WHITE HOUSE "PARALYZED"; NOW IS THE TIME FOR OBAMA TO DESTROY TRUMP - 7.24.25

SEASON 3 EPISODE 148: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Now that it's Murdochian Official (WHAT? Trump is IN the Trumpstein files? I'm shocked to discover there's gambling going on in here) and a Politico source says Trump and his White House goons are so lost "it's the first time I've ever seen them sort of paralyzed," expect them to push even harder on their QAnonTM fantasy that Barack Obama is guilty of 'treason' - even beyond the farce that the nitwitted Tulsi Gabbard and Karoline Leavitt presented yesterday.

So it is time for President Obama to respond - and crush Trump. It is Obama's moment. Rather than again insist that EVERYBODY ELSE needs to DO more and SAY more and STAND for more, he should give a national address in which he sues Trump personally for slander and defamation and announce a ridiculous figure sought - like $500 Billion - and call for a conference at which he and President Clinton and other Democratic leaders and the SCOTUS justices they appointed and every decent Republican and every true American meets to strategize how to legally and immediately remove Trump from office and replace his criminal gang with a bipartisan caretaker government to carry us through to Election Day 2028.

I will give a version of the speech Obama should now give, because he has been unexpectedly afforded the opportunity to perhaps actually start something that could end this nightmare of a madman steadily disassembling American democracy, a Temu Hitler gradually turning harassment of minorities into persecution and ethnic cleansing, a criminal who must stay in office at any cost or face the reality of dying in prison for his countless crimes. I have no doubt he can do better. I would not doubt he has a better idea.

I will take no offense - provided he DOES something.

“Trump is clearly furious,” a Politico close-to-the-White House source told its Trump stenographer yesterday. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them sort of paralyzed.” Say Hey! Trump’s White House is paralyzed! Excellent – kick them down the stairs, they can’t fight back. It’ll hurt more. The Trumpsteen Birthday Card is real and it CAN’T be the worst thing about Trump in the files that we now know Bondi told him about in May, otherwise he would’ve released the files. The photos of Epsteen at Trump’s second wedding are real, and THEY can’t be the worst otherwise he would’ve released it. Whatever’s worst is at LEAST B+ material. Keep hammering.

B-Block (37:16) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: They piled up quick! Trump just asked Washington's NFL team to change its name; Trump once hammered Obama for asking Washington's NFL team to change its name. Mike Lee fell for an AI Jerome Powell resignation so badly done that the only word in the office logo that wasn't gibberish was "BUREAU," Chris Cillizza is actually criticizing somebody else for talking politics when nobody wants to hear that person talking politics, and the passing of the eternal Ozzy Osbourne inspires John Yang to get Ozzy's native country wrong and Alex Jones to get the cause of death wrong.

C-Block (48:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Can you believe it? After I presented the inarguable evidence that CBS didn't fire Colbert just to please Trump (how are you shutting him up if he's not fired until next May?) I get invited to speak at a PRO-Colbert rally. I explained what I was going to say, and the line went dead. One of the things I was going to say was how this is the same as MSNBC's firing of Phil Donahue in 2003. I was actually in the room for that, so let's go through it step by step.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. What

(00:26):
follows is the speech Barack Obama should now give to
the nation. This is the address Barack Obama should now give,
rather than another one about how everybody else needs to
do more and say more and stand for more in
this time of crisis. This is the speech Barack Obama

(00:46):
should give now because he has been unexpectedly afforded the
opportunity to perhaps actually start something that could end this
nightmare of a madman steadily disassembling American democracy, a team
ou hitler, gradually turning harassment of minority parties into persecution
and ethnic cleansing, a criminal who must stay in office

(01:10):
at any cost or face the reality of dying in
prison for anyone of his hundreds and thousands of crimes.
This is the speech Barack Obama should now give at
this moment, in the hopes that he can inspire America
as he did in two thousand and eight, only this

(01:33):
time not merely inspire it, but save it. My fellow Americans,
if a random madman on the street or online had
accused me of treason, I would probably never hear him
say it. It has happened since I left the presidency.

(01:55):
It happened during my presidency, it happened before my presidency.
I would not blink. It is part of the job.
If an active American politician made such an accusation against me,
I would never respond. Republican and conservative politics have long
since fallen into the gutter, through the stone beneath the gutter,

(02:19):
through the basement. But when the current president of the
United States accuses me or any other former American president
of treason, and more disturbingly, still claims to have incontrovertible
proof of my guilt and instead presents only some laughably
cherry picked documents that point only to his own guilt

(02:42):
and his own collusion with Russia, and his own insanity,
as mister Trump did the day before yesterday in the
Oval Office. When this kind of sacrilege occurs, I, as
an American citizen, am left no other choice but to respond.

(03:04):
I must respond not for myself, but for my country,
for our country, for our future. Donald Trump can no
longer remain president of the United States. Whatever there is
in the so called Epstein files that incriminates him in
whatever crime or best reality or abuse, it has severed

(03:27):
the already flimsy tether between himself and reality, and a president,
the most powerful man in the world, who is severed
from reality yet retains the all too real powers of
the office, is a danger to the life of every
person in this country and every person on this planet.

(03:49):
Nothing in my conduct has ever approached the words mister
Trump has used to describe me. His animus towards me
is decades old. It has been analyzed by many smarter
people than I. It is clear that it contains elements
of racism, and of envy, and of lust for power,
and most importantly and most perilously, of sheer madness. As

(04:15):
someone who loves my country above all else, as someone
who has devoted my life to serving my country, his
words are slanderous in the highest degree possible using human language.
There is no worse accusation he can make, and no
more amplifying platform he could have made it from. In addition,

(04:39):
I must note that the members of the Supreme Court
mister Trump himself appointed, including one who he was able
to appoint only because of a manipulative and unethical political
trick enacted by his party while he was running for president,
have created virtual blanket immunity for presidents for acts committed

(05:00):
while in office. Therefore, it is not possible for any
present and to be guilty of any of the crimes
mister Trump has alleged about me, even if they were
remotely true in the slightest possible degree, because mister Trump
has made sure that there are no crimes any president
can be guilty of. Therefore, mister Trump has exceeded all

(05:24):
boundaries of acceptable comment or political criticism, or legally defendable speech,
even within the mentally warped world he inhabits. And therefore
it is necessary that I act on two fronts. In
the lesser of these, I have today had my attorneys
file a slander and defamation suit against Donald John Trump

(05:47):
as an individual. In this suit, I seek damages of
five hundred billion dollars from him personally. I have filed
an additional slander and defamation suit against the government of
the United States of America for permitting him to use
it as a staging ground for his slanders smears, and

(06:09):
more importantly, for giving him a place from which to
try to usher in a form of America in which
a madman's vague effort to save himself from prison by
fabricating an imaginary plot against this country is acceptable. I
will state now that any money I receive after I
prevail in these two lawsuits, any part of the one

(06:31):
trillion dollars in damages I am seeking, will be distributed
to citizens, immigrants, and defendants who, like me, have been
slandered and abused, and whose life has been imperiled by
this creature Trump. But more importantly than these defamation suits,
I am calling for the leaders of the Democratic Party

(06:53):
to meet with me, and with the governors of the
key Democratic led states, and with former President Clinton, and
with the members of the Supreme Court that President Clinton
and I I appointed, and with the key business leaders
of this country at a conference to attempt to fend
off the coming disaster Donald Trump seeks to inflict on

(07:15):
this nation and this world, to stop it with actions
that would shame a Soviet leader or a medieval king.
We who believe in democracy, We who believe in an
America safe for us to disagree with one another without
having someone in power who can respond by jailing us
or threatening us with phony charges and a politically corrupted judiciary.

(07:38):
We who believe in America must gather our forces now
to fend off disaster. Later to begin, we will be
filling out the idea voiced by Governor Newsom of California
that his state should no longer pay the expenses of
the so called Red States, whose economies are such that

(07:59):
they cannot provide services for their own people without being
underwritten by the so called Blue states. Governor Newsom has suggested,
in effect, a federal tax boycott, and at our conference,
those of us who want to save America will propose
an organized and safe process for all the states to
participate in this tax boycott and assume all the risks

(08:23):
so that you, as a citizen, will bear no risk.
We will additionally analyze, organize, and propose a national strike
to hasten the realization by the members of this President's
cabinet and party, and his congressional leaders and his Supreme
Court that they must join our movement or they must

(08:45):
assume responsibility for the financial chaos that will ensue in
the Red States and the areas which they purport to represent.
America will not last long as a dictatorship run by
a minority of unproductive racists. If the fair minded people

(09:05):
of the nation who oppose such a dictatorship decide to
stop paying for it. Our Conference will propose legal, peaceful
means to remove Donald John Trump from office immediately, along
with many of his most fervent and least mentally well
acolytes and enforcers, and to replace his administration with a bipartisan,

(09:29):
multi party one that can serve to undo the damage
he has already inflicted on us as a form of
caretaker government until the midterm elections of twenty twenty six
and the presidential election of twenty twenty eight hopefully put
us back on the path to the tolerant, diverse, multi
party nation in which we all grew up and in

(09:49):
which you and I, and our parents and our ancestors
have thrived since seventeen seventy six. Our Conference will seek
to celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
Declaration of Independence July fourth of next year, the two
hundred and fiftieth anniversary of our nation, by ensuring that

(10:11):
on that anniversary, our nation will still be here. I
invite all responsible Republican leaders to join us to, as
President Lincoln said, disenthrall yourselves. Disenthrall yourselves, because you already

(10:31):
know without me telling you that the next person, mister
Trump will accuse of treason is you. The dogmas of
the quiet past, President Lincoln said are inadequate to the
stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and
we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new.

(10:55):
So we must think a new and act a new
We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we share save our country.

(11:36):
I'm not holding my breath by the way Obama has become,
if anything, the national scold you really need to do more.
I really need to be retired. His reaction to what
Trump said, you or me, Probably in those situations we
would have controlled ourselves and simply gone up and smacked

(11:59):
Trump in the head. Obama's reaction was a too cool
for school statement, attributed to a spokesman beginning out of
respect for the office of the Presidency, our office does
not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out
of this White House with a response. But these claims,

(12:19):
it is not nonsense, President Obama. It is a serious
attempt to put you in prison, to put me in prison,
to put all who oppose Trump in prison. It is
not misinformation. It is brainwashing and out of respect for

(12:41):
the office of the presidency. The man in the office
shits on the office of the presidency and thus every
president who preceded him, every hour of every day. The
idea of the respect for the office of the President
of the United States is dead. Someone must restore it.
The people with the greatest opportunity to restore it and

(13:04):
with the greatest need to restore it, are our former presidents.
That's you and mister Clinton. Mister Bush is somewhere on
the sidelines, even further away from the light than you are.
In the attempt to not take any of this seriously.
Obama takes it much too seriously. Nothing could go further

(13:28):
right at this minute towards ousting Trump than Obama throwing
punches here. Nothing would beat the staid what an utter
nonsensical boor response to be replaced for once by the
kind of rage the rest of us feel, President Obama. Somebody,

(13:50):
somebody of stature, and it would be nice, somebody of probody,
somebody who does tend to stand off getting angry, summoning
our fury, directing what lurks just beneath the surface of
all us. What we need right now is and I'm
mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take this any
more eruption from Barack Obama. But if it could be

(14:19):
more sad that he's not saying something like my little speech,
anything like that, anything hopefully better written, more inspirational. If
it could be more sad, it is because he is
uniquely qualified in a unique moment to get this off
the dime. A president not just accusing his predecessors of

(14:42):
treason and being sedacious. He said sedacious. Apparently that is
Trump's version of seditious or maybe Sebasius, not just doing
that but claiming it's been proven. This is a unique
opportunity to respond. It is an invitation to come over

(15:03):
and smack him in the head and to invoke all
the gravitas and gravity that the accused ex president necessarily summons.
The current Democratic leadership is terrified and dim and buried
under consultants and focus groups. Commentators, we're just commentators. A

(15:26):
former president could actually put such a conference together and
at minimal risk to himself and thus those who participated
with him. I mean, how would Trump respond to such
a conference by accusing Obama of double secret treason. I
also think the five hundred billion dollar lawsuit against Trump

(15:48):
would be a nice touch. He would understand what that meant.
Even he would understand what that meant. If you don't
like any of that, President Obama, do something of your
own choice, do something you think is better than that.
But do something anything, because just an effing statement, not

(16:10):
even under your own name, is utterly insufficient and makes
it worse. You have a chance right now to kneecap
this man. We do not. His White House is reported
by a prominent news organization to be paralyzed by Trump. Steen,

(16:36):
He's down, kick him, kneecap him right now. The distance
you are keeping from our crisis, our national existential crisis
is assuming Marie Antoinette like proportions. And I know Marie
Antoinette never said the cake thing. I am saying you,
like every other political professional, seems to remain under the

(16:57):
delusion that the American Republic is elastic and everything will
just snap back to normal proportions eventually. Yeah, just like
it did in two thousand and nine, Remember when all
the racists went away after your election, Just like it
did in twenty fifteen, when Republicans stood firmly against nominating
a man they all called a psychopath and some correctly

(17:17):
called a hitler, just like it did in twenty twenty one,
when having failed at a coup from inside the White
House and failed to keep their monster in chief in office,
all those MAGA guys dispersed, We are broken, President Obama. Insane, impossible, inconceivable.

(17:42):
I sure hope so. But regardless, Trump just not only
said you're guilty of treason, but that it's been proved
already that you're guilty of treason. You have to cut
this guy's balls off metaphorically because he obviously doesn't have
any actual ones anymore. As we know, it's always Taco
Tuesday somewhere and this isn't random, like it or not.

(18:08):
You are the last person to get him to have
publicly backed down. When he backed down, he did the
bare minimum back down. He never repeated the back down.
He has always undermined his own back down. But he
did publicly state you were born in this country, your
birth certificate is legitimate. The ground zero of his goddamned

(18:31):
America destroying campaign was false. He admitted he was wrong.
That was the one crack in the armor of bullshit
he wears every day. You did that, Now do it again.

(18:56):
If the lawsuit seems beneath you and you don't want
to have to stoop to save the nation, then go
with the conference idea, or go with another idea. Somebody
have some ideas, you don't like my ideas, do better,
but do something. The point is that one way or

(19:17):
the other, even if it's just old age, someday Trump
will be gone. What is needed now is a strategy
for making sure that he takes his followers and is
evil with him to hell. What could be better than
an all party conference, a bipartisan effort to save the nation,
a recognition that a minority is not only in command

(19:39):
with dreams of enacting the world of George Orwell, but
if using its victim's money to finance. It's been a
long time, but this nation has had bipartisan emergency conferences
in which the peril presented by one man or one

(20:01):
event has been obvious to all political parties, and and
the suspended all the rules just to fix it. One
such conference resulted in a fateful, fatal bargain in eighteen
seventy seven that we should not repeat. The North got
the White House, the South got the end of reconstruction,
and the ground worked for Jim Crow, it was terrible.

(20:24):
On the other hand, it forestalled, and so far it
has forestalled it for one hundred and forty eight goddamned years.
The only other option in January eighteen seventy seven, which
was a Second American Civil War with more carnage, more guns.

(20:45):
I get it, President Obama, eight long years. I couldn't
make it to six years doing Sports Center every night.
You've been off since January twentieth, twenty seventeen. Even I
don't take that much time off. My high school was

(21:09):
the place that gave you your first true platform for
a political speech in nineteen ninety one. You went there
at the invitation of the same Hackley history teacher and
department chairman who told me on graduation day in nineteen
seventy five that the sportscasting thing I was planning was nice,

(21:31):
but that I needed to realize that someday, whether I
liked it or not, I would end up, whether as
candidate or as reporter or as commentator, I would end
up in politics. And I thanked him and smiled politely
and shook his hand and told him he was crazy,
and he wasn't crazy. President Obama. That is a unique,

(21:57):
if trivial bond between you and I, and I invoke
Walter Schneller's clairvoyance for you and for me and say
to you what he would say. This madman Trump has
afforded you a gift, an opportunity to do more for
your country than even eight years in the White House

(22:18):
gave you. Walter was a courtly man, the youngest son
of diplomats from Vienna, but he would have told you
this even more bluntly than I am now. In two
thousand and seven, he complained to me that he didn't
like my language towards Bush in the MSNBC Special Comments,

(22:38):
And as I began to apologize to him for telling
the President of the United States to shut up, he
interrupted me and said, no, no, you missed my point.
I do not understand how you'd refrain yourself from calling
that mother effort Bush a mother effort. I would so
on mister Schneller's behalf President Obama, this is your moment

(23:07):
kneecap that mother effort to follow up on something I
just dropped in there. Trump is clearly furious unquote, a
political close to the White House source told Politico's Trump's

(23:29):
stenographer yesterday quote, it's the first time I've seen them
sort of paralyzed. Yes, please, Trump's White House is sort
of paralyzed. Excellent. Kick them down the stairs. They can't

(23:49):
fight back. It'll hurt more if they're paralyzed. Kick them
down the stairs. Then take the elevator and meet them
when they land and kick them again. The Trump's Steen
birthday card is real, the one the Wall Street Journal reported,
and it cannot be the worst thing about Trump in

(24:12):
the trump Stein files. Otherwise he would have released the
files because it's not that bad. It's stupid and sleazy,
and that's Trump's baseline. The photos of Epstein at Trump's
second wedding, they're real, and they can't be the worst
thing in the files. Otherwise he would have released the files.
Whatever is worst in the trump Stein files is at

(24:36):
least B plus material. Keith hammering, they're sort of paralyzed.
Let's go for one hundred percent on that. I mean,
good God. Even Mike Johnson has the presence of mind
to act when the opportunity has been afforded him. Trump
needed as many distractions as he could from Trumpstein, and

(24:57):
none of them have worked. Even the Tulsey Gabbard drooling
which treason nonsense, and her conflation of Russian trivia with
actual Russian sabotage for Trump, and the talk of arrests
and trials, and the release of the Martin Luther King
junior files, and the Hillary email story by Pam Bondy
better known as Pam Bondy who refused to prosecute Epstein

(25:18):
in Florida, and the destruction of Christy Dogg killer Gnome
when she threatened New York City and reporters. None of
those Trumpstein distractions have been enough. Even Mike Johnson knew
he needed to act President Obama, so he sent the
House home to avoid any votes in the month ahead

(25:39):
on the Democratic amendments to force the release of the
Trumpstein files, because they need this window for Trump's legal
mouthpiece Todd Blanche to go see Glaine Maxwell in prison
and presumably offer her a pardon if she will lie
and say Trump had nothing to do with it. Because
as flawed a plan as that is, and as many

(25:59):
new conspiracy theories that would be spun instantly out of
that obvious perjury from Maxwell, it's doing something. Those defending
this nation are doing less than that. And I'd like

(26:20):
to point out that one organization that prides itself on
defending this nation on day four of all this, and
we are now numbered at day seventeen of trump Stein.
On day four of all this, that broke in New
York Times posted this headline how Trump deflected maga's wrath
over Epstein, at least for now, by tapping into other grievances.

(26:43):
President Trump managed to turn one of the most fractious
moments for his base into a unifying one. Spoiler alert times, no,
he didn't. Some poll numbers from the impeccable g Elliot Morris,
the last king of five thirty eight Democrats now lead
the House generic ballot forty seven to forty three eight

(27:05):
point edge nine percent undecided. Trump is at fifty seven
percent disapproval. His issue disapprovals are worse. He's underwater everywhere
except under border security. He's ahead on six points on

(27:26):
border security everything else. Disapproval is far ahead of approval
prices and inflation. It's sixty one percent disapproval to thirty
three percent approval. CNN's Frantic Guy Enton is now doing
a disapproval poll of polls, and his numbers are even

(27:48):
worse than Elliott Morris's Trump Underwater in an aggregate poll
on immigration, minus five on the economy, minus fourteen, on
foreign policy, minus fourteen, on trade, minus fifteen, on Epstein,
minus thirty seven. Trump is at minus thirty seven on Epstein,

(28:09):
and even the politico Dweebs say he and the White
House are paralyzed. It's time, President Obama, every Democratic leader,
every responsible Republican, it's time. It is time. It is today.

(28:30):
The door is open. Push Trump down the goddamned flight
of stairs. I don't think you need it, President Obama,
but you're certainly willing to have the copyright on anything
that you liked in my version of the speech. You

(28:52):
should now give and you should sue him, because that's
the only thing he understands and the only thing his
base understands. And a big, impossible number like five hundred
billion dollars is it is to anybody with an IQ
larger than twenty five. Trump supporters do not have IQs
larger than twenty five. They will be scared at the

(29:14):
thought that Trump might owe you five hundred billion dollars,
and that they might owe you another five hundred billion dollars.
And if you don't like any of those ideas. As
I said, any that you propose will necessarily be better
than any that I have just spoken. Do something. This

(29:34):
is the country and the history of this nation calling
on you, and you alone. A postcard will not suffice,
or a playlist or a very very early college basketball bracket.

(30:03):
Also of interest, he who is the last political person
in America? Who should write that nobody wants to hear
the political opinions or analysis of anybody else. Who is
the worst person to conclude this? Who is the worst
spokesman for you know? This guy over there should shut up.
Nobody cares what he thinks. Now this is close. It

(30:24):
could be Chuck Todd, could be Joe Scarborough, It could
be Joe the woman version Scarborough. But it's not. It's
a guy with the initial CC, and he's in worse
persons CC and I don't mean Sabbathia and CC has

(30:49):
perpetrated one of the all time lack of self awareness
doozies even for him. That's next. This is countdown. This
is countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead on this initiative. Countdown.

(31:29):
So you will love this, and I suspect you will
love this whether you agree with me on the Stephen
Colbert firing, or you disagree with me on the Stephen
Colbert firing, or if you only accept some parts of
my argument. That know, they were going to end his
show anyway when his contract ends next spring, and the
fact that they are now leaving him on CBS every

(31:53):
night to say whatever the f he wants between now
and then for ten months anyway, kind of confirms they
didn't do this to shut him up, just to shut
him up, because they're not shutting him up anyway. This
is the part you will love. This is the definition

(32:15):
of political commentary and political protest. The liberals have it
in a smaller scale than the Conservatives, for whom everything
is a conservative protest. They are as softish church music.
To borrow the phrase of an old colleague of mind. Anyway,
this is the part you will love. I have been

(32:35):
invited by a prominent liberal activist movement to saunter the
ten blocks or so from my home over to Colbert's
studio to speak at a rally protesting is firing. I
said I'd be happy to. I will speak about CBS's
capitulation too, and their appeasement of Trump. And how they've

(32:56):
turned that into the whorehouse network over there, how they
are behaving the way Timu Hitler wants them to. But
I will have to emphasize that the Colbert firing wasn't
really part of this, except in a small symbolic way
that's maybe a little bit more cynical than you realize.
That they are using this that they were going to
do anyway as a soop to Trump, but that it's

(33:19):
not really about Trump, just as the downsizing of Seth
Meyers's show was not about Trump, and the cancelation or
the other neutering of the Kimmel and Fallon shows to
come will not be about Trump either, Shockingly, with those
caveats they passed anyway still ahead. I have argued this
seemingly very pro corporate, anti liberal, anti liberal protest before,

(33:45):
and taking hell for it then too. But I was
right then and I'm right now, And with the anniversary
the first anniversary of his passing coming up, it is
time to revisit the day MSNBC fired its top rated
host and its top rated show came to an end,
The Phil Donahue Show, just as George Bush started bombing

(34:06):
Iraq and MSNBC claimed it was losing money too, and
MSNBC was also right. They were going to do it anyway,
they just exploited it. Next in Things I Promised not
to tell. Actually, I can go longer about that first
believe it or not. There's still more new idiots to

(34:28):
talk about, the roundup of the miss Grants, morons and
Dunning Krueger effect specimens who constitute today's other works persons
in the world. And this is the problem. When you
skip the worst person segment from one show, they begin
to pile up so much that there are honorary mentions
the cup overfloweth honorary mention number one Andrew Yang. There

(34:50):
are times at which it looks like, sounds like, and
reads as if Elon Musk is the stupidest rich person
in the world, or maybe that guy Bill, the investment
money guy, the hedge fund guy. No, Andrew Yang is
the dumbest rich guy in the world. After the Sad

(35:11):
News on Tuesday, Andrew Yang wrote rip Ozzy Osbourne a
true American original. He deleted it when somebody pointed out
to him as Homer Simpson always said, I have always

(35:33):
said I prefer our Beatles to England's Rolling Stones and
already mentioned number two. Well it's Trump. Jamel Hill, my
old brief colleague at ESPN, pointed this one out. Yes,
there's always a treat, she wrote a tweet, but a treat. President,
he wrote, should not be telling the Washington Redskins to

(35:56):
change their name. Our country has far bigger problems. Focus
on them, not nonsense, said the man who just tried
to distract you from trump Stein by demanding that the
Washington Commanders Commandeer's, Washington Football Club, Washington trump Stein's whatever
they're called now. He just demanded they change their name

(36:16):
to the Redskins. He's previously written that a president should
not be telling the to Washington football team to change
his name, because they're bigger problems. That was when he
was still partially saying honor you mentioned number three. House
Republicans John Bresnahan reports they are trying to rename part
of the Kennedy Center for Milania Trump No, not the

(36:38):
dumpster in the back a GOP amendment on the Interior
Spending Bill which has now been added to that bill
that the opera House located in the John F. Kennedy
Center for the Performing Art shall be known and designated
as the first Lady Malania Trump Opera House. Do you
want to name it after Milania? Have you thought about

(36:59):
just naming it then the Anastasia dot com Opera House,
or or the trump Stein Jeffrey Epstein helped introduce Milanna
and Trump Opera House. Or this is where people do

(37:20):
not make themselves intelligible in any known language. Opera House
to the winners, the bronze worst boy is Mike Lee stupid.
Someone has postulated that the Senator from Utah went into
the Warren holes, the rabbit holes, and the Warren Dens
and the Rabbit Warrens and the Warren Commission that is

(37:42):
the Internet and lost his mind there. He posted this
Powell's out and before it and after it had a
fire alarm. Oh, it is important. Powell's out and posted
this note addressed to the President the White House, Washington,

(38:03):
d C. I'm worried about this already, dear mister President period. Okay,
so far, I see four mistakes. You'd address it to
President Donald Trump, the White House, Washington, d C. Usually
with a zip code, and it would be on some
kind of stationary with his name on it. From Jerome
Powell after much reflection, I've decided to resign from my

(38:24):
position as chair of the Board of Governors of the
Federal Reserve System, effective at the close of business today.
And the real problem with this is down at the bottom,
where it says respectfully, and everything has been crowded to
fit one page on a computer, respectfully. Jerome H. Powell.

(38:45):
Jerome H. Powell, Chairman, Federal Reserve Board. There is a
logo of some sort and it has an eagle and
some stripes, and uh yeah, there's a wreath there looks
like an olive branch on each side, and then this
inscription OEDEO of govery BEB. So it's the oa doo

(39:12):
of GOVERYBB. Then at the bottom it's a REEBYL reserve
reserve is right, say A the last word instead of
system it it's an s I. It's like doing an
eye chart backwards, e another L upside down what looks

(39:34):
like a kind of Sloman's shield for those of you
who know what Sloman's is, and then an A, only
the bar in the A is at the bottom rather
than in the middle. So because it has this official
looking seal. Mike Lee, who among other things, believes people
believe in his comb over, Mike Lee thought this was

(39:55):
official the oedo of GOVERYBB. There's only one word right
in the logo, reserve. Everything else is designed to fool
stupid people like Senator Mike Lee. Someone has to take
Mike's phone away from him. They need to take his

(40:15):
seat away from him, obviously, but the first step take
his effing phone away from him. He does something like
this once a week, even for the Republican Party. He's stupid.
The runner up. I'm going to give this to The
Daily Beast, but I'm not con confident that it's their doing.
They may be trolling us, but certainly did the other

(40:38):
person mentioned in this. It's one of the great understated
tweets of all time, the Daily Beast. It's a promo,
a link to one of their pieces, The Daily Beast Opinion.
I simply cannot figure out why Hunter Biden thinks that
the Democratic Party or the world is in need of

(40:59):
his opinions about politics rights Chris Slizza. Then the link
is Hunter Biden really needs to shut it. Why is
he talking? Why is he still talking? By Chris Solissa.
I think I think somebody at the Daily Beast did
this deliberately. It's a troll, isn't it. I mean they

(41:21):
can't be that stupid, can they? SOLISA, Oh my, yes,
he is that stupid. He is stupid enough to have
written this article asking why somebody else keeps writing when
clearly nobody wants their opinion, his opinion, but not The
Daily Beast. And then again, they did pay Chris Soliza

(41:43):
probably twenty twenty five dollars for this piece. Why people
should not be listening to this guy by Chris Solissa,
forward by Chuck Todd, but our winner. Speaking of which,
Alex Jones, remembering that the late Azzie Osbourne had been
acutely sick since twenty nineteen, and not particularly well before then.

(42:06):
Parkinson's disease was diagnosed in twenty nineteen, along with blood clots,
mobility issues, depression, a whole array of new drugs that
had their own side effects, and he fought through it
gamely and bravely, literally appearing on stage just days before
his death. Considering that twenty nineteen was the diagnosis before

(42:27):
COVID vaccines, before COVID, Alex Jones, this brain dead, endless
blight on mankind, this waste of carbon, this large pile
of recycling, just waiting for the right landfill space to
open up. Alex Jones writes after Ozzy Osborne's death, quote,

(42:49):
the iconic Ozzy Osbourne has died suddenly after years of illness,
which mysteriously started after getting vaccinated. So Alex, I have
one question. If that's true, can I treat you to
a free COVID vaccination? Alex, Nothing will stop him from

(43:13):
hurting people. Jones, Today's other worst person in the world,

(43:34):
and so do our number one story and Phil Donahue.
This is not about what a good guy Phil Donahue was,
and he was. This is not about what a committed
liberal he was and he was. And this is not
about how he changed television talk shows television indeed for
good or for ill, all of which is true and unquestionable.

(43:55):
This is about the contention that has echoed for more
than two decades that Phil Donahue was fired by his
last employer and had his career ended by his last employer,
MSNBC because he opposed the Iraq war. That's not why

(44:16):
he was fired. That might have been why he was
fired as soon as he was, but that was not
why he was fired. And the reason I know this
is I was there and as I saw this play
out in real time. Initially, I was a disinterested bystander
the firing played out, and people told me things in

(44:38):
real time that they thought it was safe for me
to know, because what the hell. I was only going
to be back at MSNBC in two thousand and three
for a couple of weeks, maybe just a couple of days.
I'd been hired by NBC Sports do the Olympics and
other stuff for them. It's not like I was going
to replace Phil Donahue at eight o'clock on MSNBC when
they eventually fired him. Actually I did replace Phil Donahue

(45:01):
at eight pm on MSNBC when they actually fired him.
That was not the plan. That was never the plan,
and then all of a sudden, one night, that was
the plan. Phil Donahue had retired in nineteen ninety six
because his ratings had dropped from first because he was
the originator of that format, the daytime drama live talk show.

(45:22):
Barbara Walters did one, Doctor, Phil did one. They've all
done them. This was the original the Donahue Show, a
high feminist content, a high liberal content, and given the
fact that he often did really stupid topics, a high
intellectual topic and content. But by nineteen ninety six he
was done and he retired, and in two thousand and

(45:45):
two MSNBC approached him about doing a primetime show on MSNBC,
and again when they did fire him, the show that
replaced him at eight o'clock on MSNBC was called Check's
Notes Countdown with Keith Olderman. And see that's your first
clue that Donahue was. He not fired because he opposed

(46:06):
Iraq and Bush Countdown originally started as essentially just another
hour of the latest news from Iraq after we invaded,
and gradually, i'd say within two months, I began to
take a somewhat skeptical view of this. But before I
went on the air, before they assigned me the eight
o'clock show and replacing Phil Donahue, I had spent about

(46:30):
a year doing a daily commentary on the ABC Radio
network that was carried by a couple of hundred stations,
including one in New York, in which I questioned the
sanity of this impending war, and we all knew it
was coming for a year. We all knew it was
the only thing the Bush administration had been prepared for
as of September eleventh, was an a war in Iraq.

(46:51):
And the only conspiracy I ever put any weight in
was the idea that they looked at nine to eleven
and went, oh crap, what are we going to do now?
Oh my god, it's an excuse to go into Iraq.
That was the conspiracy of nine to eleven. That's the
inside job, and that's the extent of it. They were
prepared to go into Iraq at whatever excuse presented itself.
If the weather had been bad six weeks in a row,
they would have said, that's Sadam Hussein fault. We're going in.

(47:15):
In any event, my point is that if you're going
to get rid of a guy for opposing Iraq and
George W. Bush, you are not going to replace the
Phil Donahue Show with Countdown with Keith Olderman. You are
firing Donahue and replacing him with Olderman. Bad call, buddy.

(47:36):
And again I don't defend MSNBC, and I am defending
MSNBC because I saw this play out in real time.
Countdown started as another hour of news from Iraq, and
by June I was telling the real story about the
rescue of Private Jessica Lynch who had been taken hostage
by the Iraqis when in fact she was in a
hospital and they were torturing her there, and knowing fact,

(47:57):
the doctors, it turned out, from the Iraqi hospital had
contacted US servicemen through intermediaries and said, we don't have
an enough equipment to take care of her. We're worried
about permanent spinal damage. Why don't you come over and
get her when we'll stand outside and you can go
in and get her. And they turned it into the
raid at Entebbe. And I was the first newscaster nationally

(48:20):
to go and say, you know, there's this report from
a Toronto newspaper that that's not the way it went down.
And Bob Right, the head of NBC, called up the
head of MSNBC Primetime, my boss, Phil Griffin and said
fire him. And Griffin talked him down to make him apologize.
And I said, apologize to who? Phil? And he said,
apologize to the troops. I said, I didn't even mention

(48:42):
the troops. I guess that's why you're making the troops
look like they didn't know that this was I said,
so you want me to tell the story again? And
explain that I wasn't trying to insult the troops. Yes,
that'll subtle it. Otherwise we'll have to cancel the show.
And I said to myself, it's a little demeaning. On
the other hand, I got to tell the story again.
I got to throw a little cold water on this
idea that this was some sort of rescue. So's told

(49:05):
the story again. In fact, I said, would you like
me to apologize again next week? And they said yes,
And soon we were doing all the stories that question
whether or not George W. Bush was lying to America,
which he was. That's what they got instead of Phil Donahue.
They did not fire Phil Donahue over IRAQ to get me,
not just to get me, but to get eight goddamned

(49:25):
years of me saying this, screaming at George Bush getting
on the cover of The New Yorker. Shut the hell up,
mister president. They fired Phil Donahue in two thousand and
three for the following reasons. Number one, they made NBC
management and MSNBC in particular, they made the classic dapart mistake.
I have talked about day parts before. If you remember

(49:47):
Katie Kurrk being lured away from the Today Show on
NBC to host the CBS Evening News and being an
utter disaster. That was a dapart mistake. The daypart is
the mornings, the afternoons, the middays, the evenings, the late nights,
the overnights. It's a radio term, it applies to television.
And the simple truth about day parts is just because

(50:09):
you are popular in one day part does not mean
you will automatically be popular in another. In fact, it
may mean you will be unpopular. I learned this at
the age of thirty two. No earlier than that. I
learned this at the age of twenty nine. I went
from KTLA in Los Angeles, where my sports cast was

(50:30):
on at ten minutes to eleven o'clock every night and
it was the intellectual thing to watch on TV. I
went from KTLA down the street to KCBS, from channel
five to Channel two, where the sports cast came on
not at ten fifty every night, but at eleven thirty
every night. It was the same sports cast. I was
the same guy. The lighting was a little bit better,

(50:52):
the material was a little bit better, and everybody hated
me because that was a different day part. Everybody who
liked the thing and thought it was intellectual. They were
going to bed at eleven o'clock. They were literally not
going to They up till eleven thirty. All the people
who were watching me at eleven thirty were the people
who did not have to be at their jobs early
the next morning, people who were fungible, let's put it

(51:15):
that way, in terms of their career. That's how I
learned about day parts. Katie Kuric went from the Today Show,
where she was a co host and when you got
tired of her on then came that guy who later
wound up to be a you know, and then she'd
come back on when you were tired of him. And
they took her and she mostly did interviews in little
fluffy pieces, and she was a happy gal. And they

(51:35):
put her on the CBS Evening News, where her job
was to read the teleprompter at six thirty at night,
and nobody knew her at six thirty at night because
she'd been on at seven thirty in the morning, and
everybody hated her because she wasn't that good at reading
the teleprompter and she couldn't do those little fluffy interviews.
It was a newsreading job, and it was a disaster,
and it happens again and again, and somebody, several somebodies,

(51:56):
including the people who spent millions of dollars on the
MSNBC Phil Donahue Show, thought that because Phil Donna You
had been a brilliant success between the years nineteen sixty
seven and nineteen ninety six on over the air television,
usually running at one o'clock in the afternoon or two
o'clock in the afternoon, that he would be a success
at eight o'clock at night on cable in two thousand

(52:19):
and two, day part plus the other great mistake, which
is a success on broadcast television, was automatically a success
on cable television, or vice versa. That was the primary
reason they had violated the first rule. The show was
doomed from the day they signed it to the contract.
They also had another problem to get him to come

(52:40):
out of retirement, even though he wanted to. He's from television.
He wanted to keep doing it. I'm from television. I
want to keep doing it. It's part of our psychological problems.
Even though he wanted to do it, he knew he
had them over a barrel. It was MSNBC. It was
a minefield. There were littered corpses everywhere of shows that
had not succeeded. The eight pm thing alone was a

(53:02):
disaster area between my two state it's there. I was
gone for four years and four months, and there were
seventeen different shows on at eight o'clock. You had to
get what you wanted why you could get it. And
Phil Donahue said, I want a huge staff, and I'm
not going to Scacca's freaking New Jersey to do my show.
I'm going to do it from thirty Rocker. I'm not
going to do it at all, and it's going to

(53:23):
have a live audience. And I want a staff of
three times the size of anybody else's. I want three
executive producers. And I went, okay, mister Donahue, Okay, mister Donahue, Okay,
mister Donahue. The show now cost about ten times as
much to produce as any other hour on cable news,
meaning that it didn't just have to do as well

(53:43):
as the other shows on MSNBC or even slightly better
to lift up the boat, but just to pay for itself,
it basically had to do ten times better ratings than
any other show on cable television and guess what it didn't.
The Donahue Show on MSNBC premiered in August of two
thousand and two. The rating was zero points on the

(54:07):
network was averaging in its depths zero point two The
Phil Donahue Show, after initial success, the highest rating they'd
ever gotten for a premiere show, even mine, sank to
about half of the average audience on MSNBC. Was it
because he talked a lot about Iraq and doubted the

(54:28):
reasonableness of going to war there? Maybe maybe it was
the fact that he was on at eight o'clock at
night and everybody who used to watch him was either
dead or looking for him at two o'clock in the afternoon.
Back to the day part subject. So, how come when
the story of Phil Donahue's firing by MSNBC as the
Iraq War started always points out that Donahue Show and

(54:50):
Donahue were fired and canceled while it had the highest
ratings on MSNBC. Well, they left out one detail in that,
which was they had the highest ratings on MSNBC at
the time that the show was canceled. For the month
of February two thousand and three, it averaged four hundred

(55:10):
and forty six thousand viewers, just to give you a
relative idea, at these sort of apex of countdown on
MSNBC two thousand and nine, we did an average of
a million, two hundred thousand viewers a night. Four hundred
and forty six thousand was the best at MSNBC in
two thousand and three as this war approached. It was terrible.
It was a low number. It wasn't that much bigger

(55:33):
than anybody else's, and it sure wasn't ten times bigger
than every other cable show in the business. It had
the highest ratings that month, and they canceled it anyway
because it was hemorrhaging money. And my friend of the time,
Phil Griffin, who had filled me in on the entirety
of this story as it unfolded, said that they were
only getting those high ratings because they were spending, now

(55:54):
on top of everything else, a fortune in advertising. They
bought every local commercial they could get. They put bus
ads in most of the major cities trying to get
people to watch donnah It was a desperate attempt to
keep Phil Donahue on the air. As he put it,
an unfortunate term, and Phil was known for them at
the time of February. In March of two thousand and three,

(56:16):
we had to carpet balm with advertising as like, Phil,
what about IRAQ? Oh, you're right, buddy. The reason we
are left with the impression that MSNBC canceled the late
Phil Donahue show because he was opposed to IRAQ was
Phil Donahue wanted it that way. I understand this fully well.
I think what happened to me. The biggest lesson, I

(56:37):
think is the how corporate media shapes our opinions and
our coverage. Donahue said, this was a decision, my decision,
meaning relating to the cancelation of his show, the decision
to release me came from far above. This was not
an assistant program director who decided to separate me from MSNBC.
They were terrified of the anti war voice. Let me

(57:00):
interrupt to say these things are true. They were terrified
of the anti war voice. My own experience over the
Jessica Lynch story would explain that. On the other hand,
of course, it wasn't the assistant program director who separated
him from MSNBC. It was the president of MSNBC, the
president of NBC News and the president of NBC, because
that's the decisions they reserved for themselves, because those are

(57:20):
the egotistical ones, the ones where you can call in
some TV star and say either you do it my
way or you're fired. To resume mister Donahues's comments. They
were terrified of the anti war voice, and that is
not an overstatement. Anti War voices were not popular and
if your general electric, you certainly don't want an anti
war voice on a cable channel that you own. Donald

(57:40):
Rumsfeld is your biggest customer. So, by the way, I
had to have two conservatives on for every liberal. I
could have Richard pearl on alone. Richard pearl was a
diplomat in quotes who worked for Bush. But I couldn't
have Dennis Kussinich on alone, former mayor of Cleveland, who
was most anti war. I was considered two liberals. It

(58:01):
really is funny, almost when you look back on how
the management was just frozen by the anti war voice.
We were scolds, we weren't patriotic, American people disagreed with us,
and we weren't good for business, all of which is true,
but all of which somewhat exaggerates the point here. If
half a million people, and it wasn't that many were
watching Phil Donahue every night. Half a million people in

(58:23):
a country that even then was pushing three hundred million
isn't very much. His anti war voice was an annoyance
to these people, an embarrassment to people like Bob Wright
who ran NBC. Phil Donahue treated it as if he
was I don't know, he was the guy amiel Zola
writing jacquesues against the French government in eighteen ninety something.

(58:45):
Phil also forgot in making this statement that in the
fall of two thousand and two, he was on the
air on MSNBC alongside the late Jerry Nackman, who also
had a show that wasn't doing well, talking about they're
terrible ratings. They're going to fire us, Nachman said to Donahue,
and Donahue said, yeah, they are. That was in the

(59:07):
fall of two thousand and two. Weeks after the Donahue
Show had premiered. There was talk of moving Donahue to
the middle of the day. There was talk of moving
Donahue somewhere else. There was talk of putting him on
hey hiatus. Instead, everybody got fired except poor Knackman, who
got sick The reason I was at MSNBC was Jerry
Knackman was sick. They didn't have enough anchors. They asked

(59:29):
me to fill in for a few days, and the
next thing you knew, I was doing the show again.
Would they have fired Phil Donahue if Bush had said,
we have fixed this, there will be no war in Iraq, Yes,
they would have fired him. It was hemorrhaging money. It
was putting out ten dollars for every dollar it took in.

(59:52):
Would they have fired him that fast? No way. They
were short of staff. They were so short of staff
they brought me back, and I had left five years
before in flames. That's why I was there. I'm wrapping
this up. New York Magazine in twenty ten, I believe
wrote a long story about the then climaxing cable wars,

(01:00:13):
particularly between CNN and MSNBC. Gabe Sherman, I think, wrote
this with the surgeon patriotism. Following the terrorist attacks of
nine to eleven, NBC CEO Bob Wright told Shapiro, that
would be Neil Shapiro, then the head of NBC News,
that MSNBC should try and out flank Fox on the right.
We have to be more conservative than they are, right,

(01:00:34):
told Shapiro pointedly, that's absolutely true. By the way, Bob
Wright actually thought you could be to further right than
Fox was at that time, And for years I thought
he was an idiot who just had these psycho drama
ideas going on in his head. Well, of course, then
came Trump. He was right, He just didn't know how
to do it. Swirling graphics of the American flag, New

(01:00:56):
York Magazine wrote soon became a fixture on the network,
along with the tagline America's News Channel, it said, in
graphics that were taped to all the cameras so that
all the anchors would see it and say it America's
News Channel. Despite the network's emphasis on flag waving, MSNBC
showed how little it understood the Fox model when, with

(01:01:17):
Phil Griffin as MSNBC's primetime head it hired the liberal
Phil Donahue, who'd been Griffin's childhood idol, out of retirement
in April two thousand and two to anchor an eight
pm primetime talk show that would challenge Bill O'Reilly. The
show debuted with the highest ratings ever for an MSNBC program,
attracting more than a million viewers in its first night,

(01:01:38):
but within a month the audience was cut in half.
Standard for MSNBC. Rita Cosby once got nearly a million
viewers her first night, by the end of the week,
she was down to one hundred and seventy five thousand
to resume. At the same time, executives expressed increasing unease
about Donahue's vocal opposition to the looming war in Iraq.
At a time when red meat patriotism prevailed, Donahue booked

(01:01:59):
anti war guests like Michael Moore, Rosie O'Donnell, Susan Sarandon,
and Tim Robbins. By the way, I should point out
that years later, when I was trying to explain to
Phil Griffin that Rachel maddow was the next star of
MSNBC and she should be given her own show, he
tried to hire Rosie O'Donnell instead. Soon, the Donahue pro
problem threatened Griffin's job. In a tense phone conversation, NBC

(01:02:21):
News president Shapiro told MSNBC president Eric Sorenson to fire Griffin,
but Sorenson pushed back, I'm not going to do that,
he told Shapiro. Number One, Phil's been loyal to me
for a long time. I don't think it's right. Number two,
we're shorthanded. We have all this talent and he's the
one who's managing it. Part two was a lie. They
didn't have any talent at all. That's why I was

(01:02:42):
back there. As a compromise, Griffin's job was spared, but
he was stripped of responsibility for the show. The new
producer insisted on a precise numerical balance between liberals and conservatives.
Donna Hue's problems only increased when Chris Matthews let it
be known that he wanted Donahue off the air. Matthews
was a rising force at the network, with a reported

(01:03:03):
salary of five million dollars a year. He cultivated former
ge CEO Jack Welch and had the ear of the
NBC CEO, Bob Wright. The two summered together on Nantucket,
and you know the limerick about Nantucket. Matthew saw himself
as MSNBC's biggest star. Well, he was MSNBC's biggest something,

(01:03:23):
and he was upset that the network was pumping significant
resources into Donahue's show. Again. I would never defend Chris
Matthews under any circumstances, but he's absolutely right about this.
Matthews was delivering ratings with almost no advertising, ratings that
were usually much higher than those of Phil Donahue, and
here thousands and thousands of dollars in advertising were spent

(01:03:47):
daily to try to sell people on a Phil Donahue
show that nobody wanted, whether it offered a solution for
world peace and eternal life. In the fall of two
thousand and two, US News and World Report ran a
gossip item that had Matthew saying over lunch in Washington
that have done Donahue stays on the air, he could
bring down the network. After the item was published, Matthews

(01:04:09):
showed up at Donahue's office and apologized. He didn't deny it.
Donahue remembers Matthews made a hobby within MSNBC of trying
to get the rest of us fired. He tried to
do that to me in two thousand and eight during
the coverage of the Republican National Convention, when we got
removed because of something I said. Matthews had been saying
equally stupid things and usually factually inaccurate ones, but he

(01:04:32):
did call Jeff Zooker and then Jeff Immelt, the head
of GE and say you should fire Olderman and keep me.
Back to the New York Magazine article. With the war looming,
Sorenson and Griffin decided to take him off the air
to make war for twenty four to seven make room
for twenty four seven war coverage. Matthews told me he
had nothing to do with the decision. That's true. They
never listened to him. For Griffin, the firing of his

(01:04:54):
childhood idol was a painful experience. The guy that got
me into TV probably hates my guts, and I wish
he didn't because I love the guy, Griffin, says. Griffin,
who prevented Rachel Madow from appearing on MSNBC for several
years as an anchor. Anyway, he was paid back by
the fact that somehow Rachel has forgotten this and made
him the president of her production company. In any event,

(01:05:16):
so all that was playing out, and I was just
hanging around for a couple of days filling in for
Jerry Nackman, who was just out sick, and then the
diagnosis came back about how sick Jerry Nackman was, and
suddenly they didn't have enough anchors. Les Your Holt, who
was doing something like four or five hours a day
on MSNBC, was suddenly called to New York to do
more action coverage from NBC News about the Iraq War.

(01:05:39):
And now MSNBC had no anchors, They had nobody who
was familiar to their audience, They had nobody. Nacman was sick.
They certainly weren't going to have Phil Donahue anchor Iraq
war coverage. And now Lester Holt was being taken away
from them, and Brian Williams was already in Iraq personally
looking for Sodom Hussein or whatever he was doing in Iraq.

(01:06:01):
So the plan was canceled. Donna Hughes show hires somebody
good like Sam Donaldson and have him do a show
called Countdown with Sam Donaldson. I've already told you how
they turned that into Countdown with Keith Olderman. But the
gist of it was, as I said earlier, if there
had been no threat of Iraq war, or if everybody
had said, you know, Phil Donahue is right, this is asinine,

(01:06:25):
This is power greedy, This is Bush trying to use
nine to eleven in the most insincere and brutal way,
possible as an excuse for an unrelated war. If everybody
had said that, if Bush had resigned from the presidency
and Cheney with him, if they had made Michael Moore

(01:06:47):
President of the United States, they still would have fired
Phil Donahue because he lost money. Phil Donahue Television Hall
of Famer, not fired over IRAQ. I've done all the

(01:07:16):
damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Most
of our Countdown music was arranged, produced, and performed by
Brian Ray and John Phillip Chanel. Our musical directors have
Countdown and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Mister Ray
was on guitars, bass and drums. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards. Our satirical and fifthy musical comments are by
the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The Old

(01:07:39):
Woman theme from ESPN two, which was written by Mitch
Warren Davis, is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. And it's our
sports music. Other music arranged and performed by the group
No Horns Allowed. My announcer today is my friend Stevie
van zandt and everything else was as always my fault.
That's Countdown for today. Day one hundred and eighty six

(01:08:00):
of America held hostage again, just two and eighty five
days until the scheduled end of Trump's lame duck lame
brained term, unless he is removed sooner by MAGA and
Jeffrey Epstein and trump Stein. The next scheduled countdown is
Monday till then. I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon,

(01:08:23):
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olberman is

(01:08:46):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
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