Speaker 1: Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. The
Speaker 1: Trump mental illness crisis and cover up worsens this kind
Speaker 1: of reality detachment in such different venues on such different topics,
Speaker 1: from the West Point graduation ceremony to demanding somebody pay
Speaker 1: him much of whatever Harvard takes in intuition in the
Speaker 1: same weekend. From any other president at any other time,
Speaker 1: including Trump himself seven or eight years ago, this all
Speaker 1: would have been greeted by wall to wall television and
Speaker 1: online coverage and banner newspaper headlines essentially, the president has
Speaker 1: gone crazy. Instead, within twelve hours, it was all forgotten,
Speaker 1: so our national media could ignore the extinction level event
Speaker 1: crisis of a president gone fully insane, so it could
Speaker 1: return to regularly scheduled programming about how the past president
Speaker 1: would not instantly admit that his acuity game had slipped
Speaker 1: to a B B minus. Yesterday at twelve fifty one
Speaker 1: am Eastern daylight time, still considered the middle of the
Speaker 1: night even if you are crazy, Trump posted this, I
Speaker 1: defy you to tell me you understand everything he had
Speaker 1: written here. I defy you to tell me that if
Speaker 1: anybody other than this political leader had proposed in essence
Speaker 1: charging foreign countries for buying American products, or had mistaken
Speaker 1: fifty two million dollars for fifty two billion dollars. If
Speaker 1: anybody else had done that, tell me that we would
Speaker 1: not have relaunched my old show, The White House in
Speaker 1: Crisis only there would have been a version of it
Speaker 1: on all networks, and we would not even have decided
Speaker 1: it had cooled down enough yet to pause to take
Speaker 1: the first commercial break. I quote. Why isn't Harvard saying
Speaker 1: that almost thirty one percent of their students are from
Speaker 1: foreign lands? This is a well known fact. It was
Speaker 1: repeated by the Trump administration several days earlier. And yet
Speaker 1: those countries, some not at all friendly to the United States,
Speaker 1: pay nothing towards their student's education, nor do they ever
Speaker 1: intend to. They don't have to. The students have to pay.
Speaker 1: It's why it's called tuition. Nobody told us that who's
Speaker 1: this us? We want to know who those foreign students are.
Speaker 1: A reasonable request, since we give Harvard billions of dollars,
Speaker 1: But Harvard isn't exactly forthcoming. Every student in here is
Speaker 1: on a visa of some sort, and his name is
Speaker 1: in the government records. We want those names and countries.
Speaker 1: Harvard has fifty two million dollars dollars sign fifty two
Speaker 1: Comma zero zero zero Comma zero zero zero. That's fifty
Speaker 1: two million. Harvard has fifty two billion. Mised your money,
Speaker 1: misterr business Trump does not know the difference. Use it
Speaker 1: and stop asking the federal government to continue granting money
Speaker 1: to you. The money grants are largely for research, scientific research,
Speaker 1: historical research, sometimes military research. Trump clearly wants an outbound
Speaker 1: tariff on an American product education. He not only wants
Speaker 1: inbound tariffs, which have crashed the world economy. He wants
Speaker 1: an outbound tariff. He wants a country to pay for
Speaker 1: the privilege of paying. In short, in his diseased mind,
Speaker 1: the tariffs are not some kind of means of regulating
Speaker 1: international trade. They are kickbacks, kickbacks to him, personally dressed
Speaker 1: up as if they had something to do with the
Speaker 1: American government, which they don't like, the crypto scam by
Speaker 1: his crypto get to attend an official event with him,
Speaker 1: complete with the presidential seal. For all of his public life,
Speaker 1: half a century or more of it. Now, Trump has
Speaker 1: proudly proclaimed what others would try to hide, that he
Speaker 1: has never been able to separate the meaning of life
Speaker 1: from mon He cannot see the value of something. He
Speaker 1: can only see its price tag. No price tag, no value,
Speaker 1: no money for him, no value, no kickback, no value.
Speaker 1: This goes hand in hand with the reality that Trump
Speaker 1: also does not value nor understand education, or the idea
Speaker 1: that admitting foreign students who pay full freight to go
Speaker 1: to Harvard brings money into this country, to say nothing
Speaker 1: of bringing smart immigrants into this country, to say nothing
Speaker 1: of what his supporters really care about bringing white immigrants
Speaker 1: into this country. I'll come back to Harvard in detail
Speaker 1: in a little bit, but simply, Trump has never understood education.
Speaker 1: He never tires of explaining that he is smart because
Speaker 1: other people in his family were acknowledged to be smart.
Speaker 1: That it's all genetics, he had uncle. Well, if it's
Speaker 1: all genetics, you not only don't have to work at
Speaker 1: being smart, you can't be educated. You can't be educated,
Speaker 1: you can't work at gaining intelligence. You're either born stupid
Speaker 1: or you're born smart like him. Person woman man camera
Speaker 1: TV fifty two million, when you mean fifty two billion?
Speaker 1: Trump smart?
Speaker 2: And this.
Speaker 1: Was twelve hours after he stepped up to a podium
Speaker 1: to celebrate the end of the education of the cadets
Speaker 1: at West Point. If he had mailed in his speech,
Speaker 1: it might have won him a Nobel Prize or a
Speaker 1: Pulitzer Prize. Instead, he went there wore a Maga cap,
Speaker 1: because presumably he had left his hair in Florida. He
Speaker 1: read a script listlessly and then drifted off into his
Speaker 1: ad libs, into his real to the soldiers of the future,
Speaker 1: to the people to defend America in the decades to come,
Speaker 1: his true advice, when they should marry their trophy wife.
Speaker 3: He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife.
Speaker 3: Could you say a trophy wife. I guess we can
Speaker 3: say a trophy Well, it didn't work out too well.
Speaker 3: But that doesn't work out too well, I must tell
Speaker 3: you a lot of trophy wives doesn't work out.
Speaker 4: But it made him happy for a little while at least.
Speaker 2: But he found a new wife.
Speaker 3: He sold his little boat and he got a big yacht.
Speaker 3: He had one of the biggest yachts anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1: As an aside, I don't know why, it isn't clear
Speaker 1: that he was talking about millennia there. In any event,
Speaker 1: that was the message to the graduates of West Point.
Speaker 1: That and something about invasions, invasions by trophy wives. I
Speaker 1: have to say pose and this unrestrained, inexplicable, inappropriate presidential
Speaker 1: insanity at West Point stuck to nothing. The eulogy for Chuckles,
Speaker 1: the clown in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, was more
Speaker 1: coherent and more relevant. What did Chuckles ask in return?
Speaker 1: Not much in his own words, A little song, a
Speaker 1: little dance, a little seltzer down your paths. That Trump SoundBite,
Speaker 1: to say nothing of the overnight demand from him of
Speaker 1: a taste of the tuition action at Harvard had vanished
Speaker 1: from the news hole by the time the Sunday news
Speaker 1: shows hit, including the Sunday News Show hosted by Jake Tapper,
Speaker 1: especially the Sunday News Show hosted by Jake Tapper. Also
Speaker 1: missing from Jake Tapper's show and the others the reality
Speaker 1: the Tapper and his co author, Gossip writer Alex Thompson
Speaker 1: are going to have to withdraw their book about President
Speaker 1: Biden's acuity issues, which Trump has not only exceeded in
Speaker 1: both volume and danger, to say nothing of relevance, but
Speaker 1: which he exceeds in both volume and danger every goddamned day.
Speaker 1: Lachland cart Writ's new site Breaker reports that Tapper's CNN
Speaker 1: colleagues are volunteering, discussed at what Tapper has now done,
Speaker 1: and more importantly, claiming that the book got none of
Speaker 1: the rigorous fact checking that books by other CNN talent
Speaker 1: are uniformly subjected to quote. Very little of the book
Speaker 1: was fact check prior to publication, as Cartwright phrased it.
Speaker 1: Breaker checked with eight central figures named in the book,
Speaker 1: and none were contacted by the New Yorker fact checker
Speaker 1: that Tapper and Thompson have been touting on their book
Speaker 1: tour rot Row. The fact checking story is in fact
Speaker 1: dissolving in fro of the author's eyes. Politico not exactly
Speaker 1: Biden friendly nor Tapper critical territory fact check the Tapper
Speaker 1: claim that a Biden campaign town hall in Delaware in
Speaker 1: April of last year went so badly that Biden was
Speaker 1: so incoherent that none of the video shot there was
Speaker 1: usable in campaign ads. They had to throw it all
Speaker 1: away instead. Political reports it obtained saw and reviewed three
Speaker 1: completed commercials made from the video that Tapper claims was
Speaker 1: totally unusable. It was totally unusable except they used it
Speaker 1: the ads didn't run because Biden dropped out. Politico now
Speaker 1: reports Tapper has changed his story about the Delaware April
Speaker 1: event and the unusable town hall video, now claiming an
Speaker 1: anonymous Biden advisor had deemed the video not up to
Speaker 1: par as. Politico and sem four both reported video has
Speaker 1: also surfaced a Biden chatting with George Clooney at the
Speaker 1: exact event. At the exact moment, Clooney insisted Biden didn't
Speaker 1: recognize him. Recognizing a star is a matter of perception.
Speaker 1: There is also now a question about how much The
Speaker 1: New Yorker screwed up the excerpt it published of Tapper's book,
Speaker 1: The Biden Spokesman Quote published by Politico. Is this The
Speaker 1: New Yorker employee who reached out to fact check this
Speaker 1: excerpt also apparently reviewed the book and offered suggestions to
Speaker 1: the authors as they wrote it. If that is not
Speaker 1: a canceling level ethical issue, it suggests problems with Jake
Speaker 1: Tapper's mental acuity and judgment as to Tapper's desperation to
Speaker 1: sell this damn book, to do anything up to and
Speaker 1: including his human humiliating apology to Lara Trump. Lara Trump,
Speaker 1: the only woman in the world who could have married
Speaker 1: up intelligence wise by getting hitched to Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Cartwright,
Speaker 1: and Breaker noted something else that smells really, really bad.
Speaker 1: I'll quote Cartwright. We've also learned that Tapper's appearance on
Speaker 1: Megan Kelly was not cleared with bosses beforehand. Quote Jake
Speaker 1: does what Jake wants, and in this case, he went rogue.
Speaker 1: Another CNN staffer tells us, Jake Tapper went rogue. He
Speaker 1: now may have to go to some other network too.
Speaker 1: A little song, a little dance, say Jake Tapper? Is
Speaker 1: that really Seltzer?
Speaker 2: Down your pants? Okay?
Speaker 1: What in the hell is wrong with Christy Nome? I mean,
Speaker 1: what the hell do we think is actually wrong with
Speaker 1: Christy Nome? Because there's something wrong with Christy Nome. I
Speaker 1: mean she's a dog murderer. Moreover, she built a book
Speaker 1: tour around publicizing the fact that she shot her daughter's puppy.
Speaker 1: On the right, it has been widely reported that she
Speaker 1: is how shall we phrase this active outside her marriage.
Speaker 1: She looks nothing like she did five years ago or
Speaker 1: ten years ago. She was willing to travel to El
Speaker 1: Salvador to take videos of her looking at dozens of
Speaker 1: shaved oiled up, shirtless men in a cage. What in
Speaker 1: the hell do we think is wrong with Christy Nome?
Speaker 1: Ten renditionees sue the Department of Homeland Security and her
Speaker 1: it's dismissed. She takes screenshots of the legal papers dismissing it.
Speaker 1: She tweets them and adds these two words, suck it.
Speaker 1: This is a member of the cabinet, the former governor
Speaker 1: of a state. Even if it is one of the Dakotas,
Speaker 1: it's still a state. Suck it exactly exactly what are
Speaker 1: they supposed to suck? Christy? What are your suggestions on
Speaker 1: the suck front for those people that you tried to
Speaker 1: disappear from this country? And why are you doing this?
Speaker 1: What in the hell do we think is wrong with Christinome? Now,
Speaker 1: we could study this problem and debate it and never
Speaker 1: come to a conclusion. I've been asking since nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: what in the hell do we think is wrong with
Speaker 1: Donald Trump? And we are no closer to an answer. Frankly,
Speaker 1: not wishing it on him at any time in the future,
Speaker 1: certainly nothing involuntary, But we may not know the answer
Speaker 1: to that until there's an autopsy, And we may not
Speaker 1: even know that then twenty years from now could be
Speaker 1: the same thing with her. What in the hell is
Speaker 1: wrong with Christinome? It did dawn on me for the
Speaker 1: first time as I reread the quotes about her taking
Speaker 1: poor cricket into the garbage area or the pit whatever
Speaker 1: it was, with the gravel, and then she just shot
Speaker 1: the dog in the face because it wasn't responding well
Speaker 1: enough to training. And we've seen what kind of training
Speaker 1: she does. Her training methods must have consisted telling cricket
Speaker 1: suck it. I mean, it occurred to me for the
Speaker 1: first time that perhaps the whole business about publicizing that,
Speaker 1: because who would advertise that under any circumstances. If you
Speaker 1: are the worst person in the world, you wouldn't advertise
Speaker 1: it because you wouldn't want people to know you are
Speaker 1: that sick, unless you wanted somebody to know this. And
Speaker 1: who do we know in a position of not only
Speaker 1: authority and power, but being able to dole this out
Speaker 1: in ever increasing soul control of the power. Who do
Speaker 1: we know who does not understand like or believe in dogs.
Speaker 1: Donald Trump never had one, still doesn't get it. It
Speaker 1: is perhaps his favorite bad comparison anytime he wants to
Speaker 1: indicate somebody is doing something wrong or cowardly. Oh, they
Speaker 1: grobbled like a dog, They begged like a dog. They
Speaker 1: all the things dogs don't do. As someone described it
Speaker 1: very simply, Donald Trump still does not understand dogs. Could
Speaker 1: Christy nom have publicized that whole horrible story to get
Speaker 1: Donald Trump's attention, to get him if re elected, to
Speaker 1: appointer to some position in his Nazi administration. It's the
Speaker 1: first thing I've ever thought of that suggests there might
Speaker 1: be an actual, logical, flawed, logical, but logical reason behind
Speaker 1: her publicizing this What have you been up too lately?
Speaker 2: Governor? Know him well?
Speaker 1: I killed my daughter's dog. And the second message, by
Speaker 1: the way, was after she revealed how the world looks
Speaker 1: to her from behind whatever it is that is wrong
Speaker 1: with her. In this whole issue about Harvard, she announced,
Speaker 1: and why is Homeland Security dealing with who goes to
Speaker 1: school here? And who can come into this country to
Speaker 1: go to school here? And by the way, almost always
Speaker 1: full rates, rarely scholarships, all all of these tuitions underwriting
Speaker 1: the scholarships for Americans. So it's cheaper to go to
Speaker 1: Harvard and thus cheaper to go to all the other
Speaker 1: schools because all the foreign students are paying full freight,
Speaker 1: why are they involved in this sixty five sixty six
Speaker 1: hundred foreign students at Harvard announcing that they would no
Speaker 1: longer be allowed to come into this country, thus banned
Speaker 1: from Harvard, and assuming that that is the end of it.
Speaker 1: Because she doesn't believe she can be stopped, sued, overthrown, overridden,
Speaker 1: run out of botox, She said, today I sent them
Speaker 1: a letter that said they will no longer be allowed
Speaker 1: to participate in this student exchange visitor program. And that's
Speaker 1: up to twenty seven percent of their enrolled students. So
Speaker 1: it's significant. And she added this should be a warning
Speaker 1: to every other university to get your act together, which,
Speaker 1: what the hell are you talking about? Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a significant issue that sixty five sixty six hundred
Speaker 1: students would no longer be going to Harvard. Because of
Speaker 1: course Harvard does not have a waiting list. It could
Speaker 1: never find sixty five sixty six hundred new students anywhere
Speaker 1: in the United States, even if you said, well, there
Speaker 1: aren't going to be any scholarships here full freight. Trust me.
Speaker 1: I went to an Ivy League institution that one year
Speaker 1: decided it was going to become a football power. Suddenly
Speaker 1: there were one hundred football players there who had to
Speaker 1: have help getting themselves to the football stadium, the only
Speaker 1: one on campus that had big lights around it and
Speaker 1: signs and looked like in part the stadium at Ohio State,
Speaker 1: big arching stone edifice on the side about I don't know.
Speaker 1: It looked against the relief of the rest of the campus.
Speaker 1: It looked to be thirty forty stories tall.
Speaker 2: It was not.
Speaker 1: These guys were suddenly there, I don't know how, and
Speaker 1: then when that didn't work out, they were all gone.
Speaker 1: Sixty six hundred. Could you could never ever find enough
Speaker 1: students to pay full or nearly full price to go
Speaker 1: to Harvard in the place of these foreign students. Setting
Speaker 1: aside the legality, the morality, and the brain drain issues,
Speaker 1: the idea that this idiot who used to be the
Speaker 1: governor of a Dakota and is now an action dress
Speaker 1: up Barbie with eight new outfits, who likes to look
Speaker 1: at sweaty men in cages, topless in crowds in El
Speaker 1: Salvador worth a trip from anywhere. Huh Christy, that she
Speaker 1: somehow thinks she's going to put Harvard out of business. No,
Speaker 1: we don't. We have nobody left. It's not like the
Speaker 1: school you went to, Christy Northern State University, which sounds
Speaker 1: literally like the name you would put in if you
Speaker 1: didn't have the right to use the name of an
Speaker 1: actual college somewhere. Northern State University, Central Southwestern Eastern College,
Speaker 1: Northern State University. She dropped out of Northern State University.
Speaker 1: Tell Harvard what to do. This belligerence towards the Ivy
Speaker 1: League is hilarious. And by the way, if Trump actually
Speaker 1: believes it, he should renounce his degree from Penn and Wharton.
Speaker 1: From Wharton anyway, if he remembers how he got it.
Speaker 1: If he remembers that he has it, IVY League, bad,
Speaker 1: you went to the IVY League. If you don't want
Speaker 1: to be bad, you have to renounce your degree again.
Speaker 1: There is an excellent chance he has no idea how
Speaker 1: it he happen to graduate, or if he did. Harvard,
Speaker 1: of course, has handled this entirely correctly, unlike other schools,
Speaker 1: which I shall mention in a moment. Harvard's response to
Speaker 1: this was to immediately sue the Trump administration into the
Speaker 1: ground in several different lawsuits from several different companies, all
Speaker 1: of which had no interest in getting the Trump Seal
Speaker 1: of approval, and none of which we're going to fold
Speaker 1: to the Trump threats. The Ivy League institutions are endowed.
Speaker 1: They have reserves of money and money forthcoming and money
Speaker 1: coming from whenever they're again not wishing anybody a premature autopsy,
Speaker 1: but whenever autopsies are conducted on the class of you know,
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty, that's another couple million for Harvard or Cornell.
Speaker 1: Cornell is endowed to ten billion dollars. Harvard is about
Speaker 1: fifty billion. The Ivy League is at one hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty five billion dollars in endowment, in reserve, in essence,
Speaker 1: and no matter what you take away from them, they
Speaker 1: have enough to sue the government forever. If there is
Speaker 1: any institution that is specifically designed to fight back against
Speaker 1: an attempted fascist takeover of this country, it is academia,
Speaker 1: and particularly the Ivy League schools. Because of course, every
Speaker 1: Ivy League school that does this makes it more difficult
Speaker 1: and takes up more time of these monsters. They have
Speaker 1: to focus on Harvard. Why didn't they just give up, Well,
Speaker 1: because frankly, they're worth more than the United States government.
Speaker 1: You do it that way. You do not do it
Speaker 1: the way. Sorry Colombia did it. And my poor friend
Speaker 1: Claire Shipman, I don't know anything more about this just
Speaker 1: because I know Claire since nineteen ninety eight. I don't
Speaker 1: know anything more about this, just because I saw Claire
Speaker 1: earlier this year. I don't know any more about this
Speaker 1: than you do. I do know this. This is not
Speaker 1: how you do it. You do not fold, bend, and
Speaker 1: mutilate your university and the history of your institution to
Speaker 1: try to avoid what Trump is going to try to
Speaker 1: do to you, because he's going to do it to you.
Speaker 1: Anyway You're saying we'll negotiate only gives him more time
Speaker 1: to you know, send Christy Nome over with sharp knives
Speaker 1: or a gun with cricket, and guess what happened to Claire.
Speaker 1: Claire had to give the commencement address at two separate
Speaker 1: commencements at Columbia University. As the old joke goes from
Speaker 1: Young Frankenstein, could be worse, could be reigning.
Speaker 4: I know that many of you feel good morning, class
Speaker 4: of twenty twenty five. I know that many of you
Speaker 4: feel some amount of frustration with me. And I know
Speaker 4: you feel it with the administration.
Speaker 1: Notice, she tried the David Zaslav thing from a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago. David Zaslav from Warner Bros. Discovery got
Speaker 1: up and gave the speech it I think it was
Speaker 1: Boston University, the commencement address, and didn't realize they were booing.
Speaker 1: Thought they were chanting boo zazz or zaz boo, and
Speaker 1: just kept talking, pretending he had this weird look on
Speaker 1: his face, like is there an earthquake or something? And
Speaker 1: what's all noise? Are the trucks walking going by? It's construction. No,
Speaker 1: they're booing your ass. So anyway, as I said, could
Speaker 1: be worse, could be raining. That was the first of
Speaker 1: Claire's speeches. Then she had to go back the day
Speaker 1: actor and give another commencement addressed to another part of
Speaker 1: Columbia University, and they booed her and it was raining.
Speaker 1: The only solution history tells us. Twenty first century history
Speaker 1: tells us, twentieth century history tells us, nineteenth century history
Speaker 1: tells us. All of our personal histories tell us. The
Speaker 1: only way to deal with people like Trump and this
Speaker 1: idiot Christy action dress up Gnome, I don't think him
Speaker 1: a la then the gang can't act together. You tell
Speaker 1: him Northern State, which he dropped out of Harvard, will
Speaker 1: never find any more students. Columbia just gonna dry up
Speaker 1: without that money from the Trump administration. Throw all the
Speaker 1: students out. Well, I mean, look, there is the issue
Speaker 1: of what to do to prevent that. But if you
Speaker 1: lose and all the students have to leave, your institution
Speaker 1: is not going to be harmed by Trump. If you
Speaker 1: stand up and tell him to go f himself and
Speaker 1: do some damage to him on the way out, he
Speaker 1: will not come back. He doesn't want to fight. He
Speaker 1: wants you to fold. Gnome doesn't want a fight. You
Speaker 1: think she wanted to go into that gravel pit with
Speaker 1: cricket where cricket has a gun too. They'd be saying,
Speaker 1: was the name of that governor got shot by her dog?
Speaker 1: Broadening this out one more time from Nome or anybody else.
Speaker 1: The rest of this is not about her. It's not
Speaker 1: about anybody in particular in this administration.
Speaker 2: It just.
Speaker 1: Is the question of what the f is wrong with
Speaker 1: these people. I'm sure this has crossed your mind, this
Speaker 1: particular answer. I was rearranging some books over the weekend,
Speaker 1: and I came across one book again and and it
Speaker 1: just hit me again, this might be the solution. We
Speaker 1: didn't know this necessarily about the people this book is about.
Speaker 1: It could be years, it could be decades. Historians may
Speaker 1: discovered this. This is a book called Blitzed by Norman Ohler.
Speaker 1: The publisher is Alan Lane. And I'm not going to
Speaker 1: read the whole thing to you. I'll just read you
Speaker 1: the fly leaf the title of this and it's a
Speaker 1: picture of Hitler looking off to the right as you
Speaker 1: look at the cover of the book, and he looks
Speaker 1: really stoned, he looks really high. Drugs in Nazi Germany,
Speaker 1: the flyleaf reads, the Nazis presented themselves as warriors against
Speaker 1: moral degeneracy. Yet, as Norman Ohler's gripping bestseller reveals, the
Speaker 1: entire Third Reich was permeated with drugs cocaine, heroin, morphine,
Speaker 1: and most of all, meth amphetamine or crystal meth, used
Speaker 1: by everyone from factory workers to housewives, and crucial to
Speaker 1: troops resilience, even partly explaining German victory in nineteen forty.
Speaker 1: I leave you to draw your own parallels. The promiscuous
Speaker 1: use of drugs at the Verius highest levels, also impaired
Speaker 1: and confused decision making, and leave you to draw your
Speaker 1: own comparisons with Hitler and his entourage taking refuse huge
Speaker 1: and potentially lethal cocktails of stimulants administered by the physician
Speaker 1: doctor Morrell as the war turned against Germany. That's doctor
Speaker 1: Morrell and not doctor Ronnie Jackson. Doctor Morrell. While drugs
Speaker 1: can out on their own, explain the events of the
Speaker 1: Second World War or its outcome, Ohler shows they change
Speaker 1: our understanding of it. Blitzed forms a crucial missing piece
Speaker 1: of the story. The rest of it should read now
Speaker 1: available without a prescription. Again, not specific to anybody in
Speaker 1: the Trump administration, but their behavior is not dissimilar to
Speaker 1: those people who would be considered strung out. We already
Speaker 1: know about Elon Musk's drug history that is reported, recorded
Speaker 1: and sourced very well in a variety of articles, none
Speaker 1: of which he did anything about. And again it could
Speaker 1: be nothing, it could be irrelevant. This idea that Hitler
Speaker 1: did what he did right up to the end, believing
Speaker 1: that he was winning, right up until just before he
Speaker 1: killed himself, was really a function of drug use. Not
Speaker 1: necessarily drugs, but Norman Oler presents a pretty convincing case
Speaker 1: because he got a hold of all the documents and
Speaker 1: some of the prescription forms. This should be a warning
Speaker 1: to every other university to get your act together again.
Speaker 1: I'm not accusing anybody of anything in particular. It is very,
Speaker 1: very true. I would say it's likely I will officially
Speaker 1: state that I just think Christinom is a monstrous sadist
Speaker 1: with no artificial ingredients. Also of interest here, so if
Speaker 1: this episode sounds a little ragged, I had two choices.
Speaker 1: It's a holiday, take it off or ad libs of
Speaker 1: the commentary. I chose, as you can tell the latter. Hey,
Speaker 1: we're not going to hang this episode in the loover,
Speaker 1: you know, but it's okay for Memorial Day weekend. Memorial
Speaker 1: Day weekend when we remember all the sacrifice and service
Speaker 1: by Trump. That's the bad news. The good news is
Speaker 1: Bill Maher has won the Worst Person in the World
Speaker 1: honors again. He kissed Trump's ass again. That's next. This
Speaker 1: is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead
Speaker 1: on this edition of Countdown. Oh, it's that time of
Speaker 1: year again. I was being interviewed recently for an oral
Speaker 1: history of sports Illustrated magazine and we were talking about
Speaker 1: a writer they had named Chris Ballard, and how when
Speaker 1: he started at Sports Illustrated he briefly wrote their TV
Speaker 1: and radio sports column that used to run every week
Speaker 1: when people still.
Speaker 2: Cared about TV and radio sports.
Speaker 1: He wrote a piece about me just after he started,
Speaker 1: where he not only contacted the company that had just
Speaker 1: fired me and asked to talk to me, and when
Speaker 1: they said no, Keith doesn't want to talk to you,
Speaker 1: he not only believed they had asked me, but he
Speaker 1: put it in the magazine that I had refused to
Speaker 1: talk to him without ever asking me, and of course
Speaker 1: they didn't ask me. But he also he put it
Speaker 1: in an article that asserted it as fact that I
Speaker 1: would never again work in television. The article he wrote
Speaker 1: was this time of year in two thousand and one.
Speaker 1: He got laid off by Sports Illustrated in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: and I'm still here and just started working in sports
Speaker 1: television again, my fifth network, just covering baseball. The firing
Speaker 1: is the interesting part of the story. It was by Fox.
Speaker 1: Later it turned out after years of rumors that I
Speaker 1: actually did not believe. It turned out I was fired
Speaker 1: personally by Rupert Murdoch, by the way, tick tick tick
Speaker 1: rupert tick tick tick. Next in things I promised not
Speaker 1: to tell first, believe it or not, there are still
Speaker 1: more new idiots to talk about. The roundup of the miscreants,
Speaker 1: morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute the latest
Speaker 1: other worse persons in the world Lebron's worse mar Congressman
Speaker 1: Andrew Clyde. Andy's full time job is he's in the
Speaker 1: death business. He sells guns, he owns gun shops. He's
Speaker 1: a death pimp. He was the one who threw the
Speaker 1: elimination of restrictions on silencers into the budget bill and
Speaker 1: wrote about it shall not be infringed. Is not at
Speaker 1: the deathkin By the way, I'm actually fighting to go
Speaker 1: further than the current bill elaminate the taxation and registration
Speaker 1: of suppressors and short barreled farms. This is so his
Speaker 1: guns can kill more people. And this allows me to
Speaker 1: remind mister Clyde, who is an idiot on top of
Speaker 1: being in the gun business and the death business and
Speaker 1: being a death pimp, that the second Amendments, which he
Speaker 1: refers never uses, does not include the word own. Constitution
Speaker 1: has dozens of words in it, something like fifty or
Speaker 1: sixty I counted them once. That are synonyms for own, owning, ownership.
Speaker 1: It's a property document. None of these words is in
Speaker 1: the Second Amendment. You have a right to bear, as
Speaker 1: in carry, and use, and keep as in store in
Speaker 1: your home guns as part of a state militia. The
Speaker 1: Second Amendment says nothing about citizens having the right to
Speaker 1: own guns. They may or may not have the right
Speaker 1: to own guns, but the Second Amendment has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with it. It's about state militias, clearly. And everybody
Speaker 1: who has ever told you otherwise is lying. And Andrew
Speaker 1: Clyde is lying, and the Supreme Court that found other
Speaker 1: WordWise was lying. The Constitution says what it says, and
Speaker 1: the people who have lied about it, like Andy Clyde,
Speaker 1: are going to hell. Just a reminder from those of
Speaker 1: us who can read runner up worser Tim Walls, Minnesota
Speaker 1: Governor Tim Wallas. He's still governor, thank goodness. He of
Speaker 1: course is getting blamed as Kamala Harris was because the
Speaker 1: Democrats did such a half assed job solving all the
Speaker 1: problems of twenty twenty four, and Trump didn't have to
Speaker 1: stick to any of the facts or get covered like
Speaker 1: he was crazy, which he is, or diminished, which he is.
Speaker 1: Governor Wallace gave the commencement speech at the University of
Speaker 1: Minnesota Law School. Donald Trump's modern day Gestapo is scooping
Speaker 1: folks up off the streets. They're in unmarked vans, wearing masks,
Speaker 1: being shipped off to foreign tortured dungeons. No chance to
Speaker 1: him out of defense, not even a chance to kiss
Speaker 1: a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agent,
Speaker 1: shoved into those vans and disappeared. Yes, correct, Well, of
Speaker 1: course the Gestapo thing is a big deal on the
Speaker 1: right because you're not allowed to tell the Gestapo that
Speaker 1: they're the Gestapo. They think they're just Americans and not
Speaker 1: the Gestapo. So why is Tim on this list? Well,
Speaker 1: obviously because no matter what the handlers told him, and
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris, and no matter what the handlers and the
Speaker 1: consultants and all the other idiots standing in between the
Speaker 1: Democrats saying Trump is a fascist, Trump is a Nazi.
Speaker 1: We have to stop him, We have to save democracy
Speaker 1: at all costs. Let's do this. Whoever told him not to?
Speaker 1: He's on this list because he didn't use this language
Speaker 1: during the campaign. Should have called them the Gestapo last October,
Speaker 1: since it was obvious they had a plan to become
Speaker 1: the Gestapo. Since that's what they did last time. And
Speaker 1: I don't mean nineteen thirty six, I mean twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: they are the Gestapo. I have no complaints with Tim Walls.
Speaker 1: He would have been a superb vice president, first of all,
Speaker 1: unlike the one we have now. He would have been
Speaker 1: a human being who did not wear eyeliner, A human
Speaker 1: being being separate if somebody who doesn't wear eyeliner, I
Speaker 1: don't mind a vice president wearing eyeliner, the last vice
Speaker 1: president or eyeliner. This guy pretends he's not wearing eyeliner.
Speaker 1: Just be truthful about it if you want to wear eyeliner.
Speaker 1: Eddie Izzard's belief in himself, the British comedian, He told
Speaker 1: me once in a conversation we had that ultimately he
Speaker 1: wanted to become Prime Minister in eyeliner. And I said,
Speaker 1: given the history of your country, that might get you
Speaker 1: another one or two percent of the vote. He laughed,
Speaker 1: and then he said, you know you may be right,
Speaker 1: Tim Walls. Yes, they're the Gestapo. Just next time we
Speaker 1: go through this timeline say it earlier, but our winner.
Speaker 2: Oh look he's back. It's Bill Maher.
Speaker 1: I know, I know you're tired of Bill Maher being
Speaker 1: on this list, So am I Who the hell am
Speaker 1: I kidding? We both love this. He deserves it, He's
Speaker 1: earned it. Every stupid thing we all laughed at because
Speaker 1: his was the only other liberal show besides mine. We
Speaker 1: now can pay him back for his podcast company, as
Speaker 1: we know, went under. Sadly, his own podcast did not
Speaker 1: go under. It's still being published, and his latest guest
Speaker 1: on it was, Oh, guess what a Trump supporter?
Speaker 2: What a shock?
Speaker 1: Jillian Michaels, fitness guru and Trump influencer. As we know,
Speaker 1: fitness gurus do not use peds or ever get roid rage.
Speaker 2: It's a fact.
Speaker 1: Guess what. Bill is not only having Trump supporters on
Speaker 1: his shows again, He is defending Trump supporters again, because,
Speaker 1: like all really tiny brained people, his solution, when accurately
Speaker 1: criticized is to put his head down and keep going
Speaker 1: in the same direction, right off the effing cliff. Only
Speaker 1: Bill has managed somehow to climb all the way back
Speaker 1: to the top every once in a while and go
Speaker 1: right off the cliff again and here he goes one
Speaker 1: more time. Bill, Let's say it with Bill.
Speaker 2: Splack.
Speaker 1: Now Bill is defending Trump supporters again, not because he
Speaker 1: is trying to save his job by going right wing
Speaker 1: to mix in with the rest of the new right
Speaker 1: winger propagandists like Jake Tapper under the HBO, Max CNN,
Speaker 1: Warner Bros. Discovery Umbrella under John Malone, and David Zazz
Speaker 1: Lab twice for David Za's Lab in this show today. Now,
Speaker 1: Bill would never sell out. He has nothing to sell out.
Speaker 1: He never has. Bill would never sell out to keep
Speaker 1: a show that nobody watches anymore. When whatever happened to
Speaker 1: his podcast company going under could not possibly have had
Speaker 1: anything to do with, you know, a lack of money
Speaker 1: on Bill's part. No, they just went out of business
Speaker 1: because Bill was tired of it. I should have had
Speaker 1: the fist fight with him in nineteen seventy eight, shouldn't I.
Speaker 1: Jillian Michaels complaining about Tom Hanks and the Saturday Night
Speaker 1: Live Magas Sketch, which was this year than the winter
Speaker 1: weeks ago. Aren't they on hiatus already? They're talking about
Speaker 1: it now. Jillian Michael says that whole deplorable thing you.
Speaker 1: Bill Maher says, oh, sure, Jillian Michaels, they're still doing
Speaker 1: that even when you listen. I've met Tom Hanks a
Speaker 1: couple of times, and he was very kind and very lovely,
Speaker 1: and his wife was exceptionally lovely. But when he was
Speaker 1: on Saturday Night Live, Mar interrupts and says, I hated
Speaker 1: it too, and I sat on my show. I know,
Speaker 1: I hate it in wearing the MAGA hat, not shaking
Speaker 1: hands with a black person, and that's when I thought,
Speaker 1: you people don't know MAGA people. And Michaels goes, nope,
Speaker 1: excuse me, nope, and Bill goes, I mean, they have
Speaker 1: their issues, and I certainly have my issues with them.
Speaker 1: You do since when, but they're they're generally, I mean,
Speaker 1: of course there's some racists everywhere who are that bad,
Speaker 1: but generally, all the MAGA people I know have no
Speaker 1: problem shaking hands with a black person. He met Trump
Speaker 1: and he thinks MAGA people have no problem shaking hands
Speaker 1: with a black person. Here, let me shake your hand
Speaker 1: and then pull you into penury. To continue the Mar transcript,
Speaker 1: you're just hysterical and you're not helping. And I agree
Speaker 1: that was not helping, and Michael's interrupts, I don't get it.
Speaker 1: This is the part where I'm like, is this Titanic?
Speaker 2: Who knows?
Speaker 1: Bill Maher also, But mostly what I hate is it's
Speaker 1: what I call a zombie lie. Don't lie to me,
Speaker 1: it's a lie. Jillian Michaels, Yeah, Bill Maher, that Maga
Speaker 1: people aren't. We won't shake hands with I get it.
Speaker 1: It's part of a skit, and it's exaggeration, and that's comedy.
Speaker 1: It's a little too delicate a subject to just make
Speaker 1: to go there for that one. So you know, look,
Speaker 1: we all in comedy step over the line sometimes, or
Speaker 1: do one that we they want to take back. I
Speaker 1: doubt if they want to take that one back. I
Speaker 1: think they probably think it's great. But I'm telling you,
Speaker 1: as a liberal, I don't like it. Bill. You you
Speaker 1: still think you're a liberal. You still think other people
Speaker 1: still think you're a liberal. You praised Trump, you fell
Speaker 1: for Trump's Ted Bundy routine. You think anybody's still watching you?
Speaker 1: Who's a liberal? You think anybody watching you thinks you're
Speaker 1: a liberal. You're not a liberal. You're an aging TV
Speaker 1: figure who ran out of the funny several years ago
Speaker 1: and you're now doing whatever is necessary to keep your
Speaker 1: fascist bosses from firing you, to keep you on television.
Speaker 1: All this time, you think you're going into a television
Speaker 1: studio to do a show, and you find out, as
Speaker 1: we all do, no television has gotten into you, and
Speaker 1: you are doing television show. But you're just doing whatever's
Speaker 1: necessary to stay on TV, like Dennis Miller did. Remember
Speaker 1: Dennis Miller who was on that HBO show before Bill
Speaker 1: Maher Dennis Miller. Someday they'll be saying, who did that
Speaker 1: HBO show before the guy.
Speaker 2: Does it now? Bill? What was his name? Sclar?
Speaker 1: Bill Sklarr? Remember Bill Sklarr? Little guy pretended to be
Speaker 1: liberal all those years and then suddenly became a Trump
Speaker 1: fan and then they got criticized for it, and he
Speaker 1: got even worse. Eventually they fired him and had Jillian
Speaker 1: Michaels hosted the show for a while, remember that. And
Speaker 1: then David Zaslav, the executive, came down. He did the
Speaker 1: show for a while, and now they have that new guy.
Speaker 1: I don't know who could it be. There won't be
Speaker 1: an HBO by that point. They'll have changed the name again.
Speaker 2: Bill.
Speaker 1: You're not a liberal, You're a whiny little ex comedian
Speaker 1: mar two days worst person in the World, to the
Speaker 1: number one story on the Countdown, and my favorite topic,
Speaker 1: me and things I promised not to tell. Over the
Speaker 1: weekend watching hockey, I had occasion to invoke my days
Speaker 1: hosting the Baseball Game of the Week and the World
Speaker 1: Series for Fox, and it reminded me of the delightful
Speaker 1: way that ended with me being paid one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a month not to do anything. I have changed
Speaker 1: jobs a lot, and seldom have the departures included gold
Speaker 1: watches and going away parties, at least not going away
Speaker 1: parties to which I was invited. But in forty three
Speaker 1: years in radio and television, I have only actually been
Speaker 1: fired in the traditional sense of go clean out your
Speaker 1: desk and get out twice. Once the order was from
Speaker 1: a drunken radio executive who did not like the fact
Speaker 1: that I was twenty one years old, and he was overruled,
Speaker 1: and he was sent home with a warning by his
Speaker 1: boy hours later, and I was back on the job
Speaker 1: forty eight hours after that. The other time, when it
Speaker 1: actually happened, you're fired, clean out your desk, that was,
Speaker 1: unsurprisingly at the hands of Rupert Murdoch and Fox, and
Speaker 1: I mean Rupert Murdoch personally, or so he claims. When
Speaker 1: I finally convinced NBC News that I was serious about
Speaker 1: no longer hosting its Monica Lewinsky Athon in nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 1: the head of NBC Sports, Dick Eversoll, had an ingenious solution.
Speaker 1: He knew his friends at Fox Sports longed to have
Speaker 1: me front their version of SportsCenter, and so he proposed
Speaker 1: the following NBC would give my agent ten days in
Speaker 1: which to negotiate two deals. A deal for me to
Speaker 1: go to LA and host Fox Sports News and Major
Speaker 1: League Baseball on Fox, and another deal in which Fox
Speaker 1: would pay NBC one million dollars for my contract, like
Speaker 1: I was a mediocre baseball pitcher. Amazingly, it worked. I
Speaker 1: got what was then a record breaking salary for any
Speaker 1: cable sportscaster. Ever, NBC got its million, and maybe most startlingly,
Speaker 1: NBC then asked me to stay on the air as
Speaker 1: a lane duck at MSNBC for like six weeks. Curiously,
Speaker 1: throughout my career, no matter how abrasive the exit, my
Speaker 1: lane duck employers have always, for some reason trusted me
Speaker 1: to stay on their air, even though I was leaving
Speaker 1: in local news in Los Angeles once I did this
Speaker 1: for three months.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: At first, going to work at Fox Sports was a delight.
Speaker 1: Their news guys, the evil Roger Ales and his henchman
Speaker 1: John Moody, pitched me on doing stuff for them, maybe
Speaker 1: co anchoring with Bill O'Reilly, I'm serious. I passed sports.
Speaker 1: We spent money. I worked with friends. I didn't have
Speaker 1: to talk about politics. I could narrate highlights. I could
Speaker 1: do funny voices way downtown bang I lived on the beach.
Speaker 1: I mean, my next door neighbor was Hawaii. Every time
Speaker 1: there was a newspaper story about ESPN, even though our
Speaker 1: ratings were terrible, there was also my picture in it
Speaker 1: with a caption like challenging ESPN. It was great. But
Speaker 1: then two things happened. The Fox guy, who knew we
Speaker 1: needed five years at minimum just to tie ESPN in
Speaker 1: the ratings, took me to lunch one day and said, sorry, mate,
Speaker 1: my missus is moving back to England tomorrow without me,
Speaker 1: so I'm going good luck. He was replaced by guys
Speaker 1: who replaced the five year plan with a five week
Speaker 1: plan to raise the ratings by literally one fifth of
Speaker 1: one point. I left that meeting in which they explained
Speaker 1: their suicidal plan and revealed that my salary represent and
Speaker 1: an unsustainable twenty percent of their entire budget. And I
Speaker 1: called my real estate agent and put my house on
Speaker 1: the beach up for sale. Not long after, my doctor
Speaker 1: gave me a physical and a warning, cut back on
Speaker 1: work and stress and everything else, or you can have
Speaker 1: a heart attack ten years from now. I told my
Speaker 1: bosses this, and their response was to blackmail me. We
Speaker 1: have a clause in your contract which allows us to
Speaker 1: send you on the road once a week while you
Speaker 1: are still working five days in the studio. We're going
Speaker 1: to enforce that unless you kick back two thirds of
Speaker 1: your salary. They put this in a document. There are
Speaker 1: as the kids, say, receipts. So I folded to blackmail
Speaker 1: because two thirds of three million dollars a year is
Speaker 1: still pretty good. But I kept doing the job. In
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine, I broke a story that everybody laughed
Speaker 1: at that Michael Jordan was unhappy in retirement and he
Speaker 1: wanted to come back to play in the NBA, but
Speaker 1: instead of getting a salary, he wanted an ownership stake
Speaker 1: in a team two years later, he did exactly that.
Speaker 1: In two thousand, I got to host the first Mets
Speaker 1: Yankees World Series, and hosting baseball every Saturday on Fox
Speaker 1: was a pretty good gig, and we were just gearing
Speaker 1: up for the two thousand and one baseball season when
Speaker 1: I got a tip on April twentieth that the owners
Speaker 1: of the Los Angeles Dodgers had unofficially put their team
Speaker 1: up for sale, and in fact, they were talking to
Speaker 1: the old owners, the O'Malley family, about taking the Dodgers
Speaker 1: off their hands, selling the Dodgers back to the son
Speaker 1: of Walter O'Malley. This was a great scoop, but it
Speaker 1: had great danger because the owners of the Dodgers were Fox,
Speaker 1: my own employers. The next day, after getting this scoop,
Speaker 1: I made about one hundred phone calls, and sure enough
Speaker 1: I got the friend of a friend of a friend
Speaker 1: of my agent to confirm that he and his family
Speaker 1: were in preliminary discussions joining the O'Malley's to buy the
Speaker 1: Dodgers from Fox. Two sources. Great scoop, and that night
Speaker 1: I reached out to my bosses and said, what the
Speaker 1: hell do we do here? The story is solid, The
Speaker 1: Dodgers are for sale. But look, this is your candy store,
Speaker 1: and I do work for you, And if you don't
Speaker 1: want me to report this, I'm obviously not going to
Speaker 1: report it, and I'm not going to pouch, and I'm
Speaker 1: not going to give the story to somebody else. My
Speaker 1: boss has replied, good for you. Why don't we all
Speaker 1: get on the phone with the top. Rupert Murdoch has
Speaker 1: his own Personal News Corp Public relations department. Let's see
Speaker 1: what he says. So on Sunday, April twenty second, two
Speaker 1: thousand and one, we got Murdoch's own PR guy on
Speaker 1: the blower and I explained it to him. Now, mister
Speaker 1: Murdoch has a policy about this. He never interferes in
Speaker 1: editorial decisions, not even in sourced business stories, not even
Speaker 1: if they involve him. So long as you make it
Speaker 1: clear your sources are not from within the company, and
Speaker 1: so long as you're confident in your sources, and so
Speaker 1: long as you include our denial, you should proceed with
Speaker 1: this Dodger story. That is what we are paying you for.
Speaker 1: For a brief moment, I thought maybe I have misjudged
Speaker 1: Rupert Murdoch. Well, it turned out to be a very
Speaker 1: brief moment and a very wrong moment. I reported the
Speaker 1: story that night howls of denials. Five days later, though
Speaker 1: the Long Beach Press Telegram newspaper had its own story said,
Speaker 1: despite denials, Dodgers are for sale, with far more details
Speaker 1: than I had, And that really was the end of it.
Speaker 1: The team was unofficially for sale. Dodger fans, who hated
Speaker 1: what Fox had done to the team seemed happy, and
Speaker 1: the vast stinking pile of burning excrement that was Fox
Speaker 1: and News Corp. And Murdoch sailed on unperturbed. But twelve
Speaker 1: days after that, just before I was getting in my
Speaker 1: car to go to the first Fox Baseball meeting for
Speaker 1: our two thousand and one season coverage, the president of
Speaker 1: Fox Sports, yet another Aussie called David Hill, called my
Speaker 1: agent and told her case, not doing any baseball for
Speaker 1: us this year. Business decision click, end of conversation. Nothing else,
Speaker 1: no firing, no get out, no clean out your desk,
Speaker 1: no announcement. But then two days later they turned off
Speaker 1: my access to the Fox computer system, And four days
Speaker 1: after that they called and canceled my cable show. And
Speaker 1: then that night I got two weird calls from Rich Sandomir,
Speaker 1: who was the TV sports critic and TV sports business
Speaker 1: reporter for the New York Times. And Rich asks me, so,
Speaker 1: did you know you got fired by Rupert Murdoch personally?
Speaker 1: And I said, with genuine astonishment that I not only
Speaker 1: didn't know that, but even given my thoughts about Rupert Murdoch,
Speaker 1: I didn't believe that. Well, that's what my sources at
Speaker 1: Fox tell me. Apparently your Dodger story really pissed him off.
Speaker 1: But really, I said, I had cleared it through his
Speaker 1: personal PR guy. I don't know, Rich Sandomir said, Apparently
Speaker 1: he was on vacation and he got back like the
Speaker 1: ninth of this month, and he read all these stories
Speaker 1: about the Dodgers being for sale and how Fox Sports
Speaker 1: was the first to report it, and he called up
Speaker 1: David Hill and he told Hill to fire you immediately.
Speaker 1: So I told Rich, this is the first I have
Speaker 1: heard of this, and I still don't believe it, even
Speaker 1: though the day he mentioned May ninth was the day
Speaker 1: David Hill had called my agent and told her I
Speaker 1: would not be doing baseball for Fox that year. An
Speaker 1: hour later, the phone rings again, and it's Rich Sandomir again,
Speaker 1: and he sounds shaken. I got it wrong. I don't
Speaker 1: have any sources at Fox who told me Rupert fired
Speaker 1: you personally. My source said that you were telling people
Speaker 1: Rupert had fired you personally over the Dodger story. And
Speaker 1: I gave Rich a sequence of well, kind of friendly
Speaker 1: uh huhz And I said, no, I didn't and know
Speaker 1: you've never been dumb enough in your life to make
Speaker 1: the mistake you're saying you just made. And he said, well,
Speaker 1: I never said somebody at Fox said Murdock fired Joek.
Speaker 2: Thanks.
Speaker 1: By the next day, they had me come into the
Speaker 1: Fox building on Pico Boulevard and clean out my office
Speaker 1: while a guard watched. And she was a really nice guard.
Speaker 1: In fact, she brought donuts but a lovely way to
Speaker 1: go out. As I packed, I thought more and more
Speaker 1: of what had happened in the month since I had
Speaker 1: gotten that tip about the Dodgers being for sale. As
Speaker 1: I left the Fox lot for the last time as
Speaker 1: an employee, I went back a couple of times to
Speaker 1: attend table reads for the Simpsons. Table reads for the
Speaker 1: Simpsons were much more fun than being an employee at Fox.
Speaker 1: I called a couple of reporters I knew and my
Speaker 1: agent and some people in the business, and we tried
Speaker 1: to put together a timeline that made some sort of sense,
Speaker 1: because the slow motion firing thing. May ninth, you're not
Speaker 1: doing baseball. May eleventh, your computer won't work. May fifteenth,
Speaker 1: your cable show is canceled. May sixteenth, clean out your office.
Speaker 1: A week long firing made no sense until one reporter
Speaker 1: friend said, you know, Fox called me and said, call
Speaker 1: Keith up and provoke him, get him to call us names,
Speaker 1: tell him about this story in that paper, calling him
Speaker 1: washed up, get him going, And then it all clicked.
Speaker 1: My contract ran through the end of the year two
Speaker 1: thousand and one because Fox was firing me without any
Speaker 1: cause or even claiming there was a cause, without any
Speaker 1: violation of my contract or their rules. Because I had
Speaker 1: left a trail of good behavior on the Dodger story.
Speaker 1: They were trying to enrage me and get me to
Speaker 1: say something nasty that itself would be a violation of
Speaker 1: my contract so they could outright fire me and keep
Speaker 1: the money. And the money still on the contract was
Speaker 1: about eight hundred thousand dollars. Now, after decades of contemplating this,
Speaker 1: I am confident that I am no crazier than the
Speaker 1: next guy, at least not the next guy in television,
Speaker 1: but on my worst, craziest, least rational day. If you
Speaker 1: said you have two choices, Alderman, you can blow up
Speaker 1: these people who are firing you, and you can make
Speaker 1: them look bad in a newspaper for a day and
Speaker 1: then they'll fire you and keep all the money.
Speaker 2: They owe you.
Speaker 1: Or you can keep your big bazoo shut for just
Speaker 1: seven months. You can keep the eight hundred thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: and you can spend the summer doing whatever the hell
Speaker 1: you want, and you can then spend the rest of
Speaker 1: your natural life blowing these people up. If that's the choice,
Speaker 1: I will always take the scenario that gives me the
Speaker 1: eight hundred thousand dollars for doing nothing.
Speaker 2: Always so.
Speaker 1: On January first, two thousand and two, after the last
Speaker 1: Fox check cleared, I began making a professional avocation out
Speaker 1: of attacking Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox Business, Fox Murdoch,
Speaker 1: Fox O'Reilly, Fox Tucker Carlson, whatever. And I got the
Speaker 1: eight hundred thousand dollars. But there lingered for years this
Speaker 1: kind of academic question of whether Rupert Murdoch had actually
Speaker 1: fired me for having followed the rules set out by
Speaker 1: his own personal pr guy. As usual, these things resolve
Speaker 1: themselves when you least expect them to. Murdoch was speaking
Speaker 1: at a Dow Jones conference in Carlsbad, California, on May
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, two thousand and eight, seven years to the
Speaker 1: month they got rid of me and a story came
Speaker 1: across the wire with my name on it. The guy
Speaker 1: interviewing him at this conference talked about whether there should
Speaker 1: be dissenting voices on Fox quote news unquote, like that
Speaker 1: guy who was killing it on MSNBC Keith Olderman. Now
Speaker 1: Murdoch barked, I fired him five years ago. He was crizy,
Speaker 1: timing was off, But there it was, Rupert Murdoch confessing
Speaker 1: in front of a crowd that he fired me personally,
Speaker 1: the red badge of courage in quotes. I wondered if
Speaker 1: it still pissed him off that he had to pay
Speaker 1: me the eight hundred thousand dollars when I didn't take
Speaker 1: the grievance bait. Three years after that, Murdoch said it again,
Speaker 1: like I hadn't heard it the first time. On February first,
Speaker 1: twenty eleven, Rupert Murdoch was interviewed by his business talking
Speaker 1: had Neil Cavudo, who for some reason asked him if
Speaker 1: he would consider hiring me to put me on Fox News.
Speaker 1: Now we fired him once. We don't believe in firing people. Twice,
Speaker 1: Kavoodo replied, you called him a nut wall he was
Speaker 1: a nut on. Well, we had him on late night
Speaker 1: Fox Sports. There was never any such show called late
Speaker 1: night Fox Sports. But never mind, Rupe went on, it
Speaker 1: was impossible. I fired him. He was crazy, fired me
Speaker 1: for following his rules, and I was the one who
Speaker 1: was crazy. Finally, speaking of crazy, I have had for
Speaker 1: sixty three nearly sixty four years now a love hate
Speaker 1: relationship with the name Keith. But did you know that
Speaker 1: Rupert Murdoch's real first name is also Keith, but that
Speaker 1: rather than call himself Keith, he voluntarily chooses to call
Speaker 1: himself Rupert. I mean, sure, my name is Keith, but
Speaker 1: at least my name ain't freaking.
Speaker 2: Rupert.
Speaker 1: I've done all the damage I can do here. Tick
Speaker 1: tick tick, Rupert, tick tick tick, thank you for listening
Speaker 1: to this. Rather than not do a show for Memorial Day,
Speaker 1: I pretty much had lived it. It wasn't bad. I'm
Speaker 1: not submitting it for any ways, it's better when it's written.
Speaker 1: But you know, Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanel, the
Speaker 1: musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced, and performed most of
Speaker 1: our music. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray
Speaker 1: was on the guitars, bass and drums. It was produced
Speaker 1: by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are
Speaker 1: by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The
Speaker 1: sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two, written
Speaker 1: by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music
Speaker 1: arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. And
Speaker 1: my announcer today to celebrate the anniversary of my firing
Speaker 1: by Fox was my friend Kenny Maine. Everything else was
Speaker 1: as usual my fault. That's countdown for today, Day one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty seven of America held hostage. Just one,
Speaker 1: three hundred and sixty three sixty, one hundred and twelve.
Speaker 1: This is the ad lib part, just one three and
Speaker 1: thirty six days till the schedule to end of his
Speaker 1: lame duck and lame brained term, unless Putin removes him
Speaker 1: sooner or the actuarial tables do or we do? And
Speaker 1: speaking of the actuarial tables, win a free prize by
Speaker 1: writing down whatever that number was I said when I
Speaker 1: tried to say one, three hundred and thirty six and
Speaker 1: send it to your own address. Care of you, You Town, USA.
Speaker 1: The next scheduled countdown is Thursday. As always bulletins, as
Speaker 1: the news warrants, remember he's laying the groundwork now to
Speaker 1: not leave office later. He must be stopped until next time.
Speaker 1: I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
Speaker 1: good luck. Countdown with Keith Olberman is fection of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts