Keith Olbermann (52:03)
VGW Group void where prohibited by law 21 + terms and conditions apply. It is important to know that though Laura Ingraham was the first star of MSNBC literally shown on the COVID of the New York Times Magazine in a leopard print skirt in 1995, a year before MSNBC even went on the air. It's why they hired her the skirt. She did not get her own primetime show in cable News for another 22 years. And she did not get that show until she fully embraced Trump. And as we've seen yet again, as Trump has circled the drain, she sure has embraced him in things I promise not to tell little personal experience about embracing her. My primetime cable news show debuted on October 1, 1997. That would be 20 years before hers, but she Was a guest on my show the first time the next month, November 1997, and she asked me out in December. I think it was long after that that Laura revealed to me that her mother's dying words to her had been, lara, why are you so bossy? I mean, who tells anybody else something like that? Anybody else in the world? Why would you say that? Wouldn't you make up something nicer sounding? Laura, you've been such a great daughter. I mean, how in the hell could I check? Even more recently than that, she had invoked her mother again in public. I think as an excuse for raising the Social Security age or eliminating Social Security altogether, or having 90 year olds screw little screws into American iPhones or something. I can't remember what it was. It's true though, even as Laura flourished in television, she never said, here mom, here's enough so you can retire. Laura boasted in public that her mother, Ann, worked until she was 73 as a waitress full time and boasted that her mother continued to pay off Laura's college loans. Anyway, the Ingram dates and something she told me on the first of these dates has resonated with me literally every month since and is relevant to politics today. I know, I know. I did not so much date her as survive her. Even then, before 9, 11 helped to slide her cheese off her cracker. I find a diary entry referring to her as Hurricane Laura. That was March 15, 1998. Beware the ides of March, Julius Caesar. I didn't honestly, and God help me, nearly 48 years of dating, I have not been a kiss and teller. I have dated, I don't know, dozens. A couple of hundred. Actually thirteen. Seriously, with maybe three exceptions. You don't know any of their names. One of them, now a political writer, basically lived with me for three years. I keep that confidence. So why am I telling this story, violating that? Because not three months after that first date, when we were still going out, Laura Ingram asked me if she could look at a speech I was going to give at Cornell's graduation weekend and offer suggestions. This is so long ago, I literally faxed it to her. Sure enough, couple days later, I'm watching Imus in the morning, which was televised by my network, msnbc. And there on his desk in front of him is the faxed copy of my speech. And he is reading from my fax. I could recognize the exact sequence of the vertical stripes. My cheap fax machine used to streak all of my outgoing pages with Laura, used to go on his show a lot. So to curry favor with Imus. She sent him the speech without asking me. As I told her that day, all bets are now off. So I've told parts of this story before, like she had been a Supreme Court clerk for Clarence Thomas and our first date consisted of taking me on an insider's tour of the court and having me sit in his chair in tribute to him. I did not say or do anything constructive. She then cooked me the largest steak I had ever seen that did not have a rodeo cowboy riding on it. And we watched a woman, later discredited because she could not keep her stories straight, go on 60 minutes and make allegations against Bill Clinton. This is my perfect date, Laura told me, seared into my memory. But the important Laura Ingraham story sitting there in the middle of all the debris, I don't think I've ever told this. The first date was only about six weeks after the then first lady Hillary Clinton got on the Today show and blamed the at best exaggerated scandal about her husband and Monica Lewinsky on the quote, vast right wing conspiracy. That is so stupid. Laura said that night as she showed me her small office upstairs. I expected that she was about to decry the idea that Republicans would exploit television, talk radio and the brand new Internet to try to bring down a president from the other party. And I said, so naive little boy that I was no, not that. Of course we're doing that. She was kind of offended that I doubted the conspiracy part. I explained I'd only been covering politics for two months. At the end of the day, she said, end of the day? Constantly. At the end of the day it's the vast part. It's not vast. Vast right wing conspiracy. Why I bet there's not even 30 of us. Laura Ingraham then explained that she was essentially the central desk for what she called the miniature right wing conspiracy. She showed me a printed page that had the fax numbers of about two dozen people. There at the top are the sources. She said there was Ted Olson, the attorney, founder of the so called Arkansas Project and the husband of Barbara Olson, a constant presence as a talking head on cable news. She later died on 9 11. Everybody liked her. There were several numbers in the office of Independent counsel Ken Starr. One of them read B. Kavanaugh. I said, who's that? She said, nobody important. The only other name I remember was Spencer Abraham, who then was a senator from Michigan. She said they, including the people in Ken Starr's office, sent her all the rumors, the ideas, stuff about Clinton, stuff they made up and she distributed them to the Other parts of the list, that's these numbers. One number was marked Hannity radio, another Hannity TV, O'Reilly Radio, O'Reilly TV. There was one for Limbaugh. There was one marked Justice Thomas. And I pointed to it. He likes to stay in farmed. Now, maybe the most important name's not on that list. That's Matt Drudge. She said Matt Drudge used all of her stuff, but he didn't want any of it to be traceable. Very big on not traceable. So I never fax it to him. She said, I just give it to my brother. This is when she still liked her brother. He sees Drudge all the time. He gives the stuff to Drudge. Now, over here is my baseball collection. See, there were reasons to go out with her. At the time, I could think only of an old cartoon I had once seen. It was an octopus working in the post office, using all eight of its limbs to sort the mail. But every couple of weeks, it dawns on me afresh that I was actually a witness to one of the earliest configurations of the machinery. And there is no doubt today whether it is vast or miniature. It's vast. The machinery that links the right wing politicians and those who are supposed to be above the fray, like Supreme Court justices and special prosecutors and people like that there, with the right wing publicity outlets that pretend to be news organizations like Fox and Drudge and OAN and Newsmax and the ones that don't even pretend, like those who succeeded Limbaugh. This machine is in fact everything that your typical paranoid, conservative, Republican, fascist, Trumpist thinks is being run by George Soros or Bill Gates or Dr. Fauci or me. You want to be able to say there are reports or accusations about some Democrat or liberal figure or celebrity? Well, somebody puts a rumor in at one end of the machinery, or somebody makes up a rumor at one end of the machinery. It is then sent to dozens of other people. They repeat it. Voila. Suddenly there are reports. The reports then get fed back to Fox News or Breitbart or the Wall Street Journal or the Supreme Court, or they're just tweeted by a thousand bots simultaneously. You want to push this ancient racist, anti Semitic paranoia called the Great Replacement, but you want it to come out washed clean enough that soulless opportunists like Elise Stefanik and J.D. vance can say it aloud on the campaign trail without forfeiting their candidacies. This is the machinery. And I saw the machinery when it was just a list of 20 and 30 people. And at that moment, I barely recognized the importance of what I saw. Then again, I was still on that night, recovering from not just the giant stake, but something far more visceral. Earlier that day, as we were leaving the Supreme Court, Laura Ingraham had boasted about getting even with an ex boyfriend by going back into what had been their house and putting up exact copies of all the photos of the two of them together that he had taken down from his walls. And when he got smart and changed the locks, she went back again to finish the job, found her key. Didn't work. So naturally, as you would, she stuffed his garden hose through the mail slot of his front door and turned on the outdoor spigot. $10,000 worth of hardwood floors ruined, she said proudly. And part of me screamed, flee. Flee now. I didn't flee. Later, as I tried to sleep, two noises kept me awake. Snoring. Not my own. And Laura's dog. Laura's dog kept talking in his sleep. I mean, almost in syllables like that. It was something like 25 degrees out and I was on the second floor. And yet I resolved that if her dog really did make that last leap to formulate actual syllables, and it turned out her dog was the one telling her what to do, I was simply going to leave by the window without bothering to open it first. The next morning, Laura and I walked her dog. We got to an empty field. She threw a tennis ball. He went and got it. She cocked her arm back again. He took off, loving life as he did. She did not throw it. He went 40, 50, 60ft, then stopped and looked back at her with such disappointment and. And even a sense of betrayal. And she said loudly, without a trace of affection for him or anything else, wait for it. Which is when I realized I was being courted to be the next dog. A few weeks later, back home in New York, I got home from working an early morning shift, filling in for the commentator Paul Harvey at ABC Radio. I was just waking up from a tortured nap when the phone rang. It's Laura. I'm downstairs. We're going to my old law firm's party at the museum. I said I was exhausted. We're going to. Or I'll just stay here at this payphone outside your place calling you all night. We went. The next option, opportunity probably was going to be me on the wrong end of a hostage drama. Turned out she was not invited to her party. We're crashing it. I'm going to drink heavily. Frankly, it was a great party. I got to meet Hillary Clinton's mother. And her brother. And if you think the fascists are completely sincere about everything, even their neuroses and their paranoia, no. Laura Ingraham hugged Hillary Clinton's mother and Hillary Clinton's brother. They seemed to be friends. Later we wound up meeting friends of her in the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel, where she kept drinking. I was astonished after about her sixth cosmopolitan on top of everything she'd had at the party. She began to droop, her head nodding like a bobblehead doll. Her friend said, okay, that's it. We'll take care of the check, you take care of her. She had not gotten a hotel room or anything. And if you've ever heard of anybody who needed to be poured into a cab because they were so drunk, you don't really know what that means until you have to pour them into a cab. Frankly, I wanted to put her in a hotel somewhere, but the spectacle would have made the gossip pages. She basically could not stand up. So I took her to my apartment, put her into my bed, and I went and slept on the couch at the far end of the apartment, which is where I was hours later in the morning when she woke me up, because she came parading through using my phone to call my assistant to get a car sent to my address to take her to the airport and to make sure that everybody in my office knew she had stayed overnight at my apartment. And all I kept thinking was, why didn't I follow my instincts? My instincts said flee. I fleed. Not of course, if I had fled, I would have missed seeing the telephone tree of the miniature right wing conspiracy, wouldn't I? I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Brian Ray and John Philip Chenale, the musical directors of Countdown, arranged, produced and performed most of our music. Mr. Chenal handled orchestration and keyboards. Mr. Ray was on the guitars, bass and drums. And it was produced by TKO Brothers. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Foust. The sports music is the olderman Theme from ESPN2 written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group no horns allowed. And my announcer today was just cause I needed to hear his voice. My late friend George Carlin. Everything else was as ever, my fault. That's Countdown for today. Just 1382 days until the scheduled end of his lame duck lame brain term. Unless Musk removes him sooner or the actuarial tables do, or the billionaires do. The next scheduled countdown is Monday. Illness depending. As always, Bolton's as the news warrants. Also illness depending. Remember, impeach Trump. It won't work now. It will win the Democrats the midterms. And to add to the pressure on the Republicans, I want polling on a presidential recall vote. Even though we can't have a presidential recall vote. Somebody ask people what they think. Till next time, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night and good luck. Want some food? Do you? Sit, Stevie, Sit. Countdown with Keith Ulberman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
