Speaker 1: Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. I'd
Speaker 1: like to congratulate President Trump on becoming the first president
Speaker 1: of the United States to lose a war. There is
Speaker 1: an Iran deal. It's Iran and Oman. Before Trump started
Speaker 1: his vanity war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz was opened,
Speaker 1: there were no tolls. Now the Strait of Hormuz is
Speaker 1: essentially co owned between Iran and Oman with tolls, which
Speaker 1: increases prices on everything from a gallon of gas to
Speaker 1: computer chips. Donald Trump did this. I'm so tired of
Speaker 1: all the winning. There was no toll. Iran's regime was
Speaker 1: aging out of exist distance and it was tottering, and
Speaker 1: there was internal dissent against it. Now there is a
Speaker 1: toll on the Strait of horror Mouz, and the world
Speaker 1: economy has been upset, and Iran's regime has not only survived,
Speaker 1: but it has a new revenue stream. Donald Trump is
Speaker 1: the first American president to lose a war. I mean, seriously,
Speaker 1: I haven't done one of these podcasts since May eleventh,
Speaker 1: and you still haven't gotten this schmuck out of office.
Speaker 1: What have you all been doing the last eighty eight
Speaker 1: days I had heart surgery. I have something of an
Speaker 1: excuse here. The headlines are exactly the same as they
Speaker 1: were in the podcast I did eighty eight days ago.
Speaker 1: The podcast on May eleventh was about how Trump is
Speaker 1: still playing the political media like a two dollars banjo.
Speaker 1: One day insisting he settled everything and there's about to
Speaker 1: be some sort of deal, and the next day saying
Speaker 1: he is going to blow Iran to hell. It's the
Speaker 1: same headline as May eleventh. And how many times has
Speaker 1: it been the same headline since May eleventh? Forty times,
Speaker 1: fifty times, sixty to eighty eight times. Doesn't anybody notice? No,
Speaker 1: all the media every day ooh, he's about to sign
Speaker 1: a piece deal. Then the next day, ooh, he's about
Speaker 1: to blow them up real good. And then the price
Speaker 1: of oil goes up, and his mafia, his gang, his
Speaker 1: family of grifters, they sell all their oil futures when
Speaker 1: the price goes up, and they make this huge profit.
Speaker 1: And then the next day he says he's going to
Speaker 1: blow them up. And then the next day he says
Speaker 1: he's going to make a deal, and the price goes
Speaker 1: up the next day and they buy all the futures
Speaker 1: back when the price goes down, and they keep repeating
Speaker 1: this and making a profit by what's that phrase? I
Speaker 1: think I've just invented this phrase. I've just invented a
Speaker 1: new phrase called sell high and buy low. He's monetized war.
Speaker 1: He's personally grifting off a war, and he's not even
Speaker 1: trying to hide it anymore. He's now selling advanced access
Speaker 1: to his own posts on tooth Social for one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a month to anybody stupid enough to do
Speaker 1: that so they can join him on manipulating the stock
Speaker 1: market and the world energy supply. Because I don't know
Speaker 1: if investors and businessmen are the stupidest mforts in the
Speaker 1: world or reporters are the stupidest mforts in the world.
Speaker 1: But it's goddamn close, isn't it. It could be either one.
Speaker 1: Possibly it's a tie. I mean sure he means it
Speaker 1: this time. He didn't mean it the other eighty seven times.
Speaker 1: If his victims had been this stupid boss, Tweed, the
Speaker 1: infamous grifter of New York City of the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: would have stolen his first million and then stopped it
Speaker 1: out of shame and gone and become a nun somewhere.
Speaker 1: The purpose of this originally was to update you on
Speaker 1: the next episode of Countdown, when that might be, and
Speaker 1: a little bit about my health and the future of
Speaker 1: the podcast and my non linear recovery from surgery. But
Speaker 1: I got a kind of sidetrack when I realized as
Speaker 1: I prepared this that the headlines are exactly the same,
Speaker 1: and it's worse. There's more about Iran and oil to
Speaker 1: discuss on this point, and a stack of headlines, including
Speaker 1: the Michigan primary and the New York Times platforming the
Speaker 1: guy who's trying to turn now not just CBS but
Speaker 1: CBS and CNN into right wing propaganda. Thanks New York Times.
Speaker 1: But there's more about Iran in a bigger sense. And
Speaker 1: obviously the odd even gas rationing system is so Trump
Speaker 1: can stretch it forever, to keep making money off of it,
Speaker 1: to cover his Epstein file guilt, which must be worse
Speaker 1: than we can possibly imagine, to cover Epstein, to keep
Speaker 1: grifting and grafting, to pinion the other Republicans into defending him,
Speaker 1: even though they may all lose their seats in the
Speaker 1: midterms because they are on his side, and people don't
Speaker 1: like this war, and it's in Trump's personal financial interest
Speaker 1: to keep this going no matter what Oman and Iran
Speaker 1: agree to. And then there's that bigger thing that has
Speaker 1: occurred to me during my recuperation, the big picture, not
Speaker 1: just the forest for the trees, what the media has missed,
Speaker 1: but you're seeing the entire Amazon from space, that kind
Speaker 1: of big picture, and it's a fitting analogy. We forget.
Speaker 1: I forgot that this is actually bigger than Trump's hot
Speaker 1: and cold running twenty four to seven threat to democracy
Speaker 1: and to world peace. There's something bigger than Trump's threat
Speaker 1: to American democracy and to stealing the twenty twenty six
Speaker 1: midterms and trying to stay in office. If that is
Speaker 1: still on the table, I think he's still busy. You're
Speaker 1: right now trying to stay alive and fix the helicopter pad,
Speaker 1: which he didn't like and had it ripped out after
Speaker 1: two weeks, apparently because it was done by his pool boy,
Speaker 1: just the way the reflecting pool was. This is about
Speaker 1: Trump's other hot and cold literally running twenty four to
Speaker 1: seven threat, which is to life on Earth. Donald Trump
Speaker 1: is the leading person who could end the world, not tomorrow,
Speaker 1: although he could do that too, that's not likely, but
Speaker 1: long term, he is the major impediment to getting a
Speaker 1: handle on climate change, just before it eludes our grasp forever,
Speaker 1: which I think is coming up next Thursday. Possibly if
Speaker 1: you step back and look at everything that has happened,
Speaker 1: and it looms larger even than the Republicans attempt to
Speaker 1: make this a one party authoritarian state, looming larger than
Speaker 1: Trump's incredible graft, incredible greed, incredible insanity, looming larger than
Speaker 1: all that. The overarching theme is this re establishing fossil fuel,
Speaker 1: making gas good again, making gas great again, magiga, making
Speaker 1: us afraid to run out of it, driving the price
Speaker 1: up to make it seem like, oh, it's a good thing,
Speaker 1: that it's cheaper, let's use it, making the cost of
Speaker 1: a gallon of gas more important than whether or not
Speaker 1: you can breathe that air out there, and whether or
Speaker 1: not your children or your grandchildren will be smothered by
Speaker 1: that air out there sooner rather than later, whether or
Speaker 1: not they will be smothered by the atmosphere. It is
Speaker 1: setting back the banning of fossil fuels, which we have
Speaker 1: to do, or you know, I think I'll be long gone,
Speaker 1: but maybe not. Maybe this is actually going to happen
Speaker 1: in the next couple of years, but some group of
Speaker 1: our descendants, or perhaps the younger members of the audience
Speaker 1: watching this right now, will be smothered to death, or
Speaker 1: burned to death, or simply die of heat prostration because
Speaker 1: the temperature of New York today one hundred and forty
Speaker 1: seven degrees, partly cloudy, traffic and weather after the break
Speaker 1: for the list of people who collapsed on the street today.
Speaker 1: Not only do you increase the scarcity element and the
Speaker 1: positive pr image of gasoline, but you increase the fear
Speaker 1: of war, so more weapons are built and more mindless
Speaker 1: industries are propped up to profit owners, taking the money
Speaker 1: from people than they're already vanishing chances of an improved life,
Speaker 1: making them terrified of not long term disaster like climate
Speaker 1: change or their country burning to the ground, or finding
Speaker 1: food food, but finding fuel being able to drive to
Speaker 1: the mall tonight. Our descendants and maybe US two will
Speaker 1: die because Trump and MAGA and the wars in the
Speaker 1: Middle East, and every subplot to every international news story
Speaker 1: of the last eighty eight days contains some version of
Speaker 1: if we don't do this, a gallon of gas is
Speaker 1: going to cost more, and if you think at some
Speaker 1: point that common sense will take over when we start
Speaker 1: hearing a thousand Americans died today because of killer inversion
Speaker 1: layers like they had in the fifties in Pittsburgh and Ohio,
Speaker 1: or in London because of coal smog. Tell me how
Speaker 1: the sense of threat to our survival changed when COVID happened.
Speaker 1: These moron magas and their equivalents around the world, like
Speaker 1: these lizard people from Reform UK, are convinced that because
Speaker 1: they personally didn't die from COVID, COVID wasn't a real threat.
Speaker 1: And they were right, and all the people who graduated
Speaker 1: from the fourth grade, we were all wrong. Only weak
Speaker 1: people died of COVID, Only losers with bad genes, Only
Speaker 1: minorities died of COVID. When climate change is no longer
Speaker 1: just three bad stretches of green air in New York
Speaker 1: because Canadian wildfires, but it's bad every day, and your
Speaker 1: advice to stay indoors every day, These same people who
Speaker 1: managed to successfully neuter the COVID impact on those who
Speaker 1: did not actually get sick, will fall back to what
Speaker 1: Trump said about the California wildfires and the French wildfires
Speaker 1: and the Spanish wildfires and the British wildfires, and the
Speaker 1: African wildfires and the Japanese wildfires that they occurred because
Speaker 1: liberals in those liberal countries forgot to rake the forest. COVID.
Speaker 1: They're going to replace COVID. COVID was in some senses,
Speaker 1: a practice run for what they can do about climate
Speaker 1: change and how they can stop us from saving the planet.
Speaker 1: They're literally going to use pages one, seventeen, one, twenty
Speaker 1: nine or whatever it is of Orwell's nineteen eighty four
Speaker 1: and rewrite history. They're doing it right now. They try
Speaker 1: to demonize Anthony Fauci at the hearing in front of
Speaker 1: the Senate, without whom half of MAGA and Trump would
Speaker 1: have succumbed to that disease. You want to demonize Fauci,
Speaker 1: ask him about how he feels that that that he
Speaker 1: saved the Magas. Instead, they steal Fauci's diary. They use
Speaker 1: it against him in a way that would have made
Speaker 1: Joe McCarthy say, I'm sorry, I can't do that, and
Speaker 1: I actually do it long last, to have some decency,
Speaker 1: they sit Fauci at a Senate hearing at the table
Speaker 1: and they put Laura Ingram behind it.
Speaker 2: To make.
Speaker 1: Gestures at him with her face, which was genuinely brave.
Speaker 1: I have to say this, Laura was genuinely brave because
Speaker 1: because if she makes too many faces, this face, her
Speaker 1: newest one will shatter and fall off. Laura. As an aside,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to be talking more about my experiences
Speaker 1: with Laura at the tail end of this podcast. If
Speaker 1: you want to persecute doctors, go after the ones who
Speaker 1: made you look like mister ed I go away for
Speaker 1: eighty eight days and look at all the nothing that
Speaker 1: has happened in the interim. The other headlines Michigan. If
Speaker 1: you didn't know who won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan,
Speaker 1: you would have found out based solely on the Michigan
Speaker 1: GOP press release change. Abdul al Sayad became Abdul Rochman
Speaker 1: al Sayad with horns overnight. They've already started calling him
Speaker 1: that on Fox. All of the Republicans seated electeds are
Speaker 1: calling him Abdul Rochman. Al sayed. By the end of
Speaker 1: this it'll be Abdul Rochman Barack Hussein Obama Al sayed,
Speaker 1: This is how bad a situation he faces and the
Speaker 1: Democrats face in Michigan and thus in the bid to
Speaker 1: control the Senate, which is still a realistic possibility, numbers
Speaker 1: of which I will mention in a moment Tom Smith,
Speaker 1: and I'm quoting the reporter Patrick's vitec. Tom Smith, the
Speaker 1: candidate who dropped out of the Michigan eighth District primary
Speaker 1: for the Publican nomination for the House, is still poised
Speaker 1: to defeat Trump's choice, Amir Hassan. Trump endorsed Amir Hassan,
Speaker 1: but Tom Smith, who has dropped out, is going to
Speaker 1: beat Amir Hassan because Amir Hassan's name is Amir Hassan,
Speaker 1: and Republicans have gotten the subtext for the twenty five
Speaker 1: years since nine to eleven that anybody named Amir or
Speaker 1: has the middle name Hussein or is Abdul el Sayed
Speaker 1: personally did nine to eleven, except if they're from Saudi
Speaker 1: Arabia and they're friends of Trump or Trump himself who
Speaker 1: put his hands on the Middle Eastern orb, not the
Speaker 1: only orb he grabbed without permission. But this is a
Speaker 1: note that has to be read. He sent a handwritten
Speaker 1: note tod this Tom Smith, who is going to win.
Speaker 1: He is a zombie Republican candidate in the Michigan eighth
Speaker 1: He handwritten hand written note. See it, Dear FEC Inspector,
Speaker 1: this is to notify you that the Tom Smith for
Speaker 1: Congress was a late entry into the race for Michigan's
Speaker 1: eighth congressional district and has raised only eighteen hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty dollars through June thirtieth. We, therefore, per your email
Speaker 1: to us on seventy nine, will not file a report
Speaker 1: until the next deadline for filing. Signed with Thomas Smith,
Speaker 1: and then underneath he writes Thomas J. Smith candidate, and
Speaker 1: then the PS the pist Resistance. This is the guy
Speaker 1: who's going to be the nominee rather than someone named
Speaker 1: Amir Hassan, who Trump actually likes. I could not file
Speaker 1: this form electronically because I've had no success logging in
Speaker 1: and have not been able to get a response from
Speaker 1: the help desk, your Republican nominee for the eighth district
Speaker 1: in Michigan. That's the level of racism. And I'll say,
Speaker 1: ed fights. Will this be easy? No? But I like
Speaker 1: this guy because that word fights comes into play again.
Speaker 1: He throws punches at Polley's I like those kinds of candidates.
Speaker 1: I don't care if their names are. I'm not even
Speaker 1: going to throw it out there because somebody will just
Speaker 1: used the clip, he said. Mike Rogers is running on
Speaker 1: a pro data center platform so he can make more
Speaker 1: AI videos of himself to look more manly.
Speaker 3: Mike Rodgers is the guy who wants to put a
Speaker 3: data center in your backyard so he can make himself
Speaker 3: feel a little bit more manly by making an AI video.
Speaker 3: Mike Rogers is a guy who has never shot away
Speaker 3: from a corporation he could do a favor for. Mike
Speaker 3: Rodgers is a guy who, believe it or not, went
Speaker 3: back to Florida so he can lick every single boot
Speaker 3: Donald Trump owns to beg for his endorsement.
Speaker 4: I'm so sorry. If you want a senator who's gonna
Speaker 4: lick some boots, fine go vote for Mike Rogers.
Speaker 3: But if you want a senator who's going to stand
Speaker 3: up to Donald Trump, then you've got your option right here.
Speaker 1: I like this guy. He thinks he's going to beat
Speaker 1: MAGA and the Republicans by seven I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's an exaggeration. He also thought he was going to
Speaker 1: win the primary by about that much, and he didn't
Speaker 1: and no, Michigan is not New York City, and l
Speaker 1: say it is not the smiling face of Mamdani who
Speaker 1: so far the only complaints about Mamdani are outside of
Speaker 1: New York. But I'll say it makes a great point.
Speaker 1: If all Rogers has is essentially my name is Mike
Speaker 1: and his name is a scary Muslim name like Abdul,
Speaker 1: that does not change the fact that he is the
Speaker 1: Abdul who is trying to lower food prices and get
Speaker 1: jobs for people who live in Michigan. On the other
Speaker 1: side of the coin, in Arizona, Katie Hobbs is going
Speaker 1: to take a moderate Republican as her lieutenant governor, a
Speaker 1: former mayor of one of the Phoenix suburbs, if I
Speaker 1: got that correct. And the reason she's doing that is
Speaker 1: Andy Biggs is the Republican nominee for governor, and Andy
Speaker 1: Biggs is a lunatic insurrectionist Trump whore, So doing this
Speaker 1: would be a dumb capitulation to MAGA and Republicans and
Speaker 1: implying that they will be welcomed back if and when
Speaker 1: we purge this country correctly of the Maga disease, not
Speaker 1: the people, just the disease. But in Arizona, it's a
Speaker 1: great move. It's exactly the right move. You would think
Speaker 1: that AlSi Ed if he were running for governor of Arizona,
Speaker 1: even if he was the seated governor of Arizona, would
Speaker 1: do something very much like this because it's a brilliant move.
Speaker 1: It would be dumb anywhere else. But if you give
Speaker 1: non crazy Republicans a chance to climb down from Trump,
Speaker 1: especially when their choice is Andy Efing Biggs, and what
Speaker 1: do you need really, out of all the Republicans in Arizona,
Speaker 1: what do you need ten percent of them, five percent
Speaker 1: of them to make it a democratic landslide? So I
Speaker 1: think the situation is good. And a midterms forecast from
Speaker 1: strength in numbers and verisite. This is g Elliott Morris,
Speaker 1: the X five thirty eight guy. This was before Alsayed's
Speaker 1: victory in Michigan, but I think this was baked into
Speaker 1: his forecast. And again it's a it's polling interpreted with
Speaker 1: some math applied to it and then turned into forecasting.
Speaker 1: I'll just read what Elliot Morris wrote, Today's the day
Speaker 1: we've all been waiting for. If you're reading this, that
Speaker 1: means we finished dotting our eyes and crossing our tees.
Speaker 1: Just published our shiny State of the Art twenty twenty
Speaker 1: six congressional election forecast at six am Eastern August three.
Speaker 1: We give the Democrats an eighty five percent chance to
Speaker 1: win the majority in the US House of Representatives and
Speaker 1: a fifty five percent chance to win control of the Senate. Now,
Speaker 1: remember this is the Democratic Party. We still have a
Speaker 1: keen Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to deal with our largest opponents.
Speaker 1: But and the Democratic Party has a tradition of being
Speaker 1: able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Fingers crossed,
Speaker 1: because if we don't, if we don't pull this off,
Speaker 1: the planet out there is going to burn to the ground,
Speaker 1: and through the ground, there won't be any ground left.
Speaker 1: Bye bye. It's really terrible when the best answer I
Speaker 1: have to all of the situation with climate change is
Speaker 1: I'm sixty seven and a half years old. Now I did,
Speaker 1: I actually did my best. You got something better to do?
Speaker 1: It's your please, go ahead, right ahead, you take it over,
Speaker 1: take over this podcast the other headlines, as I promised. Again,
Speaker 1: It's like I didn't have surgery, I didn't take time off,
Speaker 1: I didn't contemplate, not resuming the podcast. Eighty eight days later,
Speaker 1: the New York Times screwed up again. They have platform
Speaker 1: David Ellison. New York Times platforming David Ellison, the scumbag
Speaker 1: without ethics and without eyebrows, the man that Forbes magazine
Speaker 1: called a NEPO baby, says his father is worth two
Speaker 1: hundred ninety billion dollars, called him, actually called him, you know,
Speaker 1: in a pro pro fascist, pro corporate publication like Forbes,
Speaker 1: called him a NEPO baby. I mean, I presume it
Speaker 1: was meant as a compliment between them. He and his
Speaker 1: father now control CBS News, having killed off the people
Speaker 1: who actually made it news, and they want to do
Speaker 1: the day the same. CNN two hundred ninety billion and
Speaker 1: a series of attorneys general around the country are holding
Speaker 1: this off until probably next year. They're worth two hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety billion dollars. And the Times let him make
Speaker 1: himself into a victim, David Ellison, so he could spout
Speaker 1: in an op ed about how this is all okay
Speaker 1: and he hates people who would try to minute the
Speaker 1: news and he has just not been able to get
Speaker 1: his own story out in the liberal media. Here we
Speaker 1: go again. He owns CBS now and he's trying to
Speaker 1: own CNN and he has no way to get this out.
Speaker 1: He and Daddy are only worth two hundred and ninety
Speaker 1: billion dollars. They're just these marginalized silence victimized by the
Speaker 1: liberal media.
Speaker 4: Oh, I'm up here on the cross the liberal media,
Speaker 4: the liberal media that is owned by conservative corporations and
Speaker 4: isn't the slightest bit liberal. And the Times platform this
Speaker 4: shithead so he could insist in The New York Times
Speaker 4: that he would never turn CNN into a conservative crapshack
Speaker 4: spouting nonsensical maga conspiracy theories. After he turned CBS into
Speaker 4: a conservative crap shack spouting nonsensical maga conscspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: Never do it again. This too is unchanged after eighty
Speaker 1: eight days. The people at the Times do not understand.
Speaker 1: They live here too. Related to the Times, the Maggie
Speaker 1: Haberman book, Maggie Haberman is a great reporter. Maggie Haberman
Speaker 1: is a terrible American. I'm sorry. This is her latest
Speaker 1: reporting on Trump's belief that he has been chosen to
Speaker 1: do what he is doing. Preserved. Oh, he looks like
Speaker 1: he's been preserved, but chosen by Trump doesn't believe in God,
Speaker 1: and if he does believe in God, it's God is
Speaker 1: his assistant. But Trump's belief that he has been chosen
Speaker 1: by the universe, that his ideas are now right because
Speaker 1: they are his ideas. She writes, quote, you are shot
Speaker 1: at you survive. You have taken on this mystical quality
Speaker 1: with not just your followers, but with your advisors who
Speaker 1: refer to him or then any way would refer to
Speaker 1: him as the chosen one, only semi joking in some cases.
Speaker 1: And you believe everything works out for you, which is
Speaker 1: literally what he said to Tucker Carlson. She writes, you
Speaker 1: know why the Iran war is going to work out,
Speaker 1: That things are going to work out because they always do.
Speaker 1: And so Haberman continues, you believe that your reality is
Speaker 1: better than the experts and what the experts have been
Speaker 1: telling you. He thinks the economy is boring. He literally
Speaker 1: will tell advisors he finds this boring to talk about.
Speaker 1: He wants to talk about immigrants committing rape or murdering people,
Speaker 1: and he's going to do what he wants to do. Look,
Speaker 1: he obviously doesn't want to get impeached again. But when
Speaker 1: you have to say again unimpeached. It stops mattering as much,
Speaker 1: I think, to some extent in his head. Some of
Speaker 1: that is from the book, and a lot of that
Speaker 1: quote is from an interview about the book. And that's
Speaker 1: great reporting by Maggie Haberman. Did she put this in
Speaker 1: The New York Times? No, it's in a book about
Speaker 1: stuff that happened last year. Because no matter how fast
Speaker 1: you can do it now, a book can't be printed overnight.
Speaker 1: I wonder if we had a medium that could be
Speaker 1: printed overnight or instantaneously, what would we call that? A newspaper,
Speaker 1: a podcast. Some of the stuff she wrote about in
Speaker 1: that book was from before the election. This isn't just
Speaker 1: cowardice or a mortgage that you have to pay and
Speaker 1: you're worried about whether or not your management will support
Speaker 1: you when crunch time comes, or sell you out to
Speaker 1: Trump like everybody at CBS, like is coming to NBC
Speaker 1: and ABC. This is what we used to refer to
Speaker 1: as double dipping. You have a goddamned job to report
Speaker 1: the news, Maggie Haberman, report the fucking news news is today.
Speaker 1: You get stuff like this, you don't keep it a
Speaker 1: secret to make more money off of it later. You
Speaker 1: put it out, it's news, that's news. Shameful, great reporter,
Speaker 1: terrible American sixty Minutes. The new executive producer of this program,
Speaker 1: which is in fact going to try to go on
Speaker 1: the air within a month two months tops, is named
Speaker 1: Nick Bilton. They are proceeding, according to several different media reporters,
Speaker 1: They are proceeding reportedly without enough stories in the works
Speaker 1: to create a new season of sixty Minutes. And before
Speaker 1: I go any further on this, what the fuck kind
Speaker 1: of name is Nick Bilton? Does he have a sister
Speaker 1: named Paris Bilton or Schmaris Bilton? Is he associated with
Speaker 1: the famous Bilton hotels? Nick Bilton, if that is your
Speaker 1: real name, said, there were plenty of people who knew
Speaker 1: the mechanics of putting sixty Minutes on. He would never
Speaker 1: enter fear with that. He doesn't understand. They don't understand.
Speaker 1: Conservatives don't understand. People who have not been in television
Speaker 1: don't understand. The worst producer in the world, whom I hate,
Speaker 1: whoever that happens to be. I have always had sympathy
Speaker 1: and to some degree, empathy with for one reason alone.
Speaker 1: A TV show doesn't just happen. It's not like the weather,
Speaker 1: the chief, the showrunner, the Nick Bilton, of any operation
Speaker 1: between the level of sixty minutes and news eighty seven.
Speaker 1: Keyakook Iowa is in charge of making the five hundred
Speaker 1: things that have to happen and have to happen accurately
Speaker 1: and in the correct sequence to keep any show on
Speaker 1: any television anywhere on television without things catching the fire.
Speaker 1: And I mean that literally. I was on a show
Speaker 1: once in Boston where the control room caught fire. We
Speaker 1: stayed on the air. He Nick Bilton is in charge
Speaker 1: of those mechanics at sixty minutes and any left over time,
Speaker 1: I guess you could meddle with the content. Most people
Speaker 1: who run shows like that, if they have spare time
Speaker 1: after making sure the thing doesn't fall apart, they just drink.
Speaker 1: Three generations of fascist propagandists have been raised to believe
Speaker 1: that the shows on TV are the way they are
Speaker 1: because there are secret liberal political operatives who are there bribing, cheating,
Speaker 1: and stealing staff and guests and reporters to doctor the
Speaker 1: content and fabricate ratings and sell advertisements for less than
Speaker 1: they claim and lie about profits that if only they
Speaker 1: could get rid of the liberals that diligent conservatives would
Speaker 1: find the truth the liberals have buried. This goes back
Speaker 1: to well before Fox News. This is back to the
Speaker 1: pre Rush limbaw days when there was a guy like
Speaker 1: this in every city who believed this was true, that
Speaker 1: the liberal media was there through bribery and dishonesty. And
Speaker 1: they still are everywhere. But originally it was just a
Speaker 1: guy named Pine in La and another one named Wally
Speaker 1: George whose daughter was a famous actress. But they were
Speaker 1: people all over the place. When I was an intern
Speaker 1: at Channel five in New York, we had doctor Martin
Speaker 1: Abend who believed all this stuff and said it every
Speaker 1: night perfectly. Nice man used to come in and do
Speaker 1: commentaries and debates on the news. Lovely guy used to
Speaker 1: bring in his infant son and then would explain that
Speaker 1: none of what you were seeing in the rest of
Speaker 1: the newscast was real as all the result of bribery.
Speaker 1: They believed this, and they believe that. More importantly, they
Speaker 1: believe that the mechanics of doing the show takes care
Speaker 1: of itself. They think that if they knock the liberals off,
Speaker 1: they will get a conservative sixty minutes, when all they
Speaker 1: will get is shit. Which nobody, not even conservatives, will
Speaker 1: watch because they are never going to watch because they've
Speaker 1: been trained not to watch CBS. Good luck, Nicky Bilton.
Speaker 1: The fundamental principle of conservativism is the details. Take care
Speaker 1: of themselves. There are plenty of wage slaves to do
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. We elite, superhuman conservatives are supposed
Speaker 1: to decide what color the curtains should be, and what
Speaker 1: the exact pattern on the helipad should be, and when
Speaker 1: we will fire judge Janine for telling the truth because
Speaker 1: we hired the pool boy to fix the reflecting pool.
Speaker 1: But we could blame it on Jonathan Carl. This is
Speaker 1: why they fail. Bilton's idea is Trump's idea is Musk's idea.
Speaker 1: I think big, you figure out the details, wage slave.
Speaker 1: So Nick Bilton doesn't realize that every TV show is
Speaker 1: a near miss with disaster, every single one of them.
Speaker 1: I'll go into more detail about this later, but I
Speaker 1: had a heart problem and I attended. I was waiting
Speaker 1: for the diagnosis that said, yeah, we have significant signs
Speaker 1: of you doing television too long, showing up in your ekg.
Speaker 1: It's like Trump with everything, particularly in the second term
Speaker 1: when he got rid of all the professionals. The departments
Speaker 1: don't manage themselves. They are not small details. They are
Speaker 1: the details upon which life is based. Musk does not know.
Speaker 1: You need a high school degree, or your fucking rocket
Speaker 1: will blow up again, or the debris will crash into
Speaker 1: the moon. Hey, that's great. Look we can study the impact.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have people living on the moon. What if
Speaker 1: the debris from all of his other rockets crashes into
Speaker 1: the moon. What are you gonna do then, Oh, you
Speaker 1: will send out a metavac helicopter to save them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it'll be there in six months. Rub some dirt into it.
Speaker 1: Back to this Nick Bilton. Nick Bilton called the sixty
Speaker 1: Minutes job the opportunity of a lifetime. That's true, not
Speaker 1: his lifetime. Norah O'Donnell signed up with this. Nora O'Donnell,
Speaker 1: whose first major assignment at NBC was with my original
Speaker 1: MSNBC show in nineteen ninety seven. Shame on you. I'm
Speaker 1: ashamed to know you. I'm sorry I ever helped you.
Speaker 1: Leslie stall Worth, time Whittaker are staying so that sixty
Speaker 1: Minutes doesn't die. It's dead now, it's dead now. If
Speaker 1: it wasn't dead, before it was dead the day they
Speaker 1: hired away Russ do that or don't do that? From
Speaker 1: the Times that slug. What happens when other people like
Speaker 1: this slug Russdothos sign up to do whatever Barry Weiss does.
Speaker 1: What happens to Stall and Whittaker and Worth time and
Speaker 1: it becomes pleasing to Trump's Trump says something about he
Speaker 1: loves the new sixty minutes. And then they fire Leslie Stall,
Speaker 1: and they fire Nora O'Donnell, and they fire everybody else.
Speaker 1: You decided they could rationalize cooperating and collaborating with the fascists.
Speaker 1: You know what happens when everybody signs up with it's
Speaker 1: I'm Russ Douthat, and I'm Kirsten Cinema, and I'm Chris
Speaker 1: Lickt and now I'm Nick Fuentes. And this is sixty minutes,
Speaker 1: by the way, sixty minutes. Barry Weiss is cutting it
Speaker 1: back to seventeen minutes because MAGA can't count higher than that.
Speaker 1: I happen to like that last joke. A lot. More
Speaker 1: media fail and more stupid quotes. Nick Fuentes, who I
Speaker 1: just mentioned Nick Fuentes quote, I want white people to
Speaker 1: have power. I want white billionaires that know they're white
Speaker 1: and are fighting as whites. I want white politicians, judges, lawyers, businessmen,
Speaker 1: donors that know they are white, fighting on behalf of
Speaker 1: white civilization. It's the Dave Chappelle sketch. His name is Poentes,
Speaker 1: Poor Nick. Nobody's ever told him that most of MAGA
Speaker 1: doesn't think he's white because his name is Poentes. Then
Speaker 1: there is one of the joys of my time off
Speaker 1: the continuing car fire, that is Stephen A. Smith. Stephen Smith,
Speaker 1: who was not told that he is utterly uninformed. He
Speaker 1: has now slammed trans rites because of his deep concern
Speaker 1: for the integrity of the WNBA. Stephen A. Smith who
Speaker 1: a month ago couldn't have spelled WNBA nor told you
Speaker 1: what they did there. The Financial Times Joshua Franklin had
Speaker 1: lunch with Steven A. Smith. I can tell you who
Speaker 1: didn't pay Quote sports broadcaster Stephen A. Smith, who's outspoken
Speaker 1: commentary that increasingly includes politics and influence have drawn comparisons
Speaker 1: to Joe Rogan. Stephen A. Smith makes Joe Rogan sound
Speaker 1: like Walter Lippmann and the commentaries. The influential political commentary
Speaker 1: Stephen Smith shows more political insight in his car shield
Speaker 1: commercials than he does in his commentaries. I have a
Speaker 1: sports note here. I'm going to have a sports section
Speaker 1: after the first break, but I have to mention the
Speaker 1: World Cup because Trump actually failed to buy it. That
Speaker 1: was what this has all been about the last couple
Speaker 1: of weeks. This idea of privatizing part of it. The
Speaker 1: man who tried to sell it to Trump's son in
Speaker 1: law's brother. This would have been Trump related financial force
Speaker 1: to take over at number nine hundred and thirty nine
Speaker 1: or something. Johnny Infantino FIFA Peace Prize. Johnny will lose
Speaker 1: his job because people stood up to him and trump Ism.
Speaker 1: People around the world, nobody here, but throughout Europe. And
Speaker 1: then to the surprise, particularly of Johnny Infantino, who thought
Speaker 1: he had all of the smaller, more bedraggled soccer federations
Speaker 1: in the world lined up to support him, no matter
Speaker 1: what he did, they all bailed on him too. Draw
Speaker 1: a line in the sand against Trump and Trumpists, and
Speaker 1: they will roll up and die because they are bullies,
Speaker 1: and bullies don't know what happens when they get punched
Speaker 1: in the face. Now, Johnny and Fantino will have to
Speaker 1: go back to his previous occupation, which I understood was
Speaker 1: standing on street corners showing how his shiny cubeall noggin
Speaker 1: was perfectly circular, and hoping that people would pass by
Speaker 1: and be so impressed by this that they would throw
Speaker 1: nickels at him see if they could bounce them off
Speaker 1: his perfectly shiny circular cueball mug. Of course, there's a
Speaker 1: second part that's actually important about the World Cup that
Speaker 1: may have been the last one, if not one of
Speaker 1: the last ones. Hope you enjoyed it. This one. They
Speaker 1: lucked out largely with the weather. But this is about
Speaker 1: the coming elimination of daytime sports here, and when I
Speaker 1: say here, I mean Earth, because it's going to be
Speaker 1: too damn hot, not just to play, but to practice,
Speaker 1: not just to practice, but for kids to take up
Speaker 1: games that involve going out there to do soccer or
Speaker 1: baseball or football or anything else. Too hot. One soccer expert,
Speaker 1: a professional, suggested at a public conference looking towards the
Speaker 1: future of sports that the number of countries going to
Speaker 1: the Olympics will drop in the next decade by twenty
Speaker 1: percent because the nation's at the equator and some not
Speaker 1: at the equator. Will be dropping out because their players
Speaker 1: will not be able to practice, let alone play during
Speaker 1: the day or at night, and the developmental programs will
Speaker 1: all dry up because no kid will want to go
Speaker 1: out and play outside. And we are not at meltdown
Speaker 1: yet on this subject. But in terms of professional sports,
Speaker 1: it is already nearly too hot to play competitively this summer,
Speaker 1: and we are far from it being over. Major League
Speaker 1: Baseball games have been rescheduled, timings have been changed this
Speaker 1: summer because of poor air quality. The climate crisis is here.
Speaker 1: We may be able to ignore it for weeks and
Speaker 1: even months at a time, but it is here. But happily,
Speaker 1: when players start dying mid game and when the last
Speaker 1: game is played in the last sport, y'll still be
Speaker 1: able to bet on it. Speaking of collapsing, let me
Speaker 1: give you a little update on my health as we
Speaker 1: close this segment and the podcast's future. I don't have
Speaker 1: any answers, I just wanted to update you on it.
Speaker 1: I did this podcast as a test, a stress test
Speaker 1: how much stress could I handle, and adding the video element.
Speaker 1: If you're listening and not watching the YouTube version, the
Speaker 1: first hour or so is on video, so you get
Speaker 1: to see all sorts of stuff and it probably doesn't
Speaker 1: sound what should but I'm doing the best I can.
Speaker 1: So I had an ablation on June second, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't sound like much. That they go in and they
Speaker 1: go in through your groin, which is not as much
Speaker 1: as not as much fun as it sounds at first blush.
Speaker 1: They going through your groin and they stick filaments up
Speaker 1: through your bloodstream and they then light part of your
Speaker 1: heart on fire to get a better heartbeat going. Because
Speaker 1: I had a FIB apparently for thirty years off and
Speaker 1: on and it was never diagnosed. Surprise, you told me
Speaker 1: that weird thump was my murmur. Oh I was wrong.
Speaker 1: So it's been a totally non linear recovery. The first
Speaker 1: check up, the first EKG and nonlinear recoveries are standard
Speaker 1: for this. Some people go in and they get it
Speaker 1: done and they feel better within hours. That was not
Speaker 1: the case. They don't even check for three months. So
Speaker 1: I will not have my first check up until the
Speaker 1: end of August. I have no idea if it worked
Speaker 1: or if it didn't work, or how much it worked.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see in doing this what the deadlines
Speaker 1: would do to me, if the dogs would cooperate, and
Speaker 1: they have up until this point quiet down. I wanted
Speaker 1: to see what research and especially the physical aspects of
Speaker 1: announcing would be, and we already know what the stress
Speaker 1: of the madness of King Trump is. I do find
Speaker 1: the format that I have described in which I am
Speaker 1: talking to camera is a little bit more fun than
Speaker 1: just doing the audio version, but both would continue. Hopefully
Speaker 1: I get the all clear when I go in and
Speaker 1: see my doctor, and I will give my doctor credit
Speaker 1: for this. The procedure was such that they wheeled me
Speaker 1: into the OAR at a fifteen am on June second,
Speaker 1: I got into the r I got into the Uber
Speaker 1: home at twelve thirty pm, four hours and fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: soup to nuts for heart surgery, and the last two
Speaker 1: hours of that was them just looking at me to
Speaker 1: see if I exploded or something and I didn't. Hopefully
Speaker 1: I get the all clear. We can resume around Labor
Speaker 1: Day with actual video. So I wanted you to enjoy
Speaker 1: this one last look here because it'll be a while.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not going to do this weekly or anything.
Speaker 1: I don't think I'm going to wait to see what
Speaker 1: the doctors say. And also, if you're watching this, posthumously,
Speaker 1: and I mean me posthumously. You know that I did
Speaker 1: not handle the stress correctly, and we'll refine things like
Speaker 1: the microphone and the audio on the video. But I
Speaker 1: did want you to have a good look at the
Speaker 1: dog's living room there. It is also of interest here
Speaker 1: Laura Ingram sitting behind somebody looking around him, giving weird looks,
Speaker 1: acting as if she were impaired or had one too many.
Speaker 1: The Tony Fauci hearing were the many faces of Laura Ankrim.
Speaker 1: Why does it seem so efing familiar to me? Why
Speaker 1: does it seem so fing familiar to me? Also? Mind
Speaker 1: if I whip out my Honess Wagner and these two
Speaker 1: stories are not connected in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 1: That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith
Speaker 1: Olberman Oberman. This is Sports Senate. Wait, check that not anymore.
Speaker 1: This is countdown with Keith Ulberman from Sportsball Center tonight
Speaker 1: the Big Show. Not exactly. I know you did not
Speaker 1: wait eighty eight days to hear me talk again to
Speaker 1: hear me talk about sports. But there are two significant
Speaker 1: developments in sports, one of which is focused on me.
Speaker 1: So I thought perhaps I should take this opportunity. If
Speaker 1: this is indeed the last episode of Countdown, we'll find
Speaker 1: out see how I recover from recording all this If
Speaker 1: this is the last edition, I wanted to address these
Speaker 1: two topics, and the first of them was the baseball
Speaker 1: trade deadline Monday afternoon. And I'm not going to go
Speaker 1: into any of the specifics of any of the trades,
Speaker 1: except for the fact that, of course, the Dodgers of
Speaker 1: Los Angeles traded for the best pitcher in baseball, and
Speaker 1: a tradition as old as time itself. The story, though,
Speaker 1: about baseball teams managing to unload all of their high
Speaker 1: priced players who they are not likely to re sign
Speaker 1: for the next season is become some sort of monetized
Speaker 1: highlight of the late part of the year for those
Speaker 1: teams not in contention. There are not many teams that
Speaker 1: are not in contention because baseball has dumbed its season down.
Speaker 1: We've discussed this many times before on this podcast and program,
Speaker 1: but this is really an indicator of where we are.
Speaker 1: We're now celebrating this with TV shows and with great
Speaker 1: festivals and who's going to be traded where and all
Speaker 1: kinds of marathon coverage. As if the trade deadline and
Speaker 1: the things that the teams do to denude themselves is
Speaker 1: somehow a good thing, and as if what the losing
Speaker 1: teams get for their star players prospects one out of
Speaker 1: ten of which will succeed to any serious degree in
Speaker 1: Major League Baseball at some point in the future, as
Speaker 1: if that were somehow something fans of those teams should celebrate.
Speaker 1: The other part about all of this is the trade deadline,
Speaker 1: and this mass selloff is a relatively new phenomenon in baseball.
Speaker 1: This is, in fact, teams completely giving up for the
Speaker 1: rest of the season, in this case, usually about fifty
Speaker 1: games left to play in this twenty twenty six campaign,
Speaker 1: and in many many instances signaling that they don't plan
Speaker 1: to be competitive in twenty twenty seven. And you the fan,
Speaker 1: the best hope you have is perhaps the players will
Speaker 1: be locked out by the owners and there won't be
Speaker 1: a season, So say the Mets will not lose any
Speaker 1: games next year, just to take one team at random example.
Speaker 1: In any event, they used to try to prevent exactly
Speaker 1: what they're celebrating now by means of extraordinary, almost draconian
Speaker 1: rules against selling off your high priced players. With a
Speaker 1: lot of time left in the season because it necessarily
Speaker 1: deranged the pennant race. The teams facing say the New
Speaker 1: York Mets or any of the other teams that sold
Speaker 1: off significantly against the deadline Monday, while the teams facing
Speaker 1: them who are trying to make the pennant races have
Speaker 1: easier pickings. This isn't football, where if you took the
Speaker 1: top six players off any NFL team, it would go
Speaker 1: winless the rest of the year. But still a New
Speaker 1: York Mets team made up of Triple A players is
Speaker 1: going to be easier fodder for those teams lucky enough
Speaker 1: to still have to face them on schedule than will say. Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know the teams that held on to our
Speaker 1: added team players, like the Los Angeles Dodgers. The pennant race,
Speaker 1: which used to be there to decide who was the
Speaker 1: best team in the league, not merely to provide extra
Speaker 1: rounds of playoffs for owners to sell tickets to. The
Speaker 1: pennant race, has been completely warped beyond all recognition. As
Speaker 1: I said, when they used to have pennant races, when
Speaker 1: the World Series really did determine which was the best
Speaker 1: team in baseball, there were rules against what effectively we
Speaker 1: now celebrate as the deadline Day in nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: with free agent see now inevitable and coming into effect
Speaker 1: the following winter in June nineteen seventy six, just months away,
Speaker 1: four months away from the first free agents from Reggie
Speaker 1: Jackson becoming one of the first mass scale free agents
Speaker 1: and free agency becoming part of baseball and all sports.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy six, the owner of the Oakland A's,
Speaker 1: Charles O. Finley, who was about twenty years ahead of
Speaker 1: everybody else in his game, said that what he was
Speaker 1: going to do was since he could not possibly afford
Speaker 1: to re sign his stars, he traded some of them,
Speaker 1: like Reggie Jackson, away for other players who had binding
Speaker 1: contracts and lower salary demands. But he still had several superstars,
Speaker 1: two of whom went on to be in or one
Speaker 1: of whom went on to be in the Hall of Fame,
Speaker 1: and another one who should have been, and he sold
Speaker 1: them to other teams. At the trade deadline. He sold
Speaker 1: a picture named Vida Blue, who was perhaps the best
Speaker 1: left hander of the first half of the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: sold him to the New York Yankees for one point
Speaker 1: five million dollars. He sold really Rolly Fingers, who is
Speaker 1: in the Hall of Fame, to the Boston Red Sox
Speaker 1: for a million dollars. He sold Joe Rudy, the left
Speaker 1: fielder of the A's. And remember this is the A's
Speaker 1: team that won the World Series in seventy two, seventy three,
Speaker 1: and seventy four, and went to the playoffs in seventy five,
Speaker 1: and almost went to the playoffs in seventy six, and
Speaker 1: they were selling off three of their best players, and
Speaker 1: the Commissioner of Baseball, Bowie Kune, said, oh no, you're not,
Speaker 1: and voided the trades, voided the sales. The Red Sox
Speaker 1: were in Oakland as these things went down, and Rudy
Speaker 1: and Fingers actually went into the uniform of the Red Sox.
Speaker 1: Fingers sat in the Boston bullpen in a Red Sox
Speaker 1: uniform waiting for some sort of decision to be made,
Speaker 1: and the decision wound up in court. In court, the
Speaker 1: attempt was made by the A's to get an injunction
Speaker 1: against the Commissioner of Baseball, who said he was acting
Speaker 1: in the best interests of baseball the competition idea that
Speaker 1: I just referred to, and he didn't get it, and
Speaker 1: so Raleigh Fingers and Vida Blue and Joe Rudy returned
Speaker 1: to the Oakland A's and walked away from Charles O.
Speaker 1: Finley as free agents. And he got nothing. He didn't
Speaker 1: even get a draft choice. He didn't even get a
Speaker 1: farewell note. But Finley now would be celebrated as the
Speaker 1: mastermind of what to do a deadline day. In nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, half a century ago, what is being done
Speaker 1: and celebrated now was blatantly illegal within baseball law. But
Speaker 1: it's worse than that. In the early nineteen sixties, with
Speaker 1: the New York Yankees having won most of the Penance
Speaker 1: and nearly most of the World Series since nineteen twenty one,
Speaker 1: having dominated the sport for more than forty years, the
Speaker 1: other teams began to say, hey, screw them, Let's find
Speaker 1: out a way of getting more equitable distribution of talent.
Speaker 1: And so it used to be a free fra All
Speaker 1: kid got out of high school or college and then
Speaker 1: accepted bids from major league teams the way you would
Speaker 1: in your own profession. AHA. That led them to all
Speaker 1: go to sign with teams like the New York Yankees,
Speaker 1: who had more money and more prestige. So baseball instituted
Speaker 1: the amateur draft, and to this day, although the number
Speaker 1: of rounds and players drafted every year has changed, and
Speaker 1: the breadth of the draft has changed, and there's an
Speaker 1: international draft and you can now sort of trade draft choices,
Speaker 1: it's still there to make sure that the talent gets
Speaker 1: spread out among other teams. And so in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: the New York Yankees no longer had the built in
Speaker 1: advantage of being the New York Yankees or any other
Speaker 1: team that was a leader in its field, like the
Speaker 1: Los Angeles Dodgers, and so they instituted a baseball draft
Speaker 1: to make sure that things like this would not happen.
Speaker 1: There were rules against trying to put all of the
Speaker 1: good players on the same team, like Trek Scoobel, the
Speaker 1: pitcher of the Detroit Oh No, Los Angeles Dodgers. You
Speaker 1: can't keep doing this. Inevitably, there is going to be
Speaker 1: a backlash. It hasn't happened yet because most of today
Speaker 1: a baseball owners only care about their money and have
Speaker 1: no concept that the fans might stop going if the
Speaker 1: team sucks every year, every decade, every century, which is
Speaker 1: what is beginning developed in some areas. This is not
Speaker 1: a player's greed issue. This is an owner's greed issue.
Speaker 1: This is the owners wanting more money, and when they
Speaker 1: find ways to share money amongst themselves, most of the
Speaker 1: owners in the smaller markets simply keep the money and
Speaker 1: they don't spend it on players in any event, nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, there was an effort to stop things that
Speaker 1: were done the other day against the trade Dunvine. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five, the draft was an extraordinary thing and
Speaker 1: by the way, probably not legal. But there was one
Speaker 1: rule that most baseball writers and baseball people don't know
Speaker 1: about that indicates how far we have gone in this
Speaker 1: And admittedly it was done in the mid nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: and it was designed to stop one team again, the
Speaker 1: New York Yankees. In the late nineteen thirties, the American
Speaker 1: League owners voted on a rule that said you could
Speaker 1: not make a trade in the American League with the
Speaker 1: American League's defending pennant winner. In other words, whoever won
Speaker 1: the pennant in nineteen thirty seven, no American League team
Speaker 1: could make any transaction with them, could not get them,
Speaker 1: a player could not trade them. A player, sell them
Speaker 1: a player. You could not make a deal with last
Speaker 1: year's champions, and guess what the champion's name was. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six, nineteen thirty seven, nineteen thirty eight, and
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine the New York Yankees. There was actually
Speaker 1: on the books a you can't trade with the Yankees rule,
Speaker 1: which finally got overturned because in nineteen forty, for various
Speaker 1: other reasons, the Yankees did not win the pennant and
Speaker 1: the Detroit Tigers did. And suddenly the Detroit Tigers went
Speaker 1: to try to fortify their ball club by making additional
Speaker 1: trades that winner. And somebody said, I believe it was
Speaker 1: from the Yankees. Somebody said, oh, by the way, the
Speaker 1: rule applies to you. You're the defending champions. They removed
Speaker 1: that rule very quickly. But that's how far it has
Speaker 1: changed in the history of baseball. What we once tried
Speaker 1: to legislate against in these draconian ways is now celebrated
Speaker 1: as the big event of August every season. Now the
Speaker 1: other issue is not about baseball, but about baseball cards.
Speaker 1: And perhaps you have heard about this. This is what
Speaker 1: I've been doing. Besides recuperating, I've been selling a Honess
Speaker 1: Wagner baseball card. If you're not familiar with this, it's
Speaker 1: the most it's the most famous sports card of all time.
Speaker 1: At its famous because while there were millions of copies
Speaker 1: of the other cards in that set, there are only
Speaker 1: to this day about sixty Honess Wagners known. I have
Speaker 1: a few. I just wanted you to see this. This
Speaker 1: is not a humble brag. This is a Honess Wagner.
Speaker 1: Now you'll notice about the Honess Wagner here as most
Speaker 1: of the sixties of the sixty Honess Wagners from nineteen
Speaker 1: oh nine, the set's called T two six, made by
Speaker 1: American Tobacco Corporation and sold under various brands between nineteen
Speaker 1: oh nine and nineteen eleven. What the cards were were
Speaker 1: a fascination, a mania like I don't know, garbage, pale Kids,
Speaker 1: or any whatever the game will be this Christmas, whatever
Speaker 1: the toy is, almost anything in music, almost anything in
Speaker 1: rock stardom. There were newspaper articles in nineteen oh nine
Speaker 1: about the baseball cards that were put in the cigarette packages,
Speaker 1: and one of the main features going back and reading
Speaker 1: those newspapers is where are the Honess Wagner cards? Because
Speaker 1: they had cards of everybody else. There were five hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty three different cards made in that set. Where
Speaker 1: were the other ones? It was Ty Cobb and Christy
Speaker 1: Matthewson and everybody else where was Hanness Wagner. Well here
Speaker 1: he is. In any event, the Honese Wagner card was
Speaker 1: not distribute for we can talk for forty minutes about
Speaker 1: why the Wagner card was scarce, but the point is
Speaker 1: that it was scarce in nineteen oh nine. There is
Speaker 1: an Atlanta, I believe, newspaper article from nineteen eleven with
Speaker 1: what amounts to a letter to the editor asking is
Speaker 1: there any special value attributed to a cigarette card depicting
Speaker 1: Pittsburgh shortstop Hans Wagner. That's how long this has been
Speaker 1: going on. There were people who collected these cards in
Speaker 1: nineteen oh nine and nineteen ten who did not know
Speaker 1: that there had been a hones Wagner card issued into
Speaker 1: the thirties. There were collectors who discovered their Honess Wagner
Speaker 1: card in nineteen forty, not nineteen thirty, not nineteen twenty,
Speaker 1: not nineteen ten, not nineteen oh eight. Hannis Wagner was
Speaker 1: a myth, at least in card form, and as I said,
Speaker 1: only about sixty of them have been survivors of what
Speaker 1: appears to have been anything from Wagner threatening to sue
Speaker 1: because he didn't want to be associated with cigarette advertising,
Speaker 1: as the backs all had to perhaps a deliberate attempt
Speaker 1: to fool the buyers into thinking that if they kept
Speaker 1: buying packages of cigarettes there would be a Hanus Wagner
Speaker 1: card showing up eventually what we today call a chase card,
Speaker 1: like a show Heyo Tani card that some idiot paid
Speaker 1: eleven million dollars for the other day because it had
Speaker 1: two logos and two autographs from show Heyotani on it.
Speaker 1: And the assumption is show Heyo Tani is the greatest
Speaker 1: player of all time and will not get hurt, or
Speaker 1: will not have to stop pitching, or will not fizzle
Speaker 1: out as it gets older. In any event, I'm going
Speaker 1: off on another tangent here. Most of the Wagners that survive,
Speaker 1: whatever the reason for the scarcity is, have something wrong
Speaker 1: with them. It's a curiosity. You can find baseball cards
Speaker 1: from this set that are in fantastic condition. It looks
Speaker 1: like they just came not out of the pack but
Speaker 1: off the printing machine. But this card. As you may
Speaker 1: notice for those of you who are watching it on
Speaker 1: YouTube rather than listening to the podcast, you will notice
Speaker 1: that there's something wrong with it. The borders. There should
Speaker 1: be borders along each side of the picture. I'll get
Speaker 1: it a little closer to the camera to give that
Speaker 1: an emphasis of this. This card has been trimmed. This
Speaker 1: card has had those white borders that should be running
Speaker 1: up and down the side of the thing removed. Why
Speaker 1: who knows? I used to draw in my baseball cards
Speaker 1: when I was eight and nine years old. That guy
Speaker 1: got traded, I would erase the team. I would sit
Speaker 1: there for five minutes with erasers, going through all the
Speaker 1: erasers on all the pencils in my father the architect's office,
Speaker 1: destroying his collection of erasers, and then right in in
Speaker 1: the best imitation I could of the printing the new
Speaker 1: team's name. So kids probably did this. And there was
Speaker 1: another Wagner that came my way in nineteen ninety seven
Speaker 1: or eight, As it turned out, I thought I read
Speaker 1: an article about a restorer who was advancing the cause
Speaker 1: of baseball card restoration. Baseball card restoration has been around
Speaker 1: for as long as there had been collectors. You have
Speaker 1: been able to improve a card by ironing it by
Speaker 1: removing the little wax marks that sealed the package, and
Speaker 1: the card on top of the stack in the package
Speaker 1: got the wax on it. There have been all manners
Speaker 1: of restorations, done usually surreptitiously. And in nineteen ninety eight
Speaker 1: I bought a rare baseball card that was rare because
Speaker 1: it had one word on it that the common variety
Speaker 1: did not. The word was National abbreviation nat apostrophe L.
Speaker 1: The card, although it had been authenticated as you see
Speaker 1: in a slab like this one, although it had been
Speaker 1: authenticated and graded by a company where the extra word was,
Speaker 1: was kind of down here with the name. It said Doyle,
Speaker 1: New York National. National had been clipped from another card,
Speaker 1: cut off another card, and glued onto this card with
Speaker 1: no effort to actually receive, no effort to make it
Speaker 1: look good. You could see the shadow cast by National
Speaker 1: because it was up higher than the rest of the card.
Speaker 1: I had a driver in Los Angeles used to take
Speaker 1: me to Fox Sports every day, and he was from Peru.
Speaker 1: And when we got this card, we went and picked
Speaker 1: this card up on the way to work one day,
Speaker 1: and I said, Freddie does anything look wrong to you
Speaker 1: at this? And he looked at the card and he said,
Speaker 1: why shadow under natinal? That's how obvious it was. But
Speaker 1: it was authenticated. It was in a slab, therefore it
Speaker 1: was real. Other more sophisticated attempts to restore cards by
Speaker 1: building out damaged borders, or what would you do to
Speaker 1: the Wagner that I have already referred to. You would
Speaker 1: create those borders on it and the card would probably
Speaker 1: double in value. Only the key to it at that
Speaker 1: point was not letting anybody know anyway. I read this
Speaker 1: article in nineteen ninety six or so about a gu
Speaker 1: who did restorations, and he did them, and what he
Speaker 1: wanted to do was to do them above board. He
Speaker 1: thought this was the next thing. In every other form
Speaker 1: of memorabilia collecting. You wouldn't throw a card away. You
Speaker 1: would throw a painting away. You wouldn't if the Mona
Speaker 1: Lisa is damaged, you don't just leave it with tomato
Speaker 1: ketchup on it when somebody threw tomato ketchup on it.
Speaker 1: You don't take the great works of art that have
Speaker 1: been hit by razor braides or egg creams being thrown
Speaker 1: at them and just say, okay, we're going to leave
Speaker 1: it like that, because them's the brakes. You fix it.
Speaker 1: You have professionals who can restore it, and you say
Speaker 1: this has been restored.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: This doesn't mean sticking the arms back on the venus
Speaker 1: de milo. You don't do it in every case. But
Speaker 1: the key point is you got to do it fairly
Speaker 1: objectively on the record, and this guy wanted to do that.
Speaker 1: I gave him a minor test. He really showed the
Speaker 1: ability to do it. And finally we discussed whether or
Speaker 1: not he could get an off condition Hannis Wagner card.
Speaker 1: For some they were not very highly priced then, but
Speaker 1: I didn't want honest Wagner card that looked all beat up.
Speaker 1: I wanted a really good looking Honess Wagner card for
Speaker 1: my collection. And so for seventy five thousand dollars, which
Speaker 1: I had to pay to him in a schedule over
Speaker 1: three years. That's how long thirty years ago really is.
Speaker 1: For seventy five thousand dollars, he agreed to buy a
Speaker 1: beat up Honess Wagner card and then restore it. He said,
Speaker 1: I will make it almost near mint. It will be
Speaker 1: as good as any Wagner there is even better than
Speaker 1: the famous Wayne Gretzky Wagner, which itself was restored in
Speaker 1: a different way. The Wayne Gretzky Honess Wagner card originally
Speaker 1: was larger with uneven borders, and somebody and he confessed
Speaker 1: to this and later went to prison for unrelated baseball
Speaker 1: card crimes. Somebody with real courage and real loose ethics
Speaker 1: trimmed the extra part of the card off with an
Speaker 1: exacto knife to make the edges look really sharp and
Speaker 1: in mint condition, and to make the card look exactly
Speaker 1: in the right place and the right size and not
Speaker 1: too large, not leaving any questions, and it got slabbed.
Speaker 1: It was the first famous card ever put in a holder,
Speaker 1: and it was sold. And we all told the owner
Speaker 1: of the La Kings who bought the card with Gretzky,
Speaker 1: Bruce McNall, who asked baseball card experts of the time
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen nineties. We all told him the
Speaker 1: card has been trimmed. Many of us saw this card
Speaker 1: before it was trimmed. And he said, I don't care.
Speaker 1: It's a great looking card, and that's all that mattered
Speaker 1: to him because he was a coin collector. And guess
Speaker 1: what if your coin gets a little rust on it
Speaker 1: in the time since some rooman dropped it on the
Speaker 1: street in forty two ad. You don't just leave the
Speaker 1: rust on it, you clean it off. So he didn't
Speaker 1: care that the card had been trimmed. So now what
Speaker 1: we were going to do This fellow and I were
Speaker 1: going to get a Honis Wagner. He was going to
Speaker 1: work on it. He said it would take him a
Speaker 1: couple of years because he really worked meticulously, and he
Speaker 1: had a great candidate in mind. And I said, tell
Speaker 1: me no more. But at some point I want to
Speaker 1: see your studio. I want to see how you do it.
Speaker 1: He said. Great. By the time I got the last
Speaker 1: check in, I had gone from working at ESPN to
Speaker 1: working at MSNBC and I was starting at Fox. When
Speaker 1: he said, well, the card is ready, and I sent
Speaker 1: him the last check. I said, don't ship it to me.
Speaker 1: I'll be moving to where you are in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: I picked it up in person. It gleamed. The card
Speaker 1: was beautiful. It looked better than any other Wagner, and
Speaker 1: I thought, this is my Honus Wagner. It's going into
Speaker 1: my collection and I'm going to publicize the fact that
Speaker 1: this card has been restored, and you out there buying
Speaker 1: your baseball card should look no matter what the slab says,
Speaker 1: or what the price says, or what the hypesters say.
Speaker 1: You should check to see. Maybe my card that I'm
Speaker 1: buying as a mint condition card with a ten of
Speaker 1: ten grading on the top of it, maybe it has
Speaker 1: been restored illicitly. Maybe somebody has done this to you.
Speaker 1: You should look, no matter what the authenticity says, no
Speaker 1: matter what the expert said. And I was going to
Speaker 1: be above board with it. And I got the card.
Speaker 1: It was marvelous. Man did an amazing job. I went
Speaker 1: away for a couple of weeks, put the card in
Speaker 1: my safe, came back and looked at it and went
Speaker 1: who could be so talented as to do this? I
Speaker 1: suddenly wondered if there was something else going on here.
Speaker 1: Maybe that card wasn't what he said it was. I
Speaker 1: didn't see it in its pre restoration condition. I didn't
Speaker 1: know its history, I didn't know what it looked like beforehand.
Speaker 1: He didn't tell me any of these things. So I
Speaker 1: decided to just set it aside and think about what
Speaker 1: to do. And I set it aside and thought about
Speaker 1: what to do for about twenty seven years. As one does,
Speaker 1: I just just didn't want to face the possibility that
Speaker 1: I had ripped myself off. And as time went by,
Speaker 1: I came into a little bit more money through work,
Speaker 1: and I bought some other Wagners. At one point I
Speaker 1: had four of them, and the one I've shown you
Speaker 1: I bought that became my Wagner, and the other Wagner,
Speaker 1: the restored Wagner question mark became a kind of paper
Speaker 1: weight in my office because I had to keep it
Speaker 1: in a big, thick, loose sight holder, and it would
Speaker 1: sit on top of old scorecards from spring training of
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five, or copies of the hockey news from
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, on places in my baseball card cabinets,
Speaker 1: and on the desks of my many offices. In the
Speaker 1: quarter of a century when I went from early middle
Speaker 1: age to a decrepit old man who was afraid to
Speaker 1: face the truth about his baseball card. And then last
Speaker 1: spring somebody mentioned to me that I had his old
Speaker 1: baseball car, his old hanness Wagner. What are you talking about?
Speaker 1: And he explained it had been the so called die
Speaker 1: cut Wagner. Again to refer to the trimmed Wagner here
Speaker 1: without any borders. The die cut Wagner didn't have the
Speaker 1: orange part behind his head. And what my restorer had
Speaker 1: done in being given just the head and the torso
Speaker 1: of Wagner, he had rebuilt the background. He had rebuilt
Speaker 1: it using another T two O six card. He used
Speaker 1: a third one to put a big, nice back on it.
Speaker 1: He did perhaps from a different card, yet he partially
Speaker 1: restored the name Wagner Pittsburgh at the bottom. And he
Speaker 1: did a masterful job, so masterful that he even made
Speaker 1: me wonder if it was legitimate. And this guy saying
Speaker 1: you now own this card, if I heard you sold
Speaker 1: to you, made me think, hmm, maybe I should stop
Speaker 1: just throwing this card in a box every time I move,
Speaker 1: and maybe I should get it checked out by experts.
Speaker 1: Fast forwarding this part of the story. It was real,
Speaker 1: It was restored. It was openly restored by a guy
Speaker 1: who did the masterpiece of baseball restoration, baseball card restoration.
Speaker 1: And I just sat around and you know, didn't do
Speaker 1: anything with it for a while. The folks at CGC,
Speaker 1: one of the card authenticity places with genuine ethics and standards,
Speaker 1: and my friend Al Chris SOIFOLDI, from love of the
Speaker 1: game auctions, contrived to get this thing examined, and I
Speaker 1: mean examined under microscopes and with radar waves and what
Speaker 1: else used to prove what had been done to it.
Speaker 1: And suddenly I had a Wagner double because I have
Speaker 1: two Wagners still, Oh no, I have three. Well that's
Speaker 1: too many for one man. There's something wrong in the
Speaker 1: balance of the universe. If there's one guy with three Wagoners.
Speaker 1: What kind of a society do we have if it's
Speaker 1: me and I have one twentieth of all the remaining
Speaker 1: Honness Wagners known. So I put it up f auction. Well,
Speaker 1: it's been on display in this past month at the
Speaker 1: Fanatics Fest in New York, where it drew oohs and
Speaker 1: oz and it in the last week the last weekend
Speaker 1: ended last weekend the National Card Show in Rosemont, Illinois,
Speaker 1: outside Chicago, it was on display, drawing more oohs and
Speaker 1: os and dividing the baseball card memorabilia business in half.
Speaker 1: Those who say, hey, sure, it's rest it's restored. You're
Speaker 1: not making any bones about it? Yeah, I wouldn't. I mean,
Speaker 1: why would you do it to all the damaged honis Wagner's,
Speaker 1: but it's nice to have it. Nobody's trying to pass
Speaker 1: it off as the real thing. And then there's the
Speaker 1: other people who call me the devil because I had
Speaker 1: this Why could you have damage? Debate? It was a lot.
Speaker 1: It was like you damaged, you tampered with this card.
Speaker 1: The card had been scissored in nineteen oh nine, probably
Speaker 1: by a kid who didn't want the background there at all.
Speaker 1: It was already altered, It was already damaged. We put
Speaker 1: some of it back the restorer, who, by the way,
Speaker 1: my doubts had been increased because when I tried to
Speaker 1: reach him to ask him some questions and to see
Speaker 1: finally his restoration process so I could be reassured that
Speaker 1: this was a real card, his phone was disconnected. So
Speaker 1: I emailed him and the email immediately bounced back as
Speaker 1: the account being disconnected, And and then I wrote him
Speaker 1: a letter in snail mail, and it came back to
Speaker 1: me within days. There was no trace of him. I
Speaker 1: haven't heard from him since this is December nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 1: We're talking about, anyway, the point of restoration and how
Speaker 1: dare you do this? Is the card is already been altered, destroyed,
Speaker 1: almost as so many of the nineteen o nine Honus
Speaker 1: Wagners were. As I said, nearly all of them have
Speaker 1: survived in beaten up condition. Supposedly, the company that made
Speaker 1: them send agents into the field with boxes of cards
Speaker 1: and offered the story of Aarris three hundred cards. If
Speaker 1: you kid over there playing playing sandlot baseball in your
Speaker 1: bare feet in New York, Here's three hundred cards for
Speaker 1: your Wagner. Here's five thousand cards for your Wagner. Here's
Speaker 1: ten million cigarettes for your Wagner. For some reason, the
Speaker 1: good Wagners were all gone, and I wanted a good Wagner.
Speaker 1: But the point, the two points were that have gotten
Speaker 1: lost in the auction of this card that runs through
Speaker 1: this weekend. By the way, the points that have been
Speaker 1: lost were these. The restoration was done for my collection
Speaker 1: because I wanted a nice Wagner, and I didn't think
Speaker 1: I'd ever have the money to get a nice Wagner,
Speaker 1: or even a nice clean Wagner that's just missing like
Speaker 1: its sides. I just did it for me, and I
Speaker 1: did it because I thought, well, restoration is here. There
Speaker 1: are cards that are out there that have been restored.
Speaker 1: There's supposedly an autograph making Mantle card, where the autograph
Speaker 1: may not be real, and it's like the old joke
Speaker 1: about the ballplayer who's called out for not touching second
Speaker 1: base on a triple and the manager goes out to
Speaker 1: complain about this, and the umpire goes he also didn't
Speaker 1: touch first. The autograph on the Mantle card is not real, apparently,
Speaker 1: according to an autograph expert, even though it's been certified
Speaker 1: real by an authenticator. And the card apparently we've all
Speaker 1: seen that card before and everybody says no, that those
Speaker 1: corners aren't real either, So both the card and the
Speaker 1: autograph are fake. I won't go into further details because
Speaker 1: I don't have them. And people go completely nuts over
Speaker 1: this accusation because you can't have restoration. That Olderman did
Speaker 1: a terrible thing having this card restored. But we're going
Speaker 1: to keep these cars cards that have been restored, and
Speaker 1: we're going to tell you that they haven't been restored.
Speaker 1: We're going to pretend that they're in original condition and
Speaker 1: they've somehow been preserved, and it looks exactly like they
Speaker 1: did when they rolled off the printing press in nineteen
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty one or nineteen hundred and nine, it
Speaker 1: doesn't happen. There has been illicit restoration in the hobby, ongoing,
Speaker 1: growing and presumably improving since at least and sophisticated stuff
Speaker 1: like the one the guy did on my Wagner since
Speaker 1: at least nineteen ninety five. It's there. I'm being open
Speaker 1: about it, not everybody else is. And I'd just like
Speaker 1: to say one other thing about the Honess Wagner T
Speaker 1: two six die cut restored Keith Olberman Wagner bidding remains
Speaker 1: open through this coming Saturday night. And now if you're
Speaker 1: getting this on YouTube, we return to audio only. Hope
Speaker 1: you saw enough of the Dog's apartment, I mean my studio,
Speaker 1: and I want to close this special stress test edition
Speaker 1: of Countdown with that rarest of events, one of those
Speaker 1: extraordinary moments in your life when you say, hey, no fair,
Speaker 1: that's my nightmare being played out live at a Senate
Speaker 1: hearing televised from Washington. There he was doctor Tony Fauci,
Speaker 1: who saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American lives,
Speaker 1: and would have saved more if it hadn't been for
Speaker 1: Trump and other abject brain dead morons like football quarterback
Speaker 1: Aaron Rodgers. Happily, Aaron is now in a living hell
Speaker 1: of his own in which he will not retire until
Speaker 1: at least twenty twenty seven, but his talent retired in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, and frankly, his next big event is
Speaker 1: going to be when they finally confirm he had CTE. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there's Fauci, and in front of him were some of
Speaker 1: the most fraudulent of the might as well be foreign
Speaker 1: agent magas, Senators like that Hawley clown who must be
Speaker 1: accidentally acting like what the Brits call a rent boy,
Speaker 1: and Fauci, who, despite the first initial of his last name,
Speaker 1: has no more f's to give, wisely took the Fifth
Speaker 1: Amendment throughout, just like everybody in the Trump administration has,
Speaker 1: just like Trump did. And then of course the MAGA
Speaker 1: parrots all and them for amendment. But I'm getting lost
Speaker 1: in this. It was not what was going on in
Speaker 1: front of Fauci that freaked me the Fauci out, it
Speaker 1: was what was going on behind him. They're looming behind
Speaker 1: one of the most important and civic minded, albeit sometimes flawed,
Speaker 1: medical men of this century, and the preceding one looming
Speaker 1: behind doctor Anthony Fauci, peering around him as if it
Speaker 1: were her show, and she'd been seated somehow in the
Speaker 1: wrong place where the remains of Laura ingram I mentioned
Speaker 1: this this thing about her earlier. I don't know if
Speaker 1: she remembers me, frankly, because in the way she must
Speaker 1: tell time. I guess I'm seven or eight faces ago,
Speaker 1: plus what how many times can you sell the same soul?
Speaker 1: I'm like one hundred and seventy five souls ago. But
Speaker 1: there she was making faces at well, there's a bad
Speaker 1: choice of words on my part, sorry, doing expressions, sneering,
Speaker 1: making herself the story when she's never the story, revealing
Speaker 1: a little more of her looney tunes long since sold soul,
Speaker 1: and with each contortion of her cheeks, risking the chance
Speaker 1: that one of those cheeks might break off, turn into
Speaker 1: a sharp edge projectile and pierce the skull of an
Speaker 1: Maga senator. This performance was also a great opportunity to
Speaker 1: recognize that, in a way reminiscent of that guy named
Speaker 1: Rodrigo Alvez who allegedly had a series of plastic surgeries
Speaker 1: to make himself look like a ken doll. It appears
Speaker 1: that what Laura has been going for, striving for all
Speaker 1: this time is in fact sweet polypurebread from Underdog, not
Speaker 1: real and in low death. Anyway, one of my nightmares
Speaker 1: is what Tony Fauci was doing that day. I'm doing
Speaker 1: something anything of some importance, or at least of something
Speaker 1: that required me to shave and wear a suit. It's
Speaker 1: in public, it's on TV. It could be a show,
Speaker 1: it could be a sports cast, who knows what, it
Speaker 1: could be a trial, And unbeknownst to me, seated right
Speaker 1: behind me, there are between ten and twenty different Laura Ingram's.
Speaker 1: This is a long way of saying that when my
Speaker 1: social life intersected with hers during the previous century, it
Speaker 1: went poorly. It is important to remember that while Laura
Speaker 1: Ingram was the first star at MSNBC literally shown on
Speaker 1: the cover of the New York Times magazine in a
Speaker 1: leopard print skirt in nineteen ninety five, a year before
Speaker 1: MSNBC even went on the air. It's why they hired
Speaker 1: her the skirt, she did not get her own primetime
Speaker 1: show in cable news for another twenty two years, and
Speaker 1: she did not get that show until she fully embraced
Speaker 1: Trump and as we've seen yet again, as Trump has
Speaker 1: circled the drain, she sure has embraced him in things
Speaker 1: I promised not to tell little personal experience about embracing her.
Speaker 1: My primetime cable news show debuted on October one, nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety seven. That would be twenty years before hers. But
Speaker 1: she was a guest on my show the first time
Speaker 1: the next month, November nineteen ninety seven, and she asked
Speaker 1: me out in December. I think it was long after
Speaker 1: that that Laura revealed to me that her mother's dying
Speaker 1: words to her had been, Lara, why aren't you sound BASSI?
Speaker 1: I mean, who tells anybody else something like that, anybody
Speaker 1: else in the world. Why would you say that? Wouldn't
Speaker 1: you make up something nicer sounding?
Speaker 4: Lara?
Speaker 1: You have been such a great daughter. I mean, how
Speaker 1: in the hell could I check? Even more recently than that,
Speaker 1: she had invoked her mother again in public, I think
Speaker 1: as an excuse for raising the Social Security age, or
Speaker 1: eliminating Social Security altogether, or having ninety year old's screw
Speaker 1: little screws into American iPhones or something. I can't remember
Speaker 1: what it was. It's true, though, even as Laura flourished
Speaker 1: in television. She never said her mom, here's enough so
Speaker 1: you can retire. Laura boasted in public that her mother,
Speaker 1: Anne worked until she was seventy three as a waitress
Speaker 1: full time, and boasted that her mother continued to pay
Speaker 1: off Laura's college loans. Anyway, the Ingram dates and something
Speaker 1: she told me on the first of these dates has
Speaker 1: resonated with me literally every month since and is relevant
Speaker 1: to politics today. I did not so much date her
Speaker 1: as survive her. Even then before nine to eleven helped
Speaker 1: to slide her cheese off her cracker. I find a
Speaker 1: diary entry referring to her as Hurricane Laura. That was
Speaker 1: March fifteenth, nineteen ninety eight. Beware the IDEs of March
Speaker 1: Julius Caesar. I didn't, honestly, and God helped me. Nearly
Speaker 1: forty eight years of dating, I have not been a
Speaker 1: kiss and tell her I have dated. I don't know
Speaker 1: dozens in a couple of high actually thirteen, seriously, with
Speaker 1: maybe three exceptions. You don't know any of their names.
Speaker 1: One of them, now a political writer, basically lived with
Speaker 1: me for three years. I keep that confidence. So why
Speaker 1: am I telling this story violating that? Because not three
Speaker 1: months after that first date, when we were still going out,
Speaker 1: Laura Ingram asked me if she could look at a
Speaker 1: speech I was going to give it Corneill's graduation weekend
Speaker 1: and offer suggestions. This is so long ago, I literally
Speaker 1: faxed it to her. Sure enough, a couple days later,
Speaker 1: I'm watching Imus in the morning, which was televised by
Speaker 1: my network MSNBC, and there on his desk in front
Speaker 1: of him is the faxed copy of my speech, and
Speaker 1: he is reading from my facts. I could recognize the
Speaker 1: exact sequence of the vertical stripes. My cheap fax machine
Speaker 1: used to streak all my outgoing pages with Laura used
Speaker 1: to go on his show a lot, so to curry
Speaker 1: favor with Imus, she sent him the speech without asking me.
Speaker 1: As I told her that day, all bets are now off.
Speaker 1: So I've told parts of this story before, like She
Speaker 1: had been a Supreme Court clerk for Clarence Thomas, and
Speaker 1: our first date consisted of taking me on an insider's
Speaker 1: tour of the court and having me sit in his
Speaker 1: chair in tribute to him. I did not say or
Speaker 1: do anything constructive. She then cooked me the largest steak
Speaker 1: I had ever seen that did not have a rodeo
Speaker 1: cowboy riding on it, and we watched a woman later
Speaker 1: discredited because she could not keep her stories straight, go
Speaker 1: on sixty minutes and make allegations against Bill Clinton. This
Speaker 1: is my perfect date, Laura told me, seared into my memory.
Speaker 1: But the important Laura Ingram's story sitting there in the
Speaker 1: middle of all the debris. I don't think I've ever
Speaker 1: told this. The first date was only about six weeks
Speaker 1: after the then First Lady Hillary Clinton got on the
Speaker 1: Today Show and blamed the at best exaggerated scandal about
Speaker 1: her husband at Monica Lewinsky on the quote vast right
Speaker 1: wing conspiracy that is south stumpid. Laura said that night,
Speaker 1: as she showed me her small office upstairs, I expected
Speaker 1: that she was about to decry the idea that Republicans
Speaker 1: would exploit television, talk radio and the brand new Internet
Speaker 1: to try to bring down a president from the other party.
Speaker 1: And I said, so naive little boy that I was, no,
Speaker 1: not that, of course we're doing that. She was kind
Speaker 1: of offended that I doubted the conspiracy part. I explained,
Speaker 1: I'd only been covering politics for two months. At the
Speaker 1: end of the day, she said, end of the day,
Speaker 1: constantly at the end of the day, it's that vast part.
Speaker 1: It's not vast, vast right wing conspiracy. Why, I bet
Speaker 1: there's not even thirty of us. Laura Inger some men
Speaker 1: explained that she was essentially the central desk for what
Speaker 1: she called the miniature right wing conspiracy. She showed me
Speaker 1: a printed page that had the facts numbers of about
Speaker 1: two dozen people. There at the top are the sources.
Speaker 2: She said.
Speaker 1: There was Ted Olsen, the attorney, founder of the so
Speaker 1: called Arkansas Project and the husband of Barbara Olson, a
Speaker 1: constant presence as a talking head on cable news. She
Speaker 1: later died on nine to eleven. Everybody liked her. There
Speaker 1: were several numbers in the office of Independent Counsel ken Starr.
Speaker 1: One of them read b Cavanaugh. I said, who's that?
Speaker 1: She said, nobuddy impartant. The only other name I remember
Speaker 1: was Spencer Abraham, who then was a Senator from Michigan.
Speaker 1: She said, they, including the people in ken Starr's office,
Speaker 1: sent her all the rumors, the ideas, stuff about Clinton.
Speaker 1: Stuff they made up, and she distributed them to the
Speaker 1: other parts of the list. That's these numbers. One number
Speaker 1: was marked Hannity Radio, another Hannity TV. O'Reilly Radio, O'Reilly TV.
Speaker 1: There was one for Limbaugh. There was one Mark Justice Thomas,
Speaker 1: and I pointed to it. He likes to stay and farmed. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe the most important name is not on that list.
Speaker 1: That's Matt Dradge.
Speaker 2: She said.
Speaker 1: Matt Drudge used all her stuff, but he didn't want
Speaker 1: any of it to be traceable, very big on not traceable.
Speaker 1: So I never fax it to him. She said, I
Speaker 1: just give it to my brother. This is when she
Speaker 1: still liked her brother. He sees Drudge all the time.
Speaker 1: He gives the stuff to Drudge. Now, Oliver, here is
Speaker 1: my baseball collection. See, there were reasons to go out
Speaker 1: with her. At the time, I could think only of
Speaker 1: an old cartoon I had once seen. It was an
Speaker 1: octopus working in the post office, using all eight of
Speaker 1: its limbs to sort the mail. But every couple of
Speaker 1: weeks it dawns on me afresh. Then I was actually
Speaker 1: a witness to one of the earliest configurations of the machinery.
Speaker 1: And there there is no doubt today whether it is
Speaker 1: vast or miniature. It's vast, the machinery that links the
Speaker 1: right wing politicians and those who are supposed to be
Speaker 1: above the Fray, like Supreme Court justices and special prosecutors
Speaker 1: and people like that. There with the right wing publicity
Speaker 1: outlets that pretend to be news organizations like Fox and
Speaker 1: Drudge and Oaan and Newsmax, and the ones that don't
Speaker 1: even pretend, like those who succeeded Limbaugh. This machine is,
Speaker 1: in fact everything that your typical paranoid conservative, Republican fascist
Speaker 1: trumpest thinks is being run by George Soros or Bill
Speaker 1: Gates or doctor Fauci or me. You want to be
Speaker 1: able to say, there are reports or accusations about some
Speaker 1: Democrat or a liberal figure or celebrity. Well, somebody puts
Speaker 1: a rumor in at one end of the machinery, or
Speaker 1: somebody makes up a rumor at one end of the machinery.
Speaker 1: It is then sent to dozens of other people. They
Speaker 1: repeat it, voila. Suddenly there are reports. The reports then
Speaker 1: get fed back to Fox News or bright Bart or
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal or the Supreme Court, or they're
Speaker 1: just tweeted by a thousand bots simultaneously. You want to
Speaker 1: push this ancient racist, anti Semitic paranoia called the Great Replacement,
Speaker 1: but you want it to come out washed clean enough
Speaker 1: that soulless opportunists like Elis Stefanic and JD Vance can
Speaker 1: say it aloud on the campaign trail without forfeiting their candidacies.
Speaker 1: This is the machinery. And I saw the machinery when
Speaker 1: it was just a list of twenty and thirty people,
Speaker 1: And at that moment I barely recognized the importance of
Speaker 1: what I saw. Then again, I was still on that night,
Speaker 1: recovering from not just the giant's steak, but something far
Speaker 1: more visceral. Earlier that day, as we were leaving the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court, Laura Ingram had boasted about getting even with
Speaker 1: an ex boyfriend by going back into what had been
Speaker 1: their house and putting up exact copies of all the
Speaker 1: photos of the two of them together that he had
Speaker 1: taken down from his walls. And when he got smart
Speaker 1: and changed the locks, she went back again to finish
Speaker 1: the job. Found her key didn't work so naturally as
Speaker 1: you would. She stuffed his garden hose through the mail
Speaker 1: slot of his front door and turned on the outdoors
Speaker 1: spagot ten thousand dollars worth of heart. When Florence ruined,
Speaker 1: she said proudly, and part of me screamed flee flee now,
Speaker 1: I didn't flee. Later, as I tried to sleep, two
Speaker 1: noises kept me awake, snoring, not my own and Laura's dog.
Speaker 1: Laura's dog kept talking in his sleep, I mean almost
Speaker 1: in silas.
Speaker 2: Like that.
Speaker 1: It was something like twenty five degrees out and I
Speaker 1: was on the second floor. And yet I resolved that
Speaker 1: if her dog really did make that last leap to
Speaker 1: formulate actual syllables. And it turned out her dog was
Speaker 1: the one telling her what to do, I was simply
Speaker 1: going to leave by the window without bothering to open
Speaker 1: it first. The next morning, Laura and I walked her dog.
Speaker 1: We got to an empty field. She threw a tennis ball,
Speaker 1: He went and got it. She cocked her arm back again.
Speaker 1: He took off, loving life as he did. She did
Speaker 1: not throw it. He went forty to fifty sixty feet,
Speaker 1: then stopped and looked back at her with such disappointment
Speaker 1: and even a sense of betrayal, and she said, loudly,
Speaker 1: without a trace of affection for him or anything else,
Speaker 1: wait far at which is when I realized I was
Speaker 1: being courted to be the next dog. A few weeks later,
Speaker 1: back home in New York, I got home from working
Speaker 1: an early morning shift filling in for the commentator Paul
Speaker 1: Harvey at ABC Radio. I was just waking up from
Speaker 1: a tortured nap when the phone rang and it's Lara.
Speaker 1: I'm downstairs. We're going to my old law firms party
Speaker 1: at the Museum.
Speaker 2: I said.
Speaker 1: I was exhausted.
Speaker 2: We're going, or.
Speaker 1: I'll just stay here at this payphone outside your planes
Speaker 1: calling you all night.
Speaker 2: We went.
Speaker 1: The next opportunity probably was going to be me on
Speaker 1: the wrong end of a hostage drama. Turned out she
Speaker 1: was not invited to her party. We're crashing it. I'm
Speaker 1: going to drink heavily. Frankly. It was a great party.
Speaker 1: I got to meet Hillary Clinton's mother and her brother.
Speaker 1: And if you think the fascists are completely sincere about everything,
Speaker 1: even their neuroses, and they're paranoia, no, Laura Ingram hugged
Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton's mother and Hillary Clinton's brother. They seemed to
Speaker 1: be friends. Later we wound up meeting friends of her
Speaker 1: in the Oak bar at the Plaza Hotel, where she
Speaker 1: kept drinking. I was astonished. After about her sixth Cosmopolitan
Speaker 1: on top of everything she'd had at the party, she
Speaker 1: began to droop her head nodding like a bobblehead doll.
Speaker 1: Her friend said, Okay, that's it. We'll take care of
Speaker 1: the check. You take care of her. She had not
Speaker 1: gotten a hotel room or anything. And if you've ever
Speaker 1: heard of anybody who needed to be poured into a
Speaker 1: cab because they were so drunk, you don't really know
Speaker 1: what that means until you have to pour them into
Speaker 1: a cab. Frankly, I wanted to put her in a
Speaker 1: hotel somewhere, but the spectacle would have made the gossip pages.
Speaker 1: She basically could not stand up, so I took her
Speaker 1: to my apartment, put her into my bed, and I
Speaker 1: went and slept on the couch at the far end
Speaker 1: of the apartment, which is where I was hours later
Speaker 1: in the morning when she woke me up because she
Speaker 1: came parading through using my phone to call my assistant
Speaker 1: to get a car sent to my address to take
Speaker 1: her to the airport, and to make sure that everybody
Speaker 1: in my office knew she had stayed overnight at my apartment.
Speaker 1: And all I kept.
Speaker 2: Thinking was why didn't I follow my instincts. My instincts
Speaker 2: said flee, I fleed. Not, of course, if I had fled,
Speaker 2: I would have missed seeing the telephone tree of the
Speaker 2: miniature right wing conspiracy, wouldn't I?
Speaker 1: Hey, why the long face. I've done all the damage
Speaker 1: I can do here. No more plastic surgery jokes, I promise,
Speaker 1: thank you for listening, for watching. Our musical directors have
Speaker 1: Countdown are John Phillip Schaneil on keyboards and handling orchestration
Speaker 1: and Brian Ray on guitarist, bass and drums, and their
Speaker 1: work is produced by Tko Brothers. Nancy Fauss, the best
Speaker 1: baseball stadium organist ever, is responsible for the satirical and
Speaker 1: fifty musical comments, which were not included much in this
Speaker 1: program because of the new attempts to record video. I
Speaker 1: thank them all. My announcer today was my friend Larry David.
Speaker 1: The program was produced by Ted Stevie Rose and Kit
Speaker 1: and everything else was as always my fault. That's countdown
Speaker 1: for today, Day five hundred and sixty four of America
Speaker 1: held hostage again eight hundred and ninety nine days until
Speaker 1: the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame brained
Speaker 1: term unless he is removed sooner. As the result of prediction,
Speaker 1: markets and inside are trading gone mad, or perhaps the
Speaker 1: ghost of Boss Tweed. The next scheduled countdown will be
Speaker 1: I don't know, As I keep mentioning, this was done
Speaker 1: largely as a mean of gauging the stress on my
Speaker 1: recuperating and rapidly aging persona and person I hope we
Speaker 1: resume full time around Labor Day. We'll see what the
Speaker 1: doctors say. I wonder if you can bet on it
Speaker 1: until the next one, whatever that is. I'm Keith Ulerman.
Speaker 1: Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown
Speaker 1: with Keith Alderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts.