MSNBC CANS MEHDI HASAN. WHERE'S MADDOW? HAYES? O'DONNELL? - 12.1.23 - Countdown with Keith Olbermann

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. I'd
like to apologize for what MSNBC has become again. I'd

(00:26):
like to apologize again for what MSNBC has become. They
fired Maydi Hassan yesterday. He hosted one hour a week
on Sunday nights and did streaming shows, and it might
have been the best hour on that network because while
I don't know that I agreed with even most of
what he said, he was not doctrinaire, and he didn't
simply repeat what Matdow says. And he didn't pretend to

(00:47):
be a moderate because being a Trump propagandist didn't work
out that well for him like Scarborough does. And he
didn't struggle to read a prompter full of Democratic Party
talking points like Joy Reid does. And to my knowledge,
he never fell asleep on the air like Andrea Mitchell does,
nor caused the viewer to fall asleep like Hayes and
o'donnald and because they fired him, an Englishman of Indian

(01:09):
Muslim descent in the middle of a war and terrorism
between Israel and Hamas that sometimes seems like only thirty
percent of it is being fought on the ground and
the rest of it is being fought in the world's media.
MSNBC at least appears to have made up a story
about reshuffling its weekend lineup to make more room for
Michael Steele, former GOP chairman Michael Steele, and for Alicia Melendez,

(01:34):
whose father you may know, and who in any ethical
news shop in the world, could not be on the
air again until her father's situation was resolved. And now
Hassan will be a fill in anchor because hell damn it,
they had forty nine great hours of weekend programming and
they had to cut one of them, didn't they. MSNBC

(01:58):
does not have forty nine great hours of programming a year.
I do not know for certain why they fired him.
I do not know if he said something about the
Middle East they did not like, although he said a
lot about the Middle East, I think they did not like.
I do not know if the timing was coincidental. I
do know the people running MSNBC now, saysar Conde, Rebecca

(02:23):
Blumenstein from The Wall Street Journal, and Rashida Jones, who
was only in charge of scheduling associate producers for midday
shows but is now MSNBC president and as such is
only in charge of scheduling associate producers for midday shows.
They are just dumb enough to have fired Mehdi Hassan

(02:43):
during a Middle East conflict, but for something other than
his opinions about it. They really are that dumb. Let's
put it this way. They either fired him for his
Middle East opinions during conflict in the Middle East, or
they fired him for something else during conflict in the
Middle East and thus made themselves look guilty of firing

(03:05):
him for his Middle East opinions. Anyway, However, just as
important as the continuing asinine and ignorant and sometimes flat
out comical conduct of the management of MSNBC and NBC
and NBC News, in fact, probably much more important, is

(03:27):
the issue of personal integrity of the people at what
is God help Us, the closest thing to a liberal
news network in this country, while there are what fifteen
conservative ones and much of CNN and part of MSNBC.
More important than the firing of Meidi Hassan is the
response from MSNBC stars about the firing of Media Hassan.

(03:54):
You want to hear what Mattow and O'Donnell and Hayes
and Wagner and Reed and everybody else there said about this.
Want to hear it again, Well, at least it sounds familiar.
It's the same thing Mattow and O'Donnell, at Hayes and
Wagner and Reid said when Tiffany Cross was fired a
year and a month ago right before the midterms, largely

(04:15):
because Tucker Carlson was mad at her and at NBC.
And it's the same thing that Mattow and O'Donnell and
Hayes and Wagner and Reid said when they actually put
Trump on the first edition of Kristen Welker's Chuck Todd
approved version of Meet the Press, and somehow they wound
up fact checking him for less than a minute on TV,
and they held all the real corrections for one lonely

(04:36):
post on their website. And all of it happened just
weeks after Welker let herself be whined and dined by
Trump's scum like Jason Miller right before the Republican debate
in Milwaukee. Silence. I have told the story before that
in two thousand and nine, the chairman of GE who

(04:56):
bruised like he had the skin of an immature grape
was ready to take the network offline, shut it down
because in trying to silence me, Fox News had turned
to attacking him. Jeff Immelt and his mommy. Mommy Immelt

(05:17):
was a bill O'Reilly viewer, and she called up and
yelled at her son. At in the crisis meeting in
Jeff Zuocker's office on the fifty second floor of thirty Rock,
I was, and boy did this surprise me. I was
the moderate who said, well, just let just let's not
mention Fox News for a few weeks and in the interim,

(05:38):
see if we can figure something else out. And Rachel
Maddow made it quite loudly clear that if they tried
to change a word of her scripts, she would quit
on the spot because no one would ever believe that
what she was saying had not been censored. Again. And

(05:59):
I had a quick internal meeting with myself about that,
and then I had a real life meeting with Rachel
and I said, you're right, but if we draw that
line right now in the sand, we're gonna lose. Just
give me just as long as the French held out
against the Nazis in nineteen forty, just give me thirty
three days and if I can't come up with something workable,

(06:19):
we can both quit on the air together and then
go get really drunk. And then we hugged and I
went to work and I found something workable, and that
Rachel Maddow has been dead for a long time now.
I mean, this is not an exaggeration. They are paying
her thirty one million dollars a year basically for her

(06:40):
name and for one show a week. And by the
way to that, I say, good work, Rache. Next time,
get forty one million. But if they are paying you
thirty one million dollars a year and you are not
okay with them firing Medi Hassan or Tiffany Cross or
putting Trump on Meet the Press without fact checking, guess what.
They are not going to fire Meidi Hassan or Tiffany Cross,
and they are not going to put Trump on Meet

(07:01):
the Press without fact checking. And you think that's too
much of a reach, and that management will always protect
other managers first, and profits and products last. Okay, we'll
try it this way. If Rachel Maddow wanted to just say,
I'm not okay with them firing Medi Hassan or firing

(07:23):
Tiffany cross or putting Trump on Meet the Press, say
it publicly, put it out in a tweet, leave it
at that, do nothing, just say one sentence. Do you
think they would fire her? The thirty one million dollars
isn't for one show that she does or for any
of the special coverage that she hosts. It's because they

(07:45):
have made the same mistake with her that they made
with me nearly twenty years ago. They let first me
and then her become the entirety of the MSNBC brand.
This info was from inside the twenty twenty one negotiations
to keep her there rather than let her go do
something with Sirius or with Jeff Zucker. Somewhere this was

(08:09):
the message. Yeah, thirty million is a lot of money.
If she leaves, we lose three hundred million in brand value.
Three hundred million is more than thirty million. So she
is in fact in a better position now to defend
her own principles than she was in two thousand and
nine when she threatened to quit on the spot if

(08:31):
they edited out stories about Fox News, and by the way,
she never did stories about Fox News. She is in
a better spot. In fact, so are Hayes and O'Donnell.
I mean, look, I was lead sled dog at MSNBC
when we spun Rachel off from being my guest host
to doing the nine PM show replacing Dan Abrams. I

(08:52):
was still in the front harness when we then spun
off my next guest host, O'Donnell, to his own show
at ten PM. I was still there when we put
Chris Hayes in as my last guest host, and I
tried to take him with me when I left for Kerr.
I wanted him to co host a second hour of
Countdown with Eugene Robinson, and then once they both had
enough anchoring experience, spin them both off into primetime shows.

(09:15):
Me at eight, Chris Hayes at nine, Gene Robinson at ten,
and then this other kid that I just put on
TV for the first time nationally, some nervous kid from
Jersey at eleven. His name was Steve Kornaki. The point
is that not only should one of them, or two
of them, or all of them be saying something right

(09:38):
now today about what is going on at MSNBC. The
replacement of original thought and anti establishment, pro contrarian opinion
with Pasteuriyes processed Liberal TV trademark copyright Comcast NBC, twenty
twenty three. Not only should Madow or Hayes or O'Donnell

(10:00):
or Kornaki or somebody go out on a limb, but
they could all go out on that same limb with
absolutely no fear of it falling down or being sawed
off behind them. It's not just that MSNBC has not
launched a successful new show since they put Hayes into

(10:20):
the primetime lineup in March twenty thirteen. It's that cable
news has not launched a successful new show since MSNBC
put Hayes on in March of twenty thirteen. CNN Chris
Cuomo fired just yesterday, he said he saw no difference
between Biden and Trump. Don Lemon fired Fox. Tucker Carlson

(10:42):
fired MSNBC Best of Morning Joe Weekend edition, the world's
only seventeen second long television show. When I spent a
literal year trying to talk my bosses into giving Rachel
Maddow a show on MSNBC, when their responses were, nobody

(11:04):
will watch a woman anchor, and why do you want competition?
You're a monopoly. Now you're our tent Pole when they
lied to me and they said they had hired her
as a contributor, but they hadn't, and I had to
hand her four hundred and thirty seven dollars in cash
out of my wallet to keep her from going to
CNN for two hundred and fifty dollars. After all that,

(11:25):
I finally convinced them all. But I had one last
person to convince who did not think a Rachel Matdow
TV show would work. Her name was Rachel Maddow. Look,
she said, I lived downtown in his studio apartment with
no TV and with no real window, and a couple
of years ago I was dancing in a cell phone
costume in front of a cell phone store in Massachusetts.

(11:47):
I'm not certain what success might do to me. It
might make me a terrible person. I talked her off
that ledge. I'm not sure I should have. I am
a cap list. I once calculated how much I made

(12:07):
for my twelve thirteen years in cable news compared to
sports sports five million, News seventy million, and as you know,
if you have ever seen my real life wardrobe, I
still have most of it. Money is great. When I
slammed Musk Thursday, for telling advertisers and others trying to
control him with money to go f themselves. I have

(12:29):
to confess I felt a little guilt because the point
of having the money is that you should say that
to somebody at least once in your life, not like
Musk did saying it to people who for some reason
don't want their advertisements next to anti Semitic and pizzagate posts. No,

(12:50):
say that once in your life in defense of something
or someone, or for someone or something. When I finally
left MSNBC in twenty eleven, after they breached my contract
over that suspension, they had to rescind I could have stayed.
There were a thousand reasons to go. There was one
reason to stay, and that was, as Rachel said when

(13:12):
she did not quit two years earlier over the Fox
News thing, Keith, this is the best platform we will
ever see. And I quieted that thought because I knew, well,
I'm gone, but Rachel will always stand up when it counts.
Always is a relative term. But the primary reason I

(13:34):
booked and took the chance and the money a lot
of money again again money good. The reason I took
the chance with al Gore's network was the writing was
on the wall for me at MSNBC for five years
by that point, maybe more like six or seven, they
had been trying to wear me out and trying to
box me in, Like Edward R. Murrow's producer Fred Friendley

(13:57):
once said, and no undue comparisons are being made here.
When you live in a world of controversy, you will
take fire from in front of you. When the fire
is from those you have targeted, from your opponents, from
your enemies. If it doesn't hit you, it is amazingly energizing,
it keeps you going. On the other hand, friendly said,

(14:18):
if the fire is coming from behind you, it doesn't
even really have to come near you to wound you.
It is exhausting being shot at by your own side. Gradually,
MSNBC peeled off the producers with whom I was comfortable.
They banned my favorite guest, Marcos Malitsus because Scarborough demanded it.

(14:39):
They wouldn't carve my show out from the idiot NBC
News president Cappus, who had tried to suspend me and
nearly got fired by his own lawyers because he did that.
And they were beginning to review my guests and to suggest, hey,
we do one of those special comments would be great
if you had a Republican come on to reply. And

(15:00):
I said, we already do that. And the president of
the network, Film Griffin, looked stupidly at me more stupidly,
and he said, what do you mean, Buddy, And I said,
we call that Fox News. But they wanted Michael Steele
as a regular contributor to Countdown and more panels, as
they called them, four guests at a time. You used

(15:22):
to do that on the Old Show in ninety eight.
It's a good exchange of ideas. You know, have Pat
Buchanan on once a week, Buddy, just once a week,
or Joe. Joe would love something in primetime. You might
even find he'd be easier on you behind the scenes.
The next thing I thought, I did not say. The
next thing I thought was check please. The next thing

(15:44):
I saw was Michael Steele and Pat Buchanan as contributors
to the Rachel Madows Show. This has strayed further and further,
not just from the day's other news, but from the
cancelation of the Medi Hassan Show. And I'm sorry for that.
I just think the context is important. The context of
what began to happen at MSNBC in two thy ten

(16:05):
and twenty eleven, and which has continued very slowly and
almost imperceptibly into the approved liberal opposition, always insistent, always pleasant,
but never too loud like the guy who started all this,
And more importantly still is the context of what MSNBC

(16:28):
will do next time, because obviously there will be a
next time. And if you don't believe so, ask Meydi
Hassan or Tiffany Cross or whoever decided to cut a
deal with Trump over containing the fact checket, or worse still,
whoever decided that even though Trump didn't demand anything, they
should go do that anyway, preemptively, proactively, just to get

(16:48):
on Trump's good side. There will be a next time,
and god knows what it will consist of, and who
is going to stop them? Who will even stand up
and protest, just protest as Medi Hassan gets shot by
fire coming in from behind him. And that's the really,
really sad part. They could all get away with that,

(17:11):
and at least Matdow could walk in two day right
now to saize our conde, or to the president of
the whole company if she wanted to, and say I
just heard about Meddi Hassan. I don't like this. Put
him back on. In fact, put him on every day
at three o'clock. You have twenty minutes to obey, because
Mattow and Hayes and O'Donnell can keep those jobs until

(17:34):
they die. They are grandfathered in. They are literally irreplaceable.
They don't make the money for the network that they
used to. Nobody in cable does. But also nobody else
is going to make more or even as much. And
we know Matdow has previously flexed her muscle and decisions
that did not involve her show. People she didn't like

(17:57):
began to disappear from MSNBC air and from its ranks
of showrunners and producers within months of when I quit
in January twenty eleven. The reporter in the case told
me she threatened to bail out of a New York
Times profile in twenty eighteen or nineteen if I were
mentioned in it. And I've wasted a lot of your

(18:18):
time telling you how she vetoed my plan returned there
in twenty twenty and twenty one. But if there are
three people at NBC, hell, if there are three people
in news, if there are three people in television who
can at least get away with a loud pointed protest,
Hell can get away with saying if many Hassan goes,
or if Tiffany Cross goes, or if we keep diluting

(18:41):
our product down to badly rewritten Democratic Party press releases
the three of us, we're on strike. If there are
three people in media besides like Taylor Swift who can
say we are standing on our principles and who will
then live to tell about it, it's Chris Hayes and

(19:02):
Laurence O'Donnell and Rachel Maddow. Of course, for that, you've
got to have principles. The Trump lawyer is cooperating just
this side of flipping with the prosecutors in Nevada about
the fake elector's scheme there and political rights. There's a

(19:24):
five hundred and forty three word editorial that may have
just upended the presidential campaign. And they don't mean it's
good news for Trump. But I do have to put
a PostScript to the Mehdi Hassan cancelation first, and then
I'll get to the actual news. A major comparison online
yesterday was wrong. It was to the cancelation of Phil
Donahue by MSNBC early in two thousand and three. And

(19:46):
guess what I was at that one too. I was
a witness, and I've never gone into that story at
length anywhere, So give me two minutes to do this now.
I went back there as a fill in to rebuild
bridges for one week three shows in February two thousand,
absolutely no expectation I would be staying or ever going

(20:08):
back there again. I had a full time gig with
NBC for the Olympics. I was just helping out. They
were short and anchored, They had no expectations. So people
I'd worked with just five years before they told me
the truth, and they had been planning to cancel Phil
Donahue for months. They would have fired him even if
Bush had suddenly left office, or if Sodom Hussein had

(20:29):
turned himself into Dick Cheney personally. Phil Donahue Show was
done at thirty Rock in New York with a live
audience in a live studio with a live studio union.
The rest of MSNBC before, during, and after not done
with unions. The only reason it cost less to do

(20:52):
the Phil Donahue Show than it did to do Saturday
Night live was that they didn't have to build twenty
new sets every week for the Phil Donahue Show. And yes,
it was the highest rated show on the network when
they canceled it, And yes they canceled it like hours
before Bush started bombing Iraq, But it only got those
ratings because they did carpet bombing of their own. They

(21:13):
advertised the show everywhere all the time, millions of dollars.
His staff was two or three times larger than that
of any other cable news show. So even as the
top rated show on MSNBC, Phil Donahue was hemorrhaging money.
Did Phil's anti Iraq war views help No, probably sped

(21:34):
up his cancelation. But they canceled all of prime time,
all of the shows they put on live war coverage.
And oh, by the way, if they canceled Phil Donahue
for being a liberal and anti war, why did they
give his time slot and half his producers to me?
The medi Hassan Phil Donahue comparison is wrong because Donahue

(21:57):
was canceled over money. Hassan was canceled over something he said. Okay,
no more postscripts, more trump scripts. Kenny the Cheese is
singing again. CNN reported last night that their sources say
state prosecutors have revealed that they have succeeded in quote,

(22:18):
securing the cooperation of a key witness who has agreed
to sit down with Nevada prosecutors in hopes of avoiding
prosecution there. It's not quite the same plea deal that
Ken Chesbrow took in the Georgia indictments, but it means
that thanks to Ken's help, the fake electors scheme is
now being prosecuted in those two states, and Arizona and

(22:38):
Michigan and New Mexico. The gag order is back in
effect in New York. And I hate to fall prey
to logical fallacy number one, but I keep thinking maybe
it was all those threats against Judge Angron's wife and
Judge Angron's clerk by Trump Wednesday that got the Appeals
Court in New York to realize, Hey, maybe we're enabling

(23:01):
madness and potential violence. Haunted by reality, Trump reposted all
of those anti Trump means. The idiot Laura Lumer has
falsely attributed to Angeron's wife, and now the two of
them have mixed in the judge's son. It would be
the highlight of my year if missus Engern now sues
Lumer and Trump for slander or comes out and says

(23:23):
she actually supports Republicans or something. Trump was also good
enough to repost video from the fascist Hodge Twins captioned
the Capitol cops beat the hell out of innocent J
six protesters. The cops should be charged and the protesters
should be freed. So file that for the next time
you hear any Republican mentioned law and order. And now

(23:46):
Alina Habba is in trouble. Alice Bianco, who used to
be a server at Trump's golf course and graveyard in Bedminster,
New Jersey, has sued for sexual harassment by the beverage
manager Povel. When a colleague wrote a letter about Bianco's plight,
it got to a haba and according to miss Bianco,

(24:06):
Habba quote pretending to be a friend, approached Bianco and
tricked her into signing a non disclosure agreement pretending to
be a friend. How about pretending to be a lawyer.
Habba gave this response to Politico. I always conduct myself ethically,
and I acted no differently in this circumstance. And if
that isn't a non denial, denial. My name ain't Ben Bradley,

(24:30):
speaking of which Washington Post offers a nice little slice
of life Shay Trump, Kevin McCarthy told friends. The Post
reports that after Trump sat on his hands while McCarthy's
speakerships was decapitated, Trump told McCarthy by phone that he
would have called Matt Gates off, but McCarthy had failed
to expunge Trump's impeachments. So McCarthy allegedly says he told Trump, quote,

(24:55):
F you only the full F the full evon Musk.
F McCarthy denies this or he doesn't rememb And then
there are these last two stories, and I do not
think they got the attention they deserved. The British magazine
The Economist teamed up with You Gov November twenty fifth,

(25:16):
twenty six, twenty seven polled fifteen hundred US citizens on
the presidential vote. The outcome forty four forty two. That's
forty four to forty two Biden. And lastly, there's what
Meredith McGraw and Adam Kancren wrote yesterday in Politico and
since it's basically what I said on the first episode
this week. But I'm just a guy with a podcast.

(25:38):
Let me read it part of it. Headline quote the
five hundred and forty three word editorial that may have
just upended the presidential campaign. Subheadline, the post by Trump
calling for Obamacare's replacement has lit a fire under Biden's
slow burn campaign. The editorial referred to, of course, is

(25:58):
the one from the Wall Street Journal last week, reminding
Trump that he did not kill Obamacare. Put it here thusly,
just when Trump and Biden and events had tilted the
entire profile of the election into things that favored Trump,
Trump just brought back from the dead what might be
the last issue in which Democrats completely kick republican ass

(26:20):
An NBC poll two months ago said Democrats are trusted
by two to one over Republicans on healthcare. To sum
it up, as an unnamed Biden advisor told NBC, it's
almost perfect. Politico quoted the chair of a Democratic support
group saying, Trump's quote opening up a Pandora's box of hurt.

(26:41):
It's a story that tells itself, and it not only
revivified the issue, it revivified Biden's campaign. That's the gist
of what Politico is reporting. Emails went out mass emails
to reporters, to sponsors to voters. Within hours, Nancy Pelosi
got on a press call Tuesday. Biden hit Trump on

(27:02):
video Wednesday. Commercials all are already running on the state
level Thursday. And if that were not enough good news, yesterday,
the Wall Street Journal ran another editorial on Obamacare, and
in it it attacked Trump for his failure to repeal
and his failed response to their first editorial, whereupon Trump

(27:26):
replied by attacking the Wall Street Journal, called the paper
quote globalist and the editorial page a mess. That's the
editorial page whose editorial abouch Obamacare got him so excited
that he again vowed to replace Obamacare and thus revitalized
that issue and the Biden campaign. And I have not

(27:48):
fully diagrammed this bizarre confluence of events, but I think
the gist of it is, if Joe Biden is re elected,
we can now thank the Wall Street Journal editorial board.
Also of interest here, it's almost as if I wrote

(28:11):
this next story. He is the head of the Florida
Republican Party. She is an unidentified friend who has just
alleged he raped and battered her and the other She
is his wife, the co founder of Moms for Liberty
and the first her. Her Other allegation is that they

(28:34):
had a long standing three way relationship and he used
his phone to take video of the two hers having sex.
But thank god we have moms for Liberty to make
sure nobody ever has two mommies. That's next. This is
an all new edition of Countdown? Are You Rolling? Take

(28:56):
two B one of December one, five four three two one.
This is Countdown with Keith Olberman host. Scripts to the news,
some headlines, some updates, some snark, some predictions. Dateline Washington

(29:20):
in a wonderfully contentious episode that Frank Cappra the Third
is not going to include in any remake he may
dream up of. Mister Smith goes to Washington. The Senate
Judiciary Committee actually did something about our corrupt Supreme Religious Court.
It has issued subpoenas to Harlan Crowe, the owner and
operator of Justice, Clarence Thomas, and Leonard Leo, owner and

(29:43):
operator of a whole string of justices from Sam Alito
to Brett Kavanaugh. And I'm not proud to say a
fellow member of our Cornell Alumni Association. Ah well, they
can't all be and coltergeist anyway. Republicans tried to stall
the subpoena votes, then tried to bury them under two
hundred amendments, then tried to shout down the roll call,

(30:03):
and then when they had nothing left, they all ran
away instead of voting. It's their ethos. Senator John Cornyn
told Chairman Dick Durbin, the man behind this new Democratic
idea of actually doing something. Quote, you just destroyed one
of the most important committees in the United States Senate.
Congratulations on destroying the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. That,

(30:28):
mind you, was from a Republican senator. Republican, the party
that tried to destroy democracy in twenty twenty and is
trying it again as we speak. Shut up. For his part,
Leonard Leo Cornell eighty six. And it's always these guys
with that we were too poor to afford more syllables
names guys Hugh Hewitt, Eric Erickson, Leonard Leo anyway, Leonard

(30:55):
issued a statement too, quote Senate Judiciary Committee. Democrats have
been destroying the Supreme Court. Now they are destroying the Senate.
I will not cooperate with this unlawful campaign of political
retribution unquote cool contempt to the Senate. Cool arrest him,

(31:16):
arrest Leonard Leo, drag him out by his freakin shoes. Dateline, Rome, Georgia.
The Blockbuster Marjorie Taylor Green Book, I Am not Barney
Rubble No, sorry, I got the title wrong. She went
with MTG, which is the acronym for the card game
Magic the Gathering. Why she chose that, I have no

(31:36):
idea any who. The book is just going Gangbusters. Published
by Trump Junior's new publishing house, Well out House. This
is one of those books that right wing groups usually
snap up by the tens of thousands and make into
a New York Times bestseller and then give away like
free pens. But something has come a cropper in this

(31:57):
ecosystem because the Circana Book scan system, which presents an
actual record of how many books were sold to the public,
has presented its data for MTG's first week on the
shelves short version. It's still on the shelves from November
nineteenth through November twenty fifth, Marjorie's story sold three hundred

(32:19):
and fifty two copies. Three hundred and fifty two. That's
fifty a day. Frankly, I didn't know that fifty a
day of her fans could read and dateline Kent, Connecticut.
He actually was a big sports fan, big enough that

(32:40):
the New York Yankees yesterday put out a statement lauding him, naturally,
because they are actually the New York Fascists. He also
once did a tourism commercial for the City of New
York in which a stunt double ran the bases and
slid headfirst into the plate at Yankee Stadium. And, in
the only endearing thing he ever did other than date
the actress Jill Saint John, he did a commercial for

(33:01):
the New York Times Sports section in which he claimed
his true goal in life was to have become a
National Football League play by play TV announcer so that
he could have called field goal attempts and say it's
up and it's good. Henry Kissinger is dead at age
one hundred, and I have only one other thing to say,

(33:25):
Are you sure? Don Kannanci houst Stella ahead us on

(34:05):
an all new edition of Countdown Fridays with Thurber, and
fittingly given that MSNBC stuff, James Thurber mostly stuck to
fiction or slightly fictionalized reality, but occasionally he ventured into
cultural criticism, even media criticism, and it is delightfully mean spirited.
Something I've never read aloud previously, The Secret Life of

(34:27):
James Thurber, which despite the title, is actually an attack
on of all people. The surrealist painter Salvador Dali coming
up first time for the daily roundup of the miss grants,
morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worse
persons in the world. That was my dolly impression, the
bronze worse. Tucker Carlson, Remember Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson launched

(34:52):
his fascist website, The Daily Caller about thirteen fourteen years
ago with a bang. He opened another website using my name,
then impersonated me, stole my idea nity to do an
email interview with a rather gullible Philadelphia Daily News columnist
named Stu Baikovski. Baikovsky printed the interview as if it

(35:13):
was with me and Bikovsky, and the paper had to
retract it or I would have owned the Philadelphia Daily
News and I might have been my high school friend
Will Bunch's boss. Anyhow, the Daily Beast has found tax
documents that indicate Tucker Carlson has been kicked out of
the site. Is off the board of the Daily Caller,
and those initials were for Tucker Carlson TC, and it

(35:35):
may have happened as long ago as a year next week,
because even the fascists can smell a rotting corpse. By
the way, the Daily Beast also found that the Daily
Caller took seven hundred and seven thousand dollars in COVID
workplace loans and applied to have them forgiven by the
Biden administration, and they were forgiven, so thanks Biden. Wurser.

(35:59):
Lana Burkhardt, a twenty year old woman who we find
from the good folks at Popular Information, testified to the
school board in Conroe, Texas that seeing one drawing of
a kiss between two heterosexual cartoon characters in one of
those scholastic books for kids, seeing one kiss when she

(36:20):
was eleven years old led her to an addiction to pornography,
and that by the age of thirteen she was contemplating suicide.
And so the Conroe School Board must remove all scholastic
books from its schools and its school book fairs, and
that a good alternative for the school board would be
to switch to the nonprofit independent Skytree book fairs. Hell.

(36:45):
According to Popular Information. Turns out Ms Burkhardt's recommendation switched
to Skytree Books left out a couple of key details. One,
she was homeschooled, so it must have been mom who
gave her that deadly book, not the school district. Two
about Skytree book Books, it quote appears to be a

(37:06):
hastily assembled offshoot of Brave Books. Brave Books just happens
to publish kids books written by right wingers and religious
nuts and Chaia Raychik and Jack Pisovic and Kevin Sorbo
and other Trump felaters. The president of Skytree was an
executive assistant at Brave Books until earlier this year. And
as to poor miss Burkhardt and her story of going

(37:27):
to hell looking at a guy kissing a girl, she
turns out to be an employee at Brave Books. In fact,
she's public relations coordinator. In other words, the book banners
have mutated. They are now book banners for profit, which
leads to our winners the worst. Speaking of book banners,

(37:52):
Moms for Liberty, that's Moms for Hitler. Liberty co founder
Bridget Ziegler and her husband, the new chair of the
Florida GOP, Christian Ziegler, Bridget. Ziegler was also there by
the podium when Ron DeSantis signed Florida's Don't Say Gay laws.
For the Sarasota Herald Tribune and the Florida Trident, Sarasota

(38:14):
police are currently investigating allegations against Christian Ziegler. No charges yet,
but they've gotten missearch warrant and they are examining his
phone now. Allegations from a local woman accusing Christian Ziegler
of sexual battery and according to the Trident, rape and
the unredacted words in one part of the police report
are quote stated raped, stated that raped unquote. Sadly, this

(38:42):
part of the story is all too common. There is
a psychological condition in which really sick people often spend
their lives trying basically to make sure that they can
prove that other people are way more sick than they are,
and that their efforts to persecute those people more than
compensate for their own evil, at least in their own minds,
so that they can rationalize that they are in effect

(39:03):
not net evil. Don't know if either of the Zigglers
fit that description, but I haven't told you the kicker
to this story yet. Sit down, the alleged victim also
told police that she was not exactly a stranger either
to Florida Republican chairman mister Ziggler or Moms for Liberty

(39:25):
co founder Missus Ziggler. She quote alleged that she and
both Zigglers had been involved in a long standing, consensual
three ways sexual relationship prior to the incident. Unquote, Oh so,
Mom's for liberty, It's that kind of liberty. Huh waca, waca, waca.

(39:50):
Christian Florida Republican man Ziegler and his wife Bridget Ziegler.
Just remember in Florida, don't say gay, but if you
want to say bye bye, apparently it's okay. Today's worst
persons and the world fridays with Thurber now and as

(40:18):
I believe I mentioned, Thurber stuck mostly too. Besides the
cartoons and drawings that made him famous in one part
of the world, his short stories and other works of
fiction that made him famous in the rest of the world.
But every once in a while he would get really
ticked off by something going on in real life. He
would delve into cultural criticism. He wrote pieces about how

(40:41):
bad radio was in the nineteen forties, particularly as we began
to lose more and more of his vision, and periodically
he would have at other authors, especially if he thought
their work was crap. And in that context I bring
to you The Secret Life of James Thurber by James Thurber.

(41:05):
I have only dipped here and there into Salvador Dali's
The Secret Life of Salvador Dolli, with paintings by Salvador
Dolli and photographs of Salvador Dolli, because anyone afflicted with
what my grandmother's sister Abigail called the permanent jumps, should
do no more than skidder through such an autobiography, particularly

(41:27):
in these melancholy times. One does not have to skidder
far before one comes upon some vignette which gives the
full shape and flavor of the book. The youthful dreamer
of dreams, biting a sick bat or kissing a dead horse,
the slender stripling going into man's estate with the high

(41:50):
hope and fond desire of one day eating a live
but roasted turkey, and sighing lover covering himself with goat
dung and aspic, that he might give off the true
and noble odor of the ram in my flying trip
through Dolly, I caught other glimpses of the great man,

(42:12):
Salvador adoring a seed ball fallen from a plane tree,
Salvador kicking a tiny playmate off a bridge, Salvador caressing
a crutch, Salvador breaking the old family doctor's glasses with
a leather thonged mattress beater. There would appear to be
only two things in the world that revolt him, and

(42:33):
I don't mean a long dead hedgehog. He is squeamish
about skeletons and grasshoppers. Oh well, we all have our idiosyncrasies,
Senor Dolli's memories have set me to thinking, I find
myself muttering as I shave, and on two occasions I

(42:54):
have swung my crutch at a little neighbor girl on
my way to the post office. Senor Dolly's book sells
for six dollars. My own published person history, Harper and
Brothers nineteen thirty three, sold for a dollar seventy five.
At the time. I complained briefly about this unusual figure,
principally on the ground that it represented only fifty cents

(43:16):
more than the price asked for a book called The
Adventures of Horace the Hedgehog, published the same month. The
publishers explained that the price was a closely approximated vertical
prefigured on the basis of profitable sailing, which in turn
was arrived at by taking into consideration the effect on

(43:37):
diminishing returns of the horizontal factor. In those days, all
heads of business firms adopted a guarded kind of double talk,
commonly expressed in low muffled tones, because nobody knew what
was going to happen, and nobody understood what had. Big
business had been frightened by a sequence of economic phenomena

(43:59):
which had clearly demonstrated that our civilization was in greater
danger of being turned off than of gradually crumbling away.
The upshot of it all was that I accepted the
price of one dollar and seventy five cents. In so doing,
I accepted the state of the world as a proper
standard by which the price of books should be fixed.
And now, with the world in ten times as serious

(44:21):
a condition as it was in nineteen thirty three, Dolly's
publishers set a price of six dollars on his life story.
This brings me to the inescapable conclusion that the price
fixing principle in the field of literature is not global
but personal trouble, quite simply as that I told too
much about what went on in the house I lived in,

(44:42):
and not enough about what went on inside myself. Let
me be the first to admit that the naked truth
about me is to the naked truth about Salvador DOLLI
as an old ukulele in the attic is to a
piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts.

(45:05):
Dolly has the jump on me from the beginning. He
remembers and describes in detail what it was like in
the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my
father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he
voted for William McKinley. It was a drab and somewhat

(45:25):
battered tin shed set on wheels, and it was filled
with guffawing men and cigar smoke. All in all as
far removed from the paradisiacal placenta of Salvador Dolly's first recollection,
as could well be imagined, A fat jolly man dandled
me on his knee and said that I would soon
be old enough to vote against William Jennings Bryan. I

(45:48):
thought he meant that I could push a folded piece
of paper into the slot of the padlocked box as
soon as my father was finished. When this turned out
not to be true, I had to be carried out
of the place, kicking and screaming. In my struggles I
knocked my fond derby off several times. The Derby was
not a monstrously exciting love object to me, as practically

(46:12):
everything Salvador encountered was to him, and I doubt, if
I had that day to live over again, that I
could bring myself, even in the light of exotic dedication
as I now know it, to conceive an intense and
perverse affection for the Derby. It remains obstinately in my
memory is a rather funny hat, a little too large

(46:33):
in the crown, which gave my father the appearance of
a tired, sensitive gentleman who had been persuaded against his
will to take part in a game of charades. We
lived on Champion Avenue at the time, and the voting
booth was on Mound Street. As I set down these names,
I begin to perceive an essential and important difference between

(46:54):
the infant Salvador and the infant me. This difference can
be stated in terms of environment. Salvador was brought up
in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal
el Greco and Servantes. I was brought up in Ohio,
a region steeped in the traditions of Coxey's Army, the

(47:17):
Anti Saloon League, and William Howard Taft. It is only
natural that the weather in little Salvador's soul should have
been stirred by stranger winds and enveloped in more fantastic
mists than the weather in my own soul. But enough
of muling apology for my lackluster early years. Let us

(47:40):
get back to my secret life, such as it was,
stopping just long enough to have another brief look at
Segnor Dolly on our way. Salvador Dolly's mind goes back
to a childhood half imagined and half real, in which
the edges of actuality were sometimes less sharp than the
edges of dream. He seems, somehow to have got the

(48:02):
idea that this sets him off from Harry Spencer, Charlie Doakes,
I Finberg, JJ mcnabo, William Faulkner, Herbert Hoover, and me.
What Salvey had that the rest of us kids didn't
was the perfect scenery, characters, and costumes for his desperate
little rebellion against the clean, the conventional, and the comfortable.

(48:27):
He put perfume on his hair, which would have cost
him his life in say Bayonne, New Jersey, or Youngstown, Ohio.
He owned a lizard with two tails. He wore silver
buttons on his shoes, and he knew or imagined he
knew little girls called Galuchka and Dulita. Thus he was

(48:49):
born halfway along the road to paranoia. The soft expression
of his prayers, the melting ohs of his oblations, the
capital to put it so that you can see what
I'm trying to say of his heart's desire, or so
anyway it must seem to a native of Columbus, Ohio,
who has a youngster, bought his twelve dollars suits at

(49:11):
the F and R. Lazarus Company, had his hair washed
out with ivory soap, owned a bull terrier with only
one tail, and played nicely and a bit diffidently with
little girls named Irma and Betty and Ruby. Another advantage

(49:31):
that the young dolly had over me from the standpoint
of impetus towards paranoia lay in the nature of the
adults who peopled his real world. There was in Dolly's
hometown of Figeas a family of artists named Pi, show musicians, painters,
and poets, all of whom adored the ground that the
en Font Terrible walked on. If one of them came

(49:55):
upon him, throwing himself from a high rock, a favorite
relaxation of our hero, or hanging by his feet with
his head immersed in a pail of water, the wild
news was spread about the town that greatness and genius
had come to figet Us. There was a woman who
put on a look of maternal interest when Salvador threw

(50:16):
rocks at her. The mayor of the town fell dead
one day at the boy's feet. A doctor in the community,
not the one he had horse whipped, was seized of
a fit and attempted to beat him up. The contention
that the doctor was out of his senses at the
time of the assault is Dolly's, not mine. The adults

(50:37):
around me when I was in short pants were neither
so glamorous nor so attentive. They consisted mainly of eleven
maternal grain ants, all Methodists, who were staunch believers in
physic mustard, plasters and scripture, and it was part of
their dogma that artistic tendencies should be treated in the
same way as hiccups or hysterics. None of them was

(50:58):
an artist, unless she can count Aunt Lou, who wrote
sixteen stress verse with him hit and miss rhymes in
celebration of people's birthdays or on occasion of great national disaster.
Never occurred to me to bite a bat in my
aunt's presence, or to throw stones at them. There was

(51:20):
one escape though my secret world of idiom. Two years ago,
my wife and I, looking for a house to buy,
called on a firm of real estate agents in New Milford.
One of the members of the firm, scrabbling through a
metal box containing many keys, looked up to say, the
key to the Roxbury House isn't here. His partner replied,

(51:45):
it's a common lock. A skeleton will let you in.
I was suddenly, once again five years old, with a
wide eye and open mouth. I pictured the Roxbury House
as I would have pictured it as a small boy,
a house of such dark and nameless horrors as have
never crossed the mind of our little bat buyer. It

(52:06):
was of sentences like that nonchalantly tossed off by real
estate dealers, great aunts, clergymen, and other such prosaic persons.
That the enchanted private world of my early boyhood was made.
In this world. Businessmen who phoned their wives to say
that they were tied up at the office, sat roped

(52:28):
to their swivel chairs and probably gagged, unable to move
or speak, except somehow miraculously to telephone. Hundreds of thousands
of business men tied to their chairs in hundreds of
thousands of offices in every city of my fantastic cosmos.

(52:49):
An especially fine note about the binding of all the
businessmen in all the cities was that whoever did it,
always did it around five o'clock in the afternoon. Then
there was the man who left town under a cloud.
Sometimes I saw him all wrapped up in the cloud
and invisible, like a cat in a burlap sack. That

(53:10):
other times it floated about the size of a sofa,
three or four feet above his head, following him wherever
he went. One could think about the man under the
cloud before going to sleep. An image of him wandering
around from town to town was as sure soporific, not

(53:31):
so the mental picture of a certain Missus Houston, who
had been terribly cut up when her daughter died on
the operating table. I could see the doctors too vividly,
just before they set upon Missus Houston with their knives,
and I could hear them, now, Missus Houston, will we
get up on the table like a good girl, or
will we have to be put there? I could usually

(53:52):
fight off Missus Houston before I went to sleep, but
she frequently got into my dreams, and sometimes she still does.
I remember the grotesque creature that came to haunt my
meditations when one evening my father said to my mother,
what did missus Johnson say when you told her about Betty?

(54:13):
And my mother replied, as she was all ears. There
were many other wonderful figures in the secret, surrealistic landscapes
of my youth. The old lady was always up in
the air, the husband who did not seem to be
able to put his foot down, the man who lost
his head during a fire but was still able to

(54:34):
run out of the house yelling. The young lady who
was in reality a soiled dove. It was a world
that of necessity one had to keep to oneself and
brood over in silence, because it would fall to pieces
at the touch of words. If you brought it out
into the light of actual day and put it to
the test of questions, your parents would try to laugh

(54:57):
the miracles away, or they would take your temperature and
put you to bed. Since I always ran a temperature
whenever it was taken, and I was put to bed
and left there alone with missus Houston. Such a world
as the world of my childhood is alas not year proof.
It is a ghost that, to use Henley's words, gleams, flickers,

(55:21):
vanishes away. I think it must have been the time
my little cousin Francis came to visit us, that it began,
surely and forever to dissolve. I came into the house
one rainy dusk and ask where Francis was. She is, said,
our cook up in the front room, crying her heart out.

(55:45):
The fact that a person could cry so hard that
his heart would come out of his body as perfectly
shaped and glossy as a red velvet pin cushion was
news to me. For some reason, I had never heard
the expression so common in American families whose hopes and
dreams run so often counter to attainment. I went upstairs

(56:07):
and opened the door of the front room. Francis, who
was three years older than I, jumped off the bed
and ran past me, sobbing, and down the stairs. My
search for her heart took some fifteen minutes. I tore
the bed apart and kicked up the rugs, and even

(56:28):
looked in the bureau drawers. It was no good. I
looked out the window at the rain and the darkening sky.
My cherished mental image of the man under the cloud
began to grow dim and fade away. I discovered that,
all alone in a room, I could face the thought
of missus Houston with cold equanimity. Downstairs, in the living room,

(56:54):
Francis was still crying. I began to laugh. Ah, there, Salvador.

(57:20):
The Secret Life of James Thurber by James Thurber. I've
done all the damage I can do here. Thank you
for listening. Countdown has come to you from the Vin
Scully Studios at the Olderman Broadcasting Empire in New York.
Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass and drums,

(57:44):
produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of the
Beethoven compositions, were arranged and performed by the group No
Horns Allowed. Sports music courtesy VSPN Inc. Was written by
Mitch Warren Davis. We call it the Olderman theme from
ESPN two. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by
Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever our and

(58:04):
out through today with my friend John Dee. Everything else
was pretty much my fault. That's countdown for this the
one thousand and sixtieth day since dementia Jay Trump's first
attempted coup against the democratically elected government the United States.
Convict him now while we still can. The next scheduled
countdown is Tuesday, bulletins as the news warrants. Tomorrow. By

(58:26):
the way, is my dog Roses tenth birthday. Happy birthday Rose.
Maybe I can talk you into subscribing to the podcast
this year till the next one. I'm Keith Olberman. Good Morning,
good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith

(58:56):
Olberman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get
your podcasts.

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MSNBC CANS MEHDI HASAN. WHERE'S MADDOW? HAYES? O'DONNELL? - 12.1.23

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