TRUMP IS TALKING ABOUT HIS MORTALITY AGAIN. AND WEAPONS - 10.9.25

prosecuting them this time, just jailing them. And as if it could get any worse, he specifically segued from the issue of wanting to prove to God that he's been good to how great all those missiles are at his naval base. Honestly, I don't know why the few remaining news organizations do not have entire departments devoted to analysis about which heart of Trump's insanity is in charge today.

that's what Trump meant. Then again, who knows you? And I know it should be Trump in jail because he's not only broken laws, he's nearly collected the complete set of broken laws already, to say nothing of him being in some kind of psychiatric facility, because whatever is wrong with him, it's going faster to say nothing of his ren Field Stephen Miller, who talk about having news departments devoted to studying what's wrong with him Today Stephen Miller

is manipulating Trump's untetheredness to reality and convincing Trump there really are insurrections. Then that Cash Pittzel isn't crazy when he says five percent of Chicago residents are active gang members, and Trump has long been one of those. Does what the last person to talk to him tells him? People. Miller has refined this into a self fulfilling prophecy machine. Tell Trump there is an insurrection in Portland. No, no, Chicago, Chicago turns out is easier right now. Tell him there's

ice agents imperiled. Get him to send troops to Chicago. What troops? Who knows which ones are the worst, the most paranoid, the least traceable. Get the troops to try to provoke Chicago residents, and if they succeed, show that to Trump on Fox News and get him to declare whatever the residents do to be an insurrection, and poof, Steven Miller has just fabricated an insurrection out of nothing in Chicago. This formula is how they get Trump to

do anything. Really, the whole mechanism of jailing his opponents has never been clearer than right now. You keep firing prosecutors until somebody, the one who won Miss Uncongeniality in the Beauty pageant is willing to the documents and bang James Comy is indicted, and you can say, see, mister President,

he's been indicted. It's on Fox News. Even though ABC reported yesterday that Trump's main government witness will testify that Komy told him not to leak to the media, and this witness will almost certainly be branded a hostile witness. And the motion to dismiss will be filed by Komy's defense by a week from next Monday, the twentieth, as will the motion to unseat the fraudulently appointed HAIRD prosecutor. And the judge yesterday said, no, we're not slow tracking

this process just so you can keep telling Trump. Look, the Komy trials now three months long. Your damn indictment was a page and a half. What Miller and Patel and Pam Bondi do. And once again my judgment was proved correct. From two thousand and six, I think it was when Pam Bondy hit on me outside men's room in the PBS station in Tampa. I think I said, dere, I'm just getting in the car. I gotta go to the airport to go to the moon. Anyway, what they all do when the judge rules in favor of the

motion to dismiss the indictment of James Comy. I'm not sure. Maybe just pull Trump's TVs out of the wall. I've never understood why they didn't just set up their own version of Fox News in the White House basement or something and Taylor twenty four hours of programming just to him. I mean, Laura Ingram would work there instead in a heartbeat. I mean for the same money, maybe less. Only one demand would, which would be that you'd have to give

Laura three hours instead of one. I guess they don't need a fake Fox News of their own when they have the fake Fox News that Rupert Murdoch gives them for free. Although they are always running the risks, something will happen to the real world that Fox will have to report anyway, and Trump will see it, which is why you will still see these spasms of rage by

him against Fox. Still, it's largely a good and efficient system, and it's not very much larger nor more original in scope than the means by which the Maga cult itself is manipulated. Decide what you want the outcome to be, create a phony news narrative that supports it, especially if you can work in paranoia and racism and disguise them as something else. Have some faithful maga Republicans say it while a fax camera is on him or on her. Put that on Fox. Trump sees it, the cult sees it.

It becomes their reality. There are pitfalls. What do you do when Fox lies and CNN or the Washington Post tell the truth? Well, sir, you buy CNN and the Washington Post and you convert them to maga parrots. Yeah, all that. What do you do about CBS News? Oh, you buy CBS News and you convert it, and you put an actual parrot named Barry Weiss in charge, which I will get to at length in a moment with

the mystery of the broken number three CBS pencils story. Anyway, when the process creates an uncomfortable clash for one of Trump's slaves, like Speaker Mike Tiny Johnson, between Trump reality and reality reality, Johnson can then just employ the universal solvent, the three monkeys process. I didn't see it, I didn't hear it. I didn't say it. Should Mayor Johnson of Chicago and Governor Pritzker of Illinois be in prison? Speaker Johnson,

Mayor of Should they be in prison? Should the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois be in prison. I'm not the attorney general. I'm the Speaker of the House, and I'm trying to manage the chaos here. I'm not following the day to day on that sure, Trump's invading cities, threatening elected officials, and like every eleventh of those officials is somebody Trump once appointed or favored or defended. You

remember Mike Pence, don't you, Mike Johnson? What are you going to do on that day when you were Mike Pence? But you're not following the day to day. We're all day to day, Mike Johnson. Mike, of course, then proceeded to go into the details of the day to day, because like everything else, it's bullshit multiplied by stupidity. And unfortunately, most of our Trump infested nation either doesn't understand or

doesn't know about it. And then there's that tiny sliver that actually supports it, which looks sometimes like a majority, because we forget the majority actually has no idea about this, because it's got nothing to do with entertainment news or sports news. Oh, Ronaldo is worth a billion dollars, Yes, I know who he is. Why do I care how much money he has, Why don't you do a segment on instead, whether or not at forty he's still any good at the soccer. Mike Johnson actually blew that one.

Mike Johnson should have said, I'm not following the day to day. In fact, this morning I spent in retreat praying, and I took a vow of silence and a vow to not follow the day to day. Amen, thank you Jesus. The missiles are flying. Hallelujah, Hallelujah. The idea that they all know Trump's nuts and they believe they have simply learned to ride that wave and not drown is in fact part of the Trump origin story. In February twenty seventeen,

I looked it up February thirteenth, twenty seventeen. I was, if you can imagine this, one of three guests in the Bloomberg building here in Funds City on the Charlie Rose Show, which used to run on PBS and Bloomberg before Charlie's little problem with knowing where his pants and

hands were at a given moment. When that cropped up, there was a guest host, Judd Apatow, and this lineup, if you can imagine Republican strategist Ed Rollins, with whom I had shared grudging respect and a glimmer of like for about twenty years by that point, and Maggie Haberman, for God's sake and me Rollins and Apatow took me seriously.

Haberman was condescending and dents I mentioned several times during the taping that we were all kind of missing the big picture, that all the analysis of what Trump had done was discounting this fact that there had been nothing in Trump's first three or four weeks in office that contradicted the idea that he was crazy. And I made a few references to the piece that I read here last week, which had been written the year before. Could

Trump pass a sanity test? Well? As we finished this surprisingly informative and non violent show, even though Maggie Haberman was there and cameras were powered down and Mike's put away, Ed Rollins extended his hand and smiled and it looked sincere, and he said he always enjoyed our conversations, even though he often thought I was crazy. He then laughed and said, but you know about crazy about your Trump sanity test. There was a long pause, and then Ed Rollins said,

you know, he is crazy. Ed Rollins gathered his belongings and made for the studio exit door. Of course he's crazy, Keith, I don't know why you need a test. Every once in a while, the degradation and deterioration of American society and particularly American journalism just sort of seeps into the background and we stop looking at how remarkable it actually is.

At any other point in our history, if the daughter in law of the President of the United States had her own nominal news show on a cable news channel, it would be a scandal of unbelievable proportions, even if she were qualified. Lara Trump is qualified in the sense that she's almost as stupid as a native born Trump, but we no longer notice these things. I was thinking of Lara Trump because she is wonderfully incompetent, even in her role as propagandist on Fox News, lobbing softballs at

people who are barely able to answer softballs. On behalf of her father in law. She is both the question and the answer. But I was thinking about her because I was trying to find somebody in my mind who would be worse than Barry Weiss. To run CBS News. Barry Weiss, if you don't know who she is, has failed upwards from being the naivete and dumbing down editor

of New York Times Opinions. She was encouraged to leave and left and formed a new place called the Free Press, which is, of course, like everything else with a name on it in media today, it is the exact opposite of its title. It is not the free Press. It is not free. There's nothing to do with freedom of the press in it. It is just another rationalization for fascism blog and for some reason, because it has been

dumbed down, it is essentially a substack for idiots. It was worth one hundred and fifty million dollars to the Ellison people, partially because they are still trying to curry favor with Trump, and this was another way of lifting up fascists who don't get enough help in this society. As you know, there is no oppressed group in this country today like fascists, except short, unappealing fascists. They are

even in worse positions than regular fascists. So in any event, Barry Weiss was bought out for about one hundred and fifty million dollars that's one of the reports of her free press site. And as part of the deal, she was put in charge of CBS News. And I was just thinking, would Lara Trump be worse or better for CBS News. Well, Lara Trump has now about a year's worth of experience in television, so she'd be better qualified

than Barry Wise. We are watching once again those organizations in the news when they are needed the most in the history of this country, not only failing but voluntarily jumping off cliffs. Here's the first step. You build up a center and left intelligence audience that has come to depend upon you over the decades, as The Washington Post did,

as CNN did. You make no bones about the fact that the thing probably does tend to lean a little bit liberal, because well, facts, as they say, do lean a little bit liberal, but money leans in both directions,

and especially leans on liberals. And so no matter the news organization or its origins, or its history or its importance at the moment, if it can be sold, it will be sold, and usually to the wrong person, even to a person who does the right thing at first and then figures, oh no, this is hurting my other products. And also it's encouraging Trump to blackmail me. Hi, Jeff

Bezos talking to you. Bezos apparently got away with it the first time he announced that he was being blackmailed and he wasn't going to subject himself to it or his now ex wife. And he stood up nobly in the Washington Post. Was there to say that democracy dies in darkness, and it was going to shine the light. And then something else happened, and we don't know what

it is. But then he got married to Lauren Sanchez, and all the fascists came to the wedding, and the next thing you know, the Washington Post is throwing all of its traditions and all of its readers out the effing window. There is a report from the invaluable and irreplaceable Oliver Darcy of status, formerly of CNN, who is so important that I would expect him to be bought by an Ellison anytime now, about more changes at the Washington Post this week. Benji sorrowin the editor he reports

is gone. Benji used to work with me. He was on countdown and several other people, according to people familiar with the matter, are out. Contractors were not spared. He says the legendary journalist Mark Fisher is out, who'd been with the Post for nearly four decades. The Pulitzer Prize winner David Hoffman has gone. Jack Schaefer, who I know the media critic, is gone, and the economic columnist Heather Long all out at the Washington Post. This while the

aforementioned Barry Weiss is taking over CBS News. Actually it's Larry Ellison and my old friend Jeff Shell, who having been basically career ended at NBC by Oh, Jeff Shell got another chance and now we'll do whatever the fascist wants. He is now running CBS News along with the Ellisons and Barry Weiss, who I believe has the following experience in television. She's managed to turn a set on once.

And the statement from Larry Ellison going into this debacle in which CBS News will be what remains of it totally dismantled and destroyed, and everybody who works there forever have this stink of being in at the end in which the place was killed from the inside deliberately so that it would be silenced. Not that CBS News is the leader in anything, but it is part of the firmament, part of that remaining now porous c through skeleton of

American journalism. It's also its value, like in some respects recently the Washington Post is more symbolic than anything else. It's as if the Democratic Congressional Committee were now run by Hawlly of Missouri. Well, he looks better in the pictures we name. I know he's not a Democrat, but

he's really good. Larry Ellison, who made money in tech, did a Wall Street Journal interview Monday in which he said, quote, we want CBS to speak to that seventy percent of the audience that would really define themselves at center left to center right. Wow, you do see nobody ever thought about that, trying to maximize the audience. Nobody in American media ever thought once about trying to maximize the audience. Well, what a genius Larry Ellison is. He's going to go

for a larger audience. Reminds me of the Bob and Ray character from their political sketch. The guy's running for president and they said, which party of these nomination you're going for? And he went, I figured out a mistake that they've all made. I'm going for both of them. That way I can get all the votes we want CBS to speak to that seventy percent of the audience that would really define themselves at setter left to Setter right.

Mister Ellison, I understand you don't know any of this because you've spent the last couple of decades simply counting money. And if you're willing to spend your entire life dealing with money, you can make all the money in the world and miss everything else that happens in it, like the fact that all those people at Ceter left no longer want to talk to all those people at Ceter

right and vice versa. And more importantly, they do not respect, nor understand nor eve acknowledge the existence of the other sides institutions like CBS News, like The Washington Post, like CNN. So what Ellison is doing at CBS with Barry Weiss is to replace everything that exists in the history of CBS News, from Edward R. Murrow to Dan Rather to

Katie Kirk. For God's sakes, everything in that entire roster, good, bad, and okay will be replaced by right wing sewer droppings like Barry Weise, and then just magically assume because you have dumbed it down and made it available to right wing and center right people that they will now start watching it too. I mean, where are those left wing people going to go. It's not like there are other news networks. CNN did this and self destructed. The ratings

at CNN were competitive with MSNBC three years ago. Then we all got licked. Chris licked as this podcast began, so too did his reign of terror inside CNN. We saw what happened. Everybody thought what a failure that was.

Now it was a total success. They brought him in there to do that, to discredit everything that CNN did, to destroy everything that worked well, to take people off the air who were functioning in unusual positions because they were kind of protected, like Don Lemon, who had a purpose in this media ferment and who they immediately put in a position where he could not be comfortable with

the people he was working with. Is that Don Lemon's fault on a personal basis, Yes, But anybody who would look at that situation and say, we're getting our money's worth out of Don Lemon, let's move him into a position where we can't possibly get thirty five cents out

of him, it's their fault. Then CNN did it, The Washington Post did it, million and a half cancelations, something like that in subscriptions and NOWBS under Barry Weiss, the former naivete and dumbing down editor from New York Times Opinions, a quote that The New York Times a little too late used in its profile of mis Weiss. As she ascended to the throne at CBS News, she told the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal group, you know, like

the way the Luftwaffa was influential, she told them. According to The Times in twenty twenty three, ms Weiss, who is married to a woman, quote, I know that there are some people in this room who don't believe that my marriage should have been legal. And that's okay because we're all Americans who want lower taxes. Sure you don't have to respect my human rights as long as we all keep more money. This is the creature now running CBS News as editor in chief. Sure we'll send these

people to prison camps. Sure we'll raid their homes and march their children naked into vans while pretending we are opposed to pedophilia. Sure we'll do that as long as our taxes come down. That's my job as the editor in chief of CBS News because I've got my marriage and it's okay, and you guys are going to leave me alone because I'm doing your bidding here. I believe, if you look carefully, Ms Weiss, the deal you have made is not with CBS News and the Allisons, but

with the devil. I close from something that Oliver Darcy again wrote, and sometimes I feel as if I should just read his piece, his newsletter when it comes to the media. I'm quoting him, quoting Max Tanney from Semaphore. Barry Weiss met apparently with the employees of CBS News as they sat there trying to figure out what else they could do for a living, or at least where else they could do it, and her last line to them. Her exhortation to them was, according to Tanny of Semaphore,

let's do the fucking news. Unquote the line, as mister Darcy writes, seemingly intended as a hip rally and cry hit the wrong note, you think, instead, leaving a number of staffers cringing as the independents justin Barragona reported, One CBS staffer told our Natalie Koratch that they actually laughed at the remark. Suffice to say, if Weiss wants to actually win over the hearts and minds of the staffers, she now leads, she's going to need to do a

lot better than that. Well, that's almost unnecessary. She told the people at CBS News, the people who have helped to maintain CBS News in an environment that is anti news, anti intelligence, anti washing your clothes, anti not smelling like conservatives, they have kept this place together, and she's telling them, let's do the fucking news. As if you have ever done anything connected to news in your life, you immoral,

total loser Barry Weiss. But some things never change. The last time I worked for CBS and CBS News was nineteen ninety one. I was the lame duck sports director of Channel two case CBS in Los Angeles owned and operated station. Our sports cast usually finished second in the ratings, but the newscast finished third, and they were paying me quite a lot of money, and they had an option for another two years of quite a lot of money,

about five hundred thousand dollars a year. And they had a newscaster who wasn't very good at it who they thought they could make back into the sportscaster and thus just eliminate my position, not just get rid of me and get somebody, but literally zero out the cost of

Keith Oulverman save five hundred thousand dollars. In their position, I probably would have not picked up the option too, I had been notified of this, but because it was CBS, and because I actually am a professional and always have been, and I've always been in this position trusted to stay on even after my employers have told me, now we're going to fire you in three months, we'd like you to continue to do things. I stayed at CBS and

among other things. There was a day in late nineteen ninety one when I had already been a lame duck and had already I think, negotiated a deal to go to ESPN. In the beginning of the new year of nineteen ninety two, I went to the Los Angeles Forum, the then home of the LA Lakers, and anchored from the field in a space that was the smallest place I've ever actually anchored from Magic Johnson's news conference in

which he announced he had HIV. And nothing can permit me to explain to you what that was like, because that was presumed at that point by everybody in that room except Magic Johnson, to be a death sentence. If you look at the videotapes of every station and everybody on the air and everybody they interviewed, we're all white as sheets, and it's not some sort of interference with the signal from the basement of the LA Forum. It was a death sentence, except he didn't make so, and

he was right and we were all wrong. And now, just on top of everything else, God bless him. He owns the entire town of Los Angeles, he owns half the Dodgers, he owns every theater in Los Angeles. Bless him. I always like Buck. I called him that because he said, call me Buck. My friends call me Buck. Okay, So now I'm the Lane Duck Sports director and the station's in third place again, and it's kind of a golden

time for me. It was the time I enjoyed the job the most because there really wasn't anything I could screw up, and so if there were any restraints on what I was saying on the CBS Channel two Action News in Los Angeles, they all went away. I just said, what I felt, and so I'm called into a meeting in the news director's office. Now, this was I think the fourth news director who I worked for at CBS in LA and his name was Jose Rios, and he

was a very successful news director, though not at Channel two. Then. He had just been promoted from managing editor of the newscast after the last guy had been marched out because he was not all there in the office. I believe they'd had something like fifteen news directors in eighteen years. And the woman who served as the assistant to all of them said one of them used to sit in the closet in the news director's office without his pants on. I said, how long did he last? And she just

laughed at me. I did not realize that I had produced a double entendre. So this is the office we're in. It had been the control room years and years earlier. So it was a giant office, beautifully appointed by the news director who hired me there. And now two news directors later, the guy who's sort of overseeing the waning weeks of the Keith Olberman experience has got all of us in the newsroom. The ratings have come out. We're even further in third place behind NBC and ABC than

we have before. The station has been in third place for sixteen years, ever since the suits in New York decided that winning every ratings book between nineteen fifty four and nineteen seventy five was insufficient, and when they finished tied for second or tied for first in the spring of nineteen seventy five, at just eleven o'clock, they wanted

six and they were tied for first at eleven. They had to fire all the anchors, who all then dispersed to the other stations, and all of their viewers went with them, because that's what happens when you get rid of the people that people are used to watching, as Barry Weiss will soon discover, and the Ellisons and Jeff Schell. So this is nineteen ninety one. This is before these

decisions were based on what you felt politically. This was simply a matter of what the ratings looked like and how much money you were paying for the ratings, and whether or not they could get the ratings with somebody cheaper. So I'm sitting in this meeting and at the beginning of it, the assistant to Jose Rios and as I said, he went on to a very successful career as the news director at Channel eleven, and I loved working with him. This is not about him. Somebody told him to do this.

He came in and decided to do one of these. I was flashed back to the movie The Natural, in which a hypnotherapist is brought in to try to convince Robert Redford's baseball team that losing is a disease as contagious as bubonic plague, that kind of thing. We did a little exercise in trying to break the third place habit, and so what he did, Jose's assistant, I believe her

name was Sherry Friese, handed us all number three pencils. Pencils, not number two pencils, but number three pencil They had boxes and boxes of these things, and they handed them to everybody in the room, probably seventy to one hundred staffers, and on que we were all supposed to break the pencil when Jose said three two one, we were supposed to snap the pencils in half and break the number

three habit. You get it. I believe I was the only person in that room who knew they would not be working there for certain in six or seven weeks time. And so guess what, I didn't break the pencil, and people looked at me like I had just destroyed the magic. You didn't break the pencil, and I went, my pencil is just fine. Thank you very much to Chas. Change to slemm shows quote, let's do the fucking news to

professionals from an utter amateur. Let's do the effing news, because I guess CBS no longer has a whole big supply of number three pencils. Also of interest here, the bad Bunny blowback has reached congress Woman Barney Rubble. Marjorie's stupid Green wants to make English the official language in response to Bad Bunny being selected to perform at the Super Bowl. Which English the official language, I guess means Marjorie Taylor Green is no longer allowed to talk ever again,

because whatever that is she's speaking, it ain't English. That's next. This is countdown, George Crowing. Pleasure to have you here, Thank you. This is the best news show. However, I told that to one of your producers, and I want you to know that I've seen them all and it's just for especially the first thirty five minutes. Thank you. It's just unparalleled. I got bad news between you and I. We got six minutes to completely strom that in the back. Yeah,

that's good. Thank you George from wherever you are. I needed that today. Still ahead on this editional countdown. I haven't done Thurber in a while. Thursdays with Thurber, and I want to go back to the piece that most bizarrely gives me the most comforting times like these, which turn out pretty much to be twenty four to seven at the moment, a box to hide in. Next first, believe it or not, there's still more new idiots to

talk about. The roundup of the miss Greens, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world. The runner up worse Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the cockroach of the judiciary breaking. I'm launching undercover operations to infiltrate and uproot leftist terror cells in Textas. Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger. I should have pronounced it in Texan. Leftist political terrorism a

clear present dinger. There can be no compromise with those who want us dead. Well, Number one, that's your wife. You're talking about right, those who want you dead because this is undercover operations? Is this going to be different, Ken, from what you normally do? I mean you're normally you're undercover operations result in your wife suing you for divorce. Keep your eye on the prize, Ken, Runner up everybody's

favorite Congressman from the CTE district, Derek van Orden. He uses a bad word in here and also shows some serious brain damage, so stand well back from your listening device. Civix one oh one. The Senate requires sixty votes to pass a bill. There are only fifty three Republicans in the Senate. That means seven Democrats would have to vote for the bill, or six could vote for it and jd Vance would cast the tiebreaker. Follow me for more

shit you should have learned in fourth grade. Well, evidently Derek dropped out in the third grade. That's sixty. That's only for cloture. Cloture votes no, not cloak not closure c L O t U R E. Should I spell it for you? Things like nominations, budget reconciliations, house rules, house rules changes. The meat and potatoes of the Senate still simple majority fifty one forty nine or fifty one to fifty. That's why the vice president can break a

fifty to fifty tie deck. Only there isn't one at the moment, so no vance can't vote to create a sixtieth vote. See how this works now, Civics one oh one. My god, he failed the course to get into Civics one oh one. Honestly, congressman, I'm confident there is a walk in clinic somewhere in Wisconsin where they can take you right now and scan your brain and see if whatever it is is reversible. It could easily be the onset of something serious. Your brain does not work correctly. Please,

here's the frightening reality. There's somebody in Congress worse than him. Our winner, Marjorie Stupid Green, never mind the fact that she figured out that Obamacare is necessary to keep the cost of her own families medical premiums from doubling, has just one burst of intelligence in a sea of gurgling crap. Bad Bunny says America has four months to learn Spanish before his perverse, unwonted performance at Super Bowl halftime. By the way, speaker Johnson wants Lee Greenwood to perform Lee

Greenwood one hit Wonder eighty three years old. Ninety nine percent of the country has no idea who he is or that he's alive. Bad Bunny says America has four months to learn Spanish before perverse unwanted performance at the Super Bowl half time. It would be a good time to pass my bill to make English the official language of America. And the NFL needs to stop having demonic sexual performances during its halftime shows. I know, madam, we need to leave the demonic sexual performances to you in

the privacy of your own gym. But Marjorie Taylor Green, you want to make English the official language. When you said that we were being pushed around by the Gaspacho police, when you said rights were being fragrantly violated, when you insisted that something was like a peachtree dish, Marge, if you make English the official language, you'll have to go to jail because that's not what you're speaking. Dim bulb Marjorie Taylor. She fails English and Van Orden fails fourth

grade social study. He's Green. Today's other worst person been the Gyspatcho Police. It's been a long week, and every time I find myself thinking it's been a long week, I like to turn to my book of James Thurber, and it's Fridays with Thurber. And it's been a few fridays since I've done any James Thurber. And so let's

start at the beginning. As I've mentioned many times, I read this story first aloud in a class in college in nineteen seventy nine, and a friend of mine came up to me and said, you should forget that sportscasting thing. You should read Thurber for a living, And I said, yeah, that'll ever happen. This is, for some reason, salvation for me, Catharsis, and every other emotion that is appropriate after it has been a long week. A Box to Hide In by

James Thurber. I waited till the large woman with the awful hat took up her sack of groceries and went out, peering at the tomatoes and the lettuce on her way. The clerk asked me what mine was. Have you got a box, I asked, A large box. I want a box to hide in. You want a box, he asked, I want a box to hide in. I said, what do you mean? He said, you mean a big box? I said, I meant a big box big enough to hold me. I haven't got any boxes, he said, only

cottons that cans come in. I tried several other groceries and none of them had a box big enough for me to hide in. There was nothing for it but to face life out. I didn't feel strong, and I'd had this overpowering desire to hide in a box for a long time. Well, what do you mean you want to hide in this box, one grocer asked me. It's a form of escape. I told him, hiding in a box. It circumscribes your worries in the range of your anguish. You don't see people either. How the hell do you

eat when you're in this box? Asked the grocer. How don't the hell do you get anything to eat? I said I had never been in a box and didn't know, but that that would take care of itself. Well, he said, finally, I haven't got any boxes, only some pasteboard cartons that cans come in. It was the same every place. I gave up when it got dark and the groceries closed, and hid in my room again. I turned out the light and lay on the bed. You feel better when it gets dark. I could have hit in a closet,

I suppose, but people are always opening doors. Somebody would find you in a closet. They would be startled, and you'd have to tell them why you're in the closet. Nobody pays attention to a big box lying on the floor. You could stay in it for days and nobody'd think to look in it, not even the cleaning woman. My cleaning woman came the next morning and woke me up, and I was still feeling bad. I asked her if

she knew where I could get a large box. How big a box you want, she asked, I want a box big enough for me to get inside of, I said. She looked at me with big, dim eyes. There's something wrong with her glands. She's awful, but she has a big heart, which makes it worse. She's unbearable. Her husband is sick, and her children are sick, and she is sick too. I got to thinking how pleasant it would be if I were in a box now and didn't have to see her. I'd be in a box right

there in the room, and she wouldn't know. I wondered if you had a desire to bark or laugh when someone who doesn't know walks by the box you were in. Maybe she would have a spell with her heart. If I did that would die right there. The officers and the elevator man and mister Grammage would find us funny, dog gone thing happened at the building last night. The doorman would say to his wife, I led in this woman to clean up tenf and she never come out. See she's never in there more in an hour, but

she never come out. See. So when it got time for me to go off duty, why, I says to Credit, who was on the elevator, I says, what the hell you suppose has happened to that woman cleans tenf? He says he didn't know. He says he never seen her after he took her up. So I spoke to mister Grammage about it. Sorry to bother you, mister Grammage, I says, but there's something funny about that woman cleans ten f.

So I told him. So he said we better have a look, and we all three goes up and knuts on the door and rings the bells, seeing nobody answers, so he said we'd have to walk in. So Credit opened the door and we walked in, and here was this woman cleans the apartment dead as a herring on the floor, and the gentleman that lives there was in a box. The cleaning woman kept looking at me. It was hard to realize she wasn't dead. It's a form of escape, I murmured, wat say. She asked, Dully, you

don't know of any large packing boxes, do you? I asked, now, I don't. She said, I haven't found one yet. But I still have this overpowering urge to hide in a box. Maybe it will go away, maybe I'll be all right, Maybe it will get worse. It's hard to say. Forty six years since I first read that in public, I still didn't get any better at it. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Most of our Countdown music was arranged, produced, and performed

by Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel. Our musical directors have Countdown. It was produced by Tko Brothers. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass and drums. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. That's the sports music when we do sports. Other music arranged and performed by the

group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today was my late friend and inspiration, George Carlin. Everything else was, as always

my fault. That's countdown for today. Day two hundred and sixty three of America held hostage again, but just twelve hundred days, even twelve hundred until the scheduled end of Trump's lame duck and lame brain term unless he is removed sooner by MAGA and Jeffrey Epstein, or that pavement patch on his hand, or some stuck escalator somewhere, or the psychopathy test or Tailan Hall, or that judge guy he doesn't like, or that judge girl or some Illinois

politician list lengthens, or the next scheduled countdown is Monday. I'll warn you right here. I may take this off. I don't know if you noticed a certain struggle recently, but in addition to the fact that I'm having some vision problems, it's not permanent. It's just as you don't want to know what it is, but it's temporary. It's just lasting longer than it should. In addition to that, my back went out. It's like, oh my god, what am I an old Yes? I am an old man.

Oh well, I may take the day off. We'll see. The next scheduled countdown is Monday. Maybe maybe not till then or whenever. I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.