Episode description

SERIES 2 EPISODE 210: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: It's over.

If President Biden and his campaign team and his party discipline team can handle Trump and the electorate and the news conferences and the debates as efficiently as they have turned around the effort to push him off the ticket, they are going to win the election in a landslide.

You never say it’s over, especially not with Biden headed for a news conference tomorrow as the NATO summit in Washington concludes in which literally two bad answers or one REALLY bad answer could end his candidacy before noon on Friday. But for now, and skipping for a moment the obviously larger question over whether this signals the start of democracy’s going out of business sale… it… is… over.

Final score: Number of Democrats in the House who called for him to step down, on the record… SEVEN.

Number of Democrats in the Senate who called for him to step down, on the record… NONE.

Number of ex-presidents who called for him to step down… NONE.

Number of historians he loves who called for him to step down…NONE.

Number of former Speakers of the House who reportedly told friends in private she’s deeply uneasy with his continued candidacy and of whom a Biden confidante said "He would listen reluctantly, but he'd listen to her”who called for him to step down… NONE.

Semafor News asked an attendee, off the record, if the mood was comparable to that at a funeral. The answer? “That is an insult to funerals.”

Now there’s just one problem in all this and I think you already know what it is. The only problem it solves is the one Joe Biden had, or has. Out here on the going-out-of-business sale floor, the President is suddenly losing Wisconsin by five, and the Cook Political report just moved Arizona and Georgia and Nevada from Toss-Up to Lean Trump; and just moved Minnesota, Nebraska-Second, and New Hampshire from Likely Biden to Lean Biden.

And the Biden Campaign seems to think this is over, rather than permanent. They will find out otherwise tomorrow night when he gets parsed at that press conference like he was a newly-found Dead Sea Scroll.

ALSO: Two Senators actually call for a Special Prosecutor to investigate Clarence Thomas! Project 2025 is trending. And we'll play another edition of "What Crime Did Trump Commit TODAY?"

B-Block (27:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: There are people preparing to be cryogenically frozen at the facility where they still keep Ted Williams in a jar who are setting up thousand-year investment funds for when they get thawed. Brian Stelter is so desperate to be rehired by The New York Times he's pretending his old paper also wrote an editorial calling for Trump to bow out. And Dana Bash? Jake Tapper? Trump praised your work on the debate. Your careers are thus over.

C-Block (38:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I watched an Atlanta Braves game the other night and was thus flashed back to the World Series I covered there where the hotel put me in a room next to all-night choir practice.

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