly enough, despite what
has to be to some degree her shame, Kristin Holmes
(15:28):
is expected to show up for work today at CNN
rather than retire to the Andes on a religious retreat.
The good news is Kristin Holmes was one of CNN's
voter integrity correspondents during the twenty twenty election. Not reporter integrity.
(15:52):
Voter integrity again. From the Yale historian Tim Snyder via
The New York Times, Trump is in the classic dictatorial position.
He needs to i in bed holding all executive power
to stay out of prison. This means that he will
do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power,
(16:14):
will do all that he can to never let it go.
This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else.
It is entirely inconsistent with democracy. Timothy Snyder of Yale
in that context, cancel the debate or Governor Walls metaphorically
(16:44):
gut him like a fish. I'll leave you leavened with
two kickers. Clarity campaign polling, which works for various Democratic
groups has produced this rather startling national poll result. Ready
(17:04):
Kala Harris fifty eight percent, JD Vance thirty seven percent.
Wait what Harris fifty eight Vance thirty seven After hours
of searching, I cannot find any other explanation for this.
It's not a personal approval disapproval rating comparison between the
(17:28):
presidential candidate of one party and the vice presidential candidate
of the other. It does not seem to be some
sort of typo. I can only conclude that they took
a poll actually asking people. It says more than a
thousand likely voters who they would vote for for president
Harris or Vance, and then in that matchup, she's ahead
by twenty one goddamn points, which is nice to know
(17:53):
in case in the next five weeks Trump really does
what I've suggested to him constantly since twenty sixteen, Trump
really does in the next five weeks flee to Moscow
and to circle back to the vice presidential debate. I'll
confess I only saw this in a clip online. I
(18:15):
cannot recall the last time I actually watched the network
in question. It might have been twenty twenty one, But
there is a promo box in the corner on MSNBC
and technical jargon. It's called a bug promoting the network's
preview show for the debate tonight. And it's got Rachel
Meadow's face on it and a flag and a big
(18:35):
MSNBC logo and vance versus Walls and the time and
then the title of the show she is hosting before
the debate, and the title of the show is Debate Countdown,
and under that it says MSNBC. So it says countdown
(18:58):
on MSNBC. Wait a minute, I've seen this part of
this movie already. This is where I came in, Meadow
filling in on Countdown on MSNBC. Yeah, put that on
(19:21):
the list of deja vus. Also of interest here. I
will have to wait until tomorrow so I can gather
my thoughts because they are multilayered on the death of
baseball's Pete Rose, the only athlete I know of who
managed to fully embrace the words famous and infamous simultaneously
(19:43):
for decades. As for today, Hey Republican candidate for the
House from the Virginia seventh in your campaign photos, that's
a lovely wife and kids you've got there. Who's are they?
That's next? This is Countdown. This is Countdown, with Keith
(20:06):
Olberman still ahead of us on this edition of Countdown.
(20:29):
The Braves led the Mets three nothing in the top
of the eighth, then the Mets led the Braves six
to three in the bottom of the eighth, Then the
Braves led the Mets seven to six in the top
of the ninth. Then the Mets led the Braves eight
to seven in the bottom of the ninth, then won
the game to reach the playoffs. And it was rightly
considered one of the all time most exciting baseball games.
(20:50):
And it still doesn't reflect that games like that just
thirty years ago meant you were four wins away from
playing for its championship, playing in the World Series. Now
it's like a month from now. Is the thrill of
one game, the sort of artificial environment that creates a
game like that worth the continuing downsizing of what used
(21:13):
to be a stretch in which it felt like they
were playing the Super Bowl every day for ten days.
A reminiscence about going to see the Mets, the nineteen
sixty nine Mets in the World Series ahead in things
I promised not to tell first, there are still more
new idiots talk about the daily roundup of the Miss
Grant's morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens, who constitute today's
(21:39):
worse persons in the world. Worse Derek Anderson, former Green Beret,
now running for the House from the Virginia seventh. How
Annie Carney and Katie Edmondson the reporters got this through
The New York Times, deflavorizing and both sizzing machines. I
will never know. Maybe they deliberately wrote this boring opening line.
(22:05):
Wives are hitting the airwaves across the country. Three quarters
of readers were asleep before the second the in that sentence,
lives are hitting the airwaves across the But what the
Times reporters revealed in the story is that Republican candidate
(22:26):
Anderson in the Virginia seventh well quote, has posted footage
of him posing with a woman and her three daughters
in what looks like a photo that might be used
for an annual holiday card. In another scene filmed for
potential use in a campaign ad, mister Anderson is seated
around the dining room table with the same woman and
three girls, chatting and smiling. But the people are not relatives.
(22:49):
They are the wife and children of a longtime friend.
Mister Anderson, who announced this month that he was engaged,
does not have any children of his own. His campaign
website says he lives with his dog and does not
display any of the photos. Are you saying there's something
(23:09):
wrong with displaying photos of a man and his dog.
A spokesman for mister Anderson criticized the New York Times
decision to focus on the footage and said that Derek's
opponent and every other candidate in America are in similar
pictures and video with supporters of all kinds. The spokesman
said the video simply showed mister Anderson quote with female
(23:29):
supporters and their kids rent to kids. The guy got
rent to kids for a commercial like JV Vance got
to rent a dog like Trump got to rent a
third wife. Is there anybody anybody at all in the
Republican Party who is on the level anybody? Is it
(23:52):
just hucksters? Now? Is there anybody with any self respect? Okay,
I'll stop. We knew it the day Mitt Romney went
to dinner to beg Trump for a job. The answers
to my questions are no, no, no, no, and new
the runner up worser annie Lynskey. Hey, it's Annie Day.
Annie Lynskey works for the Wall Street Journal. They call
(24:15):
her a reporter. I would, but she's not. She's just
a bitter employee. Her job there is to take shots
at Joe Biden whenever she can, gratuitous, irrelevant, invariably quickly
disproven shots at Joe Biden. She was one of the
authors of the hit piece last spring about his health,
the one that only quoted Republicans and even then didn't
(24:38):
quote Kevin McCarthy of all people, saying he never saw
any slowness in the president, the one that the media
thinks they got right because Yeah, Biden withdrew from the
race because he was having trouble making public appearances. He
didn't slow down, hasn't slowed down as president. There's nothing
wrong with his presidency anyway. This Annie Lynskey is back
(25:02):
back before the Washington Post report, or the Washington Post
rather got rid of her. She was the reporter there
who mocked Biden. Quote walking through a graveyard, That was
Annie Lynsky quote. Biden goes to a church and walks
through a graveyard in Wilmington, as his legislative agenda is
dying in Washington. That was October third, twenty twenty one.
(25:24):
That was three years ago. At face value, it was
tasteless as it was, but annie Lynskey either didn't know
enough about her own job, or didn't care enough, or
did it deliberately one way or the other. She evinced
no knowledge that the graveyard in Wilmington was the one
in which the president's late son, and his late daughter
(25:44):
and his first wife are all buried. Well, yes, annie
Lynsky's back. Yesterday, Biden, suffering from a cold, became testy
when asked why he was in Delaware over the weekend
amid the storm. I understand she now works for a
fascist Murdock propaganda sheet. But what I will never understand
is and all the right wingers picked this up too,
(26:07):
thanks to people like annie Lynsky. How at her age,
she has not yet figured out that people record audio
and video of these things. I mean, I know that's new.
The handheld cassette tape recorder just came onto the market
in nineteen sixty six, and they didn't have walk bands
(26:28):
that you could hold in your hand and record anything
until like nineteen seventy nine, and that iPhone at brand
you can still have your new iPhone from two thousand
and seven. Here is the President of the United States
not becoming testy, even though Annie Lynsky lied that he
became testy.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Why byn't she and Vice President Harris Sharon Washington commanding
this just be had I was getting it.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
I was on the phone for at least two hours
yesterday in the day before as well.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
I commend this all the telephone. It's all my security.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
It's an order for the country to see.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
That's the President of the United States exit stage right,
closing the door on that idiot reporter. And I tried it.
I've been unable to reveal who that is. I'll get
it eventually. That is called Joe Biden calling out a
lie from a liar posing as a reporter. He didn't swear,
he didn't mock, he didn't become testy, he didn't shoot
(27:29):
the guy a dirty look. But what he also didn't
do was bow and curtsey to the guy or the
annie Lynskys of this world. And what you saw in
this story Biden became testy is half of the essence
of the problem with our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying news media.
The only things most of them really pay attention to
(27:52):
are when somebody in power makes them feel good, or
when they can make somebody in power feel bad. Say
something snotty and factually erroneous to the President of the
United States, as the reporter who asked that question did,
and if he's Biden and he doesn't defer to you,
and I know him a long time, he doesn't defer
(28:13):
to you, and so you then after he leaves, you
go take the opportunity to scurry back into your rat
hole and you tweet something mean about how testy he is.
You know who's testy here, Annie Lynsky, you're testy. Now.
If you say something like that about Trump, you'll get fired,
or if he's reelected, you'll have your new Trump journalism
(28:36):
license revoked. Annie, first offense, second offense, you go to
Trump journalistic re education camp. I hate people like this.
I hate them all. We could fire all the reporters
except for like the top three percent in this country
tomorrow and replace them either with the average sports reporter
(28:57):
or the average college senior or post grad student in
journalism in this country, and the quality ofjournalism in this
nation tomorrow first day would improve by five to ten percent. Immediately,
but the winner the worst. John Roberts, Chief Justice of
the United States of America. Oh, you want to tales right,
(29:21):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The anniversary is Thursday. It's forty
one years now. But the leaf Lever News podcast master
Plan mentioned this the other day. It's a memo to
Reagan advisor Fred Fielding. We used to work for a
friend of mine in the Nixon White House, Dean somebody.
It was from one of the young in this case,
twenty eight year old lawyers, one of the associates in
(29:42):
the Office of White House Counsel Under Reagan. There is
a proposal in the Senate in nineteen eighty three, as
this is written, a bill that would launch a constitutional
amendment to end lifetime appointments for federal judges and limit
them to ten years on the bench. Fielding is asked
for an analysis and advice because Reagan wants the Department
(30:04):
of Justice to publicly oppose the proposed amendment, because of
course he's coming up for election and the idea of
term limits or age limits was going to be really
bad for Ronald Reagan in nineteen eighty four. Yes, we
need somebody's less than two hundred and six or unf
President Reagan, I need to see you. But this kid
in the Council's office who's writing to Fred Fielding, he's
(30:25):
not so sure that this is that bad an idea.
This is what he wrote. The Justice report is similar
to other reports it has filed in recent years, and
I do not propose to object to it. I would
point out, however, that there is much to be said
for changing life tenure to a term of years without
possibility of reappointment. The Framers adopted life tenure at a
(30:49):
time when people simply did not live as long as
they do now. A judge insulated from the normal currents
of life for twenty five or thirty years was a
rarity then, but is becoming commonplace today. Setting a term
of say, fifteen years, would ensure that federal judges would
not lose all touch with reality through decades of Ivory
(31:13):
Tower existence. It would also provide a more regular and
greater degree of turnover among the judges. Both developments would,
in my view, be healthy ones. Denying reappointment would eliminate
any significant threat to judicial independence. The memos suggesting hey,
you know what, the federal judges and the Supreme Court
(31:34):
justices just aren't dying as fast as they used to.
Was sent to Reagan advisor Fred Fielding forty one years
ago Thursday by John Roberts, who, if it had been adopted,
would have retired this week as Chief Justice this week
in twenty twenty, like Thomas would have retired from the
(31:54):
bench of the Supreme Court in two thousand and six
Alito in twenty twenty one. Hell, if this had been
passed nine years from next week, we'd be having the
farewell party for Brett f and Kavanaugh. Don't bother to
b Yob, John, Always go with your first idea, Roberts
(32:17):
two days worst person. Hello, the number one story on
(32:38):
the Countdown now and it's my favorite topic. Me and
things I promised not to tell. I was ten years old,
and I'm not sure that this was the last week
that baseball was more important than nearly everything else in
this country. But if not, the chronology is pretty close
by legend in my hometown, Miss Barton had been standing
on Farragut Parkway when they decided to put the school
(33:00):
there in nineteen oh five, so they just built it
around her. In fact, she had only been at the
head of her homeroom since nineteen forty two, but for
us seventh graders of the year nineteen sixty nine, the
year nineteen forty two might as well have been a
date from the reign of Julius Caesar. Miss Barton was
friendly but formidable, and what if any connection she had
(33:25):
to the world outside school eluded us In retrospect, it
took a good deal of courage for me to have
handed her the note my mother had scribbled asking her
permission for me to miss school on October fifteenth, nineteen
sixty nine. She read it, and she looked up at
me with unalloyed shock, and I knew my plans were doomed.
(33:48):
And then she smiled broadly and warmly. It was not
the last time any of us sought, but it probably
was the first time we had seen her smile. You're
going to the World Series? Have you got an extra ticket?
They were all like that. Mister Madolinski, the science teacher,
(34:09):
who looked like nothing less than a proto Nathan Lane,
had not only accepted my carrying a transistor, radio and
an earphone into class, but he had periodically called on
me during science class for the score. Mister bub the
hard assed phized teacher who once fended off twenty seven
(34:29):
kids who tried to force him into the showers on
the last day of school, suggested that when I went
to Game four, I should bring a movie camera with
me and we could watch the highlights instead of Jim
whenever the film got back from the developers. The social
studies teacher, my favorite missus Rice, the first love of
(34:49):
my life, out did them all. She moved my chair
up next to the blackboard and turned a corner of
that blackboard into a makeshift scoreboard. Every half inning, and
in those days you could cram a lot of half
into your average seventh grade social studies class, not just
like one or two half innings. I would add a
(35:11):
digit to the line score Baltimore zero zero three, Mets
zero zero zero. My dad got somewhere two tickets for
Game four. It turned out to be the Tom Seaverer game.
It ended in JC Martin's bunt thrown away down the
first baseline by relief fitcher Pete Rickord of Baltimore, with
(35:33):
pinch runner Rod Gasbar of the Mets scoring the winning
run in the tenth I got to know all those
guys I sent Rod Gasbar some previously unseen photos of
him crossing the plate. He sent one back, autographed, inscribed Keith,
thanks for attending Game four of the nineteen sixty nine
World Series, Please drive home safely. My dad and I
(35:55):
in fact took the train in from Westchester. I think
we went first, at his insistence, to Barney's, which was
then exclusively a men's clothing store in Union's Square. That's
where I got my first adult style suit with a
tailor and everything. And then up to Times Square to
change trains, where we were nearly run over by the
(36:16):
Moratorium Day protesters. That was Moratorium Day, the first big
nationwide protest against the Vietnam War, October fifteenth, nineteen sixty nine.
We changed trains and then out to Chase Stadium by
the number seven. The seats on that perfect crystal day
were in distant left field, but I had brought my binoculars,
(36:37):
really my dad's, and they brought me into the game.
I could see the Commissioner of Baseball clearly, and stand
Musials sitting next to him, and sitting next to the
Mets dugout, and I could see the sweat on Tom
Seever's face as he delivered strike after strike and the
emotion I had when I got home that night, a
temporary Mets fan because the Orioles always beat up my Yankees,
(37:00):
that emotion was simple. Whatever else would happen in my life,
I had done it. I had been to a World
Series game. I was the envy of my classmates for months.
The previous school year, they had herded us all into
the vast Cobwebby auditorium at the top of the school
(37:23):
to watch Richard Nixon's first inauguration. Several times. They had
done the same thing for Gemini and the Pollo space launches,
but those had tangible, albeit to us vague connections to
you know, actual school work. The World Series, however, was
apparently more important than school work. It was more important
(37:46):
than school. I don't remember anything else that adults would
admit was more important than school all these years later,
and hearing those words world and Series still sends a
chill through me as reflexively as the loudest Pavlovian bell.
I could not have known then I was part of
the last generation to be so indoctrinated. I assumed it
(38:09):
had always been that way, and it always would be,
and it no longer is the twenty twenty two World
Series was the third worst rated in television history, not
quite as bad as twenty twenty one, which itself was
not quite as bad as twenty twenty. There's a myriad
of causes. I have about five hundred and seventeen more
(38:32):
television and streaming channels to choose from than I did
in October nineteen sixty nine. I mean, we didn't even
have the color TV yet in October nineteen sixty nine,
at least not an our house. I have at least
five times more TV channels than I did in October
two thousand and one. And similarly, baseball no longer dwarfs
the sports landscape, even just for the World Series. The
(38:54):
de nationalizing of baseball was symbolized by the presence of
two geographically homogeneous teams. Formerly a boon ratings now a curse.
This was the two thousand World Series, the Mets and
the Yankees, the dream of every New York sports fan,
(39:18):
and nobody cared outside of New York the beginning of
the end. Yet the underlying cost of baseball's malaise is that,
like me, the owners just assumed it would always be
the way it was in nineteen sixty nine. I had
an excuse for believing that I was ten. Their excuse
that mentally they're all ten is insufficient. All but a
(39:38):
few of the owners have failed to understand television in
any way other than as a revenue source. They have
never recognized its function as merchandising, even as a mechanism
for proselytizing. They didn't know about miss Barton and mister
Madolinsky and missus Rice, and they did not care about them.
They didn't know about the kids with their cheesy white
plastic earplugs and their scratchy transistor radios. They didn't cultivate
(40:02):
the tradition they had been given by their forebears in
the first half of the twentieth century. They let the
World Series become less important than schools, and less important
than the NBA, and less important than Taylor Swift. That's
what they needed. They needed to get Taylor Swift to
(40:24):
go with Travis Kelcey to that playoff game. It takes
a certain foresight to say to a television executive, no,
we can't play the whole World Series at night because
the kids won't be able to watch. We can't bend
to society and prime time and the other sports and demographics.
Because to do that is to lessen the obligation to
(40:48):
watch the World Series. We have to play some day games.
Here's some of the money back. It would take a
certain foresight and reproductive organs the size of I don't know,
fill in the analogy yourself. As evidenced by well everything.
(41:09):
Baseball owners don't have them or the foresight to plan
for the twelve inning of a game, let alone twelve
years from now. They did not write off the few
million less NBC would have paid them as seed money
for this. Instead, it's the World Series that has gone
to seed, sometimes being reduced to being the symbolic filler
between Fox's next two promos for this year's implausible sitcom.
(41:33):
As I've discussed here previously, Baseball's owners never noticed that
the separation and isolation of the two leagues had assured
that while the audience might be divided among the fans
of sixteen, then twenty, then twenty four then twenty six
different teams, it also meant that nearly all of them
also divided into two groups, American League fans and National
(41:55):
League fans, so that even if their quote own team
unquote was not in the World Series, they still had
a rooting interest in the World Series and a re
to watch to see their league win or, as in
my case as an American League fan when I was
ten years old, to see their league lose because it
was the Baltimore Orioles and they beat the crap out
of my Yankees. I was not rooting for the Mets
(42:17):
in the nineteen sixty nine World Series. I was rooting
against the hated Baltimore Orioles. TV usually takes the sole
blame when this subject is introduced, but I know from
my own experience when the executives who make the nuts
and bolts decisions about televising baseball seeing them actually do it,
(42:37):
that they have done everything but beg the owners to
return daylight to the series, and not just when the
games have to start at five pm Pacific for the
sake of the East Coast audience. One of my bosses,
Dick eversaw, the head of NBC Sports, sat there rejiggering
the first pitch times for one series. No, no tell, buddy,
(43:02):
he has to start Wednesday at eight thirty seven and
not eight o seven. He knows that we've got a
sitcom premiering on Wednesday. He told me about offering to
split the difference in the revenue lost because of a
late afternoon start on a Saturday. I told Buddy, think
of the future. He kept saying, think of the money.
(43:23):
It isn't just the sizzle, of course, there are now
severe problems with the stake as well. In Bob Costas's
memorable phrase, as my friend put it, the wild card
has indeed turned the series into the MLB Finals. The
viewers were way ahead of the Cognizani on this celebration
of mediocrity. Amid all the explanations for the ever plummeting ratings,
(43:43):
the simplest one inevitably gets bypassed. If you're scoring at home,
or even if you're just by yourself. This just isn't
very good baseball played by not really that good baseball teams.
Five hundred foot homers and no hitters with multiple pitchers
in them and seventeen strikeout games. They are impressed, But
(44:05):
if they happen every night, they take on the falsity
of the plot twists in pro wrestling, and in a
sports world full to overflowing with last second touchdowns, buzzer
beaters from the popcorn stand. All offense, all the time
is no longer enough to hide the fact that to
be watchable baseball has to be a balance of hitting
(44:25):
and pitching. In one year, the number of World Series
starting pitchers who lasted seven innings or more dropped from
nine to none. One day, all the runs in the
world next day, a no hitter. Same two teams, same
two lineups. In the old days, the pretenders, one dimensional
(44:48):
teams like last year's Phillies, were eliminated in the slow
but fair crucible of the regular season. If the best
team in baseball occasionally had a bad week and undeservedly
lost the World Series, that merely served to create endless
spodder for the off season, something for people to talk
about until March. Now the candidates for best team in
twenty twenty two. That was the Braves, the Dodgers, even
(45:10):
the Mets. They can be eliminated almost by chance at
two levels, even before they stagger into a sometimes anti
climactic World Series. There are now two nightmare scenarios for
the television ratings. If they had continued to decline at
the rate they did in the ten years after nineteen
ninety one, ratings for the World Series of twenty twenty
(45:33):
five would be about a tenth of what they were
in nineteen ninety one. The collapse slowed, however, great news
twenty twenty two ratings were one quarter what they had
been in nineteen ninety one. That they weren't one tenth
is the good news. It is no coincidence that the
(45:55):
three worst rated World Series of all times have all
occurred since twenty twenty. The regular season has already been
new to even the teams given new free stadiums are
beginning to fail. The owners know this, and they floated
an obvious solution. They added more wildcard teams. Throughout the
(46:21):
eighteen eighties, the nascent World Series it was called the
World's Championship Series. It was the World Series was mismanaged
completely from an instant attention grabber in eighteen eighty four
where the winners of the American Association and the National
League said, hey, we should have a series to determine
which of US's best. From that explosive big bang berth,
(46:44):
it was turned into an endless traveling freak show by
eighteen eighty seven. In eighteen eighty seven, they played best
eight out of fifteen, and they kept playing it in
different cities. It wasn't just the two cities of the
two teams in it, Detroit and Saint Louis. The eighteen
eighty seven World Series was played in ten different cities,
(47:05):
and the denumont of labor wars and over expansion came
in eighteen ninety. The eighteen ninety World Series pitted the
Louisville Cyclones, who had risen from worst to first in
the American Association, which was a major League, against the
Brooklyn Bridegrooms, who had won the American Association pennant the
year before eighteen eighty nine, and then the franchise just
(47:28):
jumped into the National League for eighteen ninety and won
that pennant. There were storylines of plenty, but so full
of rancor and devoid of talent was the eighteen ninety
World Series that, even though the host Brooklyn Bridegrooms entered
Game seven leading Louisville three games to two, Game three
had been a tie, they needed just two more wins
(47:48):
for the title. The crowd the crowd for that game
Game seven of the World Series in Brooklyn three hundred fans.
Louisville then tied the series in that game three wins
apiece and a tie, and they would need a decisive
eighth game and the rest of the series, and they
(48:12):
never played it. They abandoned the World Series tied three
and three and one quote. There is scarcely enough interest
in the series, noted a writer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.
To induce the people to read the scores. The most
(48:38):
frightening part about that quote that's from eighteen ninety. I
felt that way the last three octobers during the World Series.
The world has made itself over a thousand times. Since
that sobering revolt by the board against the boring baseball's
resiliency reminds us that the World Series broadcast might still
(49:01):
inspire another generation wearing not transistor plugs but buds hooked
up to a live stream. Or like that unhappy eighteen
ninety classic, the whole thing could wind up getting canceled,
and this time it'll be canceled by TV executives. I've
(49:33):
done all the damage I can do here. Thank you
for listening. We're now back to five episodes a week,
posting nightly just after midnight Easter. Once again, there is
a Monday countdown and tell the others. Please send this
podcast to somebody who does not listen yet but could
benefit from my analysis of stuff. Brian Ray and John
Phillip Shanelle, the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced, and
(49:57):
performed most of our music. Mister Schanale handled orchestration and keyboards.
Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums. It was
produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and fifty musical comments
are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faus.
The sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two,
written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy of ESPN Inc. Other
(50:18):
music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
My announcer today was my friend John Dean. Everything else
was as usual, pretty much my fault. That's countdown for today.
Five weeks until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the
one three hundred and sixty fifth day since convicted felon
(50:39):
drooling Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected
government of the United States. Use the election, use the
mental health system, use presidential immunity if we have to
to keep him from doing it again. Wow, we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news requires.
(50:59):
Until then, I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(51:21):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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