November 18, 2024 • 69 mins
SERIES 3 EPISODE 71: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump has started down the path to purges of the military, political prosecutions and show trials. His fascists have actually leaked plans to court-martial and even seek treason charges against army leadership and even retired generals. NBC News reports: "“The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan. Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal… and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason… “They’re taking it very seriously,” the person with knowledge of the plan said."
Thus, President Biden has to proactively pardon ALL of them. In point of fact, President Biden must now assemble a list of thousands of people to pardon – in the military – in the Democratic party – in state and local governments – in election supervision - in the media – in the protest movements – in the climate movement – people in any of the fields this psychopath Trump thinks wronged him and against which he is not only plotting retribution but now actively PLANNING it.
Hegseth, already facing an unlikely confirmation due to, you know, Crusader Tats, has now been revealed to have paid off a woman after a sexual assault allegation in 2017. Trump may throw him under a bus but he's reportedly doubled down on Matt Gaetz at DOJ: “Trump wants Gaetz confirmed ‘100%’ a source told CNN. ‘He is not going to back off. He’s all in’” This figures to turn on whether or not Trump and the majority of Republican Senators who will not vote for Gaetz meet in the middle - and the middle is a Recess Appointment (and a dictatorship).
So, back to my earlier point about Pardons.
B-Block (23:30) SPECIAL COMMENT 2: There IS much to do, no matter how January 20th and the days thereafter play out. You want some practical advice? A little spiritual inspiration? St. Hubbins Day if not St. Crispin's Day? Got half an hour? Cause I have half an hour of advice.
C-Block (56:0) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Haven't done these in awhile but somebody was asking about our election night and special political coverage at MSNBC in 2004-06-08-10 and I flashed back to the continuing adventure that was Chris Matthews - particularly how he began ogling a prominent woman in the church at a presidential funeral and I was assigned to get him to stop.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
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. Now
the Trump has started down the path to purges of
(00:26):
the military, to political prosecutions, and to show trials. Now
that his fascists have actually leaked plans to court martial
and even seek treason charges against army leadership and even
retired generals, President Biden has to proactively pardon all of them.
In point, in fact, President Biden must now assemble a
(00:48):
list of thousands of people to pardon. People in the military,
in the Democratic Party, in state and local governments, in elections,
supervision in the media, in the protest movements, in the
climate movement, people in any of the fields this psycho
path Trump thinks wronged him and against which he is
(01:08):
not only plotting retribution but is now actively planning it.
Thousands of pardons, tens of thousands of pardons. They should
be as easy and as available from the Biden administration
as vaccinations, and they should be as free of stigma
in exactly the same way the vaccinations are to those
(01:30):
who understand the mortal danger that the worm eaten side
show Bob F. Kennedy Junior represents to this country. It
is a moral imperative that Joe Biden literally prioritize this
list of pardons above everything else right now, everything else
(01:53):
except perhaps his own consideration of the larger question that
Trump's desire to purge anybody from the military who isn't
personally loyal to him, and desire to purge anybody from
government who isn't personally loyal to him, and Trump's intention
to starve any city or county or state that does
(02:14):
not become personally loyal to him. Joe Biden must ask
himself if it is morally defensible to turn this country
over to a madman not just talking about destroying this
country and killing its people by astonishingly varietous means, but
one who is already starting to make this happen. Joe
(02:38):
Biden must ask if there are other actions to take
rather than hand Trump the weapons with which to institute
dictatorship and mass death. That is for the President and
his conscience and his prayers and his God to decide
(02:59):
as for the immediate crisis before us. Right now, NBC
News is reporting quote the Trump transition team is compiling
a list of senior, current and former US military officers
who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and
exploring whether they could be court martialed for their involvement.
According to a US official and a person familiar with
(03:20):
the plan, officials working on the transition are considering creating
a commission to investigate the twenty twenty one withdrawal and
whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as
serious as treason. They're taking it very seriously, the person
with knowledge of the plan said. Matt Flynn, a former
(03:43):
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counter Narcotics and Global Threats,
is helping lead the effort. The sources said. It is
being framed as a review of how the US first
got into the war in Afghanistan and how the US
ultimately withdrew. Quoting NBC News, the lawyer for this Flynn, this,
(04:05):
Flynn denies any involvement in this or in the Trump
transition team. The answer to how we got in, of course,
is that George W. Bush correctly sent troops to Afghanistan
after nine to eleven to destabilize Al Qaeda's base there,
and then he saw the chance to pretend that the
(04:25):
real culprit was Iraq, and the mission was thereafter doomed
to incompleteness. The answer to how we withdrew from Afghanistan,
of course, is that, in order to look like a
peacemaker and to win a few votes somewhere, Trump made
a nightmarishly bad deal with Taliban terrorists, having already invited
them to go to Camp David, and arranged for five
(04:47):
thousand of their worst scum to be released from captivity,
which left Afghanistan undefended in essence, and left Joe Biden
with no chance other than to get out as fast
as he could. If there should be anybody on trial
for Malfeasan's or misconduct or tree reason over the Afghanistan withdrawal,
it is Trump, And that, of course is part of
(05:09):
the point. In a dictatorship, there is not just one
man rule, but anybody but that one man blame. All
those who recognize the dictator's failures must be silenced, and
some of them must publicly take the fall for him,
no matter how many lies must be told to make
that happen. But even that is not the largest point.
(05:32):
The largest point is that these are the first notes
of the symphony of destruction that Trump intends to create.
A commission is to create a kind of permanent platform
for show trials. Show trials of the military first because
loyalty and conduct there are so easily assessed, then later
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show trials for civilians in any field. The perpetual rooting
out of supposed loyalty and treason and not failure but
sabotage has been part and parcel of every dictatorship since
ancient Rome. It was the essence of the Soviet state.
It was the backbone of Hitler's Reich. It was previewed
(06:19):
for us in the endless hearings by Jamie Comer in
the House of Representatives in the last two years. But
still further, as NBC reports, to recall former military leaders
in order to court martial them is a step beyond
that is done to smear the entirety of the non
(06:41):
Trump history of this country, to make distinctions not just
between Republicans and Democrats, and Trumpets and never Trumpers, but
between Trump and every other political and governmental figure in
at least our recent history. If the NBC report is correct,
and the Afghanistan Star Chamber would address not just the
(07:01):
withdrawal but also the decision to go in all of
a sudden, Trump's scapegoat hunters will be going after George W.
Bush and the neo cons and Liz Cheney's father, and
doing so for what might have been the one thing
they actually got right. And even beyond that, there is
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in this the opening salvo in the attempt to do
to the military what Trump has long since promised to
do to the federal government and to local police around
the country, to make them loyal to him and him alone.
I'll quote again from the NBC story. It's not clear
that Trump administration would pursue treason charges and instead could
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focus on lesser charges that highlight the officer's involvement. They
want to set an example, said the person with knowledge
of the plant. They would in fact be setting multiple
kinds of examples, not just to military personnel who might
hesitate someday to commit the illegal acts and murders Trump will,
(08:10):
no doubt order through his minions, but also an example
of how to frighten and purge and make political hay
out of anybody in any public position and eventually in
any private position in this country. This Afghanistan story is
a blueprint for governmental terror in this country starting two
(08:34):
months from Wednesday. This is why Biden must act immediately
pardon anybody who will accept one blanket, blanket pardons for
all acts. I want so many pardons that they have
to open up the government printing office twenty four to seven.
I want them so commonplace that each of my dogs
(08:55):
gets one, and the onus is erased by the sheer
number of pardon recipients. And yes, the president needs to
pardon everybody in his own face family, and in Bill
Clinton's family, and Barack Obama's family, and Kamala Harris's family,
and god knows how many other loyal families. Incidentally, it
(09:18):
is not a coincidence that this obscure, greasy scumbag heg Seth,
whom Trump wants as Secretary of Defense, wrote a book
blaming Pentagon leadership for the heartrending Afghanistan withdrawal. Heg Seth is,
as I record, this still Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense,
(09:38):
but it certainly looks like he is the first of
the team of trifles that Trump would throw under the bus.
The Washington Post reports that Hegseth, quoting them, paid a
woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of
a non disclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter
was consensual. According to a statement from his lawyer's Saturday
(10:00):
and other documents obtained by The Washington Post, heg Seth
agreed to pay an undisco closed amount to the woman
because he feared that revelation of the matter quote would
result in his immediate termination from Fox, where he worked
as a host, the statement said. The statement came after
a detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team
this week by a woman who said she is a
(10:21):
friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which
was obtained by The Post, alleged he raped the then
thirty year old Conservative Group staffer in his room after
drinking at a hotel bar. Unquote. This all was said
to transpire in twenty seventeen. This Hegseth has been on
(10:41):
the ropes since Trump leaked his name, not the least
for this series of tattoos, generously described by Vice President
elect Vance as quote a Christian motto tattooed on his
arm less generously described as part of a series of
tats including symbols used by the Christian crusaders of the
Middle Ages and more recently and more dangerously by the
(11:03):
Proud Boys and the Three percenters. The tattoos on heg
Seth were so alarming he was flagged as an internal
risk by a fellow service member and left the service
as a result. Heg Seth and his fellow Cockroach Vance,
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whose entire understanding of the works and words of Jesus
seems to be some garbled conclusion that you can get
very popular if you seem to have been martyred, exchanged
social media posts in which they dismissed the reporting of
that little white supremacist convert or kill everybody in the
Middle East issue as quote anti Christian bigotry in the
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media unquote. Hegseth then added exactly the kind of agenda
setting statement you would expect from an incoming head of
the Pentagon quote they can target me. I don't give
a damn, but this type of targeting of Christians, Conservatives, patriots,
and everyday Americans will stop on day one at Djt's
DoD which you could dismiss as typical q Andon lunacy,
(12:12):
except for the fact that the man who wrote that
may actually yet wind up in control of the largest
military force in the world, along with a remit from
the man who appointed him to use that force. Against
the citizens of the United States, like maybe when the
public were to protest treason show trials and presumably treason
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show executions of generals who were making the best out
of Trump's butchering of our exit from Afghanistan. Heg Seth
(13:13):
may meet his bus, a bus named Crusade. Not because
he's an unqualified lunatic who's inked up like a fanboy
of the Spanish Inquisition, but because it is human nature
to think, well, we didn't stop Gates, the least we
got rid of heg Seth. As if there weren't another
fifty heg seths lined up behind the original. I mean,
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you could even give the new one the same tattoos
wouldn't take more than a few days. Quote Trump wants
Gates confirmed one hundred percent. A source told CNN he
is not going to back off. He's all in, reads
the money. Quote from a CNN report which has Jamie
Gangel's name and sources all over it, quoting again, he
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views Gates as the most important member of the cabinet.
He considers the nomination of the former Florida congressman an
urgent priority for the incoming GOP mind. Already in the Senate,
it's the lady you or the tiger here. I think
you notice the word used there was confirmed. Trump wants
Gates confirmed one hundred percent. Trump has always been so slipshod,
(14:21):
so inherently confused by human language that confirmed by the
Senate and confirmed as a recess appointment could in fact
mean the same thing to him, depending on the hour
of the day and the day of the week. He
may or may not still care that there's a difference
between those things. But as I said last week, Gates
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is Trump's personal kind of favorite immoral cockroach, and yet
he still means much more to him. Symbolically, he is
Caligula's apocryphal horse appointment. Trump wants Gates to use the
DOJ as a loaded gun against anybody Trump doesn't like.
He doesn't care gives him the gun. But Trump's ego
(15:06):
also demands that the Republican senators he views as his
slaves stand up and applaud what he's doing. In short,
Gates is and nobody has better embodied this. Gates is
the living embodiment of Trump saying I will defecate, you
will eat it. So there is your tiger right now.
(15:28):
It is clear from all reporting a majority of Republican
Senators would not vote to confirm Matt Gates if there's
a vote, if there's a hearing. Trump's utter insecurity can
only be assuaged by a hearing and a vote. Does
he continue to demand it? If he demands it, he
(15:48):
may kill his dictatorship before it even starts. If he
sublimates his desire and is satisfied the course of least
resistance for these more advanced insects in the Senate Republican
Caucus think still cockroaches, but in suits and ties. Their
course of least resistance is clear, letting the recess appointment happen,
(16:13):
and then just pretending, as they have pretended for eight years,
that Trump is not Hitler. I will echo what David French,
of all people wrote in The New York Times. America
has twice elected Trump, the outsider, the bull in the
china shop, the chaos agent, but he has stood for
office only once as the actual guy in charge, the
(16:37):
buck stops here guy, and America rejected him and humiliated him.
In the long term, this could be a good augur
The United States may simply get fed up with Trump
failing at everything, or it could hasten his full implementation
of dictatorship, in which he never makes that mistake again.
(16:59):
He never makes the mistake of letting America again have
anything to say about who runs America, in which case
I refer you back to my opening remark. Joe Biden
must immediately pardon everybody he can think of, just in
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case this weekend was not worrisome enough those Trump will
not court martial, nor have Gates prosecute, nor have hag
Seth shoot. He will kill by accelerating the climate catastrophe.
His new energy secretary designate is not just a fossil
fuels prostitute. He's a fracking prostitute. Liberty energies Doug Wright.
(17:47):
Liberty from breathing, I believe is their motto. Doug writes,
tombstone someday will read there is no climate crisis and
we're not in the midst of an energy transition either,
which he said on tape. It will read that until
that tombstone is submerged under a new ocean or burned
(18:07):
to a cinder by a five hundred thousand acre wildfire.
There are two more new nightmares to recount. Trump wants
his personal attorney John Sower as Solicitor General. Sour is
the one who argued before the Supreme Court for presidential immunity.
You know, the lawyer who said that, yes, the president
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would be immune from criminal prosecution even if he had
directed the military to assassinate a political rival just by coincidence.
A reminder here to President Biden at the Supreme Court
agreed with the Solicitor General designate about that bang bang.
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And this final reminder from Elon Musk, one of Twitter's
Nazi tech bros, wrote, Trump received a clear mandate. He's
going to win by one and a half percent. Trump
received a clear mandate from the people to assemble an
extinction level event administration with respect to spending, bureaucracy, and
(19:10):
inefficiency in the federal government, which Musk retweeted to his
decreasingly populated ex echo chamber, and Musk added one word
quote true extinction level event administration. This makes me remind
you of two of my earlier assertions here today, One
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that it is now a matter for Joe Biden and
his maker to decide if turning the government over to people,
now boasting that they are beginning the process of destroying
that government, and destroying all of this nation's freedoms, and
him Biden and eventually you and me, whether or not
that really is the lesser of any number of evils,
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That's one reminder. The other one is a reminder of
this Keteman is a hell of a drug. Also of interest,
here in an all new edition of Countdown. I've been
waiting for the right moment. I don't know if it's now,
but if it isn't, it'll be soon. So let's go
(20:17):
how to proactively defend this country, this democracy, and yourself.
As Trump in night falls, as the big fat guy
blots out the sun, Have you got half an hour?
Because I have a half an hour's worth of instructions.
That's next. This is Countdown. Nearly eight years ago, I
(20:45):
was asked to give the keynote speech to the first
fundraiser for a new group called Democracy Matters, created by
the people who did Media Matters and other organizations that
ended in Matters, which had vowed to throw up every
barricade and every speed bump and every sliver of resistance
possible to the Trump craypocracy that would take power the
(21:11):
next day. I was preceded by the former governor of
a Midwestern state who actually thought that Trump had won
because we had all neglected the auto workers. This governor
really bought into the this is about economic anxiety and
economic anxiety alone. Also speaking before me a local Florida
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mayor who somehow had concluded that the lesson of the
election of Trump was we needed more non politicians running
for office and doing retail politics, knocking on doors the
way he had got an elected mayor of a city
that had ten thousand people in it, and I thought,
my god, they have had no clue as to what happened,
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and they, more importantly have no clue as to what
is going to happen. The man who asked me to
give this speech was David Brock, and he said, give
me one of your resistance videos, only in person. I
want Fire and Brimstone. And I said, well, happily I
happened to be the East Coast distributor of that. I
(22:14):
read the speech again a couple of months ago, and
I find so little of it wouldn't fit exactly today
except for the dates that I think, in offering it
to you again, the number of words I've had to
alter in this rereading is less than five. I haven't
even changed the dates. I have cut out the opening
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reference to crickets, but it's true. This was given outside
in the garden of a Fort Lauderdale hotel at night,
and when you are at the podium outside in Florida
at night in January and you pause, you can literally
hear crickets. As I gave this speech, there was almost
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no reaction. I later found out there was no reaction
because everybody there was trying to convince themselves that it
was about retail politics or ignoring the auto workers, and
this was the first person they had heard who actually
said to them, no, the building is on fire. It
is not a false alarm. So there were crickets throughout this,
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but not after it. In any event, I stand by
every word of this speech. Only now I would suggest
that what I will reread to you is nothing more
than the starting point the keynote speech to Democracy Matters,
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, January nineteenth, twenty seventeen. It's an honor
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to be here. It's an honor to see my old
friends and to meet many new ones. And now that
my affable remarks are over, let me get down to
the raw meat. Let me begin with the worst case scenario,
or one of them. In any event, imagine it is
not now January nineteenth, twenty seventeen, but instead it's January nineteenth,
twenty eighteen. You and I are here in these same circumstances,
(24:07):
right here, and I repeat to you then what I
am going to say to you now, and as I finish,
or earlier, or even as I begin, I am arrested,
or I am detained, or I am put on a
watch list somewhere, or I am audited, or I am
denounced by someone somewhere, or I am who knows what
(24:31):
happens to me one year, And that is just an estimate.
Your punishment may vary. It could be two years from now,
It could be two months from now, It could be
tomorrow afternoon after the inauguration. And of course, if and
when it happens, it will not be me alone for
the act of listening to me. You could also be
(24:51):
arrested or detained or who knows what I see some
concern on some faces political science fiction hyperbole a paranoid,
ustopian view of January nineteenth, twenty eighteen, A work of fiction.
If one year ago tonight we had been here on
(25:13):
January nineteen, twenty sixteen, And I had told you that
in one year's time, a deranged, infantile, imbecilic, paranoid, sexist, racist, militaristic, fascist, perverted, vulgar, stupid,
paper thin skinned man baby would not merely be nominated
(25:33):
for president by a major political party in this country,
but would swamp all his rivals, including the brother and
son of one former president. And if I then told
you that after unleashing all that is worst in America,
he would be able to conjure the perfect electoral storm
inside the electoral college, storm to defeat in the election
(25:57):
the wife of another president, a woman who would get
two million, nine hundred thousand more popular votes than he did.
And I told you further that in one year's time,
all we would be left asking here was not whether
or not the Russians had tampered with our sacred election,
but how much they had tampered with it. Would you
have called that political science fiction? Because I would have.
(26:21):
And I like to think I'm smarter than I have
turned out to have been on this, So it is important.
It's not happy, but it's important to remember that we
need to not assume the nightmare ends in some way.
When Donald John Trump puts his hand on the Bible
tomorrow and John Robert says, do you solemnly swear that
(26:42):
you will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the
United States, And, presuming the Bible does not leap from
his hand or spontaneously combust, Trump replies to this call
of our history and our democracy by answering, whatever, this
is not the last scene of the Manchurian candidate, nor
(27:03):
the last scene of seven days in May, nor the
last scene of it can't happen here. There are countless
possible nightmare scenarios ahead of all of us. We have
seen some of them before, the last time we let
the antiquated math of the Founders elect a Republican president
(27:23):
in defiance of the will of the people. We also
have seen a terrorist act and flames and collapses and
ashes and pyres, and the immediate exploitation of that act
by Republicans who demanded that what we should do was
what they called patriotic bipartisanship, which was in fact monopartisanship,
(27:45):
in which they were to make all the decisions, and
our role was to acquiesce to them, or to be
branded disloyal. We know what they will do if that
opportunity presents itself again. And we know from a year
of his lies and calumnies and gas lighting and or
well grade perversions of light into dark and fiction into fact,
(28:06):
that they are all now practiced and prepared and ready
to create an opportunity if none presents itself, a phony
threat that requires a curtailment of liberties, some plot he
and he alone could stop. And we must be prepared
to call such a stunt exactly what it is, and
(28:28):
to be patriots and to wrap ourselves in the flag
that we love and shout from the hills. Why what
has happened to this country two months from now, six
months from now, two years from now. Why that has
happened was because there is a Donald John Trump. And
(28:48):
we know that this time they have tilted the playing
field against us in advance in these areas. They have
spent eight years delegitimizing a president so that we might
look foolish delegitimizing an actual, illegitimate president. They have spent
the length of a campaign refusing to promise to recognize
a defeat on the premise that it could only have
(29:10):
been obtained by chicanery and dishonesty, so that we might
look foolish, refusing to honor a defeat that was actually
obtained by actual chicanery and dishonesty. They have month after
month insisting the election, the media, the opinion polls, now,
the polls about the transition, that these are rigged and fixed,
so that we might look foolish, insisting that an election,
(29:32):
the media, the opinion polls are actually rigged and fixed.
And we know that now we will and must play
by rules that sicken us, against which our souls cry out,
But we must our moral force, our moral high ground,
our patriotic self defense is simple. We did not seek
(29:56):
any of these rules. We did not seek this battle.
We did not seek this treachery. The rules and the
battle and the treachery are Trump's. We will fight him
on his terms, and we will defeat him, and we
will restore democracy, and we will defeat Trump's Russian masters.
(30:23):
Some of us have been warning since the beginning of
the presidential campaign that Trump's connection and the connection of
those around him to a dictator who has had the
foresight to replace expensive and very complicated human war with
the far more efficient cyber war invasioned by remote control.
We have noted that Trump's connection was not mere admiration
(30:45):
nor the perverted envy of a sick American monster gazing
at a sick Russian monster. And we were right. The
Russians did this. All we need to learn, and we
will learn it, is how much they did, how many
acts of war they directed against this country, how much
they had on Trump, how much they expecked him to deliver.
(31:05):
How many of the mainstream Republicans will remain loyal not
to the Constitution of the United States, but to Vladimir
God damned Putin. I wish to quote three men, and
only three men tonight, Sidney A. Chayefsky, John Lewis, and
(31:27):
first of these three Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill speaking after
what was in his time in his country, in his context,
his Trump election. We know it in history as Munich
and from the wilderness of his parliament, with a coalition
government cheering itself deafeningly for having averted war, with the
(31:50):
formal leadership of this nation shunning him and marginalizing him
and giggling at him, say nothing of his nation shunning
him and marginalizing him and giggling at him. When everybody
roared how well they had done, Churchill began in all
to whisper. The people should know that we have sustained
(32:12):
a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will
travel far with us along our road. They should know
that we have passed an awful milestone in our history.
And here I will briefly update Churchill's words. If I
could make that offense, when the whole equilibrium of the
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free world has been deranged, and that the terrible words
have for the time being been pronounced against the American democracy,
thou Art weighed in the balance and found wanting. And
don't suppose Churchill said that this is the end. This
(32:56):
is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only
the first sip, the first fore taste of a bitter cup,
which we will be proffered to us year by year,
unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor,
we arise again and take our stand for freedom as
(33:20):
in the olden time, Churchill, Tonight, in our country, which
we all love in words and in ways that we
cannot express, tonight is the end of the olden time.
In the comparison to what Churchill said in nineteen thirty eight,
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Tonight is the night before disaster. Tonight is the night
that we will look back at with some longing and
some nostalgia. Tonight is the night to which the whole
of our beings, and all of our priorities, and all
of our efforts must now be focused on getting our
country back to democracy as we have known it. With
(34:03):
the rules by which we have played ends at noon.
The fight. Our fight begins one second later, and it begins,
as you will hear at this conference this weekend, on
a series of fronts. The fight can begin in the media.
(34:27):
You everybody here can confront anybody, reporter, anchor, spokesman, shill,
anybody who tries to publicly characterize all this as just
some sort of political swing, as if it was not
the seizure of power by the worst possible person to
be found to serve as president, as if that person
had not appointed the worst possible candidate to run each agency,
(34:49):
As if Betsy de Vos was just some sort of
an alternative to traditional education. Once she really is an
alternative to traditional education, in the same way stupidity is
an alternative to traditional education. This weekend we will will
show you ways to make this clear to the media,
and it will introduce you to people whose job it
will be to shine a constant daily light on every
(35:13):
broken promise, every shady nominee, every awful policy, and everything
you can do to help directly. The fight can also
begin in the courts. Trump will come as close to
privatizing the presidency as anybody in our history before sunset tomorrow,
(35:33):
and whether he believes it or not, much of what
he will try to do is actually illegal, and there
are still laws. And this weekend will show you ways
to pursue him and to have at the head of
this fight a cliche Justice with her shining sword. Or
(35:55):
you can look at all this more practically. Trump is
coming for your money. You might as well spend some
of it to prevent him from taking all of your money.
And this fight certainly begins with a state of mind.
More than nine years ago, I ran into John Kerry
in line to pick up World Series tickets at Fenway
Park in Boston, and as we came past each other
(36:17):
in the line, he congratulated me and he said thanks
to me, and I said, you're welcome for what By
the way, he said, it was you who decided to
run headfirst into the brick wall of the Bush administration.
You said, this terror color code system was uncomfortably in
sync with Bush's political needs. And then you said, I
think they may be doing this deliberately, and just enough
(36:42):
of that wall fell down and the rest of us
could storm through and start talking about it. And that's
what turned around the two thousand and six midterms. And
I said, ah, I doubt it, but okay, I'll defer
to you on it, Senator. So never think, no matter
what has happened in the last few months, that you
individually don't matter, or that an opportunity for you to
(37:05):
prevail over this will not arise, or that your state
of mind does not matter, or that even an act
of symbolism by you does not matter. And to that point,
John Lewis, I will contend that something he did on
January thirteenth, twenty seventeen was just as important, or nearly so,
(37:27):
and certainly just as dangerous and will in the end
prove just as saving and redemptive as was his agony
on the Edmund Pettis Bridge. As you know, Congressman Lewis
was asked if he planned to try to forge a
relationship with Trump, and he said, I believe in forgiveness.
(37:47):
I believe in trying to work with people. It's going
to be hard, it's going to be very difficult. I
don't see the president elect as a legitimate president. I
think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected,
and they helped roy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. I
don't plan to attend the inauguration. You cannot be at
(38:10):
home with something that you feel is wrong. The questioner
was stunned. That's going to send a big message, said
my ex friend Chuck Todd, a message to a lot
of people in this country that you don't believe he's
a legitimate president. And John Lewis, as always, would not
(38:32):
back down, would not equivocate, would not protect himself. I
think it was a conspiracy on the part of the
Russians and others to help him get elected. That's not right,
that's not fair, that's not the open democratic process. And
John Lewis in thirty seconds, moved legitimacy center stage. In
(38:53):
the week since, he said that more than sixty elected
Democrats followed him. It should have been all of them.
John Lewis leads us yet again, And there is the
organizing principle of resistance. It is simple, as hard as
it may be to believe and to put into proper
historical contexts. And just because none of us have seen
(39:15):
it before does not mean it cannot be true. It
is simple. This is not a legitimate president. This was
a conspiracy involving, to great or small degree, another country.
This is not the open democratic process. And John Lewis
said it perfectly. You cannot be at home with something
(39:38):
that you feel is wrong. Every day we bring up Russia.
Every day we shout Russia. Every day we scream Russia.
Never do we speak this man's name without invoking what
(40:00):
Churchill called the defeat without a war. Never do we
criticize or discuss or analyze his actions or those of
his White House filled with the crew of a pirate ship,
without reminding everyone that the Russians put him there, and
that the Republicans who enable him to stay there are
passively collaborating with a foreign enemy of the United States
(40:21):
of America. At the other end of the extreme in
terms of simplicity versus complexity, never ever do we refer
to Donald Trump as president he is Trump. Certainly that
is sufficient and accurate, and it is also easier for
when it is finally time for us to erase his
(40:44):
name from American history. For now, it is our task
to erase what is left of his legitimacy. I don't
see the president elect as a legitimate president. John Lewis said,
you cannot be at home with something you feel is wrong.
(41:06):
Wise words stand the test of time and the test
of struggle, And these words from John Lewis R. Wise,
this weekend will be devoted to many means, practical and
philosophical with which we can fight this nightmare on the
terms the Republicans and their coalition partners, the American fascists
(41:29):
and the neo Nazis have chosen, and to consider the
first of the Republican hammers, which which we can grab
from their hands, and which we can then use to
chase them to hell. This weekend will be devoted to
many means, practical and philosophical, with which we can resist Trump,
reproach Trump, and ultimately repeal and replace Trump. Already we
(41:55):
see the outlines of this. The boycott against the Bright
part advertisers was a spectacular success. It can be easily repeated,
and it's fun for the entire family. There are other
media inroads to make. As I mentioned, my GQ series
crossed one hundred million views a network. I don't know
(42:19):
if this is a pipe dream of mine that is
largely liberal in its orientation. That I could speak to
you from every night would be a nice thing to have,
But I don't know if we could ever see that.
But why does it sound so vaguely familiar? But practically again,
with or without networks, we now know that we are
under no obligation to be nice or cooperative or vs
(42:45):
or bipartisan. That we can fight just as dirty and
just as viciously, and we will beat them at their
own game, because, as I have observed many times in
my commentaries, democracy has survived not so much through the
efforts of those who would protect it as it has
survived because of the stupidity of those who would destroy it.
And this time side which would destroy it includes Rudy Giuliani.
(43:10):
We know the twenty eighteen midterms must be fought on
a wedge issue. You Congressman Roora Bacher, You Congressman Chafits,
You Congressman Ryan, do you believe in democracy, or do
you support Russia and General Lisimo Francisco Trump. You can
(43:30):
tone that down as the circumstances warrant district by district
as you please. We also know those midterms are of
an importance that cannot be overstated, because while the Republicans
may realize soon or late, maybe by this time tomorrow,
that they themselves might have to impeach Trump or use,
(43:51):
more likely the twenty fifth Amendment on him because he's crazy,
we must take no chances. We must have a democratic
Congress to impeach him two years from tonight. And we
know that in the interim we must adopt the fighting
style of Muhammad Ali. Yes they will hit us, Yes
it will hurt. Yes it has already begun to hurt.
(44:14):
But each time they come in to land a blow,
we hit them back. As Richard Pryor phrased it, voicing
Ali's inner dialogue during a fight, Boom, there you go.
You take that with you, And we know that, yes,
(44:35):
that means that Trump, the man baby, the stay puffed
marshmallow man whose psychosis can be inflamed by trolling him
on Twitter, must hear the words and phrases weak soft
lost the popular vote twice no mandate, Russia putin assange, disloyal,
treachery video tape. He must hear these words and phrases
(44:59):
every time he turns around, and we know that, yes,
that means we shall actually have to learn from what
we watched him and them due to Barack Obama. So
never again should Trump or this Russian operative guy of his,
Michael Flynn, or the native of the country of Exxon,
(45:19):
mister Tillerson, or Kelly Ann Khan Job or any of them.
Never again will they get to speak in public without
somebody rising and yelling, not necessarily rudely to interrupt them,
although you can do that if you want, but somebody
rising somewhere when they say these things and responding with
every fiber in their being before, during, or after they speak,
(45:41):
and responding by shouting, you lie. And yes, we know
that nothing has ever changed for the good in the
history of man without men and women rising up and saying,
whether they whisper it or yell it, but by starting
by saying this is wrong. However, behind all this, behind
(46:05):
every strategy, behind every plan made this weekend, behind everything
we can do and everything we must do to restore
our bloodied democracy. There must be one emotion with which
our side of the political pendulum is seldom associated. This
emotion must now, in some ways become our animating principle,
(46:27):
and about that animating principle, and penultimately, in my remarks,
having already quoted Churchill and Lewis, I want to now
quote again, with revisions formissible, I hope Sidney Chaiefsky. Who
the hell is Sidney Chaiefsky. You may know him by
his nickname Patty, or you may know the name of
(46:50):
a character he wrote for the movie Network A mister Beeal,
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody
knows things are bad. It's a coupe detas. Everybody's out
of home or scared of losing their freedom. Foreign governments
by influence at the White House. Businesses are terrified of
a Twitter account. Shopkeepers keep a clan hood under the counter.
(47:14):
White supremacists are running wild in the street, and there's
nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and
there's no end to it. We know Trump is unfit
to pass a sanity test, and his enablers are unfit
to lead. And we sit watching our TVs while some
local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen attacks
on Obamacare and sixty three racist bills, as if that's
the way it's supposed to be. We all know things
(47:36):
are bad. Worse than bad, they're crazy. It's like everything
everywhere has gone crazy. So we don't go out anymore.
We sit in the house and slowly the world we're
living in is getting smaller. And always say is please
at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let
me have my steady income and my sanctuary cities and
my warm Obama memories, and I won't say anything, Just
leave us alone. Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
(47:59):
I want you to get mad. I want you to protest.
I want you to write. I want you to call
a Republican congressman, because we all know exactly what you
should say to him. I know what to do about
the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the
corporate graft in the street. And I know that first
you've got to get mad. You've got to say I'm
(48:21):
an American citizen, goddamn it, my democracy has value. So
the rest of it, the part about going to the
window opening, it's sticking your head out and yelling the
rest of it, you know, but to keep you motivated,
and to keep you mad, and to keep you unwilling
(48:43):
to take it anymore. As Howard Beale said, let me
close by noting one overarching fact that has occasionally gotten
lost since November eighth, twenty sixteen, And that is the
essence of everything, to my mind, Even with this nightmare
that comes at sunrise, even with the temporary end of
(49:04):
much of our democratic experience in this country, even with
a gold dollar sign spray painted on every American flag
and spit on the grave of every American patriot, even
with the confluence of Komi and the Russians and the
lies and the greatest grifter in the history of this country,
Even with the worst possible outcome that all of that
(49:24):
could produce, even with the greatest possible grief, no matter
what we have to face, no matter what we have
to do, no matter how long the trip back is
from tomorrow, remember and take strength from and remind all
those who forgets, and remind all those who deny, and
remind all those who lie. Remember one thing, we are
(49:46):
the majority. January nineteenth, twenty seventeen. After that, there was
silence seemed like it went on for quite a while.
Apparently not. I've heard a recording of this speech. It
was only two or three seconds. And then there was
(50:08):
an anguished roar, and then I must immodestly note there
was cheers and applause. Wasn't a big crowd. Standing ovation
is a generous term, but whatever it was, it helped.
We fought and fought, and we won the midterms, and
(50:31):
we won in twenty twenty, and we minimalized the damage
in twenty twenty two, and somewhere along the line we
assumed he would go away. So now today anyway, we
are exhausted. We have been defeated, although every day that
defeat gets a little smaller, doesn't it, statistically? And from
(50:55):
somewhere we must summon the energy of twenty eighteen and
twenty twenty and twenty twenty two. And when we defeat
them this time, we must not make a mistake. We
must destroy them because I'm not going to leave you alone.
(51:20):
I want you to get mad. So I haven't done
one of these since the election because there hasn't been
a lot to laugh about, so there's probably a need
to laugh about something. And thus we returned to the
(51:43):
old familiar topic things I promised not to tell. And
I was speaking a couple of days ago about the
coverage of the two thousand and eight presidential election. You
remember two thousand and eight, ancient history, back when there
was an American democracy, back when there was hopey, changey things,
(52:03):
as opposed to I hope you change into something other
than the president of the United States. I was talking
about two thousand and eight and was asked a series
of questions about our coverage at MSNBC, and the person
asking me questions had yet to mention the most significant
(52:25):
roadblock to getting things done, to getting that broadcast and
the other broadcasts that we did politically at MSNBC all
those years ago off the ground and then again safely
on the ground when it was all done. The assets
we had were extraordinary. Through most of the primary campaign
(52:46):
that year, and through all of two thousand and six
in the midterms, we'd had Tim Russert, who would come
on and after the network coverage was completely over, would
just sit there with us for another hour on the air.
What a pleasure that was. And then we'd go out
in the hallway and talk about baseball. The good part
of it, plus dozens of people and that then knew
(53:06):
and sincere Rachel Matdow, other people who really knew what
they were talking about and were trying to make a
point and make an inroad in what was then all
conservative corporate media, even at NBC. But the person had
not asked me one question about the major impediment, and
(53:27):
the major impediment was my co anchor for almost all
of this was Chris Efing Matthews. Over the years, I
have made allusions to Chris Matthews and just how rare
it was when he was actually in the same plane
of existence as the rest of us in the universe.
(53:50):
And I know Chris never heard me say any of
these things, because Chris never listened. If Chris listened, Chris
would probably still be on the air every night with
a nightly show on MSNBC. There's a Dorian Gray picture
of him somewhere because he hasn't changed in appearance since
the late nineteen nineties, even though he's now well you
know how old he is. He's two hundred and six.
(54:11):
The story I want to tell about Matthews, though, that
I think symbolizes and summarizes the entirety of my experience
with him, which began in two thousand and three. I
was on the set with him when he discussed the
fact that this was George Bush's day and mission accomplished
was not an exaggeration. And look at how well he
(54:32):
fits in that flight man's uniform, and he was talking
about how he looked good in the pants. That was
the beginning of it. And I said, don't you think
there's something about bringing up the whole flying experience and
the Texas Air National Guard and that whole question. You
think that's a bad idea or declaring mission accomplished while
(54:52):
American servicemen's lives are still at risk in Iraq and
will be no. No, this is his day, This is
his day. Chris can always point to being right about
any issue that ever came a cross his desk, because
he took every possible point of view on every possible issue.
He was anti Bush, pro Bush, anti Trump, pro Trump.
(55:15):
He was everything at all times. And the way you
do that is the way Trump does it. You just
don't remember what you said last time, You don't think
it's relevant, you don't think that anybody else is going
to remember it. There's a lot of similarity. There's a
lot of overlap in the ven diagrams of Chris Matthews
and Donald Trump. But I'm diverging. I promised you the
(55:37):
Chris Matthews story I could have before I sat down
in front of the microphone gone and looked this up
to get the exact date. I'm sure it was two
thousand and six or two thousand and seven, doesn't matter much.
It was cold, it was the winter. It was deep
in the winter, probably January or February. And I had
traveled to Washington on short notice because they wanted me
(56:01):
to co anchor with Matthews. The the memorial coverage of
the funerals, two of them a former president Gerald R. Ford.
Gerald Ford ultimately is down there with what Harrison and
a couple of other really short term presidents like Chester
(56:23):
Allen Arthur who just didn't make a huge impact except
for in his case one event the pardoning of Nixon.
Really didn't do much as president of the United States
and yet president of the United States state funeral. Plus
they were also going to give him a second funeral
the next day in Michigan, back in his home state
(56:48):
Grand Rapids, if I remember correctly. So we were there
for two days, me and Matthews all day doing the
state funeral one day, and then the next day the
funeral in Michigan. The state funeral was just a typical
day with Chris Matthews. I would say something and he
would then repeat it as if he had heard it
in his own head rather than coming out of my mouth.
(57:11):
Chris heard things that were said, he just never heard
who had said them. So he tended to repeat a
lot of the things I had just mentioned, and he
would jump in on interviews that he was not supposed
to be a part of, and all the rest of
the usual nonsense. He would read things on the teleprompter
that said Keith. He would read everything except the word Keith,
(57:34):
the usual stuff. So that was a good day. The
next day, when we moved to Michigan, that was not
quite as good a day. The Michigan part of the
two days of the burial, Gerald Ford was, well, I'll
make the joke now that I made off set then
and off air then, which was took two days to
(57:55):
bury him. What he wouldn't stop moving. The second day
was conducted out of a Protestant church in Grand Rapids.
If I remember correctly, that had an overhead window. And
I forget the technical terms. Although my dad was an architect,
I don't think he did a lot of churches. But
there was an overhead length of the church glass ceiling,
(58:21):
and it provided extraordinarily bright and mood altering light. And
on that day, in the middle of winter, at the
middle of the day, the light came in at such
an angle that it really did look kind of otherworldly,
if not heavenly. And so as all the leading Michigan
(58:43):
politicos and many of the national politicos who had traveled
to Michigan to attend both halves of the doubleheader of
the burial of Gerald Ford, as they filed in, and
to his credit, Chris Matthews knew every one of them
by sight, even if they were on the monitor in
front of us half an inch tall. He knew that
(59:04):
that was the dog catcher from Grand Rapids, Michigan from
nineteen thirty eight who convinced football star Gerald Ford to
go into politics and not football. He knew every one
of them. He knew the former mayor, He knew the
Attorney General of Michigan seventeen attorneys General Wigo. And that
was great. That was why when they once gave me
(59:26):
the opportunity in two thousand and eight, I think it
was to go solo and leave Matthews out. I said, no, See,
he's too valuable for stuff like that. You couldn't possibly
get a researcher to give me that information. It would
not be genuine and it would not be timely. Chris
Matthews knows off the top of his head who that is.
(59:48):
He has no idea why he's important. He has no
idea whether he has served democracy or undermined it. But
he knows who the hell that guy is. Why that's
Milton j. Erseg the twenty third still Solicitor General of
Michigan one hundred and six. So, now, when the former governor,
(01:00:12):
then the governor of Michigan came into this church at
high noon with light coming in above her, the great
former governor of Michigan came in, he knew exactly obviously
who she was. We all knew who she was. She
(01:00:32):
was Jennifer Granholm. Jennifer Granholm, whose public career began as
the woman contestant on an episode of the Dating Game.
Jennifer Granholm was then on the Dating Game in the seventies.
Was in two thousand and six seven at the funerals
of Gerald R. Ford. Is today a most attractive woman, fetching, handsome, beautiful,
(01:01:01):
whichever word you would like to use that is both
complimentary and yet not sexist. Well, on that day she
appeared in a very formal kind of mourning hat and
a black dress, and the light shining from above her
was perfect, and she hit a perfect hair day. All
(01:01:22):
the things that could combine to render one essential element
to this story. He wasn't wrong. Matthews was reeling off
the names of these other people. And there's the front
row in which the former deputy assistant dogcatcher of Kalamazoos.
(01:01:42):
And then he saw Jennifer Granholm walk in, and he said,
and now we see coming down the aisle the former governor,
the governor of a He started to pant on the air.
It's Governor Jennifer Granholme and she's perfectly attired. This went
(01:02:07):
instantaneously from the usual Chris Matthews high speed patter to
something akin to Robert F. Kennedy Junior on FaceTime. There's
no other way to describe it. If you were just
listening to Chris Matthews and everybody but me was just
listening to him. I was seated next to him in
a studio at NBC headquarters in Washington. I could see
(01:02:30):
the look on his face, the look of astonishment, him
putting his head down next to the monitor so he
could see her better. And as again I noted, she
was extremely fetching that day. In all of her great
days of fetch she was very fetched that day. This
is absolutely true. On the other hand, we are covering
(01:02:52):
the burial of the former President of the United States,
Gerald R. Ford, and Chris Matthews is panting about the
pulkratude of the governor of Michigan and stop, look at
the shape of the dress and how the light comes
in through the whatever the word was for it, of
(01:03:12):
the church. And she's this event is he began to
lose the ability to form sentences. And I don't mean
in the normal way that he would lose the ability
to form sentences. I mean he would get to that.
They were clearly telling him to stop doing this because
(01:03:32):
it was not just sexist and not just inappropriate. But
we were covering the burial of Gerald R. Ford, I
mean in the front row next to as we continued
the shot of Governor Granholm on a pool camera. I
must admit that nobody at NBC said, yeah, I got
me more of that hot governor. As the pool shot
(01:03:54):
gave us this of Governor Granholm, there was a coffin
out there with Gerald R. Ford inside, and he's talking
about Governor Granholm and how great she looks. I can't
imagine that anytime. She should just hope they took photographs
of her for her next campaign for whatever. It's like,
oh my good God. And they're clearly talking to him
(01:04:15):
from the control room telling him to stop, because every
once in a while he stops and speaks to them
like no, no, I won't. And finally the producer of this,
Court Harson, who was the producer of Hardball Matthew's show
on MSNBC, gets into my ear and says, for God's sake,
is there anything you can do? Can you stop him?
(01:04:35):
And I just looked at the camera and shook my
head and put my arms up in what would be
the hands up. Nothing I can do about it emoji.
I may have been the model for that emoji. This
is two thousand and six or seven, after all, And
they said, can you try can you write him a
note or something? So I took a piece of script
(01:04:56):
and I wrote on the back of it, Chris stopped
talking about Grand Holme that way, we are at a
presidential funeral, and I underlined we are at one two
three line at one two three lines a one to
three presidential one two three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,
(01:05:16):
ten lines under that funeral circled and I slipped it
to him, and he kept talking about her, and he
looked at me, paused and nodded yes, like I was
asking him a question. About five minutes later, we threw
to a break, and I saw one of the executives
(01:05:38):
of MSNBC come out and tell Chris that he had
to go and prepare hardball for later that afternoon, and
that the rest of the thing would be anchored by me.
So every time and they did the pool camera go
back to reaction shots of Governor Granholm. I made sure
(01:05:59):
that that piece of paper that I had handed Chris
to which he thought was some sort of some sort
of question chestian like are we at a president at funeral,
not an admonition that he was making an absolute jack
wad out of himself. I kept that note in front
of me, just in case I veered back into this.
(01:06:21):
I later told this story to Governor Granholm, who was
briefly a colleague of mine. Although you wouldn't remember this
because the network no longer exists, and I don't know
by that point if ten thousand people were watching our
shows on it, but it was a colleague of mine
on current TV. Even as I was trying to explain
to her, don't take this job. They're never going to
pay you. They're already running out of money. Jennifer Granholme
(01:06:46):
laughed coquettishly and said, Oh, that's not the first time
that's ever happened. I've done all the damage I can
(01:07:07):
do here. Thank you for listening. Yes, yes it is,
he said, with his eyes like I didn't know. Thanks
for listening. Follow me on the podcast, promo videos on
Blue Sky YouTube, Facebook, Instagram threads for the moment, Twitter
x and Tickface. I got banned from TikTok, so I
(01:07:33):
went to Tickface. Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanel, the
musical directors have Countdown, arranged, produced and performed most of
our music. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray
was on the guitars, bass and drums, and it was
produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and pithy musical comments
are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust.
(01:07:53):
The sports music is the Olderman theme for me ESPN two,
written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy BESPN Inc. Other music
was arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
Countdown for day just one, five and twenty five days
until the scheduled end of the term of lame duck
Dictator Trump. Probably the next scheduled countdown is Thursday, still
(01:08:18):
playing the scheduling by ear, especially since the heart surgery
for my rescue pop kit is Tuesday. And yes, I'll
post developments on social media and hopefully I will rejoin
you on this platform early Thursday morning. As always, Bolton says,
the news wars till the next one. I'm Keith Aldremman.
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
(01:09:01):
Keith Oldremman is a production of iHeartRadio. 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. Now
the Trump has started down the path to purges of
(00:26):
the military, to political prosecutions, and to show trials. Now
that his fascists have actually leaked plans to court martial
and even seek treason charges against army leadership and even
retired generals, President Biden has to proactively pardon all of them.
In point, in fact, President Biden must now assemble a
(00:48):
list of thousands of people to pardon. People in the military,
in the Democratic Party, in state and local governments, in elections,
supervision in the media, in the protest movements, in the
climate movement, people in any of the fields this psycho
path Trump thinks wronged him and against which he is
(01:08):
not only plotting retribution but is now actively planning it.
Thousands of pardons, tens of thousands of pardons. They should
be as easy and as available from the Biden administration
as vaccinations, and they should be as free of stigma
in exactly the same way the vaccinations are to those
(01:30):
who understand the mortal danger that the worm eaten side
show Bob F. Kennedy Junior represents to this country. It
is a moral imperative that Joe Biden literally prioritize this
list of pardons above everything else right now, everything else
(01:53):
except perhaps his own consideration of the larger question that
Trump's desire to purge anybody from the military who isn't
personally loyal to him, and desire to purge anybody from
government who isn't personally loyal to him, and Trump's intention
to starve any city or county or state that does
(02:14):
not become personally loyal to him. Joe Biden must ask
himself if it is morally defensible to turn this country
over to a madman not just talking about destroying this
country and killing its people by astonishingly varietous means, but
one who is already starting to make this happen. Joe
(02:38):
Biden must ask if there are other actions to take
rather than hand Trump the weapons with which to institute
dictatorship and mass death. That is for the President and
his conscience and his prayers and his God to decide
(02:59):
as for the immediate crisis before us. Right now, NBC
News is reporting quote the Trump transition team is compiling
a list of senior, current and former US military officers
who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and
exploring whether they could be court martialed for their involvement.
According to a US official and a person familiar with
(03:20):
the plan, officials working on the transition are considering creating
a commission to investigate the twenty twenty one withdrawal and
whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as
serious as treason. They're taking it very seriously, the person
with knowledge of the plan said. Matt Flynn, a former
(03:43):
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counter Narcotics and Global Threats,
is helping lead the effort. The sources said. It is
being framed as a review of how the US first
got into the war in Afghanistan and how the US
ultimately withdrew. Quoting NBC News, the lawyer for this Flynn, this,
(04:05):
Flynn denies any involvement in this or in the Trump
transition team. The answer to how we got in, of course,
is that George W. Bush correctly sent troops to Afghanistan
after nine to eleven to destabilize Al Qaeda's base there,
and then he saw the chance to pretend that the
(04:25):
real culprit was Iraq, and the mission was thereafter doomed
to incompleteness. The answer to how we withdrew from Afghanistan,
of course, is that, in order to look like a
peacemaker and to win a few votes somewhere, Trump made
a nightmarishly bad deal with Taliban terrorists, having already invited
them to go to Camp David, and arranged for five
(04:47):
thousand of their worst scum to be released from captivity,
which left Afghanistan undefended in essence, and left Joe Biden
with no chance other than to get out as fast
as he could. If there should be anybody on trial
for Malfeasan's or misconduct or tree reason over the Afghanistan withdrawal,
it is Trump, And that, of course is part of
(05:09):
the point. In a dictatorship, there is not just one
man rule, but anybody but that one man blame. All
those who recognize the dictator's failures must be silenced, and
some of them must publicly take the fall for him,
no matter how many lies must be told to make
that happen. But even that is not the largest point.
(05:32):
The largest point is that these are the first notes
of the symphony of destruction that Trump intends to create.
A commission is to create a kind of permanent platform
for show trials. Show trials of the military first because
loyalty and conduct there are so easily assessed, then later
(05:56):
show trials for civilians in any field. The perpetual rooting
out of supposed loyalty and treason and not failure but
sabotage has been part and parcel of every dictatorship since
ancient Rome. It was the essence of the Soviet state.
It was the backbone of Hitler's Reich. It was previewed
(06:19):
for us in the endless hearings by Jamie Comer in
the House of Representatives in the last two years. But
still further, as NBC reports, to recall former military leaders
in order to court martial them is a step beyond
that is done to smear the entirety of the non
(06:41):
Trump history of this country, to make distinctions not just
between Republicans and Democrats, and Trumpets and never Trumpers, but
between Trump and every other political and governmental figure in
at least our recent history. If the NBC report is correct,
and the Afghanistan Star Chamber would address not just the
(07:01):
withdrawal but also the decision to go in all of
a sudden, Trump's scapegoat hunters will be going after George W.
Bush and the neo cons and Liz Cheney's father, and
doing so for what might have been the one thing
they actually got right. And even beyond that, there is
(07:24):
in this the opening salvo in the attempt to do
to the military what Trump has long since promised to
do to the federal government and to local police around
the country, to make them loyal to him and him alone.
I'll quote again from the NBC story. It's not clear
that Trump administration would pursue treason charges and instead could
(07:47):
focus on lesser charges that highlight the officer's involvement. They
want to set an example, said the person with knowledge
of the plant. They would in fact be setting multiple
kinds of examples, not just to military personnel who might
hesitate someday to commit the illegal acts and murders Trump will,
(08:10):
no doubt order through his minions, but also an example
of how to frighten and purge and make political hay
out of anybody in any public position and eventually in
any private position in this country. This Afghanistan story is
a blueprint for governmental terror in this country starting two
(08:34):
months from Wednesday. This is why Biden must act immediately
pardon anybody who will accept one blanket, blanket pardons for
all acts. I want so many pardons that they have
to open up the government printing office twenty four to seven.
I want them so commonplace that each of my dogs
(08:55):
gets one, and the onus is erased by the sheer
number of pardon recipients. And yes, the president needs to
pardon everybody in his own face family, and in Bill
Clinton's family, and Barack Obama's family, and Kamala Harris's family,
and god knows how many other loyal families. Incidentally, it
(09:18):
is not a coincidence that this obscure, greasy scumbag heg Seth,
whom Trump wants as Secretary of Defense, wrote a book
blaming Pentagon leadership for the heartrending Afghanistan withdrawal. Heg Seth is,
as I record, this still Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense,
(09:38):
but it certainly looks like he is the first of
the team of trifles that Trump would throw under the bus.
The Washington Post reports that Hegseth, quoting them, paid a
woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of
a non disclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter
was consensual. According to a statement from his lawyer's Saturday
(10:00):
and other documents obtained by The Washington Post, heg Seth
agreed to pay an undisco closed amount to the woman
because he feared that revelation of the matter quote would
result in his immediate termination from Fox, where he worked
as a host, the statement said. The statement came after
a detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team
this week by a woman who said she is a
(10:21):
friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which
was obtained by The Post, alleged he raped the then
thirty year old Conservative Group staffer in his room after
drinking at a hotel bar. Unquote. This all was said
to transpire in twenty seventeen. This Hegseth has been on
(10:41):
the ropes since Trump leaked his name, not the least
for this series of tattoos, generously described by Vice President
elect Vance as quote a Christian motto tattooed on his
arm less generously described as part of a series of
tats including symbols used by the Christian crusaders of the
Middle Ages and more recently and more dangerously by the
(11:03):
Proud Boys and the Three percenters. The tattoos on heg
Seth were so alarming he was flagged as an internal
risk by a fellow service member and left the service
as a result. Heg Seth and his fellow Cockroach Vance,
(11:25):
whose entire understanding of the works and words of Jesus
seems to be some garbled conclusion that you can get
very popular if you seem to have been martyred, exchanged
social media posts in which they dismissed the reporting of
that little white supremacist convert or kill everybody in the
Middle East issue as quote anti Christian bigotry in the
(11:47):
media unquote. Hegseth then added exactly the kind of agenda
setting statement you would expect from an incoming head of
the Pentagon quote they can target me. I don't give
a damn, but this type of targeting of Christians, Conservatives, patriots,
and everyday Americans will stop on day one at Djt's
DoD which you could dismiss as typical q Andon lunacy,
(12:12):
except for the fact that the man who wrote that
may actually yet wind up in control of the largest
military force in the world, along with a remit from
the man who appointed him to use that force. Against
the citizens of the United States, like maybe when the
public were to protest treason show trials and presumably treason
(12:40):
show executions of generals who were making the best out
of Trump's butchering of our exit from Afghanistan. Heg Seth
(13:13):
may meet his bus, a bus named Crusade. Not because
he's an unqualified lunatic who's inked up like a fanboy
of the Spanish Inquisition, but because it is human nature
to think, well, we didn't stop Gates, the least we
got rid of heg Seth. As if there weren't another
fifty heg seths lined up behind the original. I mean,
(13:33):
you could even give the new one the same tattoos
wouldn't take more than a few days. Quote Trump wants
Gates confirmed one hundred percent. A source told CNN he
is not going to back off. He's all in, reads
the money. Quote from a CNN report which has Jamie
Gangel's name and sources all over it, quoting again, he
(13:55):
views Gates as the most important member of the cabinet.
He considers the nomination of the former Florida congressman an
urgent priority for the incoming GOP mind. Already in the Senate,
it's the lady you or the tiger here. I think
you notice the word used there was confirmed. Trump wants
Gates confirmed one hundred percent. Trump has always been so slipshod,
(14:21):
so inherently confused by human language that confirmed by the
Senate and confirmed as a recess appointment could in fact
mean the same thing to him, depending on the hour
of the day and the day of the week. He
may or may not still care that there's a difference
between those things. But as I said last week, Gates
(14:44):
is Trump's personal kind of favorite immoral cockroach, and yet
he still means much more to him. Symbolically, he is
Caligula's apocryphal horse appointment. Trump wants Gates to use the
DOJ as a loaded gun against anybody Trump doesn't like.
He doesn't care gives him the gun. But Trump's ego
(15:06):
also demands that the Republican senators he views as his
slaves stand up and applaud what he's doing. In short,
Gates is and nobody has better embodied this. Gates is
the living embodiment of Trump saying I will defecate, you
will eat it. So there is your tiger right now.
(15:28):
It is clear from all reporting a majority of Republican
Senators would not vote to confirm Matt Gates if there's
a vote, if there's a hearing. Trump's utter insecurity can
only be assuaged by a hearing and a vote. Does
he continue to demand it? If he demands it, he
(15:48):
may kill his dictatorship before it even starts. If he
sublimates his desire and is satisfied the course of least
resistance for these more advanced insects in the Senate Republican
Caucus think still cockroaches, but in suits and ties. Their
course of least resistance is clear, letting the recess appointment happen,
(16:13):
and then just pretending, as they have pretended for eight years,
that Trump is not Hitler. I will echo what David French,
of all people wrote in The New York Times. America
has twice elected Trump, the outsider, the bull in the
china shop, the chaos agent, but he has stood for
office only once as the actual guy in charge, the
(16:37):
buck stops here guy, and America rejected him and humiliated him.
In the long term, this could be a good augur
The United States may simply get fed up with Trump
failing at everything, or it could hasten his full implementation
of dictatorship, in which he never makes that mistake again.
(16:59):
He never makes the mistake of letting America again have
anything to say about who runs America, in which case
I refer you back to my opening remark. Joe Biden
must immediately pardon everybody he can think of, just in
(17:25):
case this weekend was not worrisome enough those Trump will
not court martial, nor have Gates prosecute, nor have hag
Seth shoot. He will kill by accelerating the climate catastrophe.
His new energy secretary designate is not just a fossil
fuels prostitute. He's a fracking prostitute. Liberty energies Doug Wright.
(17:47):
Liberty from breathing, I believe is their motto. Doug writes,
tombstone someday will read there is no climate crisis and
we're not in the midst of an energy transition either,
which he said on tape. It will read that until
that tombstone is submerged under a new ocean or burned
(18:07):
to a cinder by a five hundred thousand acre wildfire.
There are two more new nightmares to recount. Trump wants
his personal attorney John Sower as Solicitor General. Sour is
the one who argued before the Supreme Court for presidential immunity.
You know, the lawyer who said that, yes, the president
(18:28):
would be immune from criminal prosecution even if he had
directed the military to assassinate a political rival just by coincidence.
A reminder here to President Biden at the Supreme Court
agreed with the Solicitor General designate about that bang bang.
(18:48):
And this final reminder from Elon Musk, one of Twitter's
Nazi tech bros, wrote, Trump received a clear mandate. He's
going to win by one and a half percent. Trump
received a clear mandate from the people to assemble an
extinction level event administration with respect to spending, bureaucracy, and
(19:10):
inefficiency in the federal government, which Musk retweeted to his
decreasingly populated ex echo chamber, and Musk added one word
quote true extinction level event administration. This makes me remind
you of two of my earlier assertions here today, One
(19:33):
that it is now a matter for Joe Biden and
his maker to decide if turning the government over to people,
now boasting that they are beginning the process of destroying
that government, and destroying all of this nation's freedoms, and
him Biden and eventually you and me, whether or not
that really is the lesser of any number of evils,
(19:55):
That's one reminder. The other one is a reminder of
this Keteman is a hell of a drug. Also of interest,
here in an all new edition of Countdown. I've been
waiting for the right moment. I don't know if it's now,
but if it isn't, it'll be soon. So let's go
(20:17):
how to proactively defend this country, this democracy, and yourself.
As Trump in night falls, as the big fat guy
blots out the sun, Have you got half an hour?
Because I have a half an hour's worth of instructions.
That's next. This is Countdown. Nearly eight years ago, I
(20:45):
was asked to give the keynote speech to the first
fundraiser for a new group called Democracy Matters, created by
the people who did Media Matters and other organizations that
ended in Matters, which had vowed to throw up every
barricade and every speed bump and every sliver of resistance
possible to the Trump craypocracy that would take power the
(21:11):
next day. I was preceded by the former governor of
a Midwestern state who actually thought that Trump had won
because we had all neglected the auto workers. This governor
really bought into the this is about economic anxiety and
economic anxiety alone. Also speaking before me a local Florida
(21:33):
mayor who somehow had concluded that the lesson of the
election of Trump was we needed more non politicians running
for office and doing retail politics, knocking on doors the
way he had got an elected mayor of a city
that had ten thousand people in it, and I thought,
my god, they have had no clue as to what happened,
(21:54):
and they, more importantly have no clue as to what
is going to happen. The man who asked me to
give this speech was David Brock, and he said, give
me one of your resistance videos, only in person. I
want Fire and Brimstone. And I said, well, happily I
happened to be the East Coast distributor of that. I
(22:14):
read the speech again a couple of months ago, and
I find so little of it wouldn't fit exactly today
except for the dates that I think, in offering it
to you again, the number of words I've had to
alter in this rereading is less than five. I haven't
even changed the dates. I have cut out the opening
(22:36):
reference to crickets, but it's true. This was given outside
in the garden of a Fort Lauderdale hotel at night,
and when you are at the podium outside in Florida
at night in January and you pause, you can literally
hear crickets. As I gave this speech, there was almost
(22:57):
no reaction. I later found out there was no reaction
because everybody there was trying to convince themselves that it
was about retail politics or ignoring the auto workers, and
this was the first person they had heard who actually
said to them, no, the building is on fire. It
is not a false alarm. So there were crickets throughout this,
(23:18):
but not after it. In any event, I stand by
every word of this speech. Only now I would suggest
that what I will reread to you is nothing more
than the starting point the keynote speech to Democracy Matters,
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, January nineteenth, twenty seventeen. It's an honor
(23:42):
to be here. It's an honor to see my old
friends and to meet many new ones. And now that
my affable remarks are over, let me get down to
the raw meat. Let me begin with the worst case scenario,
or one of them. In any event, imagine it is
not now January nineteenth, twenty seventeen, but instead it's January nineteenth,
twenty eighteen. You and I are here in these same circumstances,
(24:07):
right here, and I repeat to you then what I
am going to say to you now, and as I finish,
or earlier, or even as I begin, I am arrested,
or I am detained, or I am put on a
watch list somewhere, or I am audited, or I am
denounced by someone somewhere, or I am who knows what
(24:31):
happens to me one year, And that is just an estimate.
Your punishment may vary. It could be two years from now,
It could be two months from now, It could be
tomorrow afternoon after the inauguration. And of course, if and
when it happens, it will not be me alone for
the act of listening to me. You could also be
(24:51):
arrested or detained or who knows what I see some
concern on some faces political science fiction hyperbole a paranoid,
ustopian view of January nineteenth, twenty eighteen, A work of fiction.
If one year ago tonight we had been here on
(25:13):
January nineteen, twenty sixteen, And I had told you that
in one year's time, a deranged, infantile, imbecilic, paranoid, sexist, racist, militaristic, fascist, perverted, vulgar, stupid,
paper thin skinned man baby would not merely be nominated
(25:33):
for president by a major political party in this country,
but would swamp all his rivals, including the brother and
son of one former president. And if I then told
you that after unleashing all that is worst in America,
he would be able to conjure the perfect electoral storm
inside the electoral college, storm to defeat in the election
(25:57):
the wife of another president, a woman who would get
two million, nine hundred thousand more popular votes than he did.
And I told you further that in one year's time,
all we would be left asking here was not whether
or not the Russians had tampered with our sacred election,
but how much they had tampered with it. Would you
have called that political science fiction? Because I would have.
(26:21):
And I like to think I'm smarter than I have
turned out to have been on this, So it is important.
It's not happy, but it's important to remember that we
need to not assume the nightmare ends in some way.
When Donald John Trump puts his hand on the Bible
tomorrow and John Robert says, do you solemnly swear that
(26:42):
you will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the
United States, And, presuming the Bible does not leap from
his hand or spontaneously combust, Trump replies to this call
of our history and our democracy by answering, whatever, this
is not the last scene of the Manchurian candidate, nor
(27:03):
the last scene of seven days in May, nor the
last scene of it can't happen here. There are countless
possible nightmare scenarios ahead of all of us. We have
seen some of them before, the last time we let
the antiquated math of the Founders elect a Republican president
(27:23):
in defiance of the will of the people. We also
have seen a terrorist act and flames and collapses and
ashes and pyres, and the immediate exploitation of that act
by Republicans who demanded that what we should do was
what they called patriotic bipartisanship, which was in fact monopartisanship,
(27:45):
in which they were to make all the decisions, and
our role was to acquiesce to them, or to be
branded disloyal. We know what they will do if that
opportunity presents itself again. And we know from a year
of his lies and calumnies and gas lighting and or
well grade perversions of light into dark and fiction into fact,
(28:06):
that they are all now practiced and prepared and ready
to create an opportunity if none presents itself, a phony
threat that requires a curtailment of liberties, some plot he
and he alone could stop. And we must be prepared
to call such a stunt exactly what it is, and
(28:28):
to be patriots and to wrap ourselves in the flag
that we love and shout from the hills. Why what
has happened to this country two months from now, six
months from now, two years from now. Why that has
happened was because there is a Donald John Trump. And
(28:48):
we know that this time they have tilted the playing
field against us in advance in these areas. They have
spent eight years delegitimizing a president so that we might
look foolish delegitimizing an actual, illegitimate president. They have spent
the length of a campaign refusing to promise to recognize
a defeat on the premise that it could only have
(29:10):
been obtained by chicanery and dishonesty, so that we might
look foolish, refusing to honor a defeat that was actually
obtained by actual chicanery and dishonesty. They have month after
month insisting the election, the media, the opinion polls, now,
the polls about the transition, that these are rigged and fixed,
so that we might look foolish, insisting that an election,
(29:32):
the media, the opinion polls are actually rigged and fixed.
And we know that now we will and must play
by rules that sicken us, against which our souls cry out,
But we must our moral force, our moral high ground,
our patriotic self defense is simple. We did not seek
(29:56):
any of these rules. We did not seek this battle.
We did not seek this treachery. The rules and the
battle and the treachery are Trump's. We will fight him
on his terms, and we will defeat him, and we
will restore democracy, and we will defeat Trump's Russian masters.
(30:23):
Some of us have been warning since the beginning of
the presidential campaign that Trump's connection and the connection of
those around him to a dictator who has had the
foresight to replace expensive and very complicated human war with
the far more efficient cyber war invasioned by remote control.
We have noted that Trump's connection was not mere admiration
(30:45):
nor the perverted envy of a sick American monster gazing
at a sick Russian monster. And we were right. The
Russians did this. All we need to learn, and we
will learn it, is how much they did, how many
acts of war they directed against this country, how much
they had on Trump, how much they expecked him to deliver.
(31:05):
How many of the mainstream Republicans will remain loyal not
to the Constitution of the United States, but to Vladimir
God damned Putin. I wish to quote three men, and
only three men tonight, Sidney A. Chayefsky, John Lewis, and
(31:27):
first of these three Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill speaking after
what was in his time in his country, in his context,
his Trump election. We know it in history as Munich
and from the wilderness of his parliament, with a coalition
government cheering itself deafeningly for having averted war, with the
(31:50):
formal leadership of this nation shunning him and marginalizing him
and giggling at him, say nothing of his nation shunning
him and marginalizing him and giggling at him. When everybody
roared how well they had done, Churchill began in all
to whisper. The people should know that we have sustained
(32:12):
a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will
travel far with us along our road. They should know
that we have passed an awful milestone in our history.
And here I will briefly update Churchill's words. If I
could make that offense, when the whole equilibrium of the
(32:36):
free world has been deranged, and that the terrible words
have for the time being been pronounced against the American democracy,
thou Art weighed in the balance and found wanting. And
don't suppose Churchill said that this is the end. This
(32:56):
is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only
the first sip, the first fore taste of a bitter cup,
which we will be proffered to us year by year,
unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor,
we arise again and take our stand for freedom as
(33:20):
in the olden time, Churchill, Tonight, in our country, which
we all love in words and in ways that we
cannot express, tonight is the end of the olden time.
In the comparison to what Churchill said in nineteen thirty eight,
(33:41):
Tonight is the night before disaster. Tonight is the night
that we will look back at with some longing and
some nostalgia. Tonight is the night to which the whole
of our beings, and all of our priorities, and all
of our efforts must now be focused on getting our
country back to democracy as we have known it. With
(34:03):
the rules by which we have played ends at noon.
The fight. Our fight begins one second later, and it begins,
as you will hear at this conference this weekend, on
a series of fronts. The fight can begin in the media.
(34:27):
You everybody here can confront anybody, reporter, anchor, spokesman, shill,
anybody who tries to publicly characterize all this as just
some sort of political swing, as if it was not
the seizure of power by the worst possible person to
be found to serve as president, as if that person
had not appointed the worst possible candidate to run each agency,
(34:49):
As if Betsy de Vos was just some sort of
an alternative to traditional education. Once she really is an
alternative to traditional education, in the same way stupidity is
an alternative to traditional education. This weekend we will will
show you ways to make this clear to the media,
and it will introduce you to people whose job it
will be to shine a constant daily light on every
(35:13):
broken promise, every shady nominee, every awful policy, and everything
you can do to help directly. The fight can also
begin in the courts. Trump will come as close to
privatizing the presidency as anybody in our history before sunset tomorrow,
(35:33):
and whether he believes it or not, much of what
he will try to do is actually illegal, and there
are still laws. And this weekend will show you ways
to pursue him and to have at the head of
this fight a cliche Justice with her shining sword. Or
(35:55):
you can look at all this more practically. Trump is
coming for your money. You might as well spend some
of it to prevent him from taking all of your money.
And this fight certainly begins with a state of mind.
More than nine years ago, I ran into John Kerry
in line to pick up World Series tickets at Fenway
Park in Boston, and as we came past each other
(36:17):
in the line, he congratulated me and he said thanks
to me, and I said, you're welcome for what By
the way, he said, it was you who decided to
run headfirst into the brick wall of the Bush administration.
You said, this terror color code system was uncomfortably in
sync with Bush's political needs. And then you said, I
think they may be doing this deliberately, and just enough
(36:42):
of that wall fell down and the rest of us
could storm through and start talking about it. And that's
what turned around the two thousand and six midterms. And
I said, ah, I doubt it, but okay, I'll defer
to you on it, Senator. So never think, no matter
what has happened in the last few months, that you
individually don't matter, or that an opportunity for you to
(37:05):
prevail over this will not arise, or that your state
of mind does not matter, or that even an act
of symbolism by you does not matter. And to that point,
John Lewis, I will contend that something he did on
January thirteenth, twenty seventeen was just as important, or nearly so,
(37:27):
and certainly just as dangerous and will in the end
prove just as saving and redemptive as was his agony
on the Edmund Pettis Bridge. As you know, Congressman Lewis
was asked if he planned to try to forge a
relationship with Trump, and he said, I believe in forgiveness.
(37:47):
I believe in trying to work with people. It's going
to be hard, it's going to be very difficult. I
don't see the president elect as a legitimate president. I
think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected,
and they helped roy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. I
don't plan to attend the inauguration. You cannot be at
(38:10):
home with something that you feel is wrong. The questioner
was stunned. That's going to send a big message, said
my ex friend Chuck Todd, a message to a lot
of people in this country that you don't believe he's
a legitimate president. And John Lewis, as always, would not
(38:32):
back down, would not equivocate, would not protect himself. I
think it was a conspiracy on the part of the
Russians and others to help him get elected. That's not right,
that's not fair, that's not the open democratic process. And
John Lewis in thirty seconds, moved legitimacy center stage. In
(38:53):
the week since, he said that more than sixty elected
Democrats followed him. It should have been all of them.
John Lewis leads us yet again, And there is the
organizing principle of resistance. It is simple, as hard as
it may be to believe and to put into proper
historical contexts. And just because none of us have seen
(39:15):
it before does not mean it cannot be true. It
is simple. This is not a legitimate president. This was
a conspiracy involving, to great or small degree, another country.
This is not the open democratic process. And John Lewis
said it perfectly. You cannot be at home with something
(39:38):
that you feel is wrong. Every day we bring up Russia.
Every day we shout Russia. Every day we scream Russia.
Never do we speak this man's name without invoking what
(40:00):
Churchill called the defeat without a war. Never do we
criticize or discuss or analyze his actions or those of
his White House filled with the crew of a pirate ship,
without reminding everyone that the Russians put him there, and
that the Republicans who enable him to stay there are
passively collaborating with a foreign enemy of the United States
(40:21):
of America. At the other end of the extreme in
terms of simplicity versus complexity, never ever do we refer
to Donald Trump as president he is Trump. Certainly that
is sufficient and accurate, and it is also easier for
when it is finally time for us to erase his
(40:44):
name from American history. For now, it is our task
to erase what is left of his legitimacy. I don't
see the president elect as a legitimate president. John Lewis said,
you cannot be at home with something you feel is wrong.
(41:06):
Wise words stand the test of time and the test
of struggle, And these words from John Lewis R. Wise,
this weekend will be devoted to many means, practical and
philosophical with which we can fight this nightmare on the
terms the Republicans and their coalition partners, the American fascists
(41:29):
and the neo Nazis have chosen, and to consider the
first of the Republican hammers, which which we can grab
from their hands, and which we can then use to
chase them to hell. This weekend will be devoted to
many means, practical and philosophical, with which we can resist Trump,
reproach Trump, and ultimately repeal and replace Trump. Already we
(41:55):
see the outlines of this. The boycott against the Bright
part advertisers was a spectacular success. It can be easily repeated,
and it's fun for the entire family. There are other
media inroads to make. As I mentioned, my GQ series
crossed one hundred million views a network. I don't know
(42:19):
if this is a pipe dream of mine that is
largely liberal in its orientation. That I could speak to
you from every night would be a nice thing to have,
But I don't know if we could ever see that.
But why does it sound so vaguely familiar? But practically again,
with or without networks, we now know that we are
under no obligation to be nice or cooperative or vs
(42:45):
or bipartisan. That we can fight just as dirty and
just as viciously, and we will beat them at their
own game, because, as I have observed many times in
my commentaries, democracy has survived not so much through the
efforts of those who would protect it as it has
survived because of the stupidity of those who would destroy it.
And this time side which would destroy it includes Rudy Giuliani.
(43:10):
We know the twenty eighteen midterms must be fought on
a wedge issue. You Congressman Roora Bacher, You Congressman Chafits,
You Congressman Ryan, do you believe in democracy, or do
you support Russia and General Lisimo Francisco Trump. You can
(43:30):
tone that down as the circumstances warrant district by district
as you please. We also know those midterms are of
an importance that cannot be overstated, because while the Republicans
may realize soon or late, maybe by this time tomorrow,
that they themselves might have to impeach Trump or use,
(43:51):
more likely the twenty fifth Amendment on him because he's crazy,
we must take no chances. We must have a democratic
Congress to impeach him two years from tonight. And we
know that in the interim we must adopt the fighting
style of Muhammad Ali. Yes they will hit us, Yes
it will hurt. Yes it has already begun to hurt.
(44:14):
But each time they come in to land a blow,
we hit them back. As Richard Pryor phrased it, voicing
Ali's inner dialogue during a fight, Boom, there you go.
You take that with you, And we know that, yes,
(44:35):
that means that Trump, the man baby, the stay puffed
marshmallow man whose psychosis can be inflamed by trolling him
on Twitter, must hear the words and phrases weak soft
lost the popular vote twice no mandate, Russia putin assange, disloyal,
treachery video tape. He must hear these words and phrases
(44:59):
every time he turns around, and we know that, yes,
that means we shall actually have to learn from what
we watched him and them due to Barack Obama. So
never again should Trump or this Russian operative guy of his,
Michael Flynn, or the native of the country of Exxon,
(45:19):
mister Tillerson, or Kelly Ann Khan Job or any of them.
Never again will they get to speak in public without
somebody rising and yelling, not necessarily rudely to interrupt them,
although you can do that if you want, but somebody
rising somewhere when they say these things and responding with
every fiber in their being before, during, or after they speak,
(45:41):
and responding by shouting, you lie. And yes, we know
that nothing has ever changed for the good in the
history of man without men and women rising up and saying,
whether they whisper it or yell it, but by starting
by saying this is wrong. However, behind all this, behind
(46:05):
every strategy, behind every plan made this weekend, behind everything
we can do and everything we must do to restore
our bloodied democracy. There must be one emotion with which
our side of the political pendulum is seldom associated. This
emotion must now, in some ways become our animating principle,
(46:27):
and about that animating principle, and penultimately, in my remarks,
having already quoted Churchill and Lewis, I want to now
quote again, with revisions formissible, I hope Sidney Chaiefsky. Who
the hell is Sidney Chaiefsky. You may know him by
his nickname Patty, or you may know the name of
(46:50):
a character he wrote for the movie Network A mister Beeal,
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody
knows things are bad. It's a coupe detas. Everybody's out
of home or scared of losing their freedom. Foreign governments
by influence at the White House. Businesses are terrified of
a Twitter account. Shopkeepers keep a clan hood under the counter.
(47:14):
White supremacists are running wild in the street, and there's
nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and
there's no end to it. We know Trump is unfit
to pass a sanity test, and his enablers are unfit
to lead. And we sit watching our TVs while some
local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen attacks
on Obamacare and sixty three racist bills, as if that's
the way it's supposed to be. We all know things
(47:36):
are bad. Worse than bad, they're crazy. It's like everything
everywhere has gone crazy. So we don't go out anymore.
We sit in the house and slowly the world we're
living in is getting smaller. And always say is please
at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let
me have my steady income and my sanctuary cities and
my warm Obama memories, and I won't say anything, Just
leave us alone. Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
(47:59):
I want you to get mad. I want you to protest.
I want you to write. I want you to call
a Republican congressman, because we all know exactly what you
should say to him. I know what to do about
the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the
corporate graft in the street. And I know that first
you've got to get mad. You've got to say I'm
(48:21):
an American citizen, goddamn it, my democracy has value. So
the rest of it, the part about going to the
window opening, it's sticking your head out and yelling the
rest of it, you know, but to keep you motivated,
and to keep you mad, and to keep you unwilling
(48:43):
to take it anymore. As Howard Beale said, let me
close by noting one overarching fact that has occasionally gotten
lost since November eighth, twenty sixteen, And that is the
essence of everything, to my mind, Even with this nightmare
that comes at sunrise, even with the temporary end of
(49:04):
much of our democratic experience in this country, even with
a gold dollar sign spray painted on every American flag
and spit on the grave of every American patriot, even
with the confluence of Komi and the Russians and the
lies and the greatest grifter in the history of this country,
Even with the worst possible outcome that all of that
(49:24):
could produce, even with the greatest possible grief, no matter
what we have to face, no matter what we have
to do, no matter how long the trip back is
from tomorrow, remember and take strength from and remind all
those who forgets, and remind all those who deny, and
remind all those who lie. Remember one thing, we are
(49:46):
the majority. January nineteenth, twenty seventeen. After that, there was
silence seemed like it went on for quite a while.
Apparently not. I've heard a recording of this speech. It
was only two or three seconds. And then there was
(50:08):
an anguished roar, and then I must immodestly note there
was cheers and applause. Wasn't a big crowd. Standing ovation
is a generous term, but whatever it was, it helped.
We fought and fought, and we won the midterms, and
(50:31):
we won in twenty twenty, and we minimalized the damage
in twenty twenty two, and somewhere along the line we
assumed he would go away. So now today anyway, we
are exhausted. We have been defeated, although every day that
defeat gets a little smaller, doesn't it, statistically? And from
(50:55):
somewhere we must summon the energy of twenty eighteen and
twenty twenty and twenty twenty two. And when we defeat
them this time, we must not make a mistake. We
must destroy them because I'm not going to leave you alone.
(51:20):
I want you to get mad. So I haven't done
one of these since the election because there hasn't been
a lot to laugh about, so there's probably a need
to laugh about something. And thus we returned to the
(51:43):
old familiar topic things I promised not to tell. And
I was speaking a couple of days ago about the
coverage of the two thousand and eight presidential election. You
remember two thousand and eight, ancient history, back when there
was an American democracy, back when there was hopey, changey things,
(52:03):
as opposed to I hope you change into something other
than the president of the United States. I was talking
about two thousand and eight and was asked a series
of questions about our coverage at MSNBC, and the person
asking me questions had yet to mention the most significant
(52:25):
roadblock to getting things done, to getting that broadcast and
the other broadcasts that we did politically at MSNBC all
those years ago off the ground and then again safely
on the ground when it was all done. The assets
we had were extraordinary. Through most of the primary campaign
(52:46):
that year, and through all of two thousand and six
in the midterms, we'd had Tim Russert, who would come
on and after the network coverage was completely over, would
just sit there with us for another hour on the air.
What a pleasure that was. And then we'd go out
in the hallway and talk about baseball. The good part
of it, plus dozens of people and that then knew
(53:06):
and sincere Rachel Matdow, other people who really knew what
they were talking about and were trying to make a
point and make an inroad in what was then all
conservative corporate media, even at NBC. But the person had
not asked me one question about the major impediment, and
(53:27):
the major impediment was my co anchor for almost all
of this was Chris Efing Matthews. Over the years, I
have made allusions to Chris Matthews and just how rare
it was when he was actually in the same plane
of existence as the rest of us in the universe.
(53:50):
And I know Chris never heard me say any of
these things, because Chris never listened. If Chris listened, Chris
would probably still be on the air every night with
a nightly show on MSNBC. There's a Dorian Gray picture
of him somewhere because he hasn't changed in appearance since
the late nineteen nineties, even though he's now well you
know how old he is. He's two hundred and six.
(54:11):
The story I want to tell about Matthews, though, that
I think symbolizes and summarizes the entirety of my experience
with him, which began in two thousand and three. I
was on the set with him when he discussed the
fact that this was George Bush's day and mission accomplished
was not an exaggeration. And look at how well he
(54:32):
fits in that flight man's uniform, and he was talking
about how he looked good in the pants. That was
the beginning of it. And I said, don't you think
there's something about bringing up the whole flying experience and
the Texas Air National Guard and that whole question. You
think that's a bad idea or declaring mission accomplished while
(54:52):
American servicemen's lives are still at risk in Iraq and
will be no. No, this is his day, This is
his day. Chris can always point to being right about
any issue that ever came a cross his desk, because
he took every possible point of view on every possible issue.
He was anti Bush, pro Bush, anti Trump, pro Trump.
(55:15):
He was everything at all times. And the way you
do that is the way Trump does it. You just
don't remember what you said last time, You don't think
it's relevant, you don't think that anybody else is going
to remember it. There's a lot of similarity. There's a
lot of overlap in the ven diagrams of Chris Matthews
and Donald Trump. But I'm diverging. I promised you the
(55:37):
Chris Matthews story I could have before I sat down
in front of the microphone gone and looked this up
to get the exact date. I'm sure it was two
thousand and six or two thousand and seven, doesn't matter much.
It was cold, it was the winter. It was deep
in the winter, probably January or February. And I had
traveled to Washington on short notice because they wanted me
(56:01):
to co anchor with Matthews. The the memorial coverage of
the funerals, two of them a former president Gerald R. Ford.
Gerald Ford ultimately is down there with what Harrison and
a couple of other really short term presidents like Chester
(56:23):
Allen Arthur who just didn't make a huge impact except
for in his case one event the pardoning of Nixon.
Really didn't do much as president of the United States
and yet president of the United States state funeral. Plus
they were also going to give him a second funeral
the next day in Michigan, back in his home state
(56:48):
Grand Rapids, if I remember correctly. So we were there
for two days, me and Matthews all day doing the
state funeral one day, and then the next day the
funeral in Michigan. The state funeral was just a typical
day with Chris Matthews. I would say something and he
would then repeat it as if he had heard it
in his own head rather than coming out of my mouth.
(57:11):
Chris heard things that were said, he just never heard
who had said them. So he tended to repeat a
lot of the things I had just mentioned, and he
would jump in on interviews that he was not supposed
to be a part of, and all the rest of
the usual nonsense. He would read things on the teleprompter
that said Keith. He would read everything except the word Keith,
(57:34):
the usual stuff. So that was a good day. The
next day, when we moved to Michigan, that was not
quite as good a day. The Michigan part of the
two days of the burial, Gerald Ford was, well, I'll
make the joke now that I made off set then
and off air then, which was took two days to
(57:55):
bury him. What he wouldn't stop moving. The second day
was conducted out of a Protestant church in Grand Rapids.
If I remember correctly, that had an overhead window. And
I forget the technical terms. Although my dad was an architect,
I don't think he did a lot of churches. But
there was an overhead length of the church glass ceiling,
(58:21):
and it provided extraordinarily bright and mood altering light. And
on that day, in the middle of winter, at the
middle of the day, the light came in at such
an angle that it really did look kind of otherworldly,
if not heavenly. And so as all the leading Michigan
(58:43):
politicos and many of the national politicos who had traveled
to Michigan to attend both halves of the doubleheader of
the burial of Gerald Ford, as they filed in, and
to his credit, Chris Matthews knew every one of them
by sight, even if they were on the monitor in
front of us half an inch tall. He knew that
(59:04):
that was the dog catcher from Grand Rapids, Michigan from
nineteen thirty eight who convinced football star Gerald Ford to
go into politics and not football. He knew every one
of them. He knew the former mayor, He knew the
Attorney General of Michigan seventeen attorneys General Wigo. And that
was great. That was why when they once gave me
(59:26):
the opportunity in two thousand and eight, I think it
was to go solo and leave Matthews out. I said, no, See,
he's too valuable for stuff like that. You couldn't possibly
get a researcher to give me that information. It would
not be genuine and it would not be timely. Chris
Matthews knows off the top of his head who that is.
(59:48):
He has no idea why he's important. He has no
idea whether he has served democracy or undermined it. But
he knows who the hell that guy is. Why that's
Milton j. Erseg the twenty third still Solicitor General of
Michigan one hundred and six. So, now, when the former governor,
(01:00:12):
then the governor of Michigan came into this church at
high noon with light coming in above her, the great
former governor of Michigan came in, he knew exactly obviously
who she was. We all knew who she was. She
(01:00:32):
was Jennifer Granholm. Jennifer Granholm, whose public career began as
the woman contestant on an episode of the Dating Game.
Jennifer Granholm was then on the Dating Game in the seventies.
Was in two thousand and six seven at the funerals
of Gerald R. Ford. Is today a most attractive woman, fetching, handsome, beautiful,
(01:01:01):
whichever word you would like to use that is both
complimentary and yet not sexist. Well, on that day she
appeared in a very formal kind of mourning hat and
a black dress, and the light shining from above her
was perfect, and she hit a perfect hair day. All
(01:01:22):
the things that could combine to render one essential element
to this story. He wasn't wrong. Matthews was reeling off
the names of these other people. And there's the front
row in which the former deputy assistant dogcatcher of Kalamazoos.
(01:01:42):
And then he saw Jennifer Granholm walk in, and he said,
and now we see coming down the aisle the former governor,
the governor of a He started to pant on the air.
It's Governor Jennifer Granholme and she's perfectly attired. This went
(01:02:07):
instantaneously from the usual Chris Matthews high speed patter to
something akin to Robert F. Kennedy Junior on FaceTime. There's
no other way to describe it. If you were just
listening to Chris Matthews and everybody but me was just
listening to him. I was seated next to him in
a studio at NBC headquarters in Washington. I could see
(01:02:30):
the look on his face, the look of astonishment, him
putting his head down next to the monitor so he
could see her better. And as again I noted, she
was extremely fetching that day. In all of her great
days of fetch she was very fetched that day. This
is absolutely true. On the other hand, we are covering
(01:02:52):
the burial of the former President of the United States,
Gerald R. Ford, and Chris Matthews is panting about the
pulkratude of the governor of Michigan and stop, look at
the shape of the dress and how the light comes
in through the whatever the word was for it, of
(01:03:12):
the church. And she's this event is he began to
lose the ability to form sentences. And I don't mean
in the normal way that he would lose the ability
to form sentences. I mean he would get to that.
They were clearly telling him to stop doing this because
(01:03:32):
it was not just sexist and not just inappropriate. But
we were covering the burial of Gerald R. Ford, I
mean in the front row next to as we continued
the shot of Governor Granholm on a pool camera. I
must admit that nobody at NBC said, yeah, I got
me more of that hot governor. As the pool shot
(01:03:54):
gave us this of Governor Granholm, there was a coffin
out there with Gerald R. Ford inside, and he's talking
about Governor Granholm and how great she looks. I can't
imagine that anytime. She should just hope they took photographs
of her for her next campaign for whatever. It's like,
oh my good God. And they're clearly talking to him
(01:04:15):
from the control room telling him to stop, because every
once in a while he stops and speaks to them
like no, no, I won't. And finally the producer of this,
Court Harson, who was the producer of Hardball Matthew's show
on MSNBC, gets into my ear and says, for God's sake,
is there anything you can do? Can you stop him?
(01:04:35):
And I just looked at the camera and shook my
head and put my arms up in what would be
the hands up. Nothing I can do about it emoji.
I may have been the model for that emoji. This
is two thousand and six or seven, after all, And
they said, can you try can you write him a
note or something? So I took a piece of script
(01:04:56):
and I wrote on the back of it, Chris stopped
talking about Grand Holme that way, we are at a
presidential funeral, and I underlined we are at one two
three line at one two three lines a one to
three presidential one two three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,
(01:05:16):
ten lines under that funeral circled and I slipped it
to him, and he kept talking about her, and he
looked at me, paused and nodded yes, like I was
asking him a question. About five minutes later, we threw
to a break, and I saw one of the executives
(01:05:38):
of MSNBC come out and tell Chris that he had
to go and prepare hardball for later that afternoon, and
that the rest of the thing would be anchored by me.
So every time and they did the pool camera go
back to reaction shots of Governor Granholm. I made sure
(01:05:59):
that that piece of paper that I had handed Chris
to which he thought was some sort of some sort
of question chestian like are we at a president at funeral,
not an admonition that he was making an absolute jack
wad out of himself. I kept that note in front
of me, just in case I veered back into this.
(01:06:21):
I later told this story to Governor Granholm, who was
briefly a colleague of mine. Although you wouldn't remember this
because the network no longer exists, and I don't know
by that point if ten thousand people were watching our
shows on it, but it was a colleague of mine
on current TV. Even as I was trying to explain
to her, don't take this job. They're never going to
pay you. They're already running out of money. Jennifer Granholme
(01:06:46):
laughed coquettishly and said, Oh, that's not the first time
that's ever happened. I've done all the damage I can
(01:07:07):
do here. Thank you for listening. Yes, yes it is,
he said, with his eyes like I didn't know. Thanks
for listening. Follow me on the podcast, promo videos on
Blue Sky YouTube, Facebook, Instagram threads for the moment, Twitter
x and Tickface. I got banned from TikTok, so I
(01:07:33):
went to Tickface. Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanel, the
musical directors have Countdown, arranged, produced and performed most of
our music. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray
was on the guitars, bass and drums, and it was
produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and pithy musical comments
are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust.
(01:07:53):
The sports music is the Olderman theme for me ESPN two,
written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy BESPN Inc. Other music
was arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
Countdown for day just one, five and twenty five days
until the scheduled end of the term of lame duck
Dictator Trump. Probably the next scheduled countdown is Thursday, still
(01:08:18):
playing the scheduling by ear, especially since the heart surgery
for my rescue pop kit is Tuesday. And yes, I'll
post developments on social media and hopefully I will rejoin
you on this platform early Thursday morning. As always, Bolton says,
the news wars till the next one. I'm Keith Aldremman.
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
(01:09:01):
Keith Oldremman is a production of iHeartRadio. More podcasts from
iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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