September 22, 2023 • 66 mins
SERIES 2 EPISODE 41: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump has gotten up in Iowa and announced if he again seizes power he will invoke the Alien Enemies Act and declare America has been INVADED and quote “immediately” detain and deport non-citizens of his choice who are older than 14 Not undocumented immigrants.
Non-citizens.
People who are here legally. People who are working TOWARDS becoming citizens. DACA’s and Dreamers and Refugees and Immigrants. At his sole discretion: The Alien Enemies Act gives the president the authority to detain ANYONE – but on the pretext that he is “removing all known or suspected gang members… drug dealers, cartel members from the United States…” Suspected. Suspected by him. So, anybody who isn’t a citizen. Anybody. Anybody. Anybody out of 22,000,000 non-citizens. The president immediately gains this power for himself, when he quote “makes public proclamation” that a quote “invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation”and THAT is why you hear the Boeberts and Greenes and Stephen Millers talk endlessly of “invasion” and Trump’s rivals climb all over each other to threaten war-by-other-names against Mexico.
Oh but Trump didn't do it last time! History is littered with the bones – literally – of those who thought that because a madman did not do the most mad thing he said he would do… THAT time that he’d never do it. It is its own form of madness to think Trump’s first actual policy statement in nearly three years that wasn’t about the 2020 election is just for show. It is its own form of madness to forget Trump’s promise of retribution, and his own burning, seething, sadistic, animating sense of vengeance.
And where do these detained non-citizens go? These places would in fact be camps, of some kind, and the living arrangements would necessarily be cramped, crowded, congested, confined — oh, what IS the word I’m looking for?
Concentrated!
That’s it! The camps would be concentrated.
Camps. With Concentration.
B-Block (27:12) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Rupert Murdoch retires to become Chairman Emeritus of Fox and News Corp. This is a man so evil that a dying television playwright with three months to live literally said he named his cancer "Rupert" after Murdoch so he had something to fight, and that if he hadn't wanted to spend his last months creating a new series, he would've murdered Murdoch on behalf of mankind. This was 29 years ago.
This man is Osama Bin-Journalist. Stop rationalizing that he deserves some kind of praise because he dominated his field. So has Trump. So did Hitler. The story of writer Dennis Potter and Rupert - and how Rupert fired me personally, after I followed his rules. And may he burn in hell and the sooner the better.
C-Block (55:20) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: His delightful story of every great dog you had to - and willingly made - excuses for: "The Dog That Bit People."
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, issuing
correction on previous media coverage regarding Rupert Murdoch and the
(00:27):
terrorist group Fox News. You do not under any circumstances
quote gotta hand it to them. I will get to
Rupert a racist, a liar, a propagandist, a destroyer of worlds,
and he's being sanitized. But first, and more importantly, while
(00:50):
you were listening to the noise and I was listening
to the noise, Trump has gotten up in Iowa and
announced that if he again sees his power, he will
invoke the Alien Enemies Act and declared that this country
has been invaded and quote immediately unquote detain and deport
(01:11):
non citizens who are older than the age of fourteen,
not undocumented immigrants, non citizens, people who are here legally,
people who are working towards citizenship, dacas and dreamers and
(01:32):
refugees and immigrants, legal authorized immigrants. Trump has already promised
to somehow overrule coincidentally enough, the Fourteenth Amendment Clause one,
ensuring citizenship to anybody born here. He has already promised
camps in which to hide the homeless. Now declare an
invasion January twenty twenty five. Then deport and detain and
(01:57):
at his sole discretion. This is a new and somehow
more evil version of Trump's oldest appeal to the blind
hatred of his cult, who must find some other to
blame for the failures of their own lives. And this
new part suggests to me that this time he means it,
(02:18):
not because of the deport part, but because of the
detain part. Trump, especially a Trump back in power, especially
a Trump seeking an excuse not to seed power at
the end of his term or to just hand pick
a successor, would need a graphic, grotesque, ongoing, in your
(02:39):
face show to keep his cult both happy and fearful
and also keep up the false narrative of crisis or invasion.
And nothing could compare to camps of seized people, nearly
all of them Hispanic here in America, roundups followed by deportetions.
(03:05):
They are dramatic, but they are narrow focused roundups and
detention centers. Well, that is the raw meat Trump dreams of.
And the Alien Enemies Act, the last extant section of
the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of seventeen ninety eight,
was used to round up and expel foreign nationals and
(03:27):
immigrants from the countries that declared war on US in
World War II. And it was an inspiration, if not
a legal rationalization for the internment of Japanese Americans, one
of our collective darkest moments. So you see what the
escalation is for Trump and his like what he actually
(03:50):
is saying in Iowa, attack undocumented immigrants first, then move
on to people here legally on the pretext that he
and it would be him. The Alien Enemies Act gives
the President the authority to detain anyone, but on the
pretext that he is quote removing all known or suspected
(04:10):
gang members, drug dealers, cartel members from the United States.
This Act has been sitting there, coiled up under the
desk for two hundred and twenty five years, waiting for
someone to deploy it to purge and to terrorize. The President,
whoever it would be, immediately gains for himself the power
(04:31):
to purge and to terrorize when he quote makes public
proclamation that a quote invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted,
or threatened against the territory of the United States by
any foreign nation. And that is why you have heard
(04:52):
the Boberts and the Greens and the Stephen Millers talk
endlessly of invasion and why you've seen Trump's rivals climb
all over each other just to threaten war by any
other name against Mexico. That's all he needs. No congressional action,
no Republican majority in either House, no corrupt ruling purchased
(05:15):
from the Supreme Court. Trump has now promised that he will,
in January twenty twenty five, invoke the Alien Enemies Act
and grant himself the right to designate anybody suspected of
being a threat. Again, he says, gang's drugs, cartels. That's
not what the Act says. It is a kidnapped first
and let God sort them out kind of an act.
(05:38):
He grants himself the right to say who will be
quote apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies suspected
suspected by him anybody who is not a full fledged
(06:00):
citizen of the United States, anybody, buddy. There is one caveat.
As with so many things, this is hardly the first
time Trump has promised some authoritarian, fascist, racist, brutal assault
(06:20):
on American society. His first boast that he would enact
mass deportations came in August twenty fifteen. The anniversary was
last month, and you didn't send a card. By November
twenty fifteen, Trump had announced he would turn them all
over to a quote deportation force. He announced that in
(06:42):
a very odd venue and to loud support from his
greatest sick ephants and mainstreamers, the clowns on the set
of Mourning Joe, the original Trump liquors, Joe Scarborough and
Mica Scarborough. Trump has never, in reality effect did any
(07:05):
mass deportations. As recently as June of twenty nineteen, he
said he was delaying what had morphed into the quote
Trump removal process for another two weeks in hopes that
in that time congressional Republicans and Democrats could get together
and work out a solution to the southern border. And then,
after four years of this drum beat of threat, he
(07:27):
moved on, and then came COVID, and then he lost,
and now it's all back with this new twist and
another twist. Besides expanding the pool of victims to everyone
who is not a full fledged citizen, this invoking of
(07:48):
the Alien Enemies Act brings with it many twists. The
estimated population of undocumented immigrants eleven million, four hundred thousand,
the number of non citizens living here twice that, and
the roundup of the ones Trump suspects the ones. Trump,
the paranoid monster personally suspects that would only be part
(08:10):
of the big show he has planned. He would move
thousands of American troops from overseas to the US Mexico border.
He would bring back his travel band, but this time
there would be no mention of terrorists or Arab countries
or rogue states. This time it would be a travel
band to quote deny entry to all communists and Marxists
(08:33):
to the United States. Well, you know who he's called
communists and Marxists, members of the Democratic Party, and with
that he has the right to detain anyone he suspects.
(08:53):
It is comforting, especially after this, to look at all
the things Trump didn't do, all the evil things that
are of much more use to him and the scum
behind him as threats or promises or things he'll do
if only he'll send another twenty five dollars, or vote
for his guy in the midterms or the local races,
or vote for him in twenty twenty four twenty twenty
(09:14):
eight or I mean, look at the wall. If Trump's
cult had to participate in an up or down vote
on him based on the reality of his wall compared
to his promise about his wall, he would lose the
Republican nomination by about ninety to ten. But the threat
(09:34):
of the wall, the promise of the wall magic. Yet
history is littered with the bones, literally littered with the
bones of those who thought that because a madman did
not do the most mad thing he said he would
do that time, that he would never ever do it.
(09:58):
It is its own form of madness to think Trump's
first actual policy statement in nearly three years that isn't
about the god damned twenty twenty election is just for show.
It is its own form of madness to forget Trump's
promise of retribution in a second term and his own burning, seething, insane, sadistic,
(10:20):
animating sense of vengeance. The deportation of eleven million Americans,
the detention of up to twenty two million Americans, the
starting line of this whole, wretched, hateful, bigoted nightmare, that
which empowered the alt right and inflamed xenophobia and imperiled
(10:42):
something fundamental to this nation since the end of slavery,
the idea that if you were born here, you were
an American, mass deportation, mass detention, and how exactly would
that work. How exactly would you take eleven million Americans
and make them, you know, leave America, or take twenty
(11:06):
two million and detain them in America, especially if and
I'm going way out on a limb here, especially if
they know didn't want to leave or be detained. Eleven
million people, that is the population of the entire state
(11:28):
of Ohio, three and a half percent of the population
of all of US. Trump has never said how he
would do any of this, no policy, no guidance about
this to be gleaned from any Trump website at any time,
anything from the campaign, anything from his years in office,
other than one of his surrogates stating in twenty sixteen
(11:51):
that about two million people would be targeted for immediate deportation,
and Trump's claims that he would deport any undocumented American
accused of a crime at that time, not convicted, just accused.
Warning echoes of this new detention of suspected gang members.
And the original plan was to quote triple the number
of immigrations and customs enforcement agents. But Trump was insisting
(12:16):
all that time that quote, We're going to do that
in a very humane fashion. Believe me, I have a
bigger heart than you do. By the way. The Trump
surrogate who promised the two million deportations as soon as
he was in office in early twenty seventeen. The Trump
surrogate who said that, Chris Christie, there is something instructive,
(12:40):
someone instructive to mention here. When I think of Trump
and immigration and his humanity and his promises to his cult,
I always think of a man named Roberto Beristain, who
was described by its mayor as one of the model
citizens of South Bend, Indiana. Restaurant owner there Steakhouse, an
(13:00):
immigrant early forties, an accidental criminal because at Niagara Falls
once he unknowingly stepped into Canadian territory. His wife voted
for Trump in twenty sixteen. Trump deported him in twenty seventeen.
(13:20):
She may have been the original I didn't think the
leopards would eat my face American, and she actually said
quote he did say, the good people would not be deported,
the good people would be checked. She left with her
husband to Mexico and near as I can tell they
are still there. They've pretty much forgotten Roberto in Indiana.
(13:44):
A friend bought the restaurant. It closed two januaries ago. Anyway,
a generous estimate is there are one hundred thousand agents
doing this stuff now. So from Trump's original promise in
twenty fifteen, we triple that to three hundred thousand, three
hundred thousand, two human mainly round up eleven million undocumented
(14:07):
Americans or twenty two million non citizens. That would be
thirty seven undocumented Americans or seventy four non citizen Americans
per agent. If you triple the number of agents, if
somehow the whole process from finding these people to apprehending them,
(14:27):
to giving them whatever is left of due process in
this world, to maybe an appeal to the transportation to
the expulsion, say that's only going to take six months
per undocumented person. In that event, Trump's deportation force could
humanely get the job done in only nineteen years. Now.
(14:49):
The new suspected alien enemies, they would presumably be rounded
up faster because they don't have rights under the Alien
Enemies Act. Only Trump would have rights. Presuming that is
all the undocumented Americans or the non citizens, Americans cooperate,
and all of their friends cooperate, and relatives cooperate, and
(15:13):
employers cooperate, and ordinary Americans who think it is the
work of the devil to round up and expel people
or incarcerate them, who risk their lives to get here
and are willing to live their lives in the shadows
to stay here, presuming they all also cooperate when the
trucks come out for their friends and neighbors, and that
one guy at the store who's eligible for his citizenship
(15:35):
in twenty twenty five. Now, no matter what numbers and
dates are actually realistic, there is another scenario in which
Trump's ethnic cleansing I'm sorry, I meant to say Trump's
humane deportation, in which the humane deportation could be concluded
by roughly twenty thirty five or so, there is still
(15:56):
one giant humane problem looming in the background. These eleven
or twenty two million people. They're not simply going to
line up on a given day and march out of
the country. And the point of the twenty two million
non citizens is to round them up and keep them somewhere.
(16:22):
However many of them there are, you are going to
have to take these people and remove them from our society,
from the schools, from the workplaces, from the trains, from
the businesses, from the building you live in, go to
their homes, and, for want of a better word, capture them.
(16:43):
Capture as many people as now live in the state
of Ohio, or if it's the full twenty two million,
as many people now live in the state of Florida,
and take them somewhere else until the process of expulsion
from the country is complete. If you really intend to
expel them, Is Donald Trump thinking of humanly keeping them
(17:06):
in his humane hotels? No? No, there'd have to be
humane deportation and detention centers of some kind, wouldn't there.
These would, I guess, have to be for a lot
of a better word, camps of some kind, and the
(17:28):
living arrangements would necessarily be cramped and crowded and congested
and confined. And what is the word I'm looking for, concentrated.
That's it. The camps would have to be concentrated where
people would be humanly held in, you know, concentrated places
(17:51):
where the deportee residents and alien enemies were in a
humane state of being concentrated, where these humane camps had
the quality of concentration camps with and unless you want
these camps with concentration to just hemorrhage every dollar, there
(18:14):
are going to have to be a lot of these
camps with concentration all around the country to make the
transportation easier. Places to round up and humanely Keep the
four hundred thousand undocumented immigrants that are in Dallas, or
the four hundred thousand more from Houston, or the eight
(18:35):
hundred thousand non citizens from New York City that's sixty
percent more New Yorkers than live on Staten Island, you know,
keep them somewhere in camps with concentration. Some of the
camps would have to be big enough to fit all
the residents of Atlanta in them, or Kansas City or
Cleveland or New Orleans. Now, you might not need to
(18:57):
house all eleven or twenty two million, because I guess
inevitably some of the people would kill themselves rather than
go back, or would resist the roundup and would be
killed humanly. I'm sure. Still, you'd better make the camps
with concentration just a little better, because well, sorry, I
(19:21):
think it would be necessary just to make the process
go more smoothly and more humanely, to make it illegal
to you know, help or hide anybody accused of being
an undocumented American or a non citizen. Maybe Trump would
make it illegal to not proactively turn in any undocumented
Americans or non citizens, and anybody guilty of one of
those crimes would also go into the same camps too,
(19:45):
the camps, you know, the camps with concentration. But don't worry,
Trump intends to do it humanly. These would be humane
camps with concentration in your neighborhood, behind the barbed wire,
(20:08):
and what could possibly go wrong in signed them? It'll
be done humanly. The other headlines as the Republicans in
the House moved towards shutting down the government and ousting
Kevin McCarthy and making I don't know Paul Gozar speaker,
(20:35):
as McCarthy played along with Trump's insistence that somebody publicly
investigate Joe Biden. You know what President Zelensky would not do,
but Kevin McCarthy is doing. And McCarthy made Congress meet
with Selensky at the National Archives yesterday because anywhere bigger,
and the twenty eight Russian Republicans who vowed to not
give Ukraine another dollar yesterday led by that slobbish idiot
(20:55):
jd Vance would get mad and McCarthy maybe will defund
the government and claim that means the Special Counsel's Office
is defunded forever. In a day, as all that unfolded,
McCarthy actually said this, I mean talk about missus Roberto
Beristain Kevin McCarthy, who was also in club, I didn't
(21:18):
think the leopards would eat my face. I don't understand
why anybody votes against bringing the idea and having the debate,
and then you got all the amiens. If you don't
like to do this is a whole new concept of
individuals that just want to burn the birth place down.
It doesn't work. I mean when we said burn it
all down, I thought everybody knew you. You wouldn't burn
(21:39):
my house down. Moron looks like the bird that just
flew into your window. In Atlanta, Ken Cheesebrough's lawyers submitted
a roster of witnesses in his defense in the trial
of the Trump nineteen Boris Epstein and Ron McDonald made
(22:01):
the cut, congratulations, you two wacky kids. In the same case,
the fake elector David Schaeffer presented one of those defenses
where you say no, no, no defense means say something
that won't get you convicted, to quote the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Because of that, neither the Democratic nor Republican electors were official.
(22:22):
Schaeffer's attorney, Craig Gillen said at that point it was
up to Congress to pick the proper electors. If both
houses of Congress agreed on the winner, that was the
official slate. He said. If the houses couldn't agree, then
and only then would Governor Kemp's certified slate become official. Yeah. No, no, no,
that's exactly the opposite of the law. You're saying that
(22:45):
your client did exactly what the prosecution is charging him with,
and he's going to go to jail now. And in
the same case, Sidney Powell is beside herself because, as
she told the court, these little charges against her racketeering, trespass,
(23:06):
invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the State of Georgia,
conspiracy to commit computer theft, and conspiracy to commit election fraud.
Why these little petty complaints, She's already being treated like
a criminal because of them. She had one of those
easy pass thingies from the TSA, the one that lets
you go through the private security line at the airports
(23:26):
where you don't have to mix with the prolls. I
mean it was clear or pre check or Global Entry
or one of them, something like that, and TSA. After
these charges took it away from her, she has to
go stand in the grown up line as if she
were a common criminal. Don't worry, Sydney Powell. Nobody thinks
(23:49):
you're a common criminal. Also of interest here, I have
two words for Rupert Murdoch, douche and bag x. This
is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Olberman postscripts to
(24:20):
the News Dateline News Corp Headquarters, Sixth Avenue, New York,
New York. Rupert Murdoch will retire to become Chairman Emeritus
of News Corporation and Chairman Emeritus of Fox and Boy.
Am I already sick of it, sick of the encomia.
Eh business giant, maybe the most powerful man in the
(24:42):
world's success on three continents, reshaped an entire business field,
no stop. The man did more damage to this country
than al Qaeda. All of this Trump, Fox News, the
right wing propaganda factory, the corrupted Supreme Court putin trying
(25:02):
to take over Elon Musk, understanding that he's just a
maladjusted clown with money. Kevin McCarthy government shutdowns, the Alien
Enemies Act, the Republican Party dissolving into a series of
ever more reprehensible Russian assets, capable of nothing but performance art,
not even good at goddamned that that's all on him.
(25:26):
You want the entire list of good things Rupert Murdoch
did in his life, You ready here it is the
entire list of good things. Rupert Murdoch did the constant
scorebug on sports telecasts. That's it, by the way. That
(25:47):
was the idea of a man named David Hill. Murdoch
just approved it. Everything else he was a dishonest, petulant, destructive, dishonest, racist, manipulative, fraudulent, dishonest, fascist, vengeful,
black hearted, dishonest asshole. And those are the compliments. The
(26:13):
only reason there are people trying to find something else
good to say about this asshole is that stupid series Succession. No,
the character of the old executive humanized Ruber Mayo was crap.
The series was crap. I've worked in television since nineteen
(26:33):
eighty one. I was in American television before this schmuck
Murdoch was I will tell you simply that not one
member of the what was it, the roy family, Not
one of the characters, nothing in the script, none of
their performances led me to believe for one second that
any of the characters could possibly be successful in some
(26:54):
alternate version of television or media in this country. Know,
as the artists say, verisimilitude. I never found myself believing
any of it could possibly be true. Succession well way
more suck than Session, but it's sanitized Rupert Murdoch, and
(27:16):
we hear people saying nice things about him worst person
in the world because if he isn't the most evil
human of the last half century, it's Trump. And frankly,
without Murdoch, there's no Trump. So I don't know. I
will say. When I read his note to the employees
(27:37):
of Fox, I was briefly encouraged. Oh I am announcing
I will transition. What transition? Well that's a hell of
a plot twist, Ah, Chairman Emeritus. Half that I do
know that a genuinely talented television writer, who would I
(27:59):
think have said the same thing about Succession excuse me
suck Session as I did. I'm supposed to believe this
man is Rupert Murdoch. I worked for Rupert Murdoch. I'm
supposed to believe this because he has six framed copies
of a newspaper front page on his wall and a
TV and he has the same number of kids as
Rupert Murdoch. How did you all manage the effort involved
(28:23):
spend two entire days writing four seasons of that trek.
That writer, he did this as he was dying, as
he knew he was dying. He did this about Rupert Murdoch.
Quote my main cancer, the dying writer told the television interviewer,
I call it Rupert. At the end of March nineteen
(28:48):
ninety four, this writer, his name was Dennis Potter, gave
perhaps the most extraordinary interview in history, certainly in the
history of television. Dennis Potter was once a London newspaper reporter.
He was the playwright of some television masterpieces, especially The
Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven and Weeks earlier, he'd
(29:08):
been diagnosed with untreatable terminal pancreatic cancer, and it had
already spread throughout his body. He was interviewed by Melvin
Bragg of Channel four in the UK, and as he
was being interviewed, Dennis Potter was dying. He was drinking
from a flask of liquid morphine. The interview aired on
(29:30):
April fourth, nineteen ninety four, and Dennis Potter died exactly
two months and three days later. Entire interview is indescribable
in its honesty and its clarity, and its sincerity and
in vernacular that did not really exist in nineteen ninety four.
It is indescribable for the lack of f's Dennis Potter
gave quote. One of the favorite fantasy plots of a
(29:54):
writer is a character is told you've got three months
to live, which is what I was told. Who would
you kill? I call my cancer the main on the
pancreast one. I call it Rupert so I can get
close to it, because that man Murdoch is the one
who if I had time. In fact, I've got too
(30:15):
much writing to do and I haven't got the energy,
but I would shoot the bugger if I could, unquote
put that in your and call me for Rupert Murdoch
television play right, name just cancer after Rupert Murdoch, and
it's humanized by his succession. Nineteen ninety four this was
(30:38):
America barely had any idea who Rupert Murdoch was in
nineteen ninety four. I mean, he owned the New York Post,
and he made it terrible and dumber that it had
been before, dumber than any American paper had been before.
He had bought a bunch of local TV stations that
had been owned by Metromedia. He strung together a kind
of a fourth television network, but not really. It had
a lot of sports, It had The Simpsons, and it
(30:59):
had like four other non sports shows. By the night
of April fourth, nineteen ninety four, as Dennis Potter was
heard telling the British interviewer Melboyn Bragg my main cancer,
I call it Rupert. If I had at the time,
I would shoot the bugger if I could. By that
exact hour, Rupert Murdoch was already beginning to formulate plans
(31:19):
for a twenty four hour channel in this country to
be named Fox News, which ultimately had the same kind
of bitter, taunting, oxymoronic imbecility in its name that is
contained in the phrase military intelligence Fox News. Back in
(31:41):
the UK, Dennis Potter was still giving his farewell address
about the man he would have shot if he'd had time. Quote,
there is no one person more responsible for the pollution
what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution
of the British press is as important a part of
the pollution of British political life, and it's an important
part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities
(32:02):
that is destroying so much of our political discourse. Sound familiar,
strong stuff for anybody, even a dying man who was
reinforcing himself with liquid morphine. But that was not the
first time Dennis Potter had taken Murdoch on. The year before,
on that same British network Channel four, it had given
(32:25):
an episode of its half hour series Opinions to Dennis Potter,
and he spent much of the time talking about quote
that drivel merchant, global huckster and so to speak, media psychopath,
Rupert Murdoch. There is an avid wetmouth down market slide
(32:45):
that began its giddiest descent the day marauding Rupert Murdoch
first left his paw marks on these shores and dragged
so many others towards the sewers, where too many of
his two craven employees have their natural habitat. It is
like he is describing Fox News and everything that is followed,
all of the both sides ism, the stuff you see
(33:09):
on the real networks, the NBC's CBS, ABC, CNN, that's
all because of Rupert Murdoch nineteen ninety four. And this
dying man named the cancer that would kill him Rupert,
so it had an identity he could hate and fight
against and exploit in order to express the menace that
(33:29):
he perceived Rupert Murdoch to be then and if he
had time, he said he would have killed him on
behalf of humanity twenty nine years ago, twenty nine years
of fatal damage ago. And it was five years before
I went to work for Rupert Murdoch anyway, even though
I had a tape of the Potter interview, and I
(33:52):
swear the book I read on the plane to go
to LA to go work for Rupert Murdoch was the
biography of Dennis Potter. See, I had finally convinced NBC
that I was serious about but I was not going
to no longer host its Monica Lewinsky Show. In nineteen
ninety eight, and the head of NBC Sports, Dick Ebersol,
had a great solution. He knew his friends at Fox
(34:14):
were longing to have me as the frontman for their
version of Sports Center, and so he proposed the following
NBC would give my agent ten days to negotiate two deals.
A deal for me to go to LA and host
Fox Sports News and Major League Baseball on Fox, and
another deal in which Fox would pay NBC a million
dollars for my contract like I was a baseball utility infielder.
(34:38):
And amazingly it worked. I got what was then a
record breaking salary for any cable sportscaster. Ever, NBC got
its million dollars, and maybe most startlingly, NBC then asked
me to stay on the air as a lame duck
for six weeks. Throughout my career, no matter how abrasive
the exit, my lame duck employers have always, for some
(34:59):
reason trusted me to stay on their air, even though
I was leaving. When I left LA in the f
first place on local news. I did this for three
months anyway. At first, Fox Sports was a delight. Their
news guys, and I mean Roger Ayles and his henchman,
John Moody. They pitched me on doing stuff for them
(35:21):
they wanted to see if I would co anchor with
Bill O'Reilly. I passed. But at four at Sports we
spent money. I worked with friends. I didn't have to
talk about politics. I could just narrate the highlights. I
could do funny voices. I lived on the beach. I
did the baseball game of the week, and went to
the All Star Game, in the World Series and everything else.
(35:44):
And every time there was a newspaper story about ESPN,
there was also my picture next to Chris Berman's, next
to Dan Patrick's, next to Whoever's, with a caption like
challenging ESPN. It was great. But then two things happened.
The Fox guy who knew that we were going to
need a minimum of five years just to get people
(36:06):
to know us, just to tie ESPN in the ratings.
Maybe he took me to lunch one day and he said, sorry, mate,
well missus is moving back to England tomorrow. I swear
he sounded like this. His then was Tony Ball, She's
going back without me, so I'm going with it. Good luck, mate.
(36:26):
He was replaced by guys, including David Hill, the score
bug guy, who replaced the five year plan with what
was a five week plan to raise the ratings by
one fifth of one point so they could raise the
price of the commercials twenty dollars each. I literally left
(36:47):
the meeting in which they explained their suicidal plan, and
they also revealed to me that my salary represented twenty
percent of their entire budget, which meant they didn't have
enough money to do the show. I left that meeting,
got to a phone, called my real estate agent and
put my house on the beach up for sale. But
(37:07):
I kept doing the job. Later, in nineteen ninety nine,
I broke a story everybody laughed at. Michael Jordan was
unhappy in retirement and he wanted to come back to
the NBA, and instead of getting a salary, he wanted
an ownership stake and a team. Two years later he
did that. Two thousand, I got to host the first
Mets Yankees World Series, and we were just gearing up
for the two thousand and one series and the two
(37:28):
thousand and one season before it, because we had just
run the rights to all of the World Series forever.
They're still doing the World Series on Fox. Just gearing
up for two thousand and one and the potential to
do the World Series every year for the next twenty
five years when I got a tip on April twentieth,
two thousand and one, that the owners of the La
Dodgers had put the team up for sale unofficially and
(37:50):
in fact they were talking to the old owners, the
O'Malley family, about taking the Dodgers off their hands. This
was a great scoop. Unfortunately it had great danger because
the owners of the Dodgers were Fox, Rupert Murdoch, my employer. HMM.
(38:11):
So the next day I made about one hundred phone
calls to make sure that there was something to this story,
and sure enough I got a friend of a friend
of a friend of my agent to confirm that he
and his family were in preliminary discussions alongside the O'Malley's
to buy the Dodgers back from Fox. I had two sources,
one of them in the deal. Great scoop, Dodgers for sale.
(38:36):
And that night I reached out to my bosses and
I said, so, uh, what do we uh? What do
we do here? What the hell do we do here?
The story is solid. The Dodgers are for sale. I
have no no doubt Rupert has put them up for sale.
He just hasn't done it officially yet hei they're talking
to the O'Malleys, I just talked to this agent. Mmmm hmmmm.
(38:58):
But look, this is this is your candy store, Fox
Fox Sports. You signed the checks I worked for you.
If if you don't want me to report this, I'm
obviously not going to report this and I'm not going
to pout. I'm not going to give it to somebody else.
Somebody will figure it out, but I'm not going to
give it to them. And my boss's reply was good
for you. Why don't we all get on the phone
(39:22):
with New York We see we get Rupert on the phone,
and if not, he has his own Personal News Corp
Public relations department. Let's see what they say. What are
the rules? This has to have come up before somewhere
in the company. So on Sunday, April twenty second, two
thousand and one, we got Murdoch's own PR guy on
the blower and I explained it to him and he said, well,
(39:42):
Rupert's on her world cruise. And in any event, he
has a policy about this. He never interferes in editorial decisions,
not even in sourced business stories, not even if they
involve him or touch on the company, so long as
you make clear that your sources are not from within
the company, because that's a money issue and a legal
(40:04):
regulars issue. So long as you are confident in your sources,
so long as you include our denial, you should proceed
with this story. That is what we are paying you for.
And I thought, for a moment, perhaps I have misjudged
Rupert Murdoch. I mean, he had a reputation as a journalist.
(40:29):
Good lord, that's what I heard at every corner yesterday,
three four thousand times. Well, yes, he's Satan, but Satan
is a journalist. Jerry was a Obama bin journalist, but
he kept reporters employed. That moment that I thought I
had misjudged Rupert Murdoch turned out to be a very
brief moment and a very wrong moment. I reported the
(40:52):
story that night. My story was only about a minute long.
The crafted Fox denial of this was like a minute
forty five read all of it? How of denials? Five
days later, the Long Beach Press Telegram had its own
story headlined, despite denials, Dodgers are for sale, and it
(41:16):
had far more details than I had. And that really
was was the end of it. The team was unofficially
for sale. Dodger fans who hated what Fox and Murdoch
had done to the team seemed happy about that. And
the vast, stinking pile of burning excrement that was Fox
and News Corp. And Rupert Murnox sailed on unperturbed, isn't
here as I could tell. And twelve days after that,
(41:39):
just before I was getting into the car to go
to the first Fox Baseball meeting for our two thousand
and one season, the president of Fox Sports, this same guy,
David Hill, the score bug guy, calls my agent and
tells a christ not doing any baseball for us this year.
Business decision click click in Australian end of conversation. Nothing else,
(42:03):
no explanation, no firing, no get out, no clean out
your desk, no announcement. And then two days later they
turned off my access to the Fox computer system. And
four days after they called and canceled my cable show.
And then that night and got two weird calls from
Richard Sandomir, who was then the TV sports critic and
TV sports business reporter for the New York Times. When
(42:26):
the New York Times did sports, and when there were
TV sports critics and Rich asks me, so, did you
know you were fired by Rupert Murdoch personally? And I said,
with genuine astonishment that not only didn't I know that,
but that, even given my thoughts about him, I did
not believe that. Ah, that's what my source is at Fox.
Tell me, apparently your Dodger story really pissed him off,
(42:50):
but really, and I said I had cleared it through
his personal PR guy. Why would that be the case?
And he goes, I don't know. Apparently he was on vacation.
He got back like May ninth, he read all these
stories about the Dodgers being for sale and how Fox
Sports it was the first report it, and called up
David Hill and he told him to fire you immediately.
And I told Rich, this the first time I've heard this,
(43:11):
and I still don't. I don't. I'm not saying I
don't believe it. I'm saying I don't believe this is true,
even though the day he mentioned was May ninth, and
May ninth was the day David Hill had called my
agent as I was going into the baseball meeting and
told her I would not be doing baseball for Fox
that year. Hmmm. Now, an hour later, the phone rings,
(43:35):
and again it's Rich Sandomir and now he sounds shaken.
I got it wrong. I don't have any sources at
Fox who told me Rupert fired you personally. My source
said that you you were telling people Rupert had fired
you personally about the Dodger story. And now I gave
Rich a series of uh huh, and I said, no,
(43:58):
I didn't, and no, You've never been dumb enough in
your life to make the mistake you're saying you just made.
And he said, well, I never said somebody had Fox
said Murdock fired you. Okay, thanks by click in American.
The next day they had me come into Fox and
clean out my office while guard watched. She was very nice.
She brought donuts. As I packed, I thought more and
(44:20):
more of what had happened in the months since I
had gotten the tip about the Dodgers being for sale.
As I left the Fox lot for the last time
as an employee, I went back a couple of times
to attend table reads for the Simpsons much more fun.
I called a couple of reporters I knew, and I
called my agent, and I called some people in the business,
and we tried to put together a timeline of what
(44:40):
had happened. That made some sense, because the slow motion
firing thing. May ninth, you're not doing baseball. May eleventh,
your computer doesn't work. May fifteenth, your cable show is canceled.
May sixteenth, clean out your office. That made no sense
until one reporter friend said, you know, Fox called me
and said, call Keith up and provoke him. Get him
(45:00):
to call us names, tell him about this story in
that paper, calling washed up, get him going. And then
it all clicked. My contract ran through the end of
the year. And because Fox was firing me without cause,
without any violation of my contract, certainly without any violation
of their rules, I was on with Murdock's vice president
(45:23):
talking about the rules. Because I had left a trail
of good behavior on the Dodger story. They were trying
to enrage me, to get me to say something nasty
that would be a violation of my contract so they
could outright fire me and keep the money. And the
money was about eight hundred thousand dollars. Now, after decades
(45:45):
of contemplating this and living it, I'm confident I am
no crazier than the next guy, but on my worst craziest,
least rational day, and I'm nearly sixty five years old.
If you said you have two choices, you can blow
up these people who are firing you. You can make
them look bad in a newspaper for a day and
(46:05):
then they'll fire you and they'll keep all the money
they owe you. Or you can keep your big bazoo
shut for seven months, keep eight hundred thousand dollars, and
then spend the rest of your natural life blowing these
people up. If that's the choice, I would always take
the scenario that gives me the eight hundred thousand dollars. Always,
(46:30):
Who wouldn't Till on January first, two thousand and two,
after the last Fox check cleared, I began making a
professional avocation out of attacking Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox Business,
Fox Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, Fox, O'Reilly, Fox, Tucker Carlson, Fox, whatever,
And I got the eight hundred thousand. But they're lingered
(46:52):
for years this rather academic question of whether Rupert Murdoch
had actually fired me for following the rules set out
by Rupert Murdoch's personal pr guy. As usual in life,
these things resolved themselves when you least expect them to.
Murdoch was speaking at the Dow Jones Conference in Carlsbad, California,
on May twenty eight, two thousand and eight, and a
(47:14):
story came across the wire with my name on it,
and the guy interviewing him talked about whether there should
be dissenting voices on Fox quote news unquote, like that
guy who was killing it on MSNBC Keith Alderman, and
Rupert Murdoch went crazy. Now, he barked, I fired him
five years ago. He was crazy. Timing was off close.
(47:39):
I mean he was able to remember the details, if
not the exact time frame, But there it was. Rupert
Murdoch confessed he had fired me personally. He was giving
me the red badge of courage a little late, but
there it was. And I wondered and hoped maybe it
still pisses him off that he had to pay me
the eight hundred grand when I wouldn't take the bait
about grievance. And three years later Rupert said it again.
(48:04):
February first, twenty eleven, He's being interviewed by his business
talking head Neil Kavudo, who for some reason asked him
if he would consider hiring me for Fox News. I
had just left MSNBC. Now we fired him once. We
don't believe in firing people twice. Kavodo replied, you called
him a nut. Well, he was a nut on we
had him on late night Fox Sports. It was never
(48:26):
any such show as Late night Fox Sports. But never mind,
disagree with him and he'd fire you. Rupert went on,
it was impossible. I fired him. He was crazy, fired
me for following his rules, and I was the one
who was crazy. And now he belongs to the ages.
(48:49):
Oh but the show humanized him. It sucked. He sucks.
To hell with them as soon as possible. And speaking
of crazy, I have a love hate relationship with the
name Keith. But did you know that Murdoch's real first
name is also Keith, But that rather than call himself Keith,
(49:15):
he has for ninety two years voluntarily chosen to call
himself Rupert. I mean, sure my name is Keith, that
at least it ain't freaking rupert that they're going to
(49:38):
write on my grave coming up Fridays with Thurber At first,
a quick announcement. I'll explain this in full detail as
soon as I can. And I preface this by saying,
there's nothing wrong with my health, though I could use
a little break here from my throat, especially after doing
(49:58):
the Rupert Murdoch voice. The dogs are fine, audience is
still growing. I like doing this. My boss, well, my
boss is me, but I am going to scale this
podcast down to four days a week for now at least.
I'll explain it in full later, but the plan is
new episodes Tuesday through Friday. That'd be Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
and Friday. Frankly, the Monday one is kind of lame anyway,
(50:21):
and it's the least listened to of the five. And
if there's important news over the weekend, I will do
one anyway on Monday, coming out Sunday night. But from
here on in the regular schedule be Monday a little
bit after midnight Eastern, Tuesday midnight Eastern, Wednesday midnight Eastern,
Thursday midnight Eastern. And as always, thanks for listening to
any of them, and I will explain it in full later.
(50:43):
But okay, Thurber, that's next. This is Countdown to the
number one story on the Countdown and Fridays with Thurber.
And it's amazing to me in retrospect how I read
all of his wonderful, realistic, not goopy writing about dogs,
(51:04):
and I thoroughly years before I was ever adopted by
a dog. Now reading his dog stories and anecdotes is
like reading about a bunch of friends, even that one
surly friend for whom we must continuously make excuses. The
(51:26):
dog that bit people by James Thurber. Probably no one
man should have as many dogs in this life as
I have had, But there was more pleasure than distress
in them for me, except in the case of an
Airdale named Mugs. He gave me more trouble than all
(51:47):
the other fifty four or five put together. Although my
moment of keenest embarrassment was the time a Scotch Terrier
named Jeanie, who had just had six puppies in the
clothes closet of a fourth floor apartment in New York,
had the unexpected seventh and last at the corner of
Eleventh Street and Fifth Avenue during a walk she had
(52:09):
insisted on taking. Then two there was the prize winning
French poodle, a giant, big black poodle, none of your little,
untroublesome white miniatures, who got sick riding in the rumble
seat of a car with me on her way to
the Greenwich dog show. She had a red rubber bib
tucked around her throat, and since a rainstorm came up
(52:29):
when we were halfway through the Bronx, I had to
hold over her a small green umbrella, really more of
a parasol. The rain beat down fearfully, and suddenly the
driver of the car drove into a big garage filled
with mechanics. It happened so quickly that I forgot to
put the umbrella down, and I will always remember with
(52:51):
sickening distress the look of incredulity mixed with hatred that
came over the face of the particular hardened garage man
that came over to see what we wanted when he
took a look at me and the poodle. All garage
men and people of that intolerant stripe hate poodles with
(53:11):
their curious haircuts, especially the pom poms that you got
to leave on their hips if you expect the dogs
to win a prize. But the Airdale, as I have said,
was the worst of all my dogs. He really wasn't
my dog. Matter of fact, I came home from a
vacation one summer to find that my brother Roy had
(53:31):
bought him while I was away the big, burly, choleric dog.
He always acted as if he thought I wasn't one
of the family. There was a slight advantage in being
one of the family, for he didn't bite the family
as often as he bit strangers. Still, in the years
that we had him, he bit everybody but Mother, and
(53:52):
he made a pass at her once but missed. It
was during the month when we suddenly had mice, and
Mugs refused to do anything about them. Nobody ever had
mice exactly like the mice we had that month. They
acted like pet mice, almost like mice somebody had trained.
They were so friendly that one night, when Mother entertained
(54:14):
at dinner the Freer Realilras, a club she and my
father had belonged to for twenty years, she put down
a lot of little dishes with food in them on
the pantry floor so that the mice would be satisfied
with that and would not come into the dining room.
Mugs stayed out in the pantry with the mice lying
on the floor, growling to himself, not at the mice,
(54:37):
but about all the people in the next room that
he would have liked to get at. Mother slipped out
into the pantry once to see how everything was going.
Everything was going fine. It made her so mad to
see mugs lying there oblivious of the mice. They came
running up to her that she slapped him, and he
(54:57):
slashed at her, but didn't make it. He was sorry immediately.
Mother said he was always sorry, he said after he
bit someone. But we could not understand how she figured
this out. He didn't act sorry. Mother used to send
a box of candy every Christmas to the people. The
Airdale bit list finally contained forty or more names. Nobody
(55:21):
could understand why we did not get rid of the dog.
I didn't understand it very well myself, but we didn't
get rid of him. I think that one or two
people tried to poison Mugs. He acted poisoned once in
a while, and old Major Moberly fired at him once
with his service revolver near the Seneca Hotel and He's
Broad Street. But Muggs lived to almost eleven years old,
(55:45):
and even when he could hardly get around, he bit
a congressman who had called to see my father on business.
My mother had never liked the congressman. She said, the
signs of his horoscope showed he couldn't be trusted. He
was Saturn with the moon and Virgo. But she sent
him a box of candy that Chris anyway. He sent
(56:06):
it right back, probably because he suspected it was trick candy.
Mother persuaded herself that it was all for the best
that the dog had bitten him, even though father lost
an important business association because of it. I wouldn't be
associated with such a man, Mother said. Mugs could read
him lack a book. We used to take turns feeding
(56:28):
mugs to be on his good side, but that didn't
always work. He was never in a very good humor
even after a meal. Nobody knew exactly what was the
matter with him, but whatever it was, it made him irascible,
especially in the mornings. Roy my brother, never felt very
well in the morning either, especially before breakfast, And once
when he came downstairs and found that Mugs had moodily
(56:51):
chewed up the morning paper, he hit him in the
face with a grapefruit, and then jumped up on the
dining room table, scattering dishes and silverware and spilling the coffee.
Mugs first free leap carried him all the way across
the table and into a brass fire screen in front
of the gas grate. But he was back on his
(57:12):
feet in a moment, and in the end he got
roy and gave him a pretty vicious bite in the leg.
Then he was all over it. He never bid anyone
more than once at a time. Mother always mentioned that
as an argument in his favor. She said he had
a quick temper, but that he didn't hold a grudge.
She was forever defending him. I think she liked him
(57:33):
because he wasn't well. He's not strong, she would say, pityingly,
but that was inaccurate. He may not have been well,
but he was terribly strong. One time my mother went
to the Chittenden Hotel to call on a woman mental
healer who was lecturing in Columbus on the subject of
(57:55):
harmonious vibrations. She wanted to find out if it was
possible to get harmonious vibrations into a dog. He's a large,
tan colored airale, mother explained. The woman said that she
had never treated a dog, but she advised my mother
to hold the thought that he did not bite and
would not bite. Mother was holding the thought the very
(58:18):
next morning when Muggs got the iceman, but she blamed
that slip up on the iceman. If you didn't think
he would bite you, he wouldn't, Mother told him. He
stomped out of the house in a terrible jangle of vibrations.
One morning, when Mugs bit me slightly more or less
in passing, I reached down and grabbed his short, stumpy
(58:39):
tail and hoisted him into the air. It was a
foolhardy thing to do, and the last time I saw
my mother, about six months ago, she said she didn't
know what possessed me. I don't either, except that I
was pretty mad. As long as I held the dog
off the floor by his tail, he couldn't get at me.
But he twisted and jerked so snarling all the time
(59:01):
that I realized I couldn't hold him that way very long.
I carried him into the kitchen and flung him onto
the floor and shut the door on him just as
he crashed against it. But I forgot about the backstairs.
Mugs went up the backstairs and down the front stairs
and had me cornered in the living room. I managed
(59:23):
to get up out of the mantelpiece above the fireplace,
but it gave way and came down with a tremendous crash,
throwing a large marble clock, several vases, and myself heavily
to the floor. Mugs was so alarmed by the racket
that when I picked myself up, he had disappeared. We
couldn't find him anywhere, although we whistled and shouted until
(59:45):
old Missus Dettweiler called after dinner that night. Mugs had
bitten her once in the leg, and she came into
the living room only after we assured her that Mugs
had run away. She had just seated herself when with
great growling and scratching of claws, Mugs emerged from under
a davenport where he had been quietly hiding all the
(01:00:08):
time and bit her again. Mother examined the bite and
put arnica on it and told Missus Dettwiler that it
was only a bruise. He just bumped you, she said.
But Missus Dettwiler left our house in a nasty state
of mind. Lots of people reported our airdale to the police,
(01:00:29):
but my father held a municipal office at the time
and was on friendly terms with the police. Even so,
the cops had been out a couple of times, once
when Mugs bit missus rufus sturtevent and again when he
bit Lieutenant Governor Molloy. But Mother told him it hadn't
been Muggs's fault, but the fault of the people who
were bitten. When he starts for them, they scream, she explained,
(01:00:52):
and that excites him. The cops suggested that it might
be a good idea to tie the dog up, but
Mother said that it mortified him to be tied up,
and that he wouldn't eat when he was tied up.
Mugs at his meals was an unusual sight because of
the fact that if you reached toward the floor he
would bite you. We usually put his food plate on
(01:01:15):
top of an old kitchen table with a bench alongside
the table. Mugs would stand on the bench and eat.
I remember that my mother's uncle, Horatio, who boasted that
he was the third man up Missionary Ridge, was flutteringly
indignant when he found out that we fed the dog
on a table because we were afraid to put his
(01:01:35):
plate on the floor. He said he wasn't afraid of
any dog that ever lived, and that he would put
the dog's plate on the floor if we would give
it to him. Roy said that If Uncle Horatio had
fed Mugs on the ground just before the battle, he
would have been the first man up Missionary ridge. Uncle
Horatio was furious. Ray amen, bray amen, now, he shouted,
(01:01:58):
I'll feed them on the floor. Roy was all forgiving
him a chance. But my father wouldn't hear of it.
He said that Mugs had already been fed. I'll feed
them again, bawled Uncle Horatio. We had quite a time
quieting him. In his last year, Muggs used to spend
(01:02:19):
practically all of his time outdoors. He didn't like to
stay in the house for some reason or other. Perhaps
it held too many unpleasant memories for him. Anyway, it
was hard to get him to come in, and as
a result, the garbage man, the iceman, and the laundryman
would not come near our house. We had to haul
the garbage down to the corner, take the laundry out,
(01:02:40):
and bring it back and meet the iceman a block
from home. After this had gone on for some time,
we hit on an ingenious arrangement for getting the dog
in the house so that we could lock him up
while the gas meter was red and so on. Mugs
was afraid of only one thing, an electrical storm thunder
(01:03:04):
and light ning frightened him out of his senses. I
think he thought a storm had broken. The day the
mantelpiece fell, he would rush into the house and hide
under a bed or in a clothes closet. So we
fixed up a thunder machine out of a long, narrow
piece of sheet iron with a wooden handle on one end.
(01:03:24):
Mother would shake this vigorously when she wanted to get
Mugs into the house. It made an excellent imitation of thunder.
But I suppose it was the most roundabout system for
running a household that was ever devised. It took a
lot out of mother. A few months before Mugs died,
he got to seeing things. He would rise slowly from
(01:03:46):
the floor, growling low and stalk, stiff legged and menacing
toward nothing at all. Sometimes the thing would be just
a little to the right or left of a visitor.
Once a fuller brush salesman got hysterecks, Muggs came wandering
(01:04:06):
into the room like Hamlet, following his father's ghosts. His
eyes were fixed on a spot just to the left
of the fuller brush man, who stood it until Muggs
was about three. Slow creeping paces from him. Then he shouted.
Mugs wavered on past him into the hallway, grumbling to himself,
but the fuller man went on shouting. I think Mother
(01:04:28):
had to throw a pan of cold water on him
before he stopped. That was the way she used to
stop us boys when we got into fights. Muggs died
quite suddenly one night. Mother wanted to bury him in
the family lot under a marble stone with some such
inscription as flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,
but we persuaded her it was against the law. In
(01:04:51):
the end we just put up a smooth board above
his grave along a lonely road. On the board I
wrote with an indelible pencil, tave Kanum. Mother was quite
pleased with this sim classic dignity of the old Latin
epitaph The Dog that Bit People by James Thurber. I've
(01:05:28):
done all the damage I can do here. Thank you
for listening. The music you heard was, for the most
part arrange produced and performed by Countdown musical directors Brian
Ray and John Phillip Schanelle. Brian Ray handled the guitars,
bass and drums. John Phillip Shaneil did the orchestration, in
keyboards and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music,
including other Beethoven tunes, was arranged and performed by No
(01:05:50):
Horns Aloud. Sports music Will Played Again Someday is courtesy
of ESPN, Inc. And it was written by Mitch Warren Davis.
We call it the Olderman theme from ESPN two. Our
satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was my
friend Larry David. Everything else pretty much my fault. So
that's countdown for this, the nine hundred and ninetieth day
(01:06:12):
since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected
government of the United States. Convict him now before he
declares you an enemy alien, and while we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is Tuesday. Bulletin says the news
warrant still then on Keith Alderman, Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(01:06:44):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio, issuing
correction on previous media coverage regarding Rupert Murdoch and the
(00:27):
terrorist group Fox News. You do not under any circumstances
quote gotta hand it to them. I will get to
Rupert a racist, a liar, a propagandist, a destroyer of worlds,
and he's being sanitized. But first, and more importantly, while
(00:50):
you were listening to the noise and I was listening
to the noise, Trump has gotten up in Iowa and
announced that if he again sees his power, he will
invoke the Alien Enemies Act and declared that this country
has been invaded and quote immediately unquote detain and deport
(01:11):
non citizens who are older than the age of fourteen,
not undocumented immigrants, non citizens, people who are here legally,
people who are working towards citizenship, dacas and dreamers and
(01:32):
refugees and immigrants, legal authorized immigrants. Trump has already promised
to somehow overrule coincidentally enough, the Fourteenth Amendment Clause one,
ensuring citizenship to anybody born here. He has already promised
camps in which to hide the homeless. Now declare an
invasion January twenty twenty five. Then deport and detain and
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at his sole discretion. This is a new and somehow
more evil version of Trump's oldest appeal to the blind
hatred of his cult, who must find some other to
blame for the failures of their own lives. And this
new part suggests to me that this time he means it,
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not because of the deport part, but because of the
detain part. Trump, especially a Trump back in power, especially
a Trump seeking an excuse not to seed power at
the end of his term or to just hand pick
a successor, would need a graphic, grotesque, ongoing, in your
(02:39):
face show to keep his cult both happy and fearful
and also keep up the false narrative of crisis or invasion.
And nothing could compare to camps of seized people, nearly
all of them Hispanic here in America, roundups followed by deportetions.
(03:05):
They are dramatic, but they are narrow focused roundups and
detention centers. Well, that is the raw meat Trump dreams of.
And the Alien Enemies Act, the last extant section of
the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of seventeen ninety eight,
was used to round up and expel foreign nationals and
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immigrants from the countries that declared war on US in
World War II. And it was an inspiration, if not
a legal rationalization for the internment of Japanese Americans, one
of our collective darkest moments. So you see what the
escalation is for Trump and his like what he actually
(03:50):
is saying in Iowa, attack undocumented immigrants first, then move
on to people here legally on the pretext that he
and it would be him. The Alien Enemies Act gives
the President the authority to detain anyone, but on the
pretext that he is quote removing all known or suspected
(04:10):
gang members, drug dealers, cartel members from the United States.
This Act has been sitting there, coiled up under the
desk for two hundred and twenty five years, waiting for
someone to deploy it to purge and to terrorize. The President,
whoever it would be, immediately gains for himself the power
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to purge and to terrorize when he quote makes public
proclamation that a quote invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted,
or threatened against the territory of the United States by
any foreign nation. And that is why you have heard
(04:52):
the Boberts and the Greens and the Stephen Millers talk
endlessly of invasion and why you've seen Trump's rivals climb
all over each other just to threaten war by any
other name against Mexico. That's all he needs. No congressional action,
no Republican majority in either House, no corrupt ruling purchased
(05:15):
from the Supreme Court. Trump has now promised that he will,
in January twenty twenty five, invoke the Alien Enemies Act
and grant himself the right to designate anybody suspected of
being a threat. Again, he says, gang's drugs, cartels. That's
not what the Act says. It is a kidnapped first
and let God sort them out kind of an act.
(05:38):
He grants himself the right to say who will be
quote apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies suspected
suspected by him anybody who is not a full fledged
(06:00):
citizen of the United States, anybody, buddy. There is one caveat.
As with so many things, this is hardly the first
time Trump has promised some authoritarian, fascist, racist, brutal assault
(06:20):
on American society. His first boast that he would enact
mass deportations came in August twenty fifteen. The anniversary was
last month, and you didn't send a card. By November
twenty fifteen, Trump had announced he would turn them all
over to a quote deportation force. He announced that in
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a very odd venue and to loud support from his
greatest sick ephants and mainstreamers, the clowns on the set
of Mourning Joe, the original Trump liquors, Joe Scarborough and
Mica Scarborough. Trump has never, in reality effect did any
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mass deportations. As recently as June of twenty nineteen, he
said he was delaying what had morphed into the quote
Trump removal process for another two weeks in hopes that
in that time congressional Republicans and Democrats could get together
and work out a solution to the southern border. And then,
after four years of this drum beat of threat, he
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moved on, and then came COVID, and then he lost,
and now it's all back with this new twist and
another twist. Besides expanding the pool of victims to everyone
who is not a full fledged citizen, this invoking of
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the Alien Enemies Act brings with it many twists. The
estimated population of undocumented immigrants eleven million, four hundred thousand,
the number of non citizens living here twice that, and
the roundup of the ones Trump suspects the ones. Trump,
the paranoid monster personally suspects that would only be part
(08:10):
of the big show he has planned. He would move
thousands of American troops from overseas to the US Mexico border.
He would bring back his travel band, but this time
there would be no mention of terrorists or Arab countries
or rogue states. This time it would be a travel
band to quote deny entry to all communists and Marxists
(08:33):
to the United States. Well, you know who he's called
communists and Marxists, members of the Democratic Party, and with
that he has the right to detain anyone he suspects.
(08:53):
It is comforting, especially after this, to look at all
the things Trump didn't do, all the evil things that
are of much more use to him and the scum
behind him as threats or promises or things he'll do
if only he'll send another twenty five dollars, or vote
for his guy in the midterms or the local races,
or vote for him in twenty twenty four twenty twenty
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eight or I mean, look at the wall. If Trump's
cult had to participate in an up or down vote
on him based on the reality of his wall compared
to his promise about his wall, he would lose the
Republican nomination by about ninety to ten. But the threat
(09:34):
of the wall, the promise of the wall magic. Yet
history is littered with the bones, literally littered with the
bones of those who thought that because a madman did
not do the most mad thing he said he would
do that time, that he would never ever do it.
(09:58):
It is its own form of madness to think Trump's
first actual policy statement in nearly three years that isn't
about the god damned twenty twenty election is just for show.
It is its own form of madness to forget Trump's
promise of retribution in a second term and his own burning, seething, insane, sadistic,
(10:20):
animating sense of vengeance. The deportation of eleven million Americans,
the detention of up to twenty two million Americans, the
starting line of this whole, wretched, hateful, bigoted nightmare, that
which empowered the alt right and inflamed xenophobia and imperiled
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something fundamental to this nation since the end of slavery,
the idea that if you were born here, you were
an American, mass deportation, mass detention, and how exactly would
that work. How exactly would you take eleven million Americans
and make them, you know, leave America, or take twenty
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two million and detain them in America, especially if and
I'm going way out on a limb here, especially if
they know didn't want to leave or be detained. Eleven
million people, that is the population of the entire state
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of Ohio, three and a half percent of the population
of all of US. Trump has never said how he
would do any of this, no policy, no guidance about
this to be gleaned from any Trump website at any time,
anything from the campaign, anything from his years in office,
other than one of his surrogates stating in twenty sixteen
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that about two million people would be targeted for immediate deportation,
and Trump's claims that he would deport any undocumented American
accused of a crime at that time, not convicted, just accused.
Warning echoes of this new detention of suspected gang members.
And the original plan was to quote triple the number
of immigrations and customs enforcement agents. But Trump was insisting
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all that time that quote, We're going to do that
in a very humane fashion. Believe me, I have a
bigger heart than you do. By the way. The Trump
surrogate who promised the two million deportations as soon as
he was in office in early twenty seventeen. The Trump
surrogate who said that, Chris Christie, there is something instructive,
(12:40):
someone instructive to mention here. When I think of Trump
and immigration and his humanity and his promises to his cult,
I always think of a man named Roberto Beristain, who
was described by its mayor as one of the model
citizens of South Bend, Indiana. Restaurant owner there Steakhouse, an
(13:00):
immigrant early forties, an accidental criminal because at Niagara Falls
once he unknowingly stepped into Canadian territory. His wife voted
for Trump in twenty sixteen. Trump deported him in twenty seventeen.
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She may have been the original I didn't think the
leopards would eat my face American, and she actually said
quote he did say, the good people would not be deported,
the good people would be checked. She left with her
husband to Mexico and near as I can tell they
are still there. They've pretty much forgotten Roberto in Indiana.
(13:44):
A friend bought the restaurant. It closed two januaries ago. Anyway,
a generous estimate is there are one hundred thousand agents
doing this stuff now. So from Trump's original promise in
twenty fifteen, we triple that to three hundred thousand, three
hundred thousand, two human mainly round up eleven million undocumented
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Americans or twenty two million non citizens. That would be
thirty seven undocumented Americans or seventy four non citizen Americans
per agent. If you triple the number of agents, if
somehow the whole process from finding these people to apprehending them,
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to giving them whatever is left of due process in
this world, to maybe an appeal to the transportation to
the expulsion, say that's only going to take six months
per undocumented person. In that event, Trump's deportation force could
humanely get the job done in only nineteen years. Now.
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The new suspected alien enemies, they would presumably be rounded
up faster because they don't have rights under the Alien
Enemies Act. Only Trump would have rights. Presuming that is
all the undocumented Americans or the non citizens, Americans cooperate,
and all of their friends cooperate, and relatives cooperate, and
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employers cooperate, and ordinary Americans who think it is the
work of the devil to round up and expel people
or incarcerate them, who risk their lives to get here
and are willing to live their lives in the shadows
to stay here, presuming they all also cooperate when the
trucks come out for their friends and neighbors, and that
one guy at the store who's eligible for his citizenship
(15:35):
in twenty twenty five. Now, no matter what numbers and
dates are actually realistic, there is another scenario in which
Trump's ethnic cleansing I'm sorry, I meant to say Trump's
humane deportation, in which the humane deportation could be concluded
by roughly twenty thirty five or so, there is still
(15:56):
one giant humane problem looming in the background. These eleven
or twenty two million people. They're not simply going to
line up on a given day and march out of
the country. And the point of the twenty two million
non citizens is to round them up and keep them somewhere.
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However many of them there are, you are going to
have to take these people and remove them from our society,
from the schools, from the workplaces, from the trains, from
the businesses, from the building you live in, go to
their homes, and, for want of a better word, capture them.
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Capture as many people as now live in the state
of Ohio, or if it's the full twenty two million,
as many people now live in the state of Florida,
and take them somewhere else until the process of expulsion
from the country is complete. If you really intend to
expel them, Is Donald Trump thinking of humanly keeping them
(17:06):
in his humane hotels? No? No, there'd have to be
humane deportation and detention centers of some kind, wouldn't there.
These would, I guess, have to be for a lot
of a better word, camps of some kind, and the
(17:28):
living arrangements would necessarily be cramped and crowded and congested
and confined. And what is the word I'm looking for, concentrated.
That's it. The camps would have to be concentrated where
people would be humanly held in, you know, concentrated places
(17:51):
where the deportee residents and alien enemies were in a
humane state of being concentrated, where these humane camps had
the quality of concentration camps with and unless you want
these camps with concentration to just hemorrhage every dollar, there
(18:14):
are going to have to be a lot of these
camps with concentration all around the country to make the
transportation easier. Places to round up and humanely Keep the
four hundred thousand undocumented immigrants that are in Dallas, or
the four hundred thousand more from Houston, or the eight
(18:35):
hundred thousand non citizens from New York City that's sixty
percent more New Yorkers than live on Staten Island, you know,
keep them somewhere in camps with concentration. Some of the
camps would have to be big enough to fit all
the residents of Atlanta in them, or Kansas City or
Cleveland or New Orleans. Now, you might not need to
(18:57):
house all eleven or twenty two million, because I guess
inevitably some of the people would kill themselves rather than
go back, or would resist the roundup and would be
killed humanly. I'm sure. Still, you'd better make the camps
with concentration just a little better, because well, sorry, I
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think it would be necessary just to make the process
go more smoothly and more humanely, to make it illegal
to you know, help or hide anybody accused of being
an undocumented American or a non citizen. Maybe Trump would
make it illegal to not proactively turn in any undocumented
Americans or non citizens, and anybody guilty of one of
those crimes would also go into the same camps too,
(19:45):
the camps, you know, the camps with concentration. But don't worry,
Trump intends to do it humanly. These would be humane
camps with concentration in your neighborhood, behind the barbed wire,
(20:08):
and what could possibly go wrong in signed them? It'll
be done humanly. The other headlines as the Republicans in
the House moved towards shutting down the government and ousting
Kevin McCarthy and making I don't know Paul Gozar speaker,
(20:35):
as McCarthy played along with Trump's insistence that somebody publicly
investigate Joe Biden. You know what President Zelensky would not do,
but Kevin McCarthy is doing. And McCarthy made Congress meet
with Selensky at the National Archives yesterday because anywhere bigger,
and the twenty eight Russian Republicans who vowed to not
give Ukraine another dollar yesterday led by that slobbish idiot
(20:55):
jd Vance would get mad and McCarthy maybe will defund
the government and claim that means the Special Counsel's Office
is defunded forever. In a day, as all that unfolded,
McCarthy actually said this, I mean talk about missus Roberto
Beristain Kevin McCarthy, who was also in club, I didn't
(21:18):
think the leopards would eat my face. I don't understand
why anybody votes against bringing the idea and having the debate,
and then you got all the amiens. If you don't
like to do this is a whole new concept of
individuals that just want to burn the birth place down.
It doesn't work. I mean when we said burn it
all down, I thought everybody knew you. You wouldn't burn
(21:39):
my house down. Moron looks like the bird that just
flew into your window. In Atlanta, Ken Cheesebrough's lawyers submitted
a roster of witnesses in his defense in the trial
of the Trump nineteen Boris Epstein and Ron McDonald made
(22:01):
the cut, congratulations, you two wacky kids. In the same case,
the fake elector David Schaeffer presented one of those defenses
where you say no, no, no defense means say something
that won't get you convicted, to quote the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Because of that, neither the Democratic nor Republican electors were official.
(22:22):
Schaeffer's attorney, Craig Gillen said at that point it was
up to Congress to pick the proper electors. If both
houses of Congress agreed on the winner, that was the
official slate. He said. If the houses couldn't agree, then
and only then would Governor Kemp's certified slate become official. Yeah. No, no, no,
that's exactly the opposite of the law. You're saying that
(22:45):
your client did exactly what the prosecution is charging him with,
and he's going to go to jail now. And in
the same case, Sidney Powell is beside herself because, as
she told the court, these little charges against her racketeering, trespass,
(23:06):
invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the State of Georgia,
conspiracy to commit computer theft, and conspiracy to commit election fraud.
Why these little petty complaints, She's already being treated like
a criminal because of them. She had one of those
easy pass thingies from the TSA, the one that lets
you go through the private security line at the airports
(23:26):
where you don't have to mix with the prolls. I
mean it was clear or pre check or Global Entry
or one of them, something like that, and TSA. After
these charges took it away from her, she has to
go stand in the grown up line as if she
were a common criminal. Don't worry, Sydney Powell. Nobody thinks
(23:49):
you're a common criminal. Also of interest here, I have
two words for Rupert Murdoch, douche and bag x. This
is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Olberman postscripts to
(24:20):
the News Dateline News Corp Headquarters, Sixth Avenue, New York,
New York. Rupert Murdoch will retire to become Chairman Emeritus
of News Corporation and Chairman Emeritus of Fox and Boy.
Am I already sick of it, sick of the encomia.
Eh business giant, maybe the most powerful man in the
(24:42):
world's success on three continents, reshaped an entire business field,
no stop. The man did more damage to this country
than al Qaeda. All of this Trump, Fox News, the
right wing propaganda factory, the corrupted Supreme Court putin trying
(25:02):
to take over Elon Musk, understanding that he's just a
maladjusted clown with money. Kevin McCarthy government shutdowns, the Alien
Enemies Act, the Republican Party dissolving into a series of
ever more reprehensible Russian assets, capable of nothing but performance art,
not even good at goddamned that that's all on him.
(25:26):
You want the entire list of good things Rupert Murdoch
did in his life, You ready here it is the
entire list of good things. Rupert Murdoch did the constant
scorebug on sports telecasts. That's it, by the way. That
(25:47):
was the idea of a man named David Hill. Murdoch
just approved it. Everything else he was a dishonest, petulant, destructive, dishonest, racist, manipulative, fraudulent, dishonest, fascist, vengeful,
black hearted, dishonest asshole. And those are the compliments. The
(26:13):
only reason there are people trying to find something else
good to say about this asshole is that stupid series Succession. No,
the character of the old executive humanized Ruber Mayo was crap.
The series was crap. I've worked in television since nineteen
(26:33):
eighty one. I was in American television before this schmuck
Murdoch was I will tell you simply that not one
member of the what was it, the roy family, Not
one of the characters, nothing in the script, none of
their performances led me to believe for one second that
any of the characters could possibly be successful in some
(26:54):
alternate version of television or media in this country. Know,
as the artists say, verisimilitude. I never found myself believing
any of it could possibly be true. Succession well way
more suck than Session, but it's sanitized Rupert Murdoch, and
(27:16):
we hear people saying nice things about him worst person
in the world because if he isn't the most evil
human of the last half century, it's Trump. And frankly,
without Murdoch, there's no Trump. So I don't know. I
will say. When I read his note to the employees
(27:37):
of Fox, I was briefly encouraged. Oh I am announcing
I will transition. What transition? Well that's a hell of
a plot twist, Ah, Chairman Emeritus. Half that I do
know that a genuinely talented television writer, who would I
(27:59):
think have said the same thing about Succession excuse me
suck Session as I did. I'm supposed to believe this
man is Rupert Murdoch. I worked for Rupert Murdoch. I'm
supposed to believe this because he has six framed copies
of a newspaper front page on his wall and a
TV and he has the same number of kids as
Rupert Murdoch. How did you all manage the effort involved
(28:23):
spend two entire days writing four seasons of that trek.
That writer, he did this as he was dying, as
he knew he was dying. He did this about Rupert Murdoch.
Quote my main cancer, the dying writer told the television interviewer,
I call it Rupert. At the end of March nineteen
(28:48):
ninety four, this writer, his name was Dennis Potter, gave
perhaps the most extraordinary interview in history, certainly in the
history of television. Dennis Potter was once a London newspaper reporter.
He was the playwright of some television masterpieces, especially The
Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven and Weeks earlier, he'd
(29:08):
been diagnosed with untreatable terminal pancreatic cancer, and it had
already spread throughout his body. He was interviewed by Melvin
Bragg of Channel four in the UK, and as he
was being interviewed, Dennis Potter was dying. He was drinking
from a flask of liquid morphine. The interview aired on
(29:30):
April fourth, nineteen ninety four, and Dennis Potter died exactly
two months and three days later. Entire interview is indescribable
in its honesty and its clarity, and its sincerity and
in vernacular that did not really exist in nineteen ninety four.
It is indescribable for the lack of f's Dennis Potter
gave quote. One of the favorite fantasy plots of a
(29:54):
writer is a character is told you've got three months
to live, which is what I was told. Who would
you kill? I call my cancer the main on the
pancreast one. I call it Rupert so I can get
close to it, because that man Murdoch is the one
who if I had time. In fact, I've got too
(30:15):
much writing to do and I haven't got the energy,
but I would shoot the bugger if I could, unquote
put that in your and call me for Rupert Murdoch
television play right, name just cancer after Rupert Murdoch, and
it's humanized by his succession. Nineteen ninety four this was
(30:38):
America barely had any idea who Rupert Murdoch was in
nineteen ninety four. I mean, he owned the New York Post,
and he made it terrible and dumber that it had
been before, dumber than any American paper had been before.
He had bought a bunch of local TV stations that
had been owned by Metromedia. He strung together a kind
of a fourth television network, but not really. It had
a lot of sports, It had The Simpsons, and it
(30:59):
had like four other non sports shows. By the night
of April fourth, nineteen ninety four, as Dennis Potter was
heard telling the British interviewer Melboyn Bragg my main cancer,
I call it Rupert. If I had at the time,
I would shoot the bugger if I could. By that
exact hour, Rupert Murdoch was already beginning to formulate plans
(31:19):
for a twenty four hour channel in this country to
be named Fox News, which ultimately had the same kind
of bitter, taunting, oxymoronic imbecility in its name that is
contained in the phrase military intelligence Fox News. Back in
(31:41):
the UK, Dennis Potter was still giving his farewell address
about the man he would have shot if he'd had time. Quote,
there is no one person more responsible for the pollution
what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution
of the British press is as important a part of
the pollution of British political life, and it's an important
part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities
(32:02):
that is destroying so much of our political discourse. Sound familiar,
strong stuff for anybody, even a dying man who was
reinforcing himself with liquid morphine. But that was not the
first time Dennis Potter had taken Murdoch on. The year before,
on that same British network Channel four, it had given
(32:25):
an episode of its half hour series Opinions to Dennis Potter,
and he spent much of the time talking about quote
that drivel merchant, global huckster and so to speak, media psychopath,
Rupert Murdoch. There is an avid wetmouth down market slide
(32:45):
that began its giddiest descent the day marauding Rupert Murdoch
first left his paw marks on these shores and dragged
so many others towards the sewers, where too many of
his two craven employees have their natural habitat. It is
like he is describing Fox News and everything that is followed,
all of the both sides ism, the stuff you see
(33:09):
on the real networks, the NBC's CBS, ABC, CNN, that's
all because of Rupert Murdoch nineteen ninety four. And this
dying man named the cancer that would kill him Rupert,
so it had an identity he could hate and fight
against and exploit in order to express the menace that
(33:29):
he perceived Rupert Murdoch to be then and if he
had time, he said he would have killed him on
behalf of humanity twenty nine years ago, twenty nine years
of fatal damage ago. And it was five years before
I went to work for Rupert Murdoch anyway, even though
I had a tape of the Potter interview, and I
(33:52):
swear the book I read on the plane to go
to LA to go work for Rupert Murdoch was the
biography of Dennis Potter. See, I had finally convinced NBC
that I was serious about but I was not going
to no longer host its Monica Lewinsky Show. In nineteen
ninety eight, and the head of NBC Sports, Dick Ebersol,
had a great solution. He knew his friends at Fox
(34:14):
were longing to have me as the frontman for their
version of Sports Center, and so he proposed the following
NBC would give my agent ten days to negotiate two deals.
A deal for me to go to LA and host
Fox Sports News and Major League Baseball on Fox, and
another deal in which Fox would pay NBC a million
dollars for my contract like I was a baseball utility infielder.
(34:38):
And amazingly it worked. I got what was then a
record breaking salary for any cable sportscaster. Ever, NBC got
its million dollars, and maybe most startlingly, NBC then asked
me to stay on the air as a lame duck
for six weeks. Throughout my career, no matter how abrasive
the exit, my lame duck employers have always, for some
(34:59):
reason trusted me to stay on their air, even though
I was leaving. When I left LA in the f
first place on local news. I did this for three
months anyway. At first, Fox Sports was a delight. Their
news guys, and I mean Roger Ayles and his henchman,
John Moody. They pitched me on doing stuff for them
(35:21):
they wanted to see if I would co anchor with
Bill O'Reilly. I passed. But at four at Sports we
spent money. I worked with friends. I didn't have to
talk about politics. I could just narrate the highlights. I
could do funny voices. I lived on the beach. I
did the baseball game of the week, and went to
the All Star Game, in the World Series and everything else.
(35:44):
And every time there was a newspaper story about ESPN,
there was also my picture next to Chris Berman's, next
to Dan Patrick's, next to Whoever's, with a caption like
challenging ESPN. It was great. But then two things happened.
The Fox guy who knew that we were going to
need a minimum of five years just to get people
(36:06):
to know us, just to tie ESPN in the ratings.
Maybe he took me to lunch one day and he said, sorry, mate,
well missus is moving back to England tomorrow. I swear
he sounded like this. His then was Tony Ball, She's
going back without me, so I'm going with it. Good luck, mate.
(36:26):
He was replaced by guys, including David Hill, the score
bug guy, who replaced the five year plan with what
was a five week plan to raise the ratings by
one fifth of one point so they could raise the
price of the commercials twenty dollars each. I literally left
(36:47):
the meeting in which they explained their suicidal plan, and
they also revealed to me that my salary represented twenty
percent of their entire budget, which meant they didn't have
enough money to do the show. I left that meeting,
got to a phone, called my real estate agent and
put my house on the beach up for sale. But
(37:07):
I kept doing the job. Later, in nineteen ninety nine,
I broke a story everybody laughed at. Michael Jordan was
unhappy in retirement and he wanted to come back to
the NBA, and instead of getting a salary, he wanted
an ownership stake and a team. Two years later he
did that. Two thousand, I got to host the first
Mets Yankees World Series, and we were just gearing up
for the two thousand and one series and the two
(37:28):
thousand and one season before it, because we had just
run the rights to all of the World Series forever.
They're still doing the World Series on Fox. Just gearing
up for two thousand and one and the potential to
do the World Series every year for the next twenty
five years when I got a tip on April twentieth,
two thousand and one, that the owners of the La
Dodgers had put the team up for sale unofficially and
(37:50):
in fact they were talking to the old owners, the
O'Malley family, about taking the Dodgers off their hands. This
was a great scoop. Unfortunately it had great danger because
the owners of the Dodgers were Fox, Rupert Murdoch, my employer. HMM.
(38:11):
So the next day I made about one hundred phone
calls to make sure that there was something to this story,
and sure enough I got a friend of a friend
of a friend of my agent to confirm that he
and his family were in preliminary discussions alongside the O'Malley's
to buy the Dodgers back from Fox. I had two sources,
one of them in the deal. Great scoop, Dodgers for sale.
(38:36):
And that night I reached out to my bosses and
I said, so, uh, what do we uh? What do
we do here? What the hell do we do here?
The story is solid. The Dodgers are for sale. I
have no no doubt Rupert has put them up for sale.
He just hasn't done it officially yet hei they're talking
to the O'Malleys, I just talked to this agent. Mmmm hmmmm.
(38:58):
But look, this is this is your candy store, Fox
Fox Sports. You signed the checks I worked for you.
If if you don't want me to report this, I'm
obviously not going to report this and I'm not going
to pout. I'm not going to give it to somebody else.
Somebody will figure it out, but I'm not going to
give it to them. And my boss's reply was good
for you. Why don't we all get on the phone
(39:22):
with New York We see we get Rupert on the phone,
and if not, he has his own Personal News Corp
Public relations department. Let's see what they say. What are
the rules? This has to have come up before somewhere
in the company. So on Sunday, April twenty second, two
thousand and one, we got Murdoch's own PR guy on
the blower and I explained it to him and he said, well,
(39:42):
Rupert's on her world cruise. And in any event, he
has a policy about this. He never interferes in editorial decisions,
not even in sourced business stories, not even if they
involve him or touch on the company, so long as
you make clear that your sources are not from within
the company, because that's a money issue and a legal
(40:04):
regulars issue. So long as you are confident in your sources,
so long as you include our denial, you should proceed
with this story. That is what we are paying you for.
And I thought, for a moment, perhaps I have misjudged
Rupert Murdoch. I mean, he had a reputation as a journalist.
(40:29):
Good lord, that's what I heard at every corner yesterday,
three four thousand times. Well, yes, he's Satan, but Satan
is a journalist. Jerry was a Obama bin journalist, but
he kept reporters employed. That moment that I thought I
had misjudged Rupert Murdoch turned out to be a very
brief moment and a very wrong moment. I reported the
(40:52):
story that night. My story was only about a minute long.
The crafted Fox denial of this was like a minute
forty five read all of it? How of denials? Five
days later, the Long Beach Press Telegram had its own
story headlined, despite denials, Dodgers are for sale, and it
(41:16):
had far more details than I had. And that really
was was the end of it. The team was unofficially
for sale. Dodger fans who hated what Fox and Murdoch
had done to the team seemed happy about that. And
the vast, stinking pile of burning excrement that was Fox
and News Corp. And Rupert Murnox sailed on unperturbed, isn't
here as I could tell. And twelve days after that,
(41:39):
just before I was getting into the car to go
to the first Fox Baseball meeting for our two thousand
and one season, the president of Fox Sports, this same guy,
David Hill, the score bug guy, calls my agent and
tells a christ not doing any baseball for us this year.
Business decision click click in Australian end of conversation. Nothing else,
(42:03):
no explanation, no firing, no get out, no clean out
your desk, no announcement. And then two days later they
turned off my access to the Fox computer system. And
four days after they called and canceled my cable show.
And then that night and got two weird calls from
Richard Sandomir, who was then the TV sports critic and
TV sports business reporter for the New York Times. When
(42:26):
the New York Times did sports, and when there were
TV sports critics and Rich asks me, so, did you
know you were fired by Rupert Murdoch personally? And I said,
with genuine astonishment that not only didn't I know that,
but that, even given my thoughts about him, I did
not believe that. Ah, that's what my source is at Fox.
Tell me, apparently your Dodger story really pissed him off,
(42:50):
but really, and I said I had cleared it through
his personal PR guy. Why would that be the case?
And he goes, I don't know. Apparently he was on vacation.
He got back like May ninth, he read all these
stories about the Dodgers being for sale and how Fox
Sports it was the first report it, and called up
David Hill and he told him to fire you immediately.
And I told Rich, this the first time I've heard this,
(43:11):
and I still don't. I don't. I'm not saying I
don't believe it. I'm saying I don't believe this is true,
even though the day he mentioned was May ninth, and
May ninth was the day David Hill had called my
agent as I was going into the baseball meeting and
told her I would not be doing baseball for Fox
that year. Hmmm. Now, an hour later, the phone rings,
(43:35):
and again it's Rich Sandomir and now he sounds shaken.
I got it wrong. I don't have any sources at
Fox who told me Rupert fired you personally. My source
said that you you were telling people Rupert had fired
you personally about the Dodger story. And now I gave
Rich a series of uh huh, and I said, no,
(43:58):
I didn't, and no, You've never been dumb enough in
your life to make the mistake you're saying you just made.
And he said, well, I never said somebody had Fox
said Murdock fired you. Okay, thanks by click in American.
The next day they had me come into Fox and
clean out my office while guard watched. She was very nice.
She brought donuts. As I packed, I thought more and
(44:20):
more of what had happened in the months since I
had gotten the tip about the Dodgers being for sale.
As I left the Fox lot for the last time
as an employee, I went back a couple of times
to attend table reads for the Simpsons much more fun.
I called a couple of reporters I knew, and I
called my agent, and I called some people in the business,
and we tried to put together a timeline of what
(44:40):
had happened. That made some sense, because the slow motion
firing thing. May ninth, you're not doing baseball. May eleventh,
your computer doesn't work. May fifteenth, your cable show is canceled.
May sixteenth, clean out your office. That made no sense
until one reporter friend said, you know, Fox called me
and said, call Keith up and provoke him. Get him
(45:00):
to call us names, tell him about this story in
that paper, calling washed up, get him going. And then
it all clicked. My contract ran through the end of
the year. And because Fox was firing me without cause,
without any violation of my contract, certainly without any violation
of their rules, I was on with Murdock's vice president
(45:23):
talking about the rules. Because I had left a trail
of good behavior on the Dodger story. They were trying
to enrage me, to get me to say something nasty
that would be a violation of my contract so they
could outright fire me and keep the money. And the
money was about eight hundred thousand dollars. Now, after decades
(45:45):
of contemplating this and living it, I'm confident I am
no crazier than the next guy, but on my worst craziest,
least rational day, and I'm nearly sixty five years old.
If you said you have two choices, you can blow
up these people who are firing you. You can make
them look bad in a newspaper for a day and
(46:05):
then they'll fire you and they'll keep all the money
they owe you. Or you can keep your big bazoo
shut for seven months, keep eight hundred thousand dollars, and
then spend the rest of your natural life blowing these
people up. If that's the choice, I would always take
the scenario that gives me the eight hundred thousand dollars. Always,
(46:30):
Who wouldn't Till on January first, two thousand and two,
after the last Fox check cleared, I began making a
professional avocation out of attacking Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox Business,
Fox Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, Fox, O'Reilly, Fox, Tucker Carlson, Fox, whatever,
And I got the eight hundred thousand. But they're lingered
(46:52):
for years this rather academic question of whether Rupert Murdoch
had actually fired me for following the rules set out
by Rupert Murdoch's personal pr guy. As usual in life,
these things resolved themselves when you least expect them to.
Murdoch was speaking at the Dow Jones Conference in Carlsbad, California,
on May twenty eight, two thousand and eight, and a
(47:14):
story came across the wire with my name on it,
and the guy interviewing him talked about whether there should
be dissenting voices on Fox quote news unquote, like that
guy who was killing it on MSNBC Keith Alderman, and
Rupert Murdoch went crazy. Now, he barked, I fired him
five years ago. He was crazy. Timing was off close.
(47:39):
I mean he was able to remember the details, if
not the exact time frame, But there it was. Rupert
Murdoch confessed he had fired me personally. He was giving
me the red badge of courage a little late, but
there it was. And I wondered and hoped maybe it
still pisses him off that he had to pay me
the eight hundred grand when I wouldn't take the bait
about grievance. And three years later Rupert said it again.
(48:04):
February first, twenty eleven, He's being interviewed by his business
talking head Neil Kavudo, who for some reason asked him
if he would consider hiring me for Fox News. I
had just left MSNBC. Now we fired him once. We
don't believe in firing people twice. Kavodo replied, you called
him a nut. Well, he was a nut on we
had him on late night Fox Sports. It was never
(48:26):
any such show as Late night Fox Sports. But never mind,
disagree with him and he'd fire you. Rupert went on,
it was impossible. I fired him. He was crazy, fired
me for following his rules, and I was the one
who was crazy. And now he belongs to the ages.
(48:49):
Oh but the show humanized him. It sucked. He sucks.
To hell with them as soon as possible. And speaking
of crazy, I have a love hate relationship with the
name Keith. But did you know that Murdoch's real first
name is also Keith, But that rather than call himself Keith,
(49:15):
he has for ninety two years voluntarily chosen to call
himself Rupert. I mean, sure my name is Keith, that
at least it ain't freaking rupert that they're going to
(49:38):
write on my grave coming up Fridays with Thurber At first,
a quick announcement. I'll explain this in full detail as
soon as I can. And I preface this by saying,
there's nothing wrong with my health, though I could use
a little break here from my throat, especially after doing
(49:58):
the Rupert Murdoch voice. The dogs are fine, audience is
still growing. I like doing this. My boss, well, my
boss is me, but I am going to scale this
podcast down to four days a week for now at least.
I'll explain it in full later, but the plan is
new episodes Tuesday through Friday. That'd be Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
and Friday. Frankly, the Monday one is kind of lame anyway,
(50:21):
and it's the least listened to of the five. And
if there's important news over the weekend, I will do
one anyway on Monday, coming out Sunday night. But from
here on in the regular schedule be Monday a little
bit after midnight Eastern, Tuesday midnight Eastern, Wednesday midnight Eastern,
Thursday midnight Eastern. And as always, thanks for listening to
any of them, and I will explain it in full later.
(50:43):
But okay, Thurber, that's next. This is Countdown to the
number one story on the Countdown and Fridays with Thurber.
And it's amazing to me in retrospect how I read
all of his wonderful, realistic, not goopy writing about dogs,
(51:04):
and I thoroughly years before I was ever adopted by
a dog. Now reading his dog stories and anecdotes is
like reading about a bunch of friends, even that one
surly friend for whom we must continuously make excuses. The
(51:26):
dog that bit people by James Thurber. Probably no one
man should have as many dogs in this life as
I have had, But there was more pleasure than distress
in them for me, except in the case of an
Airdale named Mugs. He gave me more trouble than all
(51:47):
the other fifty four or five put together. Although my
moment of keenest embarrassment was the time a Scotch Terrier
named Jeanie, who had just had six puppies in the
clothes closet of a fourth floor apartment in New York,
had the unexpected seventh and last at the corner of
Eleventh Street and Fifth Avenue during a walk she had
(52:09):
insisted on taking. Then two there was the prize winning
French poodle, a giant, big black poodle, none of your little,
untroublesome white miniatures, who got sick riding in the rumble
seat of a car with me on her way to
the Greenwich dog show. She had a red rubber bib
tucked around her throat, and since a rainstorm came up
(52:29):
when we were halfway through the Bronx, I had to
hold over her a small green umbrella, really more of
a parasol. The rain beat down fearfully, and suddenly the
driver of the car drove into a big garage filled
with mechanics. It happened so quickly that I forgot to
put the umbrella down, and I will always remember with
(52:51):
sickening distress the look of incredulity mixed with hatred that
came over the face of the particular hardened garage man
that came over to see what we wanted when he
took a look at me and the poodle. All garage
men and people of that intolerant stripe hate poodles with
(53:11):
their curious haircuts, especially the pom poms that you got
to leave on their hips if you expect the dogs
to win a prize. But the Airdale, as I have said,
was the worst of all my dogs. He really wasn't
my dog. Matter of fact, I came home from a
vacation one summer to find that my brother Roy had
(53:31):
bought him while I was away the big, burly, choleric dog.
He always acted as if he thought I wasn't one
of the family. There was a slight advantage in being
one of the family, for he didn't bite the family
as often as he bit strangers. Still, in the years
that we had him, he bit everybody but Mother, and
(53:52):
he made a pass at her once but missed. It
was during the month when we suddenly had mice, and
Mugs refused to do anything about them. Nobody ever had
mice exactly like the mice we had that month. They
acted like pet mice, almost like mice somebody had trained.
They were so friendly that one night, when Mother entertained
(54:14):
at dinner the Freer Realilras, a club she and my
father had belonged to for twenty years, she put down
a lot of little dishes with food in them on
the pantry floor so that the mice would be satisfied
with that and would not come into the dining room.
Mugs stayed out in the pantry with the mice lying
on the floor, growling to himself, not at the mice,
(54:37):
but about all the people in the next room that
he would have liked to get at. Mother slipped out
into the pantry once to see how everything was going.
Everything was going fine. It made her so mad to
see mugs lying there oblivious of the mice. They came
running up to her that she slapped him, and he
(54:57):
slashed at her, but didn't make it. He was sorry immediately.
Mother said he was always sorry, he said after he
bit someone. But we could not understand how she figured
this out. He didn't act sorry. Mother used to send
a box of candy every Christmas to the people. The
Airdale bit list finally contained forty or more names. Nobody
(55:21):
could understand why we did not get rid of the dog.
I didn't understand it very well myself, but we didn't
get rid of him. I think that one or two
people tried to poison Mugs. He acted poisoned once in
a while, and old Major Moberly fired at him once
with his service revolver near the Seneca Hotel and He's
Broad Street. But Muggs lived to almost eleven years old,
(55:45):
and even when he could hardly get around, he bit
a congressman who had called to see my father on business.
My mother had never liked the congressman. She said, the
signs of his horoscope showed he couldn't be trusted. He
was Saturn with the moon and Virgo. But she sent
him a box of candy that Chris anyway. He sent
(56:06):
it right back, probably because he suspected it was trick candy.
Mother persuaded herself that it was all for the best
that the dog had bitten him, even though father lost
an important business association because of it. I wouldn't be
associated with such a man, Mother said. Mugs could read
him lack a book. We used to take turns feeding
(56:28):
mugs to be on his good side, but that didn't
always work. He was never in a very good humor
even after a meal. Nobody knew exactly what was the
matter with him, but whatever it was, it made him irascible,
especially in the mornings. Roy my brother, never felt very
well in the morning either, especially before breakfast, And once
when he came downstairs and found that Mugs had moodily
(56:51):
chewed up the morning paper, he hit him in the
face with a grapefruit, and then jumped up on the
dining room table, scattering dishes and silverware and spilling the coffee.
Mugs first free leap carried him all the way across
the table and into a brass fire screen in front
of the gas grate. But he was back on his
(57:12):
feet in a moment, and in the end he got
roy and gave him a pretty vicious bite in the leg.
Then he was all over it. He never bid anyone
more than once at a time. Mother always mentioned that
as an argument in his favor. She said he had
a quick temper, but that he didn't hold a grudge.
She was forever defending him. I think she liked him
(57:33):
because he wasn't well. He's not strong, she would say, pityingly,
but that was inaccurate. He may not have been well,
but he was terribly strong. One time my mother went
to the Chittenden Hotel to call on a woman mental
healer who was lecturing in Columbus on the subject of
(57:55):
harmonious vibrations. She wanted to find out if it was
possible to get harmonious vibrations into a dog. He's a large,
tan colored airale, mother explained. The woman said that she
had never treated a dog, but she advised my mother
to hold the thought that he did not bite and
would not bite. Mother was holding the thought the very
(58:18):
next morning when Muggs got the iceman, but she blamed
that slip up on the iceman. If you didn't think
he would bite you, he wouldn't, Mother told him. He
stomped out of the house in a terrible jangle of vibrations.
One morning, when Mugs bit me slightly more or less
in passing, I reached down and grabbed his short, stumpy
(58:39):
tail and hoisted him into the air. It was a
foolhardy thing to do, and the last time I saw
my mother, about six months ago, she said she didn't
know what possessed me. I don't either, except that I
was pretty mad. As long as I held the dog
off the floor by his tail, he couldn't get at me.
But he twisted and jerked so snarling all the time
(59:01):
that I realized I couldn't hold him that way very long.
I carried him into the kitchen and flung him onto
the floor and shut the door on him just as
he crashed against it. But I forgot about the backstairs.
Mugs went up the backstairs and down the front stairs
and had me cornered in the living room. I managed
(59:23):
to get up out of the mantelpiece above the fireplace,
but it gave way and came down with a tremendous crash,
throwing a large marble clock, several vases, and myself heavily
to the floor. Mugs was so alarmed by the racket
that when I picked myself up, he had disappeared. We
couldn't find him anywhere, although we whistled and shouted until
(59:45):
old Missus Dettweiler called after dinner that night. Mugs had
bitten her once in the leg, and she came into
the living room only after we assured her that Mugs
had run away. She had just seated herself when with
great growling and scratching of claws, Mugs emerged from under
a davenport where he had been quietly hiding all the
(01:00:08):
time and bit her again. Mother examined the bite and
put arnica on it and told Missus Dettwiler that it
was only a bruise. He just bumped you, she said.
But Missus Dettwiler left our house in a nasty state
of mind. Lots of people reported our airdale to the police,
(01:00:29):
but my father held a municipal office at the time
and was on friendly terms with the police. Even so,
the cops had been out a couple of times, once
when Mugs bit missus rufus sturtevent and again when he
bit Lieutenant Governor Molloy. But Mother told him it hadn't
been Muggs's fault, but the fault of the people who
were bitten. When he starts for them, they scream, she explained,
(01:00:52):
and that excites him. The cops suggested that it might
be a good idea to tie the dog up, but
Mother said that it mortified him to be tied up,
and that he wouldn't eat when he was tied up.
Mugs at his meals was an unusual sight because of
the fact that if you reached toward the floor he
would bite you. We usually put his food plate on
(01:01:15):
top of an old kitchen table with a bench alongside
the table. Mugs would stand on the bench and eat.
I remember that my mother's uncle, Horatio, who boasted that
he was the third man up Missionary Ridge, was flutteringly
indignant when he found out that we fed the dog
on a table because we were afraid to put his
(01:01:35):
plate on the floor. He said he wasn't afraid of
any dog that ever lived, and that he would put
the dog's plate on the floor if we would give
it to him. Roy said that If Uncle Horatio had
fed Mugs on the ground just before the battle, he
would have been the first man up Missionary ridge. Uncle
Horatio was furious. Ray amen, bray amen, now, he shouted,
(01:01:58):
I'll feed them on the floor. Roy was all forgiving
him a chance. But my father wouldn't hear of it.
He said that Mugs had already been fed. I'll feed
them again, bawled Uncle Horatio. We had quite a time
quieting him. In his last year, Muggs used to spend
(01:02:19):
practically all of his time outdoors. He didn't like to
stay in the house for some reason or other. Perhaps
it held too many unpleasant memories for him. Anyway, it
was hard to get him to come in, and as
a result, the garbage man, the iceman, and the laundryman
would not come near our house. We had to haul
the garbage down to the corner, take the laundry out,
(01:02:40):
and bring it back and meet the iceman a block
from home. After this had gone on for some time,
we hit on an ingenious arrangement for getting the dog
in the house so that we could lock him up
while the gas meter was red and so on. Mugs
was afraid of only one thing, an electrical storm thunder
(01:03:04):
and light ning frightened him out of his senses. I
think he thought a storm had broken. The day the
mantelpiece fell, he would rush into the house and hide
under a bed or in a clothes closet. So we
fixed up a thunder machine out of a long, narrow
piece of sheet iron with a wooden handle on one end.
(01:03:24):
Mother would shake this vigorously when she wanted to get
Mugs into the house. It made an excellent imitation of thunder.
But I suppose it was the most roundabout system for
running a household that was ever devised. It took a
lot out of mother. A few months before Mugs died,
he got to seeing things. He would rise slowly from
(01:03:46):
the floor, growling low and stalk, stiff legged and menacing
toward nothing at all. Sometimes the thing would be just
a little to the right or left of a visitor.
Once a fuller brush salesman got hysterecks, Muggs came wandering
(01:04:06):
into the room like Hamlet, following his father's ghosts. His
eyes were fixed on a spot just to the left
of the fuller brush man, who stood it until Muggs
was about three. Slow creeping paces from him. Then he shouted.
Mugs wavered on past him into the hallway, grumbling to himself,
but the fuller man went on shouting. I think Mother
(01:04:28):
had to throw a pan of cold water on him
before he stopped. That was the way she used to
stop us boys when we got into fights. Muggs died
quite suddenly one night. Mother wanted to bury him in
the family lot under a marble stone with some such
inscription as flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,
but we persuaded her it was against the law. In
(01:04:51):
the end we just put up a smooth board above
his grave along a lonely road. On the board I
wrote with an indelible pencil, tave Kanum. Mother was quite
pleased with this sim classic dignity of the old Latin
epitaph The Dog that Bit People by James Thurber. I've
(01:05:28):
done all the damage I can do here. Thank you
for listening. The music you heard was, for the most
part arrange produced and performed by Countdown musical directors Brian
Ray and John Phillip Schanelle. Brian Ray handled the guitars,
bass and drums. John Phillip Shaneil did the orchestration, in
keyboards and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music,
including other Beethoven tunes, was arranged and performed by No
(01:05:50):
Horns Aloud. Sports music Will Played Again Someday is courtesy
of ESPN, Inc. And it was written by Mitch Warren Davis.
We call it the Olderman theme from ESPN two. Our
satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was my
friend Larry David. Everything else pretty much my fault. So
that's countdown for this, the nine hundred and ninetieth day
(01:06:12):
since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected
government of the United States. Convict him now before he
declares you an enemy alien, and while we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is Tuesday. Bulletin says the news
warrant still then on Keith Alderman, Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(01:06:44):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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