Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. America is not divided over the prosecution of Donald Trump. For January sixth, a new Sober Responsible poll shows it is in favor of it by a wide margin by eight percentage points. America is not divided over whether he broke the law in Georgia. A new Sober Responsible poll shows it is convinced he broke the law in Georgia by a wide margin by twenty three percented points. America is not divided over whether the twenty twenty election was stolen. Seven in ten say it was not. And Trump is not getting greater support from his base because of his three and a half indictments. A new Sober Responsible poll shows he may in fact be losing a little of it. And the effort to paint over these obvious, statistically proven realities is the latest crime of both sidesism being committed by the American media. Both sidism is afraid of stating any truth that requires any assessment or evaluation or analysis, or risks accusations of liberal bias. Both sidesism is afraid of any choice that is not which is bigger a the elephant or b the mouse. Both sidesism is fearful and lazy and self interested, and it is dangerous, and it is in play. And even those organizations that actually produce the evidence that this nation is convinced Trump has broken the law in Georgia, in Washington, in America, and that Jack Smith and Fannie Willis are right to prosecute him, even those very organizations are whispering the results for fear of blowback, or worse, because blowback is just too much trouble for the executives. The Associated Press has a new pull out on the prosecutions of Trump, and it fulfills the organization's sacred obligation to both sides ism by positioning its results in the headlines in the links. As quote, Americans are divided along party lines over Trump's actions in election cases, they are not in Georgia. The question was phrased thusly, what do you think of Trump's alleged attempt to interfere in the twenty twenty Georgia vote? Count illegal, unethical, but not illegal, or nothing wrong? Fifty one percent of Americans say it is a legal Oh, only fifty one percent. A divided nation, but wait, the combined vote for unethical but not illegal, and nothing was wrong. The combined total in those two categories is twenty eight percent. The rest are undecided. That is not a split. That is not a divided nation. That's fifty one to twenty eight same question about January sixth illegal oh, only forty seven percent say it was illegal a minority. The combined unethical or nothing wrong total is thirty nine percent. Seven in ten Americans say the twenty twenty election was not stolen from Trump. That is also not an indication of a divided nation. Fifty three percent say the Justice Department was right to indict him. Why. That's barely more than half, though, once again, half of the results are left out to make this look like it is a debate. Fifty three percent say the federal indictments are justified, only thirty percent thirty percent say it is not. There are undecided people in the Associated Press poll and in every one of these stats. For the numbers just to actually be close, for this nation to actually be what the AP headline claims, but the AP poll refutes, all of the undecideds have to break in Trump's favor. All that is to come in the next weeks and months of continuing indictments and continuing revelations and now co conspirators flipping, and the actual testimony beginning. All of that that is to come would have to somehow make Trump look better. It will not. America has made up its mind on Trump guilty, venal deserving of prosecution. The only ones saying otherwise are lying, and they are Trump and his cult and they are the lazy, cowardly, both sizest media. And it's not even true that Trump is getting martyrdom brownie points from his own morals Dead crowd. A poll from Temple University used an unusual method of surveying whether the indictments really have been strengthening Trump's support within his party, as he and every one of his cultists keep claiming. Temple does not ask if you are now likelier to do thing A because event B happened. It asks you flatly if you are going to do thing A, and then it asks you what you would have done if event B had never happened. It is called the counterfactual format, and there is considerable evidence that it produces far less partisan answers or people giving the answer they think is expected of them. And what it shows is no gain for Trump because of the indictments among Republicans, in fact, a slight loss. We are measuring hair breadths, but the election will surely come down two hair breadths again, so this counts. In the Temple poll, just over sixty four percent of Republicans surveyed said that after the indictments they are still likely to vote for Trump in the primary, But just under sixty six percent of the same group of Republicans said they would have been more likely to vote for him if he had not been indicted. America has made up its mind. Even some Republicans are regaining theirs. You know what, two percent. The difference in the Temple poll two percent of just the registered Republicans amounts to in actual votes, eight hundred thousand. The indictments cost Trump the support of eight hundred thousand Republicans. Hell, even Ted Cruz said last night he's not endorsing Trump in the primary. He used as his excuse the fact that he's such a target in his Senate reelection race. He says he can't afford to alienate a signal Dessantus voter or a single Trump voter, Because, yeah, Ted, a bunch of disgruntled Texas Trump voters are going to vote against you. Uh huh, this is where we are. Mark Meadows gets his hearing to move his part of the case of the Trump nineteen into federal court. It will be on August twenty eighth, two mondays from now, but Trump's lawyers will be in Washington at the same hour because August twenty eighth is also the Judge Tanya Chutkin hearing, at which she is expected to set the date of the start of Trump's January sixth. That would be Tanya Chutkin, against whom death threats are beginning to pop up. In one a woman leaves a voicemail calling her a quote slave and Rice Street the Fulton County jail where Meadows will still have to go to show up for processing and fingerprinting, and a mug shot by Friday, the twenty fifth, before his hearing Atlanta, where the grand jurors who indicted him and Trump and seventeen others have been docked by fascists and they are now getting death threats. And again, meadows hearing is not next Monday, the twenty first, It's the following one, the twenty eighth, Next Monday is the Great Trump News Conference, at which he will reveal the Great Harrington Declaration, and only Donald Trump could possibly get indicted on thirteen separate counts of in essence trying to defraud the voters of Georgia by lying about the election, and follow that up by holding a news conference at which he will try to is gape by presenting a one hundred page report written in part by a crazy eyed publicist, consisting entirely of again trying to defraud the voters of Georgia by lying about the election. Frankly, one of his countless ex attorneys, Ty Cobb, now says there's a good chance that whatever document he produces ends up as evidence against him, because it's likely to be fiction and solely for the purpose of contaminating the jury pool. Eleven am Trump Bedminster Golf Course in New Jersey. See Trump try to get himself indicted on counts fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. If only Evana were there to stop him, Actually she is. Maybe he communicated with her by those unsent Twitter direct message drafts. This is the theory that will not go away now. Politico notes that buried deep in the unset field Court documents on Jack Smith getting access to Trump's Twitter account. Quote. One thing prosecutors appeared to pursue is who currently has the keys unquote. The court docs show that as of February, the list included Trump's representatives to the National Archives and Records Administration NARA. Oh hell, this is where I came in. You might recall that this entire dance of the dueling courtrooms began because Trump and his liaisons would not listen when NARA asked for all its stuff back from Mary a Lago when Trump withdrew his troops from Washington in January twenty twenty one. Those narrow liaisons were Mark Meadows not anymore and a clown car, a former White House and DOJ attorney Scott Gass, Michael Purpura, Stephen Engel, John Eisenberg, and at least two names were probably not on the list anymore either, Pat Philbin and Pat Patsy Beloney sip Baloney. In twenty twenty two, as he made the fateful decision not to give NARA its stuff back, Trump added two names. And this is where access to the Twitter account might actually turn out to be something of the spy novel genre. The two new names were the propagandist John Solomon and popeyed Factotem Cash Patel. I keep thinking, this Trump Twitter DM story is going to get only bigger and bigger, and if it doesn't get bigger right away, it will get bigger later because there is going to be a big leak of something we have no idea about, and then there's going to be a big hearing in which Trump lawyers try to get all of it excluded. So Trump Twitter dms, leave space on your calendar for that, Oh your calendar, Thank you, Nancy Faus. That reminds me it is never too early to shop for the holidays. And let me give you a heads up at a head start on the hottest gift for Christmas twenty twenty three. Yes, it's this beautiful official Donald Trump twenty twenty four court appearance calendar, featuring not just wonderful photography of Trump himself it's lifelike even if he isn't, but also photography of all the prosecutors and the courthouses, and his fellow defendants and the uned co conspirators. So your official Donald Trump twenty twenty four court appearance calendar does, in fact go all the way through December twenty twenty eight sixty months. What would you pay for this gorgeous full color calendar? And when I say full color, of course, I mean it's all that cheap roustolium gold, so beloved by the Maestro himself. Wait before you answer, Your official Donald Trump twenty twenty four court appearance calendar also comes complete with the dates of the twenty twenty four campaign, so you can follow along as Trump hopscotches the world from the planned start of the federal trial in Washington on Tuesday, January second to the Iowa caucuses on Monday, January fifteenth. And by the way, in the spirit of good fun, our Trump playmate for January will be Ron DeSantis, good naturedly holding up a ball and chain. Now look ahead, turn the pages over to March. Damn thing will hold still? What an exciting time March is the GOP caucuses in Idaho on Saturday, March second. Then there's an extra large calendar square from Monday, March fourth for the caucuses in North Dakota and the start of Trump's trial in Georgia that Fani willis just put in for thank goodness, the Supreme Being Trump as his own plane and can be in two places at once, but can he be in fifteen places the next day? Because after Monday March fourth, comes Tuesday, March fifth, Super Tuesday, and you'll need your official Trump twenty twenty four court appearance calendar to keep track of the Trump primaries in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Main Massa, tuss Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, u Ta, Vermont, at and virgin Ya. Oh, and don't forget six more primaries, including the Big Thriller in Florida on Tuesday, March nineteenth and Louisiana on Saturday, March twenty third, and then back home to fun City for Monday, March twenty fifth, and the first day of the Stormy Day Niels hush money trial in New York, New York. The town's so nice they indicted him twice then, of course, in honor of that case where Trump allegedly paid a woman to keep quiet about what their sex life is like, we have this amazing high definition photo of that woman, Millennia Trump. But wait, there's more. The calendar page for May is fun Fun Fun. Monday, May twentieth, the day judge Eileen Cannon has selected to start the stolen documents case in Florida, and then Tuesday May twenty, first Republican Primary Day in Oregon and Mitch McConnell's Kentucky. And needless to say, there is our pin up photo for May of that judge that Trump appointed who has absolutely no business being on the court, Brad Kavanaugh. Okay, you get the idea. Fannie Willis has asked the judge to start the trial of the Trump nineteen on March fourth. As she announced the indictments Monday night, there was considerable doubt she could get the thing started within her goal of six months. Hell, the co defendants probably won't be done flipping on Trump by March fourth. But for sheer crassness and borderline racism, you have to hand it to Politico, the amoral access factory, whose daily email playbook often leads the world in the clankiest tone. Deaf notes its headline about whether the Fannie Willis goal of March fourth is realistic was yesterday? Any guesses be very very low in your estimations of what they would be willing to do. Any guesses quote what you talking about? Willis unquote, Politico did slightly redeem itself from that by clarifying Trump's extra large conundrum. In Georgia, the governor cannot pardon any buddy in Georgia. Nope, wors Yet, nobody can pardon anybody until five years after that person has completed his or her sentence, and that pardon would have to come from the five members state Board of Pardons and Paroles. So even in the event of a lightning speed trial, Trump is not looking at a pardon before late twenty twenty nine, and he will need more than five more editions of the official Donald Trump Court appearance calendar before he gets that pardon. As Politico writes, one of the primary qualities the board looks for in pardon applicants is someone who has taken responsibility for their actions and has shown remorse for them unquote. Sorry Trump being sorry you got caught don't count. Okay, time for America's favorite new game show once again. Let's play trumple thank you again, Nancy Faust, and ooh, we may have a Trump pull winner. And remember these identities matter because they all might still be indicted, or they might already be cooperating. Just security has fingered Tom Fitten as Georgia unindicted co conspirator number one. He is the guy who discussed the draft of a speech claiming Trump was a victim of voter fraud and had really won in twenty twenty. Only the conversation with Trump was on Halloween, so four days before the election and before anybody knew who won, and before any votes could have been fraudulent. Reminiscent of that Roger Stone video that surfaced last night, but more meaningful than that video. Roger Stone dictating a fake elector scheme before the election is infuriating, and it's a good thing to show on television, but if Trump is not in the room, it's no more meaningful than Rudy Giuliani telling his mistress in twenty nineteen about the plan for a phony claim of election fraud, or me telling you that I thought Trump would try it four and a half years before he actually did. Ryan Goodman at just Security has Boris Epstein as number three, Bernie Carrick at number five, and Phil Waldron at six, and the Washington Post separately pursuing this agrees on those two Carrick and Waldron. Goodman has false electors at nine through nineteen. I'll need names, sir, I will need names. Goodman throws a wrench in at twenty, where the COGNISCENTI think it's Patrick Byrne, but he thinks it might just be Mike Flynn. After all the others are not household names. Though, we have to give a tip of the Trumpel Champeau to Goodman's possibilities for number twenty seven to election fraud conspiracy Mavens Michael Posposewski or Jovan Pulitzer Jovaan Pulleitzer, And you will be happy to know that Jovan Pulleitzer is also known by his middle name. He is. He is j. Hutton Pulleitzer to his friends, of whom he has none certainly not after all. This also of interest here. Not only has the state of Kansas backed off its raid of the Marian Record newspaper and given the paper all of its stuff back, but the judge who signed the warrant for the corrupt police chief to go in and trash the place has, it turns out, a record of past DUIs, one of which reportedly came while she was driving with a license that had been suspended because of her first dui. So it's all better. Now, Yeah, what did they do about the publisher who died after the police raided her home? That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Olberman. Time now for the daily roundup of the miscreants, morons and dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world. The bronze governor Ron DeSantis. It is encouraging to see that if you do bad things long enough, they will catch up with you, and if you do enough bad things long enough, they will consume you. The latest jaw dropper from the Kingdom of Fascist Florida. And I'm not saying this ranks with teaching kids that slavery had the silver lining of promoting good blacksmithing training. But it's bad. The Miami New Times reports it. Under a new rule adopted last month by the Florida Board of Indoctrination Education, parents will have to sign permission slips to enable teachers to call their kids by anything other than their legal first names. Now you can see where the transphobes and the other sikos in Florida are going with this. If a transitioning girl wants to be called Amy, and her legal name is Andrew. Teachers will have to call her Andrew unless the parents approve in writing. But as usual, to fulfill their little theocratic fantasies, everybody else suffers. This also means that if Thomas wants to be called Tommy, parents have to submit a form saying the teachers can call him Tommy. What the hell do they do if he also wants to be called Tommy some days but tom on others because he's a kid. This amendment is to strengthen the rights of parents and safeguard their child's educational record, said Board of Education spokesperson Gingerbread Tea Hag. Gingerbread tea Hag. That's an unusual name. To ensure the use of the child's legal name in school. The bronze serial Canadian victim doctor Jordan Peterson at his publisher's Penguin Books. The paperback edition of his latest whining about how bad White men have it in This k Kuel World, contains quotes from several reviewers, One of them, James Marriott of the Times of London, describes Peterson's book as quote a philosophy of the meaning of life, but Marriott wrote that Peterson's philosophy of the meaning of life was quote bonkers. They out the bonker's part. Marriott hated Peterson's book, so they simply edited out the part he hated in his review and put it on the jacket. Also about Penguin books, these books are not made out of penguins, and they are not produced by penguins. So we need to look into the name too, don't we. But the winner Laura Weyer the eighth Judicial District Magistrate judge who authorized the Gestapo style raid on the offices of the Marion County Record newspaper, which resulted in all of its electronics being seized, and its investigations into the drunk driving record of a local restaurateur and the allegations against the town police chief being thwarted, and the paper's ninety eight year old publisher being at home when they raided her home and then she had a seizure and died first. Another judge in Kansas ruled yesterday that the warrant that Judge Vyer approved was invalid, probably illegal, and unwarranted, and that judge ordered everything returned immediately to the Marion County Record, except of course, for the publisher since she's dead. Then the Wichita Eagle newspaper broke news that Judge Vyr has a little problem. She has her own history of drunk driving, and that there seems to have been a conspiracy to cover at least part of it up. While she was still going by the name Laura Allen and she was the lead prosecutor in Morris County, Kansas, she was arrested for DUI in January twenty twelve. She made a plea deal in which she was supposed to go into a diversion program, but then she stopped communicating with her lawyer and she refused to get an alcohol and drug evaluation, according to the paper, so her suspended license was suspended again. And that's when in August twenty twelve, she was driving with a suspended license and in another judge's car in a different county in Kansas, when she rammed that car into a school building next to the school football field at Council Grove School. The first county apparently never knew about the second DUI in the other county, so instead of becoming a jail prisoner, Laura Byer became a judge and single handedly overruled the first Amendment in this country and led to the death of a ninety eight year old woman. Happily, the Kansas State Board of Investigation is now taking over the whole thing as a criminal case, and hopefully Police Chief Gideon Cody winds up in prison and save a cell for Judge Laura Er that is yre as in liar, because she truly is two days worst person in the world. Now a little earlier than usual to the number one story on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and things I promised not to tell, and I wanted to tell again the story of Meshu. I've mentioned this previously. I never had a dog until twenty twelve. I was allergic to dogs as a kid, and I still am to the big fur dogs. I love them, but about half an hour in a closed space with a fur dog and I stopped breathing. Also, I was repeatedly warned by my allergists over the decades that so called hypoallergenic dogs weren't really a thing always and if you had a minor reaction to the hair of a poodle or a Westie or a Maltese, you were lucky. And if you didn't and the dog had to go back. You had heartbreak. I didn't, and I was blessed by the opposite of heartbreak. And I rapidly realized, no dogs. I have wasted the first fifty three years of my existence. Then I was born again in dogs. So I've tried to make up for the lack of dogs. My gal Stevie and I. Yesterday we walked to the Animal Medical Center here in New York for her rehab, where she goes sometimes in an underwater treadmill to work on her two floating kneecaps and her torn acl She couldn't walk in April. Now we walk the forty five minutes over to rehab. I'm not sure what she's rehabbing, but she loves it. Rose, her sister, is nine. She and I were out yesterday afternoon. She comes with me to my physical therapists, and she is my physical therapist's therapy. I had often looked into getting a third dog, and I had gotten heavily involved in dog rescue work, and then in twenty eighteen, those two streams crossed. I got a call from my friend Sue Levitt. She runs the rescue part of the American Maltese Association runs it for much of the Northeast, and she said, we have something special and challenging, and if you don't want to do it, I understand. He's a three month old Maltese pop. He has a terrible, terrible heart condition. They're not sure if he's going to make it past ten months. Could you take him? Could you take him over to his heart appointments. We'll help pay for it, but could you just give him a home and then we'll see what happens. I thought about it for about five seconds. I said yes, and soon Spaghetti was in my apartment trying to boss around Stevie and Rose, and I knew he needed to stay and he needed a new name. Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Getty, Teddy Ted my dad's name perfect. I was so prepared for the worst with Ted that it was July and I didn't buy him any stuff for winter. Then I took him to the Animal Medical Center here and the cardiologist, Dennis Trafney said, he's got a heavy valve in his heart. If we don't do anything, he's got five to seven years wait years, but with medication that's seven to ten years. But I can operate on him I can give him probably a normal lifespan, and I'll thread this filament. See I'm holding this up. I feed it in through his jugular vein and then it goes into his heart. Then we stop his heart electrically for like three seconds. We push this button on the end of the filament and at the other end of the filament, see the tiny balloon and it pushes the valve open. And you just keep doing it as long as he can stand it. It's like knocking the rust off a hinge by just continually opening the door again and again. And I said, I don't see any filament, and doctor Trapney said sorry, and he moved it in front of a black background, and there it was. And I said, great, let's try it. And then I said, why did they think he was not going to make it past ten months when you say that he would have had five to seven years anyway. And the doctor said, well, if you're a vet, you might see this condition once in your career. I operate on it about three times a month. It went kind of well. Ted just turned five. There is no other way to describe Ted. He is a five year old boy in a dog's body on walks Ted looks for and flirts with all the human girls, especially if they are sitting on blankets. He comes over, stretches out, rubs up against them in a good way. Ted also barks at all dogs bigger than him and then goes up and tries to say hi to them. He has his enemies, the printer, the plunger, the thunder, and most recently the thunders relative of the rain. And there are at least a dozen television commercials that Ted can't stand and knows by the first sound he hears during them. The operation went so well, in fact, that they were about an hour late giving him back to me in twenty eighteen, because, as the surgical residence said, he'd had to do all the tests a second time because he was worried he had screwed up the first set of tests because the results were too good. If I could have gotten luckier given the prognosis with which Ted arrived, I don't know how. So when my friend Sue from Maltese Rescue called now two years ago and said, I have a really, really tough case, and I don't think there's a chance that there is going to be an unexpectedly positive outcome like we had with Ted. I listened very carefully. This was another Maltese puppy, barely three months. The family he was born into loved him, but there were two young kids there, and frankly the mother thought they were too young to watch this little dog die. His name was Mishu, it was Polish for little bear, and he had tetrology of fellow. If that sounds vaguely familiar in a human, it takes surgery that can last twelve hours to correct. Jimmy Kimmel's son had it. You may remember it from there. In dogs, there have been some early experiments in surgery, very promising, but almost exclusively for bigger dogs. If you've ever seen the drawings of mc escher, where the same staircase looks like it's going up and going down at the same time, that is what a heart afflicted with tetrology of fallow looks like. There are arteries going over the heart and others that take the newly oxygenated blood out of the heart in the wrong direction. In August twenty twenty one, Mishu arrived here. It's easy to romanticize things like this, but there was something magical about him from the first day two years ago tomorrow. He was very, very sick. His tongue and gums were purple. He wasn't getting enough oxygen, was tiny. He was dwarfed by my other three dogs, and yet he would start trouble with them. He would silently charge Ted, or he'd go up and yap at Stevie, and soon he'd get all three of them playing and fighting. And that's all the strength he had. A minute, tops, and he would have to sit down and watch the chaos he had created. And he enjoyed doing that too, and he loved it, and he loved them. If two of the dogs were lying near each other, but not next to each other, not together, Mishu would go and lie exactly in the empty space between them, so his head rested on one dog and his back paws on the other. And soon they would respond to his presence by arranging themselves cuddling together, with a space for him in between. Once I was stretched out legs up on my couch and the four of them climbed in, two of them by my feet, two of them by my knees. I called Mishu's name, and he turned up and looked at me with a look of I have to say satisfaction, and then the four of them almost simultaneously fell asleep. There such a simple thing, and yet it easily remains one of the most extraordinary and wonderful moments of my life. And I prayed that night and not for the last time, that if there was no miracle meant for Mishu, that at least when he left us, it would be while he was in my arms. And by the way, Mishu was an athlete. He just was an athlete who had no stamina. In the pen, I would keep him in for his own safety. When I had to go out, Mishu would get up on his hind legs and stand or try to get out. And once he did get out, he trotted confidently around my place. And he loved to move and run and play, and then he'd have to stop. Mishu also enjoyed food as much as any dog or any human I have ever known. He gained nearly a pound a month while he was with me. If you approached him with a treat, he would literally punch the air with one of his front legs, like an athlete celebrating a success, and often with one front leg, and then the other like they were exultant fists, and the sheer joy of that never failed to make me smile and laugh. Put him on his back next to you, jab a finger at his paws, and you would be in a boxing match with a four pound puppy who loved to duke it out with you. You always knew when the fight was over, though michhe would stop throwing hands or pause and simply take his front paws and grab your finger and hold it. He once did this with me for a solid minute. I have never felt more as if I were truly communicating with any dog. He was an extraordinarily happy puppy, even then he felt bad physically, and those were harrowing times. Mishi would be sitting on my lap usually or walking on the floor, just chilling with the other dogs, when he would suddenly tense up, sometimes letting out a cry, and twice that cry was like that of a young human boy, so startling that the other dogs stopped and stared with what could genuinely be described as a look of alarm. Most times, the tensing was my cue to grab him and hold him tight. That inability to get oxygen to all the parts of his body would cause his body to contract and writhe and if he was on any surface other than the ground, it could literally propel him to the floor. The contraction threw him around. The first time he did that, my veterinarian was here and she said, you may have to take him to the emergency room. She said it was essentially what a dog does just before it faints, and then within seconds it would stop. His body would relax, and more or less by accident, I also discovered that after one of these seizures he seemed to be soothed if I carried him and walked him around, gently rocking him in my arms and whistling at him or talking to him as I walked, He and I solved a lot of the world's problems in those little walks out in the fresh air, on the balcony or just around the house. He would often doze off, but just as often would within minutes be ready to start playing again. And so I had in my little flock of lovely dogs, a sweet, wise, serene, playful puppy who liked to grasp my fingers with his paws and loved everything about life, and there was no escaping it. He was dying well, I could not not try to find out if there was something to be done to make his life longer, or ease or happier. What we tried to do when I resumed the story that began a year ago tomorrow the story of Mishu next resuming now the story of my Maltese puppy, Michu. His heart so bad that it pumped oxygenated blood the wrong way and limited him to brief bursts of energy, And how he never really knew how sick he was, or that he had been dealt such a bad, tragic hand, and how he just took the life he was given and loved and was loved. Of course, I knew what sadness this was, this special soul trapped in a body that would betray him at any time and fatally, so I had to at least try to see if something could keep him here longer, or at least make him feel better. We went to see the city's top cardiologist for dogs, and there wasn't anything to do. Although he thought keeping the cans of a minute's worth of oxygen that you sometimes see football players breathing from on the sidelines, he thought those might help a little when he would have these little pre feints. Soon I had dozens of those cans in a hall closet, and I was discussing building him an oxygen tent. But ultimately the problem wasn't his breathing. He was breathing fine, He got all the oxygen he would normally need. It was finding some way to get the oxygen pumped by his fatally flawed heart, to carry the oxygen in the blood around his body, and there was no way to do that. The median age of survival for dogs suffering from tetrology of fallow was just about two years. The cardiologist brought up me Shue's case on a board of international experts in canine cardiac care, and they read that unfortunately, there was no chance he could survive any operation, let alone experimental surgery for this devastating malformation. He could not survive the anesthesia, let alone six, eight, ten, twelve hours of surgery. Thus, the visits to the hospital turned out to be more about letting people there who I knew, meet him and hold him. And I can tell you there was an extraordinary soothing quality to holding him. I heard it from these people again and again, what a special little soul, and he loved to be held. I took him everywhere they would let me take him. He was a regular at my weekly physical therapy for my arthritic joints. My therapist adored him. She would just hold him and tell him stories. Took him to the apple store once that he did not like. He went for walks with me and the other dogs, but always in a bag draped over my shoulder. He did not have the stamina to walk for very long, but he enjoyed the outdoors. He enjoyed the park. He enjoyed the other dogs. He enjoyed the people who would come up and say hello to him. The inevitable finally came this time last year. Throughout the last week, the little pre feints increased, but Mishu's happiness did not decrease. Two days before the end, I approached him with a treat and my camera phone rolling, and sure enough he punched with the left, and he punched with the right, and he ate the treat, and he licked his purple lips. And when I surprised him with a second treat, he did it all again. Sometime a year ago, I was sound asleep. The dogs sleep with me. And in my dreams somebody or something was breathing in my ear. Well, of course it was Mishu. He had figured out how to wake me. He had to go to the bathroom. He knew enough to tell me that he knew enough to wake me, to get me to get him down, and he had to get some water. On the afternoon of the twelfth of November, a year ago, Saturday, I was holding Mishu in my lap as I sat and looked at the peak foliage in the park out the window. With no warning, he suddenly let out that near human cry. The other dog's frozey in place. I stood up and walked him around the balcony again. I had to sit him down in his pen for a second, and I was just picking him back up when he tensed up, just like all the other times. His body got rigid and twisted, and he died. He died as I picked him back up. The special little soul was gone. His body was getting cold with stunning rapidity, and something inside me said, no, not yet. I'm not ready. And I don't know why, but I don't think he's ready. And with no training and no earthly clue, what I was doing. I tried CPR on him. You have to try, You have to try. I had so little idea what I was doing that after breathing air in and out of his lifeless body, I moved my face away as if I was going to spit out water before I had to remind myself, no moron, that would be if he was drowning. I must have done five or six breaths. When I heard him exhale. I waited for it to stop or to be a false alarm. It wasn't damned if this little dog didn't somehow teach me how how to resuscitate him. He was dead, and now he was back. I didn't delude myself that this was going to last very long, and the circumstances could not have been worse. It was a rush hour on a Friday afternoon, and there was a bottleneck and a bridge approach between Michu and I and the hospital. And I had visions of being stuck in traffic for half an hour or longer, and almost nothing they could do for him if we somehow got there in time. But you have to try, you have to try. I loaded a bag full of those cans of oxygen. I grabbed him. I got in the car. The driver realized my distress and asked me what he could do to help, and I said, don't run any lights, but do not stop unless you have to. And when you do stop, help me unwrap some of these plastic wrapped oxygen cans. The oxygen cans are what are keeping him alive. Normal trip twenty minutes. We made it in eleven minutes. The streets parted for Mishu. At the animal medical center, somehow I ran up the stairs. I handed him off to the emergency room doctor, saying with an evenness, I could not believe I was mustering. My dog is dying. He has tetrology of fallow. She ran off with him to an examining room, and a second doctor came out, and I briefed her on everything, including Mishu's human like cry and his unexpected resuscitation. And I told her he had been seen by the chief cardiologist there, and she said, doctor Fox, Doctor Fox is here, and now Mishu was being worked on by the expert in the field. And despite all of this good fortune, I knew, I knew there was no hope. I had managed to text Sue from the Maltese rescue who adored him, and she came to the hospital, and three of the people from other departments in the hospital who had met Mishu came down to see him, not for my sake, for his. It was heart bringing and heartwarming at the same time. And when his doctor came to me and said, he is alive, but if you take him out of the hospital, you'd get about as far as the parking garage, and then you'd have to bring him back because what you heard when he cried out was a stroke. The oxygen deprivation was finally too much for him. He had a stroke, and he began to gently prepare me for the question about letting him go, and I stopped him and I said, I know we've all done everything we can, Mishu, especially ready when you are. So they brought him back to me, a little drip attached to his arm, and when the toggle on the drip was thrown, the medication would end his life. He was as warm and as soft as ever in my arms, and yet I knew he was no longer there. Sue held him for a while too, and then everybody left me alone with him. I said, what you would expect somebody to say in such a circumstance about love and happiness. And then I heard myself saying things about gratitude, gratitude to him for teaching me that in the face of death, the point is to know when to try and when to say enough, and that he had taught me how to confront death and crisis and urgency with evenness and practicality that I never knew I had in any quantity whatsoever, And to be able to say, I know you had a happy life, Michu, and it seems like that, and not the fact that you had a happy life but not a long one. The happy life is all that mattered to you. The cardiologist, doctor Fox and the tech came back into the room at this point, and I said I was ready, and they turned the toggle and left very quietly. And I said to Michu, I know if there is a place for you to go now, I am certain you will be the first one they let in. I just hope they will let me visit you there someday, and I hope you will remember us. I said, good night's sweet prints and flights of angels sing me to thy rest, and he was gone again. As I had prayed when he died. Mishu died in my arms, and he managed somehow to do it twice. There are some postscripts. Mishu's cardiologist very solemnly returned and respectfully said that of those international experts who had reviewed his case and were deeply saddened that they could not help him, only two out of a couple of dozen had actually seen and been able to study any small dog suffering from tetrology of fallow, and Mishu might have one final blessing for them and the rest of us if they could keep and study his poor little malformed heart without hesitation. I said yes, because in that instance I saw him positioning his head on Stevie's head, and his back paws on Rose's backpaws, so the three of them were cuddling together, and I knew, as I had always known, this was a dog who cared about and actually loved other dogs. So the hospital wound up recalibrating some of the cameras they had that they used to photograph the smallest teeth in the smallest dogs, so they could get every imaginable image of Mishu's tiny heart and maybe someday learn methods with which to fix this nightmare in another dog, and Mishu is in the veterinary textbooks. Now. As a second PostScript, Mishu's parents had another litter late last year after he died, and their human was kind enough to offer me either of the brothers. Mishu would never know. Each was eerily reminiscent of him, but healthy, completely healthy, so healthy that they were threats to my other three dogs. I had each of them live a week with us, and I would have been fine with each other. They liked me fine, but each of them first bit ted in the genitals, and then Stevie in the genitals, and rose in the genitals, and in one case me in the genitals. They were crazy, fun but crazy. And the second one was not only twice as large as other Maltese his age, he was able to vault out of his pen like an Olympic gymnast. So they went back and now have their own homes where they are the only dogs in their own homes. So the third PostScript, when Sue from Maltese Rescue reached out again this past June and said, I've got another special case, fifteen year old, perfect health but rotting teeth, and he has dementia. His human got sick and didn't really take care of him, and then she died, and I don't know what to do. Who's going to adopt a fifteen year old? I was able to raise my hand. I had an open roster spot. The fifteen year old's name is Minae. It's French for kitty. I can't imagine what confusion that's caused him all these years. His human had been a French teacher. He actually didn't have dementia, or at least not very much dementia. It was those teeth. His teeth was so bad, so rotten. Some of them came out by just pulling on them with your fingers. So we had them all taken out. And the next day he woke up like he was seven years old, looked around like how long have these other dogs been here? Every day since then, he's gotten a little younger. He's Benjamin Button and he's a living instruction. Look out for your dog's teeth. Even if you think you know to do that, do it more. The last PostScript, I got the tattoo a month after me Shu died. His pensive, half smiling little face looks up at me from near the crook of my elbow, where he used to sit when I would carry him around after one of those pre feints. It is a remarkable likeness to me. It means exactly what you would think. It means. It comforts me lightly. It means me Shoe is always with me and always will be with me. And now, as this unwanted but not tragic anniversary approaches, Meshu will also, I hope, always be with you. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. 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