Speaker 1: Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Sure coincidence,
Speaker 1: It'll be funny, it'll be entertaining. There will be some
Speaker 1: shots fired tonight, the Press secretary to the President of
Speaker 1: the United States about an hour before what a coincidence?
Speaker 1: Shots were fired. I'm guessing you might have doubts about
Speaker 1: Saturday Nights not really an assassination attempt theater? Was what
Speaker 1: she said? Coincidence or a slip? Frankly, I think it's
Speaker 1: a coincidence. I don't think that event Saturday Night was staged,
Speaker 1: But I am beginning to think that among my fellow
Speaker 1: Americans who are not in the Trump mass hypnosis cult,
Speaker 1: I may be in the minority. Did Caroline Levitt use
Speaker 1: that phrase because she was thinking about shots being fired
Speaker 1: or just because she's so stupid and gross? I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a head scratcher of a choice. Huh. Did her
Speaker 1: sixty year old husband tell a Fox reporter before the
Speaker 1: non assassination attempt that you need to stay safe because
Speaker 1: he slipped or because he was just hitting on another
Speaker 1: woman and while she was reporting what he had told
Speaker 1: her on Fox? Did her phone line suddenly go dead
Speaker 1: because somebody cut her off or because cell phones go dead.
Speaker 1: Would Trump really stage some sort of non assassination theater
Speaker 1: maybe again? Would you think that was possible just because
Speaker 1: it's the Secret Service that's in charge of security wherever
Speaker 1: the president is and somehow the Secret Service never thought
Speaker 1: to see if Psycho's already staying at the DC, Hilton
Speaker 1: wouldn't have had to go through half of the checkpoints
Speaker 1: everybody else had. Is it suspicious that when CBS actually
Speaker 1: asks the Acting Attorney General how the guy got across
Speaker 1: state lines with a small arsenal of firearms, Todd Blanche says,
Speaker 1: I don't think that's something we should be focused on.
Speaker 1: Does that remind you of the fact that there's never
Speaker 1: been an investigation of the security disaster at Butler, PA,
Speaker 1: never mind anything else, and reportedly Trump has been the
Speaker 1: one to make sure of that. Do you wonder why
Speaker 1: they took so long to go and get Trump Saturday
Speaker 1: and when they got him, they basically dropped him and
Speaker 1: he face planted. Do you wonder why the White House
Speaker 1: is selling this as both an assassination attempt and not
Speaker 1: an assassination attempt at the same time, why White House's
Speaker 1: protocol chief said this was the hand of God saving
Speaker 1: Trump and the White House Chief of Staff tried to
Speaker 1: start a USA chant and failed, but the acting Attorney
Speaker 1: General said the attempted gunman quote was stopped before he
Speaker 1: got anywhere. You're the president. That means by definition that
Speaker 1: was not an assassination attempt. You have to be near
Speaker 1: Todd Blanche confirmed it not an assassination attempt, a security incident,
Speaker 1: and serious one, and by the way, it was contained
Speaker 1: by the pros with no fatalities. Obama had more than
Speaker 1: fifteen of these in his presidency, by the way. But
Speaker 1: back to the point, if you have doubts, and a reminder,
Speaker 1: I don't, even though I'm the guy who said Bush
Speaker 1: was manipulating the terror threats twenty years ago for political advantage,
Speaker 1: and everybody looked at me like I had three heads,
Speaker 1: and then years later his first chief of Homeland Security said, no,
Speaker 1: they were manipulating the terror threats for political advantage. I
Speaker 1: don't have doubts. But if you have doubts, might you
Speaker 1: have them just because two in a row now, a
Speaker 1: guy with long guns somehow got through all the outer
Speaker 1: security Trump perimeters. Would you consider your doubts possible just
Speaker 1: because this this Saturday night, defined it this is Donald
Speaker 1: Trump's America, donald Trump's America where violence is the primary currency,
Speaker 1: or the threat of violence, or because Donald Trump eliminated
Speaker 1: the peaceful transfer of power in this country, or because
Speaker 1: on January sixth, Donald Trump started the coup attempt by
Speaker 1: shouting fight like hell, and then in Pennsylvania Trump shouted
Speaker 1: fight fight. But at his news conference after the non
Speaker 1: assassination attempt Saturday night, he changed it back to claiming
Speaker 1: he fought like hell. That's a coincidence, Or because Trump's
Speaker 1: instinct was to take what he wants you to believe
Speaker 1: was his near martyrdom and you should feel guilty, you
Speaker 1: lib trd and turn that event into a homily at
Speaker 1: his news conference about insecure locations and how this is
Speaker 1: the final word is the reason for him to build
Speaker 1: his goddamned ballroom he is obsessed with? Is it coincidence
Speaker 1: that Trump has obsessed, deranged, in other words, worse than
Speaker 1: his usual self about what he is now actually calling
Speaker 1: his quote militarily top secret ballroom. And one night he
Speaker 1: goes to another DC ballroom, like why are you going there?
Speaker 1: And the ballroom security doesn't cut it, and there's an
Speaker 1: incident in the ballroom, and then he and literally dozens
Speaker 1: of his social media sock puppets, from Katie Miller to
Speaker 1: Megan McCain to John fing Fetterman were ready with posts
Speaker 1: insisting this settles it forever, no more discussion. You have
Speaker 1: to build the ballroom, and you're a communist and you
Speaker 1: want Trump dead if you don't support the ballroom, and
Speaker 1: we have to have a ballroom. And then they sing
Speaker 1: the national anthem and they get the words wrong, as
Speaker 1: if any Reporters Association ever would agree to hold its
Speaker 1: annual banquet at a government military facility, no matter who
Speaker 1: the president is, unless it had decided to let the
Speaker 1: government take over control of the Reporters Association, or the
Speaker 1: government simply announced it was taking over control of the
Speaker 1: Reporters Association. That's why you would have it at the
Speaker 1: White House. Of course, half the MAGA thought when they
Speaker 1: saw White House Correspondence Association that it was at the
Speaker 1: White House. They also thought it was correspondent says in
Speaker 1: writing letters. Or maybe the point is, maybe you would say,
Speaker 1: you would say allowed or silently for a second or
Speaker 1: for a week, that one word sure, because these people
Speaker 1: have lied so many times about so many things that
Speaker 1: is no longer worth the energy required to say no, no,
Speaker 1: We must give them the benefit of the doubt. Lives
Speaker 1: were at stake, people suffered emotional trauma Saturday night, while
Speaker 1: they are literally whining that The New York Times did
Speaker 1: not put their Little Dog and Pony show on its
Speaker 1: front page in the edition of the paper that was
Speaker 1: published half an hour before the event. Because Psychic Hotline,
Speaker 1: are we all beginning to think maybe, well, maybe a lot.
Speaker 1: Maybe Most of Trump's cult they believe Butler Pennsylvania was staged,
Speaker 1: and some of them are so past the point of
Speaker 1: caring that it might have been staged. It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: to them if it was staged, or if Saturday was staged,
Speaker 1: because anything for the cause. But this reaction, their reaction
Speaker 1: to this not an assassination attempt, is so over the
Speaker 1: top that it is clear they are desperate to convince
Speaker 1: people this was the real thing when the acting Attorney
Speaker 1: General says it wasn't. And by the way, the people
Speaker 1: they are most desperate to convince are themselves. Maybe the
Speaker 1: real point is it doesn't even matter if it was
Speaker 1: staged or it wasn't. It's the reality that I would
Speaker 1: defy you to tell me with certainty that you are
Speaker 1: confident that nobody in that administration suggested something like this,
Speaker 1: discussed something like this during the twenty twenty four campaign,
Speaker 1: or now now as he's hemorrhaging support, trapped in a
Speaker 1: war he doesn't have the intellect to get out of,
Speaker 1: still facing the Epstein outcomes, and fifty five percent say
Speaker 1: he no longer has the mental soundness to serve as
Speaker 1: president when it was only forty eight percent late in
Speaker 1: the campaign, and fifty seven percent say he doesn't have
Speaker 1: the judgment to be president, at sixty percent say he
Speaker 1: didn't have the temperament to be president, at sixty three
Speaker 1: percent say no, as president, he does not care about me.
Speaker 1: And all of those numbers are from a Fox News poll.
Speaker 1: There's no chance they sat there and thought, ohh hose
Speaker 1: correspondence dinner. That'd be so easy to do it there.
Speaker 1: You ever been to the Hilton. I gonna bring a
Speaker 1: tank in there, and nobody would notice. The gun doesn't
Speaker 1: even have to get anywhere I'm near the president, And
Speaker 1: then somebody else would have said, you're crazy, and somebody
Speaker 1: else would have said, all the reporters will be drunk
Speaker 1: and they're scared anyway, and they'll be unable to report,
Speaker 1: and they'll all try to get the limited cell phone
Speaker 1: service notoriously bad at that DC Hilton, And if we're lucky,
Speaker 1: we can wind up blaming all this, not just on
Speaker 1: the left, but on those scum reporters. Are you sure
Speaker 1: there's no chance of that? Matter of fact, As I
Speaker 1: have said, I don't think it was staged. I think
Speaker 1: security perimeters do have holes. I think the Secret services overworked, unimaginative.
Speaker 1: I think the screening equipment and is it not anywhere
Speaker 1: close to infallible as the experts like to pretend. Most importantly,
Speaker 1: I think there are coincidences. I mean I said it
Speaker 1: here and on social media over and over again for
Speaker 1: more than a week. Do not correspondence go to the
Speaker 1: White House correspondent's dinner, and if you do, be prepared
Speaker 1: to storm out of the dinner because of Trump. Now,
Speaker 1: because I said that, does it mean I knew that
Speaker 1: was going to happen? Did it even crossed my mind?
Speaker 1: It didn't. There are coincidences I was talking about. Don't
Speaker 1: go there, because you soil yourself whenever you're in Trump's presence.
Speaker 1: As it turned out, as many of them have learned.
Speaker 1: If you're at this security breach and you try to
Speaker 1: report and you've had about six glasses of wine and
Speaker 1: you go on CNN and you can't say anything other
Speaker 1: than and then, uh uh, perhaps that's not doing your
Speaker 1: career any good, Jake. And yes, I think what Caroline
Speaker 1: Levitt said about shots will be fired was a incidents,
Speaker 1: although how will she ever live that down? Not that
Speaker 1: I want her to, but it was coincidence because people
Speaker 1: say shit like that every day, especially violent, stupid people
Speaker 1: like Caroline Levitt and Donald Trump who are losing their
Speaker 1: grip on power and are panicking and beginning to understand
Speaker 1: what happens to them unless the Republicans never lose the
Speaker 1: White House ever again. And maybe some of them like
Speaker 1: Levitt and Cash Bttel are shorting out. And Politico has
Speaker 1: just reported Saturday morning, in fact, the cash Betel is
Speaker 1: going to be the next one Trump fires. I don't
Speaker 1: think it was state, but goddamn it, these putrid, despicable,
Speaker 1: pond scum people Trump and the retread failures he surrounds
Speaker 1: himself with, they have long since erased my confidence that
Speaker 1: nobody would ever try something this stupid and this risky
Speaker 1: and this deceitful with the life of the president of
Speaker 1: the United States, even if he is the worst one
Speaker 1: we've ever had, because he is the president of the
Speaker 1: United States, and the FAFO rule actually applies. And this
Speaker 1: is a country that two centuries ago tried a twenty
Speaker 1: one gun salute for an admiral at a dock, and
Speaker 1: they put to the guns too close to the admiral
Speaker 1: and guess what, they never found the admiral's body. So
Speaker 1: you're not supposed to play FAFO games with a president,
Speaker 1: even if he thought it was a good idea. And
Speaker 1: yet now I confess I don't have the energy anymore
Speaker 1: required to say no, no, we must give them the
Speaker 1: benefit of the doubt. Here lives, lives were at stake.
Speaker 1: I now do not have the energy to at least
Speaker 1: try to put up the pretense that something that callous
Speaker 1: and that cynical, to say nothing of something that dangerous
Speaker 1: and stupid could never be attempted in my America, my America.
Speaker 1: When was the last time you thought of it like that?
Speaker 1: If there is a tear in your eye about your America,
Speaker 1: out of pride anymore and a confidence that we are
Speaker 1: always at bare minimum, the worst country in the world
Speaker 1: except for all the other countries that is no longer.
Speaker 1: Why the tear is there? So about the correspondent's dinner thing,
Speaker 1: there's sure cynical, and then there's also sure exhausted, And
Speaker 1: I am now the latter sure on one other thing.
Speaker 1: I've lost the energy to argue about anymore. Nobody is
Speaker 1: in favor of political violence in this country, and shooting
Speaker 1: Charlie Kirk remains indefensible. But goddamnit, Van Jones and every
Speaker 1: other handwringer on the air, goddamn it, stop with. There
Speaker 1: is no room for violence in our politics. And this
Speaker 1: is not how we resolve our differences in this great country.
Speaker 1: Holy crap. This is at best the second most frequently
Speaker 1: used way we do resolve our political differences. Reagan was shot,
Speaker 1: Ford was shot at point blank, Kennedy was shot and killed.
Speaker 1: Franklin Roosevelt was shot at teddy. Roosevelt was shot as
Speaker 1: an ex president running for reelection, so was Trump. McKinley
Speaker 1: was shot and killed. Garfield was shot and killed. Lincoln
Speaker 1: was shot and killed. Andrew Jackson was targeted by a
Speaker 1: man with two guns, both of which jammed as he
Speaker 1: shoved them at him. Count all the credible plots that
Speaker 1: didn't get to a gun being drawn, and more than
Speaker 1: a quarter of all presidents have faced assassination attempts. RFK
Speaker 1: was shot and killed, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X Med Gravers,
Speaker 1: Mayor Harrison of Chicago, Mayor Sirmac of Chicago, Mayor Moscow
Speaker 1: of San Francisco, Harvey Milk, Huey Newton, Huey Long. What
Speaker 1: do you think the goddamn Civil War was? It became
Speaker 1: many things, but it started and it that ended with
Speaker 1: political violence. There is no room for violence in our politics.
Speaker 1: There should be no room. But that list that I
Speaker 1: just read, those are just the dead ones. No room
Speaker 1: for violence in our political system, My god, there is
Speaker 1: room for almost nothing else. Just don't be hypocritical about it.
Speaker 1: Just don't pretend that we are better than we are.
Speaker 1: For two hundred and fifty years, we have done often
Speaker 1: the best we possibly could, and sometimes it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you can't control lunatics. But don't say it doesn't
Speaker 1: have a place in our politics. Say you wish it didn't.
Speaker 1: And by the way, how desperate are they? Nancy Mace
Speaker 1: the last of her cheese whiz sliding off her. Ritz
Speaker 1: Cracker sees a tweet from Ben Stiller's Saturday Night reading
Speaker 1: just three words, got it done, and she jumps on
Speaker 1: it with a furiously paranoid reply, God, what done. Turned
Speaker 1: out the tweet was the last of a series by
Speaker 1: Ben about the New York Knicks beating the Atlanta Hawks
Speaker 1: in a playoff game. I don't know what's wrong with Mace,
Speaker 1: but you have to remember that literally these people are
Speaker 1: nuts or impaired, or drugged up or all the veterans
Speaker 1: have PTSD or CTE. Look Ben Stiller is. It is
Speaker 1: celebrating the non assassination attempt, where Trump was never in danger,
Speaker 1: according to his own Attorney General, Jesus suffering f I
Speaker 1: have found in these last eleven years that the safest
Speaker 1: and most emotionally economical way to think of it is
Speaker 1: to think of it this way. Those Walking Dead shows
Speaker 1: and the ten million zombie movies, they are not horror films.
Speaker 1: They are actually documentaries. I have to repeat the political
Speaker 1: report that Patel will be the next one fired. This
Speaker 1: is because of the rash of bad stories about him,
Speaker 1: which now appear to be being fed to receptive outlets
Speaker 1: deliberately the Intercept, which still has friendly connections to lots
Speaker 1: of Republicans usually never Trumps got hold of a letter
Speaker 1: that Patel wrote a decade and a half ago about
Speaker 1: two public urination incidents. If you had gotten the list
Speaker 1: of all the possible crimes that he could have committed,
Speaker 1: you would have drafted public urination either with the first
Speaker 1: or second draft choice, wouldn't you public urination incidents and
Speaker 1: arrests and encounters with cops when he was a young
Speaker 1: idiot as opposed to the older idiot he has become.
Speaker 1: It'll be sad, though, if the public peing does cash
Speaker 1: betel In, because bluntly, that was the most intelligent thing
Speaker 1: ever to come out of him. I have two clips
Speaker 1: I have saved now that I want to play that
Speaker 1: are like all the Trumpian streams see what I did there,
Speaker 1: streams of stupidity crossing. God bless him. Every time you
Speaker 1: think Trump might wriggle out of this bottomless pit in Iran,
Speaker 1: he does something new and stupid about it. First it
Speaker 1: was to invoke Vietnam, which is still a third rail,
Speaker 1: still our measuring stick for forever wars with no moral
Speaker 1: justification and no truth, and which oh, by the way Vietnam,
Speaker 1: which Trump dodged. Now he has, in the way his
Speaker 1: mind works, or more accurately, the way his mind does
Speaker 1: not work, managed to convince himself that because we had
Speaker 1: people military advisors, I don't know, tourists in Vietnam, he says,
Speaker 1: for nineteen years, because Vietnam happened and it was nineteen years.
Speaker 1: That means nineteen years is an acceptable length for his
Speaker 1: undeclared illegal war in Iran. And now because he's convinced himself,
Speaker 1: he is getting pissed when nobody agrees with him, and
Speaker 1: he keeps comparing Iran to Vietnam. The worst comparison he
Speaker 1: could make, the comparison between Iran and the war he
Speaker 1: personally he dodged. How long are you willing to wait
Speaker 1: until you get a squad?
Speaker 2: Don't rush me, Jeff? You know guys like you you
Speaker 2: want to saw So we were in Vietnam like for
Speaker 2: eighteen years.
Speaker 1: What do you say to the American people who question
Speaker 1: how much longer this will take? Obviously you know that
Speaker 1: they are having You are such a disgrace. So you
Speaker 1: know what I just said? Vietnam?
Speaker 2: How many years was Vietnam?
Speaker 1: God? Is he stupid? Wait? It's worse than that. You
Speaker 1: heard the new plan to expand the numbers of means
Speaker 1: of executions for death penalty cases, that they want to
Speaker 1: bring back the firing squad, which I remember they used
Speaker 1: in Utah when I was a teenager against that murderer
Speaker 1: Gary Gilmore. The firing squad a very efficient means of execution. Well,
Speaker 1: this led to the resurrection of a clip of Trump
Speaker 1: from last August which somehow I missed top ten Trump,
Speaker 1: in which it is clear that this ignoramus believes that
Speaker 1: the phrase capital punishment has something to do with the
Speaker 1: nation's capital. Oh God, is he stupid.
Speaker 2: Anybody murders something in the capitol, capital punishment, capital capital punishment.
Speaker 2: If somebody kills somebody in the capitol Washington, DC.
Speaker 1: That was last August. How did I miss that? The
Speaker 1: next stage, of course, would be Trump insisting we have
Speaker 1: to have capital punishment for serious corporate crimes, because of
Speaker 1: course those involve business capital. Also of interest here it
Speaker 1: is one of the great dumb quotes of twenty first
Speaker 1: century politics, and for once, it's not Trump, another bullying
Speaker 1: Republican elected announcing that Iran is going to meet its match,
Speaker 1: not on the battlefield but in the bargaining room. They've
Speaker 1: never won a war, but never lost a negotiation. They've
Speaker 1: never sat across the table negotiating with the guy that
Speaker 1: wrote the Art of the Deal. Sparky. I hate to
Speaker 1: break this to you, but Trump didn't write the Art
Speaker 1: of the Deal? Who said that? All time great quote?
Speaker 1: That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith
Speaker 1: Olberman still ahead on this initiative. Countdown going to take
Speaker 1: a break from reality and the possibility of the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty eight election actually being the twenty twenty election and
Speaker 1: White House obey in advanced dinners and let's all get
Speaker 1: a photo with a Nazi night and skip things I
Speaker 1: promised not to tell and instead read you some thurber
Speaker 1: Mondays with Thurber the Black Magic of Barney Holler, partly
Speaker 1: more brilliant Thurber humor and partly more fun being made
Speaker 1: of German Americans, And as one of them, I say,
Speaker 1: you can never have enough of that. In the interim,
Speaker 1: we always have more new idiots to talk about. The
Speaker 1: roundup of the mis grants, morons and Dunning krug effects
Speaker 1: specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world.
Speaker 1: The medallists the brons worst James Gio van Santi of
Speaker 1: Staten Island, New York. You need more than the fact
Speaker 1: that he's from Staten Island, okay. The news site streets
Speaker 1: blog NYC reports that since the year twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: the cities quote, traffic cameras have caught his pickup truck
Speaker 1: blasting through school zones or running red lights more than
Speaker 1: five hundred and forty seven times in that one burrow.
Speaker 1: He received one hundred and eighty seven camera issued tickets
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty five alone, an average of one every
Speaker 1: other day unquote. The blog also points out that the
Speaker 1: cameras can't prove he's always the one driving, But what
Speaker 1: he just loans his vehicle to other people who also
Speaker 1: like to be menaces to life and limb on Staten Island.
Speaker 1: So there's a bad human on Staten Island. Oh no,
Speaker 1: whatever shall we do? Now? There's a twist to this one.
Speaker 1: Streets Blog NYC reports that mister Giovancanti is actually Officer
Speaker 1: Geo Vancenti NYPD one hundred twentieth Precinct on Staten Island.
Speaker 1: He's a cop since twenty nineteen. Officer g Jo Van
Speaker 1: Sante as Streets Blog NYC summarized it, quoting again to
Speaker 1: protect and swerve. I would like to offer as a
Speaker 1: repost NYC Blue through the intersection. They're runner up worser
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos, dictator in chief of the Washington Post and
Speaker 1: chief supplier of plastics to Lauren Sanchez. We have to
Speaker 1: recognize now that the Post's path is to become maybe
Speaker 1: at best, at least damaging to America, a kind of
Speaker 1: small letters version of the Wall Street Journal, occasional journalism
Speaker 1: when Bezos doesn't know about it and it doesn't cost
Speaker 1: him up to thirty dollars somewhere, But editorially it's going
Speaker 1: to be fascism today, USA fascism today. Eric Wemple, the
Speaker 1: New York Times formerly of the Post, pushed out there
Speaker 1: for being good reports, this little journalistic from Bezos's toilet
Speaker 1: paper with pictures. The paper blasted a bill called the
Speaker 1: Faster Labor Contracts Bill, which would have allowed the government
Speaker 1: to pressure management when it is stalling to weaken a
Speaker 1: union or just avoid talking contract. And when we're talking
Speaker 1: about stalls here, they're talking about stalls of multiple years.
Speaker 1: While the Post wrote an editorial condemning this, they're in
Speaker 1: favor of stalling labor negotiations because it's Jeff Bezos, and
Speaker 1: the Teamsters wanted to write a letter to the editor
Speaker 1: in reply. Now we're talking a letter to the editor
Speaker 1: of a newspaper. I don't know the last time you
Speaker 1: read a letter to the editor from a union about
Speaker 1: how fast labor contracts should be negotiated. Important. I don't
Speaker 1: think though it would be on my top one hundred
Speaker 1: things to read if I had the moment. It couldn't be,
Speaker 1: practically speaking, a big deal, even to Jeff effing Bezos.
Speaker 1: Could it even to the Post, even to old cuball
Speaker 1: noggin Bezos, Oh sure it could. The teamster's letterc contained
Speaker 1: two criticisms, two paragraphs that actually mentioned Bezos by name
Speaker 1: and detailed his stalling maneuvers at Amazon. Again, this is
Speaker 1: sharp edged, but it's not going to start riots and
Speaker 1: it's not going to knock Amazon's price down. The Post
Speaker 1: refused to print the letter to the editor refused to
Speaker 1: print an opposing opinion to one of its editorials in
Speaker 1: the letter's column unless the Teamsters took out the references
Speaker 1: to Bezos. The teamsters pointed out they weren't being gratuitous
Speaker 1: they weren't just taking cheap shots at Bezos like I do.
Speaker 1: Amazon's ability to just bury its unions and would be
Speaker 1: unions as already the stuff of labor legend. They didn't
Speaker 1: include him just to embarrass him. They included Jeff Bezos
Speaker 1: because to not include Jeff Bezos in an article about
Speaker 1: stalling labor contract negotiations would be like writing about baseball
Speaker 1: and leaving out Shohey o'tani and Babe Ruth. And the
Speaker 1: Posts still refused. They returned the letter to the Teamsters
Speaker 1: with the parts about Bezos edited out, and said, we'd
Speaker 1: be happy to print this letter. They're now rewriting the
Speaker 1: letters to the editor. They're no longer letters to the editor.
Speaker 1: Then are they their letters from the editors, You journalistic bastards.
Speaker 1: The Teamsters withdrew the letter. The Post, fulfilling its new
Speaker 1: role as a house organ for Trump, behaved exactly the
Speaker 1: way Trump's organ would. It was small about things, but
Speaker 1: the winner the worst, worse than Bezos, worse than Officer Speedo,
Speaker 1: Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas, and Trump whorer. I mean,
Speaker 1: this guy will say stupid things just to please Trump,
Speaker 1: and he will say untrue things just to please Trump,
Speaker 1: and he will say racist things just to please Trump,
Speaker 1: and they look at him like he could take over
Speaker 1: his Secretary of State tomorrow, probably because he has a
Speaker 1: pretty good haircut for a Republican and the trumpst But
Speaker 1: Tom Cotton has now topped himself. On Fox News, he
Speaker 1: pushed some of the racism subtly, namely that those from
Speaker 1: the Middle East aren't as smart as Americans. Let me
Speaker 1: know when that's been true over the last say six weeks, Tommy,
Speaker 1: he said something dumb, and he said something untrue, but
Speaker 1: this time it was hilariously untrue. Tom Cotton went on
Speaker 1: Fox News and predicted Iran's imminent defeat not just on
Speaker 1: the battlefield but in the boardroom. Quote they've never won war,
Speaker 1: but never lost the negotiation, Cotton twanged, quote, They've never
Speaker 1: sat across the table negotiating with the guy that wrote
Speaker 1: the art of the deal. Tom Trump didn't write the
Speaker 1: art of the deal. It's kind of amazing. It's hard
Speaker 1: to believe that Tom Cotton, who apparently did not cheat
Speaker 1: or plagiarize or bribe his way through Harvard, doesn't know this.
Speaker 1: So my guess would be he's just lying about it.
Speaker 1: He knows this. He just doesn't care enough about America
Speaker 1: to not tell his cult a gratuitous lie. Huh. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's PTSD from Iraq. I don't know. Maybe it's the
Speaker 1: cost of having a good haircut. Maybe he's just good
Speaker 1: on exams at Harvard and he failed at everything else.
Speaker 1: The Art of the Deal was written for Trump, ghost
Speaker 1: written by Tony Schwartz, who ghost wrote apparently all of it.
Speaker 1: There isn't anything in there that Trump actually wrote. There's
Speaker 1: just a few sentences Trump allegedly took out because they
Speaker 1: insulted some of his friends. That's the only thing Trump
Speaker 1: had to do with it. They gave Schwartz co author
Speaker 1: credit on the early editions. Tony Schwartz wrote the Art
Speaker 1: of the Deal, not Donald Trump. So unless Tony Schwartz
Speaker 1: is negotiating with Iran, oh you know, come to think
Speaker 1: of it, if it's Kushner and this business clown witless whitcough, witshit,
Speaker 1: whatever his name is, might as well be Tony Schwartz
Speaker 1: negotiating on behalf of this country. In fact, I think
Speaker 1: that might be an improvement. What am I saying here? Tom? Okay,
Speaker 1: they've never sat across the table negotiating with the guy
Speaker 1: that wrote the sequel Trump Surviving at the Top. No
Speaker 1: Tom that was ghost written for him by Charles Leerson
Speaker 1: Cotton Today's other worst person.
Speaker 2: In the world.
Speaker 1: After this White House Stenographer's dinner bull Squat. The last
Speaker 1: thing you need is another media guy talking about himself.
Speaker 1: So let's do Monday with Thurber instead. One of the
Speaker 1: greatest realizations of reading everything from an author as skilled
Speaker 1: and prolific as James Thurber is to realize he could
Speaker 1: have specialized in something else and excelled at that instead.
Speaker 1: Thurber was already America's top active short form humor writer
Speaker 1: when his second career as a cartoonist was literally rescued
Speaker 1: from the garbage by his colleague Andy White at the
Speaker 1: New Yorker. Thurber liked to draw these stream of consciousness
Speaker 1: pencil never really leaves the page drawings, mostly of dogs,
Speaker 1: but he didn't think anything of them, threw them all away.
Speaker 1: White saw one of them one day at the New
Speaker 1: Yorker office that he really liked as Thurber finished it,
Speaker 1: and as soon as he said something, Thurber neatly crumpled
Speaker 1: it up into a ball and tossed it into the
Speaker 1: nearest garbage can. What are you doing? White, shouted one
Speaker 1: New Yorker art meeting later, and everybody there had agreed
Speaker 1: Thurber was a true gifted, natural, unforced, stylish, hilarious cartoonist
Speaker 1: who could also put them out like a dozen a day.
Speaker 1: Everybody but him. He didn't get it. For a long time.
Speaker 1: It was still a subject half of embarrassment and half
Speaker 1: his conviction that they were playing a practical joke on him,
Speaker 1: until they started to publish them every week in the
Speaker 1: New Yorker. Then there are the other forms of writing
Speaker 1: Thurber could have done. There are some dark Thurber stories.
Speaker 1: I mean there are implied hatchet murders, and not like
Speaker 1: the ones in his drawings where one fencer has clearly
Speaker 1: completely cut off his opponent's head while calmly saying touche.
Speaker 1: But you know, the victim, whose only emotion and reaction
Speaker 1: to this is surprised, is simply going to grab his
Speaker 1: loose noggin and promptly snap it back into place. There's
Speaker 1: no blood, there's no guts, there's just laughs. I mean though,
Speaker 1: that there are stories out there by James Thurber that
Speaker 1: are full of murder murders and guys who sing the
Speaker 1: same song obsessively day and night as they drift from
Speaker 1: depression to anger to violence. And those stories are chilling
Speaker 1: and just as well done as the humor. And Thurber
Speaker 1: never gave up trying to be upbeaten funny and write
Speaker 1: that stuff and set And then there's another part, a
Speaker 1: third area he could have gone into, the spooky part
Speaker 1: of Thurber, spooky as it was. The Great Master only
Speaker 1: occasionally delved into the supernatural. Lots of Thurber's characters, like
Speaker 1: his fictionalized version of his own mother, claimed to get
Speaker 1: messages from beyond the grave and stuff like that, but
Speaker 1: rarely did Thurber ever go a cult in the first person.
Speaker 1: This is not true in one of my all time
Speaker 1: favorites of his stories, The blame Black Magic of Barney Holler,
Speaker 1: in which a slight accent turns into something that is
Speaker 1: just right up against the line of being actually a
Speaker 1: little scary but still hilarious. The Black Magic of Barney
Speaker 1: Haller by James Thurber. It was one of those hot
Speaker 1: days on which the earth is uninhabitable, even as early
Speaker 1: as ten o'clock in the morning, Even on the hill
Speaker 1: where I live under the dark maples. The long porch
Speaker 1: was hot, and the wicker chair I sat in, complained
Speaker 1: hot lye My coffee was beginning to wear off, and
Speaker 1: with it the momentary illusion it gives that things are
Speaker 1: right and life is good. There were sultry mutterings of thunder.
Speaker 1: I had a quick feeling that if I looked up
Speaker 1: from my book, I would see Barney Holler. I looked up,
Speaker 1: and then there he was, coming along the road, lightning
Speaker 1: playing about his shoulders, thunder following him like a dog.
Speaker 1: Barney is, or was my hired man. He is strong
Speaker 1: and amiable, sweaty and dependable, slowly and heavily confident, but
Speaker 1: he is also eerie. He traffics with the devil. His
Speaker 1: ears twitch when he talks, but it isn't so much
Speaker 1: that as the things he says. Once in late June,
Speaker 1: when all of a moment, sabers began to flash brightly
Speaker 1: in the heavens and bowling balls rumbled, I took refuge
Speaker 1: in the barn. I always have a feeling that I
Speaker 1: am going to be struck by lightning, and either riven
Speaker 1: like an old apple tree, or left with a foot
Speaker 1: that aches. In rainy weather and a habit of painting,
Speaker 1: these things happen. Barney came in, not to escape the
Speaker 1: storm to which he is or pretends to be indifferent,
Speaker 1: but to put the sigh the way. Suddenly, he said
Speaker 1: the first of those things that made me when I
Speaker 1: was with him, faintly creepy. He pointed at the house.
Speaker 1: Once I see his boat come down to rock, he said,
Speaker 1: it is phenomena like that of which I stand in
Speaker 1: constant dread, boats coming down rocks, people being teleported, statues
Speaker 1: dripping blood, old regrets, and dreams in the form of
Speaker 1: Luna moths fluttering against the windows at midnight. Of course,
Speaker 1: I finally figured out what Barney meant, or what I
Speaker 1: comforted myself with believing he meant something about a bolt
Speaker 1: coming down the lightning rod on the house, a commonplace
Speaker 1: and utterly natural thing. I should have dismissed it, but
Speaker 1: it had its effect on me. Here was a stolid man,
Speaker 1: smelling of hay and leather, who talked like somebody out
Speaker 1: of Charles Fort's books, or like a traveler back from
Speaker 1: oz and all the time the lightning was zigging and
Speaker 1: zagging around him. On this hot morning. When I saw
Speaker 1: Barney coming along with his faithful storm trudging behind him,
Speaker 1: I went back frowningly to my copy of Swan's Way.
Speaker 1: I hope that Barney, seeing me absorbed in a book,
Speaker 1: would pass by without saying anything. I read. I myself
Speaker 1: seemed actually to have become the subject of my book,
Speaker 1: A church a quartet, the rivalry between Francis the First
Speaker 1: and Charles the Fifth. I could feel Barney standing looking
Speaker 1: at me, but I didn't look at him this morning.
Speaker 1: By and By, said Barney, I go hunt grocers and dvoodes.
Speaker 1: That's fine, I said, and turned a page and pretended
Speaker 1: to be engrossed in what I was reading. Barney walked on.
Speaker 1: He had wanted to talk some more, but he walked on.
Speaker 1: After a paragraph or two, his words began to come
Speaker 1: between me and the words in the book. Bime By,
Speaker 1: I go hunt grotches in dvoods. If you are susceptible
Speaker 1: such things, it is not difficult to visualize grotches. They
Speaker 1: fluttered into my mind, ugly little creatures about the size
Speaker 1: of whipperwills, only covered with blood and honey and the
Speaker 1: scrapings of church bells. Grotches. Who and what, I wondered,
Speaker 1: really was this thing in the form of a hired
Speaker 1: man that kept anointing me ominously in passing with Abra Cadabra.
Speaker 1: Barney didn't go toward the woods at once. He weeded
Speaker 1: the corn, He picked apple boughs off the lawn. He
Speaker 1: knocked a yellowjacket's nest down out of a plum tree.
Speaker 1: It was raining now, but he didn't seem to notice it.
Speaker 1: He kept looking at me out of the corner of
Speaker 1: his eye, and I kept looking at him out of
Speaker 1: the corner of my eye. Vod dime, is it beneeze?
Speaker 1: He called to me. Finally, I put down my book
Speaker 1: and sauntered out to him. When you go for those grotches,
Speaker 1: I said, firmly, I'll go with you. I was sure
Speaker 1: he wouldn't want me to go. I was right. He
Speaker 1: protested that he could get the grotches himself. I'll go
Speaker 1: with you, I said, stubbornly. We stood looking at each other,
Speaker 1: and then, abruptly, just to give him something to ponder over,
Speaker 1: I quoted, I'm going out to clean the pasture spring.
Speaker 1: I'll only stop to take the leaves away and wait
Speaker 1: to watch the water clear. I may I shan't be
Speaker 1: gone long. You come too. It wasn't, I realized, very
Speaker 1: good abracadabra, but it served. Barney looked at me in
Speaker 1: a puzzled way. Yes, he said, vaguely, it's five minutes
Speaker 1: of twelve, I said, remembering he had asked. Then we go,
Speaker 1: he said, And we trudged through the rain over to
Speaker 1: the orchard fence and climbed that, and opened a gate
Speaker 1: and went out into the meadow that slopes up to
Speaker 1: the woods. I had a prefiguring of Barney at some
Speaker 1: proper spot deep in the wood, prancing around like a goat,
Speaker 1: casting off his false nature, shedding his hired man's garments,
Speaker 1: dropping his teutonic accent, repeating diabolical phrases, conjuring up grotches.
Speaker 1: It was a great slash of lightning and along bumping
Speaker 1: of thunder. As we reached the edge of the woods,
Speaker 1: I turned and fled, glancing over my shoulder, I saw
Speaker 1: Barney standing and staring after me. It turned out, on
Speaker 1: the face of it, to be as simple as the
Speaker 1: boat that came down the rock. Grotches were crotches, crotched saplings,
Speaker 1: which he cut down to use as supports under the
Speaker 1: peach boughs, because in bearing time they become so heavy
Speaker 1: with fruit that there was danger of the branches snapping off.
Speaker 1: I saw Barney later putting the crotches in place. We
Speaker 1: didn't have much to say to each other. I can
Speaker 1: see now that he was beginning to suspect me too.
Speaker 1: About six o'clock next evening, I was alone in the
Speaker 1: house and sleeping upstairs. Barney rapped on the door of
Speaker 1: the front porch. I knew it was Barney because he
Speaker 1: called to me. I woke up slowly. It was dark
Speaker 1: for six o'clock. I heard rumblings and soft flickerings. Barney
Speaker 1: was standing at the front door with his storm at heel.
Speaker 1: I had the conviction that it wasn't storming anywhere except
Speaker 1: around my house. There couldn't without the intervention of the
Speaker 1: Devil or one of his agents, be so many lightning
Speaker 1: storms in one neighborhood. I had been dreaming of prost
Speaker 1: and the church at Cambre, and meadowlands dipped in tea,
Speaker 1: and the rivalry between Francis the First and Charles the fifth.
Speaker 1: My head whirled and I didn't get up. Barney kept
Speaker 1: on rapping. He called out again. There was a flash
Speaker 1: followed by a sharp splitting sound. Now I leaped up.
Speaker 1: This time I thought, he is here to get me.
Speaker 1: I had a notion that he was standing at the door, barefooted,
Speaker 1: with a wreath of grape leaves around his head and
Speaker 1: a wild animal's skin slung over his shoulder. I didn't
Speaker 1: want to go down, but I did. He was as usual, solid, amiable,
Speaker 1: dressed like a hired man. I went out onto the
Speaker 1: porch and looked at the improbable storm now on in
Speaker 1: all of its fury. This is getting pretty bad, I said, meaningly.
Speaker 1: Barney looked at the rain placidly well. I said, irritably,
Speaker 1: what's up? Barney turned his little squinty blue eyes on me.
Speaker 1: We go to the gaddic now and become warbs, he said,
Speaker 1: the hell we do? I thought to myself quickly. I
Speaker 1: was uneasy. I was you might even say terrified, but
Speaker 1: I determined not to show it. If he began to
Speaker 1: chant incantations or to make obscene signs, or if he
Speaker 1: attempted to sling me over his whad shoulder, I resolved
Speaker 1: to plunge, ride out into that storm, lightning it all,
Speaker 1: and run to the nearest house. I didn't know what
Speaker 1: they would think at the nearest house when I burst
Speaker 1: in upon them, or what I would tell them, but
Speaker 1: I didn't intend to accompany this amiable looking fiend to
Speaker 1: any garrick and become a warb. I tried to persuade
Speaker 1: myself that there was some simple explanation that warbs would
Speaker 1: turn out to be as innocuous as boats on rocks
Speaker 1: and grotches and divoods. But the conviction gripped me in
Speaker 1: the growling of the thunder that here, at last was
Speaker 1: the moment when Barney Holler or whoever he was, had
Speaker 1: chosen to get me. I walked toward the steps that
Speaker 1: led to the lawn and turned and faced him grimly. Listen,
Speaker 1: I barked. Suddenly, Did you know that even when it
Speaker 1: isn't brillig I can produce slythe toes? Did you happen
Speaker 1: to know that the Momrath never lived that could outgrabe me? Yeah? Eithermore.
Speaker 1: I can become anything I want to. Even if I
Speaker 1: were a warb, I wouldn't have to keep on being
Speaker 1: one if I didn't want to. I can become a
Speaker 1: playing card at will too. Once I was the jack
Speaker 1: of clubs, only I forgot to say my glasses off
Speaker 1: and some guy recognized me. I Barney was backing slowly
Speaker 1: away toward the petunia box at one end of the porch.
Speaker 1: His little blue eyes were wide. He saw that I
Speaker 1: had him. I think I go now, he said, and
Speaker 1: he walked out into the rain. The rain followed him
Speaker 1: down the road. I have a new hired man now.
Speaker 1: Barney never came back to work for me after that day.
Speaker 1: Of course, I figured out finally what he meant about
Speaker 1: the garrick and the warbs. He had simply got horribly
Speaker 1: mixed up in trying to tell me that he was
Speaker 1: going up to the garret and clear out the wasps,
Speaker 1: of which I have thousands. The new hired man is
Speaker 1: afraid of them. Barney could a scoop them up in
Speaker 1: his hands and throwing them out a window without getting stung.
Speaker 1: I am sure he trafficked with the devil, but I
Speaker 1: am sorry. I let him go. If we go to
Speaker 1: the garrets and become verbes, the hell we do one
Speaker 1: of my favorite Thurber couplets. I've done all the damage
Speaker 1: I can do here. Thank you for listening. Let me
Speaker 1: just remind you again, I don't think it was staged.
Speaker 1: I'm just worried about the possibility that you think it's
Speaker 1: staged and need to have it discussed for you. So
Speaker 1: maybe we'll do this again on Thursday and every Thursday thereafter.
Speaker 1: Couldn't have staged it. Look at what I mean they
Speaker 1: dropped Trump on the way out. You could break him
Speaker 1: at any point just by trying to pick him up.
Speaker 1: I just don't think they had enough secret servicemen to
Speaker 1: try to pull that off. How many guys you got
Speaker 1: on assignment? No, I mean in all of the capitol,
Speaker 1: three hundred and seven. Well, maybe that'll be enough. Our
Speaker 1: musical directors have countdown who have nothing to do with
Speaker 1: my remarks are John Phillips Chanel on keyboards, handling, orchestration,
Speaker 1: and Brian Ray on guitarist, bass and drums. Their work
Speaker 1: is produced by Tko Brothers. Nancy Faust, the best baseball
Speaker 1: stadium organist ever, is responsible for these satirical and pithy
Speaker 1: musical comments. The sports theme is from the Old Olberman
Speaker 1: Show on ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy, BSPN, Inc.
Speaker 1: Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns
Speaker 1: Allowed and my announcer today was my friend Kenny Maine
Speaker 1: was also produced by ESPN two. At least Originally this
Speaker 1: program was produced by Ted. Everything else was, as always
Speaker 1: my fault. That's countdown for today, Day four hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty three of a mator Arka held hostage again, but
Speaker 1: exactly one thousand days one zero zero zero until the
Speaker 1: scheduled end of his lame duck and lame brained term.
Speaker 1: As of tomorrow, we have made it to just triple
Speaker 1: digits have for us. The next scheduled countdown is Thursday.
Speaker 1: Bulletins is the news merits until that next one. I'm
Speaker 1: Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck.
Speaker 1: Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts