← Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
OUR WHITE T***H PRESIDENT MEANT FOR HIS OBAMA VIDEO TO COME OUT THAT WAY - 2.9.26
00:57:43
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Keith Olbermann
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- [02:38]
Keith Olbermann
Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartradio. Our white trash president, our white trash, redneck cracker, morally bankrupt president Here is a shock when they insist Thursday night's racist video with the Obamas as apes was not posted by Trump, but by somebody else in the White House. And then Trump himself undermines that lie that they spread on his behalf by saying he selected the video and had somebody else post it, but he just didn't watch the whole thing. So it wasn't a mistake. They just deleted it. I think each part of that is a lie. I think it was a setup. I conclude that this is not just his normal blatant human garbage, Trump racism, inherited Trump family branded racism, the same racism his father had. But I conclude the entire thing was designed to whatever degree. Anything Trump and these scumbags do is designed. It was designed to turn out exactly this way. Event happens. Backlash justifiable happens. Unrighteous indignation from Press Secretary Ava Braun happens. Oops. Oh, it turns out it wasn't supposed to be posted. Oops again. Bad staffer. Oops a third time. Trump comes out at the end of the day and endorses the original racist video. Anyway, I didn't make a mistake. And he did it this way, the way he expresses all of his racism against black people. Now, because you can't send ice after them. You can send ice after Hispanics. Because there is a simple way to categorize all Hispanics into one of two disgusting slavery era terms, legal and illegal. You can kidnap and disappear and maim Hispanics, some of them, half of them. And the good Germans living among us will stand up and cheer and endorse the buying of giant warehouses in Texas so Trump can turn them into giant concentration camps. You can do that to Hispanics. You can slander the most streamed artist in the world when he does last night's super bowl halftime show. And you can counter program him with your own racist halftime show starring a guy whose catalog is highlighted by a song endorsing statutory rape. You can get away with that because long before Trump, the Republicans moved away from their primary platform plank of the 1960s, which was criminalizing being black. They moved from that when it got too hot over there to their primary platform plank since Pat BUCHANAN and the 1990s criminalizing being Hispanic. The Obamas as Apes video got out and got out that way because Trump and the other human garbage still have to work a little bit to get away with flashbacks to the Republican policy of criminalizing being black in this country. Sadly, thanks to our slovenliness as a society, as the criminalization of being Hispanic has risen up around us steadily for 30 years, thanks to the Republicans, thanks to Bush, Bush thanks to all of them, Trump really doesn't have to work at that, as ICE and the Nazification of our society confirms. Let me interrupt myself here before I get too further in here. Without stating this specifically and explicitly, just in case there's any doubt, I am not endorsing one of these two hatreds. I hate both of these hatreds. I hate racism in all its forms. Neither victimized group here is more at fault or less at fault, or isn't doing enough or could be doing more. We failed as a country. And that as long as this is a majority white country, means we the white folk, we failed as a country. We the liberals also failed. We were on a trajectory to, if not convert the hearts and minds of the heartless and mindless racists, at least to make sure that the racists lived every minute of their lives in this country in fear of being exposed and bankrupted and destroyed. If you can't have people behaving the way they should, ethically, at least have them behaving the way they would when they think they might get caught. It's only the second best motivation, but it's still pretty useful. And we took our effing feet off the gas. And now the Department of Justice is suing people for pushing back against racism against victims and instead prosecuting fabricated, phony, non existent, impossible, quote, racism against white people. It is in some respects worse than it was in Reconstruction. But back to the Trump video and why we should keep talking about this and why I think there are days and weeks more worth of stories about it and how it's really the same story as ICE and it's really the same story as Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl. Let me go granular, as the kids say, about three things about that video and about our white trash, redneck, racist, morally bankrupt president. Three things that are more important than who hit send. Even though Trump and his whores regularly boast, he writes or approves everything that goes out under his Name. These are the three things I have not heard explored anywhere else, and they resonate this morning. Which is what? 17 scandals after the apes video scandal. Firstly, how is it somehow better for Trump if he didn't post the racism himself? This racism this time? If he didn't post the racism, it means he has a staffer with access to his account on the social media site he owns who is just as racist as he is. Or in fact, they want to portray this imaginary other staffer as more racist than he is. How is that an improvement? Trump has assistance being a virtual Klansman. There is more than one racist with access to that account? Well, more than two. We know Stephen Miller has it too. But secondly, how does this assistant work exactly? Somebody else can post to Trump's account, a deputy. Can the deputy post threats against immigrants, too? Or can he post love notes to Vladimir Putin? Or can he post stochastic calls for terror against Democrats? Or is this assistant, this deputy, is he just there just to post racism? Only Trump posts betrayals of American allies or threats against Democrats. But the assistant helps on the ape videos. Special assistant to the President for racism. Special senior assistant to the President for racism. And by the way, he's not good at the job. He screwed this up. He has final say. His job is to look at the whole video to make sure it's not so racist that it's even too racist for Trump to survive it. And he didn't. Seriously, he didn't have the extra three seconds. The only thing this creature, Trump and this administration full of vermin are good at is hate, and this assistant screwed it up. That brings me to the third point, which is that I doubt the entire story. And the first, second, third and the current fourth cover stories. I think we should address the Occam's Razor version of all this. That the likeliest scenario is not that he just skimmed some video somewhere and told an aide to post it, or an assistant went rogue and posted something too racist. Or was it not racist enough? Donald? The easiest explanation is this is an Internet trolling episode and Trump is an Internet troll. He is obsessed with his Internet image. He sees the world through a series of anonymous Internet accounts and conspiracy theories on the Internets. He has never posted anything online by accident, and he's never had anybody else post anything on his behalf by accident. Here is the easiest explanation of what this really was, and it's far worse than all that. When he is attacking Hispanic people or Muslims or LGTPQ or other minorities who are not in the front Firing line at the moment of the Trump vision of how to get white people to own everything because there's still 1% out there that he doesn't own. The other minorities who don't get full throated defense in this country when he attacks them, he does so with impunity. Because it is so easy for the MAGA scum to divide Hispanics into two categories, quote, legal and illegal. The slavery terms, because that's, that's working. Because of our failures, Trump can for the moment smear all the Hispanics he wants almost without fear of any consequences. But to do the same thing to the black community is a different story. Full on attacks like videos depicting the African American former president of the United States and his first lady as apes. Just doing that would get just too much flack even for Trump. So when Trump needs to attack Obama or just express the putrid pus of his vile tertiary stage racism, he has to make it double plausibly deniable. If he, if he hits the wrong note at the wrong time, if it's so bad even Tim Scott sits up and takes notice, Trump has to be able to blame somebody else and just throw seeds of confusion out there so that everybody is arguing over who's actually at fault. Because America, even the America in which Trump has authorized the racists to end six decades of pretending that they were not racists, the America which has trotted out the 1868 poll tax and called it election integrity, this America is not ready for loud warfare on African Americans. And I'm not, don't get me wrong on this. I'm not saying there is not warfare on African Americans. My distinction is on the term loud. I mean, you can get away with erasing regret about slavery from national parks monuments, but the line is, you can't get away with erasing the word racist from the official description of the assassin of Medgar Evers right there. And you can't get away with putting out a racist video of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes unless you can have so many denials available competing with each other that you get the media forgetting to report on the racism, Trump's racism, Trump's white trash racism. And instead they're just arguing about which denial is accurate or plausible. I think he changed his tone. Trump can't put out that video, not without being able to deny it, like deny it twice and then, and then come back at the end and wink to the, to the fellow scumbags out there, like leave the New York Times and CNN and everybody else debating whether he posted it and then deleted it. Or somebody else mistakenly posted and deleted it. Or if. Or if he's that human trash or not quite that human trash, he got the dog whistle. See, I'm Trump. I still hate black people. I'm Trump, not just Hispanics. You can trust me, Trump to be a racist. Now I have to go hide the video behind a haze about which excuse might be true. And the media will fall for it every effing time. Because Trump still can't put out that kind of video. Not with that degree of impunity. Not that obviously. Just like Trump can't use ICE to disappear and kill black people. Not yet. Our white trash, redneck, cracker, scumbag president, don't forget for a moment that of course he wants to use ICE to disappear and kill black people and LGBTQ and liberals and who's ever next. And if we give him or his successors the power, don't forget for a moment, he will use ICE to disappear and kill black people too. Which raises this postscript question. The Los Angeles Dodgers, baseball's world champions, when spring training can't come too soon, are going to the White House again to share the same oxygen in the same room with this scumbag Trump again after this? Really Magic Johnson? Really Dave Roberts? Really Mookie Betts? Are you gonna go golfing with him again? Saquon Barkley. And let me double down on my rhetoricals. Magic Doc Roberts, Mookie Saquon. You're going to spend time with this racist bastard when in the same 72 hour span he published the Obama ape video and said any athlete representing this country who has doubts about ICE should not be allowed to represent this country. What about that part of this equation, Trump implying there should be a political purity test before you can represent the United States of America? Magic Doc, Mookie Saquon, when he says shut up and play sports, you say okay, you shake his hand. Who do you think it is personally that he's trying to bury? Who do you think it is personally that he is trying to disempower? Who do you think it is he wants to see victimized when he makes America 1875 Again, I have already said we are in this position largely because we, the white folk, let our foot off the gas as we tried to move at least a little closer to a fair society. We let our foot off the gas. That's on us. You go into the White House and shake Donald Trump's hand, that's on you. You have just helped him. You have just Increased his plausibility, increased his durability as a President of the United States. You have just added a second to the length of his term. He's the President of the United States. I have to decide. I have to honor the office. He has dishonored America. He has dishonored the office. He has dishonored your people, my people. He has dishonored people. Magic. I don't know how many more times I can say this. Trump is out of his mind. He is mentally and morally incompetent. He is psychologically bankrupt, and he cannot continue as president. Cannot, cannot, cannot. And he is just waiting for an opportunity to find the next group to demonize and devour the way he is demonizing our Hispanic community. Who's next? Could be political commentators made moves in that direction. Lgbtq, transgender, blacks, Muslims. He's already cycled a few times through Muslims. It's rather easy. And apparently the yield just isn't enough for him to be racist in that direction first. But that will happen, too. The premise of Trump is the destruction of minorities. If you succeed in destroying a minority, you have to find a new minority to destroy in its place. White trash president. What happens when he totally snaps? I don't mean snaps like the Melania movie, the ishtar of the 21st century, with the White House faith director demanding the fundamentalists all buy tickets to show their devotion to God or a Republican candidate trying to move up from the House. He needs Trump's endorsement, so he's buying hundreds or thousands of tickets and giving them to voters in the primary. And I don't mean the military commanders loyal to Trump who are pressuring their troops on the bases to go buy tickets to see this piece of movie. At least it could have been subtitled so you'd have some idea what the f this woman is saying. And the last instruction from the MAGA nuts yesterday before the super bowl was don't just watch the Erica Kirk endorses Kid Rock. Kid Rock Sings About Sex with Underaged Girls show running at the same time as the super bowl broadcast. Don't just watch it, but stream it on all three or four of your devices to pad the ratings. And when I say snap, I don't mean like Trump offering to stop blocking the money to build the new rail tunnel under the Hudson. That's been a political plaything so long that Bush held it up willing to do it, provided Chuck Schumer agrees to rename Dulles Airport and Penn Station after Trump. I don't mean that kind of snap. I Mean, snap, snap. I mean, Trump is going back to wreak more havoc with ice, and this time most of the action will be in the courts. They are summarily changing the Board of Immigran immigration appeals process a new interim final rule. Interim final rule, which sounds like something George Orwell rejected as too stupid a name to put in the book. 1984. A new interim final rule in which the automatic outcome at an immigration status appeal hearing switches from, yep, review it, overrule it. If justified, you can stay till we resolve this. It goes from that automatically to this automatically. Case dismissed. Deport immediately. Can I appeal? That was your appeal. Now only a special vote by a board gets you an appeal which can still be rejected. So essentially, you have to win two appeals. The time to file for that emergency appeal was 30 days. Now it's 10 days. The automatic dismissal of your appeal happens at 15 days. The safety net beyond all safety nets. Immigration judges who are there to review their own immediate oral decisions that just run through them all in one sitting in a couple of minutes to check for simple factual mistakes. No more of that. But don't worry, we can still fix ICE. In the Senate, the Democrats still have a 10 item list of guardrails. Cain Jeffries and Chuck Schumer thought this up. ICE must obey all 4th amendment and due process laws. You know, the ones they're currently required to obey but aren't, but they sure will. Just as soon as Trump slackies promise they will. No more masks. Stop the racial profiling. What is the but the whole ICE is about racial profiling. If they stop the racial profiling like you get them to actually do that, then there's no more ice. Good. Expand training. Yes, please bring all of the horses back into all of the barns in the country. Make sure local governments can prosecute ICE murderers or other criminals, even though the law says they can prosecute them now. And Trump's Department of Justice has been refusing 100% of the time to cooperate because this is not law enforcement. This is the proud boys given badges. Make sure all detention facilities are up to standards. It's the Trump administration. What kind of standards are you expecting? Body cameras? I will say this again, because the threat of video sure stopped them from murdering Renee Goode and Alex Preddy. Yeah, body cameras. That's a solution. Renee Good's murderer was carrying his own camera as he murdered her. He did a selfie. Murder ID numbers would be visible on all uniforms. No ICE near schools or hospitals. And I assume when you say near, they think literally Next door. No paramilitary police and no ICE near polling places when the whole point of ICE is so Trump can deploy paramilitary police at polling places this November under that aforementioned election integrity lie, the one the Los Angeles Dodgers are gonna go in and shake hands on with Mr. White Trash. But don't worry, they'll sort it all out in the Senate. These ridiculously soft Democratic demands, which the Republicans say are all non starters. The Republicans say these meaningless 10 ideas are all non starters, including the body cams. Don't worry, they'll work it out. The Dems who do not have the courage to shut the government down for the next three years, they won't fold this time. The independent Senator Angus King of Maine, who's slightly better than the average Democrat because he's independent, boldly says he will vote against any funding for ICE and dhs, period. Unless. Unless there are talks happening. Good faith talks. All right, one silver lining. So that you don't crawl back into bed and quit your job and just not do anything. Maybe. Hear me out. Maybe we should give Trump the naming rights thing on Dulles Airport. First off, it's Dulles. The dullest boys. Not exactly paragons of American history. Kinda, kinda, kinda fascist CIA regime change. Who knows what they did domestically. Kind of. It's, it's a dull sky. George Conway sent me Debbie Democrats post on Blue sky yesterday with a photo of the concourse at Dulles with a sign reading welcome to Fuck Trump International Airport. And after I finished laughing, I texted George back and I wrote no, no, no, no, no, no no. Fuck Trump. Memor. Get negotiators in on that. Also of interest in an all nude episode, the people who actually think that the Washington Post fiasco was mismanagement, when in fact it was Jeff Bezos hiring a guy who he knew would slowly kill the Washington Post off. And we are now 11 years into the Trump political Ponzi scheme and there is still a guy on CNN who says he thinks Trump just pivoted to a new tone. That's next. This is Countdown. Same old goddamn tone.
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Keith Olbermann
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Keith Olbermann
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Stugats Here I have a podcast empire. It continues to grow and I have brought it here to iHeart. I'm also doing a live radio show from 3 to 5pm Eastern because my wife wanted to kick me out of the house. It's called Stigots and company Live which is available in podcast form right when the show finishes every single day. Some of the biggest names in sports, a lot of phone calls.
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Keith Olbermann
I love you guys show. It's one of my favorites.
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A lot of interaction. Guys not taking themselves too serious seriously. Those are just some of the things that you can expect from Stugots Co. And Stugots Co. Live. So listen to Stew Gots Co. Live and our original podcast. Please subscribe, rate and review Stugots Co. And God bless Football. Taylor's livelihood depends on it. Do it today and you can check all of those out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
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Keith Olbermann
This is countdown with keith olbermann. Still ahead on this all new edition of countdown. Okay, I've had a lot of jobs in my career, but apparently I have had so many jobs in my career that my capacity to remember them all is now beginning to decline. Until the other day, I had completely forgotten, apparently for several years, near as I can figure out, my weeks as the sports editor of a New York City daily newspaper that published when the big papers were out on strike back in 1978, forgot all about it. There was an office and everything and my name literally in the newspapers. And I forgot. To be fair, I think we only published three issues. But still, coming up in things I promised not to tell first, believe it or not, there's still more new idiots to talk about. The roundup of the miscreants, morons and dunning Kruger effect specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world, the bronze worse. Jim Vande Hei of Axios, formerly Washington Post, and Dylan Byers, Puck News, formerly. Well, if you think I had a lot of old jobs and this centers around the disaster, the quicksand, the ongoing brush fire that is the late lamented Washington Post. As you know, Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, owner of the Washington Post, owner of the inflatable rubber life raft they call Lauren Sanchez, pretty much destroyed the Post. The other day. He and his publisher, yet another British media failure named Will Lewis, closed the Post local desk, much of the foreign desk, all of the sports desk, fired around 300 people, all the while continuing to spend about $75 million to make and promote the movie Melania, also known as the world's first vanity snuff film. Saturday night, the other shoe finally dropped. Will Lewis, who could not be bothered to even appear on the conference call at which they destroyed the Washington Post, suddenly quit as publisher, possibly because while he could not make it to the firing of everybody, he sent his worst regards. He was spotted in public more or less at the same time, on a junket to go see the super bowl in Santa Clara, California, which is a bad look even among the corporate tech bros of Santa Clara, California. Those tech bros like Bezos, for whom human life no longer has any value and can't be pronounced anyway, most people know what happened here. Bezos got bullied or blackmailed by Trump, or he just got tired of being on that side of the equation that required, you know, effort and ethics and a conscience and democracy. So Bezos became a collaborator. He sold out to the fascists, and I hope he burns in hell for it. As I think I may have mentioned in the preceding episode, but there are still several people who are actually paid cash money to write about media, to write about politics, to write about both, who don't see that Bezos first betrayed his promise to support the Post, then sold out his own audience by sucking up to Trump, then damaged the post irretrievably with layoffs and hiring morons like Will Lewis and Matt Murray, and finally completed sabotaging the paper so that it would not keep its old audience, could not get a new audience, and would start to truly hemorrhage cash. So then he'd have to fire everybody left and of course placate Trump in the process. This wasn't a failure. This was a game plan. But don't tell Jim, Vande Hei or Dylan Byers that, because they are still baffled. Vande Hei still baffled. Why would a disinterested, disengaged, distracted Washington Post owner hire a seemingly disinterested, disengaged, distracted CEO suffer perpetual criticism and dollar loss? Lots of rich people would buy it, and even more execs would gladly run it. Show me a single entity anywhere at any time, doing anything that worked without strong, engaged leadership kinda matters. I bet Don Graham or Kara Swisher would pull together a group to take it over. Bloomberg could easily swoop it up himself. Just sell it. If you think Vande Hei is dumb. I mean, if you're waiting for Kara Swisher to ride in on the rescue here, you think Vande Hei is dumb. Jeff Bezos planned it this way. If there's no other explanation, maybe you could just go with the only one that's still there. The goal was not to win Vande Hei. The goal was to lose, to please Trump, and to do it in an excruciatingly long way, and to do it with just enough cover so that you could fool the stupid people out there into thinking that it was just bad management. And that's where Jim Bandehei came in. But if you think that was bad, Dylan Byers actually wrote something dumber because he basically took the side of firing everybody at the Washington Post, quoting Dylan Byers, Puck News it may have been heartbreaking when Matt Murray announced today that the sports and books department would be shuttered. But how could that have been a surprise? Those content areas, which are challenging to monetize, have long been colonized by other insurgents. This wasn't a murder. It was the sad result of an Escalating cold war between management and talent that had led to a total breakdown in communication over all exacerbated by distrust over other squabbles, the Kamala Harris endorsement saga, Sally Busbygate, this new opinions guy, etc. Understandably, as Saul Bellow once wrote, everyone is blind with rage. Well, everyone except Dylan Byers, who's. Who's just blind with stupidity. Oh, my God. Like the conservative commentator says about the doomed airliner and its passengers in the 60 Minutes debate that appears in the middle of the great Leslie Nielsen movie Airplane. They bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into. I say, let them crash. Holy cow. They don't see that this was deliberate. This guy actually thinks, well, why didn't you just sell it to Kara Swisher? Because that might have worked. Or it's like, oh, yeah, you have to recognize that we needed to fire people. I'm Dylan Byers. There's a management guy somewhere who hasn't been stroked recently. I anticipate having a job for life. I'm not gonna lose my job here or anywhere else by ever criticizing management. I can spell my own name. Bronze Worser Sage Steel, formerly of espn. I was just warming up with those first two dudes. She is the most radiantly stupid person I have ever worked with. And I worked with Lauren Sanchez and Stephen A. Smith. Sage Steele, with whom I once co anchored, or actually more like five times co anchored SportsCenter and came out saying, am I bleeding? She went on one of the Fox shows because she doesn't have a career anymore. So now she's just slid into the, oh, I'm going to be a pundit. That's. You spell it P. You spell it with a P. She went on one of the Fox shows and I mean, what's the difference which one it was? This is how dumb Sage Steel is. She not only did a stupid elitist bit on performers making political comments and she has no excuse for being elitist, not with that 13 horsepower brain of hers. Plus, I mean, performers, TV performers and other performers can't make political comments. Then what are you doing? You're a sportscaster and you were barely that. Oh, no, I'm. I'm going to be. I'm going to be the Michelle Tafoya of Stephen A. Smiths. Not only is this dumb, it was stolen from Laura INGRAHAM from about 25 years ago. The shut up and dribble construct Laura Ingram for whatever else you can say about her. And I can say an awful lot about her. Whatever else you can say about her. She wrote a book about this called Shut up and Sing or Shut up and Dribble or Shut up and Drink. Whatever it was, maybe that was the autobiography, the shut up and dribble construct. And Sage Steel took, I know I knew I heard it somewhere. Sage Steel on Billie Eilish and her comments about immigrants. When you're on stolen land, Steele said, quote, it was comical what she said. This is why shut up and dribble, shut up and sing because you're super talented but you don't know what you're talking about. Now, to Sage Steele's credit, she has never gone through the embarrassment of and never will have to go through the embarrassment of hearing anybody trying to insult her by saying because you're super talented. And still there's somebody worse than that. The worst, the winner. David Schelian, CNN's idiot political director. Did they put out a hiring search like 10 years ago for people who would continue to claim Trump had just changed his tone? For years it was Ban Jones tearing up at the thought of Trump changing his tone. But then they got this Chalean guy. I mean, Trump could start a world ending nuclear war later today because Putin refused to lie to him about the 2020 election. And somebody on CNN in the last seconds would say, there it is, Trump has changed his tone and this is the moment he's truly become kaboom. And it would probably be David Shailey who actually went there about Trump and his language about who ice should kidnap and disappear and murder and then slander after they're dead. Quoting David Shaley on cnn. He's clearly not looking to change the overall approach, but never no at the word but just, you know, just flee. He's clearly not looking to change the overall approach, but it is interesting to hear him take the rhetoric and try to place it back on the worst of the worst criminals. He acknowledged learning something, that this required a softer touch. Yes, a softer touch. No more search warrants, no more fourth Amendment, no more any amendments, automatic dismissals of removal order appeals. And they are still going to deport that little five year old Liam if it kills him. Not if it kills them, only if it kills him, David. The only softer touch around here is between his ears. Shailene of cnn, today's other worst person in the world. I don't want to say that I've had a lot of jobs, but I actually forgot one. It just occurred to me the other day. I was reminded of it by the most unlikely series of memories and news stories that came in front of me and I went, oh, my God. I was the entirety of a sports department for a New York City daily newspaper when I was 19 years old. I'll say that again and clarify it. And that, in fact, is what this segment is about, because I had forgotten this, because it didn't last that long. In 1978, I was finishing up an internship at Channel 5, the then Metromedia station in New York, now the Fox station in New York. Half in the sports department, half in the newsroom. And I have to say, for the period of time that I spent there, which was really only about three, three months, not even. I got to know everybody in that newsroom very well. And they became, many of them, lifelong friends. And they became instantly interested in seeing my career begin. And I was just about to, literally, a couple of months later, begin my last year at Cornell and was going back there and was trying to soak up both as much information and knowledge and experience as I could, and also as many contacts as I could. And I got a lot of them. One of them was named Stanley Pinsley. And Stanley was a wonderful guy. I don't know, in retrospect how old he was. I'm going to guess somewhere around 50. Stanley was a big Yankee fan, as I was at that time, and a big sports guy. And he used to hang out with the sportscaster Bill Mazur, and technically he was a researcher. And he also wrote for a publication called Our Town News, or simply Our Town. Our Town was a weekly newspaper in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. It came out once a week, and it was not quite the Village V, probably about half the thickness of the Village Voice, the famous avant garde Greenwich Village newspaper that had been published for decades in New York and was until, I guess, about a decade, decade and a half ago. It wasn't quite that, and it wasn't nearly as avant garde and it wasn't nearly as artsy, but it was about a certain area of Manhattan, say between the East river and 72nd street to the south, and perhaps the 96th street and Madison Avenue intersection to the north West. I think that's probably about it. Once upon a time, this was the German section of Manhattan. They had weekly and in fact, daily German newspapers well into the 1930s. My father used to tell me of going into that neighborhood when he was a kid in. In the 30s and 40s and not hearing English spoken all day, and if you went into a bar, forget about it. So this was heritage. This was its own separate community. And now it's just sort of merged generally into the Upper east side, although you will still hear the term Yorkville every once in a while. And it appears on street signs and bus destinations and such. But it had a whole ecosystem of its own, including newspapers, including one last surviving newspaper, Our Town News. All right, that's a long setup to explain how it was. I was the entire sports department of a New York City daily newspaper for a limited time in 1978, but it happened. So just as I'm wrapping up my internship, literally one or two days left in it, Stanley Pinsley comes over to me and he says, you know, the New York newspapers are going out on strike. Keith, you know that, right? And I said, yeah, I think everybody knows that's going to happen. There aren't going to be any newspapers. What are we going to do for our box scores? And I said, I don't know. He goes, I know my friend Colif Pami, who edits the Our Town News that I write for, wants to go daily. And I went, wow. Yeah. And I said, I tried to go daily in high school with a four page newspaper and we got one issue out. He goes, it's going to be difficult, but we got to try. What he wants to know is, would you like to be the sports section? And I said, sports editor? No, no, the whole sports section. You'd have a whole page that you just do sports and write as much as you can and then they'll just fill it with pictures. And I was like, what? What this your chance to be in a sports editor in New York at 19? It's terrific. And that was Stanley in a nutshell. He liked to. Just because they hadn't been done before or because they were outrageous and unsupportable. So he put me in touch with Kaleb Paimi and I thought, well, you know, there's absolutely no reason for me not to see what this is like. And I went to the offices of the Our Town News, which was printed in the newsroom and was this sprawling, kind of dilapidated and yet very functional operation on the east side somewhere somewhere near the East River. It felt like it was in the East River. The address was like 17000 E 79th St or something like that, which would put it somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, in fact. But that's neither here nor there. I'm just giving you what I remember of it now that it's all come back to me after I had apparently forgotten about this job for many years. So color pay me says I can't offer You a lot of money, but I can give you, like, $100 an issue. But you have to do the whole thing. I mean, you have to write a sports column. You have to write an article on each of the major teams whenever there's any news, and you're gonna have to call the teams and get photos of the players so we can break it up, because we don't have any sports. We've almost never done any sports at all in the history of our town. I was like, well, okay, what's the end game here? He says, the hell if I know. There's gonna be a strike. It could last a week, and then we stop, and it could last 10 years, in which case you can stay on as long as you want. And I said, well, but I am supposed to go to college in about three weeks. He goes, yeah, okay, well, if that happens, we'll either get somebody to do it, or you can get somebody else to do it, or we'll just stop it. But, you know, at least at the start here, we should do this. We shouldn't assume that it's gonna go on forever, but we should assume it's gonna last a week or two. You can get some experience, and we can get some sports cheap. Stan says, you can really write. Write something for me. Write a column right now that we could put in the paper about anything in New York sports. And I said, well, okay. And I sat down and took about half an hour and wrote about 500 words on. I forget what it was. And I handed it to him, and he went, I could publish this today. I don't even have to edit anything. You're hired. You are the sports department. I said, so should I write just like a column and a Yankee story and a Mets story and a feature of some sort, maybe on one of the other teams, the Giants and the jets, as the football season looms and looking ahead to developments with the New York Knicks, the basketball team, and something, anything else that pops up and just what, not put any bylines on them, because they can't. If there's seven articles on a page and they all say, buy Keith Olverman, it's gonna look stupid. He goes, well, you. I see you already have a lot of experience in the newspaper game. I went, well, yeah, I've done this before. It was only a high school paper, but we faced the same problems, just not on a daily basis, or in your case, a weekly basis. Now, deciding for some reason that you want to try it on a daily basis, he goes, yes, I'M nuts. I can tell already that you're nuts and you're gonna go far in this business. So we're gonna be nuts here for a while. And I'll probably scream at you for no reason. So get that in your now, he said, what you should do is make the columnist somebody else make up a name that you'd like. And I said, boyd W. Lardner. He goes, I like Ring Lardner. Yeah, I always liked his work. Well, that's a sports writer to emulate Ring Lardner. I said, well, I can't call myself Ring Lardner, but Boyd. Why Boyd? Because it goes well with Lardner. Boyd W. Lardner wrote the column, which was what Are They Talking About? Which was a hell of a title for a column for a newspaper, especially coming up with it on the spur of the moment when I thought I was just gonna be spending the last two weeks before going back to college just sitting around the pool. And then the idea became, I'm not really gonna be able to go to a lot of games because if the Yankees are playing at home and I want to find out how the Mets did and write up a story that night to go into the paper in the morning, I'm going to have to do something where I can watch two games at the same time, which means either record a game on audio or video and watch the other one live or something. I can't really go that often, but maybe, you know, if the Yankees are playing in the afternoon and the Mets are playing on the road at night, I can do both. So a couple of times I went out and did interviews and. And the late Mickey Low, which of the San Diego Padres was in town with the Padres playing the Mets? One late afternoon start, and I went out in the early afternoon and sat down with him, must have been for an hour, and did an interview with him. And he was great to me. And he explained why it was he had quit the Mets after one year with them and gone to play first base for a slow pitch softball team in Michigan and then come back to the National League with the San Diego Padres the next year, treated me absolutely seriously, possibly because there were no other sports writers there. They were all out on strike. Strike. The strike would ultimately last 80 days or more than that, nearly 90 days. And one of the byproducts that was always associated with the strike was the idea that the New York Yankees, who had been 14 and a half games out of first place in the American League east, vaulted back past the Baltimore Orioles and the Boston Red Sox to create a tie and a playoff game for the championship of the American League east, because there were no sports writers around to annoy them. And in 1978, in that window, between about 1978 and 1985, the sports writers of New York were more annoying in one week than they had been for the entirety of, say, a previous season in the 50s or 60s, or would be ever again. They're annoying now. I've had my own experiences with them. I can tell you they are annoying. But it's nothing compared to what used to greet the average New York Yankee and even some of the Mets and certainly the Rangers and the Knicks and the Giants and the jets and everybody else. In those days, it was, see if you can get a player to run screaming into the street. And a couple of times they did that. If you've ever heard the Rich Gossage tape, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I'd play it for you, but I don't have enough time to do all the beeping and bleeping that would be necessary for me to play it for you. I don't have the time. It would take about eight hours to edit it down together with all the beeps and the bleeps. So, in any event, I sat down and wrote my first series of articles, my own. One name was used for the Yankee article. We let the Met article go without a byline. In fact, the joke was we were going to put in by Anonymous. All I had to do, since he had his own layout people and they were putting out the same number of pages, just more often. I just had to prepare the copy. I didn't actually have to make it up as I did in my high school newspaper, gluing things into place, but I had to get him his headlines. I had to design the page, I had to lay out the page, and I had to get photographs and call the New York Mets and say, can you send me a set of your glossy 8 by tens so I have something to break this up. They did. The Yankees did not. The Mets did. And the Mets were always, always more cooperative with the media and always will be, in any event. So now I'm the editor and the only writer, and I'm appearing under the name Keith Alderman, columnist Boyd W. Lardner. And I was going to invent, if this continued, additional writers for football and hockey and basketball with other relevant names relevant to their sports. So what happened, of course, was I found rather quickly that there was no time left for me to sleep in this new job. I wasn't in New York City, I wasn't living there. I was living with my parents in the suburbs. So I would come in every day and spend some time in the office and maybe go out to one of the ballparks and try to do a quick interview and then go to the office and write something up and submit all the copies. Copy. Meanwhile, Kaleb Paimi and the production staff of Our Town News discovered something that I could have told them. Trying to take a weekly newspaper, no matter how popular it was, and fitting it into this sudden unbelievable gap in which there is no New York Times, no New York Post, no New York Daily News and no New York Newsday, all four of the New York newspapers. And Newsday was almost not in the city at that point, but it still existed for people coming into the city from Long island and Queen. All four of them were gone. There were several other newspapers that were created by the writers and the out of work publishers and printers and the people who own print shops and they tried to put out newspapers and I believe one of them had articles. It was a thing called not the New York Times that looked like the New York Times and tried to come out every day. The New York Metro News, which was made up of some of the key news and sports writers from the city, from the Daily News and the Post and the Times. And they went and worked and they put out a newspaper here and they even had the newspaper from the Unification Church. Sun Myung Moon, his newspaper got up to something like 40,000 subscribers for that period of time, for those 80 or 90 days when there were no Times, Post or News. Our Town news, Keith Olbermann, 19 year old sports editor, ready if it succeeded and turned into something perhaps profitable or even semi permanent, ready to actually skip his start of his senior year at Cornell. Because what am I going back to Cornell for? I'm going back to Cor to get a degree that I can finish up at almost any time in the future and then get a job in New York media. And right now I have a job in New York media. In fact, I am a sports editor and sports writer and sports columnist and sports correspondent. And I am the beat man for the Yankees and the Mets. Why am I giving this up? Well, I was ready to stay. The problem became that the everyday edition of Our Town News became whenever we're ready to print. So there was, I think, an episode or an edition of it on a Tuesday followed by another one later in the week, maybe it was Friday the first one, the sports section, was actually pretty good. Boyd W. Lardner wrote a hell of a column. The whole thing was actually pretty good. The articles were up to date. Unfortunately, the games that I was covering were three days old. The photographs had nothing to do with the games because we didn't have the Associated Press or UPI photographs. We certainly didn't have our own photographers to use. And the newsstands, because of all these other newspapers that were attempted during the time of the strike, the newsstands were actually pretty full. And for some reason nobody in the area in which the newspaper, the weekly Our Town news was so prevalent in Yorkville in the Upper east side, nobody there wanted our town news every day. There just wasn't enough. And they were not used to consuming outside of their area news in our town. So it didn't work. And I actually, I actually just sort of stopped going to the office and Caleb Paimi stopped taking people's calls. And I believe there was a certain amount of money that was lost in this operation. And I don't remember. I got one check from him. He gave me one check. We were in business long enough that I got one check for something like $150. And it was, you know, $150 more than I would have made otherwise. And the experience was great. On the other hand, I didn't sleep and it caused me to start smoking. Took me 27 years to quit. Started that day. Pipes and cigars don't do it, kids. Not even if you're going to try to be a one man sports department on a New York newspaper when they've just introduced electric typewriters. Okay, I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening and for bearing with me with the continuing vocal problems. I'm not sick. It's just like 74 degrees below zero in New York. Most of our Countdown music was arranged, produced, produced and performed by Brian Ray on guitars, bass and drums. John Philip Chenale handled the orchestration and keyboards. They are the musical directors of Countdown and their work was produced by TKO Brothers. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Foust. The sports music is the Olbermann Theme from ESPN2 written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by no horns along my announcer today was my friend Larry David. This program was produced by Ted. Everything else was, as always, my fault. That's Countdown for today. Day 386 of America held hostage again. But just 1,077 days until the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame brained term. Unless he is removed sooner by Epstein. Epstein or, I don't know, beneath the Valley of the Planet of the Ape videos. You racist son of a bitch Trump. The next scheduled countdown is Thursday. Bulletins as the news merits. Until the next one, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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