Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Donald John Trump cannot continue as president of the United States. He is at this moment having a full scale psychological breakdown. Obviously, so we're agreed good. However, lost in this quicksand of this latest Trump full length, complete and total seventy two hours of delusion of something just this side of a
fugue state, Trump has let it slip. He has provided enough clues to suggest that his next insane scheme may be a rollout of an absolutely fabricated, amazingly intricate, high octane, full volume cell of the conspiracy theory that the twenty twenty presidential election was not only fixed, but that it was fixed by Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela. And that's why
we renditioned him. You heard me, Trump revealed intentionally. I think he had a question planted at that putinesque multi hour dissociative episode only with reporters present, that they may be about to start an attempt to gaslight and sainwash at the same time some sort of Maduro confession to fixing it for Biden and then pardoning Maduro and prosecuting Biden and Who knows if Trump takes it further and tries to apply whatever this is supposed to mean to
the midterms or to this continuing quixtic anti constitutional belief that he's entitled to a third term. Who knows if his brain will not have oozed out his ears by then by next week. But I think the first part is true. I think they are really going to try the first part. They're going to try to draw all the imaginary lunatic threads together and make them into one giant imaginary lunatic plot to quote prove quote Trump quote
one quote the twenty twenty election. Thanks to Maduro. This has been the holy grail down at the flat earth spontaneous human combustion. There wasn't a moon landing end of the Trumpest spectrum. And I don't know why this came up this week unless Trump has decided that he has no way out of Minnesota except letting Ice slowly just vanish, the way he had to let the war on California slowly just vanish. And that even Trump knows Greenland is
petering out. And now it's obvious he has lost all interest in Iran, and now his cult is getting really bored with the Nobel Peace Prize stuff since he already got one, even though it's you know, used, Trump shortly will be trying to sell and expecting the congressional and senatorial whorees he owns to endorse. One of the favorite, albeit dumbest conspiracy theories about the twenty twenty election that it was fixed for President Biden by software design created
financed a shot by Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela. In reality, Nicholas Maduro is a man who struggles to successfully zipper
his own windbreaker. But since long before the twenty twenty election, the Trump gang has been pushing this nonsense that somebody or some company or some magical force in Venezuela fixed all the voting machines, because for six years now it has been evident that nothing in Trump's damaged mind is capable of processing the reality that he's lost Those around him had large he tamped down the Maduro rigged that election, you know delusion, But of course in the last year
those who could tamp him down have lost all influence on him. He weeded out those who were good at it, and has previously noted Trump's metal incapacity and his utter certainty that he is right and the rest of us are wrong grows by the hour. And then at that news conference, Trump really spilled the beans on this. He didn't do a lot, he didn't do it for a
long time. But if you were listening carefully amid all of the truly delusional, nonsensical, no line of thought drek, there were two gems on the pile of Trump shaped dung.
There is an alternative way to interpret this country's extra legal kidnapping of the dictator of Venezuela on the pretext of leaving his deputy in charge of that country, when in fact she was the one our own anti drug trafficking agencies were focused on, not him blowing up the Venezuelan fishing boats and the Venezuelan fishermen and going in and renditioning another leader might have had some vague connection
to the international drug trade. But this alternate theory, which makes just as much lack of sense, it was that it was in reality to accomplish this one thing, to get Maduro into a US prison, to get him under Trump's control, and then get him to confess or confirm or invent some story in which no Biden didn't win in twenty twenty. Trump really won in twenty twenty, and he Nicholas Maduro and his Venezuelan mastermind somehow used in space lasers, probably to change Trump votes to Biden votes
by the billions. If you can still hear me over your own laughter or uncontrollable tears, let me remind you of Trump's phone call from July twenty fifth, two thousand nineth to the then non household name president of Ukraine, Voladimir's Zolensky, which was in essence an extortion attempt, whereby Trump would supply Ukraine with weapons he was already obligated to supply by treaty in exchange for a little favor in which Zelensky would provide or producer, simply make up
evidence that fifteen months ahead of the twenty twenty election, Joe Biden was being investigated in Ukraine for corruption. It was a simple and itsself corrupt trade. Trump would extort fabricated slander against his leading likely opponent in twenty twenty in exchange for the weapons with which Zelensky might save, you know, the lives of his people. It's a hostage situation in any event. You might remember Trump got impeached for it. Maybe you read about that the first impeachment
of the two. Well, already you can see what Trump learned from all that. A simple one to one agreement with another press that it is insufficient and in fact dangerous. A box of phony documents smearing Biden would have been insufficient and dangerous in anyways, Zelenski didn't share Trump's gift
for corruption. What Trump realized at the end of this that he needed needs was something more dramatic and seemingly unanswerable, like a prison cell confession from Nicholas Maduro, drug kingpin, victim of oh US army gallantry, a confession for Maduro that he fixed the twenty twenty election for Biden because we've never had an explanation on how it was done, and this guy would say anything. It's Nicholas effing Maduro.
And whether or not they pull this off, whether or not it gets far enough for them to devote all of the resources of the United States of America to selling you this bullshit, whether or not they can convince people it's real. Trump on Tuesday made two comments that confirm he sure as hell is going to try comment number one unsolicited so rigged election.
Everybody knows that now and by the way, numbers are coming out that show it even more plainly.
We caught him, We caught.
Him, We caught them now. Trump is incapable of not lying, so he could have said that at any time. But the key to interpreting and understanding Trump's lies is to remember that he sells them so well because he has convinced himself that they are not lies. It may be only temporary, but he believes that's true. Maybe he believes
it for half an hour, half a day. Who knows, and what he needs is and it may be only a temporary, fixed, temporary support, but inevitably he needs somebody saying something to him about the subject, or he sees something on Fox News, or he reads a post or more importantly, looks at a meme on truth Social because I'm not fully convinced he's literate, and that supplies him anew with the bullshit. He needs to turn around and try to sell these fantasies to the marks out there,
his supporters. So what happened here, or more correctly, who lied to him and said something had happened with Maduro? And that translated in his diseased dissolving cortex into we
caught them. That was also provided Tuesday by one of those propaganda plants who have replaced about one third of the journalists who are trotted in to read pre written quote questions unquote, which are designed to get Trump to remember that it is now time to roll out a conspiracy theory slowly in advance, before later detonating the whole megaton package of bullshit. This plant, and nobody yet connected to the Trump disinformation complex, has ever been better described
by that word plant in all of its meetings. This plant is named Kara Castro Nuova, and she is an X boxer, not an IFC fighter, A real old fashioned punch you in the face, cross eyed woman boxer whose journalistic resume runs the entire gamut. I mean, listen to this series of great experiences in news. She's gone from NBC's Dieting Show, The Biggest Loser, to voice artistry work on the video game Grand Theft Auto to her current position White House correspondent for the Mike Lindell News TV
Network Pillow Talk. Laugh all you want, but this background, with this background, Kara Castro Nueva is like, only two notches down on the journalistic scoreboard from Barry Weiss and only one notch down from Stephen A. Smith. Still, when it was time for missus castro Nuova to deliver her line about Maduro, to read it off a card in front of her face or off of her phone, it
was hard to tell which. For somebody who could actually go into Madison Square Garden and hit somebody else in front of people in the face, she sure was terrified.
Thank you so much, President Trump. Kara Kastronova from Glyndell TV. And you spoke earlier about the twenty twenty election. Now that Maduro is in US custodying he was criminally charged, has any more information emerged that you could share with us regarding Venezuelan election software and Venezuelan ties to tampering
with the twenty twenty election? And would you consider speaking to Maduro personally in prison in New York to get some answers on Venezuela's involvement with the twenty twenty election.
No, I don't think I would be doing that.
I think my lawyership very unhappy.
If yeah, they've learned, they've learned something, So would Trump go and talk to Maduro personally in jail about the twenty twenty election, like Jack Ruby wanting to meet with the Supreme Court justices after the Kennedy assassination. No, no, of course, not. Have Trump's scumbags already gone and talked to Maduro personally about the twenty twenty election. Sure, and Trump says they've learned some things. And as you heard earlier, we caught them. It's not hard to construct the rest
of this in your own mind. You don't really need me for this part. They proceed with the prosecution of Maduro, and then Trump produces a few more shots across Joe Biden's bow. He hinted at prosecuting Biden last week for what he suggested was illegally being president, and he's hinted again this week. Quote Biden and the radical left thugs that surrounded the resolution desk in the Oval Office, and of course the illegal use of the auto pen. They should be in jail, as we know, those posts and
memos to Pam Bondi are interchangeable. And oh, by the way, it's the resolute desk, Grandpa.
We are thousands of miles away, separated by a giant ocean. It's a war that should have never started, and it wouldn't have started if the twenty twenty US presidential election weren't rigged. It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It's probably breaking news, but it should be. It's a rigged election. Can't have rigged elections.
So first he softens up the field with some more not so veiled threats against Biden and his administration. Then at some point there is a bombshell leak that Maduro is ready to confess that he has information vital to and the QAN on about the twenty twenty election, and a wave of panic sweeps through magaland that they're gonna epstein him in present, and by epstein, I mean suicide him, I don't mean Trump breaking the law and covering up all the Maduro documents that he was required to release
a month ago, like all the Epstein documents. And then there's some kind of in jail interview. Martha McCallum would be okay, Tony de Koppel would be better. Of course, he might be working for Mike Lindel TV by then anyway, finally there is a congressional hearing. James Comer would be nice, Jim Jordan would be better, and then presto chango. Maduro either gets pardoned. Remember the joke when they kidnapped him. Maduro should just go into court the first minute and
say what are the charges? Then say I plead guilty, then say, in the same breath, Okay, so I'm a drug dealer, where's my pardon? Trump? Maduro gets pardoned, or his sentence gets reduced to time served, or they give him his own island somewhere, or or this is the CBS Evening News with Nicholas Maduro. Okay, I maybe getting
carried away here, but this is the next scam. Whether it is of any practical use or not is debatable, But no matter the answer, it is essential that Trump convinces everybody he really won because of yet another version of our old friend Annosagnosia. The thought that somewhere somebody believes he lost. Truly, two hundred and fifty two hundred and seventy five million Americans believe that at least, but
he doesn't believe that either. The thought that anybody believes he's a loser, that they laugh at him about twenty twenty. This is intolerable to Trump still forever it is unfixable. He will die and his last thought will be about
the twenty twenty election. But the point now to our purposes right now is that no matter what Trump has accomplished in the last year of hell, and as impossible as this sounds, there is some comfort to the reality that his hell has been worse than ours because he is so deeply mentally disturbed, and the thought that people repudiated him, that he did not defeat an opponent, that.
He lost an election is always there, waiting to blank out the vision of life in front of him. It's always there to ruin even his most evil fun And so we had the Zelensky bullshit of twenty nineteen, and I think what we learned this week is we are probably going to have the Maduro bullshit of twenty twenty six. Now I should go back to my original premise here that he cannot continue as president once again. No shit, Keith, Well,
you really stayed up nights thinking about that one. How to fix this when there are still only motives for his enablers to keep him there and there are as yet no real motives for them to get him out of there. I still don't know. I saw a member of the British House of Lords ask in public when Trump's Republican supporters would turn on him. This was a conservative British peer, the upper crust of the Conservatives, the sons and grandsons of the guys who wanted to make
a deal with Hitler. And he thinks the Republicans will eventually turn on Trump and are about to do it. Well, why you turn on him? And if you succeed and he's out of power, he can't pardon you. If you turn on him, you lose your power, probably immediately. You lose your seat in Congress or the Senate or wherever else you are. If you turn on him, you lose all the money that is being siphoned to you, all the stock tips you get in advance, all the access
to pardons for your friends. If you turn on him, the Epstein files are released, possibly before nightfall. So no, I'm sorry, I don't have a fix yet. I don't know when this became my personal responsibility, but nobody else seems to be interested in trying to solve it. But I do have an endless supply of analogies, and that thing Tuesday, other than the Maduro part, was like watching a movie length version of an all time classic Saturday
Night Live sketch that might be before your time. The great Dan Ackroid in full six foot tall giant bosomie attire, portraying the French chef the famed Julia Child on PBS.
Who talked like this save a Liver.
Only he portrayed her having just sliced up chicken and accidentally cutting her wrist and bleeding unbelievably profusely and quickly beginning to pass out from loss of blood, all while still trying to continue her show and her cooking lesson. Ackroyd begins to almost sing save the Liver, Save and bounce from topic to topic to topic, and he she ends up with, I remember when I was a little.
Girl and my mother I said to me, we.
Had a place called Creedmore Creed more than anybody know that Creed Moore, who was a big I said, Mom, why are those bars on the building? I used to play little league baseball there at the place called Cunningham Park. Who's quite the baseball player you wouldn't believe, But I said to my mother. Mom, she would be there, always there for me. She said, son, you could be a professional baseball player. I said, thanks, Mom, I said, why are those bars on the windows?
Big building, big powerful.
Building, everything but save the liver. Thank you, Julia Child. Trump, baseball and insane asylums. By the way, exhaustive studies of the surviving box scores from Trump's three years as the first basement at NIMA, the New York Military Academy. He went there instead of to reform school show that this future Hall of famer mommy told him so had a high school career batting average of one thirty eight. I
mean that's less than mine. The rest of Trump's brain bleeding out, like Acroyd's version of Julia Child, was reflected in his overnight social media dump that preceded that press conference, leaking the text from Emmanuel Macron and NATO's Secretary General Mark Rute and retweeting the guy who said the real enemy is NATO and the UN and that Greenland meme and the Greenland Canada meme and the threat to tear French wines if Trump doesn't get Macron to pony up
a billion dollars to jump to Trump's new alternate un the Legion of Doom or whatever he's calling it, and his insistence that he doesn't care about the Nobel but Norway does fix the Nobel Prizes And isn't it too bad there are too many insane killers around you that you can't talk to. Does he own a mirror? And
then the only one that really mattered? Whereas if we needed a reminder that it is not that Trump does not feel anything for other people, it is that Trump cannot really process the idea that there are other people on this planet and that there are things in their lives that have nothing to do with Trump. Renee Good's wife, per Trump, is a liar who never cared about her. Didn't care about her as she watched her being murdered
by an ice thug. No no, no no, It was clear because she sang like an opera singer, like a professional opera singer, so loud, a professional agitator who did not respond the right way according to Trump, to witnessing her wife being murdered, didn't have the right kind of pain, according to Donald Trump, when street thugs working for Donald Trump killed Renee Good, but Renee Good's father he's important here because Renee Good's father is a Trump.
When she was shot, there was another woman that was screaming, shame, shame, shame, shame. Right, he said, so loud, like a professional opera singer. She was so loud and so professional.
She wasn't a.
Woman that was hurt, like, oh my heart's injured. She was a professionals. Shame shame. She's screaming, shame shap I said, that's not a normal person. That's that's a professional. These are professional agitators and professional people that want to see our country do badly. I felt horribly when I was told that the young woman who was I had the tragedy. It's a tragedy. It's a horrible thing. Everybody would say
Ice would say the same thing. But when I learned her her parents, and her father in particular is like, I.
Hope he still is, but I don't know.
Was a tremendous Trump fan, was all for Trump, loved Trump, and you know, it's terrible. I was told that by a lot of people. They said, oh, he loves you.
He was hoped.
I hope he still feels that way. And I sorry, hard situation.
But her father was a tremendous and parents for tremendous Trump fans.
And so there is the true lesson of Trump's invasion of Minnesota, his terrorism against that state and its people, his white trash racism towards Somali Americans, the evolution of his white trash racism towards African Americans when Trump and his white trash father were prosecuted for it by the
Nixon administration in nineteen seventy three. There is the true lesson of ICE's refusal to pay medical bills for the injuries and illnesses its gestapo has inflicted on our neighbors and our friends and our citizens, the true lesson of the laws that were supposed to protect those people, and usu lesson of the fact that the FBI found cause to investigate the murder of Renee Good, but dropped it so the Department of Justice could instead keep the focus
on trying to prosecute Mayor Fry and Governor Walls for what they said about Ice. For what you may say next about Ice or anything else Trump doesn't like you saying. Therein lies the true lesson of all the horrors that have played out, thanks holly to the madness of the terrorist Donald John Trump, we discover that the true lesson, the true tragedy, the true crisis, is something else altogether. That the true victim here is Trump, because the woman he murdered by proxy was the daughter of one of
his fans. And the unbelievable, the unbearable may now happen to Trump. Her father may for some reason not be a Trump fan. More in passing congrats to the Vice President and the Second Lady of the United States, JB. And Usha Vance. The latter, the second lady, I have only now learned. I was this many days old when I found out that the Vice President's wife goes by the unfortunate acronym of slot us slowtus. How slow is
she exactly? Slottus? Who you call on a slot? Well, anyway, my congratulations because they have a fourth child on the way, And my congratulations particularly to missus Vance. Your couch motif lingerie has worked yet again. Oh the pillows also of
interest here. So you'd think if you'd been on TV doing the news for an hour or more every night for nearly a quarter of a century, and you were on a network that was once widely thought to be liberal and once widely thought to be anti Trump and once widely watched that you would not react with a condescending, disbelieving smirk when a sitting United States Senator finally came out and said to you, Trump is insane. You might think that, then again, you are not Anderson Effing Cooper.
That idiot is next. This is an all new episode of Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Alberman still ahead on this all new edition of Countdown. This time of year, just forty nine years ago, and I am at LaGuardia Airport in New York about to board a flight along with the president of Corneill University. And that's when I and I alone look out the window towards where the plane is parked, and I notice they are trying to repair the undercarriage with paper towels, paper towels that they
are stuffing up into the underside of the craft. I swear next, in Things I promised not to tell first of believe it or not, there's still more new idiots to talk about. The roundup of the miscrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world's worse the NFL Buffalo Bills, Chapter one hundred and seventeen of the punishment that is being the Buffalo Bills. They lose their NFL playoff game thirty three
to thirty to the Denver Broncos. Then the next morning they fired their head coach, and then the screw ups began their posted press release begins. The Buffalo Bills announced that Sean McDermott has been relieved of his duties as head coach, and then they launched into the obligatory oh but we still love him from owner Terry Pagoula and Terry Bakula's quote is, Sean has done an admiral job of leading our football team. Sean has done an admiral
job of leading our football team. II MATI. If your owner thinks the adjective is admiral not admirable, the the problem isn't the coach. And if your owner still hasn't had the post with the typo deleted like three days later, the problem isn't going to be fixed. Admiral I spoke straight ahead. The runner up worser labor Secretary Laurie Chavez Dureamer going down with her ship or something under investigation by the Inspector General in her department, who is a
former Republican congressman. Now you may remember Chavez Dureamer from her proclamation that she was elected Labor secretary. Somebody has to explain the elections to her, and her later decision to hang a giant Kim Jong unstyle building sized banner
of Trump from the top of the Labor Department headquarters. Well, it turns out she's had time to do other things like one of this is in her own office, allegedly an affair with somebody who works for her in the Department of Labor, and telling her office leaders to fabricate quote unofficial or rather official unquote trips to make it look like these gallivantings where their bow were actually listening tours about labor issues nationally, labor issues in places such
as the Angels Strip club outside Portland. But that's not why she's on the list. I don't judge people here more than once a minute. I don't judge people here. And remember, every moment that a Trump cabinet family member is breaking his or her marital oath is one last moment they are spending screwing the country. No, she wins the silver because Secretary Lorie chavezder Riemer's attorney is named
doctor Nick Oberheiden. Her lawyer is doctor Nick like from the Simpsons, Hi everybody but doctor Nick as a lawyer, So he's half Doctor Nick and half Lionel Huts. What could possibly go wrong? But the winner worst a tie and it's two people who belong together as two of the most overrated journalists of the generation. We start with one a Jim Vanda Hih, co founder of Politico, a co founder of Axios, and obviously already heading to hell
for those two accomplishments. But as the nation dissolves around him and politics becomes nothing but insanity, bribery, violence, and cowardice, Jim Vanda Hih has his finger on the pulse of America in crisis. He posts quote Axios quiz. Nearly twenty democrats viewed as possible twenty twenty eight contenders on trans rights almost all ducked it. We asked, what is your response to the question can a man become a woman?
Ram the rare dim to speak bluntly, there it is the pressing question of our time, and I guess it was asked simply in order to be able to write that seeming throwaway at the end, ROM the rare dem to speak bluntly. Rom, since you probably don't know, is Rom Immanuel Clinton and Obama B list staffer, the forgotten former mayor of Chicago and one of the new crop of those like Stephen A. Smith suffering from the disease known as sure nobody knows who the fi am, but
I'm going to be president next time. I swear I swear president no of America. And he spoke bluntly about the decisive issue of the twenty twenty eight primaries in general, which is how you answer possibly the dumbest of all the magus smeary talking points. Had to find something they could compliment Rob Manuel about, and that's what it was. Sharing honors with the guy who made this crap up, Jim Vanda High. Somebody from a very rare category journalists.
Even more overrated than Jim Vanda High CNN's Anderson Cooper. Now in year twenty five of the world's longest running failed marketing campaign, millions and millions of dollars have been spent by owner after owner after owner of CNN to make him America's newsman, and he has still never won his own time slot in cable. He still never actually produced a commentary or even an observation that you can remember.
I admit he's gone to a lot of crises and and done crisis porn, and his eyes have always matched his bulletproof vest. But his greatest ac pomplishment to date is getting drunk on New Year's even giggling. I mean it is, Although the remark that brings him onto this list alongside Jim Vanda I is somewhere among his top
ten failures. Are you ready? Cooper on CNN praises European leaders for looking for an off ramp with Trump about Greenland, and then asks Senator Reuben Diego if he really thinks there is such an off rant and Diego letter rip. Diego replies, quote, No, I've been very clear. He is a madman. He is insane. He's only thinking about himself. Hey, At which point Cooper interrupts. Cooper screws up his face. Cooper gives him that I really need to get my
eyes examined, looked. I can't see anything with these glasses. Is that my car on fire in the parking lot? You know that? Look? Whereupon Anderson Cooper then says, shocked, as if it has never occurred, not just to him, but it has never to anybody in the history of the world before quote, you really think he's insane? Diego interrupts back, Yes, I'm sorry. Where are we at this moment that we don't understand what's happening in this country.
He is not rational right now. None of this is rational. Everyone needs to stop pretending this is rational, so Diego, even after being interrupted by this idiot, Anderson Cooper gives him a perfect chance to redeem himself, to come back and be a journalist for once, to be on TV with some value more than a trained chimpanzee would have reading your script for you. You should not be fungible with
well educated animals of the jungle. And yet Anderson Cooper has afforded the opportunity to come back and respond to everyone needs to stop pretending this is rational. Subtext Anderson, I'm talking about you. And what does he say? He does not say Trump isn't just insane, He's having a breakdown. He instead Anderson Cooper. He instead mumbles, Senator rimand Gego, I appreciate your time tonight, Thanks very much, Holly crap. That was it? When you think sometimes, why are we
in this mess? How did we get here? How did it get worse? Where does Anderson Cooper buy his clothes? What boys department at JC penny would sell them to him? How did some part of the establishment not push back against any of this? Since twenty ft fifteen. Think of Anderson Cooper in the earliest days of year twelve, of
this Whitman's sampler of all the imagined hells. Who's looking like he's just eating some prunes so he can dismiss a US Senator who is actually willing to tell the truth, and interrupt that US senator and say, you really think he's insane? Yes, he's insane, Emma Effer, He's insane. Anderson Cooper, get on your goddamn TV show and tell people, start telling them at the start of the hour, and don't stop till it's the end of the hour. Anderson, Yeah,
I really think he's insane. And you know what, Anderson, I think you're still just the host of the mole pretending to be a newsman. Cooper, Today's with Jim Vander High other worst persons in the world. Things I promised not to tell and this one is about Dale Corson. Dale Corson was president of Corneill University when I got there as an undergraduate in a preceding century. He served
from nineteen sixty nine to nineteen seventy seven. He had been before that in their physics department for twenty three years. He helped design the school's synchrotron. He chaired the physics department. He was dean of the College of Engineering, and he was co discoverer of asteteine, which is element number eighty five. And okay, it's time to face this. What have you done with your life? Dale Corson co discovered an element.
I was staring out the waiting room window at the Allegheny airplane that we were supposed to have already boarded on a frigid New York morning in January of nineteen seventy seven. Allegheny, which became US Air, but was colloquially
known as Agony Airlines. These were the days when the bus monopoly in this country meant that the flight from New York to Ithaca, New York, cost just a couple bucks more and was far easier than the bus did if you didn't mind the occasional stop in the rome Utica Airport, and the continuous feeling that we were flying low enough that you could reach out the window and pull fruit off the trees not an issue. In January
of nineteen seventy seven, there was just snow everywhere. These were also the days when you boarded a small flight upstate by first sitting in a room twenty yards from where the large propeller plane rested, then going out a nondescript ordinary door, and then up a staircase with wheels, no security, no formality, and judging by the fact that we were now twenty minutes late for boarding, no punctuality.
That's what I noticed, the two Allegheny employees skipping down the stairs from the airplane and ducking under the belly of the craft and pointing with cartoon like animation at the underside. I'm fairly confident my astonishment has added this detail. But when I picture the performance, and from where we all sat behind soundproofed windows, they were two mimes. You couldn't hear anything, but I swear I saw one of them slap his own forehead and point upwards suddenly, as
if trying to act out the word Eureka. The one guy bolted up the stairs back into the airplane, and as I waited, wondering what he would bring down, he trapes back down those stairs with astonishing rapidity, returning with what seemed to be a large floppy object waving in the cold January wind, an object maybe six eight inches high, maybe a foot long. And it was only when he peeled the top off of this object and handed it to his taller colleague that I realized what I was seeing.
What he was holding. The man had a stack of paper towels in his hands, a stack of paper towels that he had brought down from the airplane to where they were looking at the underside of the airplane that we were supposed to fly in that airplane to Ithaca, New York. As the guy's buddy raised one hand over his head, and then another hand over his head, and then another hand over his head, the horror finally dawned
on me in full. There was something wrong with the plane, something that these guys thought they could fix by stuffing paper towels into it. Suddenly I was in a William Shatner Twilight Zone episode. The other passengers in the waiting room dozed, or were immersed in their newspapers, or were simply not looking. I alone could see the gremlins guaranteeing our doom by trying to fix a plane with some bounty paper towels. Or perhaps George Carlin's observations about doctors
had been transposed to this scene qualitatively provably. Somewhere on Earth, there had to be literally the word the world's worst airplane, and we were about to get on it. I was still a few weeks shy of my eighteenth birthday, and I had no idea what to do. Oddly, it really didn't dawn on me that, bottom line, I didn't have to get on the airplane. I could let everybody else in the room go to their doom. I didn't think of that. I felt like I had to do something.
So I looked around at the disinterested airline staff, my soon to be co victims, all inattentive to the mad evidence of our impending disaster. And then I heard the rustle of a newspaper being folded up and put away, and appearing from behind it was a man in a hat and old framed glasses, and I recognized him at once. He looked a little like Leo G. Carroll from the Man from Uncle and north By Northwest. But in fact
he was Cornell University President Dale Corson. I was never, and since then, have never been so happy to see an authority figure in my life. I screwed up the courage to go over to President Corson. I checked back over my shoulder to make certain that Laura and Hardy were still forcing the paper towels into the Allegheny disaster Liner, and then I spoke, squeakily and hurriedly, President Corson. You
don't know me, but I'm a Cornell student, Classes seventy nine. Hi, I think there's something you need to see about our plane out there, even just as a scientist, you need to see it. And I gestured behind me a little too wildly. I remember the amused but indulgent look on that magnificently craggy face of his as he rose wordlessly, and I remember just as well how quickly that looked changed to astonishment and then anger. He put his hand on my shoulder. You might as well have a seat.
Don't worry you and I are not getting on that plane. I lingered just long enough to hear fragments of what he said to the Allegheny gate attendant, and how his voice got slightly louder in his tone, slightly crisper with each sentence. We have students and faculty here, he said, And if I remember correctly, your airline does some promotion on campus. And finally something about if you'd ever like to use our air space again. But to be fair,
my imagination may be adding that last line regardless. Within five minutes there was an announcement that flights such and such to Ithaca had been canceled due to equipment problems. I chuckled at the word equipment, and I saw President, of course in chuckling two. It wasn't equipment problems, it was paper towel problems. We would all be transferred, the announcement said to an alleghany jet leaving for Elmira, New York in about twenty minutes, and then bust to Ithaca
at no additional charge. In the confusion of changing gates, maybe even terminals, for all I know, I lost sight of President Corson, But as I got onto our sleek not fifty years old towel free jet to Elmira, I saw him again seated near the front. He smiled up at me. I thanked him for taking care of us, and he laughed, that's what I'm here for. And then he said, by the way, good work. And then he asked me what my school and my major were, and
I told him communications, really, have you considered engineering? And I told him my dad was an architect, and that the actual math and the physics and the hard work were the vane of his existence and I would never do it in a million years, as well as he could. And he hated every minute of it and laughed again, and he said, yes, I can understand that. Well clearly. At least you have the eye of a reporter. I guess that's that's some consolation. I've done all the damage
I can do here. Get the paper towels. Thank you for listening. Most of our Countdown music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray on guitars, bass and drums, and John Phillip Schenel handling orchestration and keyboards, and they, of course are our musical directors of Countdown. It was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best Baseball stadium organists ever Nancy Faust.
The sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis, Curtisy VESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today, my friend Kenny Maine. This program was produced by Ted. Everything else was as always my fault and that's countdown for today Day three hundred and sixty four, sixty five sixty six, three hundred and sixty seven of
America held hostage again. So, on the other hand, just one Thoy ninety four days until the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame brained term unless he is removed sooner by Maga and Epstein and affordability and marble armrests and Venezuela and his ice Gestapo and of course Greenland. The next scheduled countdown is Monday. Bulletins is the news warrants until the next one. I'm Keith Olbriman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman
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