February 17, 2025 • 66 mins
SEASON 3 EPISODE 99: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: There's a small problem (naturally) that Trump overlooked (of course) when he misquoted (evergreen) the probably-apocryphal (saw that coming) Napoleon quote "He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
The problem should be obvious.
What if I think I'm saving my country FROM Trump?
What if you think you are saving your country FROM Trump?
Set aside for a moment the implicit stochastic call to terrorism or just law-breaking from Trump to his supporters. What about his message to them? Us? You? Me?
Did he just indemnify all of us?
Seems kind of dangerous. On the other hand, seems like something that somebody who has slipped fully into a delusion of universal support would say.
The implications are, like Trump and Musk, just staggering.
ALSO WHY IT'S TIME FOR A NEWS BOYCOTT OF THE WHITE HOUSE: Again, I don't have enough space or words to tell you how much this won't happen, but the response to the White House attempt to dictate what the Associated Press gets to write (and open the path to telling you what YOU get to write) should be obvious and unanimous: don't send any reporters to the White House or Air Force One until the AP is restored. And I'm sure The Washington Vichy Post and The New York Bothsidesist Times and CNN (Certainly Not News) will be right out front.
On the other hand, there IS a good media pushback idea: A Democratic Shadow Press Secretary,.
B-Block (31:25) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Some Dominican voters in Reading, PA, who according to the Mayor there voted for Trump because they just assumed when he said he'd deport "illegals" he'd give them amnesties because they're good people. Mark Zuckerberg is back, suppressing ads for the ever-controversial (checks notes) Invictus Games. And Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen praise the "masculinity" of Musk and Trump even though the four of them don't have enough masculinity to fill up a thimble.
C-Block (40:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: A confession. I didn't lie when I said why I discontinued the 2016-17 GQ Series "The Resistance." Nor did I tell the entire truth. I will now. It involves a threat against me, an inadvertent meeting with old SportsCenter friends, a deep hatred of the topic of Trump, and the firing of a loyal colleague.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. He
who saves his country does not violate any law? Trump Saturday,
(00:32):
And what about if you believe this country must be
saved from Trump? It will never occur to Trump, it
will never occur to a vast majority of his culture,
will never occur even to a vast majority of commentators
on both sides, American and Trumpist. But in posting that
(00:52):
misquote of a probably apocryphal Napoleon quote, Trump has provided
an excuse to ignore the law. For anybody who hates
sim there can be no doubt Trump only thought, he
who saves his country does not violate any law would
(01:13):
apply to him, would inspire those who wish to act
on his behalf. That is how crazy Trump really is.
That's how far he has traveled from reality, traveled further
from reality since the election. Because implicit in Trump's statement
is the simple reality that you can never prove the
negative here, that you can never prove you saved your country.
(01:34):
You just have to really really believe it, or have
others believe it. And for every single person who thinks
Trump saved or is saving or will save this country,
there is at least one other American who thinks this
country has been saved, or is being saved or will
(01:55):
be saved from Trump, and to tell all of them
that they are not violating any law because they all
believe they are saving this country. That way lies the
wild West. Certainly, the media has exclusively treated Trump's post
(02:18):
as if it applies, even in his warped, dead mind,
only to him and to his supporters. The New York
Times actually wrote the story up yesterday and came as
close as ever it has to saying that might have
been a stochastic call to terrorism on Trump's behalf, but
the Times didn't, and nobody else is considering the broader context.
(02:42):
What if you believe this country must be saved from Trump?
What if you believe you must save this country from Trump? Well,
apparently Trump just gave you the thumbs up. He who
saves his country does not violate any law. I never
done in that. Trump has now gone from the reality
(03:03):
of November fifth. He got forty nine point eight percent
of the vote. Everybody else got a combined fifty point
two percent of the vote. He is a minority president.
He went from that reality to this state of madness
in which he can rationalize breaking any law and quoting
Napoleon by merely claiming he has saved or is saving
(03:27):
or will save the country, whichever suits him best at
the current moment. It's like the wall. What does he
need to be true right now? I built it already, No,
I'm building it now, No I will build it. To
say saving the country rationalizes and legalizes any act would
be a stretch if you said it while you had, say,
(03:50):
roughly one hundred percent support. Spoiler alert, he doesn't have
one hundred percent support. His opinion poll approval numbers, which
were higher than usual but still sucked, have since decreased,
especially among young voters, and as they have decreased, his
madness has increased. Still. If you need any indicator of
(04:12):
what he intends to do next, he has just told
you in that sentence everything attempt to stay in power
past twenty twenty nine, stop elections if need be, arrest
political opponents or worse, and most obviously ignore all laws.
And in the last week he has somehow ratcheted this
(04:33):
up because the now unambiguously declared lawlessness of he who
uh what is the quote again? He who smelt it
dealt it nah nah, sorry, He who saves his country
does not violate any law that has been translated into
other languages and offered up by Trump by a musk
to Germany's new Nazis and to Russia's old dictator by
(04:57):
Trump himself. And it has been shouted at our allies
and our fellow democracies in Europe by the Vice President
of I mister Vance and his functional IQ equivalent of
that of a houseplant on a front porch in Fostoria, Ohio.
So now it's not just as if Trump were trying
(05:18):
to destroy America on behalf of another country. It is
as if Trump were trying to destroy mankind on behalf
of another planet. While Trump was destroying the Justice Department
and turning Emil Beauve Beauvet Bloviator, whatever his name is,
(05:39):
into the world's oldest legal prostitute in the Eric Adams case,
while he and Eric Adams each wound up shackled to
a corpse each other. While Trump was loosening the pestilence
that is RFK Junior on health in this country and
loosing this illiterate clown who used to be missus wrestling
on the education system in this country, and while he
was firing three hundred nuclear safety staffers because he was
(06:01):
too stupid to realize they were the people who protected
the national nuclear stockpile. And then he turned out to
be even more too stupid, and he no longer had
a way to contact them at home and on fire them.
While Trump was showing just how majestically stupid he is,
while he was proving he who saves time in a
bottle does not have an opener nearby. While Trump was
(06:24):
doing that himself, his gang of deputy Furres, Vance, Rubio
and hegseeth, we're doing their impressions of Neville Chamberlain, actually
doing their Nevil Chamberlain impressions in Munich, trying to set
out Ukraine, trying to set out Europe, trying to serve Putin,
trying to encourage China, and in the case of the
(06:47):
desperately dysfunctional, cloudy brained Vance, try to make the world
safe for men to wear eyeliner and have a beard.
Who in the hell is JD Vance? To explain in
Europe that Europe needs to be more fascist, and in
being more fascist, to claim that it's free speech and
(07:11):
it's trusting in the pillars of their own democracies. Oh,
I know, he's vice president of the United States. Spiro
Agnew was vice president of the United States. John Calhoun
was vice president of the United States. JD. Vance works
for the world's leading purveyor of democracy destruction. JD Vance
(07:35):
is Donald Trump's whore. And we don't know who Donald
Trump is a whore for. But if you are now
or if you have ever been agnostic, Donald Trump is
the best evidence you have seen in your lifetime that
there really is a satan. He who saves his country
(07:56):
does not violate any law. Great, brilliant, very helpful. If
it has ever crossed Trump's mind, it and its little
feet echoing thunderously in that otherwise empty gold, rustolium covered space.
(08:16):
Just how many million Americans currently think that they are
supposed to save this country right now from him? Make
sure they know the President of the United States just
gave them a pass. You think you are in the
process of saving the country? You follow your star kid,
(08:40):
You do not violate any law. So what if you're
just another nut job with a crazy dream. When they
arrest you, you just say, but the President said, I
does not violate any laws. Less explosively about this dumbest
(09:00):
thing Trump has ever said, and maybe of more immediate
importance about this dumbest thing Trump has ever said, you
need to save the country from me, Go ahead, You're
not violating any law. Maybe of more immediate importance about
this moronic statement. The Democratic National Committee delegate David Atkins
(09:24):
notes that Trump's post from Saturday, he who saves his
country does not violate any law, should be used as
evidence in every court filing against Trump and against the
Doge scammers, and against Musk, and in the Eric Adams case,
and in everything that he hasn't even done yet but will.
(09:45):
In this context, it is the dumbest thing Trump has
ever said, because it shows foreknowledge of intent to break
the law. Because this sweeping madness doesn't just encourage assassins,
it also encourages hacking by Musk employees who answer to
names like Big Balls or the fop of the country,
(10:07):
the father of the country. Oh that's Elon Musk. Twelve
kids with four different women counting the newest claim by
the fascist nitwit who calls herself Ashley Saint Clair. By
the way, that appears to be her real name. Ashley
Saint Clair says she just welcomed Musk's newest spawn five
months ago. The update on this is now she's apparently
(10:30):
hinting it was via IVF or, as the fertility experts
call it, the driverless car of procreation. I mean, I'm
sure Musk will bring this child to the White House soon,
because when he does it, it's cute, it's humanizing. If a
woman did that, if Lauren Bobert did that, or if
(10:52):
Nancy Mace had twelve kids with four different men, or
if say, instead of Elon Musk doing that with the
kid in the Oval office, Ben Carson had done that,
or Ben Carson had had twelve kids with four different women,
they would be run out of Maga by Maga. When
Musk does it, they all bark like seals, like South
(11:15):
African apartheid friendly seals, and they do features on the
suit the kid was wearing, and they imply that the
suit proves Musk is not just a reanimated skeleton with
botox stretched over its skull. He who's saving all my
love for you does not violate any law. Incidentally, the
(12:08):
original version of he who saves his country does not
violate any law. Was I'm not gonna pay a lot
for this muffler or for this copy of the Washington Post.
In the front runner for the twenty twenty five annual
Hutzpa Award. This headline appeared in the Washington Post yesterday.
(12:30):
Quote as Musk reshapes the government, some ask where are
the guardrails? The White House has taken advantage of rules
with weak enforcement and loopholes, or simply declared it can
outweigh other laws. Lisa Rhyan then goes on at length
about the guardrails, without ever mentioning the roles of Jeff
(12:53):
Bezos and Will Lewis and the other British ass hats
brought in to neuter the Post in removing all the
guardrails there and replacing them with ones made out of
paper mache. Lisa Rhyne Lisa Rain Lisa R. E. I n,
by the way, is identified in her Washington Post bio
(13:16):
that the byline links to Lusie. She quote covers federal
agencies and the management of government in the Biden administration unquote.
And if that doesn't tell you everything you need to
know about the Washington Post at the moment, I don't
know what does covers federal agencies in the management of
government in the Biden administration. How the hell should just
(13:38):
get a byline? Then? I mean management failing to update
you know what what president this is? That's one thing,
it's the post. But the author herself never looks. Come on,
not to be outdone. The New York Times offers this
both sides, just headline. Still still they're doing this. Still,
(14:00):
the evidence mounts that somebody is blackmailing Joe con Or
the Selisburg News analysis. Trump officials attack a German consensus
on Nazis and speech. Vice President J. D. Vance and
Elon Musk have challenged decades long approaches to political extremism
that were designed to prevent another Hitler. They won't even
(14:23):
say in the headline that the Germans were posed to Nazis.
The consensus on Nazis and speech. I wonder where they've
they been four or against since the country was destroyed.
I don't remember. The Times doesn't remember. Consensus challenged extremism
prevent Vance and Musk on the same field trip as
(14:46):
this Schlong covered in brill cream Hegseth. Vance and Musk
sided publicly with Germany's new Nazis as critical elections loom
in Germany. They didn't attack a consensus. They sided did
with New Nazis. They're trying to influence the election in
(15:08):
favor of the New Nazis, and nobody here is even
publicly humiliating them for this. And I mean, just leave
the politics of it out for a moment, leave the
horrific pro fascism of it out for a moment, Just
humiliate them. Musk and Dvance about their appearance starts simply
(15:30):
with basic insults that everybody can understand. Pull off those Oh,
we can't say terrible things about what they look like.
This is war. You can throw out an insult about
Musk's dead eyes and how Vance overcame his own dead
eyes apparently by using Danessa Myrik's beauty line work paintbrush, fluid,
(15:52):
liquid eyeliner. A little more materially on the subject of media,
or what's left of it, we need a goddamned new
use boycott of this White House until the Associated Press
is fully reinstated. There I'll reuse this line from previous episodes.
(16:14):
I have neither the time nor enough words to tell
you how much this isn't going to happen. It could
cost news organizations ten or twelve dollars each. They would
never spend ten or twelve dollars each on a principle,
but still in my dreams, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBCABCCBSNPR,
(16:38):
all of them need to withdraw their reporters from covering
Trump and to stop covering Trump on their broadcasts, to
in fact use only the Associated Press coverage of Trump
until the Gibbels division of the Trump administration backs off
its attempts to crack the door open to controlling what
all reporters say and write, and then ultimately what you
(17:03):
say and write if you are unfamiliar. Trump insists the
Gulf of Mexico, which has been called that since at
least fifteen point fifty, is now the Gulf of America,
because Trump does not know that he who saves the
cost of reprinting all the maps, does not violate any law.
(17:28):
The Associated Press said, this is bullshit. The White House
then said the Associated Press reporters were banned from the
White House until it did change the name of the
Gulf of Mexico because Trump said so, and he is
the law here. Now. The media solidarity the upside to
(17:50):
that liberal monolith that rupert I was senile before senile
was cool. Murdoch believes exists the media solidarity in defense
of the AP. The Reuter's wire service says it quotes
stands with the Associated Press in objecting to coverage restrictions
imposed by the White House. Reuter stands with the AP,
(18:13):
But of course not next to it is Reuters refusing
to send a reporter to the White House. No. The
White House Correspondence Association, its latest president is one of
the conventional wisdom morons from Politico. It says this is
unacceptable and its response is to resolutely do nothing about it.
(18:35):
Axios did the most axios thing possible, showing absolutely no
sense that if the White House can punish AP, it
cansures how punish weaklings like Axios. Axios issued a statement saying, quote,
the AP and all news organizations should be free to
report as they see fit. And if that line in
the sand isn't shallow enough, Axios found its own solution,
(18:59):
quoting again, our standard is to use Gulf of America,
renamed by US from Gulf of Mexico. Absolute clowns, possibly
the greatest distance between how they are viewed in this
country and in the media of this country. Axios, and
(19:20):
how they think of themselves. The names are Van der
Hie and Allan, They ares Fops, Fops, they think they
are Pulitzer and Hearst. And still other news outlets have
done worse than Axios. Other news outlets have said nothing.
(19:43):
Hold on, I'll correct myself on that. The Atlantic has
now published a piece with an amazing headline worse than nothing.
The Gulf of America is the wrong fight to pick.
Jelad Edelman writes that quote. It draws attention away from
his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the
(20:04):
rule of law. And it's a fight that the AP
probably should never have picked in the first place. What
you have just witnessed in one and one half sentences
from mister Edelman is called the shifting of the Overton window.
We are no longer arguing about whether psychotic bullies should
be able to dictate what news organizations right and what
(20:26):
terms and names they may use, but how often and
under what circumstances. And more broadly, we are no longer
arguing whether Trump should run rough shod over the laws
and customs that have been the only thing holding this
country together. For two and a half centuries. We're now
arguing over which laws and customs he can run rough
shod and which ones we should bother to defend. To
(20:51):
quote Angela Lansbury as missus John Yerke's Iceland in the
Manchurian Candidate, what are they saying? Are they saying are
there any Communists in the Defense Department? No, of course not.
They're saying how many Commune his star there in the
Defense Department? And the Atlantic just helped the media continues
(21:13):
to collapse like a poorly built house of cards. I
like to think a house of cards made from the
deck that they use in the Manchurian Candidate. I don't
think there's any question of it now. Whatever combination of
blackmail and plain old fear of making only thirty seven
billion this year, not forty seven billion that caused the
Washington Post and Facebook and the others to fold under
(21:35):
the slightest possible pressure. It's clearly at work at the
New York Times too. That piece I mentioned before about Hitler. Oh,
we've hurt the consensus about Hitler. We won't say what
the consensus was. We might offend Hitler. He might be
still reading somewhere somebody at the New York Times is
being pressured. A Times guest op ed Trump might have
(22:00):
a case on birthright citizenships the venue for the Peace,
and that qualifier might makes you think, well, this must
be something from a neutral writer or source. Of course
it isn't. It's a piece that could have run on
Fox News, or maybe it's stupid enough for Gateway Pundit.
Two authors, both lawyers, One argued to the Supreme Court
(22:21):
that Obamacare was unconstitutional and the other one is worse,
an anti COVID vaccine nut lawyer and Fourteenth Amendment originalist
whose argument boils down to the belief that Trump expressed
again yesterday, that the Fourteenth Amendment only applied to and
thus should now only apply to X slaves, all those
(22:45):
ex slaves in the country at the moment. That's who
the Fourteenth Amendment applies to, not anybody else. This is
in the New York Times. Trump might have a case
on declaring himself emperor. I'm sorry I was reading ahead.
Of course. Eventually, all of the spineless, weasel news outlets
(23:06):
who act like this do get hoisted on their own petard.
When ABC settled Trump's nuisance lawsuit. I said it was
a legal bribe. When CBS reportedly began to debate settling
Trump's nuisance suit against them, I said that would be
a legal bribe too well. A Wall Street Journal now
reports that the CBS owner, Paramount Quote, is wrestling with
(23:29):
Weather to settle Trump's lawsuit against its CBS News unit,
and how it might do so without exposing executives to
future legal threats such as accusations of ribery. Told you so,
But wait, there's more. Paramount executives Quote in recent weeks
(23:50):
have talked about the risk that paying such a settlement
could expose directors and officers to liability in potential future
shareholder litigation. Were criminal charges for bribing a public official
and an additional concern that such litigation and here's the
(24:12):
telling point, an additional concern that such litigation may not
be protected by director and officer insurance. Oh how rich.
It has only just occurred to them that by bribing
a president they might be charged with bribery, and worse,
(24:34):
that their insurance might not cover either the bribe or
the resultant lawsuits from stockholders who don't want to pay
the money. Wait until somebody reminds them that theoretically paying
blackmail to Trump will only encourage him to blackmail them again.
(24:58):
I can't leave you in this state of depression. There's
actually a media note that is oddly an unexpectedly encouraging.
The ex Republican strategist and comm's specialist, Sherry Jacobis, has
a really really good idea low effort, low danger, high
(25:19):
yield idea. She has been suggesting for a while that
the Democrats should hold a daily press briefing on Capitol Hill,
appoint a kind of shadow press secretary, giving an alternate
White House press briefing the Democratic press briefing. Name a
(25:42):
Democratic press secretary, give him a staff, and have him
or her hold a daily news conference. Last week I
said AOC should do this every Sunday morning, so she
could own that news cycle Sunday and Monday and control
the Sunday news shows. But this is better. Somebody suggested
Pete Buddhajeedge as Democratic press secretary, and that's gold too.
(26:08):
You could have guests show up at the press conference,
but the week should be the work week for the
press secretary, the Democratic press secretary. And by the way,
the competition would be the actual White House Press Secretary,
the former center fielder of Saint Anselm College softball. But
(26:30):
the week for the Democratic Press Secretary should be not
Monday through Friday, but Sunday through Thursday. It should start
at eight am at Sunday. You would own the Sunday
shows now and forever own the news cycle on Sundays.
(26:53):
Also of interest here on this all new edition of
Countdown a Confession, why I really killed the twenty sixteen
seventeen GQ video commentary series The Resistance. It's not exactly
what I told you previously. None of that was untrue,
but there was more to it. More importantly, the explanation
(27:14):
pertains to what it says now about exhaustion in the
battle against the forces of President Pimp. He who saves
his country does not violate any law. Okay, I got
the message. Thanks, thanks, thanks for giving me immunity. He
who saves his country does not violate any law. Well,
(27:35):
I was going to do the rest of this podcast,
but I'm off to save my country first. The confession
that's next. This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith
old Woman just going ahead. In this all new edition
(28:12):
of Countdown a Confession, the real reason I discontinued the
GQ video series The Resistance in twenty seventeen. Actually it
is four reasons and why this is relevant to the
subtext to our current nightmare, the fact that everybody fighting
these American fascists so goddamn tired. Next on things I
promise not to tell first, believe it or not, there's
(28:35):
still more new idiots to talk about. The daily roundup
of the misgrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who
constitute today's other worse persons in the world Brons worse residents,
some not all, of Redding, Pennsylvania. This is from the
New Republic reading Pennsylvania voters. There seventy percent Latino. They
(29:00):
moved sixteen points towards Trump last year over twenty twenty
sixteen points. The Democrats still won the town, nevertheless, as
the Republic rights the New Republic. Indeed, that led some
Dominicans to develop a particularly hopeful view of Trump. Some
came to believe that when Trump talked about not wanting
(29:23):
quote illegals in the country, he was really telegraphing that
he might pursue some sort of amnesty for the undocumented
who don't merit removal. Amnesty, the mayor of the town,
mister Moron said, is something they fondly associate associate with
(29:44):
a Republican president due to Ronald Reagan's nineteen eighty six
immigration reform bill. A lot of Dominicans believed that could happen.
Moron told me, speaking of hopes for Trump amnesty, I
heard that one too many times. They thought the Leopards
were going to grant them amnesty because Reagan did thirty
(30:08):
eight years earlier. It's nice to know people are alike
all over. The runner up wor Sir Mark Zuckerberg again
said it before, I'll say it again. Whatever Trump has
on him, it is a dilly Facebook refused to allow
ads local ads boosted posts for the Invictus Games. You
(30:33):
know what the Invictus Games are. You've seen this right.
Everybody has an opinion about Prince Harry, I suppose except me,
But whatever you think of him, one of the things
he's done with his time over the years is to
establish a kind of Olympics for injured athletes, many of them,
(30:53):
perhaps a majority, wounded soldiers who wanted to continue continue
in sports despite the most horrific of injuries and whose
success comes in their decision not to stop. The Vancouver
Ad Agency the Invictus Games this year were in Vancouver.
Running these boosted posts on Facebook was told quote, these
(31:19):
ads can't run because it is about social issues, elections,
or politics. But you have not authorized your account to
run ads with political content. You will either need to
have an authorized page admin place this ad, or go
through the authorization process yourself. As part of the authorization's process,
all page admins and advertisers who want to run these
(31:42):
ads must enable two factor authentication and verify their identity
and location. The page admin must also link ad accounts
used for political content to the page and create an
approved disclaimer to show who is paying for ads. Once
you have become authorized, you can go back to the
(32:02):
ads creation interface and select social issues, elections, or politics
from the special ad category section during campaign creation. In
other words, you can't advertise Prince Harry's Invictus Games because
that's politics and elections and social issues because apparently somebody
(32:25):
somewhere thinks it's controversial to have injured ex servicemen competing
in the one mile run. Facebook is no longer fact
checking President Pimp, but it is requiring a line by
line detailing of where the money is coming from to
promote an international sporting event celebrating people who have achieved
(32:46):
athletic greatness despite getting their limbs blown off. Delete your
Facebook account today. It is as compromised as Elon Musk,
but our winners Jim Van de High and Mike Allen
of a This was written under their bylines. Trump and
(33:11):
Elon Musk, arguably the two most unorthodox and influential American
leaders of the twenty first century, are practicing and fine
tuning a fused theory of governing power masculine maximalism. I'll
just read that again, masculine maximalism. Why it matters. Trump
(33:35):
and Musk believe powerfully in maximalist action and language, which
is being carried out by strong, mostly white men as blunt,
uncompromising instruments to prove new limits both to power and
what's possible. I'm still stuck back here on the idea
that somebody in the world thinks that Trump and Musk
are masculine, not only masculine, but define masculine maximalism. You
(34:01):
mean weight Trump, masculine Musk, the Pillsbury dough boy, Trump
three hundred pounds of shit in a two hundred pounds
suit and hair and skin dyed with Restolium. Axios I
mentioned earlier has already sold out to Trump a thousand
times thinks as the founders do Alan and vanda Hi
(34:26):
that they are Pulitzer and Hurst. Just now they caved
by renaming the Gulf of Mexico quote Gulf of America
renamed by us from Gulf of Mexico, which just flows
off the tongue and really makes an article sing, while
insisting that by doing that they were maintaining journalism and independence.
(34:47):
And Jim Vandahi and Mike Allen of Axios and by
the way, masculine maximism them. Look, I will never claim
ever to be Captain Beefcake over here, but have you
ever seen Mike Allen in Jim van Hi masculine maximalism?
(35:12):
This is as dumb as calling Musker Trump masculine band
Hi and Alan today's other worst persons in the world. JD.
Vans's mathles finally to the number one story on the
(35:40):
Countdown and Things I Promised not to tell and a confession.
This is about the video series I used to do
for GQ dot com. First, it was called the Closer.
It was supposed to be the closer argument in the
twenty sixteen presidential election. We all know how ineptly named
(36:01):
I named it. Then it became the Resistance, which kind
of took off. One of the Resistance videos was interacted
with fifty four million times on Facebook in late twenty
sixteen and early twenty seventeen, and an independent Internet kind
of thing evaluating interactions between people and say Keith ol
(36:24):
Ruman videos determined and was quoted by CBS News as
indicating that that was the most interacted political thing on
Facebook in the entire year after the election. So the
GQ series, which was ultimately referred to as the Resistance
and got I forget how many one hundred million views
(36:45):
in total now, was something of a success until I
suddenly canceled it. I have told truths about why it
was canceled, but they have all been half truths. And
in the spirit of there are no more f's left,
let alone fs that I want to get, I think
(37:05):
I ought to fill in the complete story because it's
a little bit more complicated that I let on at
the time, and it is apropos of the current moment
as well. With so many of us struggling to fight back.
Now that our worst realizations and dreams have come together,
we are seeing all the things we said might happen,
(37:27):
all happening all at once, and we have brilliant responses.
Like the Washington Post, after a year of not being
anything resembling the guardrail it was supposed to be, writing
an article actually headlined what happened to the guardrails? You
ate them, Jeff Bezos, or you turn them into plastic
(37:47):
and use them on your girlfriend. Sorry for the analogy,
and more importantly for the imagery, but here's the point.
I was doing about three commentaries a week, usually for GQ,
and we did them, recorded them Monday afternoons, took one
(38:08):
trip down there. I got no money for it, except
for some charitable donations to dog charities and carfare, and
initially it was only carfare in one direction. I swear
to God, the Conde Nast people were so cheap at
the beginning. They only gave me carfare and uber in
one direction. You didn't have to give me any money.
(38:28):
There's no insurance required. Therefore, you don't have to send
a car for somebody, which is why TV organizations and
other video organizations and news organizations send cars for people
because they are liable for them insurance wise. But of
course if you're not paying the guy anything, if there's
no real contract, there's no insurance. I digress. Eventually the
thing began to make money, even though we were not
(38:49):
doing it for money, and I'll give Conde Nass credit
for this. They were not doing it for money either,
but it did make money. Those pre roll ads on YouTube,
just those generated something like a million dollars for Conde Nast,
and we didn't have to do anything other than hire
a teleprompter once a week so I could record three
of them. One that was kind of news of the
(39:11):
day for Monday release in the afternoon, something else that
would go on Wednesday, and then a third one that
would run Thursday or Friday that tended to be a
little bit more philosophical or predictive towards events later in
the week. The system worked fairly well, and I'm not
sure it was going to The real benefit I got
out of it, other than venting my spleen was the
fact that I was dressed by the head of styling
(39:33):
for men for GQ magazine, and I have never looked
better in my life. And the suits that he gave
me are still in fashion, and some of them were
ahead of their time. And his advice about how I
should dress was the first not only good advice I'd
ever gotten, but the first definitive advice. I literally put
on the suit that he suggested, and the narrow tie
(39:55):
he suggested, and the narrow lapels, never having thought for
a moment that these things mattered at all. And I
looked at myself on the video and I went, hey,
when did I lose twenty five pounds? Okay, so we'd
go down there and record these and I believe they
have had some value. I think they had value to me,
and if that fifty four million number was accurate in
any way, they had value to you. And then one
(40:16):
day I stopped them. Well, there's a backstory to it.
It was speculated at the time that I had been
threatened or blackmailed, that I had been as Jeff Bezos
has been, or Mark Zuckerberg had been, likely the victim
of somebody coming to me and saying, hey, remember that
time that you did this, Well, we have pictures of it. Unfortunately,
(40:37):
in one respect, my life has largely been totally dull
and has not included anything that pictures of them would
make any difference, or anybody would go, that's appalling, We're
going to put you in jail. We're going to sue you.
People would go, that's it, that's what you spent your
life doing. So it wasn't that. But there were other
(41:00):
psychological components, and again they come to bear now on
me as they did then, and as they are doing
in an extraordinary almost epidemic level with those fighting back
against trump fascism and Elonnodziism right now. There is a
(41:20):
weariness abroad in the land on top of everything else.
And you know it, and I do know it. We're
not just afraid, mortified, depressed. We're tired. All I wanted
to do after the election was retire from this, or
maybe do one commentary a month or something like that,
(41:41):
or I don't know, do a dog series of podcasts
or a sports series of podcasts, or no podcasts at all.
I've been on the air or online or on microphone
pretty much every day since nineteen seventy five. I still
have many things to say, but frankly, I'd rather not
(42:02):
say most of them. And you've heard most of them already. Okay,
One day in the summer, I think the early summer
of twenty seventeen, I was sitting with my two dogs,
then the two dogs the two girls in a little
part of Central Park near the mall, near the Bethesda Fountain,
(42:28):
where we used to all congregate, all of us who
had small dogs. And there were twelve or fifteen humans
and twenty or twenty five dogs, and they'd mix and
match at various times of the day, but always on
the weekend there'd be a late crowd in the afternoon somewhere.
And one day we had almost everybody in this little
cleiku together, and we were sitting there minding our own business,
and I was saying something to one of my dogs
(42:49):
or one of my neighbors. And a guy, a creepy
looking guy in his late twenties, early thirties, and this
woman with him, with her head bowed like she was
out of the handmaid's tail, only she'd left her hat
at home, wouldn't look up, make eye contact with anybody.
And this guy is just walking ten or twelve feet
in front of this gaggle of ten or twelve people
(43:10):
and then twenty or so dogs and he stops and
he goes, wait, you're Keith Olderman, and I said yes,
there's no point in denying it, and he went, kill
yourself now. Several other people around me gasped when they
heard this, and I went, here we go. And he
went on about Trump this and Trump that. We got
into a shouting match, and I told him I'd see
(43:31):
him at the impeachments and he'd have a nice time
in hell. And the woman got her head bowed further down.
If it had been any lower, she would have been
a contortionist with her head between her knees. But the
guy kept saying, no, really, you should go home and
kill yourself right now. And several of my friends who
were not at all versed in the history of my
(43:55):
experiences with listeners, viewers, people who sent me fake anthrax,
Dodger fans who called into CANX radio in nineteen eight
complaining that I referred to a Dodger player as a loafer,
so they were going to come down to the studio
and cut out my tongue. They didn't understand that, whereas
this was always going to be a disturbing thing, it
was not necessarily something I needed to call the cops about.
(44:18):
I was prepared to have a fight with the guy
if need be, and I was prepared to get at
hell out of there if need be, and I was
prepared to, if necessary, call the cops. But I didn't
gauge this. This was a bully who was trying to
impress himself that he was saying. So I gave as
good as I got and he staggered off and the
woman behind him, and I just thought, flee, madam, flee.
(44:41):
And I was thinking about this on the way home
with the dogs, not about me, but about the dogs,
because these people, the Trump people, are the kind of
people who would try to hurt somebody like me by
hurting the dogs. Simply put, they're bullies. They have very
little connection to reality, and they certainly have no empathy
(45:03):
or human understanding. And as many dog lovers as there
are inside the right wing, these are the same people
who believe in taking care of their dogs and the
dogs they rescue, as opposed to all dogs, regardless of
the denomination of the humans connected to them. And I
(45:23):
thought about that for a while, and I said, that's
how bad this situation really is. Coincidentally, two or three
league weeks later, after doing those two or three commentaries
every week for GQ, I was in the Apple store
nearest my home in Manhattan, and somehow or another, as
I walked in, I walked into just the optimum moment
(45:43):
where the floor manager, who was the oldest guy in
the building somewhere in his forties, stopped me and said,
mister Alderman, welcome, Can I help you? And it quickly
was revealed that he had grown up on the West coast,
San Francisco Bay area. If I remember correctly, this is
after all, twenty seventeen. He's on the West Coast, and
(46:05):
he might have been the youngest guy who I was
likely to run into in the year twenty seventeen who
had watched Sports Center religiously in the years that I
anchored it from nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety seven,
because he was on the West Coast, and what I
did with Dan Patrick as the eleven PM Sports Center
(46:26):
was for him the eight PM Sports Center. He watched
it when he was ten eleven years old before he
went to bed at night, and he couldn't stop talking
about it and how things had changed, And I said, well,
the whole thing has changed. We couldn't do that now,
and he goes, no, you could do it now. I
would watch it now. I know I would have all
seen all the highlights in advance. It doesn't matter. It's
(46:47):
a question of quality. What they put on the air
now is terrible. It was the fact that you and
Dan were doing. And I said, well, the little rosiness
of nostalgia, all nostalgia is valuable because you were younger
than and further away from death, among other things. And
he laughed and I went, no, I'm serious, and he
laughed again. I went no. We went on for a while,
and then he brought in a colleague who was a
(47:08):
little younger than himself, who was also from the West
Coast and also watched. And these guys could not have
been happier to have seen me and to have gotten
all nostalgic and to insist to me that I should
go back and do Sports Center again. And yes, they
were arch liberals. They knew of the video series for GQ,
they knew that the MSNBC show, and they said, this
(47:28):
is what we need right now. First full year of
the first Trump presidency or dictatorship. Dictatorship one, the Kingdom
of Trump, Round one well, it took me an hour
to get my phone fixed or whatever it is I
was in there for. And I was walking home by myself,
juxtaposing the incident in the park, with the guy who
(47:49):
told me to kill myself, and with these guys who
were so happy at the memory of SportsCenter, and I
got all nostalgic about it, forgetting, of course, every negative
that was associated with doing the show, or working there,
or living there, or anything else that went on during
that five and a half year span of my first
tenure with ESPN. But remember I had just done another
(48:11):
tenure with ESPN from twenty thirteen to fifteen on ESPN
two every night, in a kind of kind of flashback
to that style of Sports Center, only on ESPN two
at eleven o'clock. Only they never ran at eleven o'clock
because they bounced this around from network to networking timeslot
to timeslot. That's another complaint for another time. Regardless, I
(48:34):
got to thinking about SportsCenter nineteen ninety four and how
much fun it was to have everybody like me. We're
in television, we're in media. We want you to like us.
If one person liking us were sufficient, we wouldn't have
the mental problems that led us to work into television
or radio or media of any kind. If you need
(48:56):
a crowd of people to love you, something's wrong, and
that is solved by television and also created by television.
So I was thinking about these two things where I
would now have to run into for the rest of
my life. And I wasn't surprised by the guy who
said kill yourself. But it was just sitting there opposite
(49:18):
this glowing memory provided to me by two viewers who
wished as adults that we did that show that they
so loved when they were kids. By coincidence, I had
been in touch about something else with several of the
people I'd worked for at ESPN in twenty thirteen to fifteen,
(49:41):
and we were talking about the possibility of my going
back to work there again. Well, now, I escalated that,
and suddenly we were having meetings every couple of weeks
about my going back to work there and possibly doing
the six PM Sports Center. The then president of ESPN,
John Skipper, wanted me to do baseball play by play,
and I said I've never done it before. He said,
(50:01):
I'm sure he'd be great at it. And he said,
and by the way, I think you should do it
by yourself with no color announcer. I can't get anybody
to do that. If Vin Scully doesn't, and he's the
most popular sports broadcaster of all time, why doesn't anybody
else do it? You'd be second best. And I was like, well,
he's Ben Scully in any event. That's another argument again
(50:22):
for another time. But we were talking about this, and
we were talking about sports centers or a new show
in New York, or maybe my moving back to Connecticut
or something, and it just seemed well, I was then
fifty eight years old, and I was thinking, I don't
know how much longer I'm going to do this, but
(50:43):
you know what I'd like to do. I'd like to
do a job here before I retire and before I
die that I simply enjoy at least the parts about
being on the air that I don't WinCE and wake
up sweating in the middle of the night over because
I so hate the man I am talking about, and
I so wish that the world that he has ruined
(51:05):
could be fixed. And then I know that I might
be able to stave some of this off, but I
can't fix it no matter what I do. I can't
fix it. I might be able to improve it for
the ten minutes I'm on the air or in the video,
but I'm not going to fix it. He has powerful
forces behind him in a time in which all you
need is cash, and yet I thought, well, yeah, maybe
(51:29):
I want to make a decision here based on what
I want to do. And so we neared a deal
at ESPN, and it began to be in September and
October of twenty seventeen evident that I would return to
ESPN in twenty eighteen, probably anchoring the six PM Sports
Center by myself in Bristol, Connecticut, with the goal towards
(51:51):
moving it back to Manhattan within six months. That was
the plan, and I'd be doing baseball play by play,
although not by myself. So I knew I would have
to wrap up the GQ series, and the announced reason
that I gave for leaving that series was that I
(52:11):
believed that the mainstream media had finally assessed the reality
of Trump's threat to mankind, to continued human population of
this planet, and in fact, any life form on this
planet menaced every minute, and increasingly so by Trump, as
we are now seeing again. I thought that the media
(52:34):
had begun to pick this up. Finally, even the Chuck
Todds of this world seemed to be understanding just what
a dire situation we were in. I really did believe
that was the case, and I also thought the Muller
report was going to be of some value. And I
also thought that the media, when Trump inevitably tried to
bury it as he would and did, that they would
(52:58):
fight back and read the actual report and do their
reporting based on the report and not the summary from
bar Are. Anyway, that was to some degree an excuse
because there were a couple of other factors. I wrapped
up the GQ series suddenly in a video saying Okay,
my work here is done. And I needed to do
(53:20):
that to clear a little space between the end of
that series, and I needed perhaps a month until we
were going to announce my third tenure at ESPN, possibly
anchoring the six pm Sports Center, or at least going
back into the Sports Center mix and baseball play by play,
and a full time job again with ESPN for the
third time, and the second time since it appeared that
(53:43):
we had descended into a role of perpetual antagonists in
a nuclear war. ESPN and me peace. Ain't it wonderful?
So I needed something to say, Okay, I've decided that
I can't do anything more here and I need to
for my own life go and move back to ESPN.
(54:04):
And then there was the precipitate event. In producing these commentaries,
the Resistance ones and before that, the Closer ones for GQ,
I had been in the good hands of a man
named Jeff Gagnin, who was an editor at GQ, and
who had suggested through somebody I didn't know who had
(54:27):
called me for a quote on a story, had said,
by the way, if you do get to talk to Olderhiman,
ask him why he's not doing a video series somewhere
about the upcoming election. And I said, who asked this question?
And I got his number and I called, and the
next thing I knew we were having a meeting. And
the next thing I knew, he said, we can host these,
we can put them on our platform, and we'll fact
check them for you. We had a deal between the
(54:47):
first mention that they might be interested in something or
at least questioning why there was no series. Between that
first mention and the first video was ten days and
Jeff was involved in editing and producing these things, although
he was more of a magazine editor and still is,
and he assigned me to their video producer for GQ magazine,
(55:09):
a woman named Derna Newton, who was from New Zealand,
who had worked previously at arms distance from Michael Moore,
but in that group of people, and mostly produced fashion videos.
Because she worked for GQ, she wasn't in any way
limited to that kind of material, but that was her world.
And so when I presented the first script for the
first Trump commentary for GQ, it was in my mind
(55:33):
at my timing, seventeen minutes long. And she looked at
it and she said, you think maybe you could cut
this to two and a half, And I said, no,
the point is it's seventeen minutes. You can't put out
of seventeen minute video. That was the start of a
very contentious relationship. She brought everything that she knew about video,
which was celebrities, fashion, rock stars, people dressed in funny hats,
(55:58):
all that. She brought, that short attention span audience. She
brought that to the table, and I brought my experierience
with political commentaries in which seventeen minutes was not the
longest commentary I'd ever done. And we didn't butt heads.
We ran from opposite ends of the earth at high
speed for like an hour in each direction, and then
(56:21):
hit head to head day after day after day. There
was no week that passed where I did not say,
you have got to get Durana off this series. And
I'm sure there is no week that went by where
she didn't say I've got to get off this series.
And this went on for several months, and then something
happened at a meeting before the recording of the three
(56:44):
commentaries on Monday afternoon, where Dorenna said to me, you know,
I've been thinking about what you were doing here and
what you said, and these are the areas where I
think you're right. And I had been thinking on the
way in, now that they were picking up the cost
of the uber. On the way in, I had been
thinking that she had been right about something that she
had wanted to do in terms of production, how she
(57:05):
wanted to shoot these things. She said, you move your
hands a lot. I had wanted it tight on my face.
She said, you move your hands very eloquently. We need
to see your hands moving. And I thought this was
the dumbest thing I ever saw until about six people
in a row said, you know, by the way, the
other thing I like about those commentaries, you're talking with
your hands. Finally she had made a good point. I
(57:26):
had made a good point. Well, that was the beginning
of one of the great collaborative experiences of my life.
Suddenly we found that there were vast amounts of material
that the other one could use and improve upon, and
then we smoothed out a lot of the rough edges
of this series, both in terms of what it looked
like and more importantly, how we produced it. We cut
(57:48):
the production time in half so I could actually spend
another two hours every Monday thinking about what I was
going to say, rather than rushing to record it in time,
and how to remove the bounce in the audio in
the room. Because we worked together, and I was delighted
to see her every week, and one day she came in,
and I came in, and I was about to wrap
(58:08):
the series up, and she said, you know, they're going
to be more cutbacks here. There had already been so
many cutbacks that during my time there, which was less
than a year, they had gone from having Durna as
the head of video for GQ magazine to the head
of video for all the Conde Nas publications, and she said,
more layoffs. I'll give you a call later as to
who got laid off, and I said, oh, Christ, this
(58:30):
is going to beat him or them or that. She
called me after I got home that night and it
turned out the person who they've laid off was her,
and I said, this is outrageous, and she said, I know,
I didn't see it coming. I don't know what I'm
going to do. And I said, well, I'm going to
be talking to these people about doing this and these
people about doing that. Maybe we can work something else out,
but for now, I don't know if I can do
anything other than I quit. She said, what do you mean.
(58:53):
I said, I'm quitting right now. I'll come in and
do one more to wrap it up, and I'll put
out some excuse me, bullshit story about why we're doing it.
But I was going to end this anyway now. I'm
going to do it right now, rather than a month
from now, or rather than after I signed the new
contract with ESPN, any of those things, because this is ridiculous.
I haven't done this too many times in my life.
(59:15):
Outright quit on the spot. Because somebody else had been mistreated.
But that was, if not one hundred percent of the
reasons that I stopped the GQ series. As I've mentioned before,
the suicide guy, the event at the Apple Store, my
own sense that I should try to do something I
enjoyed rather than gave me pain every time, and then
(59:37):
finally the last straw. So it wasn't the only reason
I quit, but it was when I quit, and I
called up the publisher's office and said, or sent him
an email and said, I understand you've dismissed her and
a Newton with whom I forged not just a great
working relationship, but one in which, for the first time ever,
my blank, unyielding, uncompromising confidence that I knew everything had
(01:00:01):
grown from that into a sense of collabor with somebody
from a totally different background. I worked very hard in
this relationship, and you just fired her. I quit. So
the relevance to today, obviously is this The motivating factor
in all of it was when someone suggested, go back
(01:00:22):
and enjoy yourself, have fun, go back and do sports again,
have fun. The weariness of doing what I did then
and what I am doing now took over again, and
I know you know this weariness as well as I do,
because whereas you don't do a commentary on this twice
a week or hopefully more in the weeks to come,
(01:00:42):
I'm sure it affects you. Nonetheless, it affects all of us.
There is only one thing you can actually credit Trump for.
He does have endless amounts of energy. He certainly doesn't
spend any on anybody else but himself. None of the
rest of us really exist, of course, he has boundless energy.
(01:01:03):
He never thinks of anybody else or the consequences of
what he's doing, only what it means for him, and
feeling that infinite void in his soul. If you don't dream,
if you don't aspire, if you don't need, if you
don't exist in the same universe as everybody else, you
(01:01:25):
don't need to sleep, and you have endless amounts of
energy to devote to your animal needs. An animal that
must eat will probably not take a nap. All he
can do is eat for his ego, because that's all
he has. So that's his advantage. We who have lives,
and who have needs, and who have empathies, we tend
(01:01:46):
to get exhausted by this, and that's the great advantage
of being a fascist and a psychotic. They don't need that.
They are virtual machines. So I don't know if there's
a conclusion here. I will point out that I went
through all these machinations, and if not, lies to the
audience about why the series was stopping. I did think
(01:02:08):
the media was picking it up. I did need to
do something for my own health, But there were these
other factors in there, including the suicide guy and the
firing of my friend and Newton. Ah, the end result
might be, and the lesson might be, and it might
be pertinent here as I went through all of that
and made all the arrangements of ESPN and told everybody there, Hey,
(01:02:31):
good news, I've got I found the reason to stop
the GQ series. And it's organic and it's valid, and
it's true, and it'll give us like six weeks before
you went ounce this. In the six weeks that I
prepared the window between the GQ series and the resumption
of my sports career, the president of ESPN stopped being
(01:02:52):
the president of ESPN, and the whole deal went up
in smoke. It was later revived in small portions by
an executive. They just got rid of named Norby Williamson,
who managed somehow in the disaster yearist period after the
president of ESPN stopped being the president of ESPN to
get this thing done where I went and worked for
them part time and did ballgames and had a certain
(01:03:14):
guarantee and a part time contract. But I never wound
up doing the six o'clock Sports Center. I did not
move back to Bristol, Connecticut. I did go back to Bristol,
Connecticut three or four different times. And then that whole
ESPN experience ended because COVID closed the New York studios
that I largely worked from. So if you are flagging
(01:03:37):
and tired in your fight, remember number one that even
if you leave the fight, the problem is going to
follow you. And number two, it may very well be
that the thing that you run to to satisfy yourself
or to give yourself a happier feeling in your life,
(01:03:57):
or to focus on it may or may not still
be there when you get there. I'd like to say
I feel a lot better after that, but no, I
(01:04:18):
just feel more tired. I've done all the damage I
can do here. Thanks for listening. Listening, Brian Ray and
John Phillip Shanelle and musical directors of count impt Sorry
Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle. The musical directors of Countdown, arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Chanelle had at
orchestration and keyboards, mister Ray was on the guitars, bass
and drums, and it was produced by TKO Brothers. That's
(01:04:39):
the two of them and me, We're your brothers. Our
satirical and fifty musical comments are by the best baseball
stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is the
Old Woman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren
Davis and courtesy of ESPN. Other music arranged and performed
by the group No Horns Allowed. And my announcer today
was my friend Jonathan Banks. Everything else was as ever
(01:05:03):
my fault. That's Countdown for today, Just one four hundred
and thirty four days until the scheduled end of his
lame duck, lame brained term, unless Musk removes him sooner
or the actuarial tables do. But just remember, he who
saves his country does not violate any law. I didn't
(01:05:26):
mean you trying to save your country. The next scheduled
Countdown is Thursday. As always, bulletins as the news warrants.
Remember impeach Trump. It won't work now, it will win
the Democrats the midterms if there are midterms. Until next time,
(01:05:46):
I'm Keith Ulruman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck.
(01:06:09):
Countdown with Keith Alderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. He
who saves his country does not violate any law? Trump Saturday,
(00:32):
And what about if you believe this country must be
saved from Trump? It will never occur to Trump, it
will never occur to a vast majority of his culture,
will never occur even to a vast majority of commentators
on both sides, American and Trumpist. But in posting that
(00:52):
misquote of a probably apocryphal Napoleon quote, Trump has provided
an excuse to ignore the law. For anybody who hates
sim there can be no doubt Trump only thought, he
who saves his country does not violate any law would
(01:13):
apply to him, would inspire those who wish to act
on his behalf. That is how crazy Trump really is.
That's how far he has traveled from reality, traveled further
from reality since the election. Because implicit in Trump's statement
is the simple reality that you can never prove the
negative here, that you can never prove you saved your country.
(01:34):
You just have to really really believe it, or have
others believe it. And for every single person who thinks
Trump saved or is saving or will save this country,
there is at least one other American who thinks this
country has been saved, or is being saved or will
(01:55):
be saved from Trump, and to tell all of them
that they are not violating any law because they all
believe they are saving this country. That way lies the
wild West. Certainly, the media has exclusively treated Trump's post
(02:18):
as if it applies, even in his warped, dead mind,
only to him and to his supporters. The New York
Times actually wrote the story up yesterday and came as
close as ever it has to saying that might have
been a stochastic call to terrorism on Trump's behalf, but
the Times didn't, and nobody else is considering the broader context.
(02:42):
What if you believe this country must be saved from Trump?
What if you believe you must save this country from Trump? Well,
apparently Trump just gave you the thumbs up. He who
saves his country does not violate any law. I never
done in that. Trump has now gone from the reality
(03:03):
of November fifth. He got forty nine point eight percent
of the vote. Everybody else got a combined fifty point
two percent of the vote. He is a minority president.
He went from that reality to this state of madness
in which he can rationalize breaking any law and quoting
Napoleon by merely claiming he has saved or is saving
(03:27):
or will save the country, whichever suits him best at
the current moment. It's like the wall. What does he
need to be true right now? I built it already, No,
I'm building it now, No I will build it. To
say saving the country rationalizes and legalizes any act would
be a stretch if you said it while you had, say,
(03:50):
roughly one hundred percent support. Spoiler alert, he doesn't have
one hundred percent support. His opinion poll approval numbers, which
were higher than usual but still sucked, have since decreased,
especially among young voters, and as they have decreased, his
madness has increased. Still. If you need any indicator of
(04:12):
what he intends to do next, he has just told
you in that sentence everything attempt to stay in power
past twenty twenty nine, stop elections if need be, arrest
political opponents or worse, and most obviously ignore all laws.
And in the last week he has somehow ratcheted this
(04:33):
up because the now unambiguously declared lawlessness of he who
uh what is the quote again? He who smelt it
dealt it nah nah, sorry, He who saves his country
does not violate any law that has been translated into
other languages and offered up by Trump by a musk
to Germany's new Nazis and to Russia's old dictator by
(04:57):
Trump himself. And it has been shouted at our allies
and our fellow democracies in Europe by the Vice President
of I mister Vance and his functional IQ equivalent of
that of a houseplant on a front porch in Fostoria, Ohio.
So now it's not just as if Trump were trying
(05:18):
to destroy America on behalf of another country. It is
as if Trump were trying to destroy mankind on behalf
of another planet. While Trump was destroying the Justice Department
and turning Emil Beauve Beauvet Bloviator, whatever his name is,
(05:39):
into the world's oldest legal prostitute in the Eric Adams case,
while he and Eric Adams each wound up shackled to
a corpse each other. While Trump was loosening the pestilence
that is RFK Junior on health in this country and
loosing this illiterate clown who used to be missus wrestling
on the education system in this country, and while he
was firing three hundred nuclear safety staffers because he was
(06:01):
too stupid to realize they were the people who protected
the national nuclear stockpile. And then he turned out to
be even more too stupid, and he no longer had
a way to contact them at home and on fire them.
While Trump was showing just how majestically stupid he is,
while he was proving he who saves time in a
bottle does not have an opener nearby. While Trump was
(06:24):
doing that himself, his gang of deputy Furres, Vance, Rubio
and hegseeth, we're doing their impressions of Neville Chamberlain, actually
doing their Nevil Chamberlain impressions in Munich, trying to set
out Ukraine, trying to set out Europe, trying to serve Putin,
trying to encourage China, and in the case of the
(06:47):
desperately dysfunctional, cloudy brained Vance, try to make the world
safe for men to wear eyeliner and have a beard.
Who in the hell is JD Vance? To explain in
Europe that Europe needs to be more fascist, and in
being more fascist, to claim that it's free speech and
(07:11):
it's trusting in the pillars of their own democracies. Oh,
I know, he's vice president of the United States. Spiro
Agnew was vice president of the United States. John Calhoun
was vice president of the United States. JD. Vance works
for the world's leading purveyor of democracy destruction. JD Vance
(07:35):
is Donald Trump's whore. And we don't know who Donald
Trump is a whore for. But if you are now
or if you have ever been agnostic, Donald Trump is
the best evidence you have seen in your lifetime that
there really is a satan. He who saves his country
(07:56):
does not violate any law. Great, brilliant, very helpful. If
it has ever crossed Trump's mind, it and its little
feet echoing thunderously in that otherwise empty gold, rustolium covered space.
(08:16):
Just how many million Americans currently think that they are
supposed to save this country right now from him? Make
sure they know the President of the United States just
gave them a pass. You think you are in the
process of saving the country? You follow your star kid,
(08:40):
You do not violate any law. So what if you're
just another nut job with a crazy dream. When they
arrest you, you just say, but the President said, I
does not violate any laws. Less explosively about this dumbest
(09:00):
thing Trump has ever said, and maybe of more immediate
importance about this dumbest thing Trump has ever said, you
need to save the country from me, Go ahead, You're
not violating any law. Maybe of more immediate importance about
this moronic statement. The Democratic National Committee delegate David Atkins
(09:24):
notes that Trump's post from Saturday, he who saves his
country does not violate any law, should be used as
evidence in every court filing against Trump and against the
Doge scammers, and against Musk, and in the Eric Adams case,
and in everything that he hasn't even done yet but will.
(09:45):
In this context, it is the dumbest thing Trump has
ever said, because it shows foreknowledge of intent to break
the law. Because this sweeping madness doesn't just encourage assassins,
it also encourages hacking by Musk employees who answer to
names like Big Balls or the fop of the country,
(10:07):
the father of the country. Oh that's Elon Musk. Twelve
kids with four different women counting the newest claim by
the fascist nitwit who calls herself Ashley Saint Clair. By
the way, that appears to be her real name. Ashley
Saint Clair says she just welcomed Musk's newest spawn five
months ago. The update on this is now she's apparently
(10:30):
hinting it was via IVF or, as the fertility experts
call it, the driverless car of procreation. I mean, I'm
sure Musk will bring this child to the White House soon,
because when he does it, it's cute, it's humanizing. If a
woman did that, if Lauren Bobert did that, or if
(10:52):
Nancy Mace had twelve kids with four different men, or
if say, instead of Elon Musk doing that with the
kid in the Oval office, Ben Carson had done that,
or Ben Carson had had twelve kids with four different women,
they would be run out of Maga by Maga. When
Musk does it, they all bark like seals, like South
(11:15):
African apartheid friendly seals, and they do features on the
suit the kid was wearing, and they imply that the
suit proves Musk is not just a reanimated skeleton with
botox stretched over its skull. He who's saving all my
love for you does not violate any law. Incidentally, the
(12:08):
original version of he who saves his country does not
violate any law. Was I'm not gonna pay a lot
for this muffler or for this copy of the Washington Post.
In the front runner for the twenty twenty five annual
Hutzpa Award. This headline appeared in the Washington Post yesterday.
(12:30):
Quote as Musk reshapes the government, some ask where are
the guardrails? The White House has taken advantage of rules
with weak enforcement and loopholes, or simply declared it can
outweigh other laws. Lisa Rhyan then goes on at length
about the guardrails, without ever mentioning the roles of Jeff
(12:53):
Bezos and Will Lewis and the other British ass hats
brought in to neuter the Post in removing all the
guardrails there and replacing them with ones made out of
paper mache. Lisa Rhyne Lisa Rain Lisa R. E. I n,
by the way, is identified in her Washington Post bio
(13:16):
that the byline links to Lusie. She quote covers federal
agencies and the management of government in the Biden administration unquote.
And if that doesn't tell you everything you need to
know about the Washington Post at the moment, I don't
know what does covers federal agencies in the management of
government in the Biden administration. How the hell should just
(13:38):
get a byline? Then? I mean management failing to update
you know what what president this is? That's one thing,
it's the post. But the author herself never looks. Come on,
not to be outdone. The New York Times offers this
both sides, just headline. Still still they're doing this. Still,
(14:00):
the evidence mounts that somebody is blackmailing Joe con Or
the Selisburg News analysis. Trump officials attack a German consensus
on Nazis and speech. Vice President J. D. Vance and
Elon Musk have challenged decades long approaches to political extremism
that were designed to prevent another Hitler. They won't even
(14:23):
say in the headline that the Germans were posed to Nazis.
The consensus on Nazis and speech. I wonder where they've
they been four or against since the country was destroyed.
I don't remember. The Times doesn't remember. Consensus challenged extremism
prevent Vance and Musk on the same field trip as
(14:46):
this Schlong covered in brill cream Hegseth. Vance and Musk
sided publicly with Germany's new Nazis as critical elections loom
in Germany. They didn't attack a consensus. They sided did
with New Nazis. They're trying to influence the election in
(15:08):
favor of the New Nazis, and nobody here is even
publicly humiliating them for this. And I mean, just leave
the politics of it out for a moment, leave the
horrific pro fascism of it out for a moment, Just
humiliate them. Musk and Dvance about their appearance starts simply
(15:30):
with basic insults that everybody can understand. Pull off those Oh,
we can't say terrible things about what they look like.
This is war. You can throw out an insult about
Musk's dead eyes and how Vance overcame his own dead
eyes apparently by using Danessa Myrik's beauty line work paintbrush, fluid,
(15:52):
liquid eyeliner. A little more materially on the subject of media,
or what's left of it, we need a goddamned new
use boycott of this White House until the Associated Press
is fully reinstated. There I'll reuse this line from previous episodes.
(16:14):
I have neither the time nor enough words to tell
you how much this isn't going to happen. It could
cost news organizations ten or twelve dollars each. They would
never spend ten or twelve dollars each on a principle,
but still in my dreams, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBCABCCBSNPR,
(16:38):
all of them need to withdraw their reporters from covering
Trump and to stop covering Trump on their broadcasts, to
in fact use only the Associated Press coverage of Trump
until the Gibbels division of the Trump administration backs off
its attempts to crack the door open to controlling what
all reporters say and write, and then ultimately what you
(17:03):
say and write if you are unfamiliar. Trump insists the
Gulf of Mexico, which has been called that since at
least fifteen point fifty, is now the Gulf of America,
because Trump does not know that he who saves the
cost of reprinting all the maps, does not violate any law.
(17:28):
The Associated Press said, this is bullshit. The White House
then said the Associated Press reporters were banned from the
White House until it did change the name of the
Gulf of Mexico because Trump said so, and he is
the law here. Now. The media solidarity the upside to
(17:50):
that liberal monolith that rupert I was senile before senile
was cool. Murdoch believes exists the media solidarity in defense
of the AP. The Reuter's wire service says it quotes
stands with the Associated Press in objecting to coverage restrictions
imposed by the White House. Reuter stands with the AP,
(18:13):
But of course not next to it is Reuters refusing
to send a reporter to the White House. No. The
White House Correspondence Association, its latest president is one of
the conventional wisdom morons from Politico. It says this is
unacceptable and its response is to resolutely do nothing about it.
(18:35):
Axios did the most axios thing possible, showing absolutely no
sense that if the White House can punish AP, it
cansures how punish weaklings like Axios. Axios issued a statement saying, quote,
the AP and all news organizations should be free to
report as they see fit. And if that line in
the sand isn't shallow enough, Axios found its own solution,
(18:59):
quoting again, our standard is to use Gulf of America,
renamed by US from Gulf of Mexico. Absolute clowns, possibly
the greatest distance between how they are viewed in this
country and in the media of this country. Axios, and
(19:20):
how they think of themselves. The names are Van der
Hie and Allan, They ares Fops, Fops, they think they
are Pulitzer and Hearst. And still other news outlets have
done worse than Axios. Other news outlets have said nothing.
(19:43):
Hold on, I'll correct myself on that. The Atlantic has
now published a piece with an amazing headline worse than nothing.
The Gulf of America is the wrong fight to pick.
Jelad Edelman writes that quote. It draws attention away from
his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the
(20:04):
rule of law. And it's a fight that the AP
probably should never have picked in the first place. What
you have just witnessed in one and one half sentences
from mister Edelman is called the shifting of the Overton window.
We are no longer arguing about whether psychotic bullies should
be able to dictate what news organizations right and what
(20:26):
terms and names they may use, but how often and
under what circumstances. And more broadly, we are no longer
arguing whether Trump should run rough shod over the laws
and customs that have been the only thing holding this
country together. For two and a half centuries. We're now
arguing over which laws and customs he can run rough
shod and which ones we should bother to defend. To
(20:51):
quote Angela Lansbury as missus John Yerke's Iceland in the
Manchurian Candidate, what are they saying? Are they saying are
there any Communists in the Defense Department? No, of course not.
They're saying how many Commune his star there in the
Defense Department? And the Atlantic just helped the media continues
(21:13):
to collapse like a poorly built house of cards. I
like to think a house of cards made from the
deck that they use in the Manchurian Candidate. I don't
think there's any question of it now. Whatever combination of
blackmail and plain old fear of making only thirty seven
billion this year, not forty seven billion that caused the
Washington Post and Facebook and the others to fold under
(21:35):
the slightest possible pressure. It's clearly at work at the
New York Times too. That piece I mentioned before about Hitler. Oh,
we've hurt the consensus about Hitler. We won't say what
the consensus was. We might offend Hitler. He might be
still reading somewhere somebody at the New York Times is
being pressured. A Times guest op ed Trump might have
(22:00):
a case on birthright citizenships the venue for the Peace,
and that qualifier might makes you think, well, this must
be something from a neutral writer or source. Of course
it isn't. It's a piece that could have run on
Fox News, or maybe it's stupid enough for Gateway Pundit.
Two authors, both lawyers, One argued to the Supreme Court
(22:21):
that Obamacare was unconstitutional and the other one is worse,
an anti COVID vaccine nut lawyer and Fourteenth Amendment originalist
whose argument boils down to the belief that Trump expressed
again yesterday, that the Fourteenth Amendment only applied to and
thus should now only apply to X slaves, all those
(22:45):
ex slaves in the country at the moment. That's who
the Fourteenth Amendment applies to, not anybody else. This is
in the New York Times. Trump might have a case
on declaring himself emperor. I'm sorry I was reading ahead.
Of course. Eventually, all of the spineless, weasel news outlets
(23:06):
who act like this do get hoisted on their own petard.
When ABC settled Trump's nuisance lawsuit. I said it was
a legal bribe. When CBS reportedly began to debate settling
Trump's nuisance suit against them, I said that would be
a legal bribe too well. A Wall Street Journal now
reports that the CBS owner, Paramount Quote, is wrestling with
(23:29):
Weather to settle Trump's lawsuit against its CBS News unit,
and how it might do so without exposing executives to
future legal threats such as accusations of ribery. Told you so,
But wait, there's more. Paramount executives Quote in recent weeks
(23:50):
have talked about the risk that paying such a settlement
could expose directors and officers to liability in potential future
shareholder litigation. Were criminal charges for bribing a public official
and an additional concern that such litigation and here's the
(24:12):
telling point, an additional concern that such litigation may not
be protected by director and officer insurance. Oh how rich.
It has only just occurred to them that by bribing
a president they might be charged with bribery, and worse,
(24:34):
that their insurance might not cover either the bribe or
the resultant lawsuits from stockholders who don't want to pay
the money. Wait until somebody reminds them that theoretically paying
blackmail to Trump will only encourage him to blackmail them again.
(24:58):
I can't leave you in this state of depression. There's
actually a media note that is oddly an unexpectedly encouraging.
The ex Republican strategist and comm's specialist, Sherry Jacobis, has
a really really good idea low effort, low danger, high
(25:19):
yield idea. She has been suggesting for a while that
the Democrats should hold a daily press briefing on Capitol Hill,
appoint a kind of shadow press secretary, giving an alternate
White House press briefing the Democratic press briefing. Name a
(25:42):
Democratic press secretary, give him a staff, and have him
or her hold a daily news conference. Last week I
said AOC should do this every Sunday morning, so she
could own that news cycle Sunday and Monday and control
the Sunday news shows. But this is better. Somebody suggested
Pete Buddhajeedge as Democratic press secretary, and that's gold too.
(26:08):
You could have guests show up at the press conference,
but the week should be the work week for the
press secretary, the Democratic press secretary. And by the way,
the competition would be the actual White House Press Secretary,
the former center fielder of Saint Anselm College softball. But
(26:30):
the week for the Democratic Press Secretary should be not
Monday through Friday, but Sunday through Thursday. It should start
at eight am at Sunday. You would own the Sunday
shows now and forever own the news cycle on Sundays.
(26:53):
Also of interest here on this all new edition of
Countdown a Confession, why I really killed the twenty sixteen
seventeen GQ video commentary series The Resistance. It's not exactly
what I told you previously. None of that was untrue,
but there was more to it. More importantly, the explanation
(27:14):
pertains to what it says now about exhaustion in the
battle against the forces of President Pimp. He who saves
his country does not violate any law. Okay, I got
the message. Thanks, thanks, thanks for giving me immunity. He
who saves his country does not violate any law. Well,
(27:35):
I was going to do the rest of this podcast,
but I'm off to save my country first. The confession
that's next. This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith
old Woman just going ahead. In this all new edition
(28:12):
of Countdown a Confession, the real reason I discontinued the
GQ video series The Resistance in twenty seventeen. Actually it
is four reasons and why this is relevant to the
subtext to our current nightmare, the fact that everybody fighting
these American fascists so goddamn tired. Next on things I
promise not to tell first, believe it or not, there's
(28:35):
still more new idiots to talk about. The daily roundup
of the misgrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who
constitute today's other worse persons in the world Brons worse residents,
some not all, of Redding, Pennsylvania. This is from the
New Republic reading Pennsylvania voters. There seventy percent Latino. They
(29:00):
moved sixteen points towards Trump last year over twenty twenty
sixteen points. The Democrats still won the town, nevertheless, as
the Republic rights the New Republic. Indeed, that led some
Dominicans to develop a particularly hopeful view of Trump. Some
came to believe that when Trump talked about not wanting
(29:23):
quote illegals in the country, he was really telegraphing that
he might pursue some sort of amnesty for the undocumented
who don't merit removal. Amnesty, the mayor of the town,
mister Moron said, is something they fondly associate associate with
(29:44):
a Republican president due to Ronald Reagan's nineteen eighty six
immigration reform bill. A lot of Dominicans believed that could happen.
Moron told me, speaking of hopes for Trump amnesty, I
heard that one too many times. They thought the Leopards
were going to grant them amnesty because Reagan did thirty
(30:08):
eight years earlier. It's nice to know people are alike
all over. The runner up wor Sir Mark Zuckerberg again
said it before, I'll say it again. Whatever Trump has
on him, it is a dilly Facebook refused to allow
ads local ads boosted posts for the Invictus Games. You
(30:33):
know what the Invictus Games are. You've seen this right.
Everybody has an opinion about Prince Harry, I suppose except me,
But whatever you think of him, one of the things
he's done with his time over the years is to
establish a kind of Olympics for injured athletes, many of them,
(30:53):
perhaps a majority, wounded soldiers who wanted to continue continue
in sports despite the most horrific of injuries and whose
success comes in their decision not to stop. The Vancouver
Ad Agency the Invictus Games this year were in Vancouver.
Running these boosted posts on Facebook was told quote, these
(31:19):
ads can't run because it is about social issues, elections,
or politics. But you have not authorized your account to
run ads with political content. You will either need to
have an authorized page admin place this ad, or go
through the authorization process yourself. As part of the authorization's process,
all page admins and advertisers who want to run these
(31:42):
ads must enable two factor authentication and verify their identity
and location. The page admin must also link ad accounts
used for political content to the page and create an
approved disclaimer to show who is paying for ads. Once
you have become authorized, you can go back to the
(32:02):
ads creation interface and select social issues, elections, or politics
from the special ad category section during campaign creation. In
other words, you can't advertise Prince Harry's Invictus Games because
that's politics and elections and social issues because apparently somebody
(32:25):
somewhere thinks it's controversial to have injured ex servicemen competing
in the one mile run. Facebook is no longer fact
checking President Pimp, but it is requiring a line by
line detailing of where the money is coming from to
promote an international sporting event celebrating people who have achieved
(32:46):
athletic greatness despite getting their limbs blown off. Delete your
Facebook account today. It is as compromised as Elon Musk,
but our winners Jim Van de High and Mike Allen
of a This was written under their bylines. Trump and
(33:11):
Elon Musk, arguably the two most unorthodox and influential American
leaders of the twenty first century, are practicing and fine
tuning a fused theory of governing power masculine maximalism. I'll
just read that again, masculine maximalism. Why it matters. Trump
(33:35):
and Musk believe powerfully in maximalist action and language, which
is being carried out by strong, mostly white men as blunt,
uncompromising instruments to prove new limits both to power and
what's possible. I'm still stuck back here on the idea
that somebody in the world thinks that Trump and Musk
are masculine, not only masculine, but define masculine maximalism. You
(34:01):
mean weight Trump, masculine Musk, the Pillsbury dough boy, Trump
three hundred pounds of shit in a two hundred pounds
suit and hair and skin dyed with Restolium. Axios I
mentioned earlier has already sold out to Trump a thousand
times thinks as the founders do Alan and vanda Hi
(34:26):
that they are Pulitzer and Hurst. Just now they caved
by renaming the Gulf of Mexico quote Gulf of America
renamed by us from Gulf of Mexico, which just flows
off the tongue and really makes an article sing, while
insisting that by doing that they were maintaining journalism and independence.
(34:47):
And Jim Vandahi and Mike Allen of Axios and by
the way, masculine maximism them. Look, I will never claim
ever to be Captain Beefcake over here, but have you
ever seen Mike Allen in Jim van Hi masculine maximalism?
(35:12):
This is as dumb as calling Musker Trump masculine band
Hi and Alan today's other worst persons in the world. JD.
Vans's mathles finally to the number one story on the
(35:40):
Countdown and Things I Promised not to tell and a confession.
This is about the video series I used to do
for GQ dot com. First, it was called the Closer.
It was supposed to be the closer argument in the
twenty sixteen presidential election. We all know how ineptly named
(36:01):
I named it. Then it became the Resistance, which kind
of took off. One of the Resistance videos was interacted
with fifty four million times on Facebook in late twenty
sixteen and early twenty seventeen, and an independent Internet kind
of thing evaluating interactions between people and say Keith ol
(36:24):
Ruman videos determined and was quoted by CBS News as
indicating that that was the most interacted political thing on
Facebook in the entire year after the election. So the
GQ series, which was ultimately referred to as the Resistance
and got I forget how many one hundred million views
(36:45):
in total now, was something of a success until I
suddenly canceled it. I have told truths about why it
was canceled, but they have all been half truths. And
in the spirit of there are no more f's left,
let alone fs that I want to get, I think
(37:05):
I ought to fill in the complete story because it's
a little bit more complicated that I let on at
the time, and it is apropos of the current moment
as well. With so many of us struggling to fight back.
Now that our worst realizations and dreams have come together,
we are seeing all the things we said might happen,
(37:27):
all happening all at once, and we have brilliant responses.
Like the Washington Post, after a year of not being
anything resembling the guardrail it was supposed to be, writing
an article actually headlined what happened to the guardrails? You
ate them, Jeff Bezos, or you turn them into plastic
(37:47):
and use them on your girlfriend. Sorry for the analogy,
and more importantly for the imagery, but here's the point.
I was doing about three commentaries a week, usually for GQ,
and we did them, recorded them Monday afternoons, took one
(38:08):
trip down there. I got no money for it, except
for some charitable donations to dog charities and carfare, and
initially it was only carfare in one direction. I swear
to God, the Conde Nast people were so cheap at
the beginning. They only gave me carfare and uber in
one direction. You didn't have to give me any money.
(38:28):
There's no insurance required. Therefore, you don't have to send
a car for somebody, which is why TV organizations and
other video organizations and news organizations send cars for people
because they are liable for them insurance wise. But of
course if you're not paying the guy anything, if there's
no real contract, there's no insurance. I digress. Eventually the
thing began to make money, even though we were not
(38:49):
doing it for money, and I'll give Conde Nass credit
for this. They were not doing it for money either,
but it did make money. Those pre roll ads on YouTube,
just those generated something like a million dollars for Conde Nast,
and we didn't have to do anything other than hire
a teleprompter once a week so I could record three
of them. One that was kind of news of the
(39:11):
day for Monday release in the afternoon, something else that
would go on Wednesday, and then a third one that
would run Thursday or Friday that tended to be a
little bit more philosophical or predictive towards events later in
the week. The system worked fairly well, and I'm not
sure it was going to The real benefit I got
out of it, other than venting my spleen was the
fact that I was dressed by the head of styling
(39:33):
for men for GQ magazine, and I have never looked
better in my life. And the suits that he gave
me are still in fashion, and some of them were
ahead of their time. And his advice about how I
should dress was the first not only good advice I'd
ever gotten, but the first definitive advice. I literally put
on the suit that he suggested, and the narrow tie
(39:55):
he suggested, and the narrow lapels, never having thought for
a moment that these things mattered at all. And I
looked at myself on the video and I went, hey,
when did I lose twenty five pounds? Okay, so we'd
go down there and record these and I believe they
have had some value. I think they had value to me,
and if that fifty four million number was accurate in
any way, they had value to you. And then one
(40:16):
day I stopped them. Well, there's a backstory to it.
It was speculated at the time that I had been
threatened or blackmailed, that I had been as Jeff Bezos
has been, or Mark Zuckerberg had been, likely the victim
of somebody coming to me and saying, hey, remember that
time that you did this, Well, we have pictures of it. Unfortunately,
(40:37):
in one respect, my life has largely been totally dull
and has not included anything that pictures of them would
make any difference, or anybody would go, that's appalling, We're
going to put you in jail. We're going to sue you.
People would go, that's it, that's what you spent your
life doing. So it wasn't that. But there were other
(41:00):
psychological components, and again they come to bear now on
me as they did then, and as they are doing
in an extraordinary almost epidemic level with those fighting back
against trump fascism and Elonnodziism right now. There is a
(41:20):
weariness abroad in the land on top of everything else.
And you know it, and I do know it. We're
not just afraid, mortified, depressed. We're tired. All I wanted
to do after the election was retire from this, or
maybe do one commentary a month or something like that,
(41:41):
or I don't know, do a dog series of podcasts
or a sports series of podcasts, or no podcasts at all.
I've been on the air or online or on microphone
pretty much every day since nineteen seventy five. I still
have many things to say, but frankly, I'd rather not
(42:02):
say most of them. And you've heard most of them already. Okay,
One day in the summer, I think the early summer
of twenty seventeen, I was sitting with my two dogs,
then the two dogs the two girls in a little
part of Central Park near the mall, near the Bethesda Fountain,
(42:28):
where we used to all congregate, all of us who
had small dogs. And there were twelve or fifteen humans
and twenty or twenty five dogs, and they'd mix and
match at various times of the day, but always on
the weekend there'd be a late crowd in the afternoon somewhere.
And one day we had almost everybody in this little
cleiku together, and we were sitting there minding our own business,
and I was saying something to one of my dogs
(42:49):
or one of my neighbors. And a guy, a creepy
looking guy in his late twenties, early thirties, and this
woman with him, with her head bowed like she was
out of the handmaid's tail, only she'd left her hat
at home, wouldn't look up, make eye contact with anybody.
And this guy is just walking ten or twelve feet
in front of this gaggle of ten or twelve people
(43:10):
and then twenty or so dogs and he stops and
he goes, wait, you're Keith Olderman, and I said yes,
there's no point in denying it, and he went, kill
yourself now. Several other people around me gasped when they
heard this, and I went, here we go. And he
went on about Trump this and Trump that. We got
into a shouting match, and I told him I'd see
(43:31):
him at the impeachments and he'd have a nice time
in hell. And the woman got her head bowed further down.
If it had been any lower, she would have been
a contortionist with her head between her knees. But the
guy kept saying, no, really, you should go home and
kill yourself right now. And several of my friends who
were not at all versed in the history of my
(43:55):
experiences with listeners, viewers, people who sent me fake anthrax,
Dodger fans who called into CANX radio in nineteen eight
complaining that I referred to a Dodger player as a loafer,
so they were going to come down to the studio
and cut out my tongue. They didn't understand that, whereas
this was always going to be a disturbing thing, it
was not necessarily something I needed to call the cops about.
(44:18):
I was prepared to have a fight with the guy
if need be, and I was prepared to get at
hell out of there if need be, and I was
prepared to, if necessary, call the cops. But I didn't
gauge this. This was a bully who was trying to
impress himself that he was saying. So I gave as
good as I got and he staggered off and the
woman behind him, and I just thought, flee, madam, flee.
(44:41):
And I was thinking about this on the way home
with the dogs, not about me, but about the dogs,
because these people, the Trump people, are the kind of
people who would try to hurt somebody like me by
hurting the dogs. Simply put, they're bullies. They have very
little connection to reality, and they certainly have no empathy
(45:03):
or human understanding. And as many dog lovers as there
are inside the right wing, these are the same people
who believe in taking care of their dogs and the
dogs they rescue, as opposed to all dogs, regardless of
the denomination of the humans connected to them. And I
(45:23):
thought about that for a while, and I said, that's
how bad this situation really is. Coincidentally, two or three
league weeks later, after doing those two or three commentaries
every week for GQ, I was in the Apple store
nearest my home in Manhattan, and somehow or another, as
I walked in, I walked into just the optimum moment
(45:43):
where the floor manager, who was the oldest guy in
the building somewhere in his forties, stopped me and said,
mister Alderman, welcome, Can I help you? And it quickly
was revealed that he had grown up on the West coast,
San Francisco Bay area. If I remember correctly, this is
after all, twenty seventeen. He's on the West Coast, and
(46:05):
he might have been the youngest guy who I was
likely to run into in the year twenty seventeen who
had watched Sports Center religiously in the years that I
anchored it from nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety seven,
because he was on the West Coast, and what I
did with Dan Patrick as the eleven PM Sports Center
(46:26):
was for him the eight PM Sports Center. He watched
it when he was ten eleven years old before he
went to bed at night, and he couldn't stop talking
about it and how things had changed, And I said, well,
the whole thing has changed. We couldn't do that now,
and he goes, no, you could do it now. I
would watch it now. I know I would have all
seen all the highlights in advance. It doesn't matter. It's
(46:47):
a question of quality. What they put on the air
now is terrible. It was the fact that you and
Dan were doing. And I said, well, the little rosiness
of nostalgia, all nostalgia is valuable because you were younger
than and further away from death, among other things. And
he laughed and I went, no, I'm serious, and he
laughed again. I went no. We went on for a while,
and then he brought in a colleague who was a
(47:08):
little younger than himself, who was also from the West
Coast and also watched. And these guys could not have
been happier to have seen me and to have gotten
all nostalgic and to insist to me that I should
go back and do Sports Center again. And yes, they
were arch liberals. They knew of the video series for GQ,
they knew that the MSNBC show, and they said, this
(47:28):
is what we need right now. First full year of
the first Trump presidency or dictatorship. Dictatorship one, the Kingdom
of Trump, Round one well, it took me an hour
to get my phone fixed or whatever it is I
was in there for. And I was walking home by myself,
juxtaposing the incident in the park, with the guy who
(47:49):
told me to kill myself, and with these guys who
were so happy at the memory of SportsCenter, and I
got all nostalgic about it, forgetting, of course, every negative
that was associated with doing the show, or working there,
or living there, or anything else that went on during
that five and a half year span of my first
tenure with ESPN. But remember I had just done another
(48:11):
tenure with ESPN from twenty thirteen to fifteen on ESPN
two every night, in a kind of kind of flashback
to that style of Sports Center, only on ESPN two
at eleven o'clock. Only they never ran at eleven o'clock
because they bounced this around from network to networking timeslot
to timeslot. That's another complaint for another time. Regardless, I
(48:34):
got to thinking about SportsCenter nineteen ninety four and how
much fun it was to have everybody like me. We're
in television, we're in media. We want you to like us.
If one person liking us were sufficient, we wouldn't have
the mental problems that led us to work into television
or radio or media of any kind. If you need
(48:56):
a crowd of people to love you, something's wrong, and
that is solved by television and also created by television.
So I was thinking about these two things where I
would now have to run into for the rest of
my life. And I wasn't surprised by the guy who
said kill yourself. But it was just sitting there opposite
(49:18):
this glowing memory provided to me by two viewers who
wished as adults that we did that show that they
so loved when they were kids. By coincidence, I had
been in touch about something else with several of the
people I'd worked for at ESPN in twenty thirteen to fifteen,
(49:41):
and we were talking about the possibility of my going
back to work there again. Well, now, I escalated that,
and suddenly we were having meetings every couple of weeks
about my going back to work there and possibly doing
the six PM Sports Center. The then president of ESPN,
John Skipper, wanted me to do baseball play by play,
and I said I've never done it before. He said,
(50:01):
I'm sure he'd be great at it. And he said,
and by the way, I think you should do it
by yourself with no color announcer. I can't get anybody
to do that. If Vin Scully doesn't, and he's the
most popular sports broadcaster of all time, why doesn't anybody
else do it? You'd be second best. And I was like, well,
he's Ben Scully in any event. That's another argument again
(50:22):
for another time. But we were talking about this, and
we were talking about sports centers or a new show
in New York, or maybe my moving back to Connecticut
or something, and it just seemed well, I was then
fifty eight years old, and I was thinking, I don't
know how much longer I'm going to do this, but
(50:43):
you know what I'd like to do. I'd like to
do a job here before I retire and before I
die that I simply enjoy at least the parts about
being on the air that I don't WinCE and wake
up sweating in the middle of the night over because
I so hate the man I am talking about, and
I so wish that the world that he has ruined
(51:05):
could be fixed. And then I know that I might
be able to stave some of this off, but I
can't fix it no matter what I do. I can't
fix it. I might be able to improve it for
the ten minutes I'm on the air or in the video,
but I'm not going to fix it. He has powerful
forces behind him in a time in which all you
need is cash, and yet I thought, well, yeah, maybe
(51:29):
I want to make a decision here based on what
I want to do. And so we neared a deal
at ESPN, and it began to be in September and
October of twenty seventeen evident that I would return to
ESPN in twenty eighteen, probably anchoring the six PM Sports
Center by myself in Bristol, Connecticut, with the goal towards
(51:51):
moving it back to Manhattan within six months. That was
the plan, and I'd be doing baseball play by play,
although not by myself. So I knew I would have
to wrap up the GQ series, and the announced reason
that I gave for leaving that series was that I
(52:11):
believed that the mainstream media had finally assessed the reality
of Trump's threat to mankind, to continued human population of
this planet, and in fact, any life form on this
planet menaced every minute, and increasingly so by Trump, as
we are now seeing again. I thought that the media
(52:34):
had begun to pick this up. Finally, even the Chuck
Todds of this world seemed to be understanding just what
a dire situation we were in. I really did believe
that was the case, and I also thought the Muller
report was going to be of some value. And I
also thought that the media, when Trump inevitably tried to
bury it as he would and did, that they would
(52:58):
fight back and read the actual report and do their
reporting based on the report and not the summary from
bar Are. Anyway, that was to some degree an excuse
because there were a couple of other factors. I wrapped
up the GQ series suddenly in a video saying Okay,
my work here is done. And I needed to do
(53:20):
that to clear a little space between the end of
that series, and I needed perhaps a month until we
were going to announce my third tenure at ESPN, possibly
anchoring the six pm Sports Center, or at least going
back into the Sports Center mix and baseball play by play,
and a full time job again with ESPN for the
third time, and the second time since it appeared that
(53:43):
we had descended into a role of perpetual antagonists in
a nuclear war. ESPN and me peace. Ain't it wonderful?
So I needed something to say, Okay, I've decided that
I can't do anything more here and I need to
for my own life go and move back to ESPN.
(54:04):
And then there was the precipitate event. In producing these commentaries,
the Resistance ones and before that, the Closer ones for GQ,
I had been in the good hands of a man
named Jeff Gagnin, who was an editor at GQ, and
who had suggested through somebody I didn't know who had
(54:27):
called me for a quote on a story, had said,
by the way, if you do get to talk to Olderhiman,
ask him why he's not doing a video series somewhere
about the upcoming election. And I said, who asked this question?
And I got his number and I called, and the
next thing I knew we were having a meeting. And
the next thing I knew, he said, we can host these,
we can put them on our platform, and we'll fact
check them for you. We had a deal between the
(54:47):
first mention that they might be interested in something or
at least questioning why there was no series. Between that
first mention and the first video was ten days and
Jeff was involved in editing and producing these things, although
he was more of a magazine editor and still is,
and he assigned me to their video producer for GQ magazine,
(55:09):
a woman named Derna Newton, who was from New Zealand,
who had worked previously at arms distance from Michael Moore,
but in that group of people, and mostly produced fashion videos.
Because she worked for GQ, she wasn't in any way
limited to that kind of material, but that was her world.
And so when I presented the first script for the
first Trump commentary for GQ, it was in my mind
(55:33):
at my timing, seventeen minutes long. And she looked at
it and she said, you think maybe you could cut
this to two and a half, And I said, no,
the point is it's seventeen minutes. You can't put out
of seventeen minute video. That was the start of a
very contentious relationship. She brought everything that she knew about video,
which was celebrities, fashion, rock stars, people dressed in funny hats,
(55:58):
all that. She brought, that short attention span audience. She
brought that to the table, and I brought my experierience
with political commentaries in which seventeen minutes was not the
longest commentary I'd ever done. And we didn't butt heads.
We ran from opposite ends of the earth at high
speed for like an hour in each direction, and then
(56:21):
hit head to head day after day after day. There
was no week that passed where I did not say,
you have got to get Durana off this series. And
I'm sure there is no week that went by where
she didn't say I've got to get off this series.
And this went on for several months, and then something
happened at a meeting before the recording of the three
(56:44):
commentaries on Monday afternoon, where Dorenna said to me, you know,
I've been thinking about what you were doing here and
what you said, and these are the areas where I
think you're right. And I had been thinking on the
way in, now that they were picking up the cost
of the uber. On the way in, I had been
thinking that she had been right about something that she
had wanted to do in terms of production, how she
(57:05):
wanted to shoot these things. She said, you move your
hands a lot. I had wanted it tight on my face.
She said, you move your hands very eloquently. We need
to see your hands moving. And I thought this was
the dumbest thing I ever saw until about six people
in a row said, you know, by the way, the
other thing I like about those commentaries, you're talking with
your hands. Finally she had made a good point. I
(57:26):
had made a good point. Well, that was the beginning
of one of the great collaborative experiences of my life.
Suddenly we found that there were vast amounts of material
that the other one could use and improve upon, and
then we smoothed out a lot of the rough edges
of this series, both in terms of what it looked
like and more importantly, how we produced it. We cut
(57:48):
the production time in half so I could actually spend
another two hours every Monday thinking about what I was
going to say, rather than rushing to record it in time,
and how to remove the bounce in the audio in
the room. Because we worked together, and I was delighted
to see her every week, and one day she came in,
and I came in, and I was about to wrap
(58:08):
the series up, and she said, you know, they're going
to be more cutbacks here. There had already been so
many cutbacks that during my time there, which was less
than a year, they had gone from having Durna as
the head of video for GQ magazine to the head
of video for all the Conde Nas publications, and she said,
more layoffs. I'll give you a call later as to
who got laid off, and I said, oh, Christ, this
(58:30):
is going to beat him or them or that. She
called me after I got home that night and it
turned out the person who they've laid off was her,
and I said, this is outrageous, and she said, I know,
I didn't see it coming. I don't know what I'm
going to do. And I said, well, I'm going to
be talking to these people about doing this and these
people about doing that. Maybe we can work something else out,
but for now, I don't know if I can do
anything other than I quit. She said, what do you mean.
(58:53):
I said, I'm quitting right now. I'll come in and
do one more to wrap it up, and I'll put
out some excuse me, bullshit story about why we're doing it.
But I was going to end this anyway now. I'm
going to do it right now, rather than a month
from now, or rather than after I signed the new
contract with ESPN, any of those things, because this is ridiculous.
I haven't done this too many times in my life.
(59:15):
Outright quit on the spot. Because somebody else had been mistreated.
But that was, if not one hundred percent of the
reasons that I stopped the GQ series. As I've mentioned before,
the suicide guy, the event at the Apple Store, my
own sense that I should try to do something I
enjoyed rather than gave me pain every time, and then
(59:37):
finally the last straw. So it wasn't the only reason
I quit, but it was when I quit, and I
called up the publisher's office and said, or sent him
an email and said, I understand you've dismissed her and
a Newton with whom I forged not just a great
working relationship, but one in which, for the first time ever,
my blank, unyielding, uncompromising confidence that I knew everything had
(01:00:01):
grown from that into a sense of collabor with somebody
from a totally different background. I worked very hard in
this relationship, and you just fired her. I quit. So
the relevance to today, obviously is this The motivating factor
in all of it was when someone suggested, go back
(01:00:22):
and enjoy yourself, have fun, go back and do sports again,
have fun. The weariness of doing what I did then
and what I am doing now took over again, and
I know you know this weariness as well as I do,
because whereas you don't do a commentary on this twice
a week or hopefully more in the weeks to come,
(01:00:42):
I'm sure it affects you. Nonetheless, it affects all of us.
There is only one thing you can actually credit Trump for.
He does have endless amounts of energy. He certainly doesn't
spend any on anybody else but himself. None of the
rest of us really exist, of course, he has boundless energy.
(01:01:03):
He never thinks of anybody else or the consequences of
what he's doing, only what it means for him, and
feeling that infinite void in his soul. If you don't dream,
if you don't aspire, if you don't need, if you
don't exist in the same universe as everybody else, you
(01:01:25):
don't need to sleep, and you have endless amounts of
energy to devote to your animal needs. An animal that
must eat will probably not take a nap. All he
can do is eat for his ego, because that's all
he has. So that's his advantage. We who have lives,
and who have needs, and who have empathies, we tend
(01:01:46):
to get exhausted by this, and that's the great advantage
of being a fascist and a psychotic. They don't need that.
They are virtual machines. So I don't know if there's
a conclusion here. I will point out that I went
through all these machinations, and if not, lies to the
audience about why the series was stopping. I did think
(01:02:08):
the media was picking it up. I did need to
do something for my own health, But there were these
other factors in there, including the suicide guy and the
firing of my friend and Newton. Ah, the end result
might be, and the lesson might be, and it might
be pertinent here as I went through all of that
and made all the arrangements of ESPN and told everybody there, Hey,
(01:02:31):
good news, I've got I found the reason to stop
the GQ series. And it's organic and it's valid, and
it's true, and it'll give us like six weeks before
you went ounce this. In the six weeks that I
prepared the window between the GQ series and the resumption
of my sports career, the president of ESPN stopped being
(01:02:52):
the president of ESPN, and the whole deal went up
in smoke. It was later revived in small portions by
an executive. They just got rid of named Norby Williamson,
who managed somehow in the disaster yearist period after the
president of ESPN stopped being the president of ESPN to
get this thing done where I went and worked for
them part time and did ballgames and had a certain
(01:03:14):
guarantee and a part time contract. But I never wound
up doing the six o'clock Sports Center. I did not
move back to Bristol, Connecticut. I did go back to Bristol,
Connecticut three or four different times. And then that whole
ESPN experience ended because COVID closed the New York studios
that I largely worked from. So if you are flagging
(01:03:37):
and tired in your fight, remember number one that even
if you leave the fight, the problem is going to
follow you. And number two, it may very well be
that the thing that you run to to satisfy yourself
or to give yourself a happier feeling in your life,
(01:03:57):
or to focus on it may or may not still
be there when you get there. I'd like to say
I feel a lot better after that, but no, I
(01:04:18):
just feel more tired. I've done all the damage I
can do here. Thanks for listening. Listening, Brian Ray and
John Phillip Shanelle and musical directors of count impt Sorry
Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle. The musical directors of Countdown, arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Chanelle had at
orchestration and keyboards, mister Ray was on the guitars, bass
and drums, and it was produced by TKO Brothers. That's
(01:04:39):
the two of them and me, We're your brothers. Our
satirical and fifty musical comments are by the best baseball
stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is the
Old Woman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren
Davis and courtesy of ESPN. Other music arranged and performed
by the group No Horns Allowed. And my announcer today
was my friend Jonathan Banks. Everything else was as ever
(01:05:03):
my fault. That's Countdown for today, Just one four hundred
and thirty four days until the scheduled end of his
lame duck, lame brained term, unless Musk removes him sooner
or the actuarial tables do. But just remember, he who
saves his country does not violate any law. I didn't
(01:05:26):
mean you trying to save your country. The next scheduled
Countdown is Thursday. As always, bulletins as the news warrants.
Remember impeach Trump. It won't work now, it will win
the Democrats the midterms if there are midterms. Until next time,
(01:05:46):
I'm Keith Ulruman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck.
(01:06:09):
Countdown with Keith Alderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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