TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO CONVICT DONALD TRUMP - 5.28.24

The country the world keeps emphasizing, in succession, the unprecedented nature of Trump's indictment, of his arrest, of his arraignment, of the mugshot, the trial, the artists sketches, the jury selection, the defense, the witnesses, the objections, the fart naps, and today the unprecedented nature of the closing statements. But for some reason they leave out the other unprecedented reality that our court system is rigged, that it is rigged by Trump.

For Trump, with three justices he put on the Supreme Court until they die or resign, delaying and subverting justice in those cases, and an unqualified former yoga correspondent for the Miami Nuevo Herald he appointed to federal court brazenly and openly stalling and trying to sabotage the espionage case against him in that court. That is what is unprecedented about the prosecution of Donald Trump. That his appointees are

interfering with the attempts to bring him to justice. And we may never know if he appointed them only on the assurance that they would do exactly what they are doing now when and if it came to this. And what Trump means when he says the New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office and Justice Juan Merschan's courtroom are rigged against him, what he means is they are rigged against him because they are not rigged for him. And yes, back to my first comment, I know that every day

is a good day to convict Donald J. Trump. This, however, is the only one we're going to get for a while because Judge Cannon, Justice Barrett, Justice Gorsic, and Justice Kavanaugh might as well have offices in Trump Tower, oh and Justice Alito and missus Alito, flag connoisseur and flag

pole expert, and much more about them. Presently, verdict would be really unlikely today, but there seems to be a belief that closing statements could easily be finished off before court adjourns and realistically, we might get a verdict tomorrow, especially if one or more jurors bibbed and acted and performed and sneaked onto the jury even though they intended

to decide this case purely on the politics. I might add four or against, because remember, if Trump is convicted of anything, especially if it happens fast, he and his cult will insist that's what happened. The option from the other end of the spectrum that somebody made the proverbial buttoned up lip gesture in the mirror and then talked their way past the prosecutors and the judge, and they've just been waiting to start voting not guilty, not guilty,

not guilty until the other jurors give up. That is far more likely, because it only takes one to do that. Although this is the right moment to remind you that the four person duror B four hundred is not necessarily a Fox News viewer, even though that was widely reported during jury selection. He said during jury selection that he reads the New York Times and the Daily Mail. He's

originally from Ireland. I guess that makes sense, And then he said he gets the rest of his news from MSNBC and Fox, and a reminder again that here in New York City, Fox has owned its own station and has since March nineteen eighty six aired programs called Fox five News. They've never been liberal or anything, but they did have the presence of mind to fire the infamous Greg Kelly, now of Newsmax and Frankly, in New York, the Fox five brand is literally a decade older than

the Fox News brand. A New Yorker says he gets his news from Fox, he just as likely means the local station. Also, not to bore you with unqualified analysis about what the closing statements will punch or what the jurors will decide with. I mean, we can all guess what Trump's nut job lawyers are going to say if we can still hear them over his snoring and his gas. But actual experts seem to have built a consensus around

five essential legal issues for the jury. Fact Issue Number one, Will the jurors believe Michael Cohen's version of events and his core point, Sure, I lied. I lied for Trump. He paid me to lie, especially since the only counter witness to that, Cohen's sorta kind of ex attorney, self immolated on the stand. Fact issue number two. Did Trump pay Stormy Daniels one hundred and thirty thousand dollars to

keep quiet about the sex they had? Or did he pay Stormy Daniels one hundred thirty thousand dollars to keep her from spreading a lie about sex they did not have? Fact issue number three not what was Trump paying about? But why was he paying? Did they prove he was paying to make sure voters didn't know Stormy Daniels' story true or false before the election or was that some sort of coincidence? Fact issue number four, The payoffs were they made by Trump the company or Trump the private

amateur scumbag. It is a distinction without a difference, obviously, But if somebody on the jury buys the defense theory that these were private payments by dickwad J. Trump and not payments from his corrupt company, they could talk themselves into an excuse to acquit. In fact issue number last, you pay Cohen, you call it a retainer and a legal expense. He's a lawyer, he's doing legal related stuff.

But if the legal related stuff is itself illegal and it's not a retainer because he didn't keep the money, and you had both agreed in advance to cover it up and call it a retainer. You actually completely and

utterly falsified the records, didn't you. With one last reminder offered at face value only, there seems to be one other consensus forming among lawyers and jury watchers and trial experts, and it's this The reason Justice Juan Marshan has said nothing about defendant Jay Trump's last ten or so violations of the gag order as opposed to his first ten or so violations of the gag order is that he is in fact planning to tack time onto whatever sentence

results from the actual prosecution take care of the bill. Then again, justice theory, but a useful one which might explain why Marshan has bent himself over so far backwards. Today would be a good day to convict Donald J. Trump. There are a lot of possible responses to Israel bombing

the refugee tenth it forced Palestinians into in Rafa. One would hope there has been an off the record message to the others in the Israeli government from ours Netanyahu goes, in fact, turn them over to the international Court and stop trying to make the way the Nazis conducted war the way you conduct war, or the United States cuts off all support on say Monday, And there are a lot of responses to congresswomen Talib and other Democrats and

progressives threatening President Biden because that has not happened yet or has not happened publicly. But maybe this response will suffice. Quote one thing I do is Trump told a room full of donors in New York two weeks ago. Tonight, per the Washington Post, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they're going to behave it's a radical revolution. It has to be stopped.

also threatened to expel American students protesting. He said, quote any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. This goes right to the essence of a point I've been making since twenty sixteen, and that was reemphasized spectacularly over the weekend by my friend since childhood, Will Bunch that all of Trump's plans after seizing power involve actually

deploying the American mililitary against American civilians. Will's point, mine in a piece I did for the BBC literally eight years ago, was that to round up millions of immigrants, you not only have to have concentration camps, but you also have to have large masses of armed men to suppress protests. Because guess what, when Trump says get out, millions of people are not simply going to line up

and start marching towards the nearest border. Same for students, same for students protesting the Middle East in any direction, Same for civilians protesting mass deportations of immigrants. Trump's solution is simple, shoot and kill them. Have the military shoot and kill them. And that moment, we are living in

a military dictatorship. So when you hear about the Insurrection Act and mass deportations and any student that protests, I throw them out of the country, remember that you are actually hearing about the gentle mild surface of Trump's plans, and that beneath that gentle mild surface are piles of dead American citizens in every city and state in this country.

Before we get to some much needed comic relief, it was nice to know that Memorial Day yesterday was about Trump, like last Christmas was about Trump, like Easter was about Trump, like Mother's Day was about Trump. I suppose it is encouraging that we can still summon both surprise and disgust at his message, the one yesterday that began entirely inappropriately

and then went straight to hell from there. Happy Memorial Day to all, he wrote, unaware it was a day for remembering others, but of course in his world there are no others, including the human scum that is working

so hard to droi our once great country. And then he smeared a woman that he assaulted and another woman he had to pay off, and he attacked a judge, and he seemed to throw a homophobic smear at Anderson Cooper and ended with a seeming threat against the judge in the case that presumably goes to the jury today. Quote Now, for Mayor Shaan, here is a follow up on Trump's evil, nefarious promised that Putin will not release Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal until and unless

Trump is elected. Bluntly, that at best makes Trump an accessory to an international kidnapping, to say nothing of proving that Trump has been providing aid and comfort to our enemies, which is the legal definition of treason. And no, I am not expecting Biden five months and a week till the election to suddenly prosecute him for treason, although I don't see as many downsides to that as the politicians

might thing to do. And what a surprise it's. Another suggestion from Brian Boutler is for Biden to release publicly, one way or the other, every last goddamned piece of intel about Trump's active conspiracies with Putin and other foreign leaders, just the ones in progress as we speak. Hold a news conference, have a Senate Committee conduct to hearing, having the head of Homeland and the CIA and anybody else who has the time to show up. Just throw it all out there, or parcel it out a little bit

at a time, week after week. Oh and see if there's anything in there about his United Reich video or Unified Reich video and the other fascist violence propaganda that Trump distributes, and whether or not it is being produced or promulgated by other countries. This is no time to get weak at the knee over protocols and niceties. Trump is a foreign agent. He is trying to take over this country and end its democracy and use its military to then kill his political opponents in the streets in

front of their homes. This is the war he chose. Let us make sure that at its end there is no further trace of him. And no, that was not the comic relief. This is the comic relief. If you tried to take the weekend off from all this, you missed Trump getting his come uppance, not a big come uppance. Remember, we are aiming for making sure that at its end

there is no trace of him. But he got booed and humiliated and denied and nonplussed, and did I mention he got booed in public, and crazier than all that, crazier than imaginable, we are left in the impossible to predict position of having to thank the people who did it to him. The delegates to the presidential nominating Convention of the Libertarian Party.

is what is called a lie. He only revealed this after repeatedly asking them to nominate him, then getting six votes, then getting ruled ineligible by the Libertarians, who then cast all of twenty two votes for Rkjor and disqualified him, and then took eight hours to nominate the guy who took two percent of the Georgia Senate vote two years ago,

forcing the Raphael Warnock herschel Walker runoff. And if that was not comic relief enough, you may have noticed, as I did, that Trump's aphasia or dementia or cte or all of the above is now bad enough that he literally could not form the word libertarian at the Libertarian convention. He kept saying libertarian, liber liber liber like it was a new form of Libya. Well, hell, maybe he can

get the nomination in Libya. And now to the breaking news that you may have already heard, the flash apparently official, there have been no new reports of insurrectionist flags flown at any of Justice Alito's homes. Stunning, Okay, seriously, not quite as stunning as the Washington Post trying to spin the fact that yeah, yeah, yeah, we had the story of that first flag, the upside down American flag appropriated

by the Stop the Steel paramilitary gang. We had that story that it was flying at the Alito's home and Alexandria, Virginia, between Trump's coup attempt on January sixth, twenty twenty one and Biden's inauguration on January twentieth, twenty twenty one. But we buried it. We chose not to run it, because everybody decided Missus Martha and Alito. She put up the flag, not Justice Alito, as if that was the message. The flag conveyed Alito's house, Alito's flagpole, Alito's flag, alito flag,

run up the Alito flagpole to see who would salute. Oh,

it's that wacky Missus Alito added again. And of course Missus Alito has no possible connection to her own husband and the fact that he's on the you know, Supreme Court thingy, what utter disqualifying dereliction of duty by the Washington Post, which finally reported the story, having sat on it for one thousand, two hundred and twenty two days, having sat on it so long that the Supreme Court reporter who originally found it has already retired, having sat

on it so long that nobody is asking now whether the people actually made the editorial decision not to run it, or the paper was pressured internally or externally not to run it. Now they're running it as if they are

somehow adding value to the story. By the way, it took them another nine days after The New York Times broke the story to decide whether or not to run their own story that they had two hundred and twenty two days previously, and they're trying to sell it as if they're reporting something that their readers should be happy to see or proud of them more, and not the fact that it rivals Their associate editor, Bob Woodwards equally journalistically corrupt decision to sit on the tapes he got

of Trump in February twenty twenty, in which Trump accurately foretold how truly nightmarish COVID would be and how fatally Trump was intending to lie about it. I'll save this for my book to quote its own story. This just in Three years later, the Post reporter quote went to the Alito's home to follow up on the tip about the flag. He encountered the couple coming out of the house. Martha an Alito, was visibly upset by his presence, demanding

that he get off my property. As he described the information he was seeking, she yelled, it's an international signal of distress. Alito intervened and directed his wife into a car parked in their driveway, where they had been headed on their way out of the neighborhood. The justice denied the flag was hung upside down as a political protest, saying it stemmed from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that

his wife had raised it. Martha an Alito then got out of the car and shouted an apparent reference to the neighbors. Ask them what they did, She said, yard signs about the couple had been placed in the neighborhood. After getting back in the car, she exited again and then brought out from their residence a novelty flag, the type that would typically decorate a garden. She hoisted it

up the flagpole. There is that better, she yelled. So so so, not only was there an insurrectionist symbol hanging from a Supreme Court justice's home, and again, this is two weeks to the day after Trump tried to end American democracy and exactly the same day we finally got

Biden safely inaugurated. Not only not only was there this flag and the Washington Post knew about it, and clearly, though he would later deny knowing anything about it, Justice Alito on January twentieth, twenty twenty one, he knew all about why it was there, and it was hanging there still.

But then there was this confrontation with Missus Justice Alito, who is either nuts or impaired and nuts, or is herself an insurrectionist, or is taking the fall for her husband, or he the Supreme Court justice, is covering up for her, and the Post says, Nope, Mope, mope, so you're here. I agreed with Supreme Court reporter Bob Barnes and others that we should not do a single slice story about the flag because it seemed like the story was about

Martha and Alito and not her husband. That is Semaphore News, quoting the former Post senior managing editor Cameron Barr Bar coincidence, coincidence. Cameron Barr says this was his bad call, quoting again instead, Bar said he suggested a story on the bitter neighborhood dispute that Alito told them had prompted his wife to raise the flag. They would use the flag itself, he thought, as a detail in the story, but that story never

took shape. In retrospect, I should have pushed harder for that story, Barr said in a phone interview with Semaphore Sunday.

Bill Walton was probably the most skilled center in basketball history. Injuries, particularly and impossible to believe rash of stress fractures limited him to only three NBA seasons in which he played more than fifty eight games. In four seasons he couldn't play at all in the other ten. He won two league championships, one MVP award, he finished second in the MVP in another year, and at the age of thirty three, he won the award for sixth Man of the Year

Best Substitute. He centered the National champions at UCLA in two of his three seasons. There, and as he entered the NBA, it was conceded he was probably going to eclipse Abdul Jabbar, Bill Russell, all of them. His feet would not cooperate. Bill Walton finally retired at age thirty five and went into broadcasting, where he was utterly unpredictable, utterly delighted, utterly off the wall, NBA college, local, national, some Chicago White Sox games, didn't matter what it was.

And everybody is heartbroken because yes, all that's true, but more because everybody in sports, it seems, had met him, and everybody he did meet had a story about Bill Walton's kindness, generosity, fun and especially his support. I got to Los Angeles and started working as a local sportscaster there.

On the morning of Labor Day, September two, nineteen eighty five, I was in a state of complete disoriented shock, like a permanent jet lag, and somebody decided that I should begin my career at KTLA by getting up at like seven o'clock in the morning and covering a bicycle race, a professional bicycle race on the streets of Beverly Hills.

As if anybody watching a local newscast in LA, or if anybody debuting as a sportscaster in LA wanted bicycle highlights, or as if we could possibly shoot enough highlights to make it even vaguely interesting, or tell who won. Well, it was day one, so I was still cooperating with management. We set up on Rodeo Drive amid a pretty good

crowd for a holiday morning. I had just tested my microphone and I was wondering why it was not as if anybody was going to show up whom my audience would want me to interview, when a door opened behind me and outstepped a man with bright, curly red hair, six feet eleven inches tall, an unmistakable face, Bill Walton

of the Los Angeles Clippers. As he later told me, he'd just gotten the call from his agent that he was about to be traded to the Boston Celtics and he was going to go out now to buy tape to wrap his packing boxes in. I knew I had to see if he would comment on this weird scene playing out in front of us, and I started to approach him when he looked at me, stopped and stared and said, Hey, you're that CNN guy Channel eleven just hired.

And I said Channel five, and he said whatever, and he then gave me a fantastic interview about this bicycle race and who was in it, and he knew the names of some of the competitors and how much he enjoyed it and never missed it, and welcome to town and good luck, and then off he went, signing a few autographs as he did. A couple of minutes later, another door opens and it's a man named Richard Blackwell, hugely famous then fashion designer, writer, searingly obnoxious critic of

women's dresses. Mister Blackwell. Now he comes over to me and he asks me what's going on, and we then roll tape and I explain it to him on camera and he says, a race in Beverly Hills. What do they win the street? Now, I say to my producer, we got mister Blackwell and Bill Walton. We could stand here for five years. We can never get anything better

than these two guys. Let's go home now. Two years later, I saw Bill Walton at the NBA Finals in Boston and I go up to say hi, and he says, you put me and mister Blackwell in that bicycle race story. I don't think I saw Bill Walton in person more than two or three times again in my life. But I got letters and later emails from him, and voicemails and phone calls and just hellos that he sent through his play by play buddies encouraged me to keep doing it. Sports, news, politics, whatever.

Everybody mourning Bill Walton today is not just mourning a friend close or distant, a friend for decades or a friend for just today, decades ago. They are mourning the chairman of their own fan club. I've never known anybody who enjoyed your success for you more than Bill Walton did, nor who tried to encourage you to keep doing it. Still ahead of us on this all new edition of Countdown.

I graduated from college forty five years ago today, meaning it's nearly forty five years now that I've had the same recurring dream, the one in which I don't graduate from college forty five years ago today. Since I was taking twenty eight credits ten classes in my last semester, there was a reason for this. But the weird thing is, for decades it was a standard stress dream, but then it turned into something entirely different. Next in things I

promised not to tell, but first. As ever, there are still new more idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the mis grants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens, who constitute two days worst persons in the world, the bronze worse. Whoever is running the campaign of Prime Minister Rishi Sunach in the UK's snap parliamentary election on July fourth, I'm thinking, whoever that is they want Sunak to lose.

You may remember that as he stepped out of ten Downing Street to announce the election and begin his campaign, it began to rain on him, pouring drenching rain. No canopy, no umbrella, no towel, just him and puddles of water on his coat. And it's gone downhill for there. One of Sunak's first campaign stops was the Belfast Dockyards, from which they launched Titanic. They let him announce that if he's returned to office, he'll establish mandatory national service for

eighteen year olds. In another word, he wants to reinstitute the military draft. They let him be questioned by two workers at a factory, and then reporters went to get the names of the workers, and it turned out the workers they were not workers. They were local city councilors

from his own party. They took him to Wales, where he asked local Wales voters if they were looking forward to Wales playing in the twenty twenty four Euro Soccer Tournament, except Whales did not qualify for the twenty twenty four Euro Soccer Tournament. They let him be photographed at a supermarket called Morrison's with his head plays perfectly where it would obscure the R, the I and the S, so his head in these pictures is framed by.

to Nick Fuentes, jd Vance Trump sickophant. Jd Vance Senator of Ohio. Jd Vance is not white enough.

Fred Trump. It's father we already know. He was arrested during a public fight in Queens on Memorial Day of nineteen twenty seven, a fight during a ku Klux Klan March seven. Arrested at the ku klux Klan March. They gave Fred Trump's address in the newspaper, but they did not say whether he was fighting for the KKK or against it, though the evidence suggests he was part of

the clan march. And see if this sounds familiar, the clan passed around a flyer that read, liberty and democracy have been trampled upon when native born protest Americans dare to organize to protect one flag, the American flag, one school, the public school, and one language, the English language, so that we already knew about.

thing for this country. And sooner or later you're going to wake up and believe when he becomes president, he'll become a dictator. So America be aware, and I'll say goodbye to America. Hello.

In the only recurring dream of my life, which I have had a thousand times or two thousand times, it is always the morning of May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine. Always it doesn't vary. Every other detail of the dream varies, updates, adds in new details, adds in new life experiences, throws in additional twists, seems more nightmarish, sometimes more annoying, sometimes

more comical, and lately more enjoyable. It's a very strange, recurring dream, and it's always about the morning of May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine, graduation day at Cornell University, and starting sometime that summer June, maybe certainly by the end of that summer, I began to have this dream, not more than once a once a week on average,

and usually under conditions of great pressure. And the dream is not that complicated, although as I say, it updates so that a version of the dream in nineteen seventy nine would have been significantly different than the last time I had the dream, probably earlier this year because the frequency has fallen off. As I'll explain later, it's not a violent dream. There are no monsters. There's just pressure

and stress, and it's always the same thing. And it literally took me more than forty two forty three years to figure out what was at the heart of it, and for much of that time I had the assistance of a professional. And this was not some sort of crisis in which my life was being affected by this. But it was just this same dream again and again and again, and it got so ordinary that in it sometimes characters would say to me, write this part down.

It's new. It's graduation morning. I am unexpectedly and delightfully expected to graduate on time at Cornell University, even though I missed an entire semester and had to cram literally twenty eight credits into my last semester at the school and pass all of my courses. I think it was

ten different courses. That includes one credit for being an intern at a television station in New York the previous summer, and an independent research program about comparing means of gathering news at that station and my college radio station and a news organization I worked for briefly in nineteen seventy eight. There were a couple of one credit courses in there, but there were at least seven classes that met and

I occasionally went to them. And I am to graduate, and my parents are already at the arena, or in this case, the field, Shellkoff Field, the football stadium at Cornell. They're already there, and it's ten o'clock in the morning, eleven o'clock in the morning, and somehow the phone rings in my apartment. It's always the same place, two hundred and seven Delaware Avenue, Ithica, New York, the ground floor apartment in the old house there, with a very nice porch,

very nice place, all things considered. Bathroom was a little small. You could sit in the bathroom and reach out and answer the phone out in the living room. That's how small the bathroom was. In any event, it's always that morning. The light is exactly the same every time coming through the window, and the phone wakes me up, and it's the registrar's office or somebody else at Cornell. These details are usually just skated by, and they're telling me that I,

in fact have not graduated. But I still can provided I read five hundred pages of a book a history book by noon, or submit a twenty five page paper by noon, or take seven final exams by noon, or attend twenty five sections of a biology class by noon. It is the standard, and I know other people who've

had it, the standard non graduation dream. But the thing about this dream is, as I say, it is always updated, so that since It is clear to me the moment that request comes in that I have to take seven final exams by noon and it's already ten o'clock and they each take an hour, and there's no way I'm going to graduate on time. I'm going to have to spend the summer going to summer school at Corneilla University.

And thus the jobs I have lined up, the job prospects that in fact produced the job within a month of my graduation, they're all going to go away because I have to stay there to graduate. When it gets more pressure filled, I in fact have to go back and redo the entirety of my senior year at Cornell. So now it's not the question of one course not being completed or two or three, it's the entire year. It's forty two credits. It's like a year and a

half's worth of school. There have been occasions where I've had this dream where I am somehow both at Cornell University and on ESPN, and I have to quit the job at ESPN to go back to the start of my collegiate career. So it's no longer just I have to redo my senior year. I have to quit a job and finish school and go back to the beginning. I have to become a freshman again, because it's graduation morning and I have not in fact graduated, even though they have told me I was going to, and my

parents and my sister are sitting out there. The worst one I ever had was in the waning days at MSNBC, when I knew I could not do that show any longer, and that they had violated my contract in so many different ways that I could have spent the rest of my life suing them multiple times for breach of contract, or I could simply take the money and get out and try to do it somewhere else, which is what I did. But at the worst of that at MSNBC, I woke up from this dream doing one of these.

Because in the dream, not only was I at MSNBC doing countdown and on graduation day at Cornell on May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine, not only were these things happening simultaneously, but because I had not and I think in this case, there was some class that I had successfully dropped, only they decided in retrospect I had failed to drop the course. Therefore I had failed the course.

Therefore I had two more credits to it. Whatever it was, I now had to quit the MSNBC job and go back, not to the start of my college career, not to the start of high school, but I had to resume my education and do it all over again as a twenty year old, beginning in the third grade. And the dream ended with me walking into my third grade classroom and seeing all of my third grade classmates. They certainly looked like the ones that I was in school with.

Some of them I still know. There was Amy Farber, there was my friend Pat Sinatra. They were all there, and they were all kids, and I was an adult. And the first most terrifying thing, the only true nightmare of these nightmares or recurring dreams that I ever had, I had to try to sit as a six foot four inch adult in one of those school chairs.

return these library books. You have to do it by noon, or you don't graduate. It's like, well, here they are, okay, you graduate. The reason that the dream had such staying power, which was easy to figure out even the first time I had it, was simply this. I did have twenty eight credits in my last semester at Cornell, very simple process. I the second half of my freshman year got sick. It might have been a cold, it might have been mononucleosis.

We never quite figured out. But I didn't really want to be at Cornell University. In January nineteen seventy six, I had not had a good time as a freshman, and I didn't really want to be there, including the realization that at the age of just turned seventeen, I really wasn't ready to be there. So I managed to find a way out, whether it was a true serious

illness or just a cold that I milked. The next thing I knew, my dad was coming up and rather unhappily packing me into his car and taking me home. Which is where I needed to be right then. However, when it came to be my senior year, and I had flourished at Cornell University and managed the radio station and set myself up for this career and actually learned how to manage my time, because that's what was good

about that university. It taught you that you were, in fact going to have to punt on several unimportant things, and you could not get an A plus on everything in life. So going into my senior year, after my fall schedule had been completed with the normal load of fifteen or sixteen hours worth of credits, you know, five courses, tough ones, couple of history classes, maybe a four credit course here, maybe it was sixteen, my dad said, And

then I still had forty two credits to go. My dad said, hey, I'm not paying for anything after next spring. Have a nice semester. And I was like what he said, Yeah, Yeah, If you don't graduate on time next spring, I'm not going to pay for a dime of it, You're on your own. So that meant that I was starting that semester with fifteen credits and I needed twenty seven in the spring. As it worked out, I took twenty eight.

And also because I had missed the second half of my freshman year, I had all sorts of freshman mandatory classes that I had to take that I had not taken, that I had dropped out of, that I was taking when I had been an actual freshman in nineteen seventy six, and I being in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, which is where the Communications department was and is at Cornell.

Those were all science classes. So I had to take a freshman biology, freshman chemistry, freshman physics, and one leftover freshman English creative writing class. That one was not too much trouble, but I had other history classes to take. I had to take literally seven active classes, and I think maybe it was eight, and there were two independent

study classes. There's a lot of classes, and guess what, I lost track of a lot of them, and I double scheduled things because in those pre computer days, there was no way for them to stop you from registering for a course that required you to be at a lab at three o'clock in the afternoon for a science class and at a section for a history class at three point thirty in the afternoon. You could do that

who's going to know. I was later told that at the sections, the discussion sections with the teaching assistant for the class in biology, which was an environmental class, the ecology class which I took, because there was no real lab to adjust papers to write, and I could always write a paper fast. I knew that I would never be in that section. I'd never make it because I had to be at the chemistry lab at exactly the

same time. And they used to when they would hand the papers back, which I would turn in in various ways through friends or going right to the teaching assistant's office and handing the paper in. They would hand the papers back and they'd get, you know, NETHERI, and NETHERI would grab his paper, and then they go Oaks, and Oaks would grab his paper, and then they go Oberman, and the whole class would erupt in laughter because I

was never there. But I had no other choice. If I did not take those credits, those twenty eight credits as a senior, which about was about double the average, I was not going to have any money coming in, and I was not going to have a job, and I was going to have to stay in at the New York and somehow I was going to have to make my own living without having a job, and I

did not want to do this. So I remember in the fall of nineteen seventy eight, facing this, I went in and submitted my class schedule for the spring of nineteen seventy nine to my advisor, Professor Russell Martin, who taught, among other things, parliamentary procedure, which was a surprisingly fun class, if you can imagine such a thing. And he looked at this and he went, do you have twenty eight credits?

going to tell me I'm wrong. I said, well, I did look at this before I submitted my application for these classes for the coming semester. So he said, just hang on, picked up the phone and dialed the College, the College of Agri Culture and Life Sciences registrar and Hi, Bernice, Yeah, it's Russ Martin. Listen, I've got a I've got a student here thinks he can take twenty eight credits in this. I told him about the about the college's limit on the Well, what do you mean there's no limit? What

what do you mean there's no limit? Well, of course there's a limit. There has to be. I've been telling them there's a Well we're going to bring this up at the next meeting.

did in that class. It came down to two classes, one history class that I kind of mailed in a four credit class, and I knew the final I was going to pass it or fail it on a very narrow basis, maybe a couple of points on a fifteen point essay on a one hundred and fifty point exam.

But the Ecology final was really tough. And I was one of those test takers who would race through a final exam that you got two hours to take, and I'd get it done in thirty five minutes because I believed in what you remember at first was probably the correct answer. Get it done, Get it done, as fast as possible, if you want to go back and correct it. In this one, I was not sure. There were a lot of multiple choice questions, and I really didn't see

a pattern to them. The professor, who was a definition of ecology in the nineteen seventies had a full beard, and for all I knew of bird's nest in it. And he handed back our term papers in the middle of this, and I just finishing this thing up and ready to hand it in at an hour fifteen, half an hour behind my normal pace, very worried about whether or not I had done all I could do. And he hands back the term paper and written up at the top in red bick pen fourteen circle see me.

And I'm looking at this, and it's one of the few moments in which I in my entire life where I have questioned, am I alive or am I dead? Am I awake? Or am I dreaming? Am I about to die? I looked at this and went fourteen in my head. Because we're in a final examine, you're not allowed to scream, even though that's what I wanted to do.

a fourteen. My plans are ruined. There is no way I'm going to graduate on May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine. It's not going to happen because if this goddamn ecology test, because I had to take a goddamn tocology class, because to become a broadcaster, I had to take a series of science classes because I was going to get a Bachelor of Science in Communication Arts. And there he is, and I'm about to swing at him, and he's smiling

at me. So no, I really want to take a swing at him, and he says, hey, I'm glad I saw you. I wanted to explain why I didn't give you the fifteenth point. And I looked at him and I went, what did you say? He said, yeah, I gave you the fourteen right, And I said, see me, See, I like this whole idea that you had about ecology and about extinction, and that the paper was about extinction. I had one idea about extinction. Maybe maybe the extinction

of other animals was part of human evolution. Maybe these things were not accidentally connected, but actual functions of each other. It's not a bad idea. I had to turn it into twenty pages of an exam of a history paper, of a paper about acology, and I didn't know enough, and it was kind of I ran through six or eight shovels and he'd given me fourteen out of fifteen. I had no idea, because of course I hadn't been at the section where he said that the exam would

be graded on a one to fifteen basis. So I just heard him say I got a fourteen out of fifteen meeting I probably got a B in this class. And I gave him a kiss and walked out into the sunshine and got drunk. One down, one to go the history final, and again sitting there, think, okay, this is going to be five points. And now comes the week in which they grade the exams and you find

out whether or not you graduate. And as of Friday, I had called several times to find out if they had all the results in, because I had to pass all these courses or I would not graduate on time for Monday, May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine. It is now what Friday, May twenty fifth, and my dad calls me at the college radio station and he says, are you graduating? And I said, I don't know yet. I'll find out. I mean, we're not coming up there on

Monday just to see you not graduate. I said, fine, I'll call him again. And I called him again, and this is what I get. Yes, that's the name again. And I said to Olberman, OLB, just a moment. Woman puts the phone down. For all I know, it's the same woman Professor Martin had called last fall. Woman puts the phone down so I can hear it better than if she were holding it up to her conversation in the background, I hear, gladys, Yeah, do me a check

on Olberman? Did he graduate? No? Bone, that's my heart bone? No, no, no, no, no, no, not Oberman, ob not her. This is the guy Olb. I didn't know there was somebody named Oberman in my class in my school. That's how little I went. Oh lb, Yes that one Keith Theodore. Yes, yes, the guy in the radio station who thinks he's funny.

a class called sex roles. She was expected to graduate with honors, and she failed a class called sex roles. And I was telling this to a friend of mine who'd been away looking for a job that week and senior week, we were walking together in the procession for graduation. I totally unexpected, and I'm telling her the story and it's one of those She's standing right behind me, isn't she? And the girl who failed the class in sex roles, which led us all to gleefully enjoy the fact that

she had failed this. She stood behind me and heard me bad mouthing her, and she said, you've deserved this

for a long time, and she hit me. She slapped me on graduation morning, and my glasses went flying into the bushes, and then she stormed off to try to figure out how to deal with the fact that she had not graduated on time and I had, and my friend Carol, Carol Hebb, the greatest natural talent in broadcasting I have ever met in my life, said, you know, you're an unusual guy, but as long as she's running around, you never have to worry about actually being kind of crazy,

because you're not crazy compared to her. And I should have proposed to Carol on the spot. So we graduate, and I drink, and we get done, and my father and mother and sister come up and congratulate me, and I hand my dad the diploma and say, here's your receipt, and I rip off my cap and my gown before they can get a picture of me in it. There's one picture of me standing with Carol before the whole ceremony, and I don't remember when I did the rest of

the week. I stayed in Ethica, New York for some reason, with friends, and then went home and went looking for my job, having graduated. And then the dream started somewhere along the line, somewhere in the days and weeks beyond May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine, in which I did

not graduate and did not get the job. And I assume I don't remember ever having the dream in which I get slapped by that one girl, but every other kind of psychological torture that could occur occurs, and gradually, as I said, they became, these dreams became not disturbing

at all, but mostly kind of familiar. The last time I had it a few years ago, it finally dawned on me why I was still having it when there weren't stresses, and when there weren't things to worry about, when I had graduated and become a fairly respected alumnus of Cornell University, which you never would have been on in a million years. On May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine, I finally realized what it was. And since I said this to my therapist that day, that I realized why

I kept having this dream. Why when it was no longer an issue of stress. It wasn't kind of stress burned into the retinas of my mind. It was it was just a dream I kept having. Why Why did you keep having this dream through your thirties and forties and fifties and into your sixties. And finally, one day I woke up kind of smiling from having had the dream again for the first time in a couple of months,

and it dawned on me. Now the dream had become a positive because in the dream, I was twenty years old, and the older you get, unless some true trauma inflicted you at that age, there is almost nothing about the thought that you might actually turn into twenty years old again. That is unpleasant. Even not graduating on the day you're supposed to graduate, and you've been told you're going to graduate,

even that is better. At least, just all of your joints don't hurt at sixty five years old or even thirty five years old. And finally that became the reason that I was having the dream. It was just nostalgia for being twenty years old last time I had the dream, the dream in which I am thrown back to May twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine, the day I didn't didn't graduate in seven semesters from Cornell. I've done all the

damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass and drums, and mister Shaneale handled orchestration and keyboards produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, were arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Lderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtisy

of ESPN inc our satirical and pithy musical comments. My accompanyist Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today is my friend Howard Feineman. Everything else was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this the one hundred and sixty third day until the twenty twenty four presidential election, but two and thirty eighth day since Dictator j'ms first attempted coup against the democratically elected government

of the United States. Use the legal system, use the mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens, use the not regularly given elector objection option to stop him from doing it again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletin says the news warrants till then. I'm Keith Olruman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and well ask part of it A good luck?