Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.

Thank you Bill Barr, Thank you Jamie Comer.

You heard me, Trump's disgraced ex Attorney General Barr and Kentucky's ever disgrace full which Hunter extraordinaire Comer have reignited the Trump's Stein cover up scandal just as the Embers were about to go out.

Comber will now release what he has already leaked that William Barr told Comber's Keystone Cops Oversight Committee investigators about the avalanche of evidence linking Epstein and Trump that quote he had never seen anything that would implicate President Trump in any of this.

Maga is thus braying it is case closed.

They have both released the Epstein files, and they have cleared their lord and savior, slave Master Trump about Epstein, except for one problem.

The reason Bar never saw the evidence that would implicate Trump with Epstein is he has never shown it.

The first Trump regime US attorney for the Southern District of New York, the one Trump personally interviewed and appointed, the former Trump transition team volunteer Jeffrey Berman, says he didn't show the evidence to Bar three years ago.

Berman, whom Trump also fired wrote a book about his experiences called Holding the Line.

Turns out one of the things he held was the Epstein evidence.

He held it back from bar Quoting mister Berman, I never briefed bar on the investigation.

The charges we were seeking did not need main justice approval, and I couldn't think of any way in which he would be of help.

Keeping him out of the loop also meant that if he had any concerns or objections, we didn't have to deal with them.

Unquote.

So Trump's own guy in the Epstein prosecution in New York deliberately did not tell Trump's own attorney general what was going on in that prosecution.

And when that attorney general says he didn't see what, they never showed him, Trump's apologists and co conspirators like Jamie Comer are now trumpeting that as an exoneration as opposed to what it really is, which is yet another Trump cover up of the Epstein crimes and the Epstein network and whatever Trump did or did not have to do with Epstein.

But wait, there's more.

In that book, former US Attorney Berman also hints that the whole matter of prosecuting Epstein under Trump was a third rail, because it was former US Attorney in Florida, Alex Acosta, who gave Epstein the sweetheart deal, the dirty deal that let Epstein get away with it, that guaranteed Acosta's office would not prosecute Epstein.

That's Acosta, US attorney under President George W.

Bush and part of the Trump one cabinet, again quoting holding the line by Trump's own US attorney appoint Jeff Furman.

Quote, as we started our work, there was another factor on the periphery of the case.

Acosta was now part of Trump's cabinet, his Secretary of Labor, and a rising star in the Republican Party.

Was the Epstein matter something the Trump administration or Maju Justice would have preferred we stay away from.

I did not know the answer to that then or even now.

I also didn't care.

Unquote.

If all this sounds structurally familiar to you, Bill Barr doesn't legally or technically lie.

He tells you he never saw any crime, but leaves out the fact that everybody who worked for him told him to turn around and look in the opposite direction as the crime was being committed.

It is because this is the exact same mo that Bill Barr used when Trump had him serve as liar in chief washing the Muller Report, Barr said he couldn't prosecute or exonerate Trump based on the Muller Report, Trump and his minions that announced Barr had cleared Trump.

That is what they will be trying to do here, only to try to increase the chances that this bar sleight of hand sticks.

They had Comer leak it in advance so that whenever more of Barr's testimony about Trump and Epstein is released today, I know nothing They can hammer home the lie that everything Bar saw proves that Trump had nothing to do with it.

This time, though, there is another quote that should get similar play if the stenographic pool that has replaced the White House Press Corps does its job for once.

The ranking Democrat on Comer's Oversight Committee is Robert Garcia of California, and quoting mister Garcia during his deposition with the committee, Attorney General Barr could not clear President Trump of wrongdoing.

Chairman Comer should release the full unedited transcript of his interview for the public.

That's just as true as Comer's claim.

Bar never saw anything that implicated Trump, and he never saw anything that cleared Trump because Bar's own prosecutor, Trump's own appointee, never showed him anything.

And if you would like to feed a dying conspiracy, this is what you feed it.

They never showed him the evidence.

That's another conspiracy.

Other than the fact that Barr's magic wand helped to make the damning implications of the Muller report disappear, it is hard to understand why Trump's fellow cover up conspirators chose him to be the poster boy for the Trump Steen case here, after all, on top of everything else, on top of all the other things that Barr has committed in public office.

The headmaster of the Dalton School in New York, the lame duck, who left just at the same time that an inexperienced young man named Jeffrey Epstein was hired to teach there at Dalton in the seventies.

That headmaster, who never saw any evidence about Epstein.

That headmaster was Donald Barr.

Bill Barr's father, Barr the Elder, was leaving Dalton to take over my alma mater, Hackley.

That was my last scoop as a student journalist, by the way, and we students were told but did not print, that Barr had not exactly left Dalton voluntarily.

I graduated before he started at Hackley.

I do know that in a few years there Barr nearly bankrupted the school.

In any event, Bill Barr perfect witness confirming there is a Trump cover up of the Epstein files, which would also mean Bill Barr is now part of the Trump cover up of the Epstein files.

And as if they needed to screw this up more than Trump organized crime government got yelled at by the judge whom they asked to release the meaningless grand jury testimony so Pambondi can pretend she isn't covering up the Epstein case and renegging on her own personal promise and credibility if any.

Federal Judge Richard Berman refused the request to unseal the testimony, which is mostly just FBI agents recounting stuff, almost no witness testimony.

It's meaningless anyway, even to the conspiracy theorists.

The judge slammed Trump for going back on the administration promise to reveal what it has, slammed Bondy for trying to get the grand jury stuff released without enough time to warn the victims, and dismiss the Trump bondy stunt as a quote diversion.

Quoting again, this time from the judge's ruling.

The government's one hundred thousand in pages of Epstein files and materials dwarf the seventy odd pages of Epstein Grand jury materials.

Apart from the fact that Trump is covering up the Epstein case and still refusing to release the Epstein files, this is the salient point.

He's not doing a real good job at it.

Thank God for that.

White House still demanding we praise the fat fury for solving Ukraine.

But it turns out his deal with Russia allows Russia to veto any actual defense of Ukraine by Ukraine or by anybody else.

Swear to God.

Art of the deal Trump wants to get to Heaven, get working on that.

Pal Putin's blob of a foreign minister, Sergei the Hut, Lavrov explained first to Russian media.

Then it spread quickly internationally that the big accomplishment of the disaster in Alaska, Russia agreeing to security guarantees for Ukraine post war, comes with a slight catch.

From Russia's point of view, one of the guaranteurs has to be Russia.

The security guarantees that Russia is willing to have for Ukraine have to be vetoable by Russia.

Oh and by China as well.

In fact, no country would be allowed to defend Ukraine militarily unless both Russia and China permit it.

The guarantee, it's not really a guarantee.

In fact, it's not at all a guarantee.

Also, the summit with Zelenski and Putin, the Trump thinks he's set up.

Putin wants it in Budapest.

And if you think that's a coincidence, in nineteen ninety four, Russia already attended a summit with Ukraine at which Russia and the US and the UK guaranteed the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

And that summit was held in Budapest.

Then, as now, Russia's word is worthless.

On the other hand, so is Trump's worthless?

I mean, are there any questions left about this?

He's stalling.

That's all he's been doing since January twentieth, stalling.

This has all been about running out the clock for Putin.

This deal, that deal, ceasefire, no ceasefire.

I hate your suit fifty days, I love your suit.

Twenty days he calls Putin in the middle of the meeting for instructions.

He is effing stalling for the Russian dictator.

He is working for Putin.

Also, something else weird is going on with Ukraine below the surface.

I don't know what this is about, bluntly, but I know something is going on.

I can recognize that much.

I don't like Matt Drudge, I don't trust Matt Drudge, but I've never figured out Matt Drudge, even though it is now twenty seven and a half years since Laura Ingram boasted to me that she was the central desk feeding him stories from the far right.

But there's something else in play here with Matt Drudge and Ukraine and all of this, and I don't know what it is.

This past week he ran out of nowhere.

This headline is the Dawn being blackmailed.

The attached link not only connects to the Times of Ireland, but to an op ed in that paper written in June, written by that country's former Minister of Justice, Michael McDowell, which underscores the point I made earlier.

Since regaining power, Trump has taken every possible position on Ukraine he'd resolve it immediately.

He'd solve it in one day.

He then browbeats Zelenski.

He then threatened Putin, you have ten days to two weeks, you have fifty days, you have ten days.

Again, we have to have a meeting.

We have to have a bilateral meeting, a trilateral meeting, a Zelenski Putin meeting.

I'm a peacemaker to get to heaven.

He's running out the clock.

That's the only possible explanation.

Sure, it's a great side show to obscure trump Stein as well, but this specifically Ukraine.

This is all about stalling on Putin's behalf.

And this was what was in the op ed, the two month old op ed to which Drudge has linked quote.

The idea that the Kremlin has compromot on Trump seems increasingly plausible.

If he capitulates to Putin on Ukraine, it will grossly and perhaps fatally, betray the principles on which NATO was founded.

What is his real strategy?

Is it to collapse the Ukrainian state by weakening its resistance to Russia or to re establish Ukraine as a Russian satellite.

Is it to divide the mineral and oil assets of Ukraine with Russia in line with the deal he imposed on Zelensky in a Corleone's style offer he couldn't refuse.

Is the dictator Zelensky now to be the object of US backed regime change as part of a capitulation to Russia?

Or is there some different hidden policy agenda in the White House?

I used to be skeptical.

Mister McDowell writes about claims that Putin had access to compromot on Trump that explained his grubbling relationship with the Kremlin.

But if such compromant is not the explanation, it is hard to see why the White House is behaving as it does towards Ukraine.

Unquote, you know what this means.

It rhymes with weeescape, doesn't it.

Let's party like it's two thy sixteen.

Here's a question.

Is the army in the streets of Washington is that connected to Trump's unconstitutional vow to usurp control of the elections from the States and eliminate voting by mail and eliminate voting machines.

So it's all paper ballots and it can only be counted that one night, and that's it.

Quote.

Remember the States are merely an agent for the federal government in counting and tabulating the votes.

Bullshit.

Maybe per the interpretation of the terrorists at the Heritage Foundation, but not according to that other document we like to colloquially call the US Constitution.

So maybe the troops in DC that are patrolling places like the war torn shakeshack in Union Station are really just a warm up for enforcing this Trump's second unconstitutional executive order taking over control of election from the States.

You know, the new elections only elections where you vote in person and you only get to vote when you show them.

Like Trump explained, he always shows them when you show them your license plate.

No, he's fine, driver's license, license plate.

Political asylum, mental asylum.

He doesn't know if he's going to heaven.

He wants to.

Yeah, that ship sailed in nineteen fifty six.

Asshole.

Then there's Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew on voting.

Jeff Van Drew says he has talked to lots of dead people who have received mail in ballots.

I've talked to lots of these people who received these mail in ballots, the dead ones.

Well, Van Drew did defraud the voters of New Jersey by running as a Democrat, getting elected as a Democrat, then then not only switching part, he's been going full Nazi, So he's probably not lying here.

He probably has talked to lots of dead people.

John Birch, Father Coglin, Hitler, Chuck Grassley, you know, the usual bunch, Which brings us back to a man to whom the Lincoln Project has now given the nickname of the year, tiny shiny Fascist, Stephen Miller, whereas the Lincoln Project has now called him pee Wee German.

Oh Oly, cow, pee wee German.

With apologies to Paul Rubens.

Pee Wee German.

Pee Wee German was at the aforementioned shake Shack yesterday, home of Burgers Malten's and Nazis, hosting an event for the troops.

Boy, they spend on these guys.

Huh.

The other night Pam Bondi bought them hot dogs.

Today Pete Hegseeth gives them shake shack, not increased money to the VA or anything like that.

Shake shack at the train station.

AnyWho, Pee Wee German told the troops that he hates older voters like Trump's base, and he hates white people, also like Trump's base.

Stephen Miller said, he he hates white people.

You're not gonna lect the communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation's capital.

And let's just also dress another thing.

All these demonstrators that you've seen out here in recent days, all of these helvety white hippies, they're not part of the city.

Never happened.

By the way, most citizens of the Wasshon DC are blacked.

This is not a city that has had any safety for its black citizens for generations.

And President Trump is the one who is fixing that with the supportland Metropolitan Police Department, the support of the National Guard, and our federal Law office and officers.

So we're going to ignore the stupid fighting at basic You all need to go home and ticket out because they're all over ninety years old, and we're going to get back from the business.

I'm protecting the America for people at a citizens of washap a nest spoiler alert, pee wee German Steven Miller thinks he's a hepcat.

He's just nuts, isn't he?

And tiny?

As an aside, the event yesterday at Union Station will mark the official death of the company known as shake Shack.

I am a milkshake afficionado since nineteen sixty four or so, I have worn the evidence of this on my waist.

I don't know what's happened there, but lately the shake Shack shakes have gone from exquisite to tasting like sour battery acid.

Now it's the shake Shack company collaborating with the fascists trying to destroy democracy.

Your hosts today for Nazi Khan, shake shack.

Well done, guys.

Shake Shack equals authoritarianism.

Shake Shack supports the troops and hates the civilians.

Nicely done, shake Shack.

And now two media notes.

Firstly, as you know, I never criticize cable news, but if you have ever felt sympathy towards Abby Philip of CNN, well you can cut that the f out.

She turns out to be fully responsible for that shit show she anchors on CNN every night with Kentucky Fried, Fascism Boy, Scott Jennings and the other dregs of Maga society.

I always assumed she was being forced to do it.

I mean, cable news contracts can be pretty severe, let me tell you, nah.

Get these transcripts from the Karis Swisher podcast.

Guest Abby Phillip quote.

I know that folks really dislike Scott for his views, but I would say that there are views that you don't like, that you think are unfounded, but that are pretty widely shared.

I think Scott falls into that category.

Excuse me.

I mean you could say exactly the same thing about Stalin.

You could say it about Mount Say Tongue, you could say it about Jefferson Davis.

I know that folks really dislike Scott for his views, but I would say that there are views that you don't like that you think are unfounded, but are pretty widely shared.

I think Scott falls into that category.

So you're defending his right to go on CNN on your show and get a national platform every night designed particularly to create viral videos.

And it's just well, that's the way we have to do things here.

And as to that which Jillian michaels last week, I think it was implied that slavery wasn't that big a deal because what two percent of white people own slaves?

Quote.

Look, I like to talk about negatively about guests who come on the show, because I just don't think that's good form.

Oh my god, even when I disagree with people.

I respect their right to embarrass themselves on national television.

I think it is their right to do that, unquote and abby, it's your right to do that, and you're doing it.

But to say it like that even when I disagree with people.

The woman defended the structure of slavery in the history of the United States.

And this guy, Scott Jennings comes on and not only speaks the worst trash that is set on television outside of Newsmax in the middle of the night.

Not only does he do that, but he plays to the camera.

He stares at the camera and makes muggy faces like he was six years old.

And you're just going to talk about this as if it were ordinary disagreement, as if it were Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden in the original conservative show that they used to do, the thing that Tucker Carlson used to do.

What is that called point counterpoint?

You think I'd remember it.

I was there for it.

I consulted on them once the original contradiction show between conservatives and Liberals.

That's what you think you're doing here?

Yeah, I would say that there are views that you don't like, that you think are unfounded but that are pretty widely shared.

I think Scott falls no, he's the son of a bitch, and you put him on TV every night and you just confess to it.

That is your show, Abby Phillip, that is your fault.

That is not some idiot boss, and god knows CNN manufactures them.

The CNN Chief of the week did not shove this down your throat.

You are defending the show, and if not exactly what they say, you are defending Scott Jennings and Jillian Michaels.

If you you are culpable here, you are responsible, or more correctly, you are irresponsible.

Resign.

Never appear on television again.

You might as well be on Fox.

You might as well be Gutfeld, just another broken person who does not recognize that to want to be on TV news is a problem psychologically.

Let me tell you about that.

To want to be on TV doing the news is a sign of some degree of emotional distress.

If you recognize that, it probably lessens the degree.

But let me tell you, after fifty years in broadcasting, if you want to be on TV, that's some distress.

You need to manage it.

But if you have to be on TV news at any cost you are dead inside and Abby Philip clearly from these quotes, has to be on TV.

I am not without empathy and I've got it, Abby, your next career commercials do commercials for like shake check in addition to your burger and your milkshake?

Do you want a soft drink too?

Do you want ice with that?

Good?

Because ice is hiding in the kitchen ready to seize.

You said, I had two media notes.

Here's the second one.

I have lived through some awful White House press secretaries.

Aery Fleischer was a remorseless and bagdad bobby and level elite liar who was connected to the first administration plant, the former nude model Jeff Gannon and that wasn't even his real name, who pretended to be a reporter and one day started to ask Fleischer stupid questions, and I mean they would be considered stupid today.

They didn't even try to make them look like they were real questions.

It was just like democrats suck, How are you gonna work with them?

He did this for day after day until he was outed, and I do mean outed.

His successor, one of them, Dana Perino, was a nitwit who was employed largely because She had literally lived out of the country for years, and so when she expressed shock at a question or or didn't know what the questioner was talking about, she wasn't lying.

She was just uninformed.

I don't know what her excuse for today is.

On Fox, she's still just as uninformed.

Fittingly, Sean Spicer is entirely remembered, not as himself, but only as Melissa McCarthy portrayed him on SNL.

Sarah Huckabee, of course, scared children and small animals.

Kaylee mcinnaney was a dits.

She too is now a Fox News dits.

But in Caroline Levitt we may have achieved perfection.

First, as I've pointed out several times, there is the word lie in both her first and last names.

Second, there's the fact that, in a room full of softball questions from right wing plants like the Pizzagate guy who was there the other day, she was literally a softball player who got a scholarship to play softball at an obscure college.

She is also belligerent, condescending, and aggressively stupid, but her chief achievement is she doesn't actually speak English.

She called Hitler Hilter.

She has repeatedly mispronounced Trump's name.

Last week, she insisted Trump wheres she often calls him, Trump deserves the Noble Peace Prize.

Some people drop out or stop paying attention of or in high school, literally or metaphorically.

Some stop or drop out because of economic hardship, some out of laziness.

Caroline Levitt clearly stopped learning around the sixth or seventh grade because she became convinced that at that point she knew everything.

Well, we can add to the list.

She has now mispronounced the word pundit during a self righteous I'm Caroline, and I want your voteds sorority treasurer speech excoriating the White House Press Corps for not applauding Trump about Ukraine enough.

Though nothing has happened other than to burn another week off the clock.

Caroline, Caroline gloriously got it wrong again.

All weekend following those historic US Russia bilateral talks, we listen to clueless pundits on television.

Pundints p U n d nts, no dumber than a box of two hundred pounds of rocks.

Now, I know a lot of people make this exact mistake and say punditt so what a lot of people get drunk and drive into telephone polls too.

Does that make it any more okay to do that?

This person speaks on TV every day.

Does she have any pride or is she abby?

Philip?

Any concern madam that people might think that, irrespective of your support for fascism and your very bad Northeast accent impression of Ava Brown, that at the baseline here, you're just an imbecile who can't you know pronounce words?

Pundent, She must have been thinking fondant is in cake?

Mm?

Cake to go with my shakeshack?

Okay, pundit, let's add it on to the end of the Hall of Fame of Caroline Levitt.

For example, just before Congress enacted the original Trump Chump tax cuts, Law and order is back in America under President Trump, President Trump sounded the alarm at Jake Tappers, Colleidel filter the Nobel Peace Price.

We listened to clueless pundits on television.

So all you hilter chump pundits just remember you may try to get it, but Caroline is way ahead of you in the running for the Noble Peace Price.

Also of interest, here there's actually a third media note MSNBC changed its name like I told them to in nineteen ninety seven.

My memo in the interoffice mail envelope finally got to the fifty second floor.

MSNBC possibly the worst name of any news network ever conceived in any language, and they have now somehow found something worse to call it.

That's next.

This is count Down, Countdown, which has outlasted the name MSNBC.

This is Countdown with Keith Oberman Oberman with the.

Nobel Peace Prize.

Finally it dawns on me who she reminds me of?

Who?

Caroline Lying Levitt Lying reminds me of?

Ever seen SCTV the original sc TV, and Katherine O'Hara playing in a sketch about a TV quiz show high school students, high School Challenge or something like that, the equivalent of what we used to have in the US called the College Bowl, the ge College Bowl, Perdue versus the University of somewhere, and people would show just how little they actually had learned in school.

And in this episode, in this sketch, Katherine O'Hara plays this girl who talks like this, and every answer she gives she buzzes in before the question has been asked, and I think it's Eugene Levy of all people as the MC, and he says in Nordway, and she buzzes in and goes Dewey decimal system.

And then the next one is when the Titanic Dewey decimal System.

Every answer is Dewey Decimal System.

That's Caroline Levitt.

Death of Noble Peace Pray still ahead on this edition of Countdown the Nobel Peace Prize winning program.

It's happened again.

Another colleague has announced he's done, He's finished.

No more broadcasting, the news is dead.

And I said, sit down and shut up for an hour while I recite to you all the times I have been told that about my career, because the most recent one was like six months ago, and the first one, well, we will be coming up on the forty first anniversary of it this November.

Good evening, and welcome to the ends of my career one a decade since the eighties.

Next in things I promised not to tell first, believe it or not, there's still more new idiots to talk about.

The roundup of the misgrants, morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world.

Do ey decmal system, the Brons worse BBC News, as I always say when I torch them.

Look, the reporters are unmatched, probably in the English language, maybe in the entirety of the world.

I don't speak French.

I can't speak to the French news, and their worst is still better than the best offered by CNN or MSNBC, to say nothing of Fascist News channel.

But boy, oh boy, are there in studio editors and producers naive and easily led.

I mean sometimes it looks like a high school newscast.

The Big Second Day Story on BBC World News, which they call that not as a brand name.

They actually show it all over the world.

That's why they call it that, their Big Second Day Story.

After Zelenski and friends went the White House, they interviewed Zelenski's suit guy not not some lawyer, not lawsuit, Zelenski's stylist, his wardrobe fella, about Zelenski's new suit, the one he wore to the White House, about the idiot remark that the bimbo Brian Glenn of the Rave News Network made about Zelenski's fatigues from the meeting in February and comparing it to the Zippier suit that Zelensky wore on Monday, and then the punishment that Brian Glenn took when he smarmily tried to suck up to Zelensky by apologizing to him, and Zolensky vaporized him.

An entire segment on BBC World News, which I'd like to remind you is shown around the world.

Do he Decimal system?

An entire segment with the anchor Christian phrase who's a little holier than now at times but otherwise okay, and the interviewee was speaking Ukrainian with a translator.

The whole segment on Zelensky's wardrobe, and not once was the thing that tied the whole room together ever mentioned the TV guy from rav Rave who insulted Zelenski in the first place and got smashed up this time.

Brian Glenn is the boyfriend of the insufferable Marjorie Stupid Green.

To treat Brian Glenn as just some sort of ordinary right wing conspiracy nut reporter is to miss the point.

There is not a vast right wing conspiracy.

It is still in this country only a couple of hundred people tops.

If they disappeared, tomorrow nature would begin to heal.

But they are all in the and I don't know that it's coordinated.

They don't have meetings.

There isn't a rule book.

It's not like that they don't speak on some sort of code.

They didn't instill some sort of method of making us do what they want to and tracking our whereabouts other than to sell us all these thousand dollars phones that don't work and do track our whereabouts, but they do coordinate to some degree.

Maybe once a year.

That question was asked in February, and the phony apology was spoken intentionally.

Somebody thought about it in advance.

How to put Zelenski back on his heels ask him about his jumpsuit.

You have to make in covering this story.

If you're going to interview somebody about what Zelensky is wearing, you have to mention that the alleged reporter.

You have to make some reference to the fact that the alleged reporter actually is so deep in this pit of filth that he is willing to put his hands on Marjorie Taylor Green, I hope you weren't eating food, Speaking of which the runner up worser MSNBC.

Oh no, no, they don't call it that anymore.

Now it's called MISS now or msnow or is it MS now as in M and M's who the candy channel, M and M's now.

I've kind of like that.

I don't know what it's called.

I don't know how to pronounce it.

I guess I guess this comes from the fact that internally people think that anybody outside of thirty Rock or the place they kicked them out of, thirty Rock two in Times Square, the people who work there think that they're not the only ones who refer to it as MS.

No one watching MSNBC has ever referred to it as MS.

People who work their call it that, but they have not thought this through.

Why would you want to call your network something that is the same acronym for a devastating and heartbreaking physical ailment and disease?

Why would you do that?

Internally, it's just an abbreviation to differentiate from CNBC or NBC.

Yeah, that's say they have the they have the box of macaroons over there at MS.

Yeah.

No, there's cake.

There's cake in the MS newsroom.

That's fine.

But the keeping the MS part, it's just madness.

Anyway, They claim that MSNOW is an acronym standing for my Source News Opinion World, which is actually somehow worse than what the original MSNBC acronym stood for, which was Microsoft NBC now the background to the name MSNBC when I went to work there in nineteen ninety seven, and they're year two.

NBC News president Andy Lack, who's nuts, warned me before taking me into a meeting with the guy from Microsoft.

It's top Microsoft exec who thought he was running the place.

He said, Lack, that is, we agreed to call it that MSNBC so that the Microsoft would give us their money and their computer terminals for free.

Just not at whatever this asshole says.

And then and just ignore him.

And if you're not sure what to say, look to look to me or Phil Griffin, and we'll give you an indication what to say.

Just humor.

We just need his money.

That's all he gets in this deal.

He didn't read the fine print.

So it was Microsoft NBC and they thought they were merging cable and the Internet.

And the solution to that was to call the eight o'clock show inter Night, you get it instead of Internet.

That was Phil Griffin's idea he was the president of MSNBC.

Not only was that Phil Griffin's idea, it happened in nineteen ninety six, and it was Phil Griffins's most recent idea, just not at whatever he says.

So with MSNBC, I'm sorry, it's now called Miss Magazine has merged with the National Organization for Women, with MSNBC changing its name as it is spun off by Comcast and kicked out of the house before Comcast sells it off and the new owners destroy it like they did to CNN.

I'd like to point out that the first time I suggested it would be a good idea to dissociate itself from NBC News and create its own identity, because people who were watching US on MSNBC had already decided they did not want to watch NBC News, which is exactly the reverse of the logic of the Andy Lacks, who thought, well, people who like NBC News will certainly want to watch US twenty four hours a day.

No, you don't understand.

They have just as much MSNBC over here and as much NBC News over there as they could possibly use.

They don't want to go from one to the other call it something else.

You'll never get away from the idea that it's just NBC Junior.

You'll never get away from the idea that this is the triple A team for NBC News.

And Andy Lack of course thought, well, that's great.

We like to have a triple A team for NBC News, which is all he wanted, a place for Brian Williams to practice.

Well, he practiced a lot, but he wasn't practicing what they thought he was practicing.

I invented air.

The first time I asked them whether or not it was a good idea to rename the place was like the week I started in October nineteen ninety seven and in two thousand and three, and I still have the memo, and maybe I'll sit down and read the whole thing on here one day.

I propose they rebrand it and make it simple.

I said, you want to have a news network, call your new news network name, and you can get away with this because nobody was watching MSNBC.

I mean literally a few more people were watching it in two thousand and three than there are watching it now.

That's how bad things were in two thousand and three.

Call it NWS.

This is NWS news.

That's it.

You want to use an acronym, use that one co opt not just the brand name, but an entire industry like Time magazine.

Boy, that pretty much covers it.

Huh, what's your magazine about?

Time or Life magazine?

You have to admit you can't get better name recognition than if you called your magazine Life or Time, or if you called your news network News.

By the way, who did they send out to convince the deeply suspicious viewers that this dumb name is not a dumb name, that it isn't the TV equivalent of Edsel or New Coke or Max instead of HBO or any of the drug brand names that you can't remember or spell exactlia for you know when you have that thing xnactlia.

The point of the TV ads is to get you to remember how to remember and spell the names of the drugs and you can't remember what they're called.

You know who they sent out to, say, eld the most credible person on MSNBC now, No, it's MSNBC earlier and ms now.

You know who they sent out to pitch this, The most credible person they have the most believed, the guy whose word you can depend on whose opinion, whose position never changes.

Joe Scarborough, who said the new name is perfect and in solidarity.

Joe then changed his name to Vidcan Quizzling look it up.

But the winner the worst el Trump Bellini again needs any distraction he can find from Trumpstein.

But this is still something he has written as President of the United States, and thus we can believe he really believes this.

The museums throughout Washington, but all over the country.

Okay, I don't know what you mean that, Sonny, are essentially the last remaining segment of woke.

The Smithsonian is out of control.

I don't know if you've been to the Smithsonian, or in fact to any major museum in this country, but the last thing they are is out of control or woke.

The museums are there to invoke the year eighteen ninety eight, supposedly the year Trump enjoyed the most.

The Smithsonian is out of control.

Where everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was, and how unaccomplished the down trodden have been.

Nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future.

It's a museum, af face, It's not about the future.

We are not going to allow this to happen.

I have instructed my attorneys to go through the museums and start the exact same process that it has been done with colleges and universities, where tremendous progress has been made.

Yes, we've cut back the number of Ivy League schools from eight to six.

This country cannot be woke, because woke is broke.

We have the hottest country in the world, and we want people to talk about it, including in our museums.

He'll be asking people to shout in the libraries next and to wear their underwear on the outside.

He's going to sue the museums over covering history because there's not enough stuff about the future in the museums, because museums are about the past.

Yeah, he's not crazy, new new new.

Also, the Smithsonian mentioning slavery is woke, and once again the line about the exact same process that has been done with colleges and universities.

Again, my congratulations to Penn and Columbia and especially my ex friend Claire Shipman.

I really think Claire and the idiots who run Pen ought to be selecting where they're going to move to which country, not out of a fear of an uncomfortable life full of public shame or danger under Trump, but because of fear of an even more uncomfortable life full of even more public shame after Trump.

This is your fault, Claire.

You folded and the rest of them folded behind you, and you gave this mealy mouthed, eighty year old, stupid mother effort, the belief that he can bully anybody and that everyone will appease him because you appeased him.

Congratulations, Wake up with that every morning.

Also, Trump is now pro slavery, and he's forever two day's worst person.

Or over the weekend, a colleague of mine explained that his career is over.

It's done.

He's had all the chances, there are no more jobs to get.

It's all over.

The business is dying, his career is dying.

It's finished.

He's going to look into something else, maybe selling used cars.

And I said, boy, oh boy, if I had ten million dollars for every time I have been told my career was over, I'd have a lot less money than I actually do.

To our number one story on the countdown, and good evening, and welcome to the end of our career years or more, particularly the end of my career.

No, I'm not retiring.

I'm just quoting myself from nineteen ninety three in the launch of ESPN two and the subject of career ending announcements career ending announcements.

Recently a colleague of mine told me he was done, and I had to go through all of the times I have been told I was done.

The first one was in nineteen eighty four.

This would be in a previous century that I know.

To a lot of younger listeners, seems like it might as well be eighteen eighty four.

I have told before the story of my limited career in Boston, for which I waited about a year to start and lasted about half as long because I went to work at the wrong place, in the wrong city, outside in the wrong suburb of Boston, with the wrong boss, where they said, don't make any jokes, and I said, what did you hire me for?

And I left very very quickly, and then they tried to fire me while I was filling out the terms of my contract and staying there until they could get a replacement, and the whole thing went up in flames.

And the result of this was that the news director of the station Channel five in Boston, a man who actually answered to the name Philip Scribner.

Balboni went to the Boston Globe TV Sportswriter when they had such things as TV Sportswriters, and said, Oh, such a shame about Keith.

He was potentially such a major talent.

I will not deny that the use of that phrase did inspire me to some degree to get cracking on my career.

On the other hand, I didn't work for nearly a year later, as I was taking care of some family business back home and sort of put everything about my own interest on the shelf.

Off the record, The general manager of the station I had worked for, a man named James Coppersmith, said to my agent something that made Balboni's statement look like a compliment.

Coppersmith said, he will never again work in our business.

That got me motivated.

I believe I read recently that Coppersmith died.

In any event, I worked again in his business.

The punchline to this one, and they all have punchlines, is that at some point around two thousand and seven, I got an email at MSNBC and the return address was Philip Scribner.

Balboni, And there was a great email from my old brief news director Boston Channel five in Boston, who explained that I had been potentially such a major talent and was quoted on the record as saying that.

And now he was saying how he watched Countdown every night and was so proud to have been in there at the start of my career.

Not a word about the other part about the oh, potentially such a major talent.

I guess he meant it in the past future, perfect sense of the I don't know, my grammar education is not what it should be.

But he managed to wriggle out of it.

Never made any reference to it.

And the one thing about surviving repeated announcements that your career is over is to never really go back and criticize the people who were wrong about it, because they know they were wrong and your success is the best answer.

Nevertheless, this all came up, and I thought i'd retell it to you because I had to retell it to a friend who recently told me his career was over.

But as I said, that was just the first time that had ever happened in a fully professional setting.

In two thousand and one, and I was just reading this.

I guess about a year ago.

I came across it somewhere online.

I was reading it for a punchline in and of itself.

It was a piece in Sports Illustrated by a man named Chris Ballard, I believe, and Chris Ballard wrote an article about my being fired by Fox Sports, which he wrote as I had resigned from Fox Sports, and went on to explain that I did not respond as Sports Illustrated's request by emails and phones for comment.

I never received any of them because it never occurred to me him that when they fired me and told everybody I had resigned, they cut off my access to my email and my phone, and they said to him when he wanted to talk to me, oh, just send him an email, he'll get back to you.

And I didn't, and thus he made me look like a jerk.

In any event, the article explained in two thousand and one that having gone through ESPN and now ESPN's sort of mini me rival, Fox Sports News, that there was nothing left for me to do in the business.

I had tried news briefly in nineteen ninety seven and nineteen ninety eight.

Clearly my career in both fields was over.

I could not possibly work again in television, in news or in sports.

We're now coming up next year if I get to it.

Well, it's been twenty three, twenty four year.

Okay.

I recently saw this article and was inspired to look for it online because Chris Ballard was retiring from Sports Illustrated and I'm still One question that came up as I was retelling the story of my various career ending moments that did not in fact end my career from my friend who's very worried about this, was how I managed not to have my career And when Ballard's premise was not completely wrong, he was certainly looking at what he thought happened in television.

He was not the TV sports writer for Sports Illustrated for very long.

It was not a natural subject for him.

Most people who did this job thought that it involved simply watching sports on TV and then writing what they thought as opposed to understanding an industry or its complexities, or its parameters or its sort of weird voodoo customs.

In any event, I said, well, look, it's not very difficult to survive these things.

You just have to acknowledge that perhaps your next job after some sort of cataclysmic departure from an ESPN or a Fox Sports or an MSNBC or wherever else, perhaps it's not going to pay you quite as much as the last one did.

And so when my agent and I began to look around for more work in two thousand and one, and I might add that after Fox fired me, they had to pay me for another eight months at one hundred thousand dollars a year.

And if you can't survive on a job that requires you to do nothing for eight months and pays you eight hundred thousand dollars that you can salt away.

If you can't survive on that and enjoy your life while you're doing it, you're doing things wrong.

In any event, what I said was just the next job.

Just take a job that allows you to do what you can do and do it well, and you will succeed in it.

You have talent a lot of other people don't.

You will be low cost, so they're much more likely to overlook anything that happened in the past, and most importantly, if it is successful, you can then hold them up on the second contract negotiation.

So I went first to CNN after the Fox Sports experience started to work for them for not a lot of money, and although they did not ultimately exercise this, they signed me to a contract to do the eight pm show on CNN for a certain large amount of money, and there were two finalists they wanted us lined up in advance, and they made the clever decision to choose Connie Chung instead of me.

But they had sort of reauthorized me.

They had re established me by it was well known within the industry that I was the runner up for the job at eight o'clock and within six months of them saying, nah, we think Connie's the right person to lead us into the future here, within six months of that, I was doing the eight o'clock show on MSNBC for in fact, twice what the agreement had been at CNN, And within three years they'd signed me to a new deal that was worth three times that, more than I had ever made in my life.

So the key thing to it is to be flexible financially.

You socked them for the money while you're successful, and then by the way, once again, if you can't succeed in the business, if you can't succeed in life, when you have received in one year, anything north of three million dollars in one year.

Four million dollars.

Maybe I forget what the actual financial floor is.

But if you've made that much money in one year and can't live basically off that and simply interest from the bank that that will provide you.

If you can't do that, you must have some sort of addiction to drugs, because guess what, you can go a long way still.

I mean, yeah, it's true, four million dollars is what it used to be, but guess what it is now.

It's still really good.

I never failed to see one of these articles in which somebody who's lost a job paying in you know, the tens of millions of dollars, and it's I always finished.

Now.

It's like, yes, he's finished.

Now he can sit on a beach, he can hire somebody to do his exercise for him.

He can sit on a beach and and eat the money, and it won't make it difference.

He doesn't have to do it again in any event.

So the pattern here that I have described already has continued in subsequent years, even after I came back from the dead, after my experience in Boston, where I was dubbed the Dark prints of TV Sports and was winning awards in Los Angeles the next year.

Although, to be fair, after that quote in nineteen eighty four about how I was potentially a great talent, I did get down to about my last one hundred dollars in the bank.

And actually I actually had to borrow money from my dear sister to get on the bus to take me to the airport in New York so I could take the flight to Los Angeles to start my job there.

That's how close I cut it.

Another week and I would have been borrowing money for food.

That's where I was.

But you have to be willing to walk that tight rope to pull this off in any event.

So that was Boston became the Los Angeles job.

In the Los Angeles job, when they eliminated that, it's like, well, his career is over now.

Job was ESPN.

ESPN led to NBC.

When that didn't work out and I pushed to get out of there.

They sold me to Fox for a million dollars and they paid me a lot of money and continued to pay me a lot of money even after they stopped putting me on TV.

And that led to a doldrum period where I got to read about the guy who's now retired from Sports Illustrated explaining what network will sign him now, what team will sign him now?

Whither Keith?

This is two thousand and one.

I was forty two years old.

It's like I get nostalgic reading that, going, Yeah, you were forty two years old.

They fired you at that point people thought your career was over.

Yeah, but I was forty two.

My hair was dark most places in any event, So that led into the MSNBC job, and the MSNBC job, as sort of messy as that ended, the second one, anyway, led to the Current TV job, and as disastrous as that was, since it was kind of a confidence trick, there was a day where between the money I got for leaving NBC and the money I got for joining Current TV, I made sixty eight million dollars in one day.

I had to sew a lot of people afterwards to get all of it, but I got just about all of it.

In any event, I'm now boasting back to the point of this whole story.

An old friend of mine came in when I was doing the videos for GQ The Closer and The Resistance in twenty sixteen, in twenty seventeen, came in to watch me do this and started to ask, very very graciously and very gently about, well, isn't this something of a come down for you from the MSNBC experience where you had a staff?

And I said, well, first off, the MSNBC experience consisted of two cameramen and a floor director and me and sometimes a guest in a studio.

The staff, whereas they were all certainly dedicated to the project, consisted of basically a core of six or seven people.

It never really felt like a big deal.

I know it had more influence than then I was ever led to understand.

But it wasn't like, oh, well, you know those movies that you did with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and Tom Cruise.

Now you're just sitting at home with a camera.

It didn't have that feel in the slightest.

And I said to him, did you see the thing from CBS News the other day?

And he went, what thing from CBS News?

I said, don't you have the Google at the New York Times?

And he said yes.

I said, Google, Social Flow, Facebook, and he did on his phone and he read this political pundit Keith Alderman found a way to channel concerns about mister Trump.

This is July twenty seventeen, started hosting a series of political commentary and special interviews titled The Resistance with Keith Olderman, with the first episode featured on GQ on November sixteenth, twenty sixteen, reaching fifty four million people, equivalent to one in six Americans.

And I said, look, I understand that if you measure things solely by the idea that I'm on your TV every night, well, yeah, that the doing a video and coming into a studio that isn't really designed for TV and there's an echo in it might seem like the end of my career.

Fifty four million people saw that video and interacted with it in some kind.

They either forwarded it, or watched it, or put a comment on it, or sometimes all three.

That was, in fact the number one political video or story on Facebook in the period of time after Donald Trump's election.

I think that's something of a success.

And I said, by this point, I don't need the damn money.

The money I'm making from doing this is going to dog charities.

Okay, So we could go on at length about other small versions of that.

I once went back and forth with this guy who now is one of the people at Puck News, who insisted that I had not been negotiating with the then chairman of NBC, Jeff Schell, about returning to MSNBC in twenty nineteen, twenty and twenty one, because NBC News had insisted it wasn't true.

And I said, who told you that?

And they said, a spokesman.

And I said to this guy, his name was Dylan Byers, I said, well, who was the spokesman.

Well, it's just supposed to be a spokesman, I said, so.

They wouldn't even put their own name on it, not even a made up name Jim Jones, NBC News spokesman, which would have been, by the way, an appropriate name for a series of NBC News spokespeople.

They didn't even do that.

And he said no, they were insistent, there's never been any contact between you and Jeff Shell.

And I went hang on, and I called up from my phone twenty three emails and texts from Jeff Shell.

I photo shot at them, I screen shotted them and gave him to the guy.

And I don't think this guy Buyers has recovered since his worldview was totally destroyed.

He was writing a story about how I had deteriorated to the point where I was hallucinating about being in contact with Jeff Shell from NBC News or from NBC about returning to NBC News and MSNBC, when we were deep into negotiations about and we're delayed only by the pandemic.

And as I pointed out here before, the vetos of certain people working on the air at MSNBC, most of whose careers I started.

But that's another story which I've already discussed.

His whole worldview was shattered by this because should do be he could not comprehend that an NBC News spokesperson would lie to him, And he really said this.

He said, I don't understand why would they lie to me?

And I said, you don't have to understand that the idea that they would not put their own name on this statement might have suggested to you that they were lying to you.

Oh, I'll keep that in mind.

Well he didn't keep that in mind.

But that's again another story about Dylan Byers, and we'll get to him someday some day two somewhere soon.

Somebody asked towards the end of July twenty twenty four about my recent comeback and how I had just gotten back into political commentary now with the new podcast, and I said, it's two years old.

On August first, it was approaching five hundred episodes.

We're doing like a million listens a week, a million audience participants a week.

I mean, it's challenging certain hours on CNN for total audience.

Good God, what do you mean recent comeback?

But this is, as I said, if I had ten million dollars for every time somebody told me my career was over, A career is sort of over because I'm now of advanced years and now I've done something that I really didn't understand until the year twenty eleven, until I left MSNBC to go to Current TV, and there was built into this transfer a three month period of time where I could not work anywhere in television.

I had not had such a period of time except for the aforementioned period when I was taking care of family members who were in trouble in nineteen eighty five after the Boston experience, I hadn't had such a length at time without being on the air somewhere, And in fact, during that period in nineteen eighty five, I did a lot of freelance work just to you know, get the cash that I didn't have to borrow from my sister, who was, by the way, seventeen years old at the time.

Yeah, Jen, have you got a twenty Yeah?

Thanks, I need to go buy a cigar.

In any event, I believe we had that conversation.

In any event, the point of this was, until twenty eleven, I'd really not had a day or at least a week without deadlines.

Media deadlines.

You have to have this written by eight o'clock because the show is starting with or without you.

I hadn't had a day or a week without those since I was sixteen years old.

I was to my shock.

I found I really enjoyed not having those deadlines.

And when we went back on the air in Current TV in June of twenty eleven, I was kind of disappointed, not because the studio was actually not a studio but more like a you know, a portal to hell.

Not that part of it, which was disappointing, but not as much as I really enjoyed, you know, not shaving every weekday and not having to write, you know, ten thousand words a day and not having to read the twelve seconds of script inside the twelve second window before the sound hit, and just the number of deadlines I suddenly didn't have.

So since twenty eleven, I decided to cut back to four days work a week, generally speaking, that's my concession to my mid sixties.

And as I was preparing this to tell you this story in light of the experience I had with my friend who thought his career was over, and I was reciting this, I realized that I had left out in telling him the story, and I have deliberately left it out of the chronological order of these tales of the actual first time I was told my career was over.

I had forgotten completely about the day that the sports director what was then a prominent radio station told me that not only would he and the news director there not hire me, even though I had been told I was a candidate for a sports job there, but he told me that I would never get a job in radio or television of any prominence because of my attitude.

No one will ever hire you.

His name was Ernie Jackson, and I believe he left the town we were in to get a job selling airtime on a radio station in Cincinnati, and after that, I don't know what the hell happened to him.

The news director was a guy named Bob Lynch, and he shortly thereafter moved to a job that I think he spent his entire professional career at traffic reporter in a plane above the beautiful city of Rochester, New York.

The date that mister Jackson on mister Lynch's behalf told me that my career was over, the first time I was told you will never again work in this business, the first good evening and welcome to the end of my career was October nineteen seventy seven.

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 Phillip Schanel, our musical directors of Countdown.

It was produced by Tko Brothers.

Mister Ray was on the guitars based on drums.

Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards.

Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust.

The Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc.

That's the sports music.

Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.

An announcer today was my friend Larry David.

Everything else was, as always my fault.

Do we decimals?

It's countdown for today, Day two hundred and fourteen of America held hostage again by a pro slavery guy, just forty eight days until the scheduled end of his lane duck and lame brained term unless he is removed sooner by MAGA and Jeffrey Epstein or the actuarial tables.

Always be suspicious of a guy who starts asking whether or not he's going to get into heaven.

I'm Keith Oldraman.

Good Morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck.

Countdown with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio.

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