April 3, 2025 • 61 mins
SEASON 3 EPISODE 115: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: It only took Trump losing a critical election by 10 points in a state he carried last November for even HIM to figure out that Elon Musk is the best electoral friend the Democrats have right now. The White House has leaked that Elon's 130-day exemption as a "Special Government Employee" is up at the end of May and so is his time inadvertently saving democracy from the MAGA cult.
We CAN'T LET HIM LEAVE! Also, INDICT ELON! Also also, PROTECT ELON AT ALL COSTS! The reporting suggests Trump intends to keep Musk as an informal advisor and frequent White House visitor and that is great news. If Trump won't keep Musk attached to him sufficiently, we have to do it for him. ELON MUSK'S UNFAVORABILITY AMONG DEMOCRATICS IN WISCONSIN IS 97 PERCENT. Let's take that national!
OH BY THE WAY TRUMP JUST TANKED THE WORLD ECONOMY. 54% tariffs on China? 26% on India? Huge on the EU and UK? 10 percent on the people he likes? This is the day the Leopards of Wall Street discover that Trump of the Leopards Eating Faces Party is a cannibal: he eats the faces of other leopards! Also I'll explain how this whole tariff crap mainlines back to Trump's insane fixation with gold and the color gold.
MEDIA DISASTER: Bill Maher self-destructs. Stephen A. Smith thinks he's the first person to discover the Trump 3rd Term Scam. MSNBC's attempt to tank is so successful "Morning Joe" is now behind CNN in the demo.
B-Block (36:14) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Whoever let the BBC start a piece about the Myanmar Earthquake with the line "On the road to Mandalay." Ex-journalist Matt Taibbi will never testify to the House again. And Richard Carlson, at the center of transphobia, sports, TV news, Fox News, Renee Richards, and even worse things, is dead.
C-Block (49:45) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: With the New York Times reporting Chuck Todd is seeking to buy a podcast or local high school sports news company for two billion dollars, it's time for me to note that we are nearing the six year mark since I finally said "I have had enough of this idiot for one lifetime."
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Protect
(00:25):
Elon Musk at all costs, also indict Elon Musk now.
Also don't let Elon Musk leave the White House. Yeah.
I know someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and
still remain fully functional. I'm an artist. Since Tuesday night, anyway,
(00:47):
three opposing viewpoints. For two days now, I've been wondering
whether to try to get Elon Musk arrested in Wisconsin
or to send him a gift basket of ketamin and acid,
all the while fearing that Politico is right, and even
Trump now realizes Musk couldn't be helping us more if
he were actually George Soros in a Musk mask. And
(01:10):
Trump has told cabinet members they're going to phase Musk
out by the end of May. And first the Press
Secretary of Softball Scholarships denied this, but by late yesterday
the fascists were leaking it out via Murdoch's New York Post.
Musk is on the way out. No no, no, no
(01:33):
more Musk. Give him all the drugs that he can do,
because all he wants to do is all he wants
to do is dance. While wearing a cheesehead and shaking
the Trump cult out of its hypnotized coma. Sure, it's
a felony to offer people money to vote or to
(01:54):
not vote, or to vote your way. And sure he
offered two giant, one million dollar checks, and sure he
offered twenty dollars bill for selfies holding up photos of
the unabashed fascist maga judge candidate at the polling places
where it is illegal to campaign like that. On the
(02:18):
other hand, if all that didn't win us the Wisconsin
Supreme Court election, I don't know what could have. Oh wait,
maybe it was when Musk went on Fox and said,
losing this judge race has good chance of causing Republicans
to lose control of the House. You lose control of
the House, there will be non stop impeachment hearings and subpoenas.
(02:42):
And America, Real America, Democracy America heard that and said, yes,
goddamn it, yes exactly, You sir, are the son of
a bitch we've been looking for all this time. Yes,
Republicans lose the House, NonStop impeachment hearings and subpoenas. Woo
effing ooh send that man some horse. I think Elon
(03:10):
Musk doesn't really know it yet, couldn't understand it if
he did, can't intuitively process America or any polyglot society.
Is so far inside his own bubble that he never
has to confront anybody who would tell him any of this.
But he maybe our way out of Trump. What we
(03:35):
saw Tuesday night was America versus Elon Musk, Democracy versus
Elon Musk, Life versus Elon Musk. Just when the anti
Trump message has been repeated so often that it barely
registers with you and me, worn down with a decade
of that stupid son of a bitch Trump, and that
(03:57):
stupid son of a bitch Trump somehow finds an even
stupider son of a bitch named Musk, and Musk has
all of Trump's failures, us that apartheid accent and the
pastiness of the ozempic attic and the on stage rhythm
of a victim of Saint Vitas's dance. Can we run
against Elon Musk? Not only in Wisconsin? Please? Can we
(04:18):
run against Elon Musk everywhere? You know what Elon Musk's
disapproval number is among Democrats in Wisconsin? Now, it's ninety
seven percent ninety seven percent. You can't get ninety seven
percent of Democrats to agree. How to spell the word
(04:39):
Democrats ninety seven percent disapproval. He's ninety four points underwater
on approval. More Musk spending, more millions, more Musk outspending.
George sorows ten to one. I want Musk in every
House and Senate race in this country next year. I
(05:00):
want him trying to buy the school Board of Hastings
on Hudson News, New York. I want him in a
cheesehead in Wisconsin, and in foam cowboy hats in Texas,
and in Gulf of America, trucker caps near the Gulf
of Mexico. And now he may be leaving the White House,
(05:21):
there is still hope. The Musk is on the way
out story evolved this way yesterday. Yesterday morning, Politico reported
quote Trump has told his inner circle, including members of
his cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in
the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner,
(05:41):
ubiquitous cheerleader, and Washington hatchetman, and that this would be
pegged to the deadline to terminate the so called special
government employees. They're only allowed one hundred and thirty days.
That would be May thirtieth, unless the drugs were to
put somebody in suspended animation or something. I guess that, however,
(06:02):
is just the excuse. This is not tied to SGE
one hundred and thirty day limits. It's tied, in fact
to Elease Steffanic Politico again quote. Trump is increasingly mindful
of next year's midterms and making sure he doesn't jeopardize
his House majority. He's kept a careful eye on the
town haul outrage over DOGE, even as Republicans have chalked
(06:25):
those scenes up to coordinated liberal stagecraft. His discussions about
next steps for Musk came just days before he grew
so worried about the GOP's narrow House margin that he
withdrew New York Rep Elise Staffhanic's nomination to be Ambassador
to the UN. This has nothing to do with one
hundred and thirty days. This has something to do with
(06:48):
a two vote margin. By late afternoon yesterday, one Trump
minion had told another Trump minion to print in The
New York Post a story headline, the real reason behind
Elon Musk's departure from DOGE and why it was always
part of the plan. H that's the story that sentence
(07:09):
repeated again and again with different constructions, that it was
always to be four months and out. White House sources
said the plan has always been to let Musk return
to civilian life after his SGE status expires. Bullshit. This
is the first time they've mentioned this, and anyway, as
(07:31):
I said, there is hope Politico. One senior Administration official said,
Musk is likely to retain an informal role as an
advisor and continue to be an occasional face around the
White House crowds. Oh thank Jesus. Another caution that anyone
who thinks Musk is going to disappear entirely from Trump's
orbit is fooling themselves. Gat. I promise I won't fool myself.
(08:01):
Keep them around photo ops, not think of substance. Just
keep his great uncontrollable ego and his perpetual fugue state
front and center often enough that the Democrats can keep
running against him until at least the midterms. And if
Trump stops pushing Musk, if Musk stops blowing up like
(08:21):
some of his own rockets, we have to take over.
We then have to keep rebuilding the link between the
two of them, shackled to a corpse, each of them,
Musk and Trump, Musk and Trump, Trump and Musk, Trusk
and Mump, Truck and Mumps. Yeah. I want Elon Musk
(08:47):
indicted in Wisconsin because I want them all indicted in
Wisconsin and forty nine other states. I want Steven Miller
on the next plane to fing L Salvador. But more
than that, I want Elon Musk to win all our
races for us. And if he's gonna do that, he's
(09:08):
gonna need our help one way or the other in
for more still it, dude, he's gonna need that little
extra to keep him campaigning twenty four to seven. The
Trump part is easy. Just keep Trump convinced Musk is
funneling attention to Trump, and Trump will make sure he
grabs him whenever possible. But Musk himself, Musk's gonna need
(09:32):
all the drugs he can find, So won't you help?
Won't you gather all the drugs you can find and
send them on to him? More Musk all, Musk, all
the time, Musk today, Musk tomorrow, Musk forever. I want
Musk's face with that crooked eyes unfocused. The stuff just
(09:55):
kicked in smirk of his visible at every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, headhouse, outhouse, doghouse,
white house in America. In mind of the first ten
(10:35):
minutes of today's podcast, I would like to point out
that I was the breaking news anchor for MSNBC, and
for one week about twenty years ago, every night I
was on for six hours talking about how the pope
was dying. Not with that inflection, all right, let me
explain some of the other headlines. Briefly. Trump's day of
Liberation actually means his liberation from paying taxes. That is
(10:58):
the substance to this, though the root cause in Trump's
brain dead head for tariffs is far dumber. Ten percent
tariffs on all training partners, fifty four percent on China,
twenty four percent for the European Union, which Trump still
thinks is a country, twenty six on India, et cetera.
After hours, Gee whiz, who would have expected this? The
(11:21):
market crashed, which is not just the standard response from
betrayed Trump's supporters. I didn't expect him to eat my face.
This is something beyond that. This is other leopards learning
that the leopard eating faces party are also cannibals and
will eat leopards faces too. This will not end well
(11:45):
for Trump, and just how not well, we will get
an idea very quickly. I might actually watch the opening
bell of the stock market for the first time in
my life, just to see if some fascists CEO unfurls
(12:06):
a flag that reads impeach Trump today, tariffs or madness.
Of course, they will destroy tourism to this country, probably
raise domestic prices five to ten percent, kill international trade,
destroy American farming, worldwide depression absolutely possible now. And the
(12:27):
ultimate reason for doing this as he learned to mimic
human behavior, which is, as we know, not natural to Trump.
Trump obviously and very early on in his existence, became
fixated with the idea and the color of gold. He
doesn't really understand gold. He does not know the difference
(12:48):
between gold and gold plate, or gold plastic and gold rustolium,
which is why his buildings look like that's so cheap,
and why his bronzer looks so bad, and why his
hair looks so fake. That's one of the reasons people
who knew him believed in the pee tape. The color
(13:13):
so the eighteen nineties he found out and apparently relatively
recently or he just remembered it recently. Were called the
Gilded age guilded gold cupboard, and it sort of looks
like the word gold guild, gold, gold, guild, gold good,
(13:33):
eighteen nineties good, eighteen nineties gold rich, super rich. No
taxes in the eighteen nineties, only tariffs. So bring back tariffs,
big tariffs, big beautiful tariffs, bingo fifty four percent tariff
on Chinese goods, because this human like multi celled parasite
once learned gold good. Okay, the disappearing by our government
(14:00):
of Kilmar Abrego, Garcia. They sent a man who was
legally entitled to be here, whom this country in fact
ruled during Trump's first presidency. We were protecting from going
back to El Salvador because he would be tortured and
killed there, and Trump sent him back because of what
they now claim is a clerical error by Ice, which
it cannot correct because it can't force El Salvador to
(14:22):
return him, which is bullshit, because all it has to
do is threaten to cut the money off going to
the corrupt Al Salvador strong man, and mister Abrego will
be home for breakfast. And if Tom Holman and Pete
Hegseth and the insufferable child JV. Vance and that inflatable
rubber device known as Christy Nome claim they can't extract him,
(14:45):
you go to them and you say you get him
back or you have to go get him personally. They
are still doing this deliberately to that man and others
because it's part of the plan and there is no
legal retribution against these scumbags, especially this deviant flotation device.
No home. That will be too extreme and it will
(15:07):
come soon or late. Hope you got a good look
at that prison. Christy or mister Abrigo was in line
looking for day labor in twenty nineteen and the cops
picked him up and they claimed a confidential informant who
may or may not have ever existed, said he was
(15:27):
in the MS thirteen gang in another state in which
the man never lived. And they claim this because he
was wearing Chicago Bulls clothing, which is really bad news
for like Michael Jordan, I want Tom Holman and Christy
Noman JD. Vance who was still slandering this man. I
want them in the El Salvador in prison instead of
(15:49):
mister Abrigio and in twenty twenty nine, I want the
President to say, oh, while they're in there now, I'm sorry,
there's nothing we can do about getting them back. They're
out of our control now, the president twenty twenty nine,
President Booker, Sure, that's fine. President Okasio Cortes, President President.
Whoever is narking on Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth, I'll
(16:12):
take him. That is not over. Leaks last week about
Hegzeth bringing the wife to sensitive international intelligence meetings, Leaks
this week about Waltz and staff using Gmail for technical
conversations and for his schedule. Once again, amateurs like Waltz
and Hegseeth don't realize that your schedule tells the spies
(16:34):
when you will be somewhere and when other people will
be somewhere, in case you know they want to blow
you up or just to access all the places you
won't be. And don't tell me that your Gmail is secure.
I once heard from the Gmail people that the Russian
State actors had hacked my Gmail. Waltz and Hegseth is
(17:00):
not over, and the third term stuff is not over.
Again a reminder, this is not going to be a
bid to let any president get a third term. This
will only be Trump, not Obama, not Clinton, not Bush,
just Trump and Grover Cleveland, who's been dead since nineteen
to eight, whether on the non consecutive terms bullshit or
(17:24):
some other bullshit. Sam Alito dreams up and Lawrence tribe
has another hole in the defensive line. They can drive
a mac truck through, just to haunt your dreams a
little further, quoting him. Anyone discounting a third Trump term
per the twenty second Amendment and the twelfth Amendment is
thinking magically. The twenty second doesn't bar serving a third term,
only being elected three times. The twelfth doesn't bar running
(17:48):
for VP unless ineligible to serve as president. But Trump
isn't ineligible qed. So like last year, the easiest scenario
Trump runs, says, try and stop me, and his Supreme
Court doesn't. And Trump can almost taste this. I mean,
(18:11):
listen to him. He's dying to say it.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
You we're not joking about a third term, about possibly
planning a third term? Does that mean you're not planning
to leave Amason.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
I'm not looking at that, but I'll tell you I
have had more people asking me do have a third term,
which is in a way at the fourth term because
the other election, the twenty twenty election, was totally rigged,
So it's actually sort of a fourth term in a
certain way. I just don't want the credit for the
second because Biden was so bad. He did such a
man job, and I think that's one of the reasons
(18:44):
that I'm popular.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
If you wander the truth and from what passes for
our news media and our serene political discourse, Bill Maher
has lost whatever small amount of self control he had left.
(19:05):
Oh my god, just as mar is killing off every
last one of his fans with his tiny, bare hands,
Bill thinks he's some kind of healing deity from Fox
and the statesman who made all this happen, Ambassador kid Rock.
(19:29):
Trump took mar at the White House Monday night to
see the Lincoln bedroom and to see a copy of
the Gettysburg Address. Bill, I hate to break this to
you at this late date, but as a member of
the class of Cornell seventy nine, and you as a
member of the class of Cornell seventy eight, you do
(19:50):
know that Cornell has had a copy of the Gettysburg
Address hand copied by Lincoln at the request of Ambassador
George Bancroft. They've had it since the nineteenth century. Was
in a house at Cornell Bancroft's grandson, and then they
bought it back and it was donated and they keep
it right now under URIs Library and they show it
(20:11):
to classes at Cornell, but of course you never went
to class, and they also show it though they show
it to alumni. They like, Oh okay, ego, trip over.
This is the operative part from Fox. Kid Rock said
that he told mar before the meeting some of this
Hollywood stuff, it would be great for you to get
(20:31):
thrown out, probably be great for you to double down.
You know, I can't stand this guy, mar kid Rock said,
told him, I'm not going to sabotage something that could
potentially bring us and other people together. Oh my god,
it's the beginning of the predicted two thousand years of
(20:52):
universal peace when Bill Maher and Donald Trump are brought
together and they unzip and stage an actual battle with
their tiny little egos. And I'm going to to advertize
something that could potentially bring other people together. There, Oh god, Bill,
(21:15):
for crying out loud. If you just tell the truth
and say, look, my new boss is this idiot david'saz
lab of Warner Bros. Discovery and the fascists who now
own CNN and HBO and him. And if I don't
go as far pro Trump as I can, they'll fire
me and they'll replace me with with Chris Cuomo or
somebody who's an even bigger whore than I am. Just
(21:37):
admit it and we go fine, we got it. Go ahead,
nobody's watching anyway. Chris Cuomo on stage on Long Island
with what used to be Bill O'Reilly and the new
giant of American political analysis, Stephen A. Smith. Three Americans.
(21:57):
They called this. This is how little Stephen A. Smith
knows of the world going on around him. He attacked
Bill O'Reilly on stage, which, trust me, was pretty much
exhausted by the year twenty eleven. Quote. You and I
hey got into it when we were on Cuomo's show
(22:17):
a couple of weeks ago. Steve Bannon comes on national
television with a straight face first and then smirk thereafter,
talking about violating the Constitution of the United States, the
twenty second Amendment two terms. He said three. Chris Cromo says, yo,
you understand what the twenty second amendment says right. He said, yeah, No,
we're working on it. Everybody just glosses over it. That's right, Steven,
(22:42):
everybody's been glossing over it. No, but nobody's been talking
about Trump's claims plots to get a third term. Nobody's
been mentioning this other than all of us who've been
saying it since twenty fifteen, or the actual movement within
the conservative ranks and the quote unquote scholarly reinterpretations of
the twenty second Amendment that began on the far rid
(23:05):
in twenty twenty three to get them a third term.
Just you, you're the first one who noticed. Steven also
reports there's something called the National Basketball Association. Thank you
for mentioning that, Stephen. None of the rest of us
new although I'm beginning to smell a new host for
HBO Real Time with Steven A. Smith, or put them
(23:32):
on MSNBC in the mornings, God knows it's that, or
cartoons in black and white from Oliver Darcy's status. The
quarter one ratings are in for cable news. MSNBC averaged
one point two million viewers in prime time, down eighteen
(23:55):
percent year over year. CNN averaged five hundred and fifty
eight thousand viewers in prime down six percent over the
same period. One interesting nugget. I'm told that CNN's News
Central beat MSNBC's Morning Joe in the Advertiser coveted at
twenty five to fifty four demographic for the first time
(24:17):
since twenty twenty two, a sign Oliver is really in
self control. Here a sign that the Joe Scarborough and
Mika Brazinski led show still hasn't recovered after the marri
Lago pilgrimage aimed at cozying up to Trump. Let me
give you a quick pro tip. It's not going to recover.
(24:39):
They're going to have to fire Joe Scarborough, or at
least bring in a new Joe Scarborough, somebody else playing
the role of Joe Scarborough, Caul Lawrence, o'donald, Joe Scarborough.
Who will notice the difference except Mika. Maybe. The Morning
Joe ratings have always been bad. They are what a
(25:02):
loss leader. That's a very niche audience. Everybody in that
niche It's like the White House Correspondence dinner with more
lights and better food. I might add that's true, but
below CNN, this is how bad it is. I have
been in television since nineteen eighty one. I started at
(25:23):
CNN in nineteen eighty one, in its second full year,
And as I'm reading this, I went, wait, CNN's morning
show is called News Central. Since when I didn't even
know the name of the show, and it's now beating
Morning Joe. The name of the CNN Morning show could
have been CNN Tonight, and I would have went, oh,
(25:46):
it's awesome, it's novel below. CNN is amazing, but the
MSNV Morning Show is not sufficient to explain the overall
collapse here. Averaging one point zero two million in primetime
(26:08):
total viewers in primetime, that's like what we were doing
in two thousand and four. The new company and whoever
is buying it or going to buy it wants this.
That's the point. They're tanking it. They're tanking it the
way Warner Bros. Tanked CNN and Mar whether he knows
(26:33):
it or not, the way Mar is tanking. There's one
more move MSNBC can make to seal the deal. Now.
It's not Stephen A. Smith. I think he should be
doing the CBS Evening News. Actually Chuck Todd in the mornings.
I'm serious, No, I'm not serious. But there was a
New York Times story yesterday about Chuck a scoop they claimed.
(26:56):
I've read it three times. I still don't get it, though.
I think now, if you told me that Chuck Todd
has spent all this time writing all those bad headlines
in the New York those both sidesist headlines, I would
believe you. And the payoff was this thirteen fourteen paragraph
story about I still don't know what this story is about. Quote.
(27:16):
After leaving the corporate home of Meet the Press in January,
he got fired. Mister Todd is embarking on a career
as a media entrepreneur. He has a podcast and a
YouTube channel. I've had a podcast for two and a
(27:37):
half years. I've had a YouTube channel for five years.
And guess what I am not. I'm not a media entrepreneur.
I have a podcast and a YouTube channel. This makes
me part of the majority in this country. I believe.
He has a podcast and a YouTube channel and plans
to hire other hosts for a podcast and video network
(28:00):
focused on politics and culture. He also said that he
was working with an advisor from a major financial firm
to build or acquire a company focused on community news.
Mister Todd's business plan, the Times goes on, calls for
a constellation of local sites owned by their communities, like
(28:21):
his beloved Green Bay Packers, and anchored by coverage of
local youth sports, local ute sports utes. The growing popularity
of athletics and their importance to families who view them
(28:42):
as a gateway to college make them an ideal subject
to build around. No matter your politics, mister Todd said,
you care about local coverage of your child's latest game.
Like all parents. Chuck thinks everybody else is also a parent.
The number of kids in scholastic sports in this country
(29:04):
is approximate lee one hundred and seventy five million. No,
it's eight million, eight million kids high school and grammar
school sports and college eight million. If a quarter of
all parents of scholastic athletes in this country use Chuck's
(29:26):
network of websites, that's four million people. If it's a brilliant,
almost total success, the ceiling is four million people. Maybe.
And here is here is what he thinks that's worth.
Quote mister Todd and the bank he is working with
there eyeing a purchase that could cost up to two
(29:50):
billion dollars. He said. He declined to say whether he
had lined up any backers or specify the company they
were looking at, but he ruled out major newspaper publishers.
(30:15):
You know what major newspapers you could get for two
billion dollars, all of them. That's two billion dollars for
podcasts or websites about high school sports scores or podcasts
where the first guest is as his first podcast guest
(30:36):
was John Fetterman. Couldn't get Chris Cuomo and Steven A.
Smith two billion dollars for podcasts, Chuck for two billion dollars,
you better be getting two billion podcasts. Ah. Also of interest,
(30:59):
here we're going to talk about Chuck. I'm going to
talk about Chuck about when I hit the wall and
had enough of him. It's going on six years now.
I'm very proud I was a trendsetter because this is
the way he thinks. He thinks he can get two
billion dollars to go into this new field of podcasting
about high school sports. Everybody has a kid playing sports.
(31:26):
Also Ahead, one of the worst human beings of the
twentieth century is now dead. He transcends the stories of transphobia, politics, sports, fascism, television,
News Renee Richards and Tucker Carlson. He's part of all
of those stories and he's dead. And I unapologetically say
(31:49):
I'm glad because I'm a believer in for whom the
Bill tolds. But I will remain until my death unconvinced
this guy was ever actually for one minute, a human being.
That's next. This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith
(32:10):
Alberman still ahead. In this new edition of Countdown. Well,
(32:35):
I mentioned Chuck Todd podcast billionaire. He owns a mansion
and a yacht. He's going to start a two billion
dollar podcast network based on high school sports scores or something.
I wasn't quite clear. And I read the article one
hundred and thirteen times, but it has to be true.
(32:58):
It's in the New York Times. And I think we
finally now know who's been writing all those headlines in
the New York Times the few plague years. It's been
Chuck Todd. Have I ever told you my Chuck Todd story?
Actually I have, Well a fat I'm gonna tell it
to you again in Things I promised not to tell
(33:19):
next first, believe it or not, there's still more new
idiots to talk about. The roundup of the miscrants, morons
and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute the latest other
Worst Persons in the World. Here are the nominees the
Bronze Worst BBC News. Now I'm kind of soft pedaling
this because if I thought it was not an accident,
(33:41):
just one of those things, I would have led the
show with it. As you know, there are at least
twenty five hundred people dead in me on Mar after
the horrible earthquake that was so destructive at knockdown buildings
in Thailand, one of the most affected cities in me
on Mar, and details are still being withheld by the
(34:01):
military dictatorship. There is Mandalay. If you know anything about Mandalay.
If you've heard the name of the city of Mandalay,
it's probably from a song. There is a Rudyard Kipling
poem on the Road to Mandalay from eighteen ninety that
they set to music twenty years later, and it is
(34:23):
classic British imperialist cornball nonsense, with lyrics centered around on
the Road to Mandalay. I won't say the whole thing,
but it's on the Road to Mandalay where the flying
Fishies play and the dawn comes up like thunder outer
China crossed the Bay on the road to Mandalay. Then
(34:48):
there was another song called the Road to Mandalay by
Robbie Williams, like twenty years ago, and the same lyric
is in that totally different context on the Road to Mandalay.
So this is the key to the thing that there
are songs that have been sung for literally one hundred
and fifteen years that have this lyric on the Road
(35:11):
to Mandalay. So the BBC's otherwise extraordinary report, including hard
to smuggle out video of mean mar after the earthquake.
Their report on Tuesday from their correspondent somehow reporting from
behind the lines, opened with that reporter narrating video of
(35:31):
the destruction that was shot from a moving vehicle, and
he began with the opening line was on the road
to Mandalay. And I've bet a million viewers worldwide involuntarily
thought where the flying fishies play. It's not what you
(35:52):
want to think during a terrible earthquake aftermath, but there
it is. As I said, I'm sure it had to
have been accidental. So I'm leaving the reporter's name out,
but somebody still should said no, no, just erase that
opening line or cut out the on, so he just
says the road to Mandalay. I mean, that's kind of
(36:16):
an invocation of the line, but it's not. I'm going
to start this tragic story with a quotation from a
song from two songs to be fair, As I said,
I'm sure it's an accident. The reporter, not a native
English speaker, was in fact on the road to Mandalay.
(36:40):
The runner up worser Matt Taibi, who has no such excuse.
You remember him when he was an independent journalist before
he became a stooge for Elon Musk, who then did
Musk's bidding, then got banished by Musk, and is now
on the fringes of right wing conspiracy theory. It's a shame.
He was a good kid. He did good work for
me on Countdown. His dad was a great reporter. He's
(37:01):
turned into like Joe paranoia. In a great illustration of
what democrats should do when the fascists stage their show
hearings in Congress over bullshit, California Congressman Sidney Kamliger Dove
decided to have Matt tayebe for lunch here. They have
(37:21):
called him to testify, as they turned the first hearing
of the sub Committee on South and Central Asia into
instead hearing on how conservatives are censored. This is the
fifth of these hearings they've already had into how they
never get to talk at hearings. After this from Congresswoman
(37:44):
Kamlegger Dove, I don't think Matt Tayibi will be willing
to testify at any more of these goddamned hearings.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Majority is relitigating a made up conspiracy theory about a
part of the State Department that no longer exists. To
distract from the dumpster fire foreign policy. This administration is
per suing and elevating a serial sexual harasser as their
star witness in the process. Mister Chair, I request unanimous
(38:13):
consent to enter into the record two articles about the
Republican witness, Matt Taybee. The first is a Chicago Reader
article entitled twenty years ago in Moscow, Matt Taybe was
a misogynist a whole and possibly worse, and a Washington
Post article titled the two expat bros Who terrorized women
correspondence in Moscow with out ob check. This hearing could
(38:37):
not be more out of touch with the concerns of
everyday Americans. People's retirement savings are being decimated as Trump's
arbitrary temper tariffs tank the stock market. They are staring
down the barrel of cuts to their Social Security and
Medicare because the Republican majority wants to give a tax
break to billionaires like Elon Musk, who have deep financial
(38:58):
ties to our adversaries. Meanwhile, Trump is siding with Putin,
against our national security interests, and risking the lives of
American soldiers. In a signal group chat, I've been to
the State Department, and I do have concerns about censorship.
Censorship of the employees who are terrified to say the
wrong thing, to say anything, or have the wrong word
(39:19):
in their job title, and be terminated by an administration
that publicly relishes punishing people for their speech. If we
want to talk about censorship, we should begin with Trump's
unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and rule of law.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Hey, Matt, we're all those clippings in the Twitter files, hobro.
We'll help you scoop the rest of your reputation up
with this spoon in this terreen and you can just
carry it out with you, but the winner the worst
a man named Richard Carlson. You've never heard of Richard Carlson,
but a long time ago he was a scumbag posing
(39:55):
as a journalist in TV in California, mostly San Diego
and La. As The New York Times noted the other day,
Carlson quote collaborated with another journalist, Lance Brisson, on an
expose for Look Magazine in nineteen sixty nine that accused
Mayor Joseph Alioto of San Francisco of having ties to
mafia figures. Mister Alioto sued Looks owner Cowell's Communications for libel.
(40:20):
In nineteen seventy seven, six years after Look magazine had folded,
and following four trials in federal court, a judge awarded
mister Alioto three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in damages.
Mister Carlson and brister Berson were not defendants. In nineteen
seventy five, mister Carlson exposed a transgender automobile executive on
(40:42):
TV in Los Angeles, even though the real story was
all the lies about her claims about her special car
that got I don't know seventy miles per gallon so
She sued two and when Carlson testified against her, he
continually referred to this woman as he and him after
he got fired in La After that he had to
(41:04):
move down to San Diego as a sportscaster. Somebody told
him that the doctor who had just won a local
women's tennis tournament was also transgender, so he phoned her
and said he was going to expose her on his sportscast.
She replied, mister Carlson, I am a private person. You
can't do that. He replied, doctor Richards, you were until
(41:25):
you won that tournament in La Joya yesterday. She pleaded
with him to respect her privacy. He went on the
air anyway and announced a man has just won the
La Joya women's tennis tournament. She hurriedly called a news
conference and had to explain not just her story to
the media, but the promise of and premissive transsexuals and
(41:46):
transgenders as a whole, because then people didn't really understand
what it was all about. Her name is doctor Renee Richards,
and to this day she remains not only one of
the very best doctors I've ever had the privilege to consult,
she's eyes specialist, although she just retired at the age
of ninety. Eye muscles and eye muscle surgery the best
(42:07):
in the world, probably, I've known her forty three years.
But she's also one of the best and funniest people
I've ever known, And she taught me more about what
it is like when one of us does a story
on somebody taught me, Yeah, it's my story, but guess what,
it's their life. You've got to try to consider that.
I am happy to say I had the privilege of
(42:29):
informing Renee Richards that Richard Carlson is now dead. He
died March twenty fourth. She was dignified and restrained and
did not even make a big deal out of the
fact that she won. I did. Maybe she didn't because
she and the rest of the world knew that this bad, unqualified, unprincipled, unsuccessful,
(42:51):
hate filled dead bastard did something even worse than involuntarily
outing transsexual women and then trying to make up excuses
for some public right to know for doing so. About
ten Richard Carlson did something worse than that, because Richard
Carlson was the father of Tucker Carlson, probably more of
(43:14):
a fascist and probably more unhinged and dangerous even than
his sick, dead father. I would add that under ordinary circumstances,
it is disturbing to feel oneself expressing anything but sadness
at the death of another human being or at the
mourning of those humans they have left behind. But you
would first have to convince me that Richard and Tucker
(43:36):
Carlson were ever human beings before I would feel that way.
I feel none of what I normally do, none of
this for whom the bell tolls stuff that bell is
not tolling for me. Richard Carlson left television a year
after he outed Renee. He later told San Diego Magazine
(43:57):
that he considered television news quote insipid, sophomoric, and superficial. Oddly,
that's a pretty good summary of his life, and his
sons put it this way. Renee Richards was twice the
man that Richard Carlson ever was, and probably two hundred
times the woman. Richard Dick Carlson, and the name Dick
(44:20):
was just a remarkable coincidence. I will note that though
he died on March twenty fourth, his son announced it
over last weekend, and it got wide public play this
past Monday, which was the National Transgender Day of Visibility.
Revenge is a dish which people of taste prefer to
(44:44):
eat cold. Dick Carlson Today's worst person in the world. Well,
not really. He's not here anymore, is he. So at
least that corner of this country is now better. It
(45:15):
is unlikely that you have ever been able to do
anything about Chuck Todd, so I wanted to tell you
of the day that I did do something about him.
That day was August eleventh, twenty nineteen. I knew Chuck
for about fifteen years, early in his career, when he
was with the DC Insider publication the Hotline. He was
a frequent guest on Countdown, and in two thousand and seven,
(45:37):
when Tim Russert was thinking of hiring him at NBC News,
mine was one of dozens of temperatures Tim took. As
Chuck later wrote to me, quote, you certainly were a
tremendous advocate and cheerleader for me over the years, and
I don't forget that. Yeah, well that wasn't true. He
forgot it, all right, But I'm veering away from the
main story. In two thousand and eight, a couple of
(45:57):
Washington political types started a fantasy football league. If you
don't think fantasy football leagues are important, you should know
that last spring, a major league baseball player in uniform
walked up to another Major League baseball player in uniform
on a Major League baseball field with thousands of people
(46:18):
already in the stands, and he slapped him in the
face over a roster move that the second player had
made in their fantasy football league. The second guy had
managed to retain the rights to an injured player, and
the first guy was upset about this. So six months
after their fantasy season ended, this major league baseball player
(46:38):
walked up and slapped the other Major League baseball player.
If slaps or duels or kidnappings are not everyday occurrences
in fantasy football, they do represent the kind of baseline
intensity of the thing. So when I and others were
approached about this Washington centric league in two thousand and eight,
it was already a big deal, even before we were
(47:00):
all sworn to secrecy, because a spot in the league
was being for some DC guy named Barack Obama. It
turned out he did not join our league, some excuse
about too much work, when obviously he was just afraid
of my fantasy football skills. But some people in his
white house did join the league, and I still will
(47:21):
not identify them, because the premise of this league was
the first rule of fantasy football club is you do
not talk about fantasy football club. I will say that
Chuck Todd, like me, was an original player. We call
ourselves owners because we are nuts and it's a fantasy.
It's in the title Fantasy Football Fantasy Football Owners. And
one year, I think it was twenty ten, I had
(47:42):
assembled in this league, mostly by accident, a team that
was almost perfect. It literally lost one game all season,
and that was in the middle of the year to
Chuck Todd's team. And the night after I lost to
Chuck Todd's team, he was giving a speech I think
at the University of Virginia, and witnesses called to tell
me that he began his speech by saying, I have
(48:05):
much to tell you, but first I have to tell
you that I am in a fantasy football league with
Keith Lderman, and he has a great team this year,
and this week I upset him by a final score
of one hundred forty three to one hundred and forty
one or whatever the score was. I thought it was
pretty dumb. But by twenty ten, Chuck was the NBC
News White House correspondent, and we all cringed whenever we
(48:25):
saw he was going to be on with one of
us on MSNBC. See, some people respond well to pressure
and success, and some people do not, and some people
become entirely different people. So when Chuck violated the prime
directive of this fantasy football league and talked about it,
I shrugged. The other guys in the league did not.
(48:46):
Chuck was actually punished. The commissioner of the league ordered
that he had to skip his fourth choice in the
following year's player draft. Chuck was berefed. He believed this
would destroy his chances. He apologized to me every week,
and finally I said, you know, guys, maybe this is
too much. And as the supposed victim in the equation,
(49:06):
I got final say and Chuck got to keep his
fourth draft choice. By twenty sixteen, Chuck was because Tim
Russeer died, Tom Brokaw retired, and David Gregory flamed out.
Chuck was the host of Meet the Press. He was
also political director of NBC News, another part of Russer's
old portfolio, but whereas Tim was a master who could
(49:27):
convince the Republicans, he was ordering that I be punished
for what I said, when in fact he would be
calling me and asking me what stupid, meaningless thing I
could think of to tell the Republicans. He was punishing
me with or four. He was sublime, subtlety, not Chuck.
No subtlety there. In twenty sixteen, Chuck was preparing to
(49:48):
not name my ex lib in girlfriend Katie Turr as
the new NBC White House correspondent, even though she had
suffered as the primary NBC correspondent covering the Trump campaign,
and out of nowhere, Chuck emails me that he's going
to be in New York and he wants to take
me to dinner. I had known him more than a
decade by then, we had never as much as shared
(50:08):
pieces of the same pizza. I had not seen him
in the flesh in more than five years, and I
knew as we sat down that Chuck's idea was to
get me to tell Katie that she was not going
to be White House correspondent so he did not have to.
He kept bringing it up, what do you think Katie
would think? And then I'd switch the topic to fantasy football,
and then he'd say, but let me ask you about
(50:30):
Katie in the White House job. We did this for
ninety minutes, and finally I said, Okay, Chuck, I've avoided
it long enough. Maybe I could call her and soften
the blow for her. And that's when he said, well,
I'm going back to DC tonight, so if I want
to catch that last train, I better leave. Bye. Chuck
is not subtle. I'll spare you the other crap from
(50:52):
the fantasy league. Suffice to say, I was reminded of
how annoyingly and obviously he used to conduct himself when
I read that last May, one of Chuck's guest bookers
for the now no longer on TV Meet the Press Daily, Joe,
had emailed the office of Alaska Congressman Don Jung, hoping
to get Young to appear the next day, which would
have been the ultimate great guest get because Don Jung
(51:13):
had died two months earlier. Anyway, this fantasy football league
was fun and unique in that there had only been
one change in its composition in all that time. Chuck's
team defeated mine in the Fantasy Football super Bowl one year,
and mostly he was just annoying, like he was on
the air, nothing worse than that. And then on June nineteenth,
(51:36):
twenty nineteen, Representative Alexandria Ocazio Cortes AOC ripped the Trump
administration's migrant policies. She said, quote, the United States is
running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is
exactly what they are. They are concentration camps. End quote.
Chuck went on MSNBC and said the following in response, quote,
you can call our government's detention of migrants many things,
(51:57):
depending on how you see it. It's a stain on
our nation, maybe a necessary evil to others to deal
with an unten situation, perhaps, but do you know what
you can't call it. Chuck then played the clip of
AOC calling it concentration camps, and Chuck resumed, if you
want to criticize the shameful treatment of people at our
southern border, fine, you'll have plenty of company, but be
(52:18):
careful comparing them to Nazi concentration camps, because they're not
at all comparable. In the slightest A lot of people
me included, were stunned. Ocasio Cortes never mentioned the Nazis
and concentration camps did not begin with the Nazis or Hitler.
They began with the British in the Boer War in
(52:39):
South Africa at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Yet here was Chuck putting a word in her mouth,
and that word was Nazi, and then he attacked her
for something she never said. He lied about her. He lied,
Chuck Todd made it up on the news. I was
furious enough to email him that night. I thought by
now somebody at NBC would have pointed out that concentration
(53:01):
camps and Nazi death camps are not the same. But no,
NBC had simply tweeted out the clip of Chuck lying
about the congresswoman and putting the word Nazi in her mouth,
as if it were something NBC News should be proud of.
Chuck was furious at me. He emailed back, quote, come on,
(53:22):
own up, that she invoked the wrong image and should
have simply walked the imagery back. And I wrote him
back that the person who had to walk back imagery
here was him, since he had said Nazi and she
had not said Nazi. On my angriest day, he now replied,
I'd like to think I treated you with more respect
than this. Sad I feel like we won't recover from this,
and we had recovered from a lot. I wrote back
(53:45):
to Chuck that we weren't going to recover from anything
if he insisted that all concentration camps were Nazi death
camps and that somebody who never said Nazis owed somebody
else an apology for what not saying Nazis. There was
no getting past the reality that Chuck had no idea
that he was one hundred percent in the wrong here,
historically wrong, factually wrong, ethically wrong, not a leg to
(54:09):
stand on. So I of course began to contemplate the
year ahead in fantasy football. I couldn't face it. I'm sorry,
I let real life and fantasy sports mix, and I
just I just couldn't spend another autumn having to deal
with Chuck Todd. Chuck had often said that he was
(54:30):
now just too busy to play in the league anymore,
and he would have to leave it this year. So
on August eleventh, twenty nineteen, more in sadness than an anger,
I asked the commissioner of the league if Chuck was
coming back for the twenty nineteen season. I don't know,
maybe not, was the answer. I said, Look, this is
not him or me. I'm not asking you to not
(54:52):
let him come back. It's not like that. But if
he tells you one way or the other, let me know,
because I just can't stand another year of him. He
takes all the fun of it out of it for me.
I understand, said the commissioner. It's a but why do
it if it's not fun. At eight am on the
morning of August fourteenth, twenty nineteen, the official email notifying
everybody of the new fantasy football season went out. I
(55:15):
was not listed among the players. Nineteen minutes later, I
got an email from Chuck Todd's subject line, it's just
a game content quote just play. I won't speak to you,
and please do me the same courtesy. Grow the f
up and know I am not editing this. He really wrote,
grow the f up. I wrote back that I thought
(55:36):
he'd become part of the problem that imperils our nation
and I didn't want to have anything more to do
with him. I ended it with quote, do not contact
me again. At ten thirteen am, he contacted me again. Amazing,
how you believe what you believe about me? I'm sorry
for ever helping you get credibility. I did not reply.
(55:56):
At ten eighteen, he wrote me again again, I'm happy
to never speak with you again. I'd prefer to pretend
you don't exist. Don't make me care about you. No, boy,
when Chuck Todd asks you to not make him care
about you, you are in deep and dangerous waters. Boy.
Another Chuck email at ten twenty nine, you are truly
a tiny little man. I don't even feel sorry for
(56:18):
you anymore. You have done this to yourself, and here
I made a mistake. I did not ask him what
he felt sorry for me about and what I had
done to myself. I assume it was about losing the
twenty eighteen Fantasy Football super Bowl to him At eleven
oh nine, another email quote, you deliberately misinterpreted what I
said shot first, and then rationalized the mistaken shot with
(56:41):
some convoluted, full of bleef explanation. This presumably was the
silly little detail about him lying and saying Representative Ocasio
Cortes had referred to Nazi concentration camps. Then he wrote
that what she said quote evokes Gash Chambers, and I
think that's where we should leave it. A fantasy sports
(57:03):
league is just a fantasy sports league, And having been
in various kinds of them since nineteen good God eighty five,
I often wonder if they aren't a kind of therapeutic,
cathartic pressure valve for our inner demons. I do know this.
You find out a lot about the other people in
a fantasy sports league. So when that baseball player slapped
(57:26):
the other baseball player over the reserve running back that
he kept on his roster, and most people said, I
just don't understand why he slapped him, I said, oh,
I understand why he slapped him. Chuck Todd, billionaire. I've
(57:57):
done all the damage I can do here. Thank you
for listening. Brian Ray and John Phillip Scheneil, the musical
directors have Countdown, arranged, produced, and performed of our music.
Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray was on
the guitars, bass and drums. It was produced by Tko Brothers.
Our Satirical on fifty. Musical comments are by the best
baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is
(58:19):
the Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren
Davis and courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Other music arranged and
performed by the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today
was my friend Kenny Maine. Everything else was, as ever,
pretty much my fault one plug before I go on
(58:40):
October seventh of this year, at eleven fifteen pm Eastern daylight,
it will be the exact fiftieth anniversary of the day
I made my debut on an actual radio station that
people paid money to put commercials on. WVBRFM, the student owned,
student run commercial station at Cornell, now the community owned
(59:03):
commercial stateation of Cornell and Ithaca, New York and Tompkins County,
and the World Online operating from the palatial Olberman Cornelius
Studios on East Buffalo Street, Ithaca, New York. And if
October seventh is my fiftieth anniversary, that means that this Saturday,
April fifth is the date that my friend John Rudan
(59:26):
is celebrating his fiftieth anniversary hosting wvbr's oldie show Rock
and Remnants. Only John was able to keep his show
on WVBR, whereas Mind was canceled in nineteen seventy nine.
So congrats, John, You're a better man than I am,
and I hope that's a new windbreaker by now Rock
and remnants the Big Five. Oh Saturday Night WVBRFM. Be there, Aloha.
(59:55):
That's countdown for today, Just one three hundred and eighty
nine days until the scheduled end of his lame duck
and lame brained term, unless Musk removes him sooner. Please
don't move Musk Trump, Please leave Musk. Put him out
there every day, have him stand next to you during
the speeches, have him there all the time, all the time.
We want him there all the time. Seven ninety seven
(01:00:17):
percent disapproval in Wisconsin, ninety seven percent. The next scheduled
countdown is Monday, or as we're calling it here, Musk Day.
Tuesday is also going to be Musk Day. Wednesday will
be Musk Day. You get the point. As always, bulletins,
as the news warrants, remember im peach Trump. It won't
(01:00:37):
work now, it will win the Democrats the midterms, if
there are midterms, if they're just Musk terms. Until next time,
I'm Keith Overman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(01:01:13):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Protect
(00:25):
Elon Musk at all costs, also indict Elon Musk now.
Also don't let Elon Musk leave the White House. Yeah.
I know someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and
still remain fully functional. I'm an artist. Since Tuesday night, anyway,
(00:47):
three opposing viewpoints. For two days now, I've been wondering
whether to try to get Elon Musk arrested in Wisconsin
or to send him a gift basket of ketamin and acid,
all the while fearing that Politico is right, and even
Trump now realizes Musk couldn't be helping us more if
he were actually George Soros in a Musk mask. And
(01:10):
Trump has told cabinet members they're going to phase Musk
out by the end of May. And first the Press
Secretary of Softball Scholarships denied this, but by late yesterday
the fascists were leaking it out via Murdoch's New York Post.
Musk is on the way out. No no, no, no
(01:33):
more Musk. Give him all the drugs that he can do,
because all he wants to do is all he wants
to do is dance. While wearing a cheesehead and shaking
the Trump cult out of its hypnotized coma. Sure, it's
a felony to offer people money to vote or to
(01:54):
not vote, or to vote your way. And sure he
offered two giant, one million dollar checks, and sure he
offered twenty dollars bill for selfies holding up photos of
the unabashed fascist maga judge candidate at the polling places
where it is illegal to campaign like that. On the
(02:18):
other hand, if all that didn't win us the Wisconsin
Supreme Court election, I don't know what could have. Oh wait,
maybe it was when Musk went on Fox and said,
losing this judge race has good chance of causing Republicans
to lose control of the House. You lose control of
the House, there will be non stop impeachment hearings and subpoenas.
(02:42):
And America, Real America, Democracy America heard that and said, yes,
goddamn it, yes exactly, You sir, are the son of
a bitch we've been looking for all this time. Yes,
Republicans lose the House, NonStop impeachment hearings and subpoenas. Woo
effing ooh send that man some horse. I think Elon
(03:10):
Musk doesn't really know it yet, couldn't understand it if
he did, can't intuitively process America or any polyglot society.
Is so far inside his own bubble that he never
has to confront anybody who would tell him any of this.
But he maybe our way out of Trump. What we
(03:35):
saw Tuesday night was America versus Elon Musk, Democracy versus
Elon Musk, Life versus Elon Musk. Just when the anti
Trump message has been repeated so often that it barely
registers with you and me, worn down with a decade
of that stupid son of a bitch Trump, and that
(03:57):
stupid son of a bitch Trump somehow finds an even
stupider son of a bitch named Musk, and Musk has
all of Trump's failures, us that apartheid accent and the
pastiness of the ozempic attic and the on stage rhythm
of a victim of Saint Vitas's dance. Can we run
against Elon Musk? Not only in Wisconsin? Please? Can we
(04:18):
run against Elon Musk everywhere? You know what Elon Musk's
disapproval number is among Democrats in Wisconsin? Now, it's ninety
seven percent ninety seven percent. You can't get ninety seven
percent of Democrats to agree. How to spell the word
(04:39):
Democrats ninety seven percent disapproval. He's ninety four points underwater
on approval. More Musk spending, more millions, more Musk outspending.
George sorows ten to one. I want Musk in every
House and Senate race in this country next year. I
(05:00):
want him trying to buy the school Board of Hastings
on Hudson News, New York. I want him in a
cheesehead in Wisconsin, and in foam cowboy hats in Texas,
and in Gulf of America, trucker caps near the Gulf
of Mexico. And now he may be leaving the White House,
(05:21):
there is still hope. The Musk is on the way
out story evolved this way yesterday. Yesterday morning, Politico reported
quote Trump has told his inner circle, including members of
his cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in
the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner,
(05:41):
ubiquitous cheerleader, and Washington hatchetman, and that this would be
pegged to the deadline to terminate the so called special
government employees. They're only allowed one hundred and thirty days.
That would be May thirtieth, unless the drugs were to
put somebody in suspended animation or something. I guess that, however,
(06:02):
is just the excuse. This is not tied to SGE
one hundred and thirty day limits. It's tied, in fact
to Elease Steffanic Politico again quote. Trump is increasingly mindful
of next year's midterms and making sure he doesn't jeopardize
his House majority. He's kept a careful eye on the
town haul outrage over DOGE, even as Republicans have chalked
(06:25):
those scenes up to coordinated liberal stagecraft. His discussions about
next steps for Musk came just days before he grew
so worried about the GOP's narrow House margin that he
withdrew New York Rep Elise Staffhanic's nomination to be Ambassador
to the UN. This has nothing to do with one
hundred and thirty days. This has something to do with
(06:48):
a two vote margin. By late afternoon yesterday, one Trump
minion had told another Trump minion to print in The
New York Post a story headline, the real reason behind
Elon Musk's departure from DOGE and why it was always
part of the plan. H that's the story that sentence
(07:09):
repeated again and again with different constructions, that it was
always to be four months and out. White House sources
said the plan has always been to let Musk return
to civilian life after his SGE status expires. Bullshit. This
is the first time they've mentioned this, and anyway, as
(07:31):
I said, there is hope Politico. One senior Administration official said,
Musk is likely to retain an informal role as an
advisor and continue to be an occasional face around the
White House crowds. Oh thank Jesus. Another caution that anyone
who thinks Musk is going to disappear entirely from Trump's
orbit is fooling themselves. Gat. I promise I won't fool myself.
(08:01):
Keep them around photo ops, not think of substance. Just
keep his great uncontrollable ego and his perpetual fugue state
front and center often enough that the Democrats can keep
running against him until at least the midterms. And if
Trump stops pushing Musk, if Musk stops blowing up like
(08:21):
some of his own rockets, we have to take over.
We then have to keep rebuilding the link between the
two of them, shackled to a corpse, each of them,
Musk and Trump, Musk and Trump, Trump and Musk, Trusk
and Mump, Truck and Mumps. Yeah. I want Elon Musk
(08:47):
indicted in Wisconsin because I want them all indicted in
Wisconsin and forty nine other states. I want Steven Miller
on the next plane to fing L Salvador. But more
than that, I want Elon Musk to win all our
races for us. And if he's gonna do that, he's
(09:08):
gonna need our help one way or the other in
for more still it, dude, he's gonna need that little
extra to keep him campaigning twenty four to seven. The
Trump part is easy. Just keep Trump convinced Musk is
funneling attention to Trump, and Trump will make sure he
grabs him whenever possible. But Musk himself, Musk's gonna need
(09:32):
all the drugs he can find, So won't you help?
Won't you gather all the drugs you can find and
send them on to him? More Musk all, Musk, all
the time, Musk today, Musk tomorrow, Musk forever. I want
Musk's face with that crooked eyes unfocused. The stuff just
(09:55):
kicked in smirk of his visible at every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, headhouse, outhouse, doghouse,
white house in America. In mind of the first ten
(10:35):
minutes of today's podcast, I would like to point out
that I was the breaking news anchor for MSNBC, and
for one week about twenty years ago, every night I
was on for six hours talking about how the pope
was dying. Not with that inflection, all right, let me
explain some of the other headlines. Briefly. Trump's day of
Liberation actually means his liberation from paying taxes. That is
(10:58):
the substance to this, though the root cause in Trump's
brain dead head for tariffs is far dumber. Ten percent
tariffs on all training partners, fifty four percent on China,
twenty four percent for the European Union, which Trump still
thinks is a country, twenty six on India, et cetera.
After hours, Gee whiz, who would have expected this? The
(11:21):
market crashed, which is not just the standard response from
betrayed Trump's supporters. I didn't expect him to eat my face.
This is something beyond that. This is other leopards learning
that the leopard eating faces party are also cannibals and
will eat leopards faces too. This will not end well
(11:45):
for Trump, and just how not well, we will get
an idea very quickly. I might actually watch the opening
bell of the stock market for the first time in
my life, just to see if some fascists CEO unfurls
(12:06):
a flag that reads impeach Trump today, tariffs or madness.
Of course, they will destroy tourism to this country, probably
raise domestic prices five to ten percent, kill international trade,
destroy American farming, worldwide depression absolutely possible now. And the
(12:27):
ultimate reason for doing this as he learned to mimic
human behavior, which is, as we know, not natural to Trump.
Trump obviously and very early on in his existence, became
fixated with the idea and the color of gold. He
doesn't really understand gold. He does not know the difference
(12:48):
between gold and gold plate, or gold plastic and gold rustolium,
which is why his buildings look like that's so cheap,
and why his bronzer looks so bad, and why his
hair looks so fake. That's one of the reasons people
who knew him believed in the pee tape. The color
(13:13):
so the eighteen nineties he found out and apparently relatively
recently or he just remembered it recently. Were called the
Gilded age guilded gold cupboard, and it sort of looks
like the word gold guild, gold, gold, guild, gold good,
(13:33):
eighteen nineties good, eighteen nineties gold rich, super rich. No
taxes in the eighteen nineties, only tariffs. So bring back tariffs,
big tariffs, big beautiful tariffs, bingo fifty four percent tariff
on Chinese goods, because this human like multi celled parasite
once learned gold good. Okay, the disappearing by our government
(14:00):
of Kilmar Abrego, Garcia. They sent a man who was
legally entitled to be here, whom this country in fact
ruled during Trump's first presidency. We were protecting from going
back to El Salvador because he would be tortured and
killed there, and Trump sent him back because of what
they now claim is a clerical error by Ice, which
it cannot correct because it can't force El Salvador to
(14:22):
return him, which is bullshit, because all it has to
do is threaten to cut the money off going to
the corrupt Al Salvador strong man, and mister Abrego will
be home for breakfast. And if Tom Holman and Pete
Hegseth and the insufferable child JV. Vance and that inflatable
rubber device known as Christy Nome claim they can't extract him,
(14:45):
you go to them and you say you get him
back or you have to go get him personally. They
are still doing this deliberately to that man and others
because it's part of the plan and there is no
legal retribution against these scumbags, especially this deviant flotation device.
No home. That will be too extreme and it will
(15:07):
come soon or late. Hope you got a good look
at that prison. Christy or mister Abrigo was in line
looking for day labor in twenty nineteen and the cops
picked him up and they claimed a confidential informant who
may or may not have ever existed, said he was
(15:27):
in the MS thirteen gang in another state in which
the man never lived. And they claim this because he
was wearing Chicago Bulls clothing, which is really bad news
for like Michael Jordan, I want Tom Holman and Christy
Noman JD. Vance who was still slandering this man. I
want them in the El Salvador in prison instead of
(15:49):
mister Abrigio and in twenty twenty nine, I want the
President to say, oh, while they're in there now, I'm sorry,
there's nothing we can do about getting them back. They're
out of our control now, the president twenty twenty nine,
President Booker, Sure, that's fine. President Okasio Cortes, President President.
Whoever is narking on Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth, I'll
(16:12):
take him. That is not over. Leaks last week about
Hegzeth bringing the wife to sensitive international intelligence meetings, Leaks
this week about Waltz and staff using Gmail for technical
conversations and for his schedule. Once again, amateurs like Waltz
and Hegseeth don't realize that your schedule tells the spies
(16:34):
when you will be somewhere and when other people will
be somewhere, in case you know they want to blow
you up or just to access all the places you
won't be. And don't tell me that your Gmail is secure.
I once heard from the Gmail people that the Russian
State actors had hacked my Gmail. Waltz and Hegseth is
(17:00):
not over, and the third term stuff is not over.
Again a reminder, this is not going to be a
bid to let any president get a third term. This
will only be Trump, not Obama, not Clinton, not Bush,
just Trump and Grover Cleveland, who's been dead since nineteen
to eight, whether on the non consecutive terms bullshit or
(17:24):
some other bullshit. Sam Alito dreams up and Lawrence tribe
has another hole in the defensive line. They can drive
a mac truck through, just to haunt your dreams a
little further, quoting him. Anyone discounting a third Trump term
per the twenty second Amendment and the twelfth Amendment is
thinking magically. The twenty second doesn't bar serving a third term,
only being elected three times. The twelfth doesn't bar running
(17:48):
for VP unless ineligible to serve as president. But Trump
isn't ineligible qed. So like last year, the easiest scenario
Trump runs, says, try and stop me, and his Supreme
Court doesn't. And Trump can almost taste this. I mean,
(18:11):
listen to him. He's dying to say it.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
You we're not joking about a third term, about possibly
planning a third term? Does that mean you're not planning
to leave Amason.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
I'm not looking at that, but I'll tell you I
have had more people asking me do have a third term,
which is in a way at the fourth term because
the other election, the twenty twenty election, was totally rigged,
So it's actually sort of a fourth term in a
certain way. I just don't want the credit for the
second because Biden was so bad. He did such a
man job, and I think that's one of the reasons
(18:44):
that I'm popular.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
If you wander the truth and from what passes for
our news media and our serene political discourse, Bill Maher
has lost whatever small amount of self control he had left.
(19:05):
Oh my god, just as mar is killing off every
last one of his fans with his tiny, bare hands,
Bill thinks he's some kind of healing deity from Fox
and the statesman who made all this happen, Ambassador kid Rock.
(19:29):
Trump took mar at the White House Monday night to
see the Lincoln bedroom and to see a copy of
the Gettysburg Address. Bill, I hate to break this to
you at this late date, but as a member of
the class of Cornell seventy nine, and you as a
member of the class of Cornell seventy eight, you do
(19:50):
know that Cornell has had a copy of the Gettysburg
Address hand copied by Lincoln at the request of Ambassador
George Bancroft. They've had it since the nineteenth century. Was
in a house at Cornell Bancroft's grandson, and then they
bought it back and it was donated and they keep
it right now under URIs Library and they show it
(20:11):
to classes at Cornell, but of course you never went
to class, and they also show it though they show
it to alumni. They like, Oh okay, ego, trip over.
This is the operative part from Fox. Kid Rock said
that he told mar before the meeting some of this
Hollywood stuff, it would be great for you to get
(20:31):
thrown out, probably be great for you to double down.
You know, I can't stand this guy, mar kid Rock said,
told him, I'm not going to sabotage something that could
potentially bring us and other people together. Oh my god,
it's the beginning of the predicted two thousand years of
(20:52):
universal peace when Bill Maher and Donald Trump are brought
together and they unzip and stage an actual battle with
their tiny little egos. And I'm going to to advertize
something that could potentially bring other people together. There, Oh god, Bill,
(21:15):
for crying out loud. If you just tell the truth
and say, look, my new boss is this idiot david'saz
lab of Warner Bros. Discovery and the fascists who now
own CNN and HBO and him. And if I don't
go as far pro Trump as I can, they'll fire
me and they'll replace me with with Chris Cuomo or
somebody who's an even bigger whore than I am. Just
(21:37):
admit it and we go fine, we got it. Go ahead,
nobody's watching anyway. Chris Cuomo on stage on Long Island
with what used to be Bill O'Reilly and the new
giant of American political analysis, Stephen A. Smith. Three Americans.
(21:57):
They called this. This is how little Stephen A. Smith
knows of the world going on around him. He attacked
Bill O'Reilly on stage, which, trust me, was pretty much
exhausted by the year twenty eleven. Quote. You and I
hey got into it when we were on Cuomo's show
(22:17):
a couple of weeks ago. Steve Bannon comes on national
television with a straight face first and then smirk thereafter,
talking about violating the Constitution of the United States, the
twenty second Amendment two terms. He said three. Chris Cromo says, yo,
you understand what the twenty second amendment says right. He said, yeah, No,
we're working on it. Everybody just glosses over it. That's right, Steven,
(22:42):
everybody's been glossing over it. No, but nobody's been talking
about Trump's claims plots to get a third term. Nobody's
been mentioning this other than all of us who've been
saying it since twenty fifteen, or the actual movement within
the conservative ranks and the quote unquote scholarly reinterpretations of
the twenty second Amendment that began on the far rid
(23:05):
in twenty twenty three to get them a third term.
Just you, you're the first one who noticed. Steven also
reports there's something called the National Basketball Association. Thank you
for mentioning that, Stephen. None of the rest of us
new although I'm beginning to smell a new host for
HBO Real Time with Steven A. Smith, or put them
(23:32):
on MSNBC in the mornings, God knows it's that, or
cartoons in black and white from Oliver Darcy's status. The
quarter one ratings are in for cable news. MSNBC averaged
one point two million viewers in prime time, down eighteen
(23:55):
percent year over year. CNN averaged five hundred and fifty
eight thousand viewers in prime down six percent over the
same period. One interesting nugget. I'm told that CNN's News
Central beat MSNBC's Morning Joe in the Advertiser coveted at
twenty five to fifty four demographic for the first time
(24:17):
since twenty twenty two, a sign Oliver is really in
self control. Here a sign that the Joe Scarborough and
Mika Brazinski led show still hasn't recovered after the marri
Lago pilgrimage aimed at cozying up to Trump. Let me
give you a quick pro tip. It's not going to recover.
(24:39):
They're going to have to fire Joe Scarborough, or at
least bring in a new Joe Scarborough, somebody else playing
the role of Joe Scarborough, Caul Lawrence, o'donald, Joe Scarborough.
Who will notice the difference except Mika. Maybe. The Morning
Joe ratings have always been bad. They are what a
(25:02):
loss leader. That's a very niche audience. Everybody in that
niche It's like the White House Correspondence dinner with more
lights and better food. I might add that's true, but
below CNN, this is how bad it is. I have
been in television since nineteen eighty one. I started at
(25:23):
CNN in nineteen eighty one, in its second full year,
And as I'm reading this, I went, wait, CNN's morning
show is called News Central. Since when I didn't even
know the name of the show, and it's now beating
Morning Joe. The name of the CNN Morning show could
have been CNN Tonight, and I would have went, oh,
(25:46):
it's awesome, it's novel below. CNN is amazing, but the
MSNV Morning Show is not sufficient to explain the overall
collapse here. Averaging one point zero two million in primetime
(26:08):
total viewers in primetime, that's like what we were doing
in two thousand and four. The new company and whoever
is buying it or going to buy it wants this.
That's the point. They're tanking it. They're tanking it the
way Warner Bros. Tanked CNN and Mar whether he knows
(26:33):
it or not, the way Mar is tanking. There's one
more move MSNBC can make to seal the deal. Now.
It's not Stephen A. Smith. I think he should be
doing the CBS Evening News. Actually Chuck Todd in the mornings.
I'm serious, No, I'm not serious. But there was a
New York Times story yesterday about Chuck a scoop they claimed.
(26:56):
I've read it three times. I still don't get it, though.
I think now, if you told me that Chuck Todd
has spent all this time writing all those bad headlines
in the New York those both sidesist headlines, I would
believe you. And the payoff was this thirteen fourteen paragraph
story about I still don't know what this story is about. Quote.
(27:16):
After leaving the corporate home of Meet the Press in January,
he got fired. Mister Todd is embarking on a career
as a media entrepreneur. He has a podcast and a
YouTube channel. I've had a podcast for two and a
(27:37):
half years. I've had a YouTube channel for five years.
And guess what I am not. I'm not a media entrepreneur.
I have a podcast and a YouTube channel. This makes
me part of the majority in this country. I believe.
He has a podcast and a YouTube channel and plans
to hire other hosts for a podcast and video network
(28:00):
focused on politics and culture. He also said that he
was working with an advisor from a major financial firm
to build or acquire a company focused on community news.
Mister Todd's business plan, the Times goes on, calls for
a constellation of local sites owned by their communities, like
(28:21):
his beloved Green Bay Packers, and anchored by coverage of
local youth sports, local ute sports utes. The growing popularity
of athletics and their importance to families who view them
(28:42):
as a gateway to college make them an ideal subject
to build around. No matter your politics, mister Todd said,
you care about local coverage of your child's latest game.
Like all parents. Chuck thinks everybody else is also a parent.
The number of kids in scholastic sports in this country
(29:04):
is approximate lee one hundred and seventy five million. No,
it's eight million, eight million kids high school and grammar
school sports and college eight million. If a quarter of
all parents of scholastic athletes in this country use Chuck's
(29:26):
network of websites, that's four million people. If it's a brilliant,
almost total success, the ceiling is four million people. Maybe.
And here is here is what he thinks that's worth.
Quote mister Todd and the bank he is working with
there eyeing a purchase that could cost up to two
(29:50):
billion dollars. He said. He declined to say whether he
had lined up any backers or specify the company they
were looking at, but he ruled out major newspaper publishers.
(30:15):
You know what major newspapers you could get for two
billion dollars, all of them. That's two billion dollars for
podcasts or websites about high school sports scores or podcasts
where the first guest is as his first podcast guest
(30:36):
was John Fetterman. Couldn't get Chris Cuomo and Steven A.
Smith two billion dollars for podcasts, Chuck for two billion dollars,
you better be getting two billion podcasts. Ah. Also of interest,
(30:59):
here we're going to talk about Chuck. I'm going to
talk about Chuck about when I hit the wall and
had enough of him. It's going on six years now.
I'm very proud I was a trendsetter because this is
the way he thinks. He thinks he can get two
billion dollars to go into this new field of podcasting
about high school sports. Everybody has a kid playing sports.
(31:26):
Also Ahead, one of the worst human beings of the
twentieth century is now dead. He transcends the stories of transphobia, politics, sports, fascism, television,
News Renee Richards and Tucker Carlson. He's part of all
of those stories and he's dead. And I unapologetically say
(31:49):
I'm glad because I'm a believer in for whom the
Bill tolds. But I will remain until my death unconvinced
this guy was ever actually for one minute, a human being.
That's next. This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith
(32:10):
Alberman still ahead. In this new edition of Countdown. Well,
(32:35):
I mentioned Chuck Todd podcast billionaire. He owns a mansion
and a yacht. He's going to start a two billion
dollar podcast network based on high school sports scores or something.
I wasn't quite clear. And I read the article one
hundred and thirteen times, but it has to be true.
(32:58):
It's in the New York Times. And I think we
finally now know who's been writing all those headlines in
the New York Times the few plague years. It's been
Chuck Todd. Have I ever told you my Chuck Todd story?
Actually I have, Well a fat I'm gonna tell it
to you again in Things I promised not to tell
(33:19):
next first, believe it or not, there's still more new
idiots to talk about. The roundup of the miscrants, morons
and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute the latest other
Worst Persons in the World. Here are the nominees the
Bronze Worst BBC News. Now I'm kind of soft pedaling
this because if I thought it was not an accident,
(33:41):
just one of those things, I would have led the
show with it. As you know, there are at least
twenty five hundred people dead in me on Mar after
the horrible earthquake that was so destructive at knockdown buildings
in Thailand, one of the most affected cities in me
on Mar, and details are still being withheld by the
(34:01):
military dictatorship. There is Mandalay. If you know anything about Mandalay.
If you've heard the name of the city of Mandalay,
it's probably from a song. There is a Rudyard Kipling
poem on the Road to Mandalay from eighteen ninety that
they set to music twenty years later, and it is
(34:23):
classic British imperialist cornball nonsense, with lyrics centered around on
the Road to Mandalay. I won't say the whole thing,
but it's on the Road to Mandalay where the flying
Fishies play and the dawn comes up like thunder outer
China crossed the Bay on the road to Mandalay. Then
(34:48):
there was another song called the Road to Mandalay by
Robbie Williams, like twenty years ago, and the same lyric
is in that totally different context on the Road to Mandalay.
So this is the key to the thing that there
are songs that have been sung for literally one hundred
and fifteen years that have this lyric on the Road
(35:11):
to Mandalay. So the BBC's otherwise extraordinary report, including hard
to smuggle out video of mean mar after the earthquake.
Their report on Tuesday from their correspondent somehow reporting from
behind the lines, opened with that reporter narrating video of
(35:31):
the destruction that was shot from a moving vehicle, and
he began with the opening line was on the road
to Mandalay. And I've bet a million viewers worldwide involuntarily
thought where the flying fishies play. It's not what you
(35:52):
want to think during a terrible earthquake aftermath, but there
it is. As I said, I'm sure it had to
have been accidental. So I'm leaving the reporter's name out,
but somebody still should said no, no, just erase that
opening line or cut out the on, so he just
says the road to Mandalay. I mean, that's kind of
(36:16):
an invocation of the line, but it's not. I'm going
to start this tragic story with a quotation from a
song from two songs to be fair, As I said,
I'm sure it's an accident. The reporter, not a native
English speaker, was in fact on the road to Mandalay.
(36:40):
The runner up worser Matt Taibi, who has no such excuse.
You remember him when he was an independent journalist before
he became a stooge for Elon Musk, who then did
Musk's bidding, then got banished by Musk, and is now
on the fringes of right wing conspiracy theory. It's a shame.
He was a good kid. He did good work for
me on Countdown. His dad was a great reporter. He's
(37:01):
turned into like Joe paranoia. In a great illustration of
what democrats should do when the fascists stage their show
hearings in Congress over bullshit, California Congressman Sidney Kamliger Dove
decided to have Matt tayebe for lunch here. They have
(37:21):
called him to testify, as they turned the first hearing
of the sub Committee on South and Central Asia into
instead hearing on how conservatives are censored. This is the
fifth of these hearings they've already had into how they
never get to talk at hearings. After this from Congresswoman
(37:44):
Kamlegger Dove, I don't think Matt Tayibi will be willing
to testify at any more of these goddamned hearings.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Majority is relitigating a made up conspiracy theory about a
part of the State Department that no longer exists. To
distract from the dumpster fire foreign policy. This administration is
per suing and elevating a serial sexual harasser as their
star witness in the process. Mister Chair, I request unanimous
(38:13):
consent to enter into the record two articles about the
Republican witness, Matt Taybee. The first is a Chicago Reader
article entitled twenty years ago in Moscow, Matt Taybe was
a misogynist a whole and possibly worse, and a Washington
Post article titled the two expat bros Who terrorized women
correspondence in Moscow with out ob check. This hearing could
(38:37):
not be more out of touch with the concerns of
everyday Americans. People's retirement savings are being decimated as Trump's
arbitrary temper tariffs tank the stock market. They are staring
down the barrel of cuts to their Social Security and
Medicare because the Republican majority wants to give a tax
break to billionaires like Elon Musk, who have deep financial
(38:58):
ties to our adversaries. Meanwhile, Trump is siding with Putin,
against our national security interests, and risking the lives of
American soldiers. In a signal group chat, I've been to
the State Department, and I do have concerns about censorship.
Censorship of the employees who are terrified to say the
wrong thing, to say anything, or have the wrong word
(39:19):
in their job title, and be terminated by an administration
that publicly relishes punishing people for their speech. If we
want to talk about censorship, we should begin with Trump's
unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and rule of law.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Hey, Matt, we're all those clippings in the Twitter files, hobro.
We'll help you scoop the rest of your reputation up
with this spoon in this terreen and you can just
carry it out with you, but the winner the worst
a man named Richard Carlson. You've never heard of Richard Carlson,
but a long time ago he was a scumbag posing
(39:55):
as a journalist in TV in California, mostly San Diego
and La. As The New York Times noted the other day,
Carlson quote collaborated with another journalist, Lance Brisson, on an
expose for Look Magazine in nineteen sixty nine that accused
Mayor Joseph Alioto of San Francisco of having ties to
mafia figures. Mister Alioto sued Looks owner Cowell's Communications for libel.
(40:20):
In nineteen seventy seven, six years after Look magazine had folded,
and following four trials in federal court, a judge awarded
mister Alioto three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in damages.
Mister Carlson and brister Berson were not defendants. In nineteen
seventy five, mister Carlson exposed a transgender automobile executive on
(40:42):
TV in Los Angeles, even though the real story was
all the lies about her claims about her special car
that got I don't know seventy miles per gallon so
She sued two and when Carlson testified against her, he
continually referred to this woman as he and him after
he got fired in La After that he had to
(41:04):
move down to San Diego as a sportscaster. Somebody told
him that the doctor who had just won a local
women's tennis tournament was also transgender, so he phoned her
and said he was going to expose her on his sportscast.
She replied, mister Carlson, I am a private person. You
can't do that. He replied, doctor Richards, you were until
(41:25):
you won that tournament in La Joya yesterday. She pleaded
with him to respect her privacy. He went on the
air anyway and announced a man has just won the
La Joya women's tennis tournament. She hurriedly called a news
conference and had to explain not just her story to
the media, but the promise of and premissive transsexuals and
(41:46):
transgenders as a whole, because then people didn't really understand
what it was all about. Her name is doctor Renee Richards,
and to this day she remains not only one of
the very best doctors I've ever had the privilege to consult,
she's eyes specialist, although she just retired at the age
of ninety. Eye muscles and eye muscle surgery the best
(42:07):
in the world, probably, I've known her forty three years.
But she's also one of the best and funniest people
I've ever known, And she taught me more about what
it is like when one of us does a story
on somebody taught me, Yeah, it's my story, but guess what,
it's their life. You've got to try to consider that.
I am happy to say I had the privilege of
(42:29):
informing Renee Richards that Richard Carlson is now dead. He
died March twenty fourth. She was dignified and restrained and
did not even make a big deal out of the
fact that she won. I did. Maybe she didn't because
she and the rest of the world knew that this bad, unqualified, unprincipled, unsuccessful,
(42:51):
hate filled dead bastard did something even worse than involuntarily
outing transsexual women and then trying to make up excuses
for some public right to know for doing so. About
ten Richard Carlson did something worse than that, because Richard
Carlson was the father of Tucker Carlson, probably more of
(43:14):
a fascist and probably more unhinged and dangerous even than
his sick, dead father. I would add that under ordinary circumstances,
it is disturbing to feel oneself expressing anything but sadness
at the death of another human being or at the
mourning of those humans they have left behind. But you
would first have to convince me that Richard and Tucker
(43:36):
Carlson were ever human beings before I would feel that way.
I feel none of what I normally do, none of
this for whom the bell tolls stuff that bell is
not tolling for me. Richard Carlson left television a year
after he outed Renee. He later told San Diego Magazine
(43:57):
that he considered television news quote insipid, sophomoric, and superficial. Oddly,
that's a pretty good summary of his life, and his
sons put it this way. Renee Richards was twice the
man that Richard Carlson ever was, and probably two hundred
times the woman. Richard Dick Carlson, and the name Dick
(44:20):
was just a remarkable coincidence. I will note that though
he died on March twenty fourth, his son announced it
over last weekend, and it got wide public play this
past Monday, which was the National Transgender Day of Visibility.
Revenge is a dish which people of taste prefer to
(44:44):
eat cold. Dick Carlson Today's worst person in the world. Well,
not really. He's not here anymore, is he. So at
least that corner of this country is now better. It
(45:15):
is unlikely that you have ever been able to do
anything about Chuck Todd, so I wanted to tell you
of the day that I did do something about him.
That day was August eleventh, twenty nineteen. I knew Chuck
for about fifteen years, early in his career, when he
was with the DC Insider publication the Hotline. He was
a frequent guest on Countdown, and in two thousand and seven,
(45:37):
when Tim Russert was thinking of hiring him at NBC News,
mine was one of dozens of temperatures Tim took. As
Chuck later wrote to me, quote, you certainly were a
tremendous advocate and cheerleader for me over the years, and
I don't forget that. Yeah, well that wasn't true. He
forgot it, all right, But I'm veering away from the
main story. In two thousand and eight, a couple of
(45:57):
Washington political types started a fantasy football league. If you
don't think fantasy football leagues are important, you should know
that last spring, a major league baseball player in uniform
walked up to another Major League baseball player in uniform
on a Major League baseball field with thousands of people
(46:18):
already in the stands, and he slapped him in the
face over a roster move that the second player had
made in their fantasy football league. The second guy had
managed to retain the rights to an injured player, and
the first guy was upset about this. So six months
after their fantasy season ended, this major league baseball player
(46:38):
walked up and slapped the other Major League baseball player.
If slaps or duels or kidnappings are not everyday occurrences
in fantasy football, they do represent the kind of baseline
intensity of the thing. So when I and others were
approached about this Washington centric league in two thousand and eight,
it was already a big deal, even before we were
(47:00):
all sworn to secrecy, because a spot in the league
was being for some DC guy named Barack Obama. It
turned out he did not join our league, some excuse
about too much work, when obviously he was just afraid
of my fantasy football skills. But some people in his
white house did join the league, and I still will
(47:21):
not identify them, because the premise of this league was
the first rule of fantasy football club is you do
not talk about fantasy football club. I will say that
Chuck Todd, like me, was an original player. We call
ourselves owners because we are nuts and it's a fantasy.
It's in the title Fantasy Football Fantasy Football Owners. And
one year, I think it was twenty ten, I had
(47:42):
assembled in this league, mostly by accident, a team that
was almost perfect. It literally lost one game all season,
and that was in the middle of the year to
Chuck Todd's team. And the night after I lost to
Chuck Todd's team, he was giving a speech I think
at the University of Virginia, and witnesses called to tell
me that he began his speech by saying, I have
(48:05):
much to tell you, but first I have to tell
you that I am in a fantasy football league with
Keith Lderman, and he has a great team this year,
and this week I upset him by a final score
of one hundred forty three to one hundred and forty
one or whatever the score was. I thought it was
pretty dumb. But by twenty ten, Chuck was the NBC
News White House correspondent, and we all cringed whenever we
(48:25):
saw he was going to be on with one of
us on MSNBC. See, some people respond well to pressure
and success, and some people do not, and some people
become entirely different people. So when Chuck violated the prime
directive of this fantasy football league and talked about it,
I shrugged. The other guys in the league did not.
(48:46):
Chuck was actually punished. The commissioner of the league ordered
that he had to skip his fourth choice in the
following year's player draft. Chuck was berefed. He believed this
would destroy his chances. He apologized to me every week,
and finally I said, you know, guys, maybe this is
too much. And as the supposed victim in the equation,
(49:06):
I got final say and Chuck got to keep his
fourth draft choice. By twenty sixteen, Chuck was because Tim
Russeer died, Tom Brokaw retired, and David Gregory flamed out.
Chuck was the host of Meet the Press. He was
also political director of NBC News, another part of Russer's
old portfolio, but whereas Tim was a master who could
(49:27):
convince the Republicans, he was ordering that I be punished
for what I said, when in fact he would be
calling me and asking me what stupid, meaningless thing I
could think of to tell the Republicans. He was punishing
me with or four. He was sublime, subtlety, not Chuck.
No subtlety there. In twenty sixteen, Chuck was preparing to
(49:48):
not name my ex lib in girlfriend Katie Turr as
the new NBC White House correspondent, even though she had
suffered as the primary NBC correspondent covering the Trump campaign,
and out of nowhere, Chuck emails me that he's going
to be in New York and he wants to take
me to dinner. I had known him more than a
decade by then, we had never as much as shared
(50:08):
pieces of the same pizza. I had not seen him
in the flesh in more than five years, and I
knew as we sat down that Chuck's idea was to
get me to tell Katie that she was not going
to be White House correspondent so he did not have to.
He kept bringing it up, what do you think Katie
would think? And then I'd switch the topic to fantasy football,
and then he'd say, but let me ask you about
(50:30):
Katie in the White House job. We did this for
ninety minutes, and finally I said, Okay, Chuck, I've avoided
it long enough. Maybe I could call her and soften
the blow for her. And that's when he said, well,
I'm going back to DC tonight, so if I want
to catch that last train, I better leave. Bye. Chuck
is not subtle. I'll spare you the other crap from
(50:52):
the fantasy league. Suffice to say, I was reminded of
how annoyingly and obviously he used to conduct himself when
I read that last May, one of Chuck's guest bookers
for the now no longer on TV Meet the Press Daily, Joe,
had emailed the office of Alaska Congressman Don Jung, hoping
to get Young to appear the next day, which would
have been the ultimate great guest get because Don Jung
(51:13):
had died two months earlier. Anyway, this fantasy football league
was fun and unique in that there had only been
one change in its composition in all that time. Chuck's
team defeated mine in the Fantasy Football super Bowl one year,
and mostly he was just annoying, like he was on
the air, nothing worse than that. And then on June nineteenth,
(51:36):
twenty nineteen, Representative Alexandria Ocazio Cortes AOC ripped the Trump
administration's migrant policies. She said, quote, the United States is
running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is
exactly what they are. They are concentration camps. End quote.
Chuck went on MSNBC and said the following in response, quote,
you can call our government's detention of migrants many things,
(51:57):
depending on how you see it. It's a stain on
our nation, maybe a necessary evil to others to deal
with an unten situation, perhaps, but do you know what
you can't call it. Chuck then played the clip of
AOC calling it concentration camps, and Chuck resumed, if you
want to criticize the shameful treatment of people at our
southern border, fine, you'll have plenty of company, but be
(52:18):
careful comparing them to Nazi concentration camps, because they're not
at all comparable. In the slightest A lot of people
me included, were stunned. Ocasio Cortes never mentioned the Nazis
and concentration camps did not begin with the Nazis or Hitler.
They began with the British in the Boer War in
(52:39):
South Africa at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Yet here was Chuck putting a word in her mouth,
and that word was Nazi, and then he attacked her
for something she never said. He lied about her. He lied,
Chuck Todd made it up on the news. I was
furious enough to email him that night. I thought by
now somebody at NBC would have pointed out that concentration
(53:01):
camps and Nazi death camps are not the same. But no,
NBC had simply tweeted out the clip of Chuck lying
about the congresswoman and putting the word Nazi in her mouth,
as if it were something NBC News should be proud of.
Chuck was furious at me. He emailed back, quote, come on,
(53:22):
own up, that she invoked the wrong image and should
have simply walked the imagery back. And I wrote him
back that the person who had to walk back imagery
here was him, since he had said Nazi and she
had not said Nazi. On my angriest day, he now replied,
I'd like to think I treated you with more respect
than this. Sad I feel like we won't recover from this,
and we had recovered from a lot. I wrote back
(53:45):
to Chuck that we weren't going to recover from anything
if he insisted that all concentration camps were Nazi death
camps and that somebody who never said Nazis owed somebody
else an apology for what not saying Nazis. There was
no getting past the reality that Chuck had no idea
that he was one hundred percent in the wrong here,
historically wrong, factually wrong, ethically wrong, not a leg to
(54:09):
stand on. So I of course began to contemplate the
year ahead in fantasy football. I couldn't face it. I'm sorry,
I let real life and fantasy sports mix, and I
just I just couldn't spend another autumn having to deal
with Chuck Todd. Chuck had often said that he was
(54:30):
now just too busy to play in the league anymore,
and he would have to leave it this year. So
on August eleventh, twenty nineteen, more in sadness than an anger,
I asked the commissioner of the league if Chuck was
coming back for the twenty nineteen season. I don't know,
maybe not, was the answer. I said, Look, this is
not him or me. I'm not asking you to not
(54:52):
let him come back. It's not like that. But if
he tells you one way or the other, let me know,
because I just can't stand another year of him. He
takes all the fun of it out of it for me.
I understand, said the commissioner. It's a but why do
it if it's not fun. At eight am on the
morning of August fourteenth, twenty nineteen, the official email notifying
everybody of the new fantasy football season went out. I
(55:15):
was not listed among the players. Nineteen minutes later, I
got an email from Chuck Todd's subject line, it's just
a game content quote just play. I won't speak to you,
and please do me the same courtesy. Grow the f
up and know I am not editing this. He really wrote,
grow the f up. I wrote back that I thought
(55:36):
he'd become part of the problem that imperils our nation
and I didn't want to have anything more to do
with him. I ended it with quote, do not contact
me again. At ten thirteen am, he contacted me again. Amazing,
how you believe what you believe about me? I'm sorry
for ever helping you get credibility. I did not reply.
(55:56):
At ten eighteen, he wrote me again again, I'm happy
to never speak with you again. I'd prefer to pretend
you don't exist. Don't make me care about you. No, boy,
when Chuck Todd asks you to not make him care
about you, you are in deep and dangerous waters. Boy.
Another Chuck email at ten twenty nine, you are truly
a tiny little man. I don't even feel sorry for
(56:18):
you anymore. You have done this to yourself, and here
I made a mistake. I did not ask him what
he felt sorry for me about and what I had
done to myself. I assume it was about losing the
twenty eighteen Fantasy Football super Bowl to him At eleven
oh nine, another email quote, you deliberately misinterpreted what I
said shot first, and then rationalized the mistaken shot with
(56:41):
some convoluted, full of bleef explanation. This presumably was the
silly little detail about him lying and saying Representative Ocasio
Cortes had referred to Nazi concentration camps. Then he wrote
that what she said quote evokes Gash Chambers, and I
think that's where we should leave it. A fantasy sports
(57:03):
league is just a fantasy sports league, And having been
in various kinds of them since nineteen good God eighty five,
I often wonder if they aren't a kind of therapeutic,
cathartic pressure valve for our inner demons. I do know this.
You find out a lot about the other people in
a fantasy sports league. So when that baseball player slapped
(57:26):
the other baseball player over the reserve running back that
he kept on his roster, and most people said, I
just don't understand why he slapped him, I said, oh,
I understand why he slapped him. Chuck Todd, billionaire. I've
(57:57):
done all the damage I can do here. Thank you
for listening. Brian Ray and John Phillip Scheneil, the musical
directors have Countdown, arranged, produced, and performed of our music.
Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray was on
the guitars, bass and drums. It was produced by Tko Brothers.
Our Satirical on fifty. Musical comments are by the best
baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is
(58:19):
the Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren
Davis and courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Other music arranged and
performed by the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today
was my friend Kenny Maine. Everything else was, as ever,
pretty much my fault one plug before I go on
(58:40):
October seventh of this year, at eleven fifteen pm Eastern daylight,
it will be the exact fiftieth anniversary of the day
I made my debut on an actual radio station that
people paid money to put commercials on. WVBRFM, the student owned,
student run commercial station at Cornell, now the community owned
(59:03):
commercial stateation of Cornell and Ithaca, New York and Tompkins County,
and the World Online operating from the palatial Olberman Cornelius
Studios on East Buffalo Street, Ithaca, New York. And if
October seventh is my fiftieth anniversary, that means that this Saturday,
April fifth is the date that my friend John Rudan
(59:26):
is celebrating his fiftieth anniversary hosting wvbr's oldie show Rock
and Remnants. Only John was able to keep his show
on WVBR, whereas Mind was canceled in nineteen seventy nine.
So congrats, John, You're a better man than I am,
and I hope that's a new windbreaker by now Rock
and remnants the Big Five. Oh Saturday Night WVBRFM. Be there, Aloha.
(59:55):
That's countdown for today, Just one three hundred and eighty
nine days until the scheduled end of his lame duck
and lame brained term, unless Musk removes him sooner. Please
don't move Musk Trump, Please leave Musk. Put him out
there every day, have him stand next to you during
the speeches, have him there all the time, all the time.
We want him there all the time. Seven ninety seven
(01:00:17):
percent disapproval in Wisconsin, ninety seven percent. The next scheduled
countdown is Monday, or as we're calling it here, Musk Day.
Tuesday is also going to be Musk Day. Wednesday will
be Musk Day. You get the point. As always, bulletins,
as the news warrants, remember im peach Trump. It won't
(01:00:37):
work now, it will win the Democrats the midterms, if
there are midterms, if they're just Musk terms. Until next time,
I'm Keith Overman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(01:01:13):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Host
Keith Olbermann
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