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Countdown with Keith Olbermann
TRUMP ACCIDENTALLY REVEALS HIS PLOT TO STEAL THE MIDTERMS - 2.16.26
01:32:29
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Keith Olbermann
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Keith Olbermann
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Research shows there is a significant connection between the ability to continue to work and cancer recovery. We can make work a better place for healing, Learn more and sign The Pledge at workingwithcancerpledge.com Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. The Cadaver In Chief the President, who looks like he was just exhumed just in case, has now let slip the details of his plot to steal the midterms, his new demand of active troops at Fort Bragg, you have to vote for us, and the Valentine's Day words of his succubus Kristi Noem about making sure Trump has the right people voting, electing only the right leaders. Those are the highlights. Those are the pressure points, the tips of the spear of the latest Trump coup conspiracy. Before I lay out every stop on the Trump treason train for you in detail, let me cut to the chase and to the solution. Because what Trump has already revealed about his plans should tell us how to construct our plans. It is growing increasingly apparent to me that while the whole thing could easily collapse of its own weight and its own illegality, we are where we are because we have believed our norms and laws would hold in the past, and frankly, they have not, because most of our leaders are self interested, cowardly crap shacks. Happily, others are made of sterner stuff or they have jobs that require sterner stuff. When Trump moves to seize ballots from this election from 2026, judges will have to do what judges did not do when Trump moved to seize ballots from 2020 in Georgia earlier this year. They will have to say, these are entirely different things, bozo. And nothing gives the federal government the right to seize ballots or ballot boxes or close voting places from the current election. Some judges, in fact, may have to say much more than that. They may have to say nothing gives the federal government the right to postpone elections because of fictional, imaginary foreign interference or national security concerns and simply trotting out something dramatic. Think George W. Bush's convenient bin Laden video from four days before the 2004 election. Or imagine some sort of Nicholas Maduro or other bogeyman confession that he or they or his mom or your mom or space lasers or somebody had long since launched a project to fix these midterms. Imagine Trump saying this with 10,000 ice goons outside the judge's court. The judges would be the first line of defense, but sadly, they may not be the last. And this is where what Trump said at Fort Bragg the other night comes in and where Pete, Secretary of Scotch Hegseth's attempt to demote mark Kelly and U.S. attorney for boxed Wine Pirro's attempt to prosecute Kelly and the others, where those things come in. Somebody has clearly explained to Trump that Mark Kelly and Slotkin and the others are God damned right that military members are not only entitled to refuse illegal orders, they are constitutionally obligated to refuse illegal orders. If they do not refuse illegal orders, they can go to jail. And that includes illegal orders from Trump or Heg Seth or General Raisin Cain. Think of him as an actual raisin, like one of the old California raisins. It defangs him a little bit. So Trump is now trying to win line level service members, the line guys, the youngsters, the ones Trump thinks are the suckers and losers, trying to win them with some vague idea in his mind that if the commissioned officers and the generals and the Joint Chiefs are told to shoot up a voting precinct in Chicago and they refuse, well, the raw troops from Fort Bragg will do it anyway out of loyalty to Trump, and might even shoot the officers if Trump asks them to. Like this is the Soviet revolution as it played out on their western front against the Germans in 19 f ing 17. It is absolutely possible that the midterms could come down to the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually standing up on their hind legs like something out of the government overthrow movie Seven Days in May. And that's two references to the movie Seven Days in May in two podcasts. And that by itself is a bad sign. It is absolutely possible that the names of the people Mark Kelly and Alyssa Slotkin were actually talking to in the video they and the four House members made will become very familiar to us in October and November and December. Names like General George and Admiral Franchetti and Commandant Smith. And yes, in the wildest of political science fiction scenarios, they might all have to get together and lock General Kaine, that would be the California raisin guy. Lock General Kane in a room somewhere while they make sure the personnel under their command do not seize ballot boxes or begin to turn us into a military dictatorship. And do not start shooting civilians. And Trump does not pop out of a bunker wearing his special new uniform with the big hat personally designed and gifted to him by Kim Jong Un. It cannot be said too many times. There is no future for Trump and these scumbags around him. Rubio Vance, Stephen Miller, Noem Hegseth Patel, Gabbard Kushner Trump's two idiot sons. There is no future for any of them if the Democrats win the House and the Senate. I'd argue there is virtually no future for any of them if the Democrats just win the House. For Trump, the midterms are not the future of his agenda and his policies. For his minions, this is not the future of their plans or their money. For Trump, the midterms are life and death. His he either gains control of this country permanently through the rest of his life or virtually permanently, or he will die in prison. The Supreme Court immunity decision about presidents. Great. Good for you. Won't mean, with a democratic mechanism in place, to add just four seats to the Supreme Court, or 14 now. It is erasing way too much important detail, buffering down the pointy parts. Too much to say that everybody traveling with Trump down this seditious road that he has taken faces similar inescapable fates. But it's goddamned close. You think Pete Hegseth and his warm crimes can survive? Special prosecutor Dan Goldman? How long would it take to put Trump Jr. And his brother, idiot Trump, in jail for life? Or Kushner, if he hasn't fled to Saudi Arabia by then? This is it right here. And the most important way to prepare for it is to remember that Trump tried a coup on January 6, and he tried a coup when he tried to get two sitting senators and four congressmen indicted, like a week ago. And depending on your definition, he has moved towards trying at least three other coups. A very thorough analysis of Trump's move towards manipulating the midterms states reassuringly that judges would doubtlessly say that seizing 20, 26 ballots is not the same as seizing 20, 20 ballots. And as I said at the beginning, I agree with that. What it leaves out is the fact that Trump's response is not going be to say, ah, shucks, I guess I lost, I'll go to jail. Now, it is far more likely to be to order some friendly general to arrest those judges and seize those ballots anyway and shoot anybody who gets in the way. If we remember this at all times, we increase our likelihood of surviving this. I hope I haven't alarmed you. Actually, I hope I have goddamned alarmed you. Now, before I review what Trump has done in these last few weeks, just this year, all of which confirms he is going to try to use some combination of military and ICE and Border Patrol to steal the midterms to fix the election. Let me take a quick breath and permit you to take a quick breath. If you have any breath left. I was just reading in on Senator Slotkin of Michigan and I need to inquire about this and maybe I should have inquired first before bringing it up, but I knew that Senator Slotkin of Michigan was a fellow Cornell alum and in fact a fellow Cornell Agriculture and Life Sciences alum. But what I did not know was, was that she graduated in the year 1998. Cornell does not have a commencement address. It does not hand out phony degrees. It's one of the things I'm actually proud of. It has a convocation speech given by somebody chosen by the graduating class each year, given the day before graduation indoors and why anybody goes to it. I do not know. What we did the day before graduation, particularly if it was nice out, was the same thing we did most of the week before graduation. Drink. However, in 1998, Elissa Slotkin's graduation year, the convocation address got its largest attendance in like a decade. And between a third and a half of the graduates actually went into Barton hall and attended and listened to this guy. So if Alyssa Slotkin went to her convocation in her graduation year, 1998, the speaker she heard was me. Okay, back to the Apocalypse now already in progress. This is the checklist to keep in mind at all times of what Trump has already done. The conspiracy plot points he has already let slip, the stuff he should have kept quiet about, but he has happily told us about because he can't keep his effing mouth shut. It is our number one advantage. The number one advantage for the anti Trump forces is Trump. The timeline starts with Trump seizing Nicolas Maduro on January 3rd. I still think Maduro reappears in this somehow. Then it's sending ICE to invade Minnesota, terrorize Minneapolis and underreported terrorize rural Minnesota. And then of course, murder Renee Goode on January 7th and Alex Pretty on January 24th. And they may not have actually planned murders in advance, but if they did, wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Because the point of ICE going to Minnesota was to intimidate and to practice. Practice for the midterms. Intimidate the midterm voters and of course express the hatred and the racism at the heart of maga. Now, for all the blowback this would ultimately direct against Trump, I mean, he lost half of the people in charge of this, got fired or demoted, and he had to withdraw. He had to run like the little shit he is. It did temporarily give Trump what he needs about the midterms. The midterm part of ICE's invasion of Minnesota was a Trump victory because it allowed Pam Bondi the means with which to try to blackmail Governor Tim Walls. If Walls wanted ICE out, Bondi wrote him all he had to do was give the Department of Justice Minnesota's voter rolls. That not only obviously would give Bondi, the escapee from Last Call at the dive bar, access to an entire state's voter rolls, but it would also give the veneer of precedent for Bondi to try this again elsewhere. Now we have the means the Save America act, which is actually the Save Trump from Dying in Prison Act. The Save Trump from Dying in Prison act requires states to give their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. That's Kristi Noem, who doesn't have an honest bone in her body, or an original one that passed the House. It will almost certainly not pass the Senate, but not to worry. Trump says he will enforce it anyway via executive order. Now, how do you do that if it isn't law? Well, you do it with the military or with ice. Or you send Gabbard or Gnome or a guy named Thomas Albus. Not Albus Dumbledore. Thomas Albus. Or you do what Trump did when he went on Dan Bongino's podcast. Republicans, he said, should take over the voting in at least 15 places. Somebody told him that. How the hell do you do it? Well, executive orders that look like the Save America act, which isn't law unless a soldier is pointing a gun at your head and telling you, yes, it is. Almost everything else Trump has tried in this timeline has overlapped, so a clean chronological timeline is impossible. So there's a lot of overlap here. But the next standout date is January 28, when, using apparently falsified documents, the DOJ's Star Chamber got its hands on the Georgia 2020 ballots, while Bird Brain DNI Tulsi Gabbard stood there phoning back at the ranch and making another appointment to get that skunk hair thing going in her head. This puts some meat on the skeleton that is the paranoid ramblings of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Thomas Albus, who has been designated by Barroom Bondi to be the point weasel on attempts to fabricate election interference or national security threats. Or here comes Nicholas Maduro. I told you, if you don't know this Albus shit, he is attached at the hip to the idiot Ed Martin. Idiot Ed and Martin mainlines to Cleta Mitchell and Sidney Powell. After the 2020 coup collapse, Cleta Mitchell vanished. Powell confessed, apologized, and evidently went right back to work doing the same stuff the attempt to demote Senator Kelly, the next stage in this. You know about Trump's public announcement that Kelly had committed crimes making that video punishable by death. You know about that, too. Jeanine Pirro's complete shutout trying to indict Kelly. You know about the wooing of the military at Fort Bragg the other night. You know about the seeming malapropisms from Plastic Woman Nome about making sure only the right people vote for the right people. You know about. I do think hearing the last two comments from Trump and Noem, I think you should hear them again. I think they will help you remember this as a mantra. To not live by, but to make sure we don't have to live by. Fourth Bragg, we have your name back. We got your name back from the radical left. The radical left is not happy about it. It's another reason you have to vote for us, because they'll change it back to whatever it might be. What exactly makes you think that if the generals, if the Joint chiefs actually do their duty to this nation and shut Trump down when he tries to alter the midterms, that he won't try to alter the generals, that he won't go back to Fort Bragg and try to get all those idiots sitting behind him to grab their guns and go help him shoot the commies. Ever seen the Stephen King movie the Dead Zone? No. I don't think Christopher Walken has had a vision of President Martin Sheen starting a first strike nuclear war. The missiles are flying. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. I mean, I know Marty Sheen, but when the generals in the movie will not use their fingerprints on the device to help launch the missiles to destroy Russia and the world, President Marty Sheen threatens to cut off their hands and put their fingers on the device anyway. But if you can stomach it, I think it would be a good idea to watch that movie again. And Seven Days in May. They're both great films. And the HBO miniseries the Plot Against America and the film version of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, the great movie starring Lionel Barrymore and Basil Rathbone. Oh, yeah, that's right. Ninety years ago, the U.S. government actually got the filming of that overthrow the government movie, that here's fascism. It Can't Happen Here. The government actually got that movie canceled. Hmm. Anyway, watch what you can. Presuming you can still get Seven Days in May and the Plot Against America.
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Keith Olbermann
And.
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The Dead Zone, because the one nice thing about this deep weed political science fiction stuff is there are surprisingly few new ideas out there. And It'll be much easier when Trump tries some of this and you say, hey, wait. And you do that. You know that meme with the guy pointing, DiCaprio pointing at the TV. You do that meme that. Wait, I know that. That's in seven days in May. I know what to do now because like the best cliche in the world at the moment anyway, goes. Just because you're paranoid, America, that doesn't mean Trump's not out to get you. A quick Epstein update. Casey Wasserman is selling his Wasserman talent agency. He thinks that'll be enough just because Chapel Roan and Abby Wambach quit his agency rather than remain associated with a guy so implicated in the Epstein files. Flirtatious emails with Ghislaine Maxwell. Oh my God, are there. Did you also Pam Bondi. Pam Bondi hit on me once outside the men's room at the PBS station in Tampa 20 years ago. I'll let you know when I get over it. Wasserman. Anyway, back to his problems, thinks he can stay on as head of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. He can't. I only know him a little bit. Casey, you can't. If you do, what it means is the LA Olympics will grow increasingly tied to Jeffrey Epstein every day a little bit more until the opening ceremonies, which are on July 14, 2028. I got bad news for you, Case. You ain't gonna make it. Meanwhile, the chief legal officer, Katherine Ruemmler is out at Goldman Sachs. Oh, Epstein files. Brad Karp, chair of the Vichy law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkin and Epstein files. He's gone too. In the uk, the government is investigating, prosecuting the man who until last fall was its ambassador to Trump and the United States, Lord Mandelson, who is eyebrow high in the files. They may prosecute him and the brother of the king for turning over secret financial documents to Jeffrey Epstein. On top of everything else, the advisor who got the prime minister elected who also said to the prime minister, you should make Mandelson the ambassador. He got fired and a media guy got fired and the prime minister got close to being challenged. It was like an hour or two in there where it looked like he wasn't gonna make it. He swerved out of the way, at least for now. Here, Howard Lutnick, who said he cut off Epstein like 20 years ago, or maybe it was 2,000 years ago. Then turns out he visited Epstein island, but just for lunch and started a new business with Epstein in 2014, like a decade after he said he sworn him off and was disgusted. Yeah, he's still Trump's lying Secretary of bullshit Commerce. Because one very simple reason Trump is the CEO of the Epstein Cover Up. Every once in a while I begin to suspect that this podcast will eventually turn into a media criticism podcast. Every once in a while I suspect you believe that this podcast has already turned into such of a podcast about the media more than about politics or Trump or anything else. Because if we stop and think about it beyond the natural problems that we have had with what we all thought were laws and that turned out just to be traditions and things that men of goodwill would observe to keep the form of government here largely democratic. Apart from that overarching problem that has led us here to the precipice of eternal damnation, the second biggest collapse, the second weakest guardrail, the guardrail that second most turned out to be made out of oatmeal and paper mache is the media. There has been another array of disasters in the media in the past week. From CBS News, or what was formerly CBS News, From CNN again, from a man I used to work for named Andy Lack at NBC, formerly of NBC, though they fired him twice. And from Jake effing Tapper. I got into it very briefly to the point where people were responding to this by saying we're gonna get the popcorn now Olbermann's going at Tapper again. I just saw this on threads and responded to it, and I believe it was misunderstood. So let me clarify this and then let me see if I can carve a few new holes in Jake Tapper and explain that. But the reason I'm carving a hole in him is not for the reason that everybody thinks I am Jake Tapper. The other day posted the following Dark days. Hope you're hanging in there. That was the entire post. I will give him credit. Nowhere here does it say that his book about Joe Biden's mental health is now available at popular prices. He just says, dark days. Hope you're hanging in there. To which I responded, hope you understand you contributed to the darkness. Maybe you should quit your bullshit show on your bullshit channel and go atone for a year. Work in a hospice or a charity. Make up for how you helped Trump asshole. It was assumed that my reference there to Tapper was about the book. It it really was not, and I will explain that in a moment. In point of fact, the idea that Joe Biden's acuity should be addressed was a valid one. The timing was wrong the way Jake Tapper did it by debasing his network himself, shilling this book on the air the way he did, like a Bill O'Reilly redux. These were all humiliations. These were all disqualifications from the journalism business. But that's not the point. The point is what Jake Tapper did not do. And Jake Tapper has again underscored the fact that the pivotal moment in the 2024 presidential election was at the debate between Biden and Trump. And it had nothing to do with as bad as Biden did during that. It was Jake effing Tapper's fault because he put himself ahead of this country. Looking at Joe Biden's mental acuity, consistency, there is no question that it should have been addressed in 2022 and America would have been better off if Joe Biden had said, I will be what I said I was going to be a transitional president. I am going to get out of the way, out of the way of the next Democratic candidate. There is no question it would have been better if that had happened. And there is no question that he should have done it. And there is no question that it should have been raised more often than it was in the media by everybody, including me. What Jake Tapper did, of course, was second guess the thing while ignoring what is also unquestionable. There has never been a minute in the last 50 years in which Joe Biden has been 1, 1 millionth as mentally uncertain or as unreliable as Donald Trump has been at Donald Trump's best minute. Donald Trump is insane. Joe Biden is momentarily confused. This, however, did not sell books. So Jake Tapper whored himself out. And the results are, well, they are what we are in right now. And yet my major complaint about Jake Tapper and the reason I suggested he should quit his bullshit show and go work in a hospice or a charity and make it up to earth is not about the book, even though he sat there selling it during the middle of his newscast for the last year. My complaint with Jake Tapper remains the 2024 Biden Trump debate. It's not about the Biden book. That he went on his little Jake Tapper newscast and shilled this book the way Bill O'Reilly used to shill his books on his shows on Fox. Or some woman selling fake diamonds sells the fake diamonds and shills them on qvc. It's embarrassing. It's humiliating. But if you're incapable of being embarrassed, if you have no core, no soul, and you cannot make a fool of yourself because you just don't care, have fun. My complaint remains his role in The Biden Trump debate in 2024, which was the turning point in that campaign and the turning point that led to the late dropout of bide student from the presidential campaign. And Jake Tapper has a huge double digit percentage responsibility for what happened because Jake Tapper, moderator of that debate, refused, refused to fact check Trump's three digit lie total. When ABC did a debate, they fact checked Trump's lies. They didn't have a problem doing that. David Muir didn't have a problem doing that. Jake Tapper was more interested in being on TV than telling the truth. He is not a newsman, he has never been a newsman. He is a TV figure who has befouled himself. He has shit his pants on TV time and time again. Perhaps that is why he has sided with Trump. Oh, those were the rules you were offered for doing that debate. Jake, stop whoring yourself. What are you going to say to yourself in the last minutes of your life when the question becomes in your mind, did I do the wrong thing then? And you say yes, I could not have done worse. If you are offered an untenable unacceptable series of circumstances, you turn them down. And Jake, you didn't. You're a prostitute. Now to a place where Jake might fit in perfectly. They're looking for a new host of the CBS Evening News. Presumably they're looking for another new host of the CBS Evening News. Perhaps it should be Jake Tapper. CBS is imploding and its new anchor, Tony decopol, is going down faster than Titanic. It is now unquestionably and solely a propaganda outlet. And very few of the key people at CBS News are even pretending otherwise. There is no question that there are plenty of broadcasters and reporters who are still there. They are dropping steadily, however, and I would guess that they will all be out of there within two years. But Barry Weiss has proved herself to be a very stupid three card Monty operator who may may be fooling herself into thinking that she's some sort of journalist. If she was a journalist, she's now sold out journalism so she can pretend she's a big time executive. And evidently she's not much of that either. And there are plenty of people under her at CBS willing to sell their souls too. Like the unprincipled anchor Decouple and the amoral. And I have never understood for a moment the appeal this man had. And when he was hired by cbs, I said him. And every time I have seen him on TV since, I have said him and he's doing it still, and he is out There rooting for Bari Weiss and carrying her shit for her in a plastic bag or possibly in his own mouth. Robert Costa. Robert Costa it was who revealed that there had been an interview done with Stephen A. Smith for CBS Sunday. CBS Sunday, which used to be perhaps the most respected and most enjoyable news long form show in television. I include all of them in this. There was a quality to this show in which they largely stayed away from controversial subjects and yet managed to provide interesting and informative and accurate information. And that it is gone. It is now a staging ground for Stephen A. Shit. I will confess to you, Costa quotes Smith as saying on the program which broadcast yesterday. I'm giving strong consideration to being on that debate stage for 2027 and running for the Democratic nomination. No for president, quote, I've got this year coming up, 2026 to think about it, to study, to know the issues. Well, at least Stephen A. Is admitting that he, he doesn't know the issues, hasn't studied and hasn't thought about it. He just likes the idea of being president. Stephen is too stupid to understand that he is a stalking horse. We've been through this before. I'm not going to go through all the arguments and the whole Stephen A. Smith story. He is wonderfully talented at killing time in sports broadcasts, but most sports people will tell you that whereas he kind of knows the NBA. Anything outside of basketball. He's just making it up as he goes along. And now you're going to ask him about public policy issues that he does not understand. This is the man after all, who jumped right into the middle of the ICE shooting. The first one in Minnesota of Renee Goode and said that it was kind of unfortunate that Renee Good died, but the ICE officers were completely justified in killing her. That was his starting position. And now he's going to know the issues later and he will be portrayed doing this on cbs. And don't think that this program yesterday would be the only time you're going to see this because he's a stalking horse. He is there and too stupid to understand solely to siphon off votes from the would be Democratic candidate in 2028 or those from other parties who might oppose JV Vance or whoever the Republicans will get or if they actually try Trump for a third term. They targeted Smith's ego and it's a pretty big target. And Stephen A. Smith will not know that he's Bobby Kennedy, Jill Stein, Cornel West. I don't think he knows who any of those people are. He is being used and CBS has declared that it will be his platform. And there's more. As if this were not enough, There was Tony Decouple's town hall announcement. On March 14, he will host a town hall with J.D. vance. And one of the topics is going to be the 2028 presidential campaign with just JD Vance. How is that news? It's not. It's advertising. And what's more, the title of this Bari Weiss series of town halls is Things that matter. On February 9th, Tony decouple already once again put a hole in whatever reputation he had as a newsman at some point in his past when he announced on their newscast, the CBS quote Evening quote news. ICE arrested nearly 400,000 people in President Trump's first year in office. Of those, nearly 60% had criminal histories, meaning charges or convictions, including many for serious crimes such as drug trafficking and child pornography, and several thousand cases involving rape or murder. Those are some pretty heavy statistics. That's a very important story, and it is to some degree surprising that you're probably hearing this for the first time. 400,000 people arrested. Of those, 60% had criminal histories. Drug trafficking, child pornography, several thousand rapes or murders. The books were cooked. Trump is not right. Trump is not dragging off only the violent criminals, the worst of the worst. The number had been rewritten. The facts had been changed into what Tony decouple read to present a fake picture to falsify reality. CBS had its own online report on its website, which has not yet been corrupted by Barry Weiss, Antonio decouple and the others. The CBS story, using the same data from the same sources, reads less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump's first year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows. So between the actual number, which is less than 14%, and this dire picture of nearly 60% had criminal histories. Somebody changed the facts from the facts to lies that Coppol promptly spewed on the CBS Evening News. This would explain then something that was obtained by the New York Times and posted a goodbye, cruel world note from a producer at the CBS Evening News from a woman named Alicia Hastie, who had been there apparently for four years. And I will not read this in its entirety, but some of it is of great value. Alicia Hastie's farewell email to her colleagues. There has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as heterodox journalism. The truth is that commitment to those people and the stories they have to tell is increasingly becoming impossible. Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit, but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations, a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines. None of this detracts from the talent of all the journalists who remain at CBS News. You all produce thoughtful and important, important work, even under different circumstances. That is precisely what makes this moment so heartbreaking. The very excellence we seek to sustain is hindered by fear and uncertainty, she continued. Walter Cronkite once said in response to critics, if that is what makes us liberals, so be it. Just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism, that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased. Cronkite's idea is one of the best I've encountered. He understood that labels are inevitable, but standards are what matter. What defines journalism is not what critics call it, but whether it remains faithful to those principles. I've always taken comfort in the belief that if we hold fast to those first ideals, trust follows. But those ideals cannot stand on their own. They require vigilance. They require courage. And there you have it. At CBS News, a woman producer who was trying to uphold the principles of Walter Cronkite, quit, left, was forced out, could not do her job because she wanted to do actual journalism. A fraud named de Kopal, who once said that his newscast would be far more transparent than Walter Cronkite's. He stays. It is a very sad thing to say as somebody who grew up on CBS News and aspired to work for it, it and did. But unfortunately CBS News will have to be discontinued. There is no way to repair the damage that has been done in these brief months by the Ellisons and this witch, Barry Weiss. And lastly, just to prove that the collapse of media in this country did not begin, recently, Andy Lack has appeared out of nowhere, former president of NBC News twice and to his credit, the man who looked at me somehow in 1997 and saw a guy who could do news programming on then the almost brand new network msnbc. I don't know that he got anything else right. There have been times since then when I'm not sure that he got that right, but Andy Lack apparently popped up on Facebook and this was posted by Jeremy Barr, formerly of the Washington Post and now of the Guardian. And I will read this in its entirety because I forget which of the various cliches this is, but it's one of them. I think Lack writes. It was in 2018 at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in LA that Jeff Bezos confronted me with a simple question. When are you guys going to stand up to Trump? I was at NBC at the time and a bit startled. What do you mean? I said. He was in my face. Come on, you're letting him off the hook. He was steely eyed. I pushed back. I don't think that's quite right. Before I said anything more, he shook his head and moved on. I've thought a lot about that encounter recently, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a meager $250 million. It seemed like a bargain basement deal, lack continues, and he would be the perfect new owner, ushering one of the great newspapers into the digital age like no one else could. My best friends at the Post, included the legendary Bob Woodward, were hopeful and excited. Here we are now, bewildered and pissed off at the arrogance of the fourth richest man in the world, tearing the paper apart, firing more than 300 people with his insanely stupid leadership. Go figure. Peggy Noonan's column over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal, a lament for the Washington Post, and Tina Brown's bafflement with Bezos on her subsect frash hell yesterday are must reads. Before I address Andy Lack, I did want to mention that you've just had a conversation with Andy Lack from my two tenures or my one tenure working for him, and the second time when I actually talked to him about returning to work for him. Andy Lack exists solely to drop names. Vanity Fair, Oscar party, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos. Again, my best friends at the Post, including legendary Bob Woodward, Peggy Noonan, Tina Brown. That's right. There is one comforting thing now, kind of a funny thing about Andy Lack and his dotage. He doesn't know when people will be impressed by his name dropping and will simply go, who in the hell's Peggy Noonan? In any event, what I found so entertaining about this posting from Lack and his rage that Jeff Bezos once criticized NBC for not doing enough against Trump, was that apparently this confrontation with Bezos, which he cites to being, I guess, early 2018, would have followed by a little bit more than two years of the afternoon of Thursday, October 29, 2015, when Andy Lack, who had just been put back in charge of NBC News and MSNBC after the Brian Williams disaster, if you will remember that, offered me a new show on msnbc. It was four years since I had left to go start my own program at Current after NBC had breached my contract and I walked away with all of their money and he was willing to admit that was a mistake and he wanted me to come back. However, the rule would be my new show could not include political commentary, especially not political commentary about the Republicans, especially not political commentary about Donald Trump. He was willing to put me back and do the things, the kind of difficult things that would have been required inside NBC to put me back on the air at msnbc. He was willing to do that, provided I didn't do the only thing I was good at. He explained to me that the special comments that I started to do at MSNBC in 2008, excuse me, 2006, were the worst things that had ever been done. They destroyed msnbc. They ruined msnbc. What he meant by this was it ruined his vision of msnbc, which of course he surrendered when he left NBC circa 2000. But he never got over the idea that he was right and I was wrong and offering me a new job would prove to the whole world that he was right and I was wrong and that the worst things that ever happened to MSNBC was letting Keith Ulberman do political commentaries instead of feature interviews. He wanted me to move to Los Angeles and have a co host and do feature interviews for half an hour every night. And he said, we'll call it the Last Word. And I said, you have a show called the Last Word already with Lawrence o'? Donnell? Not for much longer, I hope. In any event, he went on now to explain to me his initial reaction the first time he saw one of the special comments. I thought you were going crazy. I thought you were literally growing crazy on the air. I called up a bunch of my friends, Jen, I said, are you watch watching Olbermann? I think he's gonna go crazy. We're all gonna have to watch tomorrow night. See, he may actually go crazy on the air. I don't know what he might do to himself on the air. He's going crazy. He's absolutely lost control of himself. I did not say to Andy Lack at that point, did I approach your total lack of control in business meetings? Was I that crazy sounding? I didn't say that because I was trying to manipulate Andy Lack into offering me this show and thus triggering an offer for a different show at cnn. That was the real not happen for a variety of reasons. So I just sat there and listened. And the other thing I did not say, the one in which the part of it which he said, okay, look, all of my friends were now going to tune in and watch you, and we were all watching to see if you were going to lose your mind. What I wanted to say, I was trying to find a way to say this and still not get him to not offer me that job, was that perhaps he'd missed the point here, that whatever he thought of the special comments, whenever he thought about my histrionics or my anger or my rage or telling President Bush to shut the hell up, he was watching, wasn't he? Andy Lack, for all that he said he hated about what I was doing, he was watching the television show, the newscast. And the first rule of doing a newscast is if you can't get anybody to watch it, it didn't really happen. This was more or less when Andy Lack explained, and I think perhaps this is the starting point when we began to move to this guardrail proving itself to be made out of oatmeal and paper mache. He did not say, in the explicit way that I would have liked him to say it, that we are about to go to hell in a handbasket. But in retrospect, it's pretty clear he said it in this opaque way. This was the moment that Andy Lack, who explained that whatever we did, we could not have me come back and do political commentary about Donald Trump. He said he knew what America wanted for news in the years 20, 15, 16, 17 and into the 2000s. He knew what America truly wanted, that the tide had turned, that the yelling was over, that the acrimony was at an end. The that what America wanted for news from MSNBC was the New York Times of cable. I am only glad, in retrospect, that he did not say the Washington Post of cable, Also of interest here. I'm not done with the media, by the way, and its failure to even partly look out for us. I want to come back later in the show and tell you about the day an MSNBC anchor told a member of the audience live on TV on msnbc, this is on television, told a member of the audience of his show on MSNBC that that audience member should die of aids. Not only that, but after it happened, the president of NBC tried to. To prevent the president of MSNBC from firing the bastard. And are you enjoying the Olympics? I think they are the worst, most insincere thing in sports. There are some exceptions, but I think almost everybody involved in them is going to make it onto the worst persons list. That's next. This is a Fahrenheit 451 level edition of Countdown. Most people think their insurance will cover them when disaster strikes. The truth, many are wrong. You pay premiums and assume you're protected until the fine print hits exclusions, limits, loopholes. Suddenly that coverage isn't coverage at all. 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Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the Ones who get it done. George Carlin, pleasure to have you here. Thank you. This is the best news show ever. I told that to one of your producers. And I want you to know that I've seen them all. And it's just the, especially the first 35 minutes. Thank you, sir. It's just, just unparalleled. I got bad news. Between you and I, we got six minutes to completely screw that in the ground. Okay, that's good. Still ahead on this edition of Countdown, I vow to invoke what Carlin would do more often than I have been. I've been getting too easy in my old age. It just occurred to me, I've moved now officially, certainly into the final two thirds. I might have moved into that years ago, who knows? But officially, 67, that's your, you know, you're not the first third, certainly not the middle third. You're definitely in the last third. And so what? So I still, I still had a few Fs to give. And having just watched the biography of George Carlin again, it's time to stop giving any Fs at all. So, no, I may have indicated to you that I was done about ranting about the collapse of media, specifically at CNN and MSNB now and all the rest of them. No, I still have more people to go after now. I have to go after Abby Phillip, who is still the person enabling that shit on cnn. I have to go after former NBC presidents Bob Wright and Andy Lack and a lunatic who is still on radio somewhere named Michael Savage. Let me tell you about the day the former MSNBC tried to go right wing and one of its hosts told one of its viewers on the air that he hoped that viewer would die of aids. And the response to this was to fire the host, obviously. Except the president of NBC tried to stop the president of MSNBC from firing the MSNBC host who wanted the viewer to die of aids. The reason I want to tell this story now is because of the cowardice and the greed of TV news that I have just finished referring to in its newest incarnation, its newest evil little monsters like Tony de Coppol and Barry Weiss. It's greater now than it was 20 years ago. That's absolutely true, but not by all that much. This has been coming for a long time. We have just reached this point and God knows where we're going from here. Coming up next, in things I promise 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. LeBron's worse congressman, Randy Fine, Florida 6th. You know Randy, he's the one who got caught illegally voting in the House using the voting cards of other members to cast extra votes for them, even though they were not in the House at the time and he was still casting their votes for them. Randy, who's also a plus sized congressman, is also crazy. He demanded that the FCC investigate and prosecute Bad Bunny for the super bowl halftime show because Randy Fine said Bad Bunny swore on national TV and should go to jail for it. Swore in Spanish in his music. Randy Fine insisted. Oh, and everybody who watched should go to jail too. Quote, Randy Fine, lock them up. Today would be a great day to round up and deport illegals, especially those who liked bad bunnies. Filled all of them, no exceptions, because of the swearing that Randy Fine heard. Except of course, there wasn't any swearing. People at places like old television companies that bring you Super Bowls or bring you the news or own MSNBC now, or they're stupid, but they're not stupid enough to avoid easy fixes like saying to this man, we're gonna put you on in front of a 125 million people all at once and you can increase your brand to whatever degree that is and say whatever you want because we're actually going to be able to use this as a window for you to speak your political piece. But you have to not swear. And he's not such a dummy that he's gonna say, then I refuse and I'm gonna swear anyway. Of course he didn't swear, but Randy Fine, whose interest in life is ham sandwiches, Randy Fine, whose interest in life is Twinkies, Randy Fine could not have been bothered to have watched and even use a live translating service online to find out that all them Spanish words that he doesn't understand were just ordinary, regular, nondescript, non curse words. So the fcc, Randy Fine, demanded that they investigate and arrest everybody. How did the FCC investigate it? They watched the super bowl halftime video. I believe it took this guy Carr, this Nazi Brendan Carr, several days to figure out that there might still be a tape of this and that people could look at it. And somebody at the FCC looked at it and translated everything from Spanish to English and realized he cleaned up the lyrics. He didn't make any references to body parts, let alone actual curse words, which you would think that the idiot maga balloon shaped congressman who represents the district between Gainesville, Florida and the Atlantic Ocean would have known. Unless Randy Fine doesn't speak Spanish and only speaks hatred. And you get to wonder, even the way things are weighted against Hispanic people in this country, how on earth do you get elected a congressman from even a largely Spanish speaking district between Gainesville and the Atlantic Ocean in Northern Florida, how do you get elected without speaking Spanish? I'm sorry you didn't get to hear the F word, Randy. By the way, Randy Fine has not apologized and he hasn't apologized for the voting thing and for the hatred and the prejudice and we've lost his attention because we said F word. And I guess he just presumed the F stood for food. The runners the of the White House social media team proving it can screw up not just about ethics and laws and moralities. It can be not just racist and insane and sexist and autocratic. It can also be just plain old stupid. Just plain old dropped out of the fourth grade stupid. The White House social media team posted right after the first U.S. olympic hockey goal from Italy and they had a bald eagle emoji and a flag emoji. And in all caps they wrote, wrote cue Freebird. Freebird being the unofficial song of the U.S. olympic hockey team because there hasn't been any good rock and roll since then. Q Freebird. And they spelled Q. Well, there's three different ways you could spell Q to those who would be looking at the White House on social media. Seriously. And they still picked the wrong 1 out of 3. They spelled it Q U E U E Q as in get in the queue, get in the line, get in the computer lineup. The Q. The Q. Of course they meant queue up. A record is cue. It's always been cue. I mean, honestly, if they'd just chosen the third option, just the letter Q as in QAnon, it would have been slightly less stupid than writing queue. U e Q free bird. I think we're just lucky they didn't spell it burrd B U R T. But the winner worst. The worst. Speaking of the Olympics. The Olympics. You heard me. The whole Olympics. Everybody connected to the Olympics. Let me start by saying something. If you're enjoying the Olympics, good for you. I'm happy for you. I think it is fair to say that I am as critical and opinionated as anybody in the world. But I also think the number of things I proselytize about is comparatively a small percentage. I mean, if you're enjoying the Olympics, I think you're mistaken. But I'm not going to stop talking, talking to you because you're enjoying the Olympics. I just don't think it's that important. But it just annoys me because there's so many things we've come to accept as normal for the Olympics that are just bullshit. So if you're enjoying the Olympics and you don't want to piss off or get mad at me or have me seem like I'm mad at you, just skip this part. There's a very nice story coming up about this guy from MSNBC who tried to to tell a viewer to die of aids. And the president of NBC tried to keep him employed after he said that even though it said in his contract, you have to fire him if he says that specific thing. There's a good story coming up after the next commercials. Skip this part if you don't want to hear me take the Olympics apart. But I'm still going to say it. Now. The Olympics is crap. The events are largely crap. What the Olympics have done to real sports is crap. Crap. What professionalism has done to the Olympics is the worst crap of all. The NBC telecasts are maudlin and terribly produced. My old colleague Mike Tirico, whose career I saved in 1992 when he got in a little, little trouble at ESPN. Mike is. Is completely smarmy. They had a game, a hockey game on Saturday on the streaming channel in which Finley beat Finland, beat Italy 11 to nothing. Although Finley could have beaten Italy 11 to nothing as well. Italy doesn't have much of a hockey team. Finland beat the host team, the Italians, 11 nothing. And they had one announcer on the Peacock streaming service. Who do you work for? I work for Peacock. Uh huh. Proud of that, are you? What do you call it around the office? Do you call it pee? Or do you call it the other thing? They had one announcer on an 11 nothing game and I switched. I swear to you, I am a better hockey play by play announcer than whoever this guy was. And the last hockey game I actually announced was in early 1974. And I could have stepped in and done a better job not even knowing the numbers the players were wearing. This fella believes the word nothing is pronounced nothing does not say G nothing in an 11 to nothing game. Do you know how many times an announcer working alone is going to say the word Nothing? It's about 273 times. That's just a guess, but that's what it seemed like from the 1/3 or so of the game I saw. And he did. I briefly searched for his name, started to search to find out who this guy was, to identify him here. But then I thought, yeah, I'm not really mellowing in my old age, contrary to what I said before. But I am picking my spots more. I found something from Marcus Aurelius that said, you know, this may not have occurred to you recently, but you are entitled not to have an opinion about something. Oh, that's very powerful if you think about it. Certainly don't have an opinion about everything. Or even if you do, just keep a couple of them to yourself. Why, why bury this guy? Other people who heard him say nothing 273 times, they know. He probably knows. I mean, he sounded like a, like a tech who showed up because the actual play by play announcer defected to some other country. I do not hate anybody bad enough just to gratuitously mention this man's name. If you want to find out who it is, go find out. I stopped. I never heard him say his name on the air. It's possible he was trying to remain anonymous, in which case I'll give him applause. I'll take back what I'm saying about him now. I'm also not going to identify NBC's hockey studio host who I saw on the air. And I said, what? She's still in the business. Friday she introduced an interview on tape saying it was conducted after the game. Except, oops, the game wasn't over yet. It was only after the second period. Then she came back on the air and made up some sort of excuse about how the game wasn't close anymore, so it might as well be after the game. It's like, holy cow. Seems kind of important to know whether or not the game is over already. Because if the game's over already, you get to leave. This host was blown out by SportsCenter nine years ago, hasn't had a major assignment since, and she's studio host at the Olympics just because her husband is a host on the Today show. What are they paying minimum wage to the host at the Olympics? Less than minimum wage. And of course, when it comes to the Olympics on tv, the standard business formula of national television, television, particularly when it comes to sports, is writ large. Do you enjoy this sport or this team? Great. We will now take this sport or team hostage. We will now charge you more to see it. And often we will make it impossible for you to watch anything else from your sport on television while we are broadcasting this and we are blackmailing you into watching this or nothing. Sign up for our service forever. Like NBC is doing with hockey. Hockey, a sport that NBC buried for about a decade before NBC lost The NHL contract a couple of years ago. And now they're back screwing up hockey yet again. And this is a real shock to me because it's years since I've watched programming for more than five or 10 minutes at a time that was produced by NBC or CBS or ABC or Fox at any length. I don't watch sitcoms, I don't watch dramas. All of my favorite shows were canceled about 2015. Letterman retired, Craig Ferguson left that show. It's all gone. My shows are no longer on TV today. The commercials and the show promos on the Olympics appear to have been designed for an audience of 9 year olds. In fact, I have to say that when I was 9 years old watching the Olympics, I would have been offended by the low quality of the commercials and the promos. I have been grieving in what little I have seen at the Olympics, seeing my friend Ben Stiller, a lovely human being on top of being extraordinarily talented, slowly unraveling his great work with these brief self humiliations for a grocery delivery company company who told him this was funny. And they keep running them. Apparently it started during the Super Bowl. They've been running at every spot break since. They're terrible. Also, who knew? When it comes to the promos, apparently every TV dramatic series is about some municipal service in Chicago. Chicago Hope, Chicago Fire, Chicago L, Chicago Diaper Delivery. Jesus H. Christ. Anyway, back to the Olympics. I was at the 1980 Olympics for UPI radio. And I was kind of the local liaison to the 1984 Summer Olympics for my TV station in Boston, an ABC station. And then roughly around then, they started to let the pro athletes perform at the Olympics. And they essentially turned the Olympics into nothing more than a bunch of All Stars Games. An opportunity for people to get jingoistic and drunk and belligerent in a kind of fantasy league environment in which the players they already knew were reassigned from their real teams to these made up temporary national teams. National teams that were based entirely on where Grandpa got lucky with Grandma. I checked out of the whole thing very quickly over the years and the Olympics have not had any interest in me. And I was supposed to anchor the Olympics from Sydney in 2000. Halfway I got out of that entire job before that happened. Then I went back to NBC intending the original point of my returning to NBC was to anchor from Athens on Cable in 2004. And then I started to do this news stuff on the side again. And I won the enduring enmity of the head of NBC Sports, Dick Ebersole, by asking him to reprioritize things. And I said instead of skipping my cable show Countdown for a month, during which it'll probably die in August 2004, September 2004, I asked Dick, take me off the Olympics. Let me stick with the I think the news show is not only going to succeed, but it's going to be important and if I leave it, it's going to go away. He almost threatened to kill me and he never understood that. And I think you can understand now why I made the choice of Countdown over the Olympics. Anyway, I keep going off on these side tangents, but there's a lot to discuss. If I'm going to trash the Olympics, I'm going to trash the Olympics. This year for the first time since 2014, the National Hockey League has shut down for three weeks so that only about seven teams worth of its players, and they have 32 teams, can go play in these Olympics. And all but about six of the games they play in the entire Olympic hockey tournament will be humiliating blowouts like Finland's or Finley's 11 nothing win over Italy on Saturday. The NHL only gets one window all season in which it is not in competition for tension, a competition it cannot even partially win. And the only time that it has equal footing or nearly equal footing is in the window after the super bowl ends and before the opening day of the baseball season, when its real competition is only the NBA and college basketball formidable. And they'll still finish third, but they finish a strong third. And so in this window. The NHL has chose to waste the window this year and will let just those two top players, 140, 150 of them, play a couple of interesting games while basically the other 25 teams worth of guys sit on their asses in the prime hockey window and hope the audience comes back after the Olympics ends. Now, if you don't like hockey, this doesn't mean anything to you. If you do like hockey, you may be looking like this at this the way I do. I don't care what country the players are playing for. I don't care where they're from. I don't care. And I'm not gonna bother to remember whether Michael Granlund is from Norway, Finland, Italy, Switzerland or Baltimore. I don't care. You know where he's from? He's from the Anaheim Ducks. That's his team. I don't need to see his passport. I don't need more jingoistic bullshit. My job is about jingoistic bullshit. Oh my God. Flag this and wave this and National Anthems. Oh my good Lord, how well has that worked out for everybody on earth? Auston Matthews, captain of the American team. The hell he is. Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Plays for the Toronto Maple Leafs, takes a three week vacation and he's captain of the American team. I know where he's from. He's from Arizona. Good for him. What does that have to do with his job? His job is in Toronto. Now the argument is the players deserve a chance to represent their countries. I guess. Sure. I mean, if you say something other than, oh, yes, I have a flag at home and I spend 25 minutes every day waving it back and forth in the backyard even though nobody you can see me, if you don't say that you are suddenly disloyal and ice will stop by. And I don't mean hockey ice, but I mean, what's the point? The players deserve a chance to represent their countries if they think it's good for them in some way or they actually have this unfortunate nationalistic bullshit. Gene. But you know what? The fans deserve to be able to watch this, their sport as scheduled, and their teams, because the players can always pursue an Olympic spot with or without the necessity of shutting down an entire league for three weeks. You do what they used to do when the Olympics were limited to amateurs. A player who wanted to play in the Olympics tried to make the Olympic team before he went pro. The greatest Olympic hockey team success we have ever seen for any nation, possibly the greatest Olympic team success in any Sport in the 130 years of the modern Olympics, Unquestionably the greatest we will ever see from here on in, unless A nation of 62 wins a gold medal in something. The 1980American hockey team, they upset the Soviet Union. Those were not members of the Toronto Maple Leafs. That was not the. That was not the Auston Matthews of 1980. Those were college guys. They won the gold medal and then they, then they went pro. Then they signed their first contracts. And oh, by the way, if this American team wins the gold medal, it will have played seven, maybe eight games to do so. The 1980 U.S. olympic team also played seven Olympic Games to win the gold medal after playing a brief preliminary schedule, very brief, just 61 games starting the previous September. The 1980 U.S. olympic team played a preliminary schedule against top collegians and international teams starting the previous September. September of 1979. They played 61 games before they got to the Olympics. Auston Matthews, Captain America. Seven games. Seven games is not a national team. It's a hobby. If that's too draconian. If that's too unfair in these days of money first, success second. Okay, I can change. I can grow a little. You want to play in the Olympics in February 2026, Auston, Matthews, Granlund, whoever the Italian goalie was who lost 11 to nothing, feel free. Take a leave of absence from your team and go play in the Olympics. Why cancel the team? The whole team isn't going. As I mentioned, about seven out of the 32 teams worth of players are going. The other one just went home. You take a leave of absence. You take a leave. You go join the national team the way international soccer stars used to leave their league clubs to go play for their countries. You feel national pride. You want to win for your nation. You want to win a gold medal for yourself? Well, give something up the way your predecessors did. It's not a question of entitlement that's ruining our society. It's a question of people believing that they're entitled to 100% of the possibilities. 50% is pretty damn good. 50% of your opportunities, and you have to choose and prioritize. That's really fair. You give something up for that. You give up, like, three weeks of your salary and you have to convince your National Hockey League team to let you skip the nine or 10 games. And of course, oddly enough, I don't think the National Hockey League teams will let them do this because, well, money. I also understand about why some of the key hockey franchises have bought into this Olympic bullshit, which I thought they had killed off in 2014. And I say this as a fan of Canada, someone who may someday soon seek political asylum in Canada, someone who wanted, when he was 10 years old, to go see the Montreal Expos, an expansion baseball team, play baseball in Canada, because it seemed to me so cool that there'd be baseball played in a different country, speaking a different language. So we went to Montreal. And I say this as somebody who genuinely wants to see the next 21 Stanley cup championships won three times, each by the seven different Canadian teams. Nice little rotation. I take the cup champion, Montreal Canadien over the Carolina Hurricanes any day of the damn week. Winnipeg instead of the New York Islanders. Vancouver Canucks over anybody, even the Maple Leafs. And with that, I say the following. Of course, the Canadian NHL teams support the Olympics idea because in hockey, Canada has a chance to win the Olympics, unlike the Stanley cup, which no Canadian team has won since 1993, which will shortly be half my lifetime ago. Sorry I had to mention that, because to me, that's what international sports is all about now? Bad sportsmanship and bitterness for which we cancel three perfectly good weeks of the National Hockey League season when psychologically, in the depth of winter, those games are more valuable to the viewer, to the elderly shut in like yours truly, than any other part of the season, including the Stanley cup finals. We canceled three weeks of these games and shoved them off into the rest of the schedule. And instead, where do I, the elderly, shut in, wind up? I have to sit here and watch like CNN and the Weather Channel or watch the NBC nightmare Olympic cast and Ben Stiller's one commercial running in every break. Everybody involved in the Olympics, one question for you. Why today's worst person's gold medalists in the world? Most people think their insurance will cover them when disaster strikes. The truth? Many are wrong. You pay premiums and assume you're protected until the fine print hits exclusions, limits, loopholes. Suddenly that coverage isn't coverage at all. My policy advocate reviews your policies, Home, Auto Life and breaks them down in plain English. They show what's really covered and what isn't. It costs just 27 cents a day less than a cup of coffee. For peace of mind, before you assume you're covered, go to mypolicyadvocate.com you might be shocked at what you find. Mypolicyadvocate.com support for the show comes from.
- [82:22]
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- [83:22]
Keith Olbermann
Need to be healthy every day to survive it and go through the next chemo round and the next chemo round. So it's important that that work was part of that to keep my mind busy for 8, 9 hours and then I had to go back and face the reality. I had a goal and the goal is to survive.
- [83:38]
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer
Research shows there is a significant connection between the ability to continue to work and cancer recovery. We can make work a better place for healing, learn more and sign the pledge@workingwithcancerpledge.com I'm Bowen Yang.
- [83:53]
Keith Olbermann
And I'm Matt Rogers.
- [83:54]
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer
During this season of the Two Five Rings podcast and the leading to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi Bud. Hi Matt. Hi Elmo. Hey Matt. Hey Bowen. Hi Cookie. Hi. Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To the number one story on the countdown and my favorite topic, me and things I Promised not to Tell. And hoo boy, they're all still at it in cable news, huh? Still hoping they'll wake up tomorrow and it'll be 2005 again and everybody watches one of the channels and hundreds of millions of dollars are just waiting to be made. And our industry is not dying. It's not, it's not. It's not. I'll repeat my point about the desperate attempts at CNN and MSNBC and the minor ones to court right wing viewers. I mean, once again I'll mention the name Abby Philip. This is no boating accident. Virtually every mainstream media organization in this country, as I have said time and time again, has already had the same journalism meeting. Let's now discuss how if Trump seizes power again and America goes fully fascist in 2025, how can we do the most important thing that journalism demands? How can we still protect this company's profits? I say this not merely because I know most of the people running the mainstream media organizations, but because these conversations have already happened. And they happened long ago, largely because the first not white guy president was elected just seven years and two months after 9 11. We forget how seriously and terrifyingly we already have teetered on the edge of full fledged fascism here after the attacks on the World Trade center and the Pentagon. 911 happened between my two tenures at MSNBC. But I returned a year and a half after it happened and by then the place I went back to Work had already hired a sort of Alex Jones prototype radio host named Michael Savage, and it was slowly trying to build him into the host of a weeknight show. Savage was a homophobe plus an equal opportunity bigot. His real name was Michael Wiener, and all you need to know about him is that he was a Wiener who pretended he was a Savage. What happened to him when they tried to stick him into primetime and what he said that led to his firing and the blowing up of the let's out Fox Fox News plan of the then NBC Chairman and CEO Bob Wright is a great story I will relish telling you in a moment. But first, a little context to this. MSNBC and Fox News launched within weeks of each other in 1996, and for a while, in fact, until I left MSNBC in December 1998, we were ahead of Fox in many time periods, though CNN crushed us both. Then Fox ascended, then came 9 11, and then Bob Wright thought he saw his opportunity. All you need to know about him is that after he left the position of running NBC, he became a contributor to Fox Business at msnbc. Wright gave Oliver north his own show and Laura Ingram her own show. He had given a program to Alan Keys, a Republican who somehow managed to lose Senate races in two different states and washed out three different times in Republican presidential primaries. His MSNBC show consisted of him giving speeches, though he was alone in a studio with no audience. Alan Keys could not break himself of his habit of spraying the room with his eyes. The viewer at home would see him looking off camera to his left, then looking at the camera, then looking off camera to the right. He went back and forth like a sprinkler. I remember once looking at him and yelling at the tv, hey Al, over here. I'm the one in the middle. Bob Wright also brought in Joe Scarborough, long before Scarborough knew how to disguise much of his fascism. Bob Wright fired Phil Donahue, although to be fair, that was really more about money than it was about politics. But he replaced Donahue show with what was supposed to be a high speed, slightly right leaning newscast produced by a Fox News refugee. It was called Countdown with Sam Donaldson. And needless to say, the right leaning idea went horribly, horribly wrong after they changed it to Countdown with Keith Olbermann. MSNBC's lineup was remarkably unstable at that time. I had hosted its 8pm show from October 1, 1997 through the beginning of December 1998, and then I left to go back to sports and baseball at fox. Then the 8pm hour was hosted by John Hockenberry for three months. Then Ollie north got his shot. A month later they started having rotating Liberals co host with ollie North. In April 1999, it became north and Paul Begala. That was five shows in five months. In May, they cut north and Begala to half an hour. In June, they canceled them and replaced them with a half hour Ann Curry documentary. In early 2000, Curry was expanded to an hour, but then in May, Curry was replaced by LORI DEW. In August 2000, they started their version of Dateline called MSNBC Investigates. In September, they cut that show to four days a week and launched a vanished white Woman of the week show, actually called Missing Persons with Diane diamond, which they canceled after one episode. And then they put MSNBC Investigates back on. Then they canceled that a month later to make room for a newscast with Forest Sawyer. Then after the uncertainty of the 2000 election, they refocused that as decision tooth 2000 with Forest Sawyer. In January 2001, they canceled Forrest Sawyer and put MSNBC Investigates back on for the third different time. Then in July, they moved the News with Brian Williams from 9pm to 8pm Then the next September, they moved Brian to CNBC and instead launched Phil Donahue show in the 8pm MSNBC slot. Then in March 2003, they off Donahue. They started Countdown originally with Lester Holt, Pat Buchanan and Bill Press. Then after the war started and there wasn't anything to count down to anymore, they hired me to host Operation Iraqi Freedom. And after one week of that show, they launched Countdown with Keith Alderman. That's 20 different shows or formats in four years and four months. So Bob Wright's next primetime ideas. And you gotta give him this much. He had a lot of primetime ideas and virtually all of them made it onto tv. His next set of ideas was a primetime lineup of me doing the news at 8, then Scarborough at 9, then Jesse Ventura at 10, and then this Michael Savage character. They began this plot by giving Savage his own show an hour every Saturday afternoon. On March 8, 2003, everybody agreed it was crap. On radio, Savage sounded kind of threatening, I guess, a kind of red meat fascist. But on tv, taking calls from viewers in a tiny little cramped looking studio somewhere in the Bay Area, he looked small and whiny and kvetchy, and he was wearing a bad toupee and a suit that was far worse than that. When I was negotiating my return to MSNBC in 2003, I got the executive in charge of primetime to put it in my contract that Michael Savage would never appear on my newscast in any form unless it was an obituary open and shut. But then on Friday, April 25, 2003, I came into work. We were about a month into the show and there in the computer rundown of my newscast was a pre recorded Michael Savage commentary. As soon as he saw I was in the office, the executive producer they had hired from Fox, a cross eyed chain smoker named Dennis Murray, pushed his way into my office and said, we have to run a Michael Savage commentary. There's also a mandatory Matt Drudge soundbar. This is per Phil Griffin, so don't think you can call Phil to get it dropped. He's not in New York, he's not reachable. And he left. I called my agent, I told her the story and I matter of factly asked, if they don't drop it, I have to walk out, don't I? Mind you, she had just exhausted herself negotiating my extremely unlikely return to msnbc. She didn't flinch. Of course you have to walk out. But first call Phil Griffin's office and tell him you're leaving. Give him a chance. It'll help when you sue them. It was breach of contract. I find dramatic, life changing and potentially costly. Stuff like that is usually way easier if you have the high moral ground. So I called Griffin's office. His assistant said he was in Washington in meetings and could not be reached. I said, well, you should reach somebody there. Tell them I just called a car to take me home because my contract says you can't put Michael effing Savage on my newscast. And somebody just did. Nice working with you all and tell Phil to give me a call sometimes. Time sometime was three minutes later. Griffin, who frequently panicked, outdid himself on this call. You. You would really walk out, buddy? I said, it was in the contract. I was putting my pens and books in a box as we spoke. I told him he was repeating himself. Finally he said, okay, okay, okay, buddy. Can you just, can you look at the commentary and find me a reason, a reason that isn't about politics, why it shouldn't run? I said, you mean like video quality or racist language or something? Phil Griffin's voice brightened. Yeah, good. Racist language or something. That'd be great. Call me back. The executive producer and I went to the video edit suite where a guy named Brendan o' Malia was cutting out the time Savage had stumbled or flubbed while recording this nonsense. First of all, I said to the ex Fox guy who was the producer, Michael Savage is wearing a brown shirt and a brown tie on top of his brown shirt. He is literally dressed Like a Hitler brown shirt. The editor, Amelia, played the whole video for me, and as I dialed Phil Griffin cell, I started laughing. I said, even for racist homophobic crap, this thing makes no sense. He just keeps saying George W. Bush is right because George W. Bush because he's right. He looks small and whiny and confetti and he's got a bad toupee and a worse suit. We wouldn't run this as a soundbite in his obituary. And the lighting is terrible and he's dressed as a brown shirt. Apparently. That was enough. Phil Griffin ordered the piece dropped from my show. I think they ran it on Scarborough show at 9pm in fact, I think I might be wrong. They ran two or three Savage commentaries on Scarborough shows. I know they intended to. God knows I never watched Scarborough Show. Happily, this was about the time Michael Savage ended his own TV career. On Saturday, July 5, 2003 show 15 out of a series of checks, notes 15, Michael Savage was on the air live on MSNBC when a caller baited him about gays. Savage replied, quote, so you're one of them sodomists? Are you a sodomite? The caller said, yes. Oh, you're one of them sodomites. Continuing the quote, you should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have nothing better to do today? Go eat a sausage and choke on it. Get trichinosis. End quote. End Michael Savage. And by the way, that quote that I just read, that was way better than the commentary they had had him record for Countdown down two days later, on Monday, Eric Sorenson, the president of msnbc, and he was president of all the boring things Bob Wright didn't want to be bothered with at msnbc, Eric Sorenson fired Michael Savage. Sorenson, for whom I worked in Los Angeles in local news and who consulted on my show on Current TV as recently as 2011, took me for a drink because he needed to tell somebody what happened next after he fired Michael Savage. As soon as the Savage firing was announced, Sorensen said the phone rang in his office and it was Bob Wright, the chairman of NBC. Did you have to fire him? Eric Wright asked in his nasal Long island accent, and Sorensen said he answered, yes, I literally had to. I had to fire him. Remember the clause in his contract? There are 40 phrases he's not allowed to use on the show. It literally says, if you say any of the following 40 things, you will be automatically fired for cause and get no money. Remember, Remember what number four on that list is? Number four is, quote, I hope you get AIDS and die, unquote. And then he said, I hope you get AIDS and die. Bob. I literally had to fire him. I had to fire him. It's in the contract, Eric Sorenson told me. There was a long pause on the other end of the phone and then Bob Wright said in anticipation of all that we have seen in television news since all the meetings about what happens if the country goes fully fascist and NBC and CNN and CBS and ABC all want to protect their profits and do the devil's work, Bob Wright said after a long pause to Eric Sorenson, who had just fired Michael Savage. Because it was in the contract, Bob Wright said softly and sadly, but Eric, did you have to fire him? I swear to God it's true. I'll never forget the look on Sorensen's face as he tried to explain explained this to me. And I knew in my heart that because he invoked the clause in the contract that said if this exact thing happens, you have to fire this guy, that they would then soon fire him. And they did. Done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Most of our Countdown music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray on guitars, bass and drums by John Philip Chenale. Hands handling the orchestration and the keyboards. Naturally, they are the musical directors of Countdown. 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 that was written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music in this thing arranged and performed by the group no Horns Allowed. My announcer today was my late friend and hero, George Carlin. I swear, George, more of you, less of me in the weeks to come. This program was produced by Ted. Everything else was, as always, my fault. And so that is Countdown for today, day 393 of America held hostage again with just 1,070 days KNX 1070 days until the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame brained term unless he is removed sooner by Epstein or Christy Noem and Corey Lewandowski or who knows the next scheduled Countdown's Thursday bulletins as the news merits till 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 podcast. Most people think their insurance will cover them when disaster strikes. The truth? Many are wrong. You pay premiums and assume you're protected until the fine print hits. Exclusions, limits, loopholes. Suddenly that coverage isn't coverage at all. My policy advocate reviews your policies, Home, Auto, Life and breaks them down in plain English. They show what's really covered and what isn't. It costs just 27 cents a day less than a cup of coffee. For peace of mind, before you assume you're covered, go to mypolicyadvocate.com you might be shocked at what you find. Mypolicyadvocate.com people at work supported me while.
- [101:11]
Keith Olbermann
I was going through treatment by not treating me like somebody who was going through treatment. Treatment sucks. Cancer sucks. Being engaged with work really helped to oh, I just knew I was going to beat this.
- [101:26]
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer
Research shows there is a significant connection between the ability to continue to work and cancer recovery. We can make work a better place for healing. Learn more and sign the pledge@workingwithcancerpledge.com over.
- [101:39]
Keith Olbermann
The last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown act in New York was signed in in July of 2019 and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B. From the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [102:12]
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer
I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi Bud. Hi Matt. Hey Elmo. Hey Matt. Hey Bowen. Hi Cookie. Hi. Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [102:46]
Keith Olbermann
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.