Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. I am convinced Sam Alito is lying about who put the flags up, and I am convinced I can prove it. And I am convinced. The proof is contained not in the upside down American flag in Virginia and not in the Appeal to Heaven flag in New Jersey. The proof is contained in the other flag. Quote, my wife is fond of flying flags. I am not. She was solely responsible for having flagpoles put up at our residence and
our vacation home. Alito writes to fifty members of the House who had asked him to recuse himself from trump an election cases before the Supreme Court, and who he has refused in the case of the Virginia Distress flag. Quote, she has flown other patriotic flags, college flags, flags supporting sports teams, et cetera. In Virginia, quote, I had nothing whatsoever to do with the flying of the flag. My
wife and I own our Virginia home jointly. She therefore has the legal right to use the property as she sees fit. In New Jersey quote, our vacation home was purchased with money she inherited from her parents and is titled in her name. I had no involvement in the decision to fly that flag, etc. Et cetera, et ceta. Wait, what was that one part in the middle there? She has flown other patriotic flags, college flags, flags supporting sports teams.
In that photograph in the New York Times of the Alito's vacation home in New Jersey, well her home, she just lets him live there. I suppose there are three flags seen flying Shae Alito, a flag of the town that the house is in that stopped, the steel appeal to Heaven flag and the third flag saluting your two thousand and twenty two National League champion Philadelphia Phillies. Martha and Alito is an Air Force brat Florida, Maine, the Azores.
She moved around a lot as a kid. She wound up at the University of Kentucky, grad school and undergraduate. Later moved to Jersey, where she met her husband. Samuel. Alito is from Trenton, the New York end of the Philly suburbs. He has said that while he was at Prince also outside Philly, quote, my real ambition at the time was to be the Commissioner of Baseball. He attended the Philadelphia Phillies fantasy camp in nineteen ninety four. He had baseball cards made up of himself showing him in
a Phillies uniform. At the Phillies fantasy camp. He threw out the ceremonial first pitch at a Phillies game in two thousand and six, wearing his own Phillies uniform. He threw out another ceremonial first pitch at a Phillies spring training game a year later. There are professional photos of imposing in a Phillies uniform in front of a Phillies locker. There is another one with him with his arm around the Philly fanatic who is the mascot of the Philadelphia Phillies.
He has refused to answer reporters questions and has laughed at them happily as to whether or not he has ever worn a Philadelphia Phillies uniform under his judicial robes while in court. Quote he DVRs nearly every Phillies game, reported Yahoo Sports in twenty thirteen, and keeps up on the fightings via MLB Network. The Los Angeles Times wrote of Alito, those who know Alito best say he has just three. Loves baseball, his family, and the law. Quote.
If you said to me where is sam Alito, I would guess at the ballpark, home with his family, or at the library. Those are the three places he lives his life. A former Alito clerk told the La Paper, but it was his wife who put up the Phillies flag, not him, Not him, the Phillies fan. He knew nothing about that either. He knows nothing about flags. His wife
does all the flags. His wife chose, of all things, not just any Phillies flag to fly, but the flag of the two twenty two Phillies, the second most ill starred Phillies team in lifelong Phillies fans sam Alito's long life.
The twenty twenty two Phillies written off for dead early in the season, who fired their manager, and then, under the guidance of an interim manager who was intending to retire from baseball that fall, they somehow won the Wild Card, upset the favorite Cardinals, upset the favored Braves in the playoffs, upset the favorite Padres, reached the World Series and almost impossibly won two of the first three games against the favorite American League champion Astros, and then in the fourth game,
two games away from a World championship, the Phillies were no hit. They got no hits, and before they and their fans did, I ment chin Sam Alito is a Phillies fan. Before they and their fans had managed to notice what had happened, the Phillies managed to score a total of just three runs in the last three games of the series, and instead of leading the World Series two games to one, they lost the World Series in
just six games. And no team has disappeared like that in the middle of any World Series since the nineteen eighty three Philadelphia Phillies. And even die hard Phillies fans in twenty twenty two wept, But there were true Phillies fans, lifelong Phillies fans who were still willing to show their pride and put up flags celebrating that cursed twenty twenty two Phillies team. And yeah, it was missus Alito who
put up the twenty twenty two Phillies flag. Not missed Alito, my wife is fond of flying flags, I am not. Next you'll be saying, my wife is fond of the Philadelphia Phillies. I am not. Now, there are lots of other points to make about sam Alito and these goddamned flags, like how he has now changed his Virginia story three times already, and the one constant that there was a verbal confrontation involving the Alitos and somebody with an f Trump sign, and then missus Alito flew the American flag
upside down. It's an international side of distress. Well, the people in the neighborhood dispute said, no, that's not the way it happened. She flew the flag upside down in the beginning of January, and the name calling incident that took place six weeks later, and maybe she spit at their car. And there's that little problem of the bitter irony of some of his language in his refusal letter to the fifty representatives who demanded he recuse. My wife
is an independently minded, private citizen. She makes her own decisions, and I honor her right to do so. That was written by the man who made sure Roe V. Wade was overturned. He won't interfere in his wife's decisions. He's happy to interfere in your wife's body. All that tells me sam Alito is a goddamned liar who is lying about these flags and everything they imply and everything you
can imagine. But you can throw all of that out as far as I am concerned, and just stick to one piece of evidence, and I will stake my case on that one piece of evidence, A flag saluting the twenty twenty two Philadelphia Phillies. The peak quad of baseball teams was not flown the next summer by Martha an Alito.
Speaking of staking your case, jury gets the Trump Stormy Daniel's election interference case, and within hours they are asking the judge for a copy of his instructions and a copy of David Pecker's testimony from the beginning of that trial. And anybody who has ever covered more than two trials in their life knows that juries that want to have testimony re read to them the first day are looking
to confirm their intention to convict the guy. More importantly, they are not looking to confirm some doubts about Michael Cohen. And doubt about Michael Cohen was basically the only defense Trump offered. The testimony they want to see again has nothing to do with Michael Cohen, So whether he lied or didn't lie, and to whom and when incidental show me the pecker. This jury has its equivalent of a
twenty twenty two Phillies flag. So maybe in that courthouse the question isn't what, but when, which means the only questions outside the courthouse begin with what is the Biden campaign's plan in the event of a guilty verdict or verdicts against Trump? What are the Democrats' plans? What are they going to do with this? Is somebody going to call for Trump to drop out, for the Republicans to
throw him out? Because the idea of running a convicted felon who interfered with a presidential election and was just convicted of it, running that man for president is on any party line, sorry, antithetical to every concept of law and order ever floated from any time in our political
history or from anywhere along our political spectrum. Is the Biden campaign going to make sure that every Democrat, from the President to all the governors, to the senators, to Obama to the deputy assistant associate temporary high school intern in the White House Press Office calls him convicted felon, Donald Trump convicted felon, and Republican nominee Donald Trump convicted
felon and Republican nominee Donald Trump. Anybody got a plan? Anybody, because it sure seems like even Trump is confident that the jury is going to nail him. Because even for him, even on the way out of a courtroom, this was a goddamned strange name check, Mother Teresa. You say, Mother Teresa, what were you banging her too?
I mean that mother's racially don't be their judge.
But we'll see, we'll see.
How we.
Does that mean you think of yourself as more holy than Mother Teresa? Now that, ma'am is a brilliant, goddamned question. Back to Trump's inexorable march towards ethnic cleansing, with the concept of ethnic being very fluid and basically being replaced by people who have thwarted him. The general heading of Trump deportations, Trump concentration camps, Trump deploying the military against
citizens and non citizens alike. Two reports, one from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Crew is the first. It has completed an analysis of more than thirteen thousand Trump social media posts spanning all of twenty twenty three through April first of this year, and the totals are staggering. Twenty five of those posts have included direct threats to deploy FBI raids, general investigations, DOJ, indictments, and jail time
against the President of the United States twenty five. And that total does not include the reposting of threats made by others, including images of violence like the one of President Biden bound and gagged in the back of a pickup truck, hypothetically kidnapped or already murdered. And also this total does not include the redistribution of a post by the sadist Marjorie Taylor Green demanding that Biden quote should
be handcuffed and hauled out of the White House. Crew notes in its report that Trump has also threatened senators, judges, non governmental organizations, members of Biden's family, and of course the entire world. The post from last August fourth, you may have forgotten quote if you go after me, I'm
coming after you. If that were not bad enough, there is a different kind of report, the second one I referred to from the Washington Post following up on Trump's threat to deport student protesters any students quote one thing I do is any student that protests I throw them
out of the country. There was seeming vagueness in Trump's statement to donors that statement from whom he was demanding twenty five or fifty million dollars apiece to keep their taxes down, about whether he meant American students or foreign students studying here. But the Post has uncovered evidence that while in office, Trump did deport illegally American citizens. To quote.
An analysis conducted by the Government Accountability Office determined that hundreds of likely US citizens were detained by immigration officials during Trump's presidency and that dozens were deported. That number
includes at least five children. These two reports are not mentioned today randomly because they mainline into another report from Semaphore News, which is based on polling polling by Navigator Research about how many voteers know about Trump's Project twenty twenty five, The plan to first fire virtually all civil service employees, replace the government as we know it with Trump approved Trump loyalists, and begin an immediate program of
mass detention and then deportation, presuming they bother with the deportation. Because, of course, history teaches us that once you open concentration camps in your country and force people into them. The concentration camps tend to stay open, and what happens is you begin looking for more people to force into them to replace the original people. The results of the polling about who knows what about Project twenty twenty five is
almost as disturbing as Project twenty twenty five. Seventy six percent of voters say they know little or nothing about Project twenty twenty five. That's all voters, every demographic and political group. Perhaps more disturbing than that, seventy one percent of Democrats know little or nothing about Project twenty twenty five.
More shattering, eighty one percent of Independence know little or nothing about Project twenty twenty five, and eighty one percent of Republicans in whose name this will be done, no little or nothing about Project twenty twenty five. In only one group surveyed is the complete unawareness of a Trump attack extensively game planned already in writing. In only one group is the lack of knowledge at less than seventy percent. Only one group is even three tenths aware of what
could be to come. Project twenty twenty five has been heard of by thirty one percent of Hispanic Americans. Happily, time for your daily comic relief provided by something utterly unexpected from Trump. Apparently, there has been electron interference. I don't want to alarm you, but if Joe Biden and Juan Mayr, Sean and the globalists and the invisible monkey frogs are interfering with the electrons, oh, there goes electricity and magnets, mah, Trump will have been right. No electrons.
You get a magnet, wet it will stop working. Also, no electrons, there will be no chemistry now, no thermal conductivity. And who the hell knows where we're gonna get gravity without electrons? How do we know that there has been electron interference? A primary Trump spokesman has told us so. Not just a Trump spokesman, but is go too, tough guy spokesman. I have avoided this comp but after this clip played, the comp is everywhere now there is no
further avoiding it. The statement was made by the Trump spokesman, who looks like the late Hawaiian wrestler and actor Harold Sakata, who portrayed Auric Goldfingers hatchetman Odd Job in the James Bond film Goldfinger. He's Stephen Chung and I do not think he has appeared on camera before the press briefing that produced this startling revelation about our electrons being interfered with.
And so, without further ado, here is Trump spokesman Stephen Chung, himself a former high school football player and an employee of Ultimate Fighting Group, Stephen Chung explaining that there's been electron interference.
Make no mistake, this is electron interference of the highest order. Crooked Joe Biden and his campaign are in complete freakout mode, and that's why they've gone back on the word. And now they've gone in bed with a highly conflicted, conflicted judge, and now they're making a political mockery of this entire thing. The fact remains that President Trump will overcome. He'll fight these charges up and down, and there's nothing to stop the truth from coming out. Thank you.
As I said, I believe that was mister Chung's first on camera appearance, or even appearance in front of a microphone, at least in this campaign. I can't find anything else of him talking online, though you have seen him quoted endlessly and constantly, angrily and virulently on Trump's behalf and frankly, Stephen Chung needs to speak about Trump on a daily basis. Oh, hell, never mind having him speak about Trump. They need to give him his own hour on Newsmax or AN or Fox.
Let's shoot the works here. He needs to have his own hour on all the networks simultaneously, MSNBC, CNN, CBS, ABC, PBS newsbas Fox, all of them, because well, I need to know more about who is interfering with our electrons and what the hell Trump's gonna do about it before the gravity shuts off and we all float up into the sky. Stephen Chung included electron interference also interest here. Well, the New York Times has done it again. Electron interference.
Is it real or was it a typo? No, they haven't gone that far yet, But The New York Times has done it again twice in one edition. Who else would you ask to defend Trump in an op ed during a trial that has, at its core is paying off a pornographic actress one hundred and thirty thousand dollars the week before the election? Who would you choose to write that op ed rather than the editor of a Catholic church magazine who once attacked paw Patrol as the
depiction of a fascist state. I wish I were kidding. You know I am not kidding. Do you see what happens when you interfere with electrons? Larry? Do you see what happens? That's next?
This is Countdown.
This is Countdown with Keith Obert still ahead of us. On this edition of Countdown, based on two stories you are about to hear about comedy based talk shows and the declining quality of executives running news organizations. I want to tell you the story of Walter Isaacson, who, in two thousand and one combined these two things. He wanted to sound me out about a CNN newscast that might include humor, and I thought, he gets it, That's what
I want to do, that's what this network needs. And it turned out he wanted me not to host such a show, but just to give him my opinion on the guy he really wanted, who would never have done it in twenty five billion years. Things I promised not to tell next, but first, as ever, there are still more new idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons, Undonning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world. There's been electron interference,
the runner up worse, Pat say Jack. I mean, I know I shouldn't be complaining that he's retiring from Wheel of Fortune next month.
Thank god.
Pat Sajack has a public persona. In private, he's a fascist and a liar and a credit grabber, and he's so lazy that when I guested for the second of two times on his long ago CBS late night talk show, I got there about an hour ninety minutes before taping began, and I asked to say hi to him, and they said, oh,
he's not here yet. He's been coming in late. And I thought it was an excuse to blow me off because Pat didn't want to see me or something, until I saw him through the window of my dressing room drive up to the studio, and then he popped in a few minutes later to my dressing room and he said, Hey, just got here, Thanks for coming in tonight. Later. And this is nineteen eighty nine, this guest appearance, both of them. I think the later part is like two thousand and five.
Pat Sajack decided that he had discovered me and he had put me on national television, and I owed him my career. The Pat Sajack Show lasted fifteen months. It didn't really qualify as national television. I know this because I was on the newscast in LA that preceded it, and everybody turned off our already lousy ratings. We did like twice the audience he did in LA. Also, it had Rush Limbaugh on as a guest host, and then
the audience mutinied and they canceled the whole thing. And oh, by the way, I had first gone on national television eight years earlier at CNN every day for three years. Anyway, with say Jack retiring, it turns out that the primary non sports vehicle of political advertising on television, especially conservative political advertising, it may disappear the average one of the eight million nightly Wheel of Fortune viewers is in the sixty five to dead demographic. I can really get away
with making that joke. Now, that's the key demo though, for political ads, the most engaged voters are sixty five to dead, and it is kind of by Potterson. Congressman Jeff Jackson, the Democratic candidate for Attorney General in North Carolina, has posted a video on TikTok explaining that the most bang for your political advertising dollar is he like to salve the puzzle, pat.
Want to take you behind the scenes on something. Last year, from my campaign, I had to buy a lot of advertising on TV, so I learn how much it cost. Running One ad on Judge Judy cost me three hundred dollars. One ad on Chicago Fire was five thousand dollars because it's a big primetime show. One ad during a Panthers football game was fifty thousand dollars. I could afford zero of those, but Wheel of Fortune. Ads during Wheel of
Fortune cost three thousand dollars. But they come with a pretty big audience, so I bought a lot of those. I loaded up on Wheel of Fortune and some other shows at similar price points. The effect was immediate. It was amazing. It was like, all of the sudden, I existed to a bunch of people I had never existed to before. Here's why I'm telling you this because last week we were all on the House for to vote on the debt ceiling. This was the big vote to
avoid default. And I'm standing next to a congressman who's been there for a while, and I say something to him like, I hope the country understands that we can't keep getting this close to disaster. It's not good. And he looked at me and said, how much are you willing to spend to teach them? And I knew what he meant. He was talking about Wheel of Fortune.
Liberals have helped maga's scumbag Pat Sajack make millions cool cool, all right, But let's be smart here, oh, Biden, campaign by out Wheel of Fortune all the spots between now and November fifth, all of them, even when Ryan Seacrest takes over, by every commercial, every availability, Do it, do it now? Do it now? The bronze were Sir Brenda Ramer. Brenda Ramer is the owner of the aquarium and shark Lab by Team Echo in Hendersonville, North Carolina. In February,
Brenda Ramer announced the impossible. Her aquariums California round ray Charlotte was pregnant and had been pregnant since last September, and she was due any day now. In captivity, births are rare for these rays, but this was even stranger because Charlotte Charlotte hadn't had a date in many years, and that met either. The father was a bamboo shark that shared her tank, which one biologist compared to a person mating with an anaconda or it was immaculate conception.
Now it can happen. It's like really really rare. Well, here it is almost June, and nothing further onto pregnancy, which is now approaching nine months, more than twice the normal pregnancy and gestation for a ray And when a reporter asked to see Charlotte, the owner Ms. Raymer told him to buy a ticket to the Little Aquarium. And then while he was in there, and he saw Charlotte and she looked happy and spelt. While the reporter was in there, Ms Ramer called the cops, claimed he was
harassing customers. The reporter also says he saw no baby ray Or, and you knew this had to be coming at some point. No, no baby shark. Do doo doo do doo doo doo doot do But the winner the worst. Publisher A. G. Selzberger and his editor Joe con and Today's edition of the accelerating self immolation of The New
York Times. The Times decided it needed to have an op ed by the editor of a Catholic literary journal who is also a fellow at Catholic University, to defend Trump in a case which has at its center him paying for the silence of a porn star he had sex with right after his wife gave births.
I guess this is a.
Different Catholic church than the one I'd heard about all my life. Yeah, whatever, AnyWho, Matthew Walter writes, quote, the most obvious antecedents for the current prosecution of mister Trump
date from his time in the White House. The two impeachments, the wide ranging investigation of Russian quote collusion that consumed roughly half of his term, the speculation about violations of the Logan Act, the Logan Act, speculation about violations of the Logan Act and the Emoluments Clause, and the suggestion that he'd be removed from office under the dubious terms
of the twenty fifth Amendment. Whatever their merits, these efforts were all in their animating spirit, partisan attempts to negate the outcome of the twenty sixteen presidential election. Or Trump is a Russian asset who sold this country out for his own personal gain. You want to both sides this, that's the other side of it, asshole. Quoting again, mister Walter, It seems as if no one any longer quote accepts
the outcome of an election. If he disagrees with it, an unwelcome result becomes ipso facto evidence of some devious attempt to upend the foundations of quote our democracy, one to which the proper response is not running a better campaign next time, but trying to use whatever legal weapons are available to force the victor outside the political realm entirely, or at least to render him powerless within it. Well, that would be good if you were confessing to this,
mister Walter. Quote mister Bragg has accused mister Trump of conspiring to corrupt a presidential election. In this case, that is a tautology. All elections are corrupt in the sense of being unavoidably tainted by unlikable personalities, moral failings, dubious coalitions, venal motivations, unlovely compromises in the other thousand natural shocks. That flesh is heir too. That last part is so that you at home will know. Mister Walter read some
Hamlet once. Pretending that mister Trump's worthiness to serve a second term is a matter of criminal law rather than a political question, is typical of our American insistence. Blah blah blah, blah blah, you got the idea. New York Times op ed semi colon Trump is immune from prosecution unless he shoots somebody, and maybe not. Then if you
don't get the idea, I'll add this. Three years ago, this Walter character published a piece and it was not parody, nor satire, nor even something stripped out of the pages of the onion. The headline the fascist state of paw Patrol. There is no society or even commerce, just the relentless force of the police. By the way, the Times was
not done with us. The headline writers are very jealous of the opinion section's ability to both sides American democracy into an early grave quote emerging portrait of judge in Trump document's case prepared prickly and slow. Judge Eileen Cannon's handling of court hearings offers insights into how the case has become bogged down in unresolved issues. Unresolved issues like how she's deliberately slow walking the Trump trial because he effing appointed her and she has the morals of California
round ray. Publisher ag Selzberger of The New York Times all the news that's fit to print unless it throws off the number of angels who can dance on the head of a both sides's pin and changes it from the mandatory even number to an unacceptable odd number. Two days worst publisher in the world. Walter Isaacson was editor of Time magazine back when that was like a full time paying job. Then Time and CNN merged and they thought, well, hey, this guy does news make him like president of CNN
or something. And in his first three months, Walter decided CNN needed a comedy news show, but as I will tell you, he never thought I would be right for that. Then he decided CNN needed a new eight pm news cast from somebody outside of the company actually signed me to a contract to maybe do it. Then decided now
I wasn't right for it. Then he had to oversee CNN's nine to eleven coverage, and then he had to make a crucial decision that the future of CNN was Anderson Cooper, who has done as much as anybody to make sure that CNN has in that time sunk from
first place in the field to last. The part about the humorous news show put Walter Isaacson back in the news early this year because Chris licked and honestly, CNN ought to build a statue to him, and I have a festival every year like La Tamatina in Italy, where everybody stands around and throws tomatoes at the statue. Chris licked was per Semaphore News is reporting quote considering hiring a comedian to host one of CNN's primetime shows to fill the primetime nine to eleven PM hours with a
non traditional version of the news. Five people with the planning said executives have floated names including Bill Maher, Trevor Noah, Arcinio Hall, and John Stewart and have looked at other comedic focused talk shows for inspiration. And as I read this story, I found myself transported back in time to the office of Walter Isaacson, President of CNN, Friday, August third, two thousand and one. His big office was filled with
the brilliant late summer sun. He called me in. He said how much he had enjoyed how I had used humor in my work at ESPN and MSNBC, and that he had what he thought was a great idea, and he wanted my thoughts. What if we took an hour in primetime and instead of being deadly serious CNN or conversational CNN, or even point counterpoint CNN. What if we were funny CNN? Satirical CNN sounded familiar to me because I had pitched this exact idea to Walter and his
bosses not a month before. I still have the email in my computer. I had done a version of it for CNN in my sports reporting when I started in TV two decades before, and then I had raised it to something higher and more of a proven success at ESPN, and I did it at MSNBC in nineteen ninety seven and nineteen ninety eight. More sardonic than satirical, more bitter than humorous, but it got some laughs. In two thousand and one, I happened to be back with CNN as
a scheduled freelancer filling in on the show. Jeff Greenfield was supposed to host at eleven o'clock every night. Then he broke his ankle or something. My agent was negotiating to get me the eight pm hour that they were going to give to somebody who was not currently on the network, and I had said, obviously, you couldn't have a comedian do the news, but you could have a newscaster with a decent sense of comedy bring a humorous
starting point to it. And not only was I qualified, but as I said to Walter, right then I can do the key thing. That is the only way you can get away with this idea. I can be the guy on the air doing the slightly funny news when a bridge suddenly collapses, or Ronald Reagan dies or there is a terrorist attack, and I can swerve back into serious coverage before the network crashes, because you know, it had a comedy show on when the world ended. Walter
nodded politely. What would you think of John Stewart? He asked, do you think the audience would buy John Stuart doing that? I think he's great, don't you, I said frankly, Walter, No,
mostly for the reason I just outlined. I mean, if John Stewart is doing your funny news one night and then there's unfunny news, you are And then I said a word that rhymed with duct And I also said that I didn't know him well, but everybody I knew who did said John Stuart was insufferable, impossible to work with, A dreadful and dreary person notorious for stealing other people's
ideas and pretend they were his. I said his point of view was closer to my own, but that, frankly, the closest personality comp in cable News to John Stewart was actually Bill O'Reilly. I saw my words bounce off Walter's head and float out the window of his CNN top floor office. Do you think John would do it
to be fair? I don't think they asked him In two thousand and one, the previous time, a CNN president thought of this idea and mistakenly believed he was saying, let's have John Stewart do the news, when in fact what he was saying was let's have John Stewart's ratings between nine and ten every night, because that's what Chris Lick was thinking, as it was what Walter Isaacson was thinking, and why Chris Licked immediately moved the idea from impossible
crash and burn to feasible. No on Stewart, Let's call Arsenio Hall. He's alive.
Right.
The longest than a common Many News Hybridge show can be is about thirty minutes, and one can argue based on audience retention for the John Stewart Daily Show and the Colbert Raport. It's actually closer to about fifteen minutes, as Clicked must have remembered from his days running Colbert's amazingly unfunny CBS program. No late night comedy show that dabbled in news in a monologue or even multiple desk segments has ever done more than about ten twelve minutes
of it a night. And I mean the superstars limited themselves to ten minutes of it to night. David Letterman, Johnny Carson, even Jay Leno others have tried ten minutes
of news humor and were never heard from again. And if you doubt me, ask yourself if you remember the Pat Sayjack Show on CBS at eleven thirty every night, or Comedy Central's The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, or frankly, what do you remember of the third incarnation of the Daily Show with Trevor Noah, who kept the franchise alive after Stewart retired. But my god, it was just barely and Chris Lickt of the We thought they were paced eaters.
Lichts supposedly brought up Trevor Noah and did bring up John Stewart in an interview with The New York Times in twenty twenty two, and so then somebody thought of Charles Barkley and my old college colleague Bill Maher, a semaphore noted, Marr is a potentially more realistic prospect. The host of HBO's long running weekly show that bears his name is already in house at Warner Bros. Discovery. CNN's
parent company. Puck reported this week that CNN is in talks to begin airing some of Marr's weekly extra HBO segments. There were several problems with Bill Maher. Of course, for twenty five years, he has been abhorred by conservatives. They got him canceled from his original nightly show on ABC politically incorrect after nine to eleven. That's fine, Conservatives are not going to watch CNN no matter what is fascist
owner John Malone might do. But the issue here is Mar has also gradually spent nearly all of his goodwill and reputation with liberals. They may not all abhor him yet, but he stopped being appointment viewing for liberals perhaps as long as a decade ago. Also, if the quality of the humor in his once a week HBO show is an indicator. Putting him on nightly on CNN starting say, next Monday, would mean he would be out of material
by next Thursday, maybe next Wednesday. I also know Bill since literally nineteen seventy eight, and I used to be on the HBO show often, and he invariably told me that the best thing that ever happened to him was getting away from having to do a TV show every night, that six days of prep for one show was a tough enough ratio. Finally, CNN had the brilliant idea it would solve that problem by putting mar just once a week on in his timeslot, his regular favorite time slot,
late nights on Fridays. It took the segment he used to do after his HBO show was over that they would put online, and instead they put it in the eleven pm Friday night CNN newscast, and it got an audience literally half the size of this podcast. I think they've canceled it for good, but who knows, because honestly, who'd notice. And Lastly, while it is assumed people actually watch Bill Maher's show, there is no proof of that. HBO does not produce ratings for the programs it puts
on cable. It's not in the ratings game. It's in the subscription game. As I suggested just now, we don't know how many people watch mar We know there aren't maybe any conservatives. We don't know if there are still any liberals, And that, of course, is the other fundamental flaw here. The cover story for Chris Lichts actual job was he was to bring back balanced a political news Well, quick, name me the last a political news comedian or satirist.
I'll wait. Even if you think the foppish guy they have on Fox, Blowfeld or Gutworm or whatever his name is is actually funny, is he a political letterman? Was actually kind of a political Yet most of his political stuff wound up mocking Republicans because they do things that are easier to laugh at, like John McCain lying to him and not showing up for that two thousand and eight hour long interview we were supposed to get just
before the election, and they had to bring in me. Sorry, when Colbert, who is far more conservative than he wants you to know, could cover up his intent by pretending he was just pretending he was far more successful than he is now. And it needs to be remembered that until Trump's ascension, CBS, with that guy Licked in charge of it, was about to swap him and the a political and a funny James Cordon and Relegate Colbert at
twelve thirty at night. And even if you disagree with my comedy analysis, the bottom line is you cannot do comedy about news without being political. And you can't put a comedian in the driver's seat of a real newscast because one day he will have to segue into live coverage of the massive explosion down at the Goiter clinic. If you really wanted to do an hour or just half an hour of comedy news, it would have to be political, and it would have to be hosted by
somebody able to turn on a dime. From the Chuckle Hut to Good Evening, there are dead ex presidents. You're talking Al Franken or maybe maybe me, and CNN is not going to hire Al Franken. And guess what, CNN is definitely definitely not going to hire me. So let us go back in time again to Walter Isaacson's office, long before before anybody heard of God damned Elon MUCKs.
Back to Walter's office at CNN and the dear innocent free Deluge days of August two thousand and one, and when Walter Isaacson was the president of CNN after Rees Schoenfeld had been it, and Bert Reinhardt, whom I worked for, and Tom Johnson, who I did not but I knew, and Rick Kaplan, who I did work for later, and Walter was before John Klein who tried to bring me back to CNN in two thousand and six but got overruled by Jim Walton, who had been the backup Chiron
guy on my CNN sports cast in nineteen eighty three, and Jim was also president, and then Jim fired John, and then somebody fired Jim, and then they brought in Jeff Zooker and he tried to bring me back in twenty sixteen, and then they fired him, and then it was Chris Licked and then they fired him. And now I got that British guy who once bit a producer because he thought it was funny. I can't actually recall how long I was in Walter Isaacson's office that summer day,
so long ago. He had a lot of questions he wanted to ask me, and he continually refer heard to my experience mixing humor and serious coverage in sports, and even right then when I was filling in for Jeff Greenfield, and the longer I was in there, the more it seemed like he was leading up to asking me if
I wanted to try it, and he never asked. And what made that even crazier was not long after CNN offered me the job of lead anchor and managing editor at its CNNSI Sports network, and a different contract as a full time salaried host and essayist on news and sports for the regular CNN network, and a third contract, a holding contract, which would really just be a pre negotiation in case they chose me from the finalists for their main eight o'clock anchor flagship show, and it turned
out a month later they shuddered CNNSI, but we did proceed on the anchor essayist contract and we signed that holding contract. So I had two contract with CNN, and then at eight o'clock they never executed my other contract because they gave the show two Connie Chung Connie Chung and then they canceled her show one year later. Walter left CNN in January two thousand and three, and a month later I returned to MSNBC and we started Countdown.
Politics and commentary gradually squeezed out the time I had devoted to the humor and satire. But originally Countdown was as much satire as it was controversy. And one day in two thousand and five, a call was transferred into my office from one of our guest bookers who said somebody that they tried to get to be on the show was not going to do it, but he wanted to talk to me. While he was on the line, Keith, it's Walter Isaacson. I've been meaning to call you for
a couple of months. I don't know if you remember this. In fact, I kind of hope you don't. But in two thousand and one, do you remember I asked you about doing a newscast with a comedy element to you, and I must have asked you about John Stewart, and everybody liked John Stuart and I just wanted to say I watch Countdown every night, and every night I say
to myself, this is exactly the show I wanted. And the guy was sitting on the other side of my goddamn desk and I didn't even see him because I was looking at it backwards, and I just kicked myself. This is the man who just fixed the Elon Musk quotes what Walter Isaacson said next in two thousand and five. Should be a lesson to anybody else who wants to try Walter Isaacson's idea from two thousand and one and
claim it is their idea. You don't get a comedian to do funny news, Walter said, as if I had not told him this. You get a newsman who's kind of funny to do news that's kind of funny. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countown musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards, and they're doing very well despite the
electron interference. It was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of the Beethoven, arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed sports music when we play it is the Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN inc. Our satirical and fifthy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer was my friend Tony Kornheiser, and
everything else was pretty much my fault. That's countdown for this, the one hundred and sixty first day until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the fortieth day since Dictator Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Use the legal system, use the mental health system, huge presidential immunity of that happens, use the not regularly given elector objection option. Use electron interference to
stop him from doing it again. While we stell ten. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bolletins is the news warrants till then. I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck.
This is electron interference of the highest order. A yai ya.
These are the flags of elito insurrection. Appeal to have been sad. You know a damn thing. Why don't you ask them what dad? Yai I am Martha an ELITEO. Oh, it's my flag.
It's my world.
I deny you excess. It's an international signal.
Love.
Distress Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.