June 11, 2024 • 66 mins
SERIES 2 EPISODE 191: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The polls continue to underscore it. Trump's conviction, just twelve days ago, is already half as important in voters' decision-making process as where the candidates stand on immigration. 28% tell CBS the convictions are a "major factor" for them, yet this number is dismissed because it isn't by itself decisive. A separate Morning Consult poll says Trump's net favorability is now four points below that of Biden's - because of the trial.
And yet the President, and his advisors, and the old men of the Democratic Party continue to contrive to keep Joe Biden from saying the truth in public. He says the impact of the convictions is for the public to decide. No! That’s for the public to decide? This isn’t an American Idol vote. This isn’t Coke versus Pepsi. This is democracy or dictatorship and most people don’t know and YOU, Mr. President, have to make the case. You don’t have to sink to Trump’s brain-damaged rhetorical level but “that’s for the public to decide?” HELP THEM DECIDE. TELL THEM THE TRUTH.
Part of the problem is: the campaign seems to be incapable of realizing it can do multiple attacks on Trump - from criminality to dictatorship to the price of orange juice. I'll give some examples of the variety of ads they could run.
MEANWHILE: KNOTTED BY WINDSOR. Justice Alito makes a fool of himself as my friend the investigative journalist Lauren Windsor records him agreeing that either the right or left will "win" - and he had a much better visit with her than did his wife. Martha-Ann Alito promises to get revenge against everybody, fly an anti-LGBTQ flag, and sue the bunch of them. It turns out everything we thought about them was comparatively positive.
AND JUST FOR LAUGHS: Jonathan Turley has declared Trump "elderly."
B-Block (34:44) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Alleged Democratic governor Hochul of New York, after freezing NYC congestion prices, apparently bails out on fundraiser hosted by auto dealers. Marge Barney Rubble Greene thinks electric cars run on gasoline. Politico with the typo of the year, about a fabulous "head of head."
C-Block (40:21) FROM THE SPORTS CENTRAL CENTER NEWSDESK TONIGHT: I moved this last in case you are NOT a baseball fan of 57 seasons' duration whom the game is losing. The Athletic publishes its survey of current players and guess what! Turns out they all invented the game, and anybody who played before about 2010 was incompetent and irrelevant. Worse yet, somebody grabs my personal third rail, insulting Babe Ruth. Which means I have to go through mediocre reliever Adam Ottavino's 2018 contention that he would strike Babe Ruth out every time he faced him. If you brought Babe Ruth into baseball 2024 and gave him its tiny ballparks and elaborate video scouting and training regimens, he would hit 255 homers.
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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. The
President is wrong, Paul Begala is wrong, the polls are right,
(00:27):
and Trump's convictions continue to eat away at his Republican
support and the Democrats need to emphasize his criminality at
every turn. Now it is Morning Consults weekly tracking poll,
and ignore the swing from Trump plus one last week
to Biden plus one this week. This is their analysis
(00:49):
of their poll quote New York trial hurt Trump's image.
This is the sixth successive week in which Biden's net
favorability rating has bettered Trump's, a trend that began as
legal proceedings in New York ramped up. The latest data
shows Trump's worst net favorability rating since last January. That
(01:13):
is the point Biden's net favorability is minus nine. Trump's
is now minus twelve. He is further underwater in the
land of the Bland. The one digit disapproval guy is king.
The day before the Morning Consult poll was the CBS
you gov poll, and Trump was ahead fifty to forty nine,
(01:36):
but Biden is ahead in battleground states fifty to forty nine.
To their eternal discredit, Ugov and CBS gives you none
of the raw data in the battleground states, nor anything
on a state by state basis, only saying we oversampled
in them in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania,
(01:57):
in Wisconsin. That's like looking outside your window and saying
there's some weather out there. CBS also completely and more
importantly misses the point when it asks which issues are
major factors in your vote, and it gets eighty one
percent saying yes, the economy is a major factor in
my vote. Seventy five percent say yes, inflation is, seventy
(02:21):
four percent say the state of democracy is fifty six
percent say yes, the US Mexico border is a major
factor in my vote. And then CBS concludes only twenty
eight percent said the Trump conviction would be a major
factor in their vote. Seventeen percent said it would be
a minor factor, right twenty eight percent, So fifty six
(02:44):
percent say the border, immigration, deportation, the Trump racism card.
Fifty six percent say that is a major factor in
their vote, something Trump has been selling NonStop for nine years,
but half that many say his conviction, which is still
just twelve days old, is also a major factor. In
(03:04):
twelve days, Trump's conviction in the hush money election interference
trial has become half as important as immigration and the border.
And that is being dismissed in the write up as
being a minor factor. It is in fact, astonishingly large,
astonishingly fast, and that's not even considering the minor voters.
(03:25):
Twenty eight percent say it's a major factor, seventeen percent
say it's a minor factor. Nearly half of voters say
his convictions are a factor in their vote. CBS also
noted in passing that the conviction seem to be improving
Biden's position with Democrats. Of course it is. It is
animating them. That's the other point. We see the same
(03:48):
thing in a different you gov poll for Yahoo News,
which has Biden up forty six to forty four. And
by the way, that's his first lead in that poll
since October. And again, more importantly, let me quote the
write up, Trump's conviction in the hush money case may
have even made aid some otherwise skeptical Democrats and independence
(04:09):
more inclined to believe that Trump is guilty of other crimes.
The number of Americans who now think Trump quote conspired
to overturn the results of a presidential election, for instance,
has grown from forty five percent to fifty percent since January,
which includes a seventy nine percent to eighty eight percent
(04:31):
uptick among Democrats plus a forty five percent to fifty
percent uptick among independents. And belief that Trump is guilty
of taking highly classified documents from the White House and
obstructing efforts to retrieve them has increased from forty eight
percent to fifty two percent over the same period, with
similar gains among Democrats and independents. Hallelujah. The point is
(04:56):
being made for us that Yahoo poll also shows voters
want to know how those trials will turn out before
the election, and although this will not happen, if Trump
were to be convicted of another serious crime before the election,
Biden's lead would widen to forty six to forty And that,
(05:19):
of course, is why his concierge, Judge Eileen Cannon, and
the Political Supreme Court have worked so hard to prevent
any other verdicts before the election. And Yahoo also asked,
and this is more important, and I give them all
the credit in the world. Which is more important to you?
(05:39):
Joe Biden's age or Donald Trump's conviction, the result the
Trump conviction is more important to forty three percent, the
Biden age is more important to thirty eight percent. And
nobody knows how to read the polls. And so with
(06:01):
the most encouraging polling numbers for Biden and more importantly
against Trump, showing an awareness of Trump's criminality, the most
encouraging polling numbers this year, and hard and fast polling
evidence that the convictions are hurting Trump well for polling
meaning the mud is slightly clearer than the usual mud.
(06:24):
What is the Biden campaign doing with these the most
encouraging polling numbers this year? Off camera, the President is
telling people at fundraisers that Trump is a convicted felon
and that having a convicted felon seeking the presidency is disturbing,
And on camera, in an interview with ABC News, he
(06:46):
wouldn't say it. What do you think the American people
should make of this? How important do you think this
conviction should be in this race for president? That's for
the public to decide.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
But one thing for certain is stop undermining the rule
of law.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
No wrong answer, no, mister president ah ah. That's for
the public. To decide. This is not an American idol vote,
This isn't coke versus pepsi. This isn't the time to
stay above the fray. This is democracy or dictatorship. This
(07:21):
is life or death. And most people voting don't know that.
And you are the president of the United States, and
you have to make the case to them. You don't
have to sink to Trump's brain damaged rhetorical level. That's
for me to do, but to say that's for the
(07:41):
public to decide, Help them decide. Tell them the truth,
because mister president, when you hesitate like that, all the
other Democrats think they are supposed to hesitate. Paul freaking
Begala goes on CNN and says, quote, the Democrats have
to make this about your life, not Donald Trump's. I
(08:04):
mean it's always you know, I was politically raised by
Bill Clinton, and he would always say, you know, elections
are about the voters lives, not ours, and Democrats need
to take this to that message of we're here for you.
I'm not very interested in mister Trump's personal problems. I'm
interested in the lives and families of the American people. Bullshit, bullshit.
(08:27):
Paul Bagala Trump's personal problems, like his you know, dictatorship problem,
and his if I lose this election, I'll die in
prison problem, and his I'm a convicted felon problem, These
are all also about the voter's lives. Trump is willing
to end all of the voter's lives just to save
(08:49):
his own. You want to debate how much economics, how
much immigration, and how much dictatorship in the mix here, fine,
but don't tell me you're not interested, mister in mister
Trump's personal problems, or I will have to mention that
(09:11):
your last consulting job was on Hillary Clinton's two thousand campaign,
and we know how that turned out. And you and
the others are still thinking twenty twenty four is just
nineteen ninety six with a little added pizazz, a little
free song of you know, America is going out of
business sale. The suicidal madness of the Paul begalas even
(09:38):
the Biden reluctance to just harshly focus on Trump's convictions,
is also at its core and inability to realize that
not only can you base a campaign on more than
one theme, more than one slogan, more than one pitch,
but that in these days of epically low attention spans.
(10:00):
You have to Nobody is saying the whole anti Trump
campaign should be about his crimes. You need to have
as many ads about his attempts to overthrow democracy, but
you also need just as many and just as bold
ads about meat and potatoes issues. I wouldn't be so
upset about this if the Biden advertising We're a little stronger.
(10:23):
Trump keeps promising to defund all schools that have vaccine mandates. Well,
this should be an advertising no brainer. I cooked this up.
It took me about forty five seconds. Convicted fellow, Donald
(10:44):
Trump wants to keep your children from getting vaccines. All vaccines,
he says. I will not give one penny to any
school that has a vaccine mandates. No vaccines, says Donald Trump.
No measles vaccine, no tetanus vaccine, no polio vaccine. Just
(11:07):
sixty years ago, six thousand American children died from polio
because there was no vaccine. Convicted fellon, Donald Trump wants
to keep your children from getting the polio vaccine. Donald
Trump wants to kill your children. Okay, how hard was that?
(11:37):
Just slap? I'm Joe Biden, and I approved this message
on the end, and you have a campaign ad, and
and you have the lead story in the news cycle
that day, simple, memorable and by the way true. What
are you thing's gonna happen if Trump is reelected and
there are no vaccines? Once again, I wrote that in
(11:58):
forty five seconds. Imagine what a pro could do. Don't
tell me it's too tough. We need that Willy Horton
commercial attitude, only with facts and reality. Or if you
don't want to do the Trump wants to kill your
kids ad, how about a quick pocketbook style commercial convicted felon.
(12:26):
Donald Trump wants to deport millions of people. Maybe you
like this idea, maybe you hate it, but either way,
he's going to make you pay for it. Who does
the tough jobs in this country? Who harvests the crops,
who cooks at the restaurants, who delivers things to your home?
(12:48):
What happens when Trump has deported all the people who
do all the tough jobs. Companies will have to spend
twice as much to get people to do those jobs.
Guess who will pay for that? You will guess what
(13:10):
happens then? Inflation? Donald Trump wants more inflation. I mean,
you can make one of these for every topic you
could think of, from the price of gas to the
(13:30):
impact of Trump's stance on climate change on the cost
of orange juice. In fact, you could make ten new
ones a day. I could make ten new ones a day.
This isn't as hard as the Paul Begalas of this
World wants you to think. And you can go really topical.
I mean, I mean really topical. I ask you only
for this one one visualization for me. Visualize lots of
(13:54):
shots of the Appeal to Heaven flag and the upside
down American flags, and lots of shots of guys in robes.
Convicted felon Donald Trump loves Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito,
(14:18):
you know, the flag guy. And sam Alito has told
an investigative reporter that he agrees with her that America's
future is a choice. Tolerant moderates like you must lose,
lose everything so that sam Alito and convicted felon Donald
(14:40):
Trump and other religious fanatics can win.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
One side or the other. One side or the other
is right away.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
That's what Trump and Alito want. They want to win,
and they want you to lose everything. Vote Democratic. We
will get sam Alito off the Supreme Court, or we
will expand the Supreme Court. Because this country is for
(15:09):
all the people. This isn't Iran, this is America. I mean,
imagine how much fun that one will be putting on
the tag. I'm Joe Biden and I approved this message
because this isn't Iran. If that clip of Alito there
(15:34):
surprised you read the Rolling Stone piece about my friend,
the investigative journalist Lauren Windsor and Sam Alito, and once
again we survive thanks to the stupidity of the people
who would kill us. This is the second time Lauren
has gotten sam Alito to disqualify himself on tape. She
(15:54):
did it last year too. She just massages the egos
of these self indulgent psychos long enough and the next
thing you know, they're going all Illuminati on her.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
It's easy to blame to blame the media, but I
do blame really because they do nothing like con sizes
and so they have really road in trust in.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Years. I don't know, I really don't know. I mean
ordinary people, ordinary.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Is and where I work for Americans. So this is
in general, need to work on us to try to
heal this polarization, because it's very dangerous.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
The polar.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
I think it is a matter of like winning.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
I think they're probably right one side or the other.
One side or the other is going to win.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
I mean there can be.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
I mean a way of working, a way of living
together peacefully. But it's difficult, you know, because there are
differences and fundamental things that really can't.
Speaker 4 (17:07):
Be coming out.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
He can't be off us, so it's not.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Like you're going to what the difference. Unbelievably, in the
Alito family, Justice Alito had the best night while talking
to Lauren Windsor, Oh boy.
Speaker 5 (17:24):
Why do you think they're coming after you?
Speaker 1 (17:26):
I mean, like the whole I appeal to.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
Have headed flags of bullshit right.
Speaker 6 (17:32):
But that's you know. The other thing is that I'm
not easy to believe that he should control me.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Yes, it's loco to help.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
He never kench as well. Wait, there's more. What's the
Italian proverb about? Revenge is a dish which people of
taste prefer to eat cold with a lot of apparatefs.
My heritage is a dream.
Speaker 6 (17:57):
You come after me to I do away.
Speaker 7 (18:02):
It doesn't have to email that though, the way, Davringo,
you know what I want I want a sacred Heart
of Jesus' flag because I have to look across the
lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month xadly
and he's like, oh, please, don't put up a flag.
Speaker 6 (18:16):
I said, I won't do it because I'm deferring to you.
But when you were free of this nonsense, I'm putting
it up. And I'm going to send them a message.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Every day, maybe every week.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
I'll be changing the flags. There'll be all kinds.
Speaker 6 (18:27):
I made a flag in my head. This is how
I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It's white and
it's yellow and orange flames around it, and in the
middle is the word vigonia. Virgonia in Italian means shame,
virgonia v e rg o g na vergon shame, shame.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Shame on you. I would say, as many have, hearing
the whole tape of her too quick recordings of Alido,
that he must resign, except that the theocrats in this
country are hearing those Lauren windsor tapes and rejoicing and
sacrificing goat or whatever it is they do, because Alito
is their guy. And we have now certainly entered into
(19:10):
what we can safely called the post resignation era of
American political history, in which nobody will go voluntarily, no
matter the shame, no matter the crime, no matter the corruption,
no matter the number of times they don't recognize that
it's Lauren Windsor batting her eyes at them. Trump had
(19:52):
his first meeting with his probation officer yesterday Inhale. For
a second, think about the reality that a presidential candidate
having a with his probation officer ya zoom has happened,
(20:12):
and it was not only not covered live on all
news networks in the world, especially considering they really had
nothing else to talk about, but I didn't even lead
this podcast with it. A meeting with a probation officer
who's going to report to the judge with recommendations or
(20:33):
at least assessments that will affect whether or not the
judge sends him to the Big House at the sentencing
on July eleventh. By the way, Trump just learned what
I found out like fifteen years ago. Why you do
not rely on Jonathan Turley as a legal expert or
(20:56):
as anything else. Jonathan Turley went on Fox and says
Judge Mayor Shawn kn't send Trump to prison because Trump
is an elderly first time offender. He called him elderly,
elderly convicted fellon Donald Trump. And look, I'm holding up
(21:18):
these papers by Jonathan Turley. I don't know that Trump
will be quoting any more. Turley articles elderly first time
offender Donald Trump. Ah, yeah, maybe put it in a
B section, Mac, but yeah, a lead nowh Hello, we
(21:40):
got the hotter Biden. Jerry went home without giving us
a verdict. Oh the pat Sayjack retirement. At the risk
of devoting the entire podcast to naval gazing and philosophy,
it can never be over emphasized. Part of Trump's success
is this firehouse fire hose effect. There's so much going
(22:05):
on that something that happened Sunday is already forgotten, like
uh well, like Trump glitching again. In fact, he he
escalated from ordinary glitching to the record scratch glitch, where
you immediately repeat what you just said and neither times
(22:26):
can you finish the word oh man.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
And no, I'll tell you what. These are sick people.
And I hope the military. I hope the military revolts
at the voting booth and just says we're not gonna
take it.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Military Milt also forgotten from Sunday, Trump out and out
lying about disrespecting the military. Re let me finish that
for you, military re Trump out and out lying about
having disrespected the military. Here he is denying it, followed
(23:04):
by doing it on videotape in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Think of it from a practical standpoint. I'm standing there
with generals and military people in a cemetery, and I
look at them, I say, these people are suckers and losers. Now,
think of it unless you're a psycho or a crazy
person or a very stupid person who would say that anyway,
(23:31):
but who would say it to military people with military
because as president of the United States, I would say
if I made that statement, if I have generals here,
if I haven't, I would imagine that most of them
would end up in a major fistfight with the president. Okay,
And you know what I would have said, It was okay.
In that one instance, they made up a story. They
(23:52):
just out of thin air, just like a lot of
the fake stories are made up by these people because
they're among the most dishonest people in the country, the
fake news. They're dishonest people, but Frank, Frank, let.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
Me get to it.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
He hit me hero. He's not a war hero, war hero.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
He's a war high and a half years.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
He's a war hero because he was captured.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I like people that weren't captured.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
Okay, I hate to tell you.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
She was a warrior. Yeah. He'd never say something bad
about the military, except something bad about John McCain, and
except about what General Kelly said. He said, which he
then lied about. I wonder if that came up in
the remote meeting with his freaking probation officer, or maybe
maybe the freaking probation officer said, hey, is Jonathan Turley Wright?
(24:38):
Are you an elderly first time offender? Elderly first time offender. God,
there's got to be a song in that. I'm working
on it. Also, even though the once great Washington Post
(24:59):
is a wounded being lying there on the Veldt, which,
if you know Washingt is take the metro, go to
the National's Park station. It's out near there. Even though
that's true, I am obligated to take a shot at
the Washington Post because at this point it looks increasingly
like Jeff Bezos adopted the phrase democracy dies in darkness
(25:20):
as nothing more than a clever marketing slogan. And he
don't give a damn about democracy dying in darkness, and
he never did. The new Washington Post marketing slogan may
very well be well. Democracy's dead already, so at least
fascism makes me richer. The Post has profiled Russ's vote,
the ironically named Trump cultist who is behind Project twenty
(25:42):
twenty five and theocratizing America and maybe you know, having
the army shoot anti Trump civilians. Russ's vote could wind
up as Trump's hmmler or gerring, or more likely his
Albert spear. He's nuts, He's amoral, he is completely unburdened
by conscience. He waives the flag of religion and then
(26:05):
tries to put it through your thorax. If he wasn't bald,
Trump might have considered vote for vice president. I mean
vote Trump, vote perfect slogan. The Post headline in its
profile about this man who is a danger to everything
America has ever stood for quote Trump loyalist pushes post
(26:29):
constitutional vision for second term post constitutional. In other words,
we've cut to the chase, here have we, Washington Post,
And we have already let Trump terminate the constitution. So
we're post constitutional and we're already moving into shaping the dictatorship.
And instead of a headline like this man wants to
(26:51):
end your freedom and make you a slave, the Post
goes with Trump loyalist pushes post constitutional vision for a
second term, which makes me think of an article somewhere
about your body decomposing after your death and the headline
Trump loyalist pushes postlife weight loss plan. Why has American
(27:16):
journalism descended to the next of Dante's circles of hell
so quickly? You know about the British sleeves journalist the
Washington Post brought in Trump loyalist pushes post American vision
for America. But do you know about the British editor
in chief of the Wall Street Journal the one who
(27:37):
must have greenlighted that hit piece last week on the
President's age, the one that only quoted Republicans and deliberately
edited out all comments from Democrats. Daniel Lippman of Politico
has a story about her. Her name is Emma Tucker,
and the story sounds like it was written by mel
Brooks that he cut it out of the producers. Mister
(27:59):
Lippmann writes that at the Wall Street Journal party before
the twenty twenty three White House Correspondent's Dinner, Ms Tucker,
in conversation with a journal staffer and an unidentified second person, said,
and I'm quoting Politico here, that she hadn't realized that
there were two Houses of Congress. Oh my god, she
(28:24):
hadn't realized that there were two houses of Congress. Emma
Tucker's response to this was, quote, this is garbage. Well,
that's one description of it. I'd prefer to go with
mel Brooks and the producers, like I mentioned the scene
where he has the dilettant. Broadway producer Roger Debris played
(28:45):
by Christopher Hewitt, read the script and say I never
knew that the third Reich meant Germany. I mean, it's
just drenched with historical goodies like that. Wait, there's a
North Dakota also of interest here. You think all that's bad?
(29:14):
Which member of Congress? And by the way, there are
two houses of Congress. Now have you heard, thanks Obama?
Which member of Congress has indicated at a Trump rally
that they believe that electric cars run on gas? I mean,
you'd have to be pretty stupid to think that, So
(29:36):
you have only like two hundred and seventy five choices.
But I have faith in you. I think you can
figure out who said this. That's next. This is an
all new edition of Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith
Olberman still ahead of us on this all new edition
(30:18):
of Countdown. I am breaking format. One of those things
has happened in sports that makes my hair catch fire,
then turn white, then fall out, then grow back, then
turn black, then turn white again. And I want to
comment on it at length, and you may or may
not be interested in that, so I'm going to put
(30:40):
it last. So no things I promised not to tell today. Instead,
I will give you my response to a survey of
active baseball players by the website The Athletic, in which
the active players absolutely trashed the old timers, and by
old timers, they meet anybody who played before twenty ten.
(31:02):
And apart from proving that nobody thinks as highly of
today's baseball players as to today's baseball players, somebody grabbed
what is for me personally the third rail. Somebody said,
in talking about batters versus pitchers, you think Babe Ruth
ever saw a slider because they were too arrogant to
(31:25):
google it first, and find out that the slider was
in use in baseball when Babe Ruth was nine years old.
And that invokes the story of the active pitcher who
a few years ago claimed he would strike out Babe
Ruth every time he faced him. And by the way,
his earned run average at this moment is five point
seventy nine. Coming up. But first, as ever, there are
(31:50):
still more new idiots to talk about who are not
in baseball. The daily roundup of the mis grants, morons
and dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's non baseball
worst persons in the world. And yes, if they ball cares,
and I know it doesn't. Baseball's losing me the bronze worse.
Governor Kathy Hokel, alleged Democrat of New York. Hokel has
(32:15):
abruptly and it sure looks like she's done it illegally
frozen the introduction of congestion pricing in New York City
at the end of the month. This is where they
charge you for going downtown. It's worked in cities around
the world. It's increased traffic flow, increase the use of
mass transit, decreased pollution, and she stopped it just her
(32:40):
after it passed. She's being sued, she may be primaried.
There may be a push forming to remove her. Happily,
for her opponents, Kathy Hokel is just not bright. She
claimed yesterday that no, she's not attending a fundraiser for
her today in New York City. The fundraiser, which donors
are being asked to fork over five to ten thousand
(33:02):
dollars a piece, is being days after she came down
in favor of cars and traffic and pollution and sucked
a billion dollars worth of funding out of mass transit
in New York City. This fundraiser for her is being
held at the Center for Automotive Education and Training in
Queens and it's being staged by Well this is a coincidence,
(33:24):
the Greater New York Automobile Association, a group of car fanciers,
people who like to make models.
Speaker 8 (33:32):
No, it's a group of car dealers. Governor Hokal, get
the f out of my city.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
The runner up worse, sir. Every once in a while,
there's a moment or two when it seems as if
Marjorie Taylor, insurrectionist human trash Barney rubble Green might not
be as stupid as she looks. And then she reminds you, oh,
yes she is.
Speaker 4 (33:58):
And you think gas prices are high, Now just wait
until you're forced to drive an electric veha.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Exactly see what sells there? What makes that is the
exactly where she congratulates herself on her brilliance. Also, ma'am,
you have a deviated septum. If you'll get it repaired,
I'll pay for the operation. Enacling Marjorie Taylor Green thinks
electric vehicles run on gasoline. Now she may be confused.
(34:39):
I mean, it's a day ending in why she may
be confused. She might be thinking of hybrids. And I
suppose if you walked her through it very carefully and slowly,
over the course of several weeks or months, Green would
finally realize that the point of electric vehicles, why they
call them electric vehicles, is that they don't run on gasoline,
(35:01):
and they certainly would not drive up demand for or
the of gasoline. But after like three minutes of trying
to process reality the eyes of Marjorie Taylor are you
sure you haven't had multiple concussions? Green just glaze over
and she gets that hit in the face with a snowshovel. Look.
I mean this one is up there with the time
(35:23):
she demanded a national divorce because in her new country,
let's call it Moronica, you could force students to recite
the Pledge of Allegiance every day. The Pledge of Allegiance
in a divorced country, the Pledge of allegiance that includes
the line one nation indivisible. I guess division would be
(35:44):
illegal in her new country. She doesn't know what indivisible means.
The debate over what makes Marge so stupid is endless
and pointless. Just last week, she explained something on Twitter
by using a phrase that she must have heard a
not stupid person say once therein lies ojie. She thinks
it's there and law she spelled it thch e R
(36:09):
space new word e n l i E s. She
thinks there's a word and lies like that guy used
to run China Joe and lies. Oh my god, they're
and lies for all intensive purposes Marjorie. Previously, Midge has
(36:30):
warned us that Bill Gates intends to force us to
eat artificial meat grown in a quote peach tree dish.
It's two years now since her video in which she
insisted that Joe Biden would soon be unleashing his secret
police against America. You know, the gospacho. Maybe it's brain damage.
Maybe it's an IQ matching Tom Brady's uniform number or
(36:53):
Babe Ruth's uniform number. Maybe it's opioids. Maybe it's steroids.
Maybe it's hemorrhoids. Maybe it's inbreeding. But I am going
to play this part of this clip again and then
offer you a really low odds explanation that truly would
tie it all neatly together.
Speaker 4 (37:10):
You think gas prices are high, now just wait until
you're forced to drive an electric vehicle.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
So here's my theory. What is my theory? It's my theory.
My theory was born last month after scientists at Cambridge
University completed a ten year project to take some unearthed
bones from a Neanderthal woman who had died seventy five
thousand years ago and was found in the Shanadar Cave
in Kurdistan in Iraq, and using computer modeling and precise
(37:38):
calculations at a little art they reconstructed her face. They
call her shannizar Z and she's a dead ringer for
Marjorie Taylor Green. I mean a little on the facial coloring,
but with the amount of makeup marg wares, it's pretty close.
Same bulging bones under the eyebrows, the high cheek bones,
(38:00):
the prominent nose. Only the hair color is really different,
and we know how it got different. So here's my theory.
When they found shannas dar's Z Neanderthal woman from seventy
five thousand years ago, they did not find her alone.
There were two of them, and one was dead shannazar Z,
and the other one was just frozen in suspended animation.
(38:22):
And they brought her back to life and they named
her Shanadar MTG, and the Republicans promptly ran her for Congress.
And here we are with a leading GOP elected representative
insisting that electric cars run on gasoline. But our winner
the worst of worsts Politico Playbook. Politico Playbook is well
(38:47):
known as the home of typos and log rolling for
the editor's girlfriend and editors who are only there because
they've been fired by everybody else, and printing interminable lists
of anonymous political reporters who mistakenly think they are celebrities
because they were attending parties they don't know are slightly
less important than the meetings of the Kowanas Club in
(39:09):
Rapid City. But even for them, even for a political playbook,
this is a dilly. It's about North Dakota Governor Doug
the mono Brow Bergham. And how as I have suggested
here for months, Bergham is actually the clubhouse leader to
be Trump's running mate, because when Trump picked Mike Pence,
he thinks he was right and Mike Pence just failed.
(39:31):
He needs a better Mike Pence. And that's got Doug
Bergham written all over it. Anyway, here's the typo about
Bergham and Trump quote. As for looks, which are clearly
important to the former president, Trump has also told people
that Bergham looks the part and has gushed over his
thick head of head.
Speaker 8 (39:56):
Thick head of head, Doug Bergham has a thick head
of head. That's typo Politico playbook.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
At least I think it's a typo.
Speaker 8 (40:11):
Two days, worst persons.
Speaker 5 (40:16):
And no word.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
They kind of it happens. Holy crap, When I didn't like.
Speaker 5 (40:43):
This is Sports Center? Wait check that not anymore. This
is Countdown with Keith Ulberman.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
And as I said, I'm screwing with the format today
because something really pissed me off from sports and I'm
going to need a little time to talk about it,
and you may or may not care. So our number
one story on the Countdown is Sportscenters Central Tonight. Do
you think Babe Ruth ever saw a slider question mark? Annually,
(41:20):
the now New York Times owned website The Athletic does
a survey of Major League Baseball players in which they
make the mistake of asking today's baseball players opinions and
questions and insights about the game today and about the
game in the past. And one thing has been certain
for the last well I've been a baseball fan since
(41:42):
nineteen sixty seven, so since nineteen sixty seven, is that
today's baseball players know almost nothing about the past. And
I mean the twenty twenty four baseball players know nothing
about nineteen ninety four, as the nineteen ninety four players
knew nothing about nineteen seventy four, and as I presume
the nineteen twenty four players knew nothing about eighteen eight.
(42:05):
They just think they live in a vacuum every generation.
I had a conversation not long ago with a baseball
play by play man, and I asked him. Actually, I
posited to him that it seemed to me that there
were only two or three guys, maybe four, on every
team that could actually play baseball, That the rest of
(42:27):
them were hitters or pitchers who really didn't know what
they were supposed to do strategically at a given moment,
whether they should swing on a certain count or not,
what base they should throw to, where they should go
to in a rundown play, that they didn't know the
essence of baseball as it used to be taught. And
he went, there's not that many. It's probably one or two.
(42:51):
In any event, The Athletic asked baseball players many different
topics and asked them one thing in particular, what about
the criticisms of today's game by recent former Major leaguers. Hell,
you should read this article just to see how highly
today's players think of themselves and how nobody appreciates them,
(43:16):
and how they don't get the credit for playing in
the most difficult game that has ever been called baseball,
That nobody ever looks out for what they need, that
they don't get what they deserve. Despite the seven hundred
million dollar contract that show hey Otani got and the
freedom to play basically anywhere they want to from one
year to the next end coaching staffs that are now
(43:38):
who twenty twenty five guys per team trying to help you,
and all the video in the world and computers and
all the rest of that. But it all boils down
to that one quote I started with, essentially the comments
from about seventy five players or so who were willing
to criticize baseball as it used to be. And they're
not talking about nineteen sixty seven. They're talking about twenty
(44:00):
ten baseball players. These seventy five or so all had
the basic same argument. No player from the past could
exist in today's game, or almost no player from the past.
And this is one thing that has changed appreciably. Players
in the past used to think of themselves as the
culmination of a series of evolutions, that the game had
(44:22):
gotten greater, and therefore they had gotten greater, and their
physicality had gotten greater, et cetera, et cetera. It's not
like that. Reading this article, it's all about how today's
baseball players would if they put together an all star
team against yesterday's great players, they'd come to bat once
and they would never ever end the game. Because today's
(44:43):
baseball players would never make it out because they're perfect.
This is what they have been taught. And we can
talk about what this means in terms of society and
entitlement and reading your own newspaper clippings and all the
rest of that, but I'll spare that. I'm just saying
that the article will make you in raged. And unfortunately
(45:07):
it's not just baseball, every sport except probably the National
Hockey League. The players pretty much think that the guys
before them were idiots who just happened to stumble around
and set all these records and win all these championships.
But there was one quote in there about how difficult
it is to face pitching today, and the quote was,
do you think Babe Ruth ever saw a slider? And
(45:29):
the answer is, you goddamn righty saw slider. The slider
was put into use by the great Philadelphia Athletics Hall
of Fame pitcher Charles Bender, native American from Minnesota, who
debuted I believe in the year nineteen hundred and three.
It was later perfected in the twenties by another pitcher
named George Blaholder. But the slider that pitch with that
(45:52):
motion was well known in Major League baseball long before
Babe Ruth came to the major leagues in nineteen fourteen.
And any time that you hear somebody invoked Babe Ruth
and dismiss him, well, he only played against white pitching. Well,
he also only played against like one hundred different pitchers. Nominally,
(46:12):
he was facing one of the two hundred best baseball
pitchers of all time. And yes, maybe that number was limited,
and half of what should have been the two hundred
best baseball pitchers of his time were segregated out of
the game. So let's say he should have faced one
of the top four hundred pitchers every day when he
(46:33):
played in Major League baseball. Well, today, that's like a
thousand pitchers are active. At any one point. Any hitter
goes to the plate facing one of the thousand, let's
be conservative, just the healthy ones, maybe the best six
hundred active pitchers in the game, as opposed to the
four hundred or the two hundred or the one hundred
that Babe Ruth faced. But I'm getting very very far
(46:54):
into the weeds and the woods here. This is much
simpler than I'm making it out to be. Every time
somebody invokes Babe Ruth, as happened yesterday in the Athletic
back to December of twenty eighteen, when Adam Ottavino, who
is a relief pitcher who has experienced moderate success in
the major leagues for many years and is now with
the team that is the home of moderate success, the
(47:17):
New York Mets. Adam Ottavino told a podcast that if
he faced Babe Ruth, he would strike him out. Every time.
Babe Ruth would not make contact against him, he would
strike him out every time. This, I think, still to
this day, summarizes the attitude of the modern player about
(47:38):
the past in baseball, and it's also moronic. Adam Otavino
is a smart guy, well respected among his teammates, pleasant
with the media, and could not be more wrong about
this because he has not considered anything other than what
he knows of baseball, and he has projected himself back
into its history and said, look how much bigger and
(48:01):
stronger I am. Therefore, I would strike him out every
time I throw pitches he's never seen before. I cannot stop,
and since December of twenty eighteen, I have not stopped
thinking about this hypothetical theoretical transcendent somewhere in outer space
without time, matchup between Adam Adavino and Babe Ruth or
(48:23):
whoever it was the anonymous player who was quoted in
The Athletic Yesterday saying, do you think Babe Ruth ever
saw a slider? Yeah? Probably once every game. Obviously the
matchup could never happen. Babe Ruth died in nineteen forty eight.
He retired from baseball in nineteen thirty five. He was
(48:43):
born in eighteen ninety four, meaning if he came back
somehow from the dead and played today, he'd be one
hundred and thirty years old. I don't think he could
get around on Adam Ottavito's slider. I don't think he
could get around on my slider. But let's make this
increasingly fair. The point of what Adam Adavino said was,
I suppose at Otdavino's prime and at Babe Ruth's prime,
(49:06):
out of Vino thinks he would strike him out every time.
So in theory, you'd have to have this matchup somewhere.
You couldn't just pluck these two guys out of their
existences and put them in a timeless white space in
which the best Adam out of Vino, with all of
his advantages, would face the best Babe Ruth with only
the advantages of his lifetime. Of course, that would happen
(49:31):
the way he thinks it would. He would strike him
out every time, at least the first few times until
Ruth tried to adjust to him. But it wouldn't happen
that way. Even in the wildest theory of time travel
in space, you got to travel to some time. So
where do you play it? Is it a home or
a road game? For Adam out of Vino? Is it
nineteen twenty seven? Is it Babe Ruth's prime? Babe Ruth
(49:54):
as he was a little portly but surprisingly nimble, big belly,
big shoulders, unbelievably fast, hands as fast as Henry Aaron
according to those who saw them, both as fast as
any player today, and tiny little legs, unexpected speed and grace,
(50:15):
and more importantly, in nineteen twenty seven, Babe Ruth hit
sixty home runs, and no other team in the American
League hit more than fifty six home runs. No other
complete team came close to his individual performance in home
runs for the equivalent impact, how many more home runs
he hit than everybody else last year? There would have
had to have been in twenty twenty three, a major
(50:37):
league baseball player who hit himself two hundred and fifty
five home runs. That's how better than everybody else, Babe
Ruth was in nineteen twenty seven. But also, what about
the ballparks you're playing in nineteen twenty seven? Where did
he hit these? Down the left field line at Yankee Stadium,
and Ruth was a left hand hitter, was two hundred
(50:59):
and eighty one feet down the right field line. It
was two hundred and ninety five feet, tiny distances even
then on the other hand, in center field it was
four hundred and ninety feet to the bleachers in center field.
Any major league hitter who came into a ballpark in
which centerfield was four hundred and ninety feet away, they
would leave. They would go on strike. Center fields now
(51:22):
are not four hundred and ninety feet but closer to
four hundred and nine feet, And we're not even going
to talk about the power alleys and everything else. The
ballparks of nineteen twenty seven were gigantic, except if you
pulled the ball right to the foul pole. Because Yankee
Stadium two hundred and ninety five feet right down the
line there for Babe Ruth's home runs, then jutted out
(51:43):
to about three twenty almost immediately, and then gradually out
to four hundred and ninety feet in right center field
and center field. The other thing about hitting in nineteen
twenty seven, you did not get a new, fresh, clean,
easy to see baseball every pitch. Sometimes a game could
be played with less than twenty baseballs in And yes
(52:06):
it's true, as autom Altavino pointed out, Babe Ruth did
not see any of today's exotic pitchers and their exotic
movements and the pitches that they threw. No, he just
saw spit balls, shine balls, emery balls, balls that had
gouges taken out of them by ballplayers, rings, balls that
(52:26):
had been in use for several innings and were lopsided,
balls that were not stitched properly to begin with and
came apart when you hit them. The other thing that
I always think about that modern players don't think about
is Babe Ruth saw each pitcher live, and that was it.
Today's batters can study every pitch the opposing pitcher, every
(52:51):
opposing pitcher has ever thrown, ever thrown as recently as
the nineteen eighties and nineties. Tony Gwinn, my late friend
of the San Diego Padres, used to go looked at
funny by his teammates because he was studying videotape of
the pictures. What good does that do? How does that
help you guess what? They didn't have videotape of all
(53:11):
the other pictures in nineteen twenty seven. They didn't have
still pictures of most of the pictures in action in
nineteen twenty seven. You couldn't tell what another picture threw.
You had a reputation, You had your own memory. Maybe
like many players did, you wrote down what you saw
as it happened, so you'd have a fresh memory the
next time you saw the guy in Saint Louis in August,
(53:32):
when it was ninety five degrees and you were playing
at one thirty in the afternoon. Baby Ruth had no gym.
Bab Ruth did not work out. Nobody really had understood
the relationship between staying in shape and hitting home runs,
or hitting or pitching or anything else. On the other hand,
if you're playing this game in nineteen twenty seven, it
would seem that almost all the advantages the gigantic ballparks,
(53:56):
no video, no gym. That would favor Adam out of Vino,
And I'm sure it would for the first couple of
it bats. But here's something else. If you transported any
major league ball player of twenty twenty four back to
the year nineteen twenty seven, he would feel like Robinson Crusoe,
washed up on the desert island. He has no assistance
(54:18):
of any kind. A major league baseball team consisted of
twenty three, twenty four or twenty five players, the manager, and,
if you were lucky, two coaches, both of whom were
there basically to go drinking with the manager after the game.
I researched this when I was a kid. The first
book I ever published, in nineteen seventy four, when I
(54:40):
was fifteen years old, was about the major league coaches.
It was a list of major league coaches, and it
was the greatest shock of my life to that point.
In nineteen twenty seven, there were sixteen teams, and the
sixteen teams had twenty eight coaches among them. Five of
these guys were either former pitchers or catchers. There were
five pitching coaches. So Adam Ottavino, if you go back
(55:04):
to Facebook bab in nineteen twenty seven. You are on
your own. You don't have video of him either. Also,
there are no night games. Now to some pitchers, night
games and day games make no difference whatsoever. But the
point is there are no night games. And most importantly
for somebody like Ottavino, who was a very good pitcher,
(55:26):
there are no good relief pitchers. Maybe there's one or two.
Furpo Marberry of the Washington Senators would come in and
work in relief almost exclusively, but there really weren't relief pitchers.
If you were a good pitcher, you had to start,
and you had to start every fourth day. So Adam
Ottavino is not pitching an inning or two in which
he would face Babe Ruth once or twice, maybe over
(55:49):
the course of one game, and might face him again
a few weeks later, so that when he faced him
seven times in one season, yes, maybe he would strike
him out seven times. There was a picture named hub
Prewitt who managed to strike out Babe Ruth repeatedly and
got almost nobody else out. That was his whole reputation,
the man who got Ruth out. But Ottavino would not
(56:11):
have the luxury of only facing Ruth seven times, he'd
have to face him four times in a game, because
not only would they make him into a starting pitcher,
but the likelihood of him being relieved at any point
during the game is almost zero. You go out there
and throw your two hundred pitches at him, and then
we'll see you in four days again. And by the way,
you'll see the Yankees again in no more than a
month's time, because there are only seven other teams in
(56:32):
the league, and you play each other in a balanced schedule,
none of this interleague crap. So that's nineteen twenty seven.
What if you brought Babe Ruth. Do you think Babe
Ruth ever saw a slider? Yeah, he probably saw. He
saw a slider and all those spitball pitches and the
other things. And by the way, he wasn't wearing a
batting helmet for any of this, nor any armor on
(56:54):
his arms, nor any protection of any kind. So let's
bring it to twenty twenty four, and Adam Ottavino is
as he is, and Babe Ruth is the stranger arriving
in a new world. Well, the first thing that Babe
Ruth finds out is sho hey Otani signed a contract
last winter for seven hundred million dollars for ten years.
(57:15):
And even when the calculations are shown to Babe Ruth
as to what that means in nineteen twenty seven dollars,
Babe Ruth is going to say, Holy spit, and he's
going to go right to the gym and start working
out in the hopes of playing until he's forty five
years old, rather than retiring forcibly at the age of
about forty. That's the first thing he's going to see.
(57:38):
He might actually begin to take care of himself. And
if he doesn't think of that himself, he has six
hitting coaches and twelve assistant hitting coaches and all the
videotape he could ever want to look at at Adam
out of you know, And if he can't really perceive
what videotape is, there's of course a videotape coach to
show it to him. And then he goes to the
(57:59):
ballpark and says, where's the rest of it? Tiny ballparks,
centerfield to Yankee Stadium is not four hundred and ninety feet.
Center field in some ballparks is pushing three ninety nine,
not quite four hundred feet. Babe Ruth averaged at the
peak ten year stretch of his career ten triples a
(58:19):
year in smaller ballparks, just slightly smaller ballparks. By nineteen
twenty seven standards, he would have hit seventy home runs
in nineteen twenty seven, not sixty. Now, suddenly center field,
to which players regularly hit home runs, is available to him.
The only home runs hit to center field before about
(58:40):
nineteen fifty were inside the park home runs. Babe Ruth
could now take an adam out of eno pitch, a
slider or something else and put it over the freaking
center field fence in any ballpark in the major leagues.
Remember what I mentioned earlier that the equivalent of what
Ruth did compared to the rest of the league in
nineteen twenty seven would require somebody to hit two hundred
and fifty five home runs this year. He might do
(59:02):
it also in terms of longevity. In addition to all
of the athletic facilities available to him to get in
shape and stay in shape, there are trainers, multiple trainers.
There are workout rooms. There are doctors. There are team doctors.
They didn't have team doctors in nineteen twenty seven. They
didn't have padded fences in nineteen twenty seven. They didn't
(59:24):
have the designated hitter in nineteen twenty seven, where Ruth,
if he was tired or hungover or had spent the
last three days without sleeping because he was chasing girls,
could be the designated hitter and not have to worry
about playing the outfield or though if he played the
outfield he had those fences had padding on them today
(59:45):
and they did not in nineteen twenty seven, So if
he ran into the outfield fences he did on many occasions,
there are pictures of him laid out cold on the
ground with all his teammates standing around waiting for him
to come to That would never happen. And as I
mentioned before, again, what are you facing today as the
(01:00:06):
average hitter going to the plate in the average Major
League game against random pitcher number five hundred and thirty two.
Because baseball is nearly twice as big as it was
in nineteen twenty seven, there are automatically going to be
twice as many pitchers, plus their longevity and their ability
to get through a season is half of what it
(01:00:27):
was at best compared to nineteen twenty seven. There are
literally at any point in the game, six hundred or
so active pitchers rotating around from team to team sometimes
and from the majors to the minor leagues. So you
are facing any one of six hundred different pitchers, whereas
Babe Ruth went through his career facing really just the
American League pitchers, maybe just one of the best one
(01:00:49):
hundred pitchers in the world, and now one of the
best six hundred pitchers in the world. The average pitcher
he's going to face today is not as good as
the average pitcher he would have faced in nineteen twenty seven.
So here's the gist of it. I think, having watched
this game and the other games all this time, and
having remembering flashing back to a conversation I had on
(01:01:12):
ESPN two in October nineteen ninety three with my co
host Susie Calber about Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe, and
she looking at me and going, well, of course, Wayne
Gretzky's better. He's of today. All of today's athletes are
better than they were in nineteen fifty three, and now
Wayne Gretzky is dismissed because he's not as big as
the ones who play in twenty twenty four. Every generation
(01:01:35):
does this, Well, they're much better today. I don't know
that that's true. You'd really have to have Babe Ruth
face Adam Outavino to see whether or not Adam Oudavino
would strike him out or Babe Ruth would hit a
home run seven hundred and eighty five feet off Adam Outavino.
That is the point of playing the game. That is
the one thing that does not change, and the idea
(01:01:56):
that today's players dismiss their predecessors. It occurs to me
in the Baseball documentary by Ken Burns, there is a
player quoted about how they don't play it as good
as they used to in his day. His quotes are
from about eighteen seventy, and he's talking about baseball in
eighteen fifty five. The gist of this is that, as
in any generation, some sort of theoretical, magical conflict between
(01:02:21):
Adam Adavino and Babe Ruth on a field somewhere in
the sky would depend on who was better prepared, who
had better access to training, better access to information, better
access to nutrition, better access to coaching, better access to
(01:02:44):
video of the opponent. Those are ninety five percent of
the improvements from one generation to the next and whatever
is next in baseball or any other sport, when in
twenty years from now people look back and go, well, yeah,
but he was hitting off people like Adam Otnovino, and
(01:03:05):
you know, Pete Alonzo was considered a great player. Show Hey,
Otani was the only two way player. Remember those dead
days in baseball in twenty twenty four. That's the one
guarantee going forward, somebody else, sitting in some other podcast
will have these exact same complaints about Adam Ottavino the
(01:03:25):
seventh or whoever the player was who was quoted in
the Athletic as saying, do you think Babe Ruth ever
saw a slider? And someday somebody will say the equivalent
of this in some future search engine world. Did you
think about googling that before you asked that question? And
(01:03:59):
another thing about the goddamned eighteen ninety World Series and
how that and I got it next time, I've done
all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schaneil arranged,
produced and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was
on the guitars, bass and drums. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration
(01:04:21):
and keyboards. Was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including
some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Old
Woman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis
courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical and pithy musical comments
and the organ accompany meant for the commercials in the
(01:04:42):
A Block by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever,
and I work on a song for Jonathan Turley. Our
announcer was my friend Larry David, and everything else was
pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this. The
one hundred and forty eighth day until the twenty twenty
four presidential election, the two hundred and fifty third day
(01:05:03):
since convicted felon Don Trump's first attempted coup against the
democratically elected government of the United States. Use the July
eleventh sentencing hearing for an elderly first time offender, Use
the mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens
to stop him from doing it again. While we still can.
(01:05:28):
The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins is the news
warrants till then. I'm Keith Ulruman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is
(01:06:07):
a production 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. The
President is wrong, Paul Begala is wrong, the polls are right,
(00:27):
and Trump's convictions continue to eat away at his Republican
support and the Democrats need to emphasize his criminality at
every turn. Now it is Morning Consults weekly tracking poll,
and ignore the swing from Trump plus one last week
to Biden plus one this week. This is their analysis
(00:49):
of their poll quote New York trial hurt Trump's image.
This is the sixth successive week in which Biden's net
favorability rating has bettered Trump's, a trend that began as
legal proceedings in New York ramped up. The latest data
shows Trump's worst net favorability rating since last January. That
(01:13):
is the point Biden's net favorability is minus nine. Trump's
is now minus twelve. He is further underwater in the
land of the Bland. The one digit disapproval guy is king.
The day before the Morning Consult poll was the CBS
you gov poll, and Trump was ahead fifty to forty nine,
(01:36):
but Biden is ahead in battleground states fifty to forty nine.
To their eternal discredit, Ugov and CBS gives you none
of the raw data in the battleground states, nor anything
on a state by state basis, only saying we oversampled
in them in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania,
(01:57):
in Wisconsin. That's like looking outside your window and saying
there's some weather out there. CBS also completely and more
importantly misses the point when it asks which issues are
major factors in your vote, and it gets eighty one
percent saying yes, the economy is a major factor in
my vote. Seventy five percent say yes, inflation is, seventy
(02:21):
four percent say the state of democracy is fifty six
percent say yes, the US Mexico border is a major
factor in my vote. And then CBS concludes only twenty
eight percent said the Trump conviction would be a major
factor in their vote. Seventeen percent said it would be
a minor factor, right twenty eight percent, So fifty six
(02:44):
percent say the border, immigration, deportation, the Trump racism card.
Fifty six percent say that is a major factor in
their vote, something Trump has been selling NonStop for nine years,
but half that many say his conviction, which is still
just twelve days old, is also a major factor. In
(03:04):
twelve days, Trump's conviction in the hush money election interference
trial has become half as important as immigration and the border.
And that is being dismissed in the write up as
being a minor factor. It is in fact, astonishingly large,
astonishingly fast, and that's not even considering the minor voters.
(03:25):
Twenty eight percent say it's a major factor, seventeen percent
say it's a minor factor. Nearly half of voters say
his convictions are a factor in their vote. CBS also
noted in passing that the conviction seem to be improving
Biden's position with Democrats. Of course it is. It is
animating them. That's the other point. We see the same
(03:48):
thing in a different you gov poll for Yahoo News,
which has Biden up forty six to forty four. And
by the way, that's his first lead in that poll
since October. And again, more importantly, let me quote the
write up, Trump's conviction in the hush money case may
have even made aid some otherwise skeptical Democrats and independence
(04:09):
more inclined to believe that Trump is guilty of other crimes.
The number of Americans who now think Trump quote conspired
to overturn the results of a presidential election, for instance,
has grown from forty five percent to fifty percent since January,
which includes a seventy nine percent to eighty eight percent
(04:31):
uptick among Democrats plus a forty five percent to fifty
percent uptick among independents. And belief that Trump is guilty
of taking highly classified documents from the White House and
obstructing efforts to retrieve them has increased from forty eight
percent to fifty two percent over the same period, with
similar gains among Democrats and independents. Hallelujah. The point is
(04:56):
being made for us that Yahoo poll also shows voters
want to know how those trials will turn out before
the election, and although this will not happen, if Trump
were to be convicted of another serious crime before the election,
Biden's lead would widen to forty six to forty And that,
(05:19):
of course, is why his concierge, Judge Eileen Cannon, and
the Political Supreme Court have worked so hard to prevent
any other verdicts before the election. And Yahoo also asked,
and this is more important, and I give them all
the credit in the world. Which is more important to you?
(05:39):
Joe Biden's age or Donald Trump's conviction, the result the
Trump conviction is more important to forty three percent, the
Biden age is more important to thirty eight percent. And
nobody knows how to read the polls. And so with
(06:01):
the most encouraging polling numbers for Biden and more importantly
against Trump, showing an awareness of Trump's criminality, the most
encouraging polling numbers this year, and hard and fast polling
evidence that the convictions are hurting Trump well for polling
meaning the mud is slightly clearer than the usual mud.
(06:24):
What is the Biden campaign doing with these the most
encouraging polling numbers this year? Off camera, the President is
telling people at fundraisers that Trump is a convicted felon
and that having a convicted felon seeking the presidency is disturbing,
And on camera, in an interview with ABC News, he
(06:46):
wouldn't say it. What do you think the American people
should make of this? How important do you think this
conviction should be in this race for president? That's for
the public to decide.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
But one thing for certain is stop undermining the rule
of law.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
No wrong answer, no, mister president ah ah. That's for
the public. To decide. This is not an American idol vote,
This isn't coke versus pepsi. This isn't the time to
stay above the fray. This is democracy or dictatorship. This
(07:21):
is life or death. And most people voting don't know that.
And you are the president of the United States, and
you have to make the case to them. You don't
have to sink to Trump's brain damaged rhetorical level. That's
for me to do, but to say that's for the
(07:41):
public to decide, Help them decide. Tell them the truth,
because mister president, when you hesitate like that, all the
other Democrats think they are supposed to hesitate. Paul freaking
Begala goes on CNN and says, quote, the Democrats have
to make this about your life, not Donald Trump's. I
(08:04):
mean it's always you know, I was politically raised by
Bill Clinton, and he would always say, you know, elections
are about the voters lives, not ours, and Democrats need
to take this to that message of we're here for you.
I'm not very interested in mister Trump's personal problems. I'm
interested in the lives and families of the American people. Bullshit, bullshit.
(08:27):
Paul Bagala Trump's personal problems, like his you know, dictatorship problem,
and his if I lose this election, I'll die in
prison problem, and his I'm a convicted felon problem, These
are all also about the voter's lives. Trump is willing
to end all of the voter's lives just to save
(08:49):
his own. You want to debate how much economics, how
much immigration, and how much dictatorship in the mix here, fine,
but don't tell me you're not interested, mister in mister
Trump's personal problems, or I will have to mention that
(09:11):
your last consulting job was on Hillary Clinton's two thousand campaign,
and we know how that turned out. And you and
the others are still thinking twenty twenty four is just
nineteen ninety six with a little added pizazz, a little
free song of you know, America is going out of
business sale. The suicidal madness of the Paul begalas even
(09:38):
the Biden reluctance to just harshly focus on Trump's convictions,
is also at its core and inability to realize that
not only can you base a campaign on more than
one theme, more than one slogan, more than one pitch,
but that in these days of epically low attention spans.
(10:00):
You have to Nobody is saying the whole anti Trump
campaign should be about his crimes. You need to have
as many ads about his attempts to overthrow democracy, but
you also need just as many and just as bold
ads about meat and potatoes issues. I wouldn't be so
upset about this if the Biden advertising We're a little stronger.
(10:23):
Trump keeps promising to defund all schools that have vaccine mandates. Well,
this should be an advertising no brainer. I cooked this up.
It took me about forty five seconds. Convicted fellow, Donald
(10:44):
Trump wants to keep your children from getting vaccines. All vaccines,
he says. I will not give one penny to any
school that has a vaccine mandates. No vaccines, says Donald Trump.
No measles vaccine, no tetanus vaccine, no polio vaccine. Just
(11:07):
sixty years ago, six thousand American children died from polio
because there was no vaccine. Convicted fellon, Donald Trump wants
to keep your children from getting the polio vaccine. Donald
Trump wants to kill your children. Okay, how hard was that?
(11:37):
Just slap? I'm Joe Biden, and I approved this message
on the end, and you have a campaign ad, and
and you have the lead story in the news cycle
that day, simple, memorable and by the way true. What
are you thing's gonna happen if Trump is reelected and
there are no vaccines? Once again, I wrote that in
(11:58):
forty five seconds. Imagine what a pro could do. Don't
tell me it's too tough. We need that Willy Horton
commercial attitude, only with facts and reality. Or if you
don't want to do the Trump wants to kill your
kids ad, how about a quick pocketbook style commercial convicted felon.
(12:26):
Donald Trump wants to deport millions of people. Maybe you
like this idea, maybe you hate it, but either way,
he's going to make you pay for it. Who does
the tough jobs in this country? Who harvests the crops,
who cooks at the restaurants, who delivers things to your home?
(12:48):
What happens when Trump has deported all the people who
do all the tough jobs. Companies will have to spend
twice as much to get people to do those jobs.
Guess who will pay for that? You will guess what
(13:10):
happens then? Inflation? Donald Trump wants more inflation. I mean,
you can make one of these for every topic you
could think of, from the price of gas to the
(13:30):
impact of Trump's stance on climate change on the cost
of orange juice. In fact, you could make ten new
ones a day. I could make ten new ones a day.
This isn't as hard as the Paul Begalas of this
World wants you to think. And you can go really topical.
I mean, I mean really topical. I ask you only
for this one one visualization for me. Visualize lots of
(13:54):
shots of the Appeal to Heaven flag and the upside
down American flags, and lots of shots of guys in robes.
Convicted felon Donald Trump loves Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito,
(14:18):
you know, the flag guy. And sam Alito has told
an investigative reporter that he agrees with her that America's
future is a choice. Tolerant moderates like you must lose,
lose everything so that sam Alito and convicted felon Donald
(14:40):
Trump and other religious fanatics can win.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
One side or the other. One side or the other
is right away.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
That's what Trump and Alito want. They want to win,
and they want you to lose everything. Vote Democratic. We
will get sam Alito off the Supreme Court, or we
will expand the Supreme Court. Because this country is for
(15:09):
all the people. This isn't Iran, this is America. I mean,
imagine how much fun that one will be putting on
the tag. I'm Joe Biden and I approved this message
because this isn't Iran. If that clip of Alito there
(15:34):
surprised you read the Rolling Stone piece about my friend,
the investigative journalist Lauren Windsor and Sam Alito, and once
again we survive thanks to the stupidity of the people
who would kill us. This is the second time Lauren
has gotten sam Alito to disqualify himself on tape. She
(15:54):
did it last year too. She just massages the egos
of these self indulgent psychos long enough and the next
thing you know, they're going all Illuminati on her.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
It's easy to blame to blame the media, but I
do blame really because they do nothing like con sizes
and so they have really road in trust in.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Years. I don't know, I really don't know. I mean
ordinary people, ordinary.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Is and where I work for Americans. So this is
in general, need to work on us to try to
heal this polarization, because it's very dangerous.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
The polar.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
I think it is a matter of like winning.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
I think they're probably right one side or the other.
One side or the other is going to win.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
I mean there can be.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
I mean a way of working, a way of living
together peacefully. But it's difficult, you know, because there are
differences and fundamental things that really can't.
Speaker 4 (17:07):
Be coming out.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
He can't be off us, so it's not.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Like you're going to what the difference. Unbelievably, in the
Alito family, Justice Alito had the best night while talking
to Lauren Windsor, Oh boy.
Speaker 5 (17:24):
Why do you think they're coming after you?
Speaker 1 (17:26):
I mean, like the whole I appeal to.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
Have headed flags of bullshit right.
Speaker 6 (17:32):
But that's you know. The other thing is that I'm
not easy to believe that he should control me.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Yes, it's loco to help.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
He never kench as well. Wait, there's more. What's the
Italian proverb about? Revenge is a dish which people of
taste prefer to eat cold with a lot of apparatefs.
My heritage is a dream.
Speaker 6 (17:57):
You come after me to I do away.
Speaker 7 (18:02):
It doesn't have to email that though, the way, Davringo,
you know what I want I want a sacred Heart
of Jesus' flag because I have to look across the
lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month xadly
and he's like, oh, please, don't put up a flag.
Speaker 6 (18:16):
I said, I won't do it because I'm deferring to you.
But when you were free of this nonsense, I'm putting
it up. And I'm going to send them a message.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Every day, maybe every week.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
I'll be changing the flags. There'll be all kinds.
Speaker 6 (18:27):
I made a flag in my head. This is how
I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It's white and
it's yellow and orange flames around it, and in the
middle is the word vigonia. Virgonia in Italian means shame,
virgonia v e rg o g na vergon shame, shame.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Shame on you. I would say, as many have, hearing
the whole tape of her too quick recordings of Alido,
that he must resign, except that the theocrats in this
country are hearing those Lauren windsor tapes and rejoicing and
sacrificing goat or whatever it is they do, because Alito
is their guy. And we have now certainly entered into
(19:10):
what we can safely called the post resignation era of
American political history, in which nobody will go voluntarily, no
matter the shame, no matter the crime, no matter the corruption,
no matter the number of times they don't recognize that
it's Lauren Windsor batting her eyes at them. Trump had
(19:52):
his first meeting with his probation officer yesterday Inhale. For
a second, think about the reality that a presidential candidate
having a with his probation officer ya zoom has happened,
(20:12):
and it was not only not covered live on all
news networks in the world, especially considering they really had
nothing else to talk about, but I didn't even lead
this podcast with it. A meeting with a probation officer
who's going to report to the judge with recommendations or
(20:33):
at least assessments that will affect whether or not the
judge sends him to the Big House at the sentencing
on July eleventh. By the way, Trump just learned what
I found out like fifteen years ago. Why you do
not rely on Jonathan Turley as a legal expert or
(20:56):
as anything else. Jonathan Turley went on Fox and says
Judge Mayor Shawn kn't send Trump to prison because Trump
is an elderly first time offender. He called him elderly,
elderly convicted fellon Donald Trump. And look, I'm holding up
(21:18):
these papers by Jonathan Turley. I don't know that Trump
will be quoting any more. Turley articles elderly first time
offender Donald Trump. Ah, yeah, maybe put it in a
B section, Mac, but yeah, a lead nowh Hello, we
(21:40):
got the hotter Biden. Jerry went home without giving us
a verdict. Oh the pat Sayjack retirement. At the risk
of devoting the entire podcast to naval gazing and philosophy,
it can never be over emphasized. Part of Trump's success
is this firehouse fire hose effect. There's so much going
(22:05):
on that something that happened Sunday is already forgotten, like
uh well, like Trump glitching again. In fact, he he
escalated from ordinary glitching to the record scratch glitch, where
you immediately repeat what you just said and neither times
(22:26):
can you finish the word oh man.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
And no, I'll tell you what. These are sick people.
And I hope the military. I hope the military revolts
at the voting booth and just says we're not gonna
take it.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Military Milt also forgotten from Sunday, Trump out and out
lying about disrespecting the military. Re let me finish that
for you, military re Trump out and out lying about
having disrespected the military. Here he is denying it, followed
(23:04):
by doing it on videotape in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Think of it from a practical standpoint. I'm standing there
with generals and military people in a cemetery, and I
look at them, I say, these people are suckers and losers. Now,
think of it unless you're a psycho or a crazy
person or a very stupid person who would say that anyway,
(23:31):
but who would say it to military people with military
because as president of the United States, I would say
if I made that statement, if I have generals here,
if I haven't, I would imagine that most of them
would end up in a major fistfight with the president. Okay,
And you know what I would have said, It was okay.
In that one instance, they made up a story. They
(23:52):
just out of thin air, just like a lot of
the fake stories are made up by these people because
they're among the most dishonest people in the country, the
fake news. They're dishonest people, but Frank, Frank, let.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
Me get to it.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
He hit me hero. He's not a war hero, war hero.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
He's a war high and a half years.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
He's a war hero because he was captured.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I like people that weren't captured.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
Okay, I hate to tell you.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
She was a warrior. Yeah. He'd never say something bad
about the military, except something bad about John McCain, and
except about what General Kelly said. He said, which he
then lied about. I wonder if that came up in
the remote meeting with his freaking probation officer, or maybe
maybe the freaking probation officer said, hey, is Jonathan Turley Wright?
(24:38):
Are you an elderly first time offender? Elderly first time offender. God,
there's got to be a song in that. I'm working
on it. Also, even though the once great Washington Post
(24:59):
is a wounded being lying there on the Veldt, which,
if you know Washingt is take the metro, go to
the National's Park station. It's out near there. Even though
that's true, I am obligated to take a shot at
the Washington Post because at this point it looks increasingly
like Jeff Bezos adopted the phrase democracy dies in darkness
(25:20):
as nothing more than a clever marketing slogan. And he
don't give a damn about democracy dying in darkness, and
he never did. The new Washington Post marketing slogan may
very well be well. Democracy's dead already, so at least
fascism makes me richer. The Post has profiled Russ's vote,
the ironically named Trump cultist who is behind Project twenty
(25:42):
twenty five and theocratizing America and maybe you know, having
the army shoot anti Trump civilians. Russ's vote could wind
up as Trump's hmmler or gerring, or more likely his
Albert spear. He's nuts, He's amoral, he is completely unburdened
by conscience. He waives the flag of religion and then
(26:05):
tries to put it through your thorax. If he wasn't bald,
Trump might have considered vote for vice president. I mean
vote Trump, vote perfect slogan. The Post headline in its
profile about this man who is a danger to everything
America has ever stood for quote Trump loyalist pushes post
(26:29):
constitutional vision for second term post constitutional. In other words,
we've cut to the chase, here have we, Washington Post,
And we have already let Trump terminate the constitution. So
we're post constitutional and we're already moving into shaping the dictatorship.
And instead of a headline like this man wants to
(26:51):
end your freedom and make you a slave, the Post
goes with Trump loyalist pushes post constitutional vision for a
second term, which makes me think of an article somewhere
about your body decomposing after your death and the headline
Trump loyalist pushes postlife weight loss plan. Why has American
(27:16):
journalism descended to the next of Dante's circles of hell
so quickly? You know about the British sleeves journalist the
Washington Post brought in Trump loyalist pushes post American vision
for America. But do you know about the British editor
in chief of the Wall Street Journal the one who
(27:37):
must have greenlighted that hit piece last week on the
President's age, the one that only quoted Republicans and deliberately
edited out all comments from Democrats. Daniel Lippman of Politico
has a story about her. Her name is Emma Tucker,
and the story sounds like it was written by mel
Brooks that he cut it out of the producers. Mister
(27:59):
Lippmann writes that at the Wall Street Journal party before
the twenty twenty three White House Correspondent's Dinner, Ms Tucker,
in conversation with a journal staffer and an unidentified second person, said,
and I'm quoting Politico here, that she hadn't realized that
there were two Houses of Congress. Oh my god, she
(28:24):
hadn't realized that there were two houses of Congress. Emma
Tucker's response to this was, quote, this is garbage. Well,
that's one description of it. I'd prefer to go with
mel Brooks and the producers, like I mentioned the scene
where he has the dilettant. Broadway producer Roger Debris played
(28:45):
by Christopher Hewitt, read the script and say I never
knew that the third Reich meant Germany. I mean, it's
just drenched with historical goodies like that. Wait, there's a
North Dakota also of interest here. You think all that's bad?
(29:14):
Which member of Congress? And by the way, there are
two houses of Congress. Now have you heard, thanks Obama?
Which member of Congress has indicated at a Trump rally
that they believe that electric cars run on gas? I mean,
you'd have to be pretty stupid to think that, So
(29:36):
you have only like two hundred and seventy five choices.
But I have faith in you. I think you can
figure out who said this. That's next. This is an
all new edition of Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith
Olberman still ahead of us on this all new edition
(30:18):
of Countdown. I am breaking format. One of those things
has happened in sports that makes my hair catch fire,
then turn white, then fall out, then grow back, then
turn black, then turn white again. And I want to
comment on it at length, and you may or may
not be interested in that, so I'm going to put
(30:40):
it last. So no things I promised not to tell today. Instead,
I will give you my response to a survey of
active baseball players by the website The Athletic, in which
the active players absolutely trashed the old timers, and by
old timers, they meet anybody who played before twenty ten.
(31:02):
And apart from proving that nobody thinks as highly of
today's baseball players as to today's baseball players, somebody grabbed
what is for me personally the third rail. Somebody said,
in talking about batters versus pitchers, you think Babe Ruth
ever saw a slider because they were too arrogant to
(31:25):
google it first, and find out that the slider was
in use in baseball when Babe Ruth was nine years old.
And that invokes the story of the active pitcher who
a few years ago claimed he would strike out Babe
Ruth every time he faced him. And by the way,
his earned run average at this moment is five point
seventy nine. Coming up. But first, as ever, there are
(31:50):
still more new idiots to talk about who are not
in baseball. The daily roundup of the mis grants, morons
and dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's non baseball
worst persons in the world. And yes, if they ball cares,
and I know it doesn't. Baseball's losing me the bronze worse.
Governor Kathy Hokel, alleged Democrat of New York. Hokel has
(32:15):
abruptly and it sure looks like she's done it illegally
frozen the introduction of congestion pricing in New York City
at the end of the month. This is where they
charge you for going downtown. It's worked in cities around
the world. It's increased traffic flow, increase the use of
mass transit, decreased pollution, and she stopped it just her
(32:40):
after it passed. She's being sued, she may be primaried.
There may be a push forming to remove her. Happily,
for her opponents, Kathy Hokel is just not bright. She
claimed yesterday that no, she's not attending a fundraiser for
her today in New York City. The fundraiser, which donors
are being asked to fork over five to ten thousand
(33:02):
dollars a piece, is being days after she came down
in favor of cars and traffic and pollution and sucked
a billion dollars worth of funding out of mass transit
in New York City. This fundraiser for her is being
held at the Center for Automotive Education and Training in
Queens and it's being staged by Well this is a coincidence,
(33:24):
the Greater New York Automobile Association, a group of car fanciers,
people who like to make models.
Speaker 8 (33:32):
No, it's a group of car dealers. Governor Hokal, get
the f out of my city.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
The runner up worse, sir. Every once in a while,
there's a moment or two when it seems as if
Marjorie Taylor, insurrectionist human trash Barney rubble Green might not
be as stupid as she looks. And then she reminds you, oh,
yes she is.
Speaker 4 (33:58):
And you think gas prices are high, Now just wait
until you're forced to drive an electric veha.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Exactly see what sells there? What makes that is the
exactly where she congratulates herself on her brilliance. Also, ma'am,
you have a deviated septum. If you'll get it repaired,
I'll pay for the operation. Enacling Marjorie Taylor Green thinks
electric vehicles run on gasoline. Now she may be confused.
(34:39):
I mean, it's a day ending in why she may
be confused. She might be thinking of hybrids. And I
suppose if you walked her through it very carefully and slowly,
over the course of several weeks or months, Green would
finally realize that the point of electric vehicles, why they
call them electric vehicles, is that they don't run on gasoline,
(35:01):
and they certainly would not drive up demand for or
the of gasoline. But after like three minutes of trying
to process reality the eyes of Marjorie Taylor are you
sure you haven't had multiple concussions? Green just glaze over
and she gets that hit in the face with a snowshovel. Look.
I mean this one is up there with the time
(35:23):
she demanded a national divorce because in her new country,
let's call it Moronica, you could force students to recite
the Pledge of Allegiance every day. The Pledge of Allegiance
in a divorced country, the Pledge of allegiance that includes
the line one nation indivisible. I guess division would be
(35:44):
illegal in her new country. She doesn't know what indivisible means.
The debate over what makes Marge so stupid is endless
and pointless. Just last week, she explained something on Twitter
by using a phrase that she must have heard a
not stupid person say once therein lies ojie. She thinks
it's there and law she spelled it thch e R
(36:09):
space new word e n l i E s. She
thinks there's a word and lies like that guy used
to run China Joe and lies. Oh my god, they're
and lies for all intensive purposes Marjorie. Previously, Midge has
(36:30):
warned us that Bill Gates intends to force us to
eat artificial meat grown in a quote peach tree dish.
It's two years now since her video in which she
insisted that Joe Biden would soon be unleashing his secret
police against America. You know, the gospacho. Maybe it's brain damage.
Maybe it's an IQ matching Tom Brady's uniform number or
(36:53):
Babe Ruth's uniform number. Maybe it's opioids. Maybe it's steroids.
Maybe it's hemorrhoids. Maybe it's inbreeding. But I am going
to play this part of this clip again and then
offer you a really low odds explanation that truly would
tie it all neatly together.
Speaker 4 (37:10):
You think gas prices are high, now just wait until
you're forced to drive an electric vehicle.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
So here's my theory. What is my theory? It's my theory.
My theory was born last month after scientists at Cambridge
University completed a ten year project to take some unearthed
bones from a Neanderthal woman who had died seventy five
thousand years ago and was found in the Shanadar Cave
in Kurdistan in Iraq, and using computer modeling and precise
(37:38):
calculations at a little art they reconstructed her face. They
call her shannizar Z and she's a dead ringer for
Marjorie Taylor Green. I mean a little on the facial coloring,
but with the amount of makeup marg wares, it's pretty close.
Same bulging bones under the eyebrows, the high cheek bones,
(38:00):
the prominent nose. Only the hair color is really different,
and we know how it got different. So here's my theory.
When they found shannas dar's Z Neanderthal woman from seventy
five thousand years ago, they did not find her alone.
There were two of them, and one was dead shannazar Z,
and the other one was just frozen in suspended animation.
(38:22):
And they brought her back to life and they named
her Shanadar MTG, and the Republicans promptly ran her for Congress.
And here we are with a leading GOP elected representative
insisting that electric cars run on gasoline. But our winner
the worst of worsts Politico Playbook. Politico Playbook is well
(38:47):
known as the home of typos and log rolling for
the editor's girlfriend and editors who are only there because
they've been fired by everybody else, and printing interminable lists
of anonymous political reporters who mistakenly think they are celebrities
because they were attending parties they don't know are slightly
less important than the meetings of the Kowanas Club in
(39:09):
Rapid City. But even for them, even for a political playbook,
this is a dilly. It's about North Dakota Governor Doug
the mono Brow Bergham. And how as I have suggested
here for months, Bergham is actually the clubhouse leader to
be Trump's running mate, because when Trump picked Mike Pence,
he thinks he was right and Mike Pence just failed.
(39:31):
He needs a better Mike Pence. And that's got Doug
Bergham written all over it. Anyway, here's the typo about
Bergham and Trump quote. As for looks, which are clearly
important to the former president, Trump has also told people
that Bergham looks the part and has gushed over his
thick head of head.
Speaker 8 (39:56):
Thick head of head, Doug Bergham has a thick head
of head. That's typo Politico playbook.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
At least I think it's a typo.
Speaker 8 (40:11):
Two days, worst persons.
Speaker 5 (40:16):
And no word.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
They kind of it happens. Holy crap, When I didn't like.
Speaker 5 (40:43):
This is Sports Center? Wait check that not anymore. This
is Countdown with Keith Ulberman.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
And as I said, I'm screwing with the format today
because something really pissed me off from sports and I'm
going to need a little time to talk about it,
and you may or may not care. So our number
one story on the Countdown is Sportscenters Central Tonight. Do
you think Babe Ruth ever saw a slider question mark? Annually,
(41:20):
the now New York Times owned website The Athletic does
a survey of Major League Baseball players in which they
make the mistake of asking today's baseball players opinions and
questions and insights about the game today and about the
game in the past. And one thing has been certain
for the last well I've been a baseball fan since
(41:42):
nineteen sixty seven, so since nineteen sixty seven, is that
today's baseball players know almost nothing about the past. And
I mean the twenty twenty four baseball players know nothing
about nineteen ninety four, as the nineteen ninety four players
knew nothing about nineteen seventy four, and as I presume
the nineteen twenty four players knew nothing about eighteen eight.
(42:05):
They just think they live in a vacuum every generation.
I had a conversation not long ago with a baseball
play by play man, and I asked him. Actually, I
posited to him that it seemed to me that there
were only two or three guys, maybe four, on every
team that could actually play baseball, That the rest of
(42:27):
them were hitters or pitchers who really didn't know what
they were supposed to do strategically at a given moment,
whether they should swing on a certain count or not,
what base they should throw to, where they should go
to in a rundown play, that they didn't know the
essence of baseball as it used to be taught. And
he went, there's not that many. It's probably one or two.
(42:51):
In any event, The Athletic asked baseball players many different
topics and asked them one thing in particular, what about
the criticisms of today's game by recent former Major leaguers. Hell,
you should read this article just to see how highly
today's players think of themselves and how nobody appreciates them,
(43:16):
and how they don't get the credit for playing in
the most difficult game that has ever been called baseball,
That nobody ever looks out for what they need, that
they don't get what they deserve. Despite the seven hundred
million dollar contract that show hey Otani got and the
freedom to play basically anywhere they want to from one
year to the next end coaching staffs that are now
(43:38):
who twenty twenty five guys per team trying to help you,
and all the video in the world and computers and
all the rest of that. But it all boils down
to that one quote I started with, essentially the comments
from about seventy five players or so who were willing
to criticize baseball as it used to be. And they're
not talking about nineteen sixty seven. They're talking about twenty
(44:00):
ten baseball players. These seventy five or so all had
the basic same argument. No player from the past could
exist in today's game, or almost no player from the past.
And this is one thing that has changed appreciably. Players
in the past used to think of themselves as the
culmination of a series of evolutions, that the game had
(44:22):
gotten greater, and therefore they had gotten greater, and their
physicality had gotten greater, et cetera, et cetera. It's not
like that. Reading this article, it's all about how today's
baseball players would if they put together an all star
team against yesterday's great players, they'd come to bat once
and they would never ever end the game. Because today's
(44:43):
baseball players would never make it out because they're perfect.
This is what they have been taught. And we can
talk about what this means in terms of society and
entitlement and reading your own newspaper clippings and all the
rest of that, but I'll spare that. I'm just saying
that the article will make you in raged. And unfortunately
(45:07):
it's not just baseball, every sport except probably the National
Hockey League. The players pretty much think that the guys
before them were idiots who just happened to stumble around
and set all these records and win all these championships.
But there was one quote in there about how difficult
it is to face pitching today, and the quote was,
do you think Babe Ruth ever saw a slider? And
(45:29):
the answer is, you goddamn righty saw slider. The slider
was put into use by the great Philadelphia Athletics Hall
of Fame pitcher Charles Bender, native American from Minnesota, who
debuted I believe in the year nineteen hundred and three.
It was later perfected in the twenties by another pitcher
named George Blaholder. But the slider that pitch with that
(45:52):
motion was well known in Major League baseball long before
Babe Ruth came to the major leagues in nineteen fourteen.
And any time that you hear somebody invoked Babe Ruth
and dismiss him, well, he only played against white pitching. Well,
he also only played against like one hundred different pitchers. Nominally,
(46:12):
he was facing one of the two hundred best baseball
pitchers of all time. And yes, maybe that number was limited,
and half of what should have been the two hundred
best baseball pitchers of his time were segregated out of
the game. So let's say he should have faced one
of the top four hundred pitchers every day when he
(46:33):
played in Major League baseball. Well, today, that's like a
thousand pitchers are active. At any one point. Any hitter
goes to the plate facing one of the thousand, let's
be conservative, just the healthy ones, maybe the best six
hundred active pitchers in the game, as opposed to the
four hundred or the two hundred or the one hundred
that Babe Ruth faced. But I'm getting very very far
(46:54):
into the weeds and the woods here. This is much
simpler than I'm making it out to be. Every time
somebody invokes Babe Ruth, as happened yesterday in the Athletic
back to December of twenty eighteen, when Adam Ottavino, who
is a relief pitcher who has experienced moderate success in
the major leagues for many years and is now with
the team that is the home of moderate success, the
(47:17):
New York Mets. Adam Ottavino told a podcast that if
he faced Babe Ruth, he would strike him out. Every time.
Babe Ruth would not make contact against him, he would
strike him out every time. This, I think, still to
this day, summarizes the attitude of the modern player about
(47:38):
the past in baseball, and it's also moronic. Adam Otavino
is a smart guy, well respected among his teammates, pleasant
with the media, and could not be more wrong about
this because he has not considered anything other than what
he knows of baseball, and he has projected himself back
into its history and said, look how much bigger and
(48:01):
stronger I am. Therefore, I would strike him out every
time I throw pitches he's never seen before. I cannot stop,
and since December of twenty eighteen, I have not stopped
thinking about this hypothetical theoretical transcendent somewhere in outer space
without time, matchup between Adam Adavino and Babe Ruth or
(48:23):
whoever it was the anonymous player who was quoted in
The Athletic Yesterday saying, do you think Babe Ruth ever
saw a slider? Yeah? Probably once every game. Obviously the
matchup could never happen. Babe Ruth died in nineteen forty eight.
He retired from baseball in nineteen thirty five. He was
(48:43):
born in eighteen ninety four, meaning if he came back
somehow from the dead and played today, he'd be one
hundred and thirty years old. I don't think he could
get around on Adam Ottavito's slider. I don't think he
could get around on my slider. But let's make this
increasingly fair. The point of what Adam Adavino said was,
I suppose at Otdavino's prime and at Babe Ruth's prime,
(49:06):
out of Vino thinks he would strike him out every time.
So in theory, you'd have to have this matchup somewhere.
You couldn't just pluck these two guys out of their
existences and put them in a timeless white space in
which the best Adam out of Vino, with all of
his advantages, would face the best Babe Ruth with only
the advantages of his lifetime. Of course, that would happen
(49:31):
the way he thinks it would. He would strike him
out every time, at least the first few times until
Ruth tried to adjust to him. But it wouldn't happen
that way. Even in the wildest theory of time travel
in space, you got to travel to some time. So
where do you play it? Is it a home or
a road game? For Adam out of Vino? Is it
nineteen twenty seven? Is it Babe Ruth's prime? Babe Ruth
(49:54):
as he was a little portly but surprisingly nimble, big belly,
big shoulders, unbelievably fast, hands as fast as Henry Aaron
according to those who saw them, both as fast as
any player today, and tiny little legs, unexpected speed and grace,
(50:15):
and more importantly, in nineteen twenty seven, Babe Ruth hit
sixty home runs, and no other team in the American
League hit more than fifty six home runs. No other
complete team came close to his individual performance in home
runs for the equivalent impact, how many more home runs
he hit than everybody else last year? There would have
had to have been in twenty twenty three, a major
(50:37):
league baseball player who hit himself two hundred and fifty
five home runs. That's how better than everybody else, Babe
Ruth was in nineteen twenty seven. But also, what about
the ballparks you're playing in nineteen twenty seven? Where did
he hit these? Down the left field line at Yankee Stadium,
and Ruth was a left hand hitter, was two hundred
(50:59):
and eighty one feet down the right field line. It
was two hundred and ninety five feet, tiny distances even
then on the other hand, in center field it was
four hundred and ninety feet to the bleachers in center field.
Any major league hitter who came into a ballpark in
which centerfield was four hundred and ninety feet away, they
would leave. They would go on strike. Center fields now
(51:22):
are not four hundred and ninety feet but closer to
four hundred and nine feet, And we're not even going
to talk about the power alleys and everything else. The
ballparks of nineteen twenty seven were gigantic, except if you
pulled the ball right to the foul pole. Because Yankee
Stadium two hundred and ninety five feet right down the
line there for Babe Ruth's home runs, then jutted out
(51:43):
to about three twenty almost immediately, and then gradually out
to four hundred and ninety feet in right center field
and center field. The other thing about hitting in nineteen
twenty seven, you did not get a new, fresh, clean,
easy to see baseball every pitch. Sometimes a game could
be played with less than twenty baseballs in And yes
(52:06):
it's true, as autom Altavino pointed out, Babe Ruth did
not see any of today's exotic pitchers and their exotic
movements and the pitches that they threw. No, he just
saw spit balls, shine balls, emery balls, balls that had
gouges taken out of them by ballplayers, rings, balls that
(52:26):
had been in use for several innings and were lopsided,
balls that were not stitched properly to begin with and
came apart when you hit them. The other thing that
I always think about that modern players don't think about
is Babe Ruth saw each pitcher live, and that was it.
Today's batters can study every pitch the opposing pitcher, every
(52:51):
opposing pitcher has ever thrown, ever thrown as recently as
the nineteen eighties and nineties. Tony Gwinn, my late friend
of the San Diego Padres, used to go looked at
funny by his teammates because he was studying videotape of
the pictures. What good does that do? How does that
help you guess what? They didn't have videotape of all
(53:11):
the other pictures in nineteen twenty seven. They didn't have
still pictures of most of the pictures in action in
nineteen twenty seven. You couldn't tell what another picture threw.
You had a reputation, You had your own memory. Maybe
like many players did, you wrote down what you saw
as it happened, so you'd have a fresh memory the
next time you saw the guy in Saint Louis in August,
(53:32):
when it was ninety five degrees and you were playing
at one thirty in the afternoon. Baby Ruth had no gym.
Bab Ruth did not work out. Nobody really had understood
the relationship between staying in shape and hitting home runs,
or hitting or pitching or anything else. On the other hand,
if you're playing this game in nineteen twenty seven, it
would seem that almost all the advantages the gigantic ballparks,
(53:56):
no video, no gym. That would favor Adam out of Vino,
And I'm sure it would for the first couple of
it bats. But here's something else. If you transported any
major league ball player of twenty twenty four back to
the year nineteen twenty seven, he would feel like Robinson Crusoe,
washed up on the desert island. He has no assistance
(54:18):
of any kind. A major league baseball team consisted of
twenty three, twenty four or twenty five players, the manager, and,
if you were lucky, two coaches, both of whom were
there basically to go drinking with the manager after the game.
I researched this when I was a kid. The first
book I ever published, in nineteen seventy four, when I
(54:40):
was fifteen years old, was about the major league coaches.
It was a list of major league coaches, and it
was the greatest shock of my life to that point.
In nineteen twenty seven, there were sixteen teams, and the
sixteen teams had twenty eight coaches among them. Five of
these guys were either former pitchers or catchers. There were
five pitching coaches. So Adam Ottavino, if you go back
(55:04):
to Facebook bab in nineteen twenty seven. You are on
your own. You don't have video of him either. Also,
there are no night games. Now to some pitchers, night
games and day games make no difference whatsoever. But the
point is there are no night games. And most importantly
for somebody like Ottavino, who was a very good pitcher,
(55:26):
there are no good relief pitchers. Maybe there's one or two.
Furpo Marberry of the Washington Senators would come in and
work in relief almost exclusively, but there really weren't relief pitchers.
If you were a good pitcher, you had to start,
and you had to start every fourth day. So Adam
Ottavino is not pitching an inning or two in which
he would face Babe Ruth once or twice, maybe over
(55:49):
the course of one game, and might face him again
a few weeks later, so that when he faced him
seven times in one season, yes, maybe he would strike
him out seven times. There was a picture named hub
Prewitt who managed to strike out Babe Ruth repeatedly and
got almost nobody else out. That was his whole reputation,
the man who got Ruth out. But Ottavino would not
(56:11):
have the luxury of only facing Ruth seven times, he'd
have to face him four times in a game, because
not only would they make him into a starting pitcher,
but the likelihood of him being relieved at any point
during the game is almost zero. You go out there
and throw your two hundred pitches at him, and then
we'll see you in four days again. And by the way,
you'll see the Yankees again in no more than a
month's time, because there are only seven other teams in
(56:32):
the league, and you play each other in a balanced schedule,
none of this interleague crap. So that's nineteen twenty seven.
What if you brought Babe Ruth. Do you think Babe
Ruth ever saw a slider? Yeah, he probably saw. He
saw a slider and all those spitball pitches and the
other things. And by the way, he wasn't wearing a
batting helmet for any of this, nor any armor on
(56:54):
his arms, nor any protection of any kind. So let's
bring it to twenty twenty four, and Adam Ottavino is
as he is, and Babe Ruth is the stranger arriving
in a new world. Well, the first thing that Babe
Ruth finds out is sho hey Otani signed a contract
last winter for seven hundred million dollars for ten years.
(57:15):
And even when the calculations are shown to Babe Ruth
as to what that means in nineteen twenty seven dollars,
Babe Ruth is going to say, Holy spit, and he's
going to go right to the gym and start working
out in the hopes of playing until he's forty five
years old, rather than retiring forcibly at the age of
about forty. That's the first thing he's going to see.
(57:38):
He might actually begin to take care of himself. And
if he doesn't think of that himself, he has six
hitting coaches and twelve assistant hitting coaches and all the
videotape he could ever want to look at at Adam
out of you know, And if he can't really perceive
what videotape is, there's of course a videotape coach to
show it to him. And then he goes to the
(57:59):
ballpark and says, where's the rest of it? Tiny ballparks,
centerfield to Yankee Stadium is not four hundred and ninety feet.
Center field in some ballparks is pushing three ninety nine,
not quite four hundred feet. Babe Ruth averaged at the
peak ten year stretch of his career ten triples a
(58:19):
year in smaller ballparks, just slightly smaller ballparks. By nineteen
twenty seven standards, he would have hit seventy home runs
in nineteen twenty seven, not sixty. Now, suddenly center field,
to which players regularly hit home runs, is available to him.
The only home runs hit to center field before about
(58:40):
nineteen fifty were inside the park home runs. Babe Ruth
could now take an adam out of eno pitch, a
slider or something else and put it over the freaking
center field fence in any ballpark in the major leagues.
Remember what I mentioned earlier that the equivalent of what
Ruth did compared to the rest of the league in
nineteen twenty seven would require somebody to hit two hundred
and fifty five home runs this year. He might do
(59:02):
it also in terms of longevity. In addition to all
of the athletic facilities available to him to get in
shape and stay in shape, there are trainers, multiple trainers.
There are workout rooms. There are doctors. There are team doctors.
They didn't have team doctors in nineteen twenty seven. They
didn't have padded fences in nineteen twenty seven. They didn't
(59:24):
have the designated hitter in nineteen twenty seven, where Ruth,
if he was tired or hungover or had spent the
last three days without sleeping because he was chasing girls,
could be the designated hitter and not have to worry
about playing the outfield or though if he played the
outfield he had those fences had padding on them today
(59:45):
and they did not in nineteen twenty seven, So if
he ran into the outfield fences he did on many occasions,
there are pictures of him laid out cold on the
ground with all his teammates standing around waiting for him
to come to That would never happen. And as I
mentioned before, again, what are you facing today as the
(01:00:06):
average hitter going to the plate in the average Major
League game against random pitcher number five hundred and thirty two.
Because baseball is nearly twice as big as it was
in nineteen twenty seven, there are automatically going to be
twice as many pitchers, plus their longevity and their ability
to get through a season is half of what it
(01:00:27):
was at best compared to nineteen twenty seven. There are
literally at any point in the game, six hundred or
so active pitchers rotating around from team to team sometimes
and from the majors to the minor leagues. So you
are facing any one of six hundred different pitchers, whereas
Babe Ruth went through his career facing really just the
American League pitchers, maybe just one of the best one
(01:00:49):
hundred pitchers in the world, and now one of the
best six hundred pitchers in the world. The average pitcher
he's going to face today is not as good as
the average pitcher he would have faced in nineteen twenty seven.
So here's the gist of it. I think, having watched
this game and the other games all this time, and
having remembering flashing back to a conversation I had on
(01:01:12):
ESPN two in October nineteen ninety three with my co
host Susie Calber about Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe, and
she looking at me and going, well, of course, Wayne
Gretzky's better. He's of today. All of today's athletes are
better than they were in nineteen fifty three, and now
Wayne Gretzky is dismissed because he's not as big as
the ones who play in twenty twenty four. Every generation
(01:01:35):
does this, Well, they're much better today. I don't know
that that's true. You'd really have to have Babe Ruth
face Adam Outavino to see whether or not Adam Oudavino
would strike him out or Babe Ruth would hit a
home run seven hundred and eighty five feet off Adam Outavino.
That is the point of playing the game. That is
the one thing that does not change, and the idea
(01:01:56):
that today's players dismiss their predecessors. It occurs to me
in the Baseball documentary by Ken Burns, there is a
player quoted about how they don't play it as good
as they used to in his day. His quotes are
from about eighteen seventy, and he's talking about baseball in
eighteen fifty five. The gist of this is that, as
in any generation, some sort of theoretical, magical conflict between
(01:02:21):
Adam Adavino and Babe Ruth on a field somewhere in
the sky would depend on who was better prepared, who
had better access to training, better access to information, better
access to nutrition, better access to coaching, better access to
(01:02:44):
video of the opponent. Those are ninety five percent of
the improvements from one generation to the next and whatever
is next in baseball or any other sport, when in
twenty years from now people look back and go, well, yeah,
but he was hitting off people like Adam Otnovino, and
(01:03:05):
you know, Pete Alonzo was considered a great player. Show Hey,
Otani was the only two way player. Remember those dead
days in baseball in twenty twenty four. That's the one
guarantee going forward, somebody else, sitting in some other podcast
will have these exact same complaints about Adam Ottavino the
(01:03:25):
seventh or whoever the player was who was quoted in
the Athletic as saying, do you think Babe Ruth ever
saw a slider? And someday somebody will say the equivalent
of this in some future search engine world. Did you
think about googling that before you asked that question? And
(01:03:59):
another thing about the goddamned eighteen ninety World Series and
how that and I got it next time, I've done
all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schaneil arranged,
produced and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was
on the guitars, bass and drums. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration
(01:04:21):
and keyboards. Was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including
some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Old
Woman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis
courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical and pithy musical comments
and the organ accompany meant for the commercials in the
(01:04:42):
A Block by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever,
and I work on a song for Jonathan Turley. Our
announcer was my friend Larry David, and everything else was
pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this. The
one hundred and forty eighth day until the twenty twenty
four presidential election, the two hundred and fifty third day
(01:05:03):
since convicted felon Don Trump's first attempted coup against the
democratically elected government of the United States. Use the July
eleventh sentencing hearing for an elderly first time offender, Use
the mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens
to stop him from doing it again. While we still can.
(01:05:28):
The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins is the news
warrants till then. I'm Keith Ulruman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is
(01:06:07):
a production 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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