TRUMP: I PREVENTED NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST YOU'RE WELCOME! - 8.31.23

Add this to the list of things that will make your life easier. Weco Hospitality You can get their fresh chef-made meals delivered when you want them. No subscription required. These meals come already prepared for you and are ready to eat after some quick finishing touches. Did we mention there are no subscriptions? We did, but we're telling you again. Visit wecohospitality.com to order that's w-e-c-o-hospitality.com and for a limited time use promo code easy for free delivery. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Good news everyone. Trump saved us from nuclear holocaust. He did so by doing something no president had ever done before and only he could have thought of and only he realized and only he accomplished he dealt with North Korea. Were you in charge of the Trump organization? He was asked in a deposition last April for the state of New York's $250 million civil fraud lawsuit against the company a transcript of which has just been unsealed. No, Trump explained he was not in charge. Quote, I was very busy. I was, I considered this the most important job in the world, saving millions of lives. Unquote. Ah, when was that? Quote, I think you would have nuclear holocaust. If I didn't deal with North Korea, I think you would have a nuclear war if I weren't elected and I think you might have a nuclear war now if you want to know the truth. Unquote. Uh, thanks. This underscores a part of Trump's insanity that it sometimes seems like we have gotten all too used to. He really does think he is the first person to have ever thought of something or to have ever done something. That in fact, everybody else in his position did as long ago as 1946. I never hear him say something like this. Only I saved millions of lives because only I dealt with North Korea without thinking of what the idiot director Roger Debris in Mel Brooks's movie The Producers says about the play itself. Quote, I never knew that the third Reich meant Germany. I mean, it's just drenched with historical goodies like that. That is Trump. If that was not enough insanity for you in this deposition, parts of which are included in the latest edition of the New York Times. And remember, the deposition was supposed to be about how the Trump organization defrauded everybody and how according to prosecutors, Trump frequently overstated his net worth sometimes by as much as two billion, two hundred million dollars. Trump also explains to senior attorney Kevin Wallace, quote, friends of mine have said, you are the most honest person in the world. So we've done a good job. Don't get credit for it. Well, we did say thanks for stopping the big blowy upie. God, this guy is nuts. Why, Lord, have you blighted us with this nuts guy? One last exchange from the transcript with Trump attorney, Christopher Keiss talking to attorney general's office attorney, Kevin Wallace, Keiss. We're going to be here until midnight. If you keep asking questions that are all over the map, Wallace, Chris, we're going to be here until midnight. If your client answers every question with an eight minute speech, I can see it now. The epitaph on Trump's headstone. You're welcome. Welcome, of course, in all caps. You know, the headstone near the bunker on 12 at Bedminster. Regardless of the chaff being thrown at the prosecutors at every turn, there is progress around the edges. Peter Navarro, the pocket-sized financial Charlotteson and Trump loyalist who defied a subpoena to testify to the January 6th committee has now lost his bid to avoid trial for that defiance and the trial will begin Tuesday. And in doing so, Navarro provided one of the most joyful moments of the last eight years. Navarro insisted Trump had asserted executive privilege to keep him from testifying, which was a neat trick since A, Trump was not president then, and B, the committee had not even been formed when Trump was still president, and most relevantly C, Navarro could not prove Trump even tried it after he was president. But the satisfying moment came when, as he addressed the media, following the judges' ruling that the trial will go on, the five-six-ish Navarro realized that there had been a woman standing behind him all that time, holding a sign, reading Trump lost, and you know it. Navarro then reached up to grab the sign from her hands, and she nonchalantly and effortlessly reached it up about an inch or so higher, and Navarro could not grab it. He was s out of luck. The CNN here, hey, they want to own up to that. Here's the problem. Here, oh, who's this? You're already facing charges. Yeah, get it. So, you hear this whole time, situation. Yes, okay. If you did not hear that woman clearly, she says, bro, you're already facing charges. Go ahead and commit another crime. I've been standing here the whole time, situational awareness, unquote. And that woman's name was Farnie Willis. In a different Washington courtroom, Judge Barrel Howell ruled against Rudy Giuliani in the defamation case against him by the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss. But if you've heard reporting that Giuliani has lost that case, that is not exactly correct. The judge simply ruled that the case can continue against Giuliani because he clearly said what the two women claim he said, and now they can take the case to trial and see what if any damages Giuliani owes them. Proving that Rudy has never, not even for a stretch of eight or ten minutes, been half as smart as he thinks he is, Rudy Giuliani then promptly went on the air with Greg Kelly of Newsmax and smeared Freeman and Moss again. Quote, I interpreted what I saw on a tape. I still interpreted it that way. I mean, there's no doubt they were screwing around. What I said about Ruby Freeman is that they violated the law of Georgia in the way they counted those ballots. There's no question they did. They threw the public out. You can see that on the tape and it's clear that they were hiding the ballots, unquote. You only have two options here. I'm wondering if these remarks will be added to the current case against Giuliani or they will be made into a second and entirely new one. Either way, this prediction, someday, years from now, when Rudy Giuliani is a footnote to the coverage of 9.11, if the nation survives, there will be statues erected to honor Ruby Freeman and Sheamus. In not a Washington courtroom, but a well-known popular capital building in that same city, the revenge fantasies continue to inflate inside Trump's semi-human brain and one of them looks like it's going to send Kevin McCarthy right over a cliff. There is no question that the Republicans are going to try to impeach President Biden. Almost solely doing so to get Trump off their backs and they may try to do it without first getting a house vote, approving an impeachment inquiry. The problem with that is when the Democrats tried to start the first Trump impeachment without a vote on an inquiry. The Republicans wailed so loudly. Congressman Doug Collins memorably screamed, it's not impeachment unless there is a vote that Nancy Pelosi held the vote. So now McCarthy has two choices. It's not impeachment without a vote or hold the vote and watch it fail because he doesn't have 218 Republican votes because of his Congressman who were elected in districts one by Biden. More amazingly, there is more awareness within the Republican caucus than there is in the American news media that while yes, the Republicans don't have the votes. They also don't have the evidence. Politico quotes a senior GOP aid who sees what might be a train wreck for the ages coming as saying, we haven't proven the case for impeachment yet. How can you start impeachment? We haven't done what you need to do to start impeachment. There is no way we'd get the votes. Unquote. Mr. Speaker, just Thelma and Louise this thing hit the gas. The canyon is that way. Down at the granular level, a Georgia state politician prostituting himself to protect the criminal Trump against prosecution by Fulton County District Attorney Willis has now had the audacity to claim that the district attorney is using quote her position in a political manner. She's politicizing this. This guy has threatened Fony Willis with reprimands, sanctions, hearings, state senate investigations and removal under a new law to oust wayward prosecutors. And she's the one politicizing this. This cracker's name is Steve Gooch. No, I'm not making that up. Gooch, G double OCH. And he is the majority leader. And if he did not already sound like a complete cliche, Steve Gooch grew up in Lumpkin County, Georgia. He's one of the Lumpkin Gooch's. And the real surprise about Steve Gooch's remarks Wednesday was that they have been met with blowback from within the Georgia Republican Party. Georgia House Speaker John Burns has taken an extraordinary step of writing to the rest of his caucus to dismiss what he calls quote theatrics like this. Burns writes, a select few are calling to defund a duly elected district attorney of this state and her office in an attempt to interfere with the criminal justice system. Let me ID this guy again. He is the Republican Speaker of the Georgia State House. Quote, targeting one specific DA in this banner certainly flaunts the idea of separation of powers, if not outright violates it. Speaker Burns, a Republican also points out that the state government does not have a kind of line item veto on the salaries of each prosecutor. You want to defund Fanny Willis? You have to defund all the district attorneys in the state of Georgia. Quote, speaker Burns, again, regardless of your views of this case, removing this funding would also have the unintended consequence of causing a delay or complete lack of prosecution of other serious offenses. The Speaker of the Georgia House, John Burns, from Newington near Savannah. Frankly, I fear for his life because back in the state senate, where a majority leader, Gooch, is saying Willis is quote, definitely tainted. Gooch is actually one of the moderate Republican senators. While betraying his office by serving Trump instead of America, Gooch found himself reprimanding Georgia freshman state senator Colton Moore, whom I have quoted here repeatedly ever since he claimed that the defendants in the Trump case are now facing death by lethal injection. Moore seems to have backed off that, and now says it's not death by lethal injection, just life in prison, and just for fun he mixed in the Civil War. Moore wants a special session of the Georgia Senate called to impeach Fanny Willis because she indicted Trump with absolutely no irony in his voice nor any self-awareness. Majority leader Gooch has responded to that with quote, we want to make sure we calm down. We look at this stuff deliberately and we do it in a mature way. You see, Gooch opposes this special session idea, not because it's an abuse of the separation of powers, but because it would require support from some Democrats and Gooch opposes the impeachment idea, not because it's obstruction of justice, but because it would require a two-thirds vote and quote, there's simply no way we'd have the numbers to do that. What we are seeing from the Republicans in the Georgia State Senate is an utter breakdown of any awareness that they are there to serve the state constitution and its laws and the nation. Or anything, in fact, except the whims of their political cult and the mollock at its head. We will exercise Trump from this country. The courts will get him or those in his party who are worse than he is will get him or the actuarial tables will get him, but I do not know how we will be able to relieve this nation of the stain of this madness in the hearts and minds of the Republicans that Trump has infected. When I say I worry for the safety of Georgia House Speaker Burns because he's bringing up separation of powers and how you can't defund one Georgia district attorney, you'd have to defund them all. And if somehow you could, you'd also wind up ending the prosecution of murder and rape in Fulton County. I'm not exaggerating. Burns has brought common sense to a party where Gooch is a moderate and more represents the we're in the mood for a lynching wing of the state GOP. So as always, we come back to my contention that democracy is still breathing not because of our efforts to preserve it, but because of the stupidity of those who would destroy it. Andy Clyde is the Georgia congressman who sits on the Appropriations Committee, and he thinks he can save his lord and master Trump by defunding with us at Alvin Bragg and Jack Smith, even though the first two are not using federal funds and the third is perpetually funded by the 1987 Act, which established his office. Now, Congressman Clyde is himself being investigated. Our friends at crew, citizens for responsibility and ethics in Washington, have just filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics because Andy Clyde is self-dealing. What looked like traditional amoral, murderous, run-of-the-mill Republican worship of the thrill of killing people with guns turns out to be worse than that. In January, the Department of Justice approved stricter regulations on stabilizing braces that allow pistols to be fired off the shoulder like rifles, because God knows we don't have enough rifles in this country. They call these things pistol braces, creatively, and they have factored in many mass shootings already, including the one that claimed 10 in a Boulder Colorado grocery store in 2021. Congressman Clyde naturally supports mass shootings, specifically those that use pistol braces. He has introduced a bill to eliminate most of the new restrictions on pistol braces. He's introduced a congressional resolution that would nullify the Department of Justice rule about pistol braces. He's introduced an amendment that would prevent ATF from spending any money to enforce the rule. So whose pocket is Andy Clyde in? His own turns out Congressman Andy Clyde, busily accusing Funny Willis and Alvin Bragg and Jack Smith of corruption and deceit, and that owns Clyde Armory Inc., a company that sells firearms that are equipped with pistol braces. Introducing legislation to line his own pockets with money made from the blood of mass shooting victims is not just wildly unethical, it may in fact be illegal. But go on Congressman, tell me about the threat to the nation represented by Funny Willis. Also of interest here, even by the slubbantly ethical standards of cable news, this would seem to be a no-brainer. You cannot be a cable news anchor while serving as a media advisor to a $3 billion international corporation and flying on the founder's private jet and doing damage control for him with other media outlets. Why MSNBC is going to have to fire one of its prime time hosts. Plus Wednesday, at about 2.45 p.m. Eastern, we here hit a threshold, and I wanted to thank you for it now and not wait till later. On February 1st, we celebrated the first milestone of podcasts, the You Don't Suck Download milestone of an audience of 1 million in one month. Yesterday, we reached for the month of August 2023 between downloads and verified YouTube plays the milestone of a total audience of 3 million in one month. I thank you. We will finish up what you downloaded today in a moment. That's next, this is Countdown. Even if you love cooking, getting dinner on the table every night can be tough. One can eat gluten. The kiddo is picky, and you remember you want something besides everyone else's leftovers. Let We Go Hospitality help. Get their fully prepared, ready in only 10 minutes meals delivered when you want them. No subscription required. Chili Glazed salmon for the adults. Meet all sliders for the little ones, all in a single night. Visit We Go Hospitality.com to order. That's W-E-C-O Hospitality.com and for a limited time, use promo code Variety for free delivery on your first week. This is Countdown with Keith Elberman. Post scripts to the news. Some headlines, some updates, some snark, some predictions, date line Covington Kentucky. The good news is, during the latest Mitch glitch, whatever it was that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was looking at, out on a horizon only he could see, it seemed like it made him happy. The bad news is, for the second time in about a month, McConnell has frozen at his handlers who would all need new jobs if he say had to resign or retire or he went into a permanent stupor or something. They just kept him out there in front of the media and pretended everything was fine and he was just having trouble hearing. We're going to need a minute. So, do you have a question? Please speak up. Most concerning. That followed a 20-minute talk by McConnell to the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce in which everything seemed to be okay. Since it had a TV station, WLWT reports that between the speech and the freeze, McConnell, quote, walked down a few steps from the podium and caught himself as if he were about to fall as he approached his chair. If you are wondering about the subtext here, Kentucky's Republican legislature passed a law taking from the governor there the right to appoint a new senator of his own choosing to an empty seat. Now, it must be a senator from the same party as the departed incumbent who is selected from a list supplied by that party. Political reports that asked about whether he would go along with that new law or simply ignore it, appoint Democrat and take his chances in the courts, Kentucky's Democratic Governor Andy Beshear twice refused to answer. And date line Washington, prosecutors wanted Judge Timothy Kelly to sentence Proud Boys leaders Enrique Tario and Ethan Nordein to 33 and 27 years in prison, respectively yesterday, after their convictions for seditious conspiracy. As the time for sentencing came and went, Tario and Nordein were sentenced to nothing. It was postponed. Judge Kelly had a medical issue. Nordein will now be sentenced along with other Proud Boys members on Friday. Tario will not be sentenced until next Tuesday, and I know that sounds completely fishy, but that's only because it is still ahead on Countdown. It may have been the day American television news jumped the shark. Well, the first day, and the shark was in the Rubicon. 26 years ago now, this weekend since we humiliated ourselves, after the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales coming up in things I promise not to tell. First time for the daily roundup of the Miss Grant's Morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world. LeBron's Holly Peterson of San Francisco. She's an anti-pickleball activist. I know that sounds ridiculous, but this is serious stuff. The noise of that game. Puck, Puck, Puck, Puck, Puck, Puck, Puck. The noise of that game for hours on end is so maddening that some anti-pickleball activists in British Columbia started a hunger strike. Here in New York, they turned the skating rink in Central Park into like a 24-court pickleball complex, and that Puck, Puck sound is annoying, though it's not as bad as the roller disco they had here last summer that played the same track every night. Oh, it's done a summer. It must be 7.58 p.m. But Peterson's San Francisco eight bedroom home sits right on top the Presidio wall playground there, and that's where they have pickleball courts in San Francisco, and at that close distance it is maddening. Life altering, she says. Miss Peterson has started a petition, and that's fine. I hear her almost literally, but there's a twist here. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that in that eight bedroom home that she is trying to sell now for $36 million. Holly Peterson has a built-in pickleball court. Pickleball not less GB pickleball judged. The runner up Robert O'Neal, who makes his living, claiming to people that he killed Osama bin Laden, and then going on Fox and then Newsmax, and insulting people as a commentator, and tying everything that happens in the world from our stance against China to the use of masks during the pandemic to how he killed Osama bin Laden. Quote, thank God it wasn't Delta flying us when we killed bin Laden. Unquote, it is so drunk he fell asleep at a Texas hotel bar. A guard tried to escort O'Neal to a room. He was arrested after he allegedly punched the guard and twice called him the N word, asked for a statement by the New York Post O'Neal launched into a speech about how he fired the shots that killed Osama bin Laden. But the winner Stephanie Rool of MSNBC. Anybody remember when CNN fired Chris Cuomo a year ago because he was secretly advising his brother, the embattled governor of New York, and his boss was also secretly advising the governor. It's always his boss's girlfriend, and they were all soft peddling CNN's coverage of the governor's scandals. Remember that? MSNBC has a similar problem and the only reason it is not viewed as a bigger problem is when Stephanie Rool did this, she was a business reporter elsewhere at Bloomberg News. CNBC reports, and that's kind of uncomfortable, CNBC reporting about MSNBC. CNBC reports that something unfortunate came up in a shareholder lawsuit against Kevin Plank, the founder of Under Armour, charging him with artificially inflating the price of the stock and costing investors money. When Morgan Stanley had downgraded the company stock in 2016, Stephanie Rool asked the founder, Plank, to send her company private data that would contradict the report, and then she advised that they should send that data to other media outlets. And when the stock improved, Plank said he was saying thank you to Stephanie Rool by arranging for her to interview company spokesperson NBA star Steph Curry. Then she was suddenly taking trips on Plank's private jet, and then he established a private phone number so she could advise him on media relations in private while she was supposedly covering his company as a member of the media. Asked if she was flying as a friend or as a reporter, she answered, quote, I was flying on his plane as myself, Stephanie Rool, I'm not really in a category one or the other. Ethics here? MSNBC and Stephanie Rool rightly covering Clarence Thomas, improperly taking free jet trips from people whose cases he might adjudicate, and correctly pointing out the appearance of a conflict of interest. Meanwhile, Rool had taken her own undisclosed free jet trips from people she covered and might cover again and serving as their media advisor. Is it exactly the same thing? No, it is not. Is it that serious? No, it is not. Is it close enough to merit firing her? Yeah, you can't do that. Stephanie, I can be media and your media consultant simultaneously, Rool. Today's worst person in the world! If you feel like getting dinner on the table for everyone is basically impossible, we've got the perfect solve for you. Meet Weiko Hospitality. They deliver fully prepared, totally craveable dinners that are ready in only 10 minutes. No chopping, no cooking, just a little heat toss toss and you're all set set. Visit WeikoHospitality.com to order. That's W-E-C-O Hospitality.com and for a limited time, use promo code Crave for free delivery and damn good dinners. Just ahead, there's the old line about never going to see how sausages are made. Then there's the only thing that's worse than that. The day you realize that the place you work actually is where the sausages are made. The coverage of the death of Princess Diana 26 years ago this weekend, things I promise not to tell next. First time to feature another dog in need, you can help every dog has its day. Thomas is five months old, an ordinary white and cream and black mutt, and they had to amputate one leg in the back and two in the front are broken and the fourth one is mangled and he is lying there wagging his tail at the people taking care of him. Bite wounds, possible violence at the hands of humans, found on train tracks and he's wagging his tail at people who are taking care of him. Thomas is on antibiotics and getting laser treatments for the pain and he was not supposed to make it, he's going to make it. Our friends at Hounds in Pounds found him, they're caring for him and they are doing a fundraiser at cuddly.com and you can help by donating or by finding him on my feed and retweeting him. Look for Thomas at Cuddly. Thomas, thank you and I thank you. Finally to our number one story on the countdown and my favorite topic, me and things I promise not to tell. The date on the death certificate was Sunday, August 31st, 1997. But because of the time difference, the news was known here very late on the night of Saturday, August 30th, 1997. It was the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and please do not misunderstand me, I'm not equating anything that happened to me around that time with what happened to her or what happened to those who loved her or what happened to those who simply admired her from afar. But in retrospect, I can see that Saturday night as a demarcation point in the history of news in this country. Three nights earlier, I had watched them pack the last of my stuff into the van at my home in Sutherington, Connecticut, where I had lived for five and a half years while I did ESPN's sports center. Great show, much of it, great fun, a great partner, great house, four bedrooms, 3,000 square feet heated swimming pool, house vac system, $351,000. All that was great, not really a great life. I was on my way to a new life at MSNBC. Thursday was a photo shoot for Esquire. They dressed me up like Austin Powers. I didn't get it then, I don't get it now. Then an interview with TV Guide and then suddenly an invitation from my old friend and new boss Phil Griffin to come join him and his family for a long weekend in the Hamptons. I had never been there. It was not the kind of thing I did. It was Long Island. I was from Westchester, but they were willing to pay. And it was spectacular. Even though my accommodations consisted of a converted garage, the bed and breakfast part of the home of a woman who had had her own show on Channel 2 in New York, 43 years previously and whose walls were filled with momentos from it. I thought briefly and with a shutter, that's what my walls are going to look like in 2040 if I live that long. Well, it's not 2040 yet and I haven't lived that long, but I'm happy to tell you there are dozens of photos and art covering my walls and only one of them is a momentum of an old TV show I did. But the point was and is taken. Anyway, a nice meal with the Griffin's at their Hamptons full house rental on Friday. A warm day spent at a pristine beach on Saturday pronounced good with kids by Phil's wife. And then we went across the bay to the Hamptons home of Jeff Zucker, then the head of the today show and the de facto operational head of all of NBC news. We dined on his balcony overlooking the water. We watched the fireworks overlooking the water and we were just having a night cap on this vast lawn of his overlooking the water. My memory tells me the lawn was approximately the size of the field at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and there were huge lights hanging off the house which seemed nearly as strong as the lights at Dodger Stadium. And then suddenly everybody's phone rang. Summer ended in three seconds. There were still pages in those days. Those went off too. You could even hear phones ringing in the distance creating something akin to a strange buzzing concert. My God! Zucker shouted, Princess Dye is dead. Now he and Phil Griffin began to pace across that giant lawn. Another phone rang and Zucker now had one pinned to each ear. Standing some distance away with Phil Griffin's wife, I noticed how quickly Griffin and Zucker synced up. They were walking towards each other, crossing each other's paths, then walking side by side and then veering off in opposite directions as if there had been a choreographer somewhere. Phil's wife and I were equally disgusted, not so much at her husband and Zucker, but at the circumstances of Diana's death. 48 hours earlier, the interviewer from TV Guide had actually asked me what my first questions would be for my hypothetical guests, Nelson Mandela and Sean Penn. My abstract concepts of the news, my new career were about news I watched or listened to, like PBS or NPR or the all news radio stations in New York or Washington when the atmospheric conditions were right in Bristol, Connecticut. And my favorite news-related show, British Prime Minister's Question Time. This was not what I heard Phil Griffin and Jeff Zucker arranging in the wake of Diana's death. Throwing out large offers to self-announced royal experts and accident analysts and people who knew Dodie Fyed and even some of the photographers in the cars chasing Diana's into the tunnel when it crashed, offering them large sums of money to make themselves available exclusively to MSNBC for the duration and booking whole planes full of reservations to send everybody from the today show to the funeral. Now look, I was 37 years old. Then I already understood these were the necessary logistical moves of smart executives. Sad and terrible things happened and people still had to go on and cover them. But there was something exceptionally callous and cold about the choreographed dance I was watching. As I said to Phil's wife, the tabloid media has been chasing celebrities for years and tonight they finally got one. She nodded but punched me in the shoulder and corrected me. We finally got one. You are part of we now. Well that in turn made me think about quitting on the spot. My agent was on the west coast. It was not that late there and soon I joined Griffin and Zucker. Zucker was on his third different phone by then pacing on that lovely lawn while telling my agent that maybe we should take the ABC boss Bob Eiger up on his offer. He said if I ever wanted to go back to ESPN I should just call. What do you think I asked my agent too soon? The next week was all Diana leading up to the funeral overnight Friday anchored on NBC and MSNBC I think by Katie Kirk who actually told the audience that some random British woman was in fact the model Cindy Crawford. She wasn't Cindy Crawford. This passing forgotten trivial mistake seemed to me to be emblematic of what Diana's death had done in an instant to the business I was just getting into. Suddenly the last few years of television news had clarified themselves and a timeline had emerged in my mind. I had gone to work for CNN at the start of its second year 1981. Yes we were already in color. We used to have a weather report, a sportscast, a business update, and a science and medicine story every hour. But by 1995 CNN and everybody else had learned just find one story and pound it into the ground 24 seven if you can and dress it up so that the viewer does not feel dirty for having watched it. That first story in 1995 was the OJ Simpson trial and while it was nominally a genuinely important story about a huge public figure, people forget that a huge public figure sportscaster and actor murdering his wife, that's not what they covered at the OJ Simpson trial. They were covering every salacious detail. They were covering literally every blood stain. They were covering interracial marriage. They were pitting whites against blacks. They were sometimes I saw it happen making up bombshell stories and all the people now running MSNBC which I was joining in its second year were those who had covered themselves in glory or covered themselves in something at the OJ trial. It is not coincidental that one media organization was discussed by the judge Lance Edo for doing a fair job of covering the OJ Simpson trial. That organization was ESPN Sports Center. Anyway, television news has never been the same. There was some argument for 24 seven coverage of the Simpson trial because it was a daily thing. Diana was dead and for a month it was treated as if it had happened an hour earlier. Cable news by this point CNN, CNN headline, Fox and MSNBC now began to look for 24 seven stories or in their absence to create them. The death of the Colorado little girl Jean-Bene Ramsey, every missing white woman in America, even the Clinton Lewinsky story. I often did two live shows a night about the Clinton Lewinsky story even when there hadn't been any actual news in a week or 10 days. If something happened, if some tidbit was reported by the Washington Post when all the news sites updated for the only time all day at 11 p.m. Eastern, yes, that's how computers worked back then. We might stay on for two or three extra hours to discuss this one sentence in the revised Washington Post story again and again and again. We retrained TV audiences to fixate on one story at a time, especially if that story involved somebody famous. That in turn magnified the celebrity element of all of American life. It explains in part everything that has happened since Diana died from the Clinton story, to the lionization of the generals after 9-11 through the rise of Barack Obama and of course the election of Trump. I did not ultimately quit my new MSNBC show a month before it was to premiere. The next morning I took a bus back to New York and vowed to, as I put it in my diary, do a show that would expose tabloidism and be upright at whatever cost to a tone that I should be involved, however, distantly in a business that could in essence kill three people including the most beloved woman in the world. Nice thought didn't happen. We did the first show a month later. October 1st 1997, Phil Griffin was the producer. Half the time was consumed by a round table of four celebrity journalists and gossips. When I tried to draw them out on the media's responsibility to the people in these stories, a voice talked to me through my earpiece. It was Phil Griffin and he was shouting. Forget that. Ask them who killed John Van A Ramsey. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown has come to you from our studios high atop the sports capsule building in New York. Here are the credits. Most of the music range produced and performed by Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel, who are the countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboard is by John Phillips Chanel. Guitar is based on drums by Brian Ray, produced by TKO brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by no horns allowed. The sports music is the Obermann theme from the SPN 2 and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of the SPN Inc. Musical comments by Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was my friend John Deane and everything else was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this the 967th day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Convict him now while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is Tuesday. I don't take a lot of time off. This is like the 283rd edition in 13 months and still this Labor Day weekend it'll be bulletins as the news warrants. Till the next one whenever it is I'm Keith Obermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night and good luck.