December 5, 2024 • 62 mins
SEASON 3 EPISODE 76: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I'd like to thank the one person doing the most to undermine and derail the Trump transition, and dissipate any momentum he might have.
Trump himself.
He learned nothing from Matt Gaetz and so Pete Hegseth spends another day "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind." We are now reduced to Hegseth's mother pleading directly on Fox to Trump - staring in the camera as she does so - to continue supporting her idiot child for Secretary of Defense. But when asked if she'll testify on his behalf to the Senate confirmation hearings she refused to commit to it.
Amazeballs.
What's relevant here is that among the big names mentioned as Plan B is yet another Republican congressman. If he gets the job rather than Hegseth or DeSantis or Ernst, the GOP will have a House margin of one (1) vote - which isn't a margin at all.
ALSO: I TOLD YOU SO. Sunday night I suggested not only should Biden pardon Hunter but that he should pardon everybody else he thinks of. Last night Politico reported they're talking about it, but that only the names Adam Schiff, Tony Fauci, and Liz Cheney came up.
And in case like me you thought Chris Cillizza and Chuck Todd were the same person, have I got a shock for you.
B-Block (33:43) SPECIAL COMMENT NO. 2 - I have been pondering when we started on the road to Trump - or at least when we discovered that what should be the final guardrail to protect American democracy, the President himself, wasn't a guardrail at all. I've settled on January 19, 2009 and read you what I wrote and said that night and even what sounds awfully like a prediction of the advent of Trump Brand Stupid Fascism.
C-Block (52:00) IN SPORTS: Have you heard about it? The worst sports idea of all-time? "The Golden At Bat" as proposed by Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred. It is a gimmick as stupid as if you stopped the 7th Game of the NBA Finals and had the title decided by a free-throw shooting contest. And it's supposed to "attract young people to the game" which is a euphemism for "we expect you fans to be intensely concerned with how much money we owners make."
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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. I
would just like to go on the record and thank
(00:26):
the person who is doing the most to undermine the
Trump transition and the most to let the air out
of the momentum of Trump's gigantic one point four percent landslide.
I'd just like to thank the person who is making
Trump look stupid and amateurish and failureish. And that person,
(00:51):
of course, is Donald Trump. He was humiliated with the
Matt Gates nomination to the degree that when the thing
finally became utterly untenable and potentially destructive to him personally,
he didn't even try to blame anybody. He didn't stamp
(01:12):
his feet. He just moved on. And he got the
famous prosecutor who put Dwight Gooden, the failed Mets pitcher,
in jail for seven months. He just punted on Gates.
And you know, Trump knows he's in trouble when he
shuts up. Now, he has not said a word. He's
(01:35):
just standing there next to Pete Hegseth, who will never
be Secretary of Defense, who will never run the Pentagon,
who right now is probably a poor bet to get
his job back on the weekend edition of the Fox
News Morning Show. And every time Pete heg Seth's dumpster
fire goes out or drops down a little bit in intensity,
(02:00):
Trump is there as it reignites. When Mommy becomes part
of your story, When it's mommy who called you an
abuser of women, when it's mommy who suggested you needed
psychological help, and somebody she sent the email to has
(02:20):
decided to give it to the media. When mom from
eight years ago, seven years ago, it doesn't matter if
it was seven minutes ago. When Mom is part of
the reason you're not going to get the job, and
it's so bad that you have to put Mom on TV,
and it's so bad on TV that Mom instead of
(02:42):
answering the softball questions, the answering of the softball questions
was insufficient. She turned to camera and stared and thanked
the furor for his support of her son, the abuser,
(03:03):
and then she blamed the media, the awful media, for
having threatened her by calling her up and telling her
that they were going to print this and they wanted
to know what her reaction was and if she wanted
to say something, what evil bastard's trying to make it
fair to her, we can see where heg Sith got
his stupidity and his arrogance. And then as part of
(03:29):
the softball questions, this guy Doucey says to her, so
will you testify in front of the Senate on your
son's behalf? And if you are really trying, if you
are debasing yourself, Donald Trump, to the point of having
your nominee for Secretary of Defense, the punching power of
(03:53):
the Pentagon, the macho, slicked back, greasy haired Pete Hegseth,
who's had to turn to his mom to get him
out of trouble. When you go to that sense and
level of self humiliation for Hegseth, for his mom, for Fox,
for the entirety of the conservative fascist operation, and for
(04:15):
yourself Trump, when you go to that degree, and this
man Deucey turns to this woman and says, will you
be testifying on his behalf in front of the Senate?
And she says, I don't have an answer for you
on that, and she isn't sure. She won't commit. He's meet,
He's done, and not only that, instead of bailing out
(04:39):
on him when there was still time for people to
forget about him when there was still time for him
not to come up in every subsequent discussion of whoever
becomes the head of the Pentagon the Secretary of Defense,
when you could have removed the stain from your red
tie instead of doing it then, now just stand a
(05:03):
little closer to this. I will quote Bert Lancaster again
as JJ Hunsecker talking to the Tony Curtis character in
the great film Sweet Smell of Success. Your dead son,
get yourself buried heg Sith was supposed to meet as
(05:24):
part of the Pete Hegseth, Hey, you want to have
a beer with Pete Hegseth. Isn't that how we judge conservatives?
Who do you want to have a beer with this
alcoholic over here? He was supposed to have a beer
or something with Josh Hawley from Missouri, who is his
own dumpster fire, But we can leave that alone for
the time being. He was supposed to meet with Josh Hawley,
(05:48):
and then Hally's announcement came that there was going to
be a postponement of this meeting as part of the
senatorial tour of Pete Hegseth the dumpster fire on wheels
rolling past your Senate Office, Hawley said, it's been canceled.
Somebody in the transition team told PBS's reporter on the
(06:12):
Hill that they were told the transition team was told
that the Hegseth Hally meeting was canceled because Hegseth has
to be somewhere else today. The PBS reporter Lisai dejar
Dan naturally said, Florida, And there was apparently a shrug
(06:33):
and no answer to that. But we were informed by the
transition team member that the decision to cancel the Holly
Hegseth meeting was in fact on the Hegseth side, and
it quote came from a higher power. This is disastrous.
(06:54):
It's fantastically, wonderfully disastrous. If you had popcorn leftover from
the Matt Gates fiasco, keep it handy, because it doesn't
look like Trump's going to get out of this anytime soon,
because he's crazy and now he may in fact be
(07:17):
lazy and crazy, but lazy in a sense of not
maintaining that fisticuff's position that was the hallmark of everything
in his life. If there's one thing you'd look at
Trump and say, I find that useful and possibly something
I want to try to achieve. It's the fact that
he's never been satisfied with something. When there is a victory,
(07:38):
he wants more. This is his illness. It's not about
having money. It's about getting money. It's not about having power.
It's about getting power. It's not about defeating you or
winning in some way. It's about destroying you and then
coming back and destroying you once again. And in this case,
both with Gates and now with eg Seth, he took
(07:59):
his foot off the pedal. This is after the mom'st
worry about the email. All of this now, this is
after the drinking at Fox story. NBC News reports ten
sources at Fox News who said that he was always
drinking there, and let me see if I can read this.
One of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him
(08:23):
as recently as last month and heard him complain about
being hungover this fall. I will confess to you that
twice in my broadcasting career I went on the air
after having had alcohol at dinner, and once I had
(08:43):
too much and was mortified that I was going to
just sound like this on the air. I watched the
video of the show the next day and it was
absolutely fine. Nobody noticed, and I thought, well, I got
away with it. I'm never going to try that again.
One of the sources said they smelled alcohol and Pete
(09:04):
Hegseth as recently his last month. We're not talking about
ancient history, because this was also after the story about
him drinking so much at Concerned Veterans for America, like
eight years ago that there was a whistleblower report about
his drinking and he had to quit. And if you
thought the idea of Donald Trump again having his little
(09:27):
fat fingers on the button, if you thought that was
terrifying enough, now imagine that the guy at the Pentagon
who would be conferred with in the event that anything
was done, including invading Canada. Canada. Hello, if you want
to make it worse, just think about Trump calling up
(09:47):
the Secretary of Defense and he's drunk. I'm sure this
has happened before at some point in American history, but
this would apparently happen with Pete Hegseth on a regular basis,
and who would talk him out of bombing Vancouver. And
(10:09):
all of this was after the story of the serial
philandering during his first marriage and the story of the
sexual allegations or sexual abuse, allegations at the Conservative Convention
and his whole campaign that he started to turn the
army into the equivalent of the eleventh century crusaders who
(10:31):
slaughtered the infidels because they were true Christians. I'm not
making these references. These are the things he said. He
wants the nineteenth century version of the US military, or
the eleventh century version of the Christian crusaders, just go
into a part of the country or the world, or
(10:52):
the nation or wherever, and just wipe everybody out, because
we know true Christians believe that Christ truly supported infidelity
and abuse and alcohol and especially slaughtering. Pete Hegseth says
Trump called him yesterday and told him to hang in there.
(11:14):
I don't know. Was he drunk. Did Trump just tell
him to hang I suppose. I suppose at heart. One
of the principal problems that Trump has in assessing other
people to work for him is that he's such a
piece of crap himself that everybody else looks like I
don't know Sigmund Freud or Beethoven or Mickey Mantle or
(11:39):
I don't know who. He can't possibly know that just
because you are better than he is at a given
thing that that does not mean you're any good at it.
And after all, I think the number of children that
heg Seth has with the number of women that he's
(11:59):
had them with is still less than Trump's figure. The
only thing that is likely to actually resonate with Trump
is this idea of drinking. He doesn't like drinking. There
have been alcoholics in his family, his own brother died
from it. This has registered in some way that I'm
sure Trump does not understand, other than drinking bad. Well,
(12:23):
this is why you vet people. This is why, whether
you are fitting out your sports department at a local
television station or the entirety of your government as president
of the United States, why you can't just pick people
you see on TV and think they look good. You
can't cast an administration, even if you are crazy would
(12:49):
be dictator. You should ask other people first, because all
you need is for the first two big picks in
your draft to blow up in your face and suddenly
you are a foot shorter and you're going ten miles
an hour slower. And then after he eventually cuts bait
(13:09):
with Hegseth, whenever what's next comes out comes out, then
he's going to go through this with cash Patel. I'd
say keep an eye on cash Patel, but that would
be a cheap joke. And then you'll go through this
with Musk, and if not with Musk, then with Vivek Ramaswami,
(13:31):
because the Department of Government Efficiency is just another confidence
trick designed to in some way privatize something or cut
the taxes of well Elon Musk. And it turns out,
as CNN reported yesterday, there are hours and hours of
tape of Vivek Ramaswami trashing Elon Musk, his new co
(13:58):
director at the Department of stealing money from the government.
I'm sorry, Department of Government Efficiency. And he's saying, and
let me see if I can read this quote from
the CNN story, this is him on tape. I have
no reason to think Elon won't jump like a circus
monkey when Jijinping calls in the hour of need, endless interviews, comments,
(14:24):
podcast appearances, apparently stopping passers by on the street to
tell them this that he's in bed Musk. That is
with China, calling Musk a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party.
And this again, this is not stuff that his mother
wrote about Vivek Ramaswami in twenty eighteen. This is from
(14:45):
last year. This is the problem with confidence tricksters. They
lie so much, they have forgotten half their lives, and
they don't know going into a room whether they hate
all those people in there or love them. Back to
second Secretary of Defense if it's not heg Seth, and
(15:08):
I don't know if you've been able to pick this
up from my comment so far, it's not going to
be heg Seth. The Trumper has put out a story
yesterday that the second choice is Ron DeSantis. I'm not
sure I believe this. I suppose the DeSantis willingness to
go back and endorse Trump might have registered and pushed
(15:31):
its way through Trump's only satisfaction in life, which is
to torture people one way or the other. But I
still think they might as well have said, oh no,
the new Secretary of Defense is going to be Nicki Haley.
They've made up. The other big name was Jonie Ernst.
You remember her. She is the governor of Iowa who
(15:52):
has run on campaigns and more campaigns and more campaigns
after that, all of them with the same theme, I'm
going to go kill a pig right now. I wish
I were making that up. I wish that was a
euphemism for something. I wish that was like saying keep
an eye on cash Pattel. She just made another reference
(16:14):
to killing pigs. But and this is where all of
this kind of oh, popcorn time. Let's watch Trump burn
down his own house while he's still in it. It's
a one nothing lead right now for the good guys.
This could make it to nothing. There's one practical thing
that could make it far more than two nothing. It
(16:34):
could make it one hundred to nothing, CNN reported. And
I don't know that anybody picked this up that the
other vetted name as an alternate for when hegseeth finally disappears,
like the cheshire cat, where all that will be left
of him before he vanishes is his slicked down hair.
(16:57):
The other guy that they vetted to be Secretary of
Defense is Congressman first term Congressman Slea Hunt from Texas
and the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations. And
so what if he picks another Republican congressman for his cabinet.
(17:21):
The Republican threshold right now in the House, their lead
in the House, their margin in the House is two
hundred and seventeen Republicans to two hundred and fifteen Democrats.
So take one away and it's a one vote margin,
which is a no vote margin. Nothing. Nothing could be
more pleasing than the idea of Mike Johnson, Speaker of
(17:44):
the House, unable to get anything done because one of
the remaining Republicans is out drunk or has been appointed
Secretary of Defense. We want hunt, we want hunt, we
want hunt, we want hunt, we want just now, I
(18:30):
said about a quote. If I can read this, this
is not a figure of speech. I am suffering from
a Chalasian or Khalasian, depending on your pronunciation, an eye
infection in which one of my eyes is pretty much
closed and the other one's not too happy with me either.
(18:50):
It could be a double Kalaysian. So I'm doing my
best here, but I can't really see. So I've had
to add lib and thus this thing has had a
certain ragged quality that I would rather it did not.
I'm doing my best here, but I am playing hurt
and I'm supposed to not be doing this. Please do
not tell doctor Renee Richards. Now I will mention something
(19:14):
else I told you so remember Sunday night when the
story broke but Joe Biden was pardoning his son, and
everybody went, oh, no, it'll give Trump an excuse to
do this, And I said, I love this. Do more
ten million pardons by the Biden administration before the Democracy
(19:35):
going out of business sale ends on January twentieth. I
want Biden signing pardons as Trump goes to the podium
seventy two hours after I suggested this, politico, and I
am going to try to read this. Biden White House
is discussing preemptive pardons for those in Trump's crosshairs. Well
(20:01):
good White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary
step of handing out blanket pardons to those who've committed
no crimes, both because it could suggest impropriety, only fueling
Trump's criticisms. Once again, stop stop thinking that Trump needs
(20:24):
fuel for his criticisms. Trump is conducting a conversation in
his head and has been since sometime in the nineteen fifties.
He's holding a conversation at all times. The person he
is speaking to is his best friend, his twin, his
(20:45):
invisible twin, Ronald Trump, who's even angrier than Donald is
that's all this is about. He doesn't need fuel. He
has Ronald fueling Trump's criticisms. Trump without criticisms stops breathing.
Back to what Politico wrote, Let's see I was here,
(21:08):
both because it could suggest impropriety and because those offered
preemptive pardons may reject them. Pro tip, don't reject them.
Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress's
January sixth committee as Senator elect Adam Schiff and former
GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said
(21:29):
Cheney should go to jail, along with the rest of
the Unselect Committee. Also mentioned by Biden's aids for a
pardoner is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infections and Infectious Diseases. Excuse me,
I can't really read. Can I again? Why are we
stopping here? I see a list there of let's see Fauci,
(21:50):
Cheney shift. That's three people. We're about ten million, nine
hundred and ninety nine thousand short. I know it's hyperbole
to have a one eight hundred hotline hundred pardon me, Joe,
but why not? Trump is already mocking the concept of
(22:11):
the Department of Justice. We're not talking ineptitude like Garland.
This is corruption. This is persecution. This is star Chambers.
This is making up laws to prosecute people who are innocent.
And the bitterness and the anger and the inability to
(22:31):
take the win is limitless in Donald Trump. And if
it ever stopped or in some way ebbed, Ronald Trump
would be there to make sure he got angry again.
I mean, honest to God, the White House should spend
the rest of the Biden term offering pardons to every
(22:52):
family member of everybody associated with anybody who might get
a pardon, every administration staffer, every media member, everybody's ever
worked for Amtrak. Be a stack of blank pardons sent
to MSNBC and crew and every left wing organization. But
(23:15):
I mean, let's be reasonable, no more than five thousand
of them per outfit. I'll take one. I will take
a pardon. I don't know that I have ever broken
a law, not knowingly. I'll take it. Whatever preemptive partner. Sure,
these people are going to pervert the justice system. They
(23:38):
are going to do it. They are nuts, they are fascists,
and all the comparisons to Hitler are obviously hyperbolic in
some way, because only Hitler was Hitler and only the
Holocaust was the Holocaust. But every time I've referred to
Trump as Hitler, it's about the stuff that preceded that.
Have you ever seen the movie Judgment at Nuremberg? Trying
(24:01):
not to turn this into the Burt Lancaster Show, but
Bert Lancaster in that movie plays an eminent German jurist,
a combination of several real life figures, who has tried
for war crimes along with other Nazi jurists, and as
they make excuses, he breaks down and goes through, case
(24:23):
by case almost how they perverted the law to turn
it into a weapon for Hitler. That's what we're going
to face. That's what's going to happen when they go
looking through your social media feed, when they run out
of other people to prosecute. That's what we're facing. And
you think somehow, Gavin Newsom and other Democrats and the
(24:47):
New York Times editorial board and other handwringers, you think
that this makes the Democrats look bad, makes Biden look bad.
On January twentieth, at noon, Trump is going to light
the w White House on fire and figuratively the nation
(25:08):
on fire, and what Biden is doing by pardoning his
son and discussing these preemptive pardons for others is pulling
people out of the fire, people who don't deserve to
die in a fire started by Donald Trump. Consequences to this,
some people are going to judge it harshly f them.
(25:29):
The issue here is getting as many people out alive
as we can alive to fight back and destroy Trump
and trump Ism and create a world in which, at
some point in the near future it will be illegal
to say the name Trump out loud in America. They
(25:51):
want to put cash Patel in charge of the FBI.
Do you think he is going to be there because
they've suddenly embraced DEI. He is there because they no
longer care whether the FBI director even tries to act
(26:12):
like actual law enforcement. They care only that he acts
like an enforce er. One last thing, and I'm pushing
my luck here, but I will now confess I am
(26:36):
surprised that the world did not come to an end
and the planet did not burn to a cinder on Tuesday,
because apparently that's when this happened. Chris Solissa did some
sort of podcast where his guest was Chuck Todd. First
(27:00):
of all, I'm shocked because I always assumed they were
the same person, the same stupid blame everybody but themselves person.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I follow the Hunter Biden trial very closely. I read
every transcript, all the testimony, because that's what you can.
All that was made public, and there is you want
to you want to read, you want to you want
to get angry, just as a as as somebody in
just all these mixed emotions. You read the Halle Biden
transcript and that's both widow yes and and essentially he
(27:35):
turned her into a crack addict. And this was all
happening in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and Joe and Joe
Biden were so concerned about their family that they decided
to run for president.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
YEP.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
I just so when you talk about the word selfish,
I it's almost like the word doesn't I mean I.
Their decision to run for president put the entire Democratic
Party and the United States of America in the position
that is in now.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Ah. Of course, that was terrible of Biden to run
and defeat Trump and save democracy in twenty twenty What
a horrible selfish person he is Chuck Todd and Crys.
You know who's missing from that conversation. They could have
(28:28):
used special guest Mark Halprin and maybe Nate Silver, but
I think, I think right now what we need is
Chuck Todd and Chris interviewing Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzynski.
(28:50):
Also ahead in an unbelievably all new edition of Countdown.
I am going to reread to you a special comment
that I did in two thousand and nine, which I
have identified as the day, not the comment being the
cause of this, but what it was about the day
in which the idea of the president as the final
(29:12):
guard rail protecting American society changed, was erased, was broken irretrievably.
You may ask if I'm saying I can't actually see
the papers in front of me, and I'm kind of
fudging it. I've probably got a couple of quotes wrong.
How did I read this well? I actually recorded the
next segment a couple of days ago before this chariso
(29:34):
got in my eye. I can't stop calling it a
cheriso to people. I have a chariso in my eye.
Also one other commentary, which I will do live because
I don't need to read anything about this. Have you
heard about this idea from baseball the golden at bat,
where a manager wants a game can summon anybody he
(29:55):
wants to hit in a particular situation, presumably a potential
game winning situation. And you might have the theory of
a game in which show Heyotani bats for the Los
Angeles Dodgers, and then since he popped out or struck
out and didn't get that run home, the manager Dave
Roberts says, Okay, I'm gonna have show Aotani bat next.
(30:19):
In other words, destroying the essence of baseball. It's been
proposed by somebody in baseball who happens to be the
commissioner of baseball and who went to college with me.
If you think baseball is dying, this will remove any
doubt that you have that baseball is dying. And if
you think that it's dying slowly, the good news will
be this will speed it up. All that is ahead.
(30:43):
That's next. This is a Playing Herd edition of Countdown.
I have been ruminating of late as to the start date.
How did we get here? I think we may know
when did we start going here? That's a little tougher,
(31:04):
I guess realistically, it's whatever day the primordial human crawled
out of the primordial sludge in which our ancestors lived.
And I don't mean Trump's family getting to America. But
if you want a date at which all of this
was elevated to the presidential level, where the last guardrail,
(31:27):
which really is what the president of the United States
is supposed to be and has become in the entire world,
the last guardrail, when that turned into no more guard rails.
I think I have figured out that date or roughly
that year, and I don't want anybody to mistake this
as I read this piece again that I am blaming
(31:48):
Barack Obama for Donald Trump, but there is a main line,
straight line connection between two things something Obama did not
do and everything that Trump has done since I gave
a special comment, and most of them I have forgotten
and have seen again or read again with some surprise
(32:09):
and not inconsiderable pride, if you will forgive me that.
But this one I've always remembered because of the reaction
to it. The date it was given was January nineteenth,
two thousand and nine, and I can remember it a
cold night in Washington, the night before the inauguration of
the first non white guy president of the United States,
and the euphoria that had come through most of the country,
(32:32):
including those people who had voted for John McCain, who said, well,
at least we have done this. Seventy five percent of
the country seemed to be at least accepting this idea
that this was something good, whether or not they liked
the man at all. And so the night before, having
unintentionally but nonetheless having supported Obama in his nomination bit
(32:56):
against Hillary Clinton, I decided to be the one who
relieved themselves in the soup I believe would be the
youthstic explanation for this. I did a commentary the night
before Obama was inaugurated, and the next day people were
yelling at me during the coverage of the inauguration, complaining
that I had not given the man a chance. As
(33:17):
it turned out, I was right. And not only was
I right, I was prescient in ways that I did
not understand. And as always when you are prescient, the
one problem with prescience is you always get the timeframe wrong.
I thought we had perhaps fifty years before what happened
would happen. It turned out. Let's see January nineteenth, two
(33:39):
thousand and nine to January twentieth, twenty sixteen seventeen. Rather
we had eight years and one day. This is what
I read with no edits on the night of January nineteenth,
two thousand and nine, which I will take as the
start of how we got where we are right now,
where the last guardrail turned out to be made out
(34:02):
of paper mache. We have tortured people. You and I.
This is the people's democracy. We are those people. These
are our elected officials. That they did not come to
us and ask us to act thusly in our names
is unfortunate, indeed criminal, But it is also almost irrelevant.
(34:25):
They work for us. They work for us, and they
tortured people, And so we have tortured people. You and
I know we have tortured colleague shak Mohammad. We not
only know about it, we have now heard it boasted
about by one of the men who, as of tomorrow
will no longer work for us, George Walker Bush quote.
(34:47):
The techniques were necessary and are necessary to be used
on a rare occasion to get information necessary to protect
the American people. Mister Bush said to Fox News on
January eleventh. One such person, who gave us information was
colleague Shak Mohammad. I'm in the Oval office. I'm told
that we have captured colleague Shake Mohammad and the professionals
believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So
(35:10):
I asked what tools are available for us to find
information from him. They give me a list of tools,
and I said, are these tools deemed to be legal?
We got legal opinions before the decision was made. I
think when people study the history of this particular episode,
they will find out we gained good information from colleague
Shack Muhammad in order to protect our country. We believe
(35:31):
that the information we gained helped saved lives on American
soil unquote. Never Mind mister Bush's delusions here. Never Mind
all primary sources who witnessed the interrogation of colleague Shake
Mohammad said they got nothing from him until they started
buddying up to him. Never Mind that mister Bush's supporter's
favorite torture construction, the mythical ticking time bomb scenario, not
(35:55):
only did not transpire here, but mister Bush has not
even had the imagination to pretend it did, just in
order to slightly cover his moral tracks. The key is
that this statement, if it had been under oath, would
have been a confession to a war crime. Mister Bush
is proactive. I asked what tools are available. Mister Bush
(36:18):
is aware of the legal haze in which he steps,
and I said, are these tools deemed to be legal?
Mister Bush realizes the tools he has chosen have been used.
We gained good information from colleague Shaik Muhammad. Since we
know from previous admissions at the Pentagon that colleage Shik
Muhammad was waterboarded, we can infer that mister Bush knew
he would be waterboarded and knew afterwards that he had
(36:41):
been waterboarded. Mister Bush is guilty. He is guilty as sin.
Mister President Elect, you were first asked about all this
on the eighteenth of April last I am proud to
say you were asked about it by a fellow who
got onto his high school newspaper while I was the
editor Will Bunch the Philadelphia Daily News. I think you
(37:05):
are right you President elect Obama told him if crimes
have been committed, they should be investigated. You are also
right that I would not want my first term consumed
by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as
a partisan witch hunt because I think we have too
many problems we have to solve. So this is an
area where I would want to exercise judgment unquote. Good amen,
(37:33):
But in that brief interview was born, or at least elucidated,
a loophole genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies.
Vice President elect Biden echoed this on December twenty first,
in a statement to which your transition team has directed
all those to whom this is a paramount issue. He said,
(37:56):
the questions of whether or not a criminal act has
been committed or a very very bad judgment has been
engaged in is something the Just Department decides. After his
comment last week with straightforwardness that was like water to
a lost soul in the Sahara that waterboarding is torture,
your nominee at Justice, mister Eric Holder, echoed all this.
(38:19):
We don't want to criminalize policy differences that might exist
between the outgoing administration and the administration that is about
to take over. But mister President elect, you have a
confession since this statement of a structure of policy prefacing
policy itself for mister Biden, you have had mister Bush's confession. Moreover,
(38:42):
since mister Biden's statement, you have a legal assessment from
within the bowels of the Bush administration itself. Quote, we
tortured Mohammad al Katani, Judge Susan Crawford told The Washington
Post a week ago. His treatment met the legal definition
of torture. That was why. Judge Crawford added that as
the Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether or
(39:04):
not to bring detainees at Guantanamo Bay in trial, she
decided in Katani's case not too This, mister President elect,
was not the obvious waterboarding of colleague Sheik Muhammad. This
was a more insidious combination of legally approved procedures that
still nearly killed this man Katani. The techniques were all authorized,
(39:28):
Judge Crawford continued, but the manner in which they applied
them was overly aggressive and too persistent. This was not
any one particular act. It was just a combination of
things that had a medical impact on him that hurt
his health. In fact, mister President Elect, the records at
GITMO showed that Katani's heart beat eventually slowed to thirty
five beats per minute. Quote. It was abusive and uncalled
(39:52):
for and coercive, clearly coercive. I sympathized with the intelligence
gatherers in those days after nine to eleven, not knowing
what was coming next, and trying to gain information to
keep us safe. But there still has to be a
love that we should not cross. Unfortunately, what this has done,
I think has tainted everything going forward. Sadly, as commendable
(40:16):
as the intention here might seem, this country has never
moved forward without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past.
In point of fact, every effort to merely draw a
line in the sand and declare the past dead has
served only to keep the past alive, and often to
strengthen the past. We compromised with slavery in the Declaration
(40:41):
of Independence and in the Constitution, and four score and
nine years later we had buried six hundred thousand of
our sons and brothers in a civil war. After that
war's ending, we compromised with the social restructuring and protection
of the rights of the minorities in the South, and
a century later we had not only not resolved anything,
(41:03):
but black leaders were still being as assassinated in the
cities of the South. We compromised with Germany in the
reconstruction of Europe after the First World War. Nobody even
arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war crimes trials
then and nineteen years later there was an indescribably more
evil Germany and a more heartrending Second World War. We
(41:24):
compromised with the trusts of the early nineteen hundreds. Today
we have corporations too big to fail. We compromised with
the Palmer raids and got McCarthyism, and we compromised with
McCarthyism and got Watergate. We compromised with Watergate, and junior
members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately
at risk, and they grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz
(41:45):
and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. But mister President elect,
you are entirely correct as you say what we have
to focus on is getting things right in the future,
as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in
the past. That means prosecuting all those involved in the
Bush administration's torture of prisoners and starting at the top.
(42:10):
You are also right that you should not want your
first term consumed by what was perceived on the part
of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt. But your only
other option might be to let this set and fester indefinitely, because,
mister President elect, someday there will be another Republican president,
(42:31):
or even a Democrat, just as blind as mister Bush
to ethics and to this country's moral force. He will
look back to what you did about mister Bush, or
what you did not do, and he will see precedent,
or as Cheney saw, he will see how not to
(42:52):
get caught next time. Prosecute, mister President elect. Even if
you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished
good for generations unborn. Merely by acting. You will deny
mister Bush what he most wants right now, without prosecutions,
without this nation standing up and saying this was wrong,
we will atone. Mister Bush's version of what happened goes intoe.
(43:15):
The historical record of this nation. Torture was legal, It worked,
It saved the country. The end, we have tortured people,
You and I, mister President elect. This is the people's democracy.
We are the people. These were our elected officials. That
(43:39):
they did not come to us and act thusly in
our names is unfortunate and indeed criminal, but it is
almost irrelevant. They worked for us, they tortured people, and
so we have tortured people. Thus, beginning tomorrow, it is
up to you not just to discontinue this, but to
(44:00):
prevent it. At the end of his first year in office,
mister Lincoln tried to contain, extualize the Civil War for
those who still wanted to compromise with evils of secession
and slavery. The struggle of today, Lincoln wrote, is not
altogether for today, It is for a vast future. Also,
mister President elect, you have been handed the beginning of
(44:23):
that future. Use it to protect our children and our
distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again. If
you are worried about the Republicans viewing any torture prosecution
in the way you postulated to Will Bunch a partisan
witch hunt, you can remind them that the woman who
said all that, Susan Crawford, is a lifelong Republican. So,
(44:48):
mister President Elect, beyond whatever else will come out as
the whistleblowers began to say what they're going to say
just after noon tomorrow, you have your predecessor's unofficial confession,
and you have this singular evaluation by a principle in
your assessor's administration, this kind of line level confession. They
(45:11):
are guilty of this, Mister President elect. They are guilty
as sin. Since he talked to my friend Bunch in April,
mister Obama's only lengthy comments about this were made to
George Stephanopolis on January eleventh of this year. See if
a disturbing theme becomes evident, Obviously we are going to
look at past practices. I don't believe that anybody is
(45:33):
above the law. On the other hand, I also have
a belief that we need to look forward as opposed
to looking backwards. Later, my instinct is to focus on
how do we make sure that moving forward we are
doing the right thing. Later, still, my orientation is going
to be to move forward. Finally, what we have to
(45:58):
focus on is getting things right in the future, as
opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past,
asked January nineteenth, two thousand and nine, on MSNBC, the
night before Obama took office, imploring him to not let
the legal violations of the torture statutes by the Bush
(46:23):
administration go unpunished, in large part because it would warn
all those to come that all they had to do
was to act in some fashion that would cloak their
sins as president or around the presidency, and they would
(46:47):
not be prosecuted and could not be prosecuted. Before there
was Supreme Court presidential immunity, there was de facto presidential immunity.
And are we paying the price for it now? Because
mister Obama was right. What we have to focus on
(47:08):
is getting things right in the future, as opposed to
looking at what we got wrong in the past and
doing that we got things wrong in the future. I'm
not right, George Crowing A pleasure to have you here.
Thank you. This is the best news show ever. I
toil that to one of your producers, and I want
(47:30):
you to know that I've seen them all and it's
just for especially the first thirty five minutes. Thank you.
It's just just unparalleled. I got bad news between you
and I. We got six minutes to completely still that
in here. That's good.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This
is Countdown with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
And, as promised in an almost completely ad libbed edition
of The Big Show, a final comment about sports. You
may or may not have heard about this. It is
simply the most ridiculous idea I have heard proposed by
anybody in any position of authority in any sport in
(48:25):
my lifetime. And if I make it to the end
of next month, I'll be sixty six years old. I've
seen a lot of crap, and this is the worst.
Surprisingly enough, it comes from a guy I went to
college with, Robert Manfred, Commissioner of Baseball, the man they
chose in order to make Bud Selig look like a
Hall of Fame. Commissioner Rob Manfred has floated an idea
(48:50):
of allowing once a game per team, in every baseball game,
presumably during the regular season and in the postseason and
in the World Series, to defy the primary cardinal rule
of the game, thou shalt bat, in order he wants
to have teams have a choice once again to have
(49:12):
a golden at batch, a golden ball, a golden well,
there's another word I'm thinking of now, but I'll leave
it alone, But it would shower you with excitement. The
golden ball would be an opportunity for a team to
defy the batting order. If it says your worst hitter,
(49:34):
the worst hitter of all time is up in the
bottom of the ninth inning, with the winning run at
second base, you have to have him hit or pinch
it for him and remove him from the game. Those
are the rules. They have been the rules since the
beginning of time. It's not like basketball, and this is
always one of the great selling points of the game.
This and the fact that there's no clock, which they
(49:55):
haven't mentioned in the last couple of years since they
installed a clock. But the primary idea was you could
not have Lebron James take every one of your crucial shots.
Michael Jordan could have the ball at any time. Tom
Brady would throw the ball every time, nearly every time
the New England Patriots or his other teams needed him two.
(50:18):
In hockey, the shot could always be taken by your
best shooter. But in baseball, there are nine batters and
how they come up, how you order them is the
fundamental strategy of a game of baseball and thus a
season of baseball, and Rob Manfred wants to change that
once again. You can take out your worst hitter and
(50:38):
have anybody you want hit for him at that moment.
If you have the worst hitter on the Los Angeles Dodgers,
Chris Taylor who bat it. I don't know. I believe
the number was in negatives last year. If he's due
up in that game winning situation, you can take him
out and have show Hey Otani bat or anybody else
(50:59):
you want. It's a total joke. It is a total
prostitution of the point of baseball. The point of baseball
is that in that clutch situation, your hero can only
be the hero if it's his turn. The reason baseball
has been part of America for two hundred years, almost
(51:20):
one hundred and sixty years professionally is that it is
that balance between the individual star and the team unit.
You don't have the choice of giving that at bat
to the best player. You can't have the best pitcher
throw that one pitch for a variety of reasons. But
in the situation with a hitter who could conceivably come
(51:41):
up every day every year, you can't just say, Okay,
I'm putting Chris Taylor on the bench just for this
crucial moment and bringing in Babe Ruth. It can't do it,
and he wants to do it now. There has been
some version of this in which it would only be
allowed in extra innings, which they've already destroyed by having
a runner start each extra inning at second base with
(52:03):
nobody out, because we want less baseball, not more. But
this idea of having somebody be able to come in
and hit in the clutch in that critical situation sounds
great the way a three point contest in the middle
of a baseball game would sound new and exciting and invigorating.
(52:24):
Because we're losing the young people, we're not growing the game.
There is an argument ongoing in New York between two
of the primary announcers for the two teams, Michael Kay
of the Yankees, who's been a friend of mine for
about twenty five years, and Howie Rose of the Mets,
who's been a friend of mine for about forty five years.
And they have been going back and forth kind of inadvertently,
(52:44):
because Michael thinks this is a way to grow the
game and get youngsters interested in it, and how He,
of course thinks it's completely crazy, and how he is
right because among other things, and I haven't seen this emphasized,
if they actually did this in one regular season game,
where you could come in and have this guy bat
during all games, not just extra inning games, and extra
(53:07):
inning games average nine or ten percent a year. So
there's every team plays about sixteen seventeen somewhere in there
extra inning games a year. But if you could conceivably,
in that clutch moment, have show Heyotani come in one
hundred and sixty two extra times. And mind you, this
is in addition to his other at bats. He could
have just popped out to second base and then you
(53:27):
give him another chance to give the get the winning
run home from second. The same man could bat twice
in a row, or you could bat him ahead of himself.
Show Aotani is on deck, you could pinch it, show
he Otani for the guy hitting ahead of shoe Heotani.
It's literally a home run contest in the middle of
a game that counts. It further dilutes the concept of baseball.
(53:50):
But to the point I was just making one hundred
and sixty two, theoretically extra at bats would be given
to show Heyo Tani. What would happen to all the records?
How many home runs would Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron,
or for God's sakes, even Arry Bonds have hits if
they had an extra one hundred and sixty two at
bats every year. The numbers are meaningless. Now the statistics,
(54:13):
the entire history, the contact between baseball and its past,
would be totally obliterated, and it would be reduced to,
as I said, a home running contest. The reason Michael
Kay and others have pointed out that this needs to
be done is that baseball is not getting the younger audience,
even though the younger audience has increased on TV and
radio in any event for baseball over the last couple
(54:35):
of years. But the point is that it isn't growing
the game, meaning that Michael and many other well intentioned
baseball people have over the course of fifty years of
the drip drip drip of this term, we're not growing
the game. They've fallen victim to this nonsense. Growing the
game is the owner's euphemism for we want more money.
(54:56):
If you are a baseball fan, you should not and
could not have any interest whatsoever in whether or not
there are sixty and other people sitting in the ballpark
with you or six. You should not care whether there
are five million people watching baseball or fifty million baseball
fans watching at the same time you are. There are
(55:17):
certain important indicators as to the health of a game
that those numbers reflect, but no teams are going out
of business. The last baseball team that actually went bankrupt
was in nineteen seventy. The Seattle Pilots went bankrupt, and
the guy in Milwaukee who was thus able to obtain
them and move them to Milwaukee, where they had become
(55:37):
the Milwaukee Brewers by putting down something like ten thousand
dollars of his own money, was a car salesman named
Bud Selig, a commissioner of baseball who turned out to
have a lot of millions of dollars because a team
went bankrupt. No baseball teams are going bankrupt. The worst
economic situations in Tampa in Oakland, these are still profit
making operations, and any owner who's dissatisfied with how much
(56:01):
money he makes can simply sell the team, probably ten
to twenty times what he paid for it. Baseball teams
are now worth a billion dollars each minimally, how much
do you think the Boston Red Sox would get if
you suddenly got tired of it? Because the game is
not growing enough? And yes, maybe they'll come a day
when franchises are worthless and owners make less, and so
(56:23):
perhaps the teams will only be worth half a billion
dollars in any event, This is not about improving the
game or getting the youngsters, or having the Golden Ball,
or seeing sho Heo Tani back five times a game
rather than four and hit one hundred and thirty three
home runs in a season and finish second in the
National League with that number. That's not what this is about.
This is about getting the owners more money. And it's moronic,
(56:45):
and everybody buying into it doesn't even see that they're
just serving rich people to help them get richer. It
is part of a fundamental issue of what's wrong with
this country. We began to fetishize not people having money.
There's nothing wrong with people having money. I encourage people
to have money. I have money myself to have more money.
(57:06):
I often take the opportunity to get more money. But
when that becomes the only thing in life, as I've
said many times in the nineteen seventies, business coverage investment,
the Wall Street Markets and such business coverage on television
in this country, other than in the event of economic
crashes or depression or price controls. Like Richard Nixon put in,
(57:28):
the economic coverage on television consisted of Walter Cronkite somewhere
in the middle of the show, just before the second
or third commercial on the CBS Evening News saying Wall
Street closed, mostly higher today and relatively active trading. This
was the CBS Evening News. That was it. There were
no networks devoted to business coverage. There was no lionization
(57:49):
of great investors or inventors. There was nobody interested in
who the hell Warren Buffett was. And yes, these men
were important behind the scenes, but then they'll die the
day to day lives of ordinary Americans. They didn't amount
to a rat's ass. Collectively, owners in baseball were known
only when they screwed things up or move their teams
to other cities. Walter O'Malley became famous for being hated.
(58:13):
And now we are relatively ready to have the commissioner baseball,
who by the way, went to the Industrial and Labor
Relations College at Cornell where he studied how to screw
labor rob Manfred wants to make them even more money
because they're not making more money faster enough, instead of
doing what previous owners and commissioners have done. When the
(58:34):
profit margins were not one hundred and seventy eight percent
every year. They've done sillier things in the past. They
used to just simply add another team and charge some
idiot two billion dollars for a team that didn't exist.
The Tampa Bay Rays, the Arizona Diamondbacks exist because previous
owners in the nineteen eighties tried to knock down the
(58:55):
prices of salaries. This was the price that Baseball paid
for the owner's collusion. Again, the owners screwing up, and
now they want to complete destroy the uniqueness of the
game another one of its ten or twelve unique elements
that separates it from basketball, that separates it from hockey,
that separates it from football, that separates it from soccer.
(59:17):
They want to take away the point, the difficulty. They
want to dumb it down. The Golden rule, the Golden
at bat, the Golden I don't know, the Golden corral.
Its nonsensical, stupid, destructive, and Baseball should fire its commissioner
(59:39):
immediately for even giving voice to it. And your understanding
of the crux of the problem in baseball is in
this this commissioner. The previous commissioner was a baseball fan
who used to go to baseball games and enjoy baseball,
and he had many stupid, mistaken ideas, and he had
(01:00:00):
a vanity the size of ten knees. But he liked baseball,
and he wanted to see good baseball. I have no
idea if Rob Manfred likes baseball or not, but I
would like to see an adaptation of his rule. I'd
like to have a golden Commissioner moment in which, in
a matter of a clutch situation, once in every big decision,
(01:00:22):
I could swap him out and put in the best
commissioner I had, which in this case would be anybody
but him. I've done all the damage I can do here.
(01:00:44):
Thank you for listening to this unusual edition of Countdown
where I could barely see anything written in front of
me other than some very large font notes. And again,
how did you do the Obama special comment from two
thousand and nine? I recorded that earlier. In any event,
you know the credits. Brian Ray and John Phillip Scheneil
do the music, and there's Nancy Faust with the special
(01:01:07):
pithy musical comments. And the sports music is from ESPN
two by Mitch Warren Davis, and some other music in
there is from No Horns Allowed. In any event, I
did write this number down in big letters on the
door to the studio, five hundred and nine days until
the scheduled end of the Lane Duck presidency of Lame
(01:01:27):
Donald Duck. The next scheduled countdown is Sunday. We'll see
or possibly maybe we won't see. Wish me luck. My
vision is not in jeopardy. It's just that I can't
really see and I'm supposed to not be doing this,
So don't tell doctor Renee Richards. Thank you in the
interim bulletins, as the news warrants, as long as I
(01:01:49):
can find my own studio till the next time, whenever
that is. I'm Keith Aulderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(01:02:17):
of iHeartRadio. 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. I
would just like to go on the record and thank
(00:26):
the person who is doing the most to undermine the
Trump transition and the most to let the air out
of the momentum of Trump's gigantic one point four percent landslide.
I'd just like to thank the person who is making
Trump look stupid and amateurish and failureish. And that person,
(00:51):
of course, is Donald Trump. He was humiliated with the
Matt Gates nomination to the degree that when the thing
finally became utterly untenable and potentially destructive to him personally,
he didn't even try to blame anybody. He didn't stamp
(01:12):
his feet. He just moved on. And he got the
famous prosecutor who put Dwight Gooden, the failed Mets pitcher,
in jail for seven months. He just punted on Gates.
And you know, Trump knows he's in trouble when he
shuts up. Now, he has not said a word. He's
(01:35):
just standing there next to Pete Hegseth, who will never
be Secretary of Defense, who will never run the Pentagon,
who right now is probably a poor bet to get
his job back on the weekend edition of the Fox
News Morning Show. And every time Pete heg Seth's dumpster
fire goes out or drops down a little bit in intensity,
(02:00):
Trump is there as it reignites. When Mommy becomes part
of your story, When it's mommy who called you an
abuser of women, when it's mommy who suggested you needed
psychological help, and somebody she sent the email to has
(02:20):
decided to give it to the media. When mom from
eight years ago, seven years ago, it doesn't matter if
it was seven minutes ago. When Mom is part of
the reason you're not going to get the job, and
it's so bad that you have to put Mom on TV,
and it's so bad on TV that Mom instead of
(02:42):
answering the softball questions, the answering of the softball questions
was insufficient. She turned to camera and stared and thanked
the furor for his support of her son, the abuser,
(03:03):
and then she blamed the media, the awful media, for
having threatened her by calling her up and telling her
that they were going to print this and they wanted
to know what her reaction was and if she wanted
to say something, what evil bastard's trying to make it
fair to her, we can see where heg Sith got
his stupidity and his arrogance. And then as part of
(03:29):
the softball questions, this guy Doucey says to her, so
will you testify in front of the Senate on your
son's behalf? And if you are really trying, if you
are debasing yourself, Donald Trump, to the point of having
your nominee for Secretary of Defense, the punching power of
(03:53):
the Pentagon, the macho, slicked back, greasy haired Pete Hegseth,
who's had to turn to his mom to get him
out of trouble. When you go to that sense and
level of self humiliation for Hegseth, for his mom, for Fox,
for the entirety of the conservative fascist operation, and for
(04:15):
yourself Trump, when you go to that degree, and this
man Deucey turns to this woman and says, will you
be testifying on his behalf in front of the Senate?
And she says, I don't have an answer for you
on that, and she isn't sure. She won't commit. He's meet,
He's done, and not only that, instead of bailing out
(04:39):
on him when there was still time for people to
forget about him when there was still time for him
not to come up in every subsequent discussion of whoever
becomes the head of the Pentagon the Secretary of Defense,
when you could have removed the stain from your red
tie instead of doing it then, now just stand a
(05:03):
little closer to this. I will quote Bert Lancaster again
as JJ Hunsecker talking to the Tony Curtis character in
the great film Sweet Smell of Success. Your dead son,
get yourself buried heg Sith was supposed to meet as
(05:24):
part of the Pete Hegseth, Hey, you want to have
a beer with Pete Hegseth. Isn't that how we judge conservatives?
Who do you want to have a beer with this
alcoholic over here? He was supposed to have a beer
or something with Josh Hawley from Missouri, who is his
own dumpster fire, But we can leave that alone for
the time being. He was supposed to meet with Josh Hawley,
(05:48):
and then Hally's announcement came that there was going to
be a postponement of this meeting as part of the
senatorial tour of Pete Hegseth the dumpster fire on wheels
rolling past your Senate Office, Hawley said, it's been canceled.
Somebody in the transition team told PBS's reporter on the
(06:12):
Hill that they were told the transition team was told
that the Hegseth Hally meeting was canceled because Hegseth has
to be somewhere else today. The PBS reporter Lisai dejar
Dan naturally said, Florida, And there was apparently a shrug
(06:33):
and no answer to that. But we were informed by the
transition team member that the decision to cancel the Holly
Hegseth meeting was in fact on the Hegseth side, and
it quote came from a higher power. This is disastrous.
(06:54):
It's fantastically, wonderfully disastrous. If you had popcorn leftover from
the Matt Gates fiasco, keep it handy, because it doesn't
look like Trump's going to get out of this anytime soon,
because he's crazy and now he may in fact be
(07:17):
lazy and crazy, but lazy in a sense of not
maintaining that fisticuff's position that was the hallmark of everything
in his life. If there's one thing you'd look at
Trump and say, I find that useful and possibly something
I want to try to achieve. It's the fact that
he's never been satisfied with something. When there is a victory,
(07:38):
he wants more. This is his illness. It's not about
having money. It's about getting money. It's not about having power.
It's about getting power. It's not about defeating you or
winning in some way. It's about destroying you and then
coming back and destroying you once again. And in this case,
both with Gates and now with eg Seth, he took
(07:59):
his foot off the pedal. This is after the mom'st
worry about the email. All of this now, this is
after the drinking at Fox story. NBC News reports ten
sources at Fox News who said that he was always
drinking there, and let me see if I can read this.
One of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him
(08:23):
as recently as last month and heard him complain about
being hungover this fall. I will confess to you that
twice in my broadcasting career I went on the air
after having had alcohol at dinner, and once I had
(08:43):
too much and was mortified that I was going to
just sound like this on the air. I watched the
video of the show the next day and it was
absolutely fine. Nobody noticed, and I thought, well, I got
away with it. I'm never going to try that again.
One of the sources said they smelled alcohol and Pete
(09:04):
Hegseth as recently his last month. We're not talking about
ancient history, because this was also after the story about
him drinking so much at Concerned Veterans for America, like
eight years ago that there was a whistleblower report about
his drinking and he had to quit. And if you
thought the idea of Donald Trump again having his little
(09:27):
fat fingers on the button, if you thought that was
terrifying enough, now imagine that the guy at the Pentagon
who would be conferred with in the event that anything
was done, including invading Canada. Canada. Hello, if you want
to make it worse, just think about Trump calling up
(09:47):
the Secretary of Defense and he's drunk. I'm sure this
has happened before at some point in American history, but
this would apparently happen with Pete Hegseth on a regular basis,
and who would talk him out of bombing Vancouver. And
(10:09):
all of this was after the story of the serial
philandering during his first marriage and the story of the
sexual allegations or sexual abuse, allegations at the Conservative Convention
and his whole campaign that he started to turn the
army into the equivalent of the eleventh century crusaders who
(10:31):
slaughtered the infidels because they were true Christians. I'm not
making these references. These are the things he said. He
wants the nineteenth century version of the US military, or
the eleventh century version of the Christian crusaders, just go
into a part of the country or the world, or
(10:52):
the nation or wherever, and just wipe everybody out, because
we know true Christians believe that Christ truly supported infidelity
and abuse and alcohol and especially slaughtering. Pete Hegseth says
Trump called him yesterday and told him to hang in there.
(11:14):
I don't know. Was he drunk. Did Trump just tell
him to hang I suppose. I suppose at heart. One
of the principal problems that Trump has in assessing other
people to work for him is that he's such a
piece of crap himself that everybody else looks like I
don't know Sigmund Freud or Beethoven or Mickey Mantle or
(11:39):
I don't know who. He can't possibly know that just
because you are better than he is at a given
thing that that does not mean you're any good at it.
And after all, I think the number of children that
heg Seth has with the number of women that he's
(11:59):
had them with is still less than Trump's figure. The
only thing that is likely to actually resonate with Trump
is this idea of drinking. He doesn't like drinking. There
have been alcoholics in his family, his own brother died
from it. This has registered in some way that I'm
sure Trump does not understand, other than drinking bad. Well,
(12:23):
this is why you vet people. This is why, whether
you are fitting out your sports department at a local
television station or the entirety of your government as president
of the United States, why you can't just pick people
you see on TV and think they look good. You
can't cast an administration, even if you are crazy would
(12:49):
be dictator. You should ask other people first, because all
you need is for the first two big picks in
your draft to blow up in your face and suddenly
you are a foot shorter and you're going ten miles
an hour slower. And then after he eventually cuts bait
(13:09):
with Hegseth, whenever what's next comes out comes out, then
he's going to go through this with cash Patel. I'd
say keep an eye on cash Patel, but that would
be a cheap joke. And then you'll go through this
with Musk, and if not with Musk, then with Vivek Ramaswami,
(13:31):
because the Department of Government Efficiency is just another confidence
trick designed to in some way privatize something or cut
the taxes of well Elon Musk. And it turns out,
as CNN reported yesterday, there are hours and hours of
tape of Vivek Ramaswami trashing Elon Musk, his new co
(13:58):
director at the Department of stealing money from the government.
I'm sorry, Department of Government Efficiency. And he's saying, and
let me see if I can read this quote from
the CNN story, this is him on tape. I have
no reason to think Elon won't jump like a circus
monkey when Jijinping calls in the hour of need, endless interviews, comments,
(14:24):
podcast appearances, apparently stopping passers by on the street to
tell them this that he's in bed Musk. That is
with China, calling Musk a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party.
And this again, this is not stuff that his mother
wrote about Vivek Ramaswami in twenty eighteen. This is from
(14:45):
last year. This is the problem with confidence tricksters. They
lie so much, they have forgotten half their lives, and
they don't know going into a room whether they hate
all those people in there or love them. Back to
second Secretary of Defense if it's not heg Seth, and
(15:08):
I don't know if you've been able to pick this
up from my comment so far, it's not going to
be heg Seth. The Trumper has put out a story
yesterday that the second choice is Ron DeSantis. I'm not
sure I believe this. I suppose the DeSantis willingness to
go back and endorse Trump might have registered and pushed
(15:31):
its way through Trump's only satisfaction in life, which is
to torture people one way or the other. But I
still think they might as well have said, oh no,
the new Secretary of Defense is going to be Nicki Haley.
They've made up. The other big name was Jonie Ernst.
You remember her. She is the governor of Iowa who
(15:52):
has run on campaigns and more campaigns and more campaigns
after that, all of them with the same theme, I'm
going to go kill a pig right now. I wish
I were making that up. I wish that was a
euphemism for something. I wish that was like saying keep
an eye on cash Pattel. She just made another reference
(16:14):
to killing pigs. But and this is where all of
this kind of oh, popcorn time. Let's watch Trump burn
down his own house while he's still in it. It's
a one nothing lead right now for the good guys.
This could make it to nothing. There's one practical thing
that could make it far more than two nothing. It
(16:34):
could make it one hundred to nothing, CNN reported. And
I don't know that anybody picked this up that the
other vetted name as an alternate for when hegseeth finally disappears,
like the cheshire cat, where all that will be left
of him before he vanishes is his slicked down hair.
(16:57):
The other guy that they vetted to be Secretary of
Defense is Congressman first term Congressman Slea Hunt from Texas
and the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations. And
so what if he picks another Republican congressman for his cabinet.
(17:21):
The Republican threshold right now in the House, their lead
in the House, their margin in the House is two
hundred and seventeen Republicans to two hundred and fifteen Democrats.
So take one away and it's a one vote margin,
which is a no vote margin. Nothing. Nothing could be
more pleasing than the idea of Mike Johnson, Speaker of
(17:44):
the House, unable to get anything done because one of
the remaining Republicans is out drunk or has been appointed
Secretary of Defense. We want hunt, we want hunt, we
want hunt, we want hunt, we want just now, I
(18:30):
said about a quote. If I can read this, this
is not a figure of speech. I am suffering from
a Chalasian or Khalasian, depending on your pronunciation, an eye
infection in which one of my eyes is pretty much
closed and the other one's not too happy with me either.
(18:50):
It could be a double Kalaysian. So I'm doing my
best here, but I can't really see. So I've had
to add lib and thus this thing has had a
certain ragged quality that I would rather it did not.
I'm doing my best here, but I am playing hurt
and I'm supposed to not be doing this. Please do
not tell doctor Renee Richards. Now I will mention something
(19:14):
else I told you so remember Sunday night when the
story broke but Joe Biden was pardoning his son, and
everybody went, oh, no, it'll give Trump an excuse to
do this, And I said, I love this. Do more
ten million pardons by the Biden administration before the Democracy
(19:35):
going out of business sale ends on January twentieth. I
want Biden signing pardons as Trump goes to the podium
seventy two hours after I suggested this, politico, and I
am going to try to read this. Biden White House
is discussing preemptive pardons for those in Trump's crosshairs. Well
(20:01):
good White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary
step of handing out blanket pardons to those who've committed
no crimes, both because it could suggest impropriety, only fueling
Trump's criticisms. Once again, stop stop thinking that Trump needs
(20:24):
fuel for his criticisms. Trump is conducting a conversation in
his head and has been since sometime in the nineteen fifties.
He's holding a conversation at all times. The person he
is speaking to is his best friend, his twin, his
(20:45):
invisible twin, Ronald Trump, who's even angrier than Donald is
that's all this is about. He doesn't need fuel. He
has Ronald fueling Trump's criticisms. Trump without criticisms stops breathing.
Back to what Politico wrote, Let's see I was here,
(21:08):
both because it could suggest impropriety and because those offered
preemptive pardons may reject them. Pro tip, don't reject them.
Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress's
January sixth committee as Senator elect Adam Schiff and former
GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said
(21:29):
Cheney should go to jail, along with the rest of
the Unselect Committee. Also mentioned by Biden's aids for a
pardoner is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infections and Infectious Diseases. Excuse me,
I can't really read. Can I again? Why are we
stopping here? I see a list there of let's see Fauci,
(21:50):
Cheney shift. That's three people. We're about ten million, nine
hundred and ninety nine thousand short. I know it's hyperbole
to have a one eight hundred hotline hundred pardon me, Joe,
but why not? Trump is already mocking the concept of
(22:11):
the Department of Justice. We're not talking ineptitude like Garland.
This is corruption. This is persecution. This is star Chambers.
This is making up laws to prosecute people who are innocent.
And the bitterness and the anger and the inability to
(22:31):
take the win is limitless in Donald Trump. And if
it ever stopped or in some way ebbed, Ronald Trump
would be there to make sure he got angry again.
I mean, honest to God, the White House should spend
the rest of the Biden term offering pardons to every
(22:52):
family member of everybody associated with anybody who might get
a pardon, every administration staffer, every media member, everybody's ever
worked for Amtrak. Be a stack of blank pardons sent
to MSNBC and crew and every left wing organization. But
(23:15):
I mean, let's be reasonable, no more than five thousand
of them per outfit. I'll take one. I will take
a pardon. I don't know that I have ever broken
a law, not knowingly. I'll take it. Whatever preemptive partner. Sure,
these people are going to pervert the justice system. They
(23:38):
are going to do it. They are nuts, they are fascists,
and all the comparisons to Hitler are obviously hyperbolic in
some way, because only Hitler was Hitler and only the
Holocaust was the Holocaust. But every time I've referred to
Trump as Hitler, it's about the stuff that preceded that.
Have you ever seen the movie Judgment at Nuremberg? Trying
(24:01):
not to turn this into the Burt Lancaster Show, but
Bert Lancaster in that movie plays an eminent German jurist,
a combination of several real life figures, who has tried
for war crimes along with other Nazi jurists, and as
they make excuses, he breaks down and goes through, case
(24:23):
by case almost how they perverted the law to turn
it into a weapon for Hitler. That's what we're going
to face. That's what's going to happen when they go
looking through your social media feed, when they run out
of other people to prosecute. That's what we're facing. And
you think somehow, Gavin Newsom and other Democrats and the
(24:47):
New York Times editorial board and other handwringers, you think
that this makes the Democrats look bad, makes Biden look bad.
On January twentieth, at noon, Trump is going to light
the w White House on fire and figuratively the nation
(25:08):
on fire, and what Biden is doing by pardoning his
son and discussing these preemptive pardons for others is pulling
people out of the fire, people who don't deserve to
die in a fire started by Donald Trump. Consequences to this,
some people are going to judge it harshly f them.
(25:29):
The issue here is getting as many people out alive
as we can alive to fight back and destroy Trump
and trump Ism and create a world in which, at
some point in the near future it will be illegal
to say the name Trump out loud in America. They
(25:51):
want to put cash Patel in charge of the FBI.
Do you think he is going to be there because
they've suddenly embraced DEI. He is there because they no
longer care whether the FBI director even tries to act
(26:12):
like actual law enforcement. They care only that he acts
like an enforce er. One last thing, and I'm pushing
my luck here, but I will now confess I am
(26:36):
surprised that the world did not come to an end
and the planet did not burn to a cinder on Tuesday,
because apparently that's when this happened. Chris Solissa did some
sort of podcast where his guest was Chuck Todd. First
(27:00):
of all, I'm shocked because I always assumed they were
the same person, the same stupid blame everybody but themselves person.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I follow the Hunter Biden trial very closely. I read
every transcript, all the testimony, because that's what you can.
All that was made public, and there is you want
to you want to read, you want to you want
to get angry, just as a as as somebody in
just all these mixed emotions. You read the Halle Biden
transcript and that's both widow yes and and essentially he
(27:35):
turned her into a crack addict. And this was all
happening in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and Joe and Joe
Biden were so concerned about their family that they decided
to run for president.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
YEP.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
I just so when you talk about the word selfish,
I it's almost like the word doesn't I mean I.
Their decision to run for president put the entire Democratic
Party and the United States of America in the position
that is in now.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Ah. Of course, that was terrible of Biden to run
and defeat Trump and save democracy in twenty twenty What
a horrible selfish person he is Chuck Todd and Crys.
You know who's missing from that conversation. They could have
(28:28):
used special guest Mark Halprin and maybe Nate Silver, but
I think, I think right now what we need is
Chuck Todd and Chris interviewing Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzynski.
(28:50):
Also ahead in an unbelievably all new edition of Countdown.
I am going to reread to you a special comment
that I did in two thousand and nine, which I
have identified as the day, not the comment being the
cause of this, but what it was about the day
in which the idea of the president as the final
(29:12):
guard rail protecting American society changed, was erased, was broken irretrievably.
You may ask if I'm saying I can't actually see
the papers in front of me, and I'm kind of
fudging it. I've probably got a couple of quotes wrong.
How did I read this well? I actually recorded the
next segment a couple of days ago before this chariso
(29:34):
got in my eye. I can't stop calling it a
cheriso to people. I have a chariso in my eye.
Also one other commentary, which I will do live because
I don't need to read anything about this. Have you
heard about this idea from baseball the golden at bat,
where a manager wants a game can summon anybody he
(29:55):
wants to hit in a particular situation, presumably a potential
game winning situation. And you might have the theory of
a game in which show Heyotani bats for the Los
Angeles Dodgers, and then since he popped out or struck
out and didn't get that run home, the manager Dave
Roberts says, Okay, I'm gonna have show Aotani bat next.
(30:19):
In other words, destroying the essence of baseball. It's been
proposed by somebody in baseball who happens to be the
commissioner of baseball and who went to college with me.
If you think baseball is dying, this will remove any
doubt that you have that baseball is dying. And if
you think that it's dying slowly, the good news will
be this will speed it up. All that is ahead.
(30:43):
That's next. This is a Playing Herd edition of Countdown.
I have been ruminating of late as to the start date.
How did we get here? I think we may know
when did we start going here? That's a little tougher,
(31:04):
I guess realistically, it's whatever day the primordial human crawled
out of the primordial sludge in which our ancestors lived.
And I don't mean Trump's family getting to America. But
if you want a date at which all of this
was elevated to the presidential level, where the last guardrail,
(31:27):
which really is what the president of the United States
is supposed to be and has become in the entire world,
the last guardrail, when that turned into no more guard rails.
I think I have figured out that date or roughly
that year, and I don't want anybody to mistake this
as I read this piece again that I am blaming
(31:48):
Barack Obama for Donald Trump, but there is a main line,
straight line connection between two things something Obama did not
do and everything that Trump has done since I gave
a special comment, and most of them I have forgotten
and have seen again or read again with some surprise
(32:09):
and not inconsiderable pride, if you will forgive me that.
But this one I've always remembered because of the reaction
to it. The date it was given was January nineteenth,
two thousand and nine, and I can remember it a
cold night in Washington, the night before the inauguration of
the first non white guy president of the United States,
and the euphoria that had come through most of the country,
(32:32):
including those people who had voted for John McCain, who said, well,
at least we have done this. Seventy five percent of
the country seemed to be at least accepting this idea
that this was something good, whether or not they liked
the man at all. And so the night before, having
unintentionally but nonetheless having supported Obama in his nomination bit
(32:56):
against Hillary Clinton, I decided to be the one who
relieved themselves in the soup I believe would be the
youthstic explanation for this. I did a commentary the night
before Obama was inaugurated, and the next day people were
yelling at me during the coverage of the inauguration, complaining
that I had not given the man a chance. As
(33:17):
it turned out, I was right. And not only was
I right, I was prescient in ways that I did
not understand. And as always when you are prescient, the
one problem with prescience is you always get the timeframe wrong.
I thought we had perhaps fifty years before what happened
would happen. It turned out. Let's see January nineteenth, two
(33:39):
thousand and nine to January twentieth, twenty sixteen seventeen. Rather
we had eight years and one day. This is what
I read with no edits on the night of January nineteenth,
two thousand and nine, which I will take as the
start of how we got where we are right now,
where the last guardrail turned out to be made out
(34:02):
of paper mache. We have tortured people. You and I.
This is the people's democracy. We are those people. These
are our elected officials. That they did not come to
us and ask us to act thusly in our names
is unfortunate, indeed criminal, But it is also almost irrelevant.
(34:25):
They work for us. They work for us, and they
tortured people, And so we have tortured people. You and
I know we have tortured colleague shak Mohammad. We not
only know about it, we have now heard it boasted
about by one of the men who, as of tomorrow
will no longer work for us, George Walker Bush quote.
(34:47):
The techniques were necessary and are necessary to be used
on a rare occasion to get information necessary to protect
the American people. Mister Bush said to Fox News on
January eleventh. One such person, who gave us information was
colleague Shak Mohammad. I'm in the Oval office. I'm told
that we have captured colleague Shake Mohammad and the professionals
believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So
(35:10):
I asked what tools are available for us to find
information from him. They give me a list of tools,
and I said, are these tools deemed to be legal?
We got legal opinions before the decision was made. I
think when people study the history of this particular episode,
they will find out we gained good information from colleague
Shack Muhammad in order to protect our country. We believe
(35:31):
that the information we gained helped saved lives on American
soil unquote. Never Mind mister Bush's delusions here. Never Mind
all primary sources who witnessed the interrogation of colleague Shake
Mohammad said they got nothing from him until they started
buddying up to him. Never Mind that mister Bush's supporter's
favorite torture construction, the mythical ticking time bomb scenario, not
(35:55):
only did not transpire here, but mister Bush has not
even had the imagination to pretend it did, just in
order to slightly cover his moral tracks. The key is
that this statement, if it had been under oath, would
have been a confession to a war crime. Mister Bush
is proactive. I asked what tools are available. Mister Bush
(36:18):
is aware of the legal haze in which he steps,
and I said, are these tools deemed to be legal?
Mister Bush realizes the tools he has chosen have been used.
We gained good information from colleague Shaik Muhammad. Since we
know from previous admissions at the Pentagon that colleage Shik
Muhammad was waterboarded, we can infer that mister Bush knew
he would be waterboarded and knew afterwards that he had
(36:41):
been waterboarded. Mister Bush is guilty. He is guilty as sin.
Mister President Elect, you were first asked about all this
on the eighteenth of April last I am proud to
say you were asked about it by a fellow who
got onto his high school newspaper while I was the
editor Will Bunch the Philadelphia Daily News. I think you
(37:05):
are right you President elect Obama told him if crimes
have been committed, they should be investigated. You are also
right that I would not want my first term consumed
by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as
a partisan witch hunt because I think we have too
many problems we have to solve. So this is an
area where I would want to exercise judgment unquote. Good amen,
(37:33):
But in that brief interview was born, or at least elucidated,
a loophole genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies.
Vice President elect Biden echoed this on December twenty first,
in a statement to which your transition team has directed
all those to whom this is a paramount issue. He said,
(37:56):
the questions of whether or not a criminal act has
been committed or a very very bad judgment has been
engaged in is something the Just Department decides. After his
comment last week with straightforwardness that was like water to
a lost soul in the Sahara that waterboarding is torture,
your nominee at Justice, mister Eric Holder, echoed all this.
(38:19):
We don't want to criminalize policy differences that might exist
between the outgoing administration and the administration that is about
to take over. But mister President elect, you have a
confession since this statement of a structure of policy prefacing
policy itself for mister Biden, you have had mister Bush's confession. Moreover,
(38:42):
since mister Biden's statement, you have a legal assessment from
within the bowels of the Bush administration itself. Quote, we
tortured Mohammad al Katani, Judge Susan Crawford told The Washington
Post a week ago. His treatment met the legal definition
of torture. That was why. Judge Crawford added that as
the Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether or
(39:04):
not to bring detainees at Guantanamo Bay in trial, she
decided in Katani's case not too This, mister President elect,
was not the obvious waterboarding of colleague Sheik Muhammad. This
was a more insidious combination of legally approved procedures that
still nearly killed this man Katani. The techniques were all authorized,
(39:28):
Judge Crawford continued, but the manner in which they applied
them was overly aggressive and too persistent. This was not
any one particular act. It was just a combination of
things that had a medical impact on him that hurt
his health. In fact, mister President Elect, the records at
GITMO showed that Katani's heart beat eventually slowed to thirty
five beats per minute. Quote. It was abusive and uncalled
(39:52):
for and coercive, clearly coercive. I sympathized with the intelligence
gatherers in those days after nine to eleven, not knowing
what was coming next, and trying to gain information to
keep us safe. But there still has to be a
love that we should not cross. Unfortunately, what this has done,
I think has tainted everything going forward. Sadly, as commendable
(40:16):
as the intention here might seem, this country has never
moved forward without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past.
In point of fact, every effort to merely draw a
line in the sand and declare the past dead has
served only to keep the past alive, and often to
strengthen the past. We compromised with slavery in the Declaration
(40:41):
of Independence and in the Constitution, and four score and
nine years later we had buried six hundred thousand of
our sons and brothers in a civil war. After that
war's ending, we compromised with the social restructuring and protection
of the rights of the minorities in the South, and
a century later we had not only not resolved anything,
(41:03):
but black leaders were still being as assassinated in the
cities of the South. We compromised with Germany in the
reconstruction of Europe after the First World War. Nobody even
arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war crimes trials
then and nineteen years later there was an indescribably more
evil Germany and a more heartrending Second World War. We
(41:24):
compromised with the trusts of the early nineteen hundreds. Today
we have corporations too big to fail. We compromised with
the Palmer raids and got McCarthyism, and we compromised with
McCarthyism and got Watergate. We compromised with Watergate, and junior
members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately
at risk, and they grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz
(41:45):
and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. But mister President elect,
you are entirely correct as you say what we have
to focus on is getting things right in the future,
as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in
the past. That means prosecuting all those involved in the
Bush administration's torture of prisoners and starting at the top.
(42:10):
You are also right that you should not want your
first term consumed by what was perceived on the part
of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt. But your only
other option might be to let this set and fester indefinitely, because,
mister President elect, someday there will be another Republican president,
(42:31):
or even a Democrat, just as blind as mister Bush
to ethics and to this country's moral force. He will
look back to what you did about mister Bush, or
what you did not do, and he will see precedent,
or as Cheney saw, he will see how not to
(42:52):
get caught next time. Prosecute, mister President elect. Even if
you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished
good for generations unborn. Merely by acting. You will deny
mister Bush what he most wants right now, without prosecutions,
without this nation standing up and saying this was wrong,
we will atone. Mister Bush's version of what happened goes intoe.
(43:15):
The historical record of this nation. Torture was legal, It worked,
It saved the country. The end, we have tortured people,
You and I, mister President elect. This is the people's democracy.
We are the people. These were our elected officials. That
(43:39):
they did not come to us and act thusly in
our names is unfortunate and indeed criminal, but it is
almost irrelevant. They worked for us, they tortured people, and
so we have tortured people. Thus, beginning tomorrow, it is
up to you not just to discontinue this, but to
(44:00):
prevent it. At the end of his first year in office,
mister Lincoln tried to contain, extualize the Civil War for
those who still wanted to compromise with evils of secession
and slavery. The struggle of today, Lincoln wrote, is not
altogether for today, It is for a vast future. Also,
mister President elect, you have been handed the beginning of
(44:23):
that future. Use it to protect our children and our
distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again. If
you are worried about the Republicans viewing any torture prosecution
in the way you postulated to Will Bunch a partisan
witch hunt, you can remind them that the woman who
said all that, Susan Crawford, is a lifelong Republican. So,
(44:48):
mister President Elect, beyond whatever else will come out as
the whistleblowers began to say what they're going to say
just after noon tomorrow, you have your predecessor's unofficial confession,
and you have this singular evaluation by a principle in
your assessor's administration, this kind of line level confession. They
(45:11):
are guilty of this, Mister President elect. They are guilty
as sin. Since he talked to my friend Bunch in April,
mister Obama's only lengthy comments about this were made to
George Stephanopolis on January eleventh of this year. See if
a disturbing theme becomes evident, Obviously we are going to
look at past practices. I don't believe that anybody is
(45:33):
above the law. On the other hand, I also have
a belief that we need to look forward as opposed
to looking backwards. Later, my instinct is to focus on
how do we make sure that moving forward we are
doing the right thing. Later, still, my orientation is going
to be to move forward. Finally, what we have to
(45:58):
focus on is getting things right in the future, as
opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past,
asked January nineteenth, two thousand and nine, on MSNBC, the
night before Obama took office, imploring him to not let
the legal violations of the torture statutes by the Bush
(46:23):
administration go unpunished, in large part because it would warn
all those to come that all they had to do
was to act in some fashion that would cloak their
sins as president or around the presidency, and they would
(46:47):
not be prosecuted and could not be prosecuted. Before there
was Supreme Court presidential immunity, there was de facto presidential immunity.
And are we paying the price for it now? Because
mister Obama was right. What we have to focus on
(47:08):
is getting things right in the future, as opposed to
looking at what we got wrong in the past and
doing that we got things wrong in the future. I'm
not right, George Crowing A pleasure to have you here.
Thank you. This is the best news show ever. I
toil that to one of your producers, and I want
(47:30):
you to know that I've seen them all and it's
just for especially the first thirty five minutes. Thank you.
It's just just unparalleled. I got bad news between you
and I. We got six minutes to completely still that
in here. That's good.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This
is Countdown with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
And, as promised in an almost completely ad libbed edition
of The Big Show, a final comment about sports. You
may or may not have heard about this. It is
simply the most ridiculous idea I have heard proposed by
anybody in any position of authority in any sport in
(48:25):
my lifetime. And if I make it to the end
of next month, I'll be sixty six years old. I've
seen a lot of crap, and this is the worst.
Surprisingly enough, it comes from a guy I went to
college with, Robert Manfred, Commissioner of Baseball, the man they
chose in order to make Bud Selig look like a
Hall of Fame. Commissioner Rob Manfred has floated an idea
(48:50):
of allowing once a game per team, in every baseball game,
presumably during the regular season and in the postseason and
in the World Series, to defy the primary cardinal rule
of the game, thou shalt bat, in order he wants
to have teams have a choice once again to have
(49:12):
a golden at batch, a golden ball, a golden well,
there's another word I'm thinking of now, but I'll leave
it alone, But it would shower you with excitement. The
golden ball would be an opportunity for a team to
defy the batting order. If it says your worst hitter,
(49:34):
the worst hitter of all time is up in the
bottom of the ninth inning, with the winning run at
second base, you have to have him hit or pinch
it for him and remove him from the game. Those
are the rules. They have been the rules since the
beginning of time. It's not like basketball, and this is
always one of the great selling points of the game.
This and the fact that there's no clock, which they
(49:55):
haven't mentioned in the last couple of years since they
installed a clock. But the primary idea was you could
not have Lebron James take every one of your crucial shots.
Michael Jordan could have the ball at any time. Tom
Brady would throw the ball every time, nearly every time
the New England Patriots or his other teams needed him two.
(50:18):
In hockey, the shot could always be taken by your
best shooter. But in baseball, there are nine batters and
how they come up, how you order them is the
fundamental strategy of a game of baseball and thus a
season of baseball, and Rob Manfred wants to change that
once again. You can take out your worst hitter and
(50:38):
have anybody you want hit for him at that moment.
If you have the worst hitter on the Los Angeles Dodgers,
Chris Taylor who bat it. I don't know. I believe
the number was in negatives last year. If he's due
up in that game winning situation, you can take him
out and have show Hey Otani bat or anybody else
(50:59):
you want. It's a total joke. It is a total
prostitution of the point of baseball. The point of baseball
is that in that clutch situation, your hero can only
be the hero if it's his turn. The reason baseball
has been part of America for two hundred years, almost
(51:20):
one hundred and sixty years professionally is that it is
that balance between the individual star and the team unit.
You don't have the choice of giving that at bat
to the best player. You can't have the best pitcher
throw that one pitch for a variety of reasons. But
in the situation with a hitter who could conceivably come
(51:41):
up every day every year, you can't just say, Okay,
I'm putting Chris Taylor on the bench just for this
crucial moment and bringing in Babe Ruth. It can't do it,
and he wants to do it now. There has been
some version of this in which it would only be
allowed in extra innings, which they've already destroyed by having
a runner start each extra inning at second base with
(52:03):
nobody out, because we want less baseball, not more. But
this idea of having somebody be able to come in
and hit in the clutch in that critical situation sounds
great the way a three point contest in the middle
of a baseball game would sound new and exciting and invigorating.
(52:24):
Because we're losing the young people, we're not growing the game.
There is an argument ongoing in New York between two
of the primary announcers for the two teams, Michael Kay
of the Yankees, who's been a friend of mine for
about twenty five years, and Howie Rose of the Mets,
who's been a friend of mine for about forty five years.
And they have been going back and forth kind of inadvertently,
(52:44):
because Michael thinks this is a way to grow the
game and get youngsters interested in it, and how He,
of course thinks it's completely crazy, and how he is
right because among other things, and I haven't seen this emphasized,
if they actually did this in one regular season game,
where you could come in and have this guy bat
during all games, not just extra inning games, and extra
(53:07):
inning games average nine or ten percent a year. So
there's every team plays about sixteen seventeen somewhere in there
extra inning games a year. But if you could conceivably,
in that clutch moment, have show Heyotani come in one
hundred and sixty two extra times. And mind you, this
is in addition to his other at bats. He could
have just popped out to second base and then you
(53:27):
give him another chance to give the get the winning
run home from second. The same man could bat twice
in a row, or you could bat him ahead of himself.
Show Aotani is on deck, you could pinch it, show
he Otani for the guy hitting ahead of shoe Heotani.
It's literally a home run contest in the middle of
a game that counts. It further dilutes the concept of baseball.
(53:50):
But to the point I was just making one hundred
and sixty two, theoretically extra at bats would be given
to show Heyo Tani. What would happen to all the records?
How many home runs would Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron,
or for God's sakes, even Arry Bonds have hits if
they had an extra one hundred and sixty two at
bats every year. The numbers are meaningless. Now the statistics,
(54:13):
the entire history, the contact between baseball and its past,
would be totally obliterated, and it would be reduced to,
as I said, a home running contest. The reason Michael
Kay and others have pointed out that this needs to
be done is that baseball is not getting the younger audience,
even though the younger audience has increased on TV and
radio in any event for baseball over the last couple
(54:35):
of years. But the point is that it isn't growing
the game, meaning that Michael and many other well intentioned
baseball people have over the course of fifty years of
the drip drip drip of this term, we're not growing
the game. They've fallen victim to this nonsense. Growing the
game is the owner's euphemism for we want more money.
(54:56):
If you are a baseball fan, you should not and
could not have any interest whatsoever in whether or not
there are sixty and other people sitting in the ballpark
with you or six. You should not care whether there
are five million people watching baseball or fifty million baseball
fans watching at the same time you are. There are
(55:17):
certain important indicators as to the health of a game
that those numbers reflect, but no teams are going out
of business. The last baseball team that actually went bankrupt
was in nineteen seventy. The Seattle Pilots went bankrupt, and
the guy in Milwaukee who was thus able to obtain
them and move them to Milwaukee, where they had become
(55:37):
the Milwaukee Brewers by putting down something like ten thousand
dollars of his own money, was a car salesman named
Bud Selig, a commissioner of baseball who turned out to
have a lot of millions of dollars because a team
went bankrupt. No baseball teams are going bankrupt. The worst
economic situations in Tampa in Oakland, these are still profit
making operations, and any owner who's dissatisfied with how much
(56:01):
money he makes can simply sell the team, probably ten
to twenty times what he paid for it. Baseball teams
are now worth a billion dollars each minimally, how much
do you think the Boston Red Sox would get if
you suddenly got tired of it? Because the game is
not growing enough? And yes, maybe they'll come a day
when franchises are worthless and owners make less, and so
(56:23):
perhaps the teams will only be worth half a billion
dollars in any event, This is not about improving the
game or getting the youngsters, or having the Golden Ball,
or seeing sho Heo Tani back five times a game
rather than four and hit one hundred and thirty three
home runs in a season and finish second in the
National League with that number. That's not what this is about.
This is about getting the owners more money. And it's moronic,
(56:45):
and everybody buying into it doesn't even see that they're
just serving rich people to help them get richer. It
is part of a fundamental issue of what's wrong with
this country. We began to fetishize not people having money.
There's nothing wrong with people having money. I encourage people
to have money. I have money myself to have more money.
(57:06):
I often take the opportunity to get more money. But
when that becomes the only thing in life, as I've
said many times in the nineteen seventies, business coverage investment,
the Wall Street Markets and such business coverage on television
in this country, other than in the event of economic
crashes or depression or price controls. Like Richard Nixon put in,
(57:28):
the economic coverage on television consisted of Walter Cronkite somewhere
in the middle of the show, just before the second
or third commercial on the CBS Evening News saying Wall
Street closed, mostly higher today and relatively active trading. This
was the CBS Evening News. That was it. There were
no networks devoted to business coverage. There was no lionization
(57:49):
of great investors or inventors. There was nobody interested in
who the hell Warren Buffett was. And yes, these men
were important behind the scenes, but then they'll die the
day to day lives of ordinary Americans. They didn't amount
to a rat's ass. Collectively, owners in baseball were known
only when they screwed things up or move their teams
to other cities. Walter O'Malley became famous for being hated.
(58:13):
And now we are relatively ready to have the commissioner baseball,
who by the way, went to the Industrial and Labor
Relations College at Cornell where he studied how to screw
labor rob Manfred wants to make them even more money
because they're not making more money faster enough, instead of
doing what previous owners and commissioners have done. When the
(58:34):
profit margins were not one hundred and seventy eight percent
every year. They've done sillier things in the past. They
used to just simply add another team and charge some
idiot two billion dollars for a team that didn't exist.
The Tampa Bay Rays, the Arizona Diamondbacks exist because previous
owners in the nineteen eighties tried to knock down the
(58:55):
prices of salaries. This was the price that Baseball paid
for the owner's collusion. Again, the owners screwing up, and
now they want to complete destroy the uniqueness of the
game another one of its ten or twelve unique elements
that separates it from basketball, that separates it from hockey,
that separates it from football, that separates it from soccer.
(59:17):
They want to take away the point, the difficulty. They
want to dumb it down. The Golden rule, the Golden
at bat, the Golden I don't know, the Golden corral.
Its nonsensical, stupid, destructive, and Baseball should fire its commissioner
(59:39):
immediately for even giving voice to it. And your understanding
of the crux of the problem in baseball is in
this this commissioner. The previous commissioner was a baseball fan
who used to go to baseball games and enjoy baseball,
and he had many stupid, mistaken ideas, and he had
(01:00:00):
a vanity the size of ten knees. But he liked baseball,
and he wanted to see good baseball. I have no
idea if Rob Manfred likes baseball or not, but I
would like to see an adaptation of his rule. I'd
like to have a golden Commissioner moment in which, in
a matter of a clutch situation, once in every big decision,
(01:00:22):
I could swap him out and put in the best
commissioner I had, which in this case would be anybody
but him. I've done all the damage I can do here.
(01:00:44):
Thank you for listening to this unusual edition of Countdown
where I could barely see anything written in front of
me other than some very large font notes. And again,
how did you do the Obama special comment from two
thousand and nine? I recorded that earlier. In any event,
you know the credits. Brian Ray and John Phillip Scheneil
do the music, and there's Nancy Faust with the special
(01:01:07):
pithy musical comments. And the sports music is from ESPN
two by Mitch Warren Davis, and some other music in
there is from No Horns Allowed. In any event, I
did write this number down in big letters on the
door to the studio, five hundred and nine days until
the scheduled end of the Lane Duck presidency of Lame
(01:01:27):
Donald Duck. The next scheduled countdown is Sunday. We'll see
or possibly maybe we won't see. Wish me luck. My
vision is not in jeopardy. It's just that I can't
really see and I'm supposed to not be doing this,
So don't tell doctor Renee Richards. Thank you in the
interim bulletins, as the news warrants, as long as I
(01:01:49):
can find my own studio till the next time, whenever
that is. I'm Keith Aulderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(01:02:17):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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