Speaker 1: Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Today
Speaker 1: would be a good day to convict Donald J. Trump.
Speaker 1: The jury in his Stormy Daniel's hush money election interference
Speaker 1: case may get the case as soon as this afternoon,
Speaker 1: and then they could deliver the only verdict not materially
Speaker 1: interfered with by a judge or judges that Trump himself appointed.
Speaker 1: The country the world keeps emphasizing, in succession, the unprecedented
Speaker 1: nature of Trump's indictment, of his arrest, of his arraignment,
Speaker 1: of the mugshot, the trial, the artists sketches, the jury selection,
Speaker 1: the defense, the witnesses, the objections, the fart naps, and
Speaker 1: today the unprecedented nature of the closing statements. But for
Speaker 1: some reason they leave out the other unprecedented reality that
Speaker 1: our court system is rigged, that it is rigged by Trump.
Speaker 1: For Trump, with three justices he put on the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court until they die or resign, delaying and subverting justice
Speaker 1: in those cases, and an unqualified former yoga correspondent for
Speaker 1: the Miami Nuevo Herald he appointed to federal court brazenly
Speaker 1: and openly stalling and trying to sabotage the espionage case
Speaker 1: against him in that court. That is what is unprecedented
Speaker 1: about the prosecution of Donald Trump. That his appointees are
Speaker 1: interfering with the attempts to bring him to justice. And
Speaker 1: we may never know if he appointed them only on
Speaker 1: the assurance that they would do exactly what they are
Speaker 1: doing now when and if it came to this. And
Speaker 1: what Trump means when he says the New York District
Speaker 1: Attorney Alvin Bragg's office and Justice Juan Merschan's courtroom are
Speaker 1: rigged against him, what he means is they are rigged
Speaker 1: against him because they are not rigged for him. And yes,
Speaker 1: back to my first comment, I know that every day
Speaker 1: is a good day to convict Donald J. Trump. This, however,
Speaker 1: is the only one we're going to get for a
Speaker 1: while because Judge Cannon, Justice Barrett, Justice Gorsic, and Justice
Speaker 1: Kavanaugh might as well have offices in Trump Tower, oh
Speaker 1: and Justice Alito and missus Alito, flag connoisseur and flag
Speaker 1: pole expert, and much more about them. Presently, verdict would
Speaker 1: be really unlikely today, but there seems to be a
Speaker 1: belief that closing statements could easily be finished off before
Speaker 1: court adjourns and realistically, we might get a verdict tomorrow,
Speaker 1: especially if one or more jurors bibbed and acted and
Speaker 1: performed and sneaked onto the jury even though they intended
Speaker 1: to decide this case purely on the politics. I might
Speaker 1: add four or against, because remember, if Trump is convicted
Speaker 1: of anything, especially if it happens fast, he and his
Speaker 1: cult will insist that's what happened. The option from the
Speaker 1: other end of the spectrum that somebody made the proverbial
Speaker 1: buttoned up lip gesture in the mirror and then talked
Speaker 1: their way past the prosecutors and the judge, and they've
Speaker 1: just been waiting to start voting not guilty, not guilty,
Speaker 1: not guilty until the other jurors give up. That is
Speaker 1: far more likely, because it only takes one to do that.
Speaker 1: Although this is the right moment to remind you that
Speaker 1: the four person duror B four hundred is not necessarily
Speaker 1: a Fox News viewer, even though that was widely reported
Speaker 1: during jury selection. He said during jury selection that he
Speaker 1: reads the New York Times and the Daily Mail. He's
Speaker 1: originally from Ireland. I guess that makes sense, And then
Speaker 1: he said he gets the rest of his news from
Speaker 1: MSNBC and Fox, and a reminder again that here in
Speaker 1: New York City, Fox has owned its own station and
Speaker 1: has since March nineteen eighty six aired programs called Fox
Speaker 1: five News. They've never been liberal or anything, but they
Speaker 1: did have the presence of mind to fire the infamous
Speaker 1: Greg Kelly, now of Newsmax and Frankly, in New York,
Speaker 1: the Fox five brand is literally a decade older than
Speaker 1: the Fox News brand. A New Yorker says he gets
Speaker 1: his news from Fox, he just as likely means the
Speaker 1: local station. Also, not to bore you with unqualified analysis
Speaker 1: about what the closing statements will punch or what the
Speaker 1: jurors will decide with. I mean, we can all guess
Speaker 1: what Trump's nut job lawyers are going to say if
Speaker 1: we can still hear them over his snoring and his gas.
Speaker 1: But actual experts seem to have built a consensus around
Speaker 1: five essential legal issues for the jury. Fact Issue Number one,
Speaker 1: Will the jurors believe Michael Cohen's version of events and
Speaker 1: his core point, Sure, I lied. I lied for Trump.
Speaker 1: He paid me to lie, especially since the only counter
Speaker 1: witness to that, Cohen's sorta kind of ex attorney, self
Speaker 1: immolated on the stand. Fact issue number two. Did Trump
Speaker 1: pay Stormy Daniels one hundred and thirty thousand dollars to
Speaker 1: keep quiet about the sex they had? Or did he
Speaker 1: pay Stormy Daniels one hundred thirty thousand dollars to keep
Speaker 1: her from spreading a lie about sex they did not have?
Speaker 1: Fact issue number three not what was Trump paying about?
Speaker 1: But why was he paying? Did they prove he was
Speaker 1: paying to make sure voters didn't know Stormy Daniels' story
Speaker 1: true or false before the election or was that some
Speaker 1: sort of coincidence? Fact issue number four, The payoffs were
Speaker 1: they made by Trump the company or Trump the private
Speaker 1: amateur scumbag. It is a distinction without a difference, obviously,
Speaker 1: But if somebody on the jury buys the defense theory
Speaker 1: that these were private payments by dickwad J. Trump and
Speaker 1: not payments from his corrupt company, they could talk themselves
Speaker 1: into an excuse to acquit. In fact issue number last,
Speaker 1: you pay Cohen, you call it a retainer and a
Speaker 1: legal expense. He's a lawyer, he's doing legal related stuff.
Speaker 1: But if the legal related stuff is itself illegal and
Speaker 1: it's not a retainer because he didn't keep the money,
Speaker 1: and you had both agreed in advance to cover it
Speaker 1: up and call it a retainer. You actually completely and
Speaker 1: utterly falsified the records, didn't you. With one last reminder
Speaker 1: offered at face value only, there seems to be one
Speaker 1: other consensus forming among lawyers and jury watchers and trial experts,
Speaker 1: and it's this The reason Justice Juan Marshan has said
Speaker 1: nothing about defendant Jay Trump's last ten or so violations
Speaker 1: of the gag order as opposed to his first ten
Speaker 1: or so violations of the gag order is that he
Speaker 1: is in fact planning to tack time onto whatever sentence
Speaker 1: results from the actual prosecution take care of the bill.
Speaker 1: Then again, justice theory, but a useful one which might
Speaker 1: explain why Marshan has bent himself over so far backwards.
Speaker 1: Today would be a good day to convict Donald J. Trump.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of possible responses to Israel bombing
Speaker 1: the refugee tenth it forced Palestinians into in Rafa. One
Speaker 1: would hope there has been an off the record message
Speaker 1: to the others in the Israeli government from ours Netanyahu goes,
Speaker 1: in fact, turn them over to the international Court and
Speaker 1: stop trying to make the way the Nazis conducted war
Speaker 1: the way you conduct war, or the United States cuts
Speaker 1: off all support on say Monday, And there are a
Speaker 1: lot of responses to congresswomen Talib and other Democrats and
Speaker 1: progressives threatening President Biden because that has not happened yet
Speaker 1: or has not happened publicly. But maybe this response will suffice.
Speaker 1: Quote one thing I do is Trump told a room
Speaker 1: full of donors in New York two weeks ago. Tonight,
Speaker 1: per the Washington Post, any student that protests, I throw
Speaker 1: them out of the country. You know, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that,
Speaker 1: they're going to behave it's a radical revolution. It has
Speaker 1: to be stopped.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: If you get me elected, we're going to set that
Speaker 1: movement back twenty five or thirty years. As always, with
Speaker 1: a mentally declining psychotic like Trump, it's impossible to differentiate
Speaker 1: the breadth of the threats from the pathology of his illnesses.
Speaker 1: He clearly threatened to expel foreign students protesting against Israel.
Speaker 1: I suppose he doesn't say that just protesting, but he
Speaker 1: also threatened to expel American students protesting. He said, quote
Speaker 1: any student that protests, I throw them out of the country.
Speaker 1: This goes right to the essence of a point I've
Speaker 1: been making since twenty sixteen, and that was reemphasized spectacularly
Speaker 1: over the weekend by my friend since childhood, Will Bunch
Speaker 1: that all of Trump's plans after seizing power involve actually
Speaker 1: deploying the American mililitary against American civilians. Will's point, mine
Speaker 1: in a piece I did for the BBC literally eight
Speaker 1: years ago, was that to round up millions of immigrants,
Speaker 1: you not only have to have concentration camps, but you
Speaker 1: also have to have large masses of armed men to
Speaker 1: suppress protests. Because guess what, when Trump says get out,
Speaker 1: millions of people are not simply going to line up
Speaker 1: and start marching towards the nearest border. Same for students,
Speaker 1: same for students protesting the Middle East in any direction,
Speaker 1: Same for civilians protesting mass deportations of immigrants. Trump's solution
Speaker 1: is simple, shoot and kill them. Have the military shoot
Speaker 1: and kill them. And that moment, we are living in
Speaker 1: a military dictatorship. So when you hear about the Insurrection
Speaker 1: Act and mass deportations and any student that protests, I
Speaker 1: throw them out of the country, remember that you are
Speaker 1: actually hearing about the gentle mild surface of Trump's plans,
Speaker 1: and that beneath that gentle mild surface are piles of
Speaker 1: dead American citizens in every city and state in this country.
Speaker 1: Before we get to some much needed comic relief, it
Speaker 1: was nice to know that Memorial Day yesterday was about Trump,
Speaker 1: like last Christmas was about Trump, like Easter was about Trump,
Speaker 1: like Mother's Day was about Trump. I suppose it is
Speaker 1: encouraging that we can still summon both surprise and disgust
Speaker 1: at his message, the one yesterday that began entirely inappropriately
Speaker 1: and then went straight to hell from there. Happy Memorial
Speaker 1: Day to all, he wrote, unaware it was a day
Speaker 1: for remembering others, but of course in his world there
Speaker 1: are no others, including the human scum that is working
Speaker 1: so hard to droi our once great country. And then
Speaker 1: he smeared a woman that he assaulted and another woman
Speaker 1: he had to pay off, and he attacked a judge,
Speaker 1: and he seemed to throw a homophobic smear at Anderson
Speaker 1: Cooper and ended with a seeming threat against the judge
Speaker 1: in the case that presumably goes to the jury today.
Speaker 1: Quote Now, for Mayor Shaan, here is a follow up
Speaker 1: on Trump's evil, nefarious promised that Putin will not release
Speaker 1: Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal until and unless
Speaker 1: Trump is elected. Bluntly, that at best makes Trump an
Speaker 1: accessory to an international kidnapping, to say nothing of proving
Speaker 1: that Trump has been providing aid and comfort to our enemies,
Speaker 1: which is the legal definition of treason. And no, I
Speaker 1: am not expecting Biden five months and a week till
Speaker 1: the election to suddenly prosecute him for treason, although I
Speaker 1: don't see as many downsides to that as the politicians
Speaker 1: might thing to do. And what a surprise it's. Another
Speaker 1: suggestion from Brian Boutler is for Biden to release publicly,
Speaker 1: one way or the other, every last goddamned piece of
Speaker 1: intel about Trump's active conspiracies with Putin and other foreign leaders,
Speaker 1: just the ones in progress as we speak. Hold a
Speaker 1: news conference, have a Senate Committee conduct to hearing, having
Speaker 1: the head of Homeland and the CIA and anybody else
Speaker 1: who has the time to show up. Just throw it
Speaker 1: all out there, or parcel it out a little bit
Speaker 1: at a time, week after week. Oh and see if
Speaker 1: there's anything in there about his United Reich video or
Speaker 1: Unified Reich video and the other fascist violence propaganda that
Speaker 1: Trump distributes, and whether or not it is being produced
Speaker 1: or promulgated by other countries. This is no time to
Speaker 1: get weak at the knee over protocols and niceties. Trump
Speaker 1: is a foreign agent. He is trying to take over
Speaker 1: this country and end its democracy and use its military
Speaker 1: to then kill his political opponents in the streets in
Speaker 1: front of their homes. This is the war he chose.
Speaker 1: Let us make sure that at its end there is
Speaker 1: no further trace of him. And no, that was not
Speaker 1: the comic relief. This is the comic relief. If you
Speaker 1: tried to take the weekend off from all this, you
Speaker 1: missed Trump getting his come uppance, not a big come uppance. Remember,
Speaker 1: we are aiming for making sure that at its end
Speaker 1: there is no trace of him. But he got booed
Speaker 1: and humiliated and denied and nonplussed, and did I mention
Speaker 1: he got booed in public, and crazier than all that,
Speaker 1: crazier than imaginable, we are left in the impossible to
Speaker 1: predict position of having to thank the people who did
Speaker 1: it to him. The delegates to the presidential nominating Convention
Speaker 1: of the Libertarian Party.
Speaker 3: Now I think you should nominate me or at least
Speaker 3: vote for me, and we should win together. You heard
Speaker 3: those words nominate me or vote vote for me, because
Speaker 3: the Libertarians want to vote for me, and most of
Speaker 3: them will.
Speaker 2: That's nige, that snid. Only if you want to win,
Speaker 2: only if you want to win.
Speaker 4: Maybe you don't want to win, Maybe you don't want
Speaker 4: to win.
Speaker 2: Thank you, dear Roy, Thank you. No, only do that
Speaker 2: if you want to win. If you want to lose,
Speaker 2: don't do that.
Speaker 3: Keep getting you three percent every four years. Just some
Speaker 3: of the things that make me a libertarian without even
Speaker 3: trying to be one.
Speaker 2: That's night.
Speaker 1: Trump shortly thereafter claimed he had never sought the Libertarian nomination.
Speaker 1: He claimed Republican party rules deny him the option of
Speaker 1: accepting the nomination of other parties. This, in political language
Speaker 1: is what is called a lie. He only revealed this
Speaker 1: after repeatedly asking them to nominate him, then getting six votes,
Speaker 1: then getting ruled ineligible by the Libertarians, who then cast
Speaker 1: all of twenty two votes for Rkjor and disqualified him,
Speaker 1: and then took eight hours to nominate the guy who
Speaker 1: took two percent of the Georgia Senate vote two years ago,
Speaker 1: forcing the Raphael Warnock herschel Walker runoff. And if that
Speaker 1: was not comic relief enough, you may have noticed, as
Speaker 1: I did, that Trump's aphasia or dementia or cte or
Speaker 1: all of the above is now bad enough that he
Speaker 1: literally could not form the word libertarian at the Libertarian convention.
Speaker 1: He kept saying libertarian, liber liber liber like it was
Speaker 1: a new form of Libya. Well, hell, maybe he can
Speaker 1: get the nomination in Libya. And now to the breaking
Speaker 1: news that you may have already heard, the flash apparently official,
Speaker 1: there have been no new reports of insurrectionist flags flown
Speaker 1: at any of Justice Alito's homes. Stunning, Okay, seriously, not
Speaker 1: quite as stunning as the Washington Post trying to spin
Speaker 1: the fact that yeah, yeah, yeah, we had the story
Speaker 1: of that first flag, the upside down American flag appropriated
Speaker 1: by the Stop the Steel paramilitary gang. We had that
Speaker 1: story that it was flying at the Alito's home and Alexandria, Virginia,
Speaker 1: between Trump's coup attempt on January sixth, twenty twenty one
Speaker 1: and Biden's inauguration on January twentieth, twenty twenty one. But
Speaker 1: we buried it. We chose not to run it, because
Speaker 1: everybody decided Missus Martha and Alito. She put up the flag,
Speaker 1: not Justice Alito, as if that was the message. The
Speaker 1: flag conveyed Alito's house, Alito's flagpole, Alito's flag, alito flag,
Speaker 1: run up the Alito flagpole to see who would salute. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's that wacky Missus Alito added again. And of course
Speaker 1: Missus Alito has no possible connection to her own husband
Speaker 1: and the fact that he's on the you know, Supreme
Speaker 1: Court thingy, what utter disqualifying dereliction of duty by the
Speaker 1: Washington Post, which finally reported the story, having sat on
Speaker 1: it for one thousand, two hundred and twenty two days,
Speaker 1: having sat on it so long that the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: reporter who originally found it has already retired, having sat
Speaker 1: on it so long that nobody is asking now whether
Speaker 1: the people actually made the editorial decision not to run it,
Speaker 1: or the paper was pressured internally or externally not to
Speaker 1: run it. Now they're running it as if they are
Speaker 1: somehow adding value to the story. By the way, it
Speaker 1: took them another nine days after The New York Times
Speaker 1: broke the story to decide whether or not to run
Speaker 1: their own story that they had two hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: two days previously, and they're trying to sell it as
Speaker 1: if they're reporting something that their readers should be happy
Speaker 1: to see or proud of them more, and not the
Speaker 1: fact that it rivals Their associate editor, Bob Woodwards equally
Speaker 1: journalistically corrupt decision to sit on the tapes he got
Speaker 1: of Trump in February twenty twenty, in which Trump accurately
Speaker 1: foretold how truly nightmarish COVID would be and how fatally
Speaker 1: Trump was intending to lie about it. I'll save this
Speaker 1: for my book to quote its own story. This just
Speaker 1: in Three years later, the Post reporter quote went to
Speaker 1: the Alito's home to follow up on the tip about
Speaker 1: the flag. He encountered the couple coming out of the house.
Speaker 1: Martha an Alito, was visibly upset by his presence, demanding
Speaker 1: that he get off my property. As he described the
Speaker 1: information he was seeking, she yelled, it's an international signal
Speaker 1: of distress. Alito intervened and directed his wife into a
Speaker 1: car parked in their driveway, where they had been headed
Speaker 1: on their way out of the neighborhood. The justice denied
Speaker 1: the flag was hung upside down as a political protest,
Speaker 1: saying it stemmed from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that
Speaker 1: his wife had raised it. Martha an Alito then got
Speaker 1: out of the car and shouted an apparent reference to
Speaker 1: the neighbors. Ask them what they did, She said, yard
Speaker 1: signs about the couple had been placed in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: After getting back in the car, she exited again and
Speaker 1: then brought out from their residence a novelty flag, the
Speaker 1: type that would typically decorate a garden. She hoisted it
Speaker 1: up the flagpole. There is that better, she yelled. So
Speaker 1: so so, not only was there an insurrectionist symbol hanging
Speaker 1: from a Supreme Court justice's home, and again, this is
Speaker 1: two weeks to the day after Trump tried to end
Speaker 1: American democracy and exactly the same day we finally got
Speaker 1: Biden safely inaugurated. Not only not only was there this
Speaker 1: flag and the Washington Post knew about it, and clearly,
Speaker 1: though he would later deny knowing anything about it, Justice
Speaker 1: Alito on January twentieth, twenty twenty one, he knew all
Speaker 1: about why it was there, and it was hanging there still.
Speaker 1: But then there was this confrontation with Missus Justice Alito,
Speaker 1: who is either nuts or impaired and nuts, or is
Speaker 1: herself an insurrectionist, or is taking the fall for her husband,
Speaker 1: or he the Supreme Court justice, is covering up for her,
Speaker 1: and the Post says, Nope, Mope, mope, so you're here.
Speaker 1: I agreed with Supreme Court reporter Bob Barnes and others
Speaker 1: that we should not do a single slice story about
Speaker 1: the flag because it seemed like the story was about
Speaker 1: Martha and Alito and not her husband. That is Semaphore News,
Speaker 1: quoting the former Post senior managing editor Cameron Barr Bar coincidence, coincidence.
Speaker 1: Cameron Barr says this was his bad call, quoting again instead,
Speaker 1: Bar said he suggested a story on the bitter neighborhood
Speaker 1: dispute that Alito told them had prompted his wife to
Speaker 1: raise the flag. They would use the flag itself, he thought,
Speaker 1: as a detail in the story, but that story never
Speaker 1: took shape. In retrospect, I should have pushed harder for
Speaker 1: that story, Barr said in a phone interview with Semaphore Sunday.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: You get a tip on or just before Inauguration day,
Speaker 1: after an attempted coup that a Supreme Court justice, who
Speaker 1: has skipped the inauguration, by the way, is waving an
Speaker 1: insurrection flag over to his house. You go, he's there,
Speaker 1: You talk to him. His wife threatens you, loses her
Speaker 1: shit and starts saying stuff like ask them what they
Speaker 1: did and even there is that better? And even though
Speaker 1: they both insist this was just a neighborhood spat, she says,
Speaker 1: it's an international signal distress. And you you.
Speaker 4: You bury the story. Alito, I I am, I am
Speaker 4: wait wait wait wait I I I Alito, Oh I
Speaker 4: I Alito.
Speaker 5: Oh, Nancy, I ya, these are the flags of Alito insurrection.
Speaker 5: Appeal to heaven, Sam did Noah damn thing?
Speaker 2: Why don't you ask them what they did?
Speaker 5: I y y I am Martha and Alito, it's my flag,
Speaker 5: It's my world.
Speaker 2: I deny you access.
Speaker 1: It's an international signal love distress. Thank you, Nancy Faust.
Speaker 1: Also of interest here on this all new edition of
Speaker 1: Countdown in memory of perhaps the most beloved man in
Speaker 1: all of sports, Bill Walton, and so did Trump's father
Speaker 1: once go up to one of his neighbors in Florida
Speaker 1: and start praising Hitler. That's what they had on c
Speaker 1: Span the other day. That's next. This is Countdown.
Speaker 2: This is Countdown with Keith Oberman.
Speaker 6: This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This
Speaker 6: is Countdown with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 1: And it's the Sports Central centered news desks sports News tonight.
Speaker 1: He would certainly be upset with all of us being
Speaker 1: this sad. Nobody loved playing his sport, Nobody loved being
Speaker 1: a sportscaster life more than Bill Walton. His life ended
Speaker 1: yesterday of cancer at the age of seventy one. Outside
Speaker 1: of his family, it seemed few of even those closest
Speaker 1: to him were where he was that sick. Until last week.
Speaker 1: Bill Walton was probably the most skilled center in basketball history. Injuries,
Speaker 1: particularly and impossible to believe rash of stress fractures limited
Speaker 1: him to only three NBA seasons in which he played
Speaker 1: more than fifty eight games. In four seasons he couldn't
Speaker 1: play at all in the other ten. He won two
Speaker 1: league championships, one MVP award, he finished second in the
Speaker 1: MVP in another year, and at the age of thirty three,
Speaker 1: he won the award for sixth Man of the Year
Speaker 1: Best Substitute. He centered the National champions at UCLA in
Speaker 1: two of his three seasons. There, and as he entered
Speaker 1: the NBA, it was conceded he was probably going to
Speaker 1: eclipse Abdul Jabbar, Bill Russell, all of them. His feet
Speaker 1: would not cooperate. Bill Walton finally retired at age thirty
Speaker 1: five and went into broadcasting, where he was utterly unpredictable,
Speaker 1: utterly delighted, utterly off the wall, NBA college, local, national,
Speaker 1: some Chicago White Sox games, didn't matter what it was.
Speaker 1: And everybody is heartbroken because yes, all that's true, but
Speaker 1: more because everybody in sports, it seems, had met him,
Speaker 1: and everybody he did meet had a story about Bill
Speaker 1: Walton's kindness, generosity, fun and especially his support. I got
Speaker 1: to Los Angeles and started working as a local sportscaster there.
Speaker 1: On the morning of Labor Day, September two, nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: I was in a state of complete disoriented shock, like
Speaker 1: a permanent jet lag, and somebody decided that I should
Speaker 1: begin my career at KTLA by getting up at like
Speaker 1: seven o'clock in the morning and covering a bicycle race,
Speaker 1: a professional bicycle race on the streets of Beverly Hills.
Speaker 1: As if anybody watching a local newscast in LA, or
Speaker 1: if anybody debuting as a sportscaster in LA wanted bicycle highlights,
Speaker 1: or as if we could possibly shoot enough highlights to
Speaker 1: make it even vaguely interesting, or tell who won. Well,
Speaker 1: it was day one, so I was still cooperating with management.
Speaker 1: We set up on Rodeo Drive amid a pretty good
Speaker 1: crowd for a holiday morning. I had just tested my
Speaker 1: microphone and I was wondering why it was not as
Speaker 1: if anybody was going to show up whom my audience
Speaker 1: would want me to interview, when a door opened behind
Speaker 1: me and outstepped a man with bright, curly red hair,
Speaker 1: six feet eleven inches tall, an unmistakable face, Bill Walton
Speaker 1: of the Los Angeles Clippers. As he later told me,
Speaker 1: he'd just gotten the call from his agent that he
Speaker 1: was about to be traded to the Boston Celtics and
Speaker 1: he was going to go out now to buy tape
Speaker 1: to wrap his packing boxes in. I knew I had
Speaker 1: to see if he would comment on this weird scene
Speaker 1: playing out in front of us, and I started to
Speaker 1: approach him when he looked at me, stopped and stared
Speaker 1: and said, Hey, you're that CNN guy Channel eleven just hired.
Speaker 1: And I said Channel five, and he said whatever, and
Speaker 1: he then gave me a fantastic interview about this bicycle
Speaker 1: race and who was in it, and he knew the
Speaker 1: names of some of the competitors and how much he
Speaker 1: enjoyed it and never missed it, and welcome to town
Speaker 1: and good luck, and then off he went, signing a
Speaker 1: few autographs as he did. A couple of minutes later,
Speaker 1: another door opens and it's a man named Richard Blackwell,
Speaker 1: hugely famous then fashion designer, writer, searingly obnoxious critic of
Speaker 1: women's dresses. Mister Blackwell. Now he comes over to me
Speaker 1: and he asks me what's going on, and we then
Speaker 1: roll tape and I explain it to him on camera
Speaker 1: and he says, a race in Beverly Hills. What do
Speaker 1: they win the street? Now, I say to my producer,
Speaker 1: we got mister Blackwell and Bill Walton. We could stand
Speaker 1: here for five years. We can never get anything better
Speaker 1: than these two guys. Let's go home now. Two years later,
Speaker 1: I saw Bill Walton at the NBA Finals in Boston
Speaker 1: and I go up to say hi, and he says,
Speaker 1: you put me and mister Blackwell in that bicycle race story.
Speaker 1: I don't think I saw Bill Walton in person more
Speaker 1: than two or three times again in my life. But
Speaker 1: I got letters and later emails from him, and voicemails
Speaker 1: and phone calls and just hellos that he sent through
Speaker 1: his play by play buddies encouraged me to keep doing it. Sports, news, politics, whatever.
Speaker 1: Everybody mourning Bill Walton today is not just mourning a
Speaker 1: friend close or distant, a friend for decades or a
Speaker 1: friend for just today, decades ago. They are mourning the
Speaker 1: chairman of their own fan club. I've never known anybody
Speaker 1: who enjoyed your success for you more than Bill Walton did,
Speaker 1: nor who tried to encourage you to keep doing it.
Speaker 1: Still ahead of us on this all new edition of Countdown.
Speaker 1: I graduated from college forty five years ago today, meaning
Speaker 1: it's nearly forty five years now that I've had the
Speaker 1: same recurring dream, the one in which I don't graduate
Speaker 1: from college forty five years ago today. Since I was
Speaker 1: taking twenty eight credits ten classes in my last semester,
Speaker 1: there was a reason for this. But the weird thing is,
Speaker 1: for decades it was a standard stress dream, but then
Speaker 1: it turned into something entirely different. Next in things I
Speaker 1: promised not to tell, but first. As ever, there are
Speaker 1: still new more idiots to talk about. The daily roundup
Speaker 1: of the mis grants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens,
Speaker 1: who constitute two days worst persons in the world, the
Speaker 1: bronze worse. Whoever is running the campaign of Prime Minister
Speaker 1: Rishi Sunach in the UK's snap parliamentary election on July fourth,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, whoever that is they want Sunak to lose.
Speaker 1: You may remember that as he stepped out of ten
Speaker 1: Downing Street to announce the election and begin his campaign,
Speaker 1: it began to rain on him, pouring drenching rain. No canopy,
Speaker 1: no umbrella, no towel, just him and puddles of water
Speaker 1: on his coat. And it's gone downhill for there. One
Speaker 1: of Sunak's first campaign stops was the Belfast Dockyards, from
Speaker 1: which they launched Titanic. They let him announce that if
Speaker 1: he's returned to office, he'll establish mandatory national service for
Speaker 1: eighteen year olds. In another word, he wants to reinstitute
Speaker 1: the military draft. They let him be questioned by two
Speaker 1: workers at a factory, and then reporters went to get
Speaker 1: the names of the workers, and it turned out the
Speaker 1: workers they were not workers. They were local city councilors
Speaker 1: from his own party. They took him to Wales, where
Speaker 1: he asked local Wales voters if they were looking forward
Speaker 1: to Wales playing in the twenty twenty four Euro Soccer Tournament,
Speaker 1: except Whales did not qualify for the twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: Euro Soccer Tournament. They let him be photographed at a
Speaker 1: supermarket called Morrison's with his head plays perfectly where it
Speaker 1: would obscure the R, the I and the S, so
Speaker 1: his head in these pictures is framed by.
Speaker 2: The word moron.
Speaker 1: And now they've let him be photographed on a private
Speaker 1: jet with his head framed by big signs reading exit.
Speaker 1: The campaign is not yet a week old. The Bronx
Speaker 1: worser Nick Fuentes, there's a lot to hate here. He's
Speaker 1: a racist, he's an anti semini semit, he's a misogynist.
Speaker 1: He has a smirk that makes the non violent want
Speaker 1: to slap it off his face. But his worst quality
Speaker 1: is his utter self unawareness. Nick Fuentes is trying to
Speaker 1: enforce ethnic cleansing, racial purity on the Trump fascists Because
Speaker 1: to Nick Fuentes, jd Vance Trump sickophant. Jd Vance Senator
Speaker 1: of Ohio. Jd Vance is not white enough.
Speaker 7: Jd Vance also has a non white wife, an Indian wife,
Speaker 7: and a kid named Vivek. All his kids have Indian names,
Speaker 7: So it's like, what exactly are we getting? And that's
Speaker 7: not a dig at him just because I'm a racist
Speaker 7: or something, but it's like, who is this guy?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 7: Do we really expect that the guy who has an
Speaker 7: Indian wife and name their kid Vivek is going to
Speaker 7: support white identity?
Speaker 1: It will never occur to Nick Fuentes unless Trump triumphs
Speaker 1: and we go fascist. It will never occur to him
Speaker 1: until they are literally dragging him off by his feet.
Speaker 1: That all his enabling of the virulence and the violence
Speaker 1: will mean nothing in his own defense. That sooner or
Speaker 1: later the Trumpists will look at him and look at
Speaker 1: his name, and they'll say, Fuentes, what makes you all
Speaker 1: think we think you are white? And then they'll drag
Speaker 1: him off by his feet. But our winner, the worst,
Speaker 1: Fred Trump. It's father we already know. He was arrested
Speaker 1: during a public fight in Queens on Memorial Day of
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty seven, a fight during a ku Klux Klan
Speaker 1: March seven. Arrested at the ku klux Klan March. They
Speaker 1: gave Fred Trump's address in the newspaper, but they did
Speaker 1: not say whether he was fighting for the KKK or
Speaker 1: against it, though the evidence suggests he was part of
Speaker 1: the clan march. And see if this sounds familiar, the
Speaker 1: clan passed around a flyer that read, liberty and democracy
Speaker 1: have been trampled upon when native born protest Americans dare
Speaker 1: to organize to protect one flag, the American flag, one school,
Speaker 1: the public school, and one language, the English language, so
Speaker 1: that we already knew about.
Speaker 2: Then.
Speaker 1: This happened on Washington Journal on c SPAN on Friday morning,
Speaker 1: and the topic was your view of Trump's rhetoric. And
Speaker 1: I don't know who this is, And they didn't say
Speaker 1: it on c SPAN because you don't have to give
Speaker 1: your name, and I don't know if he's lying. I
Speaker 1: only know c SPAN followed up on this by doing
Speaker 1: absolutely nothing about it.
Speaker 8: But here you go, next, good money. Unless I just
Speaker 8: want to refer that I'm a ninety two year old man,
Speaker 8: and I will. I remember when Trump's father was in
Speaker 8: our village and talked to me. I personally, he was
Speaker 8: really a fan of Hitler. He'd said that dictatorship is
Speaker 8: not as bad as people think. He says, one man
Speaker 8: rule is better than having too many people trying to
Speaker 8: bring their opinion up. And that was the same thing
Speaker 8: his son days. He believes that dictatorship is the best
Speaker 8: thing for this country. And sooner or later you're going
Speaker 8: to wake up and believe when he becomes president, he'll
Speaker 8: become a dictator. So America be aware, and I'll say
Speaker 8: goodbye to America. Hello.
Speaker 1: Kind of amazing, really, Fred Trump, the nut does not
Speaker 1: fall far from the tree. Two days, Where's Where's Sudden?
Speaker 1: And May twenty eighth, two thousand, twenty four. I did
Speaker 1: not have the dream last night, but every other time
Speaker 1: I've had the dream, it's been May twenty eighth, but
Speaker 1: not twenty twenty four. May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: to the number one story on the countdown in this
Speaker 1: all new edition. And my only recurring dream of my life,
Speaker 1: but I've had it a thousand times, two thousand times.
Speaker 1: In the only recurring dream of my life, which I
Speaker 1: have had a thousand times or two thousand times, it
Speaker 1: is always the morning of May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: Always it doesn't vary. Every other detail of the dream varies, updates,
Speaker 1: adds in new details, adds in new life experiences, throws
Speaker 1: in additional twists, seems more nightmarish, sometimes more annoying, sometimes
Speaker 1: more comical, and lately more enjoyable. It's a very strange,
Speaker 1: recurring dream, and it's always about the morning of May
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine, graduation day at Cornell University,
Speaker 1: and starting sometime that summer June, maybe certainly by the
Speaker 1: end of that summer, I began to have this dream,
Speaker 1: not more than once a once a week on average,
Speaker 1: and usually under conditions of great pressure. And the dream
Speaker 1: is not that complicated, although as I say, it updates
Speaker 1: so that a version of the dream in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: nine would have been significantly different than the last time
Speaker 1: I had the dream, probably earlier this year because the
Speaker 1: frequency has fallen off. As I'll explain later, it's not
Speaker 1: a violent dream. There are no monsters. There's just pressure
Speaker 1: and stress, and it's always the same thing. And it
Speaker 1: literally took me more than forty two forty three years
Speaker 1: to figure out what was at the heart of it,
Speaker 1: and for much of that time I had the assistance
Speaker 1: of a professional. And this was not some sort of
Speaker 1: crisis in which my life was being affected by this.
Speaker 1: But it was just this same dream again and again
Speaker 1: and again, and it got so ordinary that in it
Speaker 1: sometimes characters would say to me, write this part down.
Speaker 1: It's new. It's graduation morning. I am unexpectedly and delightfully
Speaker 1: expected to graduate on time at Cornell University, even though
Speaker 1: I missed an entire semester and had to cram literally
Speaker 1: twenty eight credits into my last semester at the school
Speaker 1: and pass all of my courses. I think it was
Speaker 1: ten different courses. That includes one credit for being an
Speaker 1: intern at a television station in New York the previous summer,
Speaker 1: and an independent research program about comparing means of gathering
Speaker 1: news at that station and my college radio station and
Speaker 1: a news organization I worked for briefly in nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 1: There were a couple of one credit courses in there,
Speaker 1: but there were at least seven classes that met and
Speaker 1: I occasionally went to them. And I am to graduate,
Speaker 1: and my parents are already at the arena, or in
Speaker 1: this case, the field, Shellkoff Field, the football stadium at Cornell.
Speaker 1: They're already there, and it's ten o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 1: eleven o'clock in the morning, and somehow the phone rings
Speaker 1: in my apartment. It's always the same place, two hundred
Speaker 1: and seven Delaware Avenue, Ithica, New York, the ground floor
Speaker 1: apartment in the old house there, with a very nice porch,
Speaker 1: very nice place, all things considered. Bathroom was a little small.
Speaker 1: You could sit in the bathroom and reach out and
Speaker 1: answer the phone out in the living room. That's how
Speaker 1: small the bathroom was. In any event, it's always that morning.
Speaker 1: The light is exactly the same every time coming through
Speaker 1: the window, and the phone wakes me up, and it's
Speaker 1: the registrar's office or somebody else at Cornell. These details
Speaker 1: are usually just skated by, and they're telling me that I,
Speaker 1: in fact have not graduated. But I still can provided
Speaker 1: I read five hundred pages of a book a history
Speaker 1: book by noon, or submit a twenty five page paper
Speaker 1: by noon, or take seven final exams by noon, or
Speaker 1: attend twenty five sections of a biology class by noon.
Speaker 1: It is the standard, and I know other people who've
Speaker 1: had it, the standard non graduation dream. But the thing
Speaker 1: about this dream is, as I say, it is always updated,
Speaker 1: so that since It is clear to me the moment
Speaker 1: that request comes in that I have to take seven
Speaker 1: final exams by noon and it's already ten o'clock and
Speaker 1: they each take an hour, and there's no way I'm
Speaker 1: going to graduate on time. I'm going to have to
Speaker 1: spend the summer going to summer school at Corneilla University.
Speaker 1: And thus the jobs I have lined up, the job
Speaker 1: prospects that in fact produced the job within a month
Speaker 1: of my graduation, they're all going to go away because
Speaker 1: I have to stay there to graduate. When it gets
Speaker 1: more pressure filled, I in fact have to go back
Speaker 1: and redo the entirety of my senior year at Cornell.
Speaker 1: So now it's not the question of one course not
Speaker 1: being completed or two or three, it's the entire year.
Speaker 1: It's forty two credits. It's like a year and a
Speaker 1: half's worth of school. There have been occasions where I've
Speaker 1: had this dream where I am somehow both at Cornell
Speaker 1: University and on ESPN, and I have to quit the
Speaker 1: job at ESPN to go back to the start of
Speaker 1: my collegiate career. So it's no longer just I have
Speaker 1: to redo my senior year. I have to quit a
Speaker 1: job and finish school and go back to the beginning.
Speaker 1: I have to become a freshman again, because it's graduation
Speaker 1: morning and I have not in fact graduated, even though
Speaker 1: they have told me I was going to, and my
Speaker 1: parents and my sister are sitting out there. The worst
Speaker 1: one I ever had was in the waning days at MSNBC,
Speaker 1: when I knew I could not do that show any longer,
Speaker 1: and that they had violated my contract in so many
Speaker 1: different ways that I could have spent the rest of
Speaker 1: my life suing them multiple times for breach of contract,
Speaker 1: or I could simply take the money and get out
Speaker 1: and try to do it somewhere else, which is what
Speaker 1: I did. But at the worst of that at MSNBC,
Speaker 1: I woke up from this dream doing one of these.
Speaker 1: Because in the dream, not only was I at MSNBC
Speaker 1: doing countdown and on graduation day at Cornell on May
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine, not only were these things
Speaker 1: happening simultaneously, but because I had not and I think
Speaker 1: in this case, there was some class that I had
Speaker 1: successfully dropped, only they decided in retrospect I had failed
Speaker 1: to drop the course. Therefore I had failed the course.
Speaker 1: Therefore I had two more credits to it. Whatever it was,
Speaker 1: I now had to quit the MSNBC job and go back,
Speaker 1: not to the start of my college career, not to
Speaker 1: the start of high school, but I had to resume
Speaker 1: my education and do it all over again as a
Speaker 1: twenty year old, beginning in the third grade. And the
Speaker 1: dream ended with me walking into my third grade classroom
Speaker 1: and seeing all of my third grade classmates. They certainly
Speaker 1: looked like the ones that I was in school with.
Speaker 1: Some of them I still know. There was Amy Farber,
Speaker 1: there was my friend Pat Sinatra. They were all there,
Speaker 1: and they were all kids, and I was an adult.
Speaker 1: And the first most terrifying thing, the only true nightmare
Speaker 1: of these nightmares or recurring dreams that I ever had,
Speaker 1: I had to try to sit as a six foot
Speaker 1: four inch adult in one of those school chairs.
Speaker 2: And that's when.
Speaker 1: They shot in the movie that is your nightmare zooms
Speaker 1: out and you're a tiny little figure in a big picture,
Speaker 1: screaming your head off because you've been stuck into one
Speaker 1: of these chairs and you can never get out. So
Speaker 1: the dream would constantly update over the decades wherever I
Speaker 1: was working. I had to quit that job and go
Speaker 1: back to depending on the amount of pressure on me
Speaker 1: as far back as the third grade. Sometimes it would
Speaker 1: be much easier. Sometimes it would be you forgot to
Speaker 1: return these library books. You have to do it by noon,
Speaker 1: or you don't graduate. It's like, well, here they are, okay,
Speaker 1: you graduate. The reason that the dream had such staying power,
Speaker 1: which was easy to figure out even the first time
Speaker 1: I had it, was simply this. I did have twenty
Speaker 1: eight credits in my last semester at Cornell, very simple process.
Speaker 1: I the second half of my freshman year got sick.
Speaker 1: It might have been a cold, it might have been mononucleosis.
Speaker 1: We never quite figured out. But I didn't really want
Speaker 1: to be at Cornell University. In January nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: I had not had a good time as a freshman,
Speaker 1: and I didn't really want to be there, including the
Speaker 1: realization that at the age of just turned seventeen, I
Speaker 1: really wasn't ready to be there. So I managed to
Speaker 1: find a way out, whether it was a true serious
Speaker 1: illness or just a cold that I milked. The next
Speaker 1: thing I knew, my dad was coming up and rather
Speaker 1: unhappily packing me into his car and taking me home.
Speaker 1: Which is where I needed to be right then. However,
Speaker 1: when it came to be my senior year, and I
Speaker 1: had flourished at Cornell University and managed the radio station
Speaker 1: and set myself up for this career and actually learned
Speaker 1: how to manage my time, because that's what was good
Speaker 1: about that university. It taught you that you were, in
Speaker 1: fact going to have to punt on several unimportant things,
Speaker 1: and you could not get an A plus on everything
Speaker 1: in life. So going into my senior year, after my
Speaker 1: fall schedule had been completed with the normal load of
Speaker 1: fifteen or sixteen hours worth of credits, you know, five courses,
Speaker 1: tough ones, couple of history classes, maybe a four credit
Speaker 1: course here, maybe it was sixteen, my dad said, And
Speaker 1: then I still had forty two credits to go. My
Speaker 1: dad said, hey, I'm not paying for anything after next spring.
Speaker 1: Have a nice semester. And I was like what he said, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: If you don't graduate on time next spring, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to pay for a dime of it, You're on
Speaker 1: your own. So that meant that I was starting that
Speaker 1: semester with fifteen credits and I needed twenty seven in
Speaker 1: the spring. As it worked out, I took twenty eight.
Speaker 1: And also because I had missed the second half of
Speaker 1: my freshman year, I had all sorts of freshman mandatory
Speaker 1: classes that I had to take that I had not taken,
Speaker 1: that I had dropped out of, that I was taking
Speaker 1: when I had been an actual freshman in nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: and I being in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences,
Speaker 1: which is where the Communications department was and is at Cornell.
Speaker 1: Those were all science classes. So I had to take
Speaker 1: a freshman biology, freshman chemistry, freshman physics, and one leftover
Speaker 1: freshman English creative writing class. That one was not too
Speaker 1: much trouble, but I had other history classes to take.
Speaker 1: I had to take literally seven active classes, and I
Speaker 1: think maybe it was eight, and there were two independent
Speaker 1: study classes. There's a lot of classes, and guess what,
Speaker 1: I lost track of a lot of them, and I
Speaker 1: double scheduled things because in those pre computer days, there
Speaker 1: was no way for them to stop you from registering
Speaker 1: for a course that required you to be at a
Speaker 1: lab at three o'clock in the afternoon for a science
Speaker 1: class and at a section for a history class at
Speaker 1: three point thirty in the afternoon. You could do that
Speaker 1: who's going to know. I was later told that at
Speaker 1: the sections, the discussion sections with the teaching assistant for
Speaker 1: the class in biology, which was an environmental class, the
Speaker 1: ecology class which I took, because there was no real
Speaker 1: lab to adjust papers to write, and I could always
Speaker 1: write a paper fast. I knew that I would never
Speaker 1: be in that section. I'd never make it because I
Speaker 1: had to be at the chemistry lab at exactly the
Speaker 1: same time. And they used to when they would hand
Speaker 1: the papers back, which I would turn in in various
Speaker 1: ways through friends or going right to the teaching assistant's
Speaker 1: office and handing the paper in. They would hand the
Speaker 1: papers back and they'd get, you know, NETHERI, and NETHERI
Speaker 1: would grab his paper, and then they go Oaks, and
Speaker 1: Oaks would grab his paper, and then they go Oberman,
Speaker 1: and the whole class would erupt in laughter because I
Speaker 1: was never there. But I had no other choice. If
Speaker 1: I did not take those credits, those twenty eight credits
Speaker 1: as a senior, which about was about double the average,
Speaker 1: I was not going to have any money coming in,
Speaker 1: and I was not going to have a job, and
Speaker 1: I was going to have to stay in at the
Speaker 1: New York and somehow I was going to have to
Speaker 1: make my own living without having a job, and I
Speaker 1: did not want to do this. So I remember in
Speaker 1: the fall of nineteen seventy eight, facing this, I went
Speaker 1: in and submitted my class schedule for the spring of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine to my advisor, Professor Russell Martin, who taught,
Speaker 1: among other things, parliamentary procedure, which was a surprisingly fun class,
Speaker 1: if you can imagine such a thing. And he looked
Speaker 1: at this and he went, do you have twenty eight credits?
Speaker 2: Here?
Speaker 1: Professor Martin looked a little like John Connolly, the former
Speaker 1: governor of Texas who was with JFK when the Kennedy
Speaker 1: assassination occurred. I never stopped thinking about that when I
Speaker 1: would sit there and visit with him. And he said,
Speaker 1: you know, you can't take twenty eight credits. There's a
Speaker 1: university rule against that. The maximum is, I believe eighteen.
Speaker 1: I said, no, you're wrong about that. He said, that's right.
Speaker 1: I've been here teaching for twenty five years, and you're
Speaker 1: going to tell me I'm wrong. I said, well, I
Speaker 1: did look at this before I submitted my application for
Speaker 1: these classes for the coming semester. So he said, just
Speaker 1: hang on, picked up the phone and dialed the College,
Speaker 1: the College of Agri Culture and Life Sciences registrar and Hi, Bernice, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's Russ Martin. Listen, I've got a I've got a
Speaker 1: student here thinks he can take twenty eight credits in this.
Speaker 1: I told him about the about the college's limit on
Speaker 1: the Well, what do you mean there's no limit? What
Speaker 1: what do you mean there's no limit? Well, of course
Speaker 1: there's a limit. There has to be. I've been telling
Speaker 1: them there's a Well we're going to bring this up
Speaker 1: at the next meeting.
Speaker 2: Click.
Speaker 1: And he looked at me and he and he saw
Speaker 1: the smile on my face, and he said, don't, don't, don't, don't.
Speaker 1: I have another call to make. And now he called
Speaker 1: the University Registrar's Office.
Speaker 2: RNA.
Speaker 1: Russ Martin, listen, I've got another one of these overachievers
Speaker 1: here who thinks he's going to take twenty eight credits.
Speaker 1: And I told him about the university rule of prohibiting
Speaker 1: the number of What do you mean there's no rule? Well,
Speaker 1: God damn it, We're going to talk about this at
Speaker 1: the next meeting. And he hung the phone up on
Speaker 1: RNA and He looked at me and he said, you're insane,
Speaker 1: but I have to sign this. There's no limit. Don't
Speaker 1: come to me when you crack up next spring.
Speaker 2: Don't do it.
Speaker 1: I said, I have no choice. My father's not going
Speaker 1: to pay for anything after next spring. I have to
Speaker 1: get out on time. I have job prospects. So comes
Speaker 1: the next spring and somehow I balance everything out and
Speaker 1: I take the Ecology class and I know going into
Speaker 1: the final that the paper that we submitted would decide
Speaker 1: whether or not I graduated, or at least how I
Speaker 1: did in that class. It came down to two classes,
Speaker 1: one history class that I kind of mailed in a
Speaker 1: four credit class, and I knew the final I was
Speaker 1: going to pass it or fail it on a very
Speaker 1: narrow basis, maybe a couple of points on a fifteen
Speaker 1: point essay on a one hundred and fifty point exam.
Speaker 1: But the Ecology final was really tough. And I was
Speaker 1: one of those test takers who would race through a
Speaker 1: final exam that you got two hours to take, and
Speaker 1: I'd get it done in thirty five minutes because I
Speaker 1: believed in what you remember at first was probably the
Speaker 1: correct answer. Get it done, Get it done, as fast
Speaker 1: as possible, if you want to go back and correct it.
Speaker 1: In this one, I was not sure. There were a
Speaker 1: lot of multiple choice questions, and I really didn't see
Speaker 1: a pattern to them. The professor, who was a definition
Speaker 1: of ecology in the nineteen seventies had a full beard,
Speaker 1: and for all I knew of bird's nest in it.
Speaker 1: And he handed back our term papers in the middle
Speaker 1: of this, and I just finishing this thing up and
Speaker 1: ready to hand it in at an hour fifteen, half
Speaker 1: an hour behind my normal pace, very worried about whether
Speaker 1: or not I had done all I could do. And
Speaker 1: he hands back the term paper and written up at
Speaker 1: the top in red bick pen fourteen circle see me.
Speaker 1: And I'm looking at this, and it's one of the
Speaker 1: few moments in which I in my entire life where
Speaker 1: I have questioned, am I alive or am I dead?
Speaker 1: Am I awake? Or am I dreaming? Am I about
Speaker 1: to die? I looked at this and went fourteen in
Speaker 1: my head. Because we're in a final examine, you're not
Speaker 1: allowed to scream, even though that's what I wanted to do.
Speaker 2: Fourteen fourteen.
Speaker 1: As it turned out, I went through every answer on
Speaker 1: that goddamned ecology final to the point where they had
Speaker 1: to take they had to pull the exam out of
Speaker 1: my hands. I'm holding on too, let me.
Speaker 2: Just come thrun one more time.
Speaker 1: I staggered out into the brilliant sunlight of a beautiful
Speaker 1: Ithaca morning and waiting for me in the lobby outside
Speaker 1: of the exam room, which was in a hall called Roberts.
Speaker 1: Roberts Hall was built in the year ten sixty six.
Speaker 1: It was the oldest building I'd ever been in in
Speaker 1: my life. And there is this professor with his bird's
Speaker 1: nest beard, and I'm just going to go up to
Speaker 1: him and hit him in the face. He given me
Speaker 1: a fourteen. My plans are ruined. There is no way
Speaker 1: I'm going to graduate on May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: It's not going to happen because if this goddamn ecology test,
Speaker 1: because I had to take a goddamn tocology class, because
Speaker 1: to become a broadcaster, I had to take a series
Speaker 1: of science classes because I was going to get a
Speaker 1: Bachelor of Science in Communication Arts. And there he is,
Speaker 1: and I'm about to swing at him, and he's smiling
Speaker 1: at me. So no, I really want to take a
Speaker 1: swing at him, and he says, hey, I'm glad I
Speaker 1: saw you. I wanted to explain why I didn't give
Speaker 1: you the fifteenth point. And I looked at him and
Speaker 1: I went, what did you say? He said, yeah, I
Speaker 1: gave you the fourteen right, And I said, see me, See,
Speaker 1: I like this whole idea that you had about ecology
Speaker 1: and about extinction, and that the paper was about extinction.
Speaker 1: I had one idea about extinction. Maybe maybe the extinction
Speaker 1: of other animals was part of human evolution. Maybe these
Speaker 1: things were not accidentally connected, but actual functions of each other.
Speaker 1: It's not a bad idea. I had to turn it
Speaker 1: into twenty pages of an exam of a history paper,
Speaker 1: of a paper about acology, and I didn't know enough,
Speaker 1: and it was kind of I ran through six or
Speaker 1: eight shovels and he'd given me fourteen out of fifteen.
Speaker 1: I had no idea, because of course I hadn't been
Speaker 1: at the section where he said that the exam would
Speaker 1: be graded on a one to fifteen basis. So I
Speaker 1: just heard him say I got a fourteen out of
Speaker 1: fifteen meeting I probably got a B in this class.
Speaker 1: And I gave him a kiss and walked out into
Speaker 1: the sunshine and got drunk. One down, one to go
Speaker 1: the history final, and again sitting there, think, okay, this
Speaker 1: is going to be five points. And now comes the
Speaker 1: week in which they grade the exams and you find
Speaker 1: out whether or not you graduate. And as of Friday,
Speaker 1: I had called several times to find out if they
Speaker 1: had all the results in, because I had to pass
Speaker 1: all these courses or I would not graduate on time
Speaker 1: for Monday, May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine. It is
Speaker 1: now what Friday, May twenty fifth, and my dad calls
Speaker 1: me at the college radio station and he says, are
Speaker 1: you graduating? And I said, I don't know yet. I'll
Speaker 1: find out. I mean, we're not coming up there on
Speaker 1: Monday just to see you not graduate. I said, fine,
Speaker 1: I'll call him again. And I called him again, and
Speaker 1: this is what I get. Yes, that's the name again.
Speaker 1: And I said to Olberman, OLB, just a moment. Woman
Speaker 1: puts the phone down. For all I know, it's the
Speaker 1: same woman Professor Martin had called last fall. Woman puts
Speaker 1: the phone down so I can hear it better than
Speaker 1: if she were holding it up to her conversation in
Speaker 1: the background, I hear, gladys, Yeah, do me a check
Speaker 1: on Olberman? Did he graduate? No? Bone, that's my heart bone? No, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: not Oberman, ob not her. This is the guy Olb.
Speaker 1: I didn't know there was somebody named Oberman in my
Speaker 1: class in my school. That's how little I went. Oh lb,
Speaker 1: Yes that one Keith Theodore. Yes, yes, the guy in
Speaker 1: the radio station who thinks he's funny.
Speaker 2: Right, No you sure?
Speaker 1: No again? Now my life is flashed in front of
Speaker 1: me twice in about a minute and a half. Can't
Speaker 1: imagine why I would have had dreams based on this reality.
Speaker 2: No you sure? History? Okay?
Speaker 1: Where?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 8: All right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well I'll tell him. All right, you passed? You
Speaker 1: graduate on Monday? What you graduate on Monday? I said,
Speaker 1: what was all that about? No, in history, we couldn't
Speaker 1: find the history final the history score you got to
Speaker 1: you gotta se minus in history. You did, we very
Speaker 1: well in the final exam. We just didn't have it
Speaker 1: connected yet. No, you're you're you're you're good, you're you
Speaker 1: You've made it fairly fairly. It was close, but you're
Speaker 1: you're out, you're at you're graduating. Congratulations, Thank you.
Speaker 2: Very much.
Speaker 1: You're welcome, have a nice weekend. Say hi to your
Speaker 1: folks for me. And I said okay, and then just
Speaker 1: went out and got drunk again. Called my dad, I said, hey,
Speaker 1: guess what. I graduated. So on graduation morning, they kept
Speaker 1: passing around bottles of champagne and they did not get
Speaker 1: past me. And I graduated. And there was a whole
Speaker 1: thing where a girl I was interested in who didn't
Speaker 1: graduate on time because she failed sex roles. She failed
Speaker 1: a class called sex roles. She was expected to graduate
Speaker 1: with honors, and she failed a class called sex roles.
Speaker 1: And I was telling this to a friend of mine
Speaker 1: who'd been away looking for a job that week and
Speaker 1: senior week, we were walking together in the procession for graduation.
Speaker 1: I totally unexpected, and I'm telling her the story and
Speaker 1: it's one of those She's standing right behind me, isn't she?
Speaker 1: And the girl who failed the class in sex roles,
Speaker 1: which led us all to gleefully enjoy the fact that
Speaker 1: she had failed this. She stood behind me and heard
Speaker 1: me bad mouthing her, and she said, you've deserved this
Speaker 1: for a long time, and she hit me. She slapped
Speaker 1: me on graduation morning, and my glasses went flying into
Speaker 1: the bushes, and then she stormed off to try to
Speaker 1: figure out how to deal with the fact that she
Speaker 1: had not graduated on time and I had, and my
Speaker 1: friend Carol, Carol Hebb, the greatest natural talent in broadcasting
Speaker 1: I have ever met in my life, said, you know,
Speaker 1: you're an unusual guy, but as long as she's running around,
Speaker 1: you never have to worry about actually being kind of crazy,
Speaker 1: because you're not crazy compared to her. And I should
Speaker 1: have proposed to Carol on the spot. So we graduate,
Speaker 1: and I drink, and we get done, and my father
Speaker 1: and mother and sister come up and congratulate me, and
Speaker 1: I hand my dad the diploma and say, here's your receipt,
Speaker 1: and I rip off my cap and my gown before
Speaker 1: they can get a picture of me in it. There's
Speaker 1: one picture of me standing with Carol before the whole ceremony,
Speaker 1: and I don't remember when I did the rest of
Speaker 1: the week. I stayed in Ethica, New York for some reason,
Speaker 1: with friends, and then went home and went looking for
Speaker 1: my job, having graduated. And then the dream started somewhere
Speaker 1: along the line, somewhere in the days and weeks beyond
Speaker 1: May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine, in which I did
Speaker 1: not graduate and did not get the job. And I
Speaker 1: assume I don't remember ever having the dream in which
Speaker 1: I get slapped by that one girl, but every other
Speaker 1: kind of psychological torture that could occur occurs, and gradually,
Speaker 1: as I said, they became, these dreams became not disturbing
Speaker 1: at all, but mostly kind of familiar. The last time
Speaker 1: I had it a few years ago, it finally dawned
Speaker 1: on me why I was still having it when there
Speaker 1: weren't stresses, and when there weren't things to worry about,
Speaker 1: when I had graduated and become a fairly respected alumnus
Speaker 1: of Cornell University, which you never would have been on
Speaker 1: in a million years. On May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: I finally realized what it was. And since I said
Speaker 1: this to my therapist that day, that I realized why
Speaker 1: I kept having this dream. Why when it was no
Speaker 1: longer an issue of stress. It wasn't kind of stress
Speaker 1: burned into the retinas of my mind. It was it
Speaker 1: was just a dream I kept having. Why Why did
Speaker 1: you keep having this dream through your thirties and forties
Speaker 1: and fifties and into your sixties. And finally, one day
Speaker 1: I woke up kind of smiling from having had the
Speaker 1: dream again for the first time in a couple of months,
Speaker 1: and it dawned on me. Now the dream had become
Speaker 1: a positive because in the dream, I was twenty years old,
Speaker 1: and the older you get, unless some true trauma inflicted
Speaker 1: you at that age, there is almost nothing about the
Speaker 1: thought that you might actually turn into twenty years old again.
Speaker 1: That is unpleasant. Even not graduating on the day you're
Speaker 1: supposed to graduate, and you've been told you're going to graduate,
Speaker 1: even that is better. At least, just all of your
Speaker 1: joints don't hurt at sixty five years old or even
Speaker 1: thirty five years old. And finally that became the reason
Speaker 1: that I was having the dream. It was just nostalgia
Speaker 1: for being twenty years old last time I had the dream,
Speaker 1: the dream in which I am thrown back to May
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine, the day I didn't didn't
Speaker 1: graduate in seven semesters from Cornell. I've done all the
Speaker 1: damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown
Speaker 1: musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel arranged, produced,
Speaker 1: and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on
Speaker 1: the guitars, bass and drums, and mister Shaneale handled orchestration
Speaker 1: and keyboards produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some
Speaker 1: of the Beethoven compositions, were arranged and performed by the
Speaker 1: group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Lderman
Speaker 1: theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtisy
Speaker 1: of ESPN inc our satirical and pithy musical comments. My
Speaker 1: accompanyist Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our
Speaker 1: announcer today is my friend Howard Feineman. Everything else was
Speaker 1: pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this the
Speaker 1: one hundred and sixty third day until the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four presidential election, but two and thirty eighth day since
Speaker 1: Dictator j'ms first attempted coup against the democratically elected government
Speaker 1: of the United States. Use the legal system, use the
Speaker 1: mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens, use
Speaker 1: the not regularly given elector objection option to stop him
Speaker 1: from doing it again while we still can. The next
Speaker 1: scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletin says the news warrants till then.
Speaker 1: I'm Keith Olruman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
Speaker 1: well ask part of it A good luck?
Speaker 2: A yeah.
Speaker 5: These are the flags of Alito Insurrection, appeal to have
Speaker 5: and send in Noah, damn thing.
Speaker 2: Why don't you ask them what they did? I Yi yi,
Speaker 2: I am Martha and Alito. It's my flag, it's my world.
Speaker 2: I deny you access.
Speaker 1: It's an international signal of distress. Countdown with Keith Olreman
Speaker 1: is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.