Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Now the Trump has started down the path to purges of the military, to political prosecutions, and to show trials. Now that his fascists have actually leaked plans to court martial and even seek treason charges against army leadership and even retired generals, President Biden has to proactively pardon all of them. In point, in fact, President Biden must now assemble a list of thousands of people to pardon. People in the military, in the Democratic Party, in state and local governments, in elections, supervision in the media, in the protest movements, in the climate movement, people in any of the fields this psycho path Trump thinks wronged him and against which he is not only plotting retribution but is now actively planning it. Thousands of pardons, tens of thousands of pardons. They should be as easy and as available from the Biden administration as vaccinations, and they should be as free of stigma in exactly the same way the vaccinations are to those who understand the mortal danger that the worm eaten side show Bob F. Kennedy Junior represents to this country. It is a moral imperative that Joe Biden literally prioritize this list of pardons above everything else right now, everything else except perhaps his own consideration of the larger question that Trump's desire to purge anybody from the military who isn't personally loyal to him, and desire to purge anybody from government who isn't personally loyal to him, and Trump's intention to starve any city or county or state that does not become personally loyal to him. Joe Biden must ask himself if it is morally defensible to turn this country over to a madman not just talking about destroying this country and killing its people by astonishingly varietous means, but one who is already starting to make this happen. Joe Biden must ask if there are other actions to take rather than hand Trump the weapons with which to institute dictatorship and mass death. That is for the President and his conscience and his prayers and his God to decide as for the immediate crisis before us. Right now, NBC News is reporting quote the Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior, current and former US military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court martialed for their involvement. According to a US official and a person familiar with the plan, officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the twenty twenty one withdrawal and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason. They're taking it very seriously, the person with knowledge of the plan said. Matt Flynn, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counter Narcotics and Global Threats, is helping lead the effort. The sources said. It is being framed as a review of how the US first got into the war in Afghanistan and how the US ultimately withdrew. Quoting NBC News, the lawyer for this Flynn, this, Flynn denies any involvement in this or in the Trump transition team. The answer to how we got in, of course, is that George W. Bush correctly sent troops to Afghanistan after nine to eleven to destabilize Al Qaeda's base there, and then he saw the chance to pretend that the real culprit was Iraq, and the mission was thereafter doomed to incompleteness. The answer to how we withdrew from Afghanistan, of course, is that, in order to look like a peacemaker and to win a few votes somewhere, Trump made a nightmarishly bad deal with Taliban terrorists, having already invited them to go to Camp David, and arranged for five thousand of their worst scum to be released from captivity, which left Afghanistan undefended in essence, and left Joe Biden with no chance other than to get out as fast as he could. If there should be anybody on trial for Malfeasan's or misconduct or tree reason over the Afghanistan withdrawal, it is Trump, And that, of course is part of the point. In a dictatorship, there is not just one man rule, but anybody but that one man blame. All those who recognize the dictator's failures must be silenced, and some of them must publicly take the fall for him, no matter how many lies must be told to make that happen. But even that is not the largest point. The largest point is that these are the first notes of the symphony of destruction that Trump intends to create. A commission is to create a kind of permanent platform for show trials. Show trials of the military first because loyalty and conduct there are so easily assessed, then later show trials for civilians in any field. The perpetual rooting out of supposed loyalty and treason and not failure but sabotage has been part and parcel of every dictatorship since ancient Rome. It was the essence of the Soviet state. It was the backbone of Hitler's Reich. It was previewed for us in the endless hearings by Jamie Comer in the House of Representatives in the last two years. But still further, as NBC reports, to recall former military leaders in order to court martial them is a step beyond that is done to smear the entirety of the non Trump history of this country, to make distinctions not just between Republicans and Democrats, and Trumpets and never Trumpers, but between Trump and every other political and governmental figure in at least our recent history. If the NBC report is correct, and the Afghanistan Star Chamber would address not just the withdrawal but also the decision to go in all of a sudden, Trump's scapegoat hunters will be going after George W. Bush and the neo cons and Liz Cheney's father, and doing so for what might have been the one thing they actually got right. And even beyond that, there is in this the opening salvo in the attempt to do to the military what Trump has long since promised to do to the federal government and to local police around the country, to make them loyal to him and him alone. I'll quote again from the NBC story. It's not clear that Trump administration would pursue treason charges and instead could focus on lesser charges that highlight the officer's involvement. They want to set an example, said the person with knowledge of the plant. They would in fact be setting multiple kinds of examples, not just to military personnel who might hesitate someday to commit the illegal acts and murders Trump will, no doubt order through his minions, but also an example of how to frighten and purge and make political hay out of anybody in any public position and eventually in any private position in this country. This Afghanistan story is a blueprint for governmental terror in this country starting two months from Wednesday. This is why Biden must act immediately pardon anybody who will accept one blanket, blanket pardons for all acts. I want so many pardons that they have to open up the government printing office twenty four to seven. I want them so commonplace that each of my dogs gets one, and the onus is erased by the sheer number of pardon recipients. And yes, the president needs to pardon everybody in his own face family, and in Bill Clinton's family, and Barack Obama's family, and Kamala Harris's family, and god knows how many other loyal families. Incidentally, it is not a coincidence that this obscure, greasy scumbag heg Seth, whom Trump wants as Secretary of Defense, wrote a book blaming Pentagon leadership for the heartrending Afghanistan withdrawal. Heg Seth is, as I record, this still Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, but it certainly looks like he is the first of the team of trifles that Trump would throw under the bus. The Washington Post reports that Hegseth, quoting them, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a non disclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter was consensual. According to a statement from his lawyer's Saturday and other documents obtained by The Washington Post, heg Seth agreed to pay an undisco closed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter quote would result in his immediate termination from Fox, where he worked as a host, the statement said. The statement came after a detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team this week by a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, alleged he raped the then thirty year old Conservative Group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar. Unquote. This all was said to transpire in twenty seventeen. This Hegseth has been on the ropes since Trump leaked his name, not the least for this series of tattoos, generously described by Vice President elect Vance as quote a Christian motto tattooed on his arm less generously described as part of a series of tats including symbols used by the Christian crusaders of the Middle Ages and more recently and more dangerously by the Proud Boys and the Three percenters. The tattoos on heg Seth were so alarming he was flagged as an internal risk by a fellow service member and left the service as a result. Heg Seth and his fellow Cockroach Vance, whose entire understanding of the works and words of Jesus seems to be some garbled conclusion that you can get very popular if you seem to have been martyred, exchanged social media posts in which they dismissed the reporting of that little white supremacist convert or kill everybody in the Middle East issue as quote anti Christian bigotry in the media unquote. Hegseth then added exactly the kind of agenda setting statement you would expect from an incoming head of the Pentagon quote they can target me. I don't give a damn, but this type of targeting of Christians, Conservatives, patriots, and everyday Americans will stop on day one at Djt's DoD which you could dismiss as typical q Andon lunacy, except for the fact that the man who wrote that may actually yet wind up in control of the largest military force in the world, along with a remit from the man who appointed him to use that force. Against the citizens of the United States, like maybe when the public were to protest treason show trials and presumably treason show executions of generals who were making the best out of Trump's butchering of our exit from Afghanistan. Heg Seth may meet his bus, a bus named Crusade. Not because he's an unqualified lunatic who's inked up like a fanboy of the Spanish Inquisition, but because it is human nature to think, well, we didn't stop Gates, the least we got rid of heg Seth. As if there weren't another fifty heg seths lined up behind the original. I mean, you could even give the new one the same tattoos wouldn't take more than a few days. Quote Trump wants Gates confirmed one hundred percent. A source told CNN he is not going to back off. He's all in, reads the money. Quote from a CNN report which has Jamie Gangel's name and sources all over it, quoting again, he views Gates as the most important member of the cabinet. He considers the nomination of the former Florida congressman an urgent priority for the incoming GOP mind. Already in the Senate, it's the lady you or the tiger here. I think you notice the word used there was confirmed. Trump wants Gates confirmed one hundred percent. Trump has always been so slipshod, so inherently confused by human language that confirmed by the Senate and confirmed as a recess appointment could in fact mean the same thing to him, depending on the hour of the day and the day of the week. He may or may not still care that there's a difference between those things. But as I said last week, Gates is Trump's personal kind of favorite immoral cockroach, and yet he still means much more to him. Symbolically, he is Caligula's apocryphal horse appointment. Trump wants Gates to use the DOJ as a loaded gun against anybody Trump doesn't like. He doesn't care gives him the gun. But Trump's ego also demands that the Republican senators he views as his slaves stand up and applaud what he's doing. In short, Gates is and nobody has better embodied this. Gates is the living embodiment of Trump saying I will defecate, you will eat it. So there is your tiger right now. It is clear from all reporting a majority of Republican Senators would not vote to confirm Matt Gates if there's a vote, if there's a hearing. Trump's utter insecurity can only be assuaged by a hearing and a vote. Does he continue to demand it? If he demands it, he may kill his dictatorship before it even starts. If he sublimates his desire and is satisfied the course of least resistance for these more advanced insects in the Senate Republican Caucus think still cockroaches, but in suits and ties. Their course of least resistance is clear, letting the recess appointment happen, and then just pretending, as they have pretended for eight years, that Trump is not Hitler. I will echo what David French, of all people wrote in The New York Times. America has twice elected Trump, the outsider, the bull in the china shop, the chaos agent, but he has stood for office only once as the actual guy in charge, the buck stops here guy, and America rejected him and humiliated him. In the long term, this could be a good augur The United States may simply get fed up with Trump failing at everything, or it could hasten his full implementation of dictatorship, in which he never makes that mistake again. He never makes the mistake of letting America again have anything to say about who runs America, in which case I refer you back to my opening remark. Joe Biden must immediately pardon everybody he can think of, just in case this weekend was not worrisome enough those Trump will not court martial, nor have Gates prosecute, nor have hag Seth shoot. He will kill by accelerating the climate catastrophe. His new energy secretary designate is not just a fossil fuels prostitute. He's a fracking prostitute. Liberty energies Doug Wright. Liberty from breathing, I believe is their motto. Doug writes, tombstone someday will read there is no climate crisis and we're not in the midst of an energy transition either, which he said on tape. It will read that until that tombstone is submerged under a new ocean or burned to a cinder by a five hundred thousand acre wildfire. There are two more new nightmares to recount. Trump wants his personal attorney John Sower as Solicitor General. Sour is the one who argued before the Supreme Court for presidential immunity. You know, the lawyer who said that, yes, the president would be immune from criminal prosecution even if he had directed the military to assassinate a political rival just by coincidence. A reminder here to President Biden at the Supreme Court agreed with the Solicitor General designate about that bang bang. And this final reminder from Elon Musk, one of Twitter's Nazi tech bros, wrote, Trump received a clear mandate. He's going to win by one and a half percent. Trump received a clear mandate from the people to assemble an extinction level event administration with respect to spending, bureaucracy, and inefficiency in the federal government, which Musk retweeted to his decreasingly populated ex echo chamber, and Musk added one word quote true extinction level event administration. This makes me remind you of two of my earlier assertions here today, One that it is now a matter for Joe Biden and his maker to decide if turning the government over to people, now boasting that they are beginning the process of destroying that government, and destroying all of this nation's freedoms, and him Biden and eventually you and me, whether or not that really is the lesser of any number of evils, That's one reminder. The other one is a reminder of this Keteman is a hell of a drug. Also of interest, here in an all new edition of Countdown. I've been waiting for the right moment. I don't know if it's now, but if it isn't, it'll be soon. So let's go how to proactively defend this country, this democracy, and yourself. As Trump in night falls, as the big fat guy blots out the sun, Have you got half an hour? Because I have a half an hour's worth of instructions. That's next. This is Countdown. Nearly eight years ago, I was asked to give the keynote speech to the first fundraiser for a new group called Democracy Matters, created by the people who did Media Matters and other organizations that ended in Matters, which had vowed to throw up every barricade and every speed bump and every sliver of resistance possible to the Trump craypocracy that would take power the next day. I was preceded by the former governor of a Midwestern state who actually thought that Trump had won because we had all neglected the auto workers. This governor really bought into the this is about economic anxiety and economic anxiety alone. Also speaking before me a local Florida mayor who somehow had concluded that the lesson of the election of Trump was we needed more non politicians running for office and doing retail politics, knocking on doors the way he had got an elected mayor of a city that had ten thousand people in it, and I thought, my god, they have had no clue as to what happened, and they, more importantly have no clue as to what is going to happen. The man who asked me to give this speech was David Brock, and he said, give me one of your resistance videos, only in person. I want Fire and Brimstone. And I said, well, happily I happened to be the East Coast distributor of that. I read the speech again a couple of months ago, and I find so little of it wouldn't fit exactly today except for the dates that I think, in offering it to you again, the number of words I've had to alter in this rereading is less than five. I haven't even changed the dates. I have cut out the opening reference to crickets, but it's true. This was given outside in the garden of a Fort Lauderdale hotel at night, and when you are at the podium outside in Florida at night in January and you pause, you can literally hear crickets. As I gave this speech, there was almost no reaction. I later found out there was no reaction because everybody there was trying to convince themselves that it was about retail politics or ignoring the auto workers, and this was the first person they had heard who actually said to them, no, the building is on fire. It is not a false alarm. So there were crickets throughout this, but not after it. In any event, I stand by every word of this speech. Only now I would suggest that what I will reread to you is nothing more than the starting point the keynote speech to Democracy Matters, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, January nineteenth, twenty seventeen. It's an honor to be here. It's an honor to see my old friends and to meet many new ones. And now that my affable remarks are over, let me get down to the raw meat. Let me begin with the worst case scenario, or one of them. In any event, imagine it is not now January nineteenth, twenty seventeen, but instead it's January nineteenth, twenty eighteen. You and I are here in these same circumstances, right here, and I repeat to you then what I am going to say to you now, and as I finish, or earlier, or even as I begin, I am arrested, or I am detained, or I am put on a watch list somewhere, or I am audited, or I am denounced by someone somewhere, or I am who knows what happens to me one year, And that is just an estimate. Your punishment may vary. It could be two years from now, It could be two months from now, It could be tomorrow afternoon after the inauguration. And of course, if and when it happens, it will not be me alone for the act of listening to me. You could also be arrested or detained or who knows what I see some concern on some faces political science fiction hyperbole a paranoid, ustopian view of January nineteenth, twenty eighteen, A work of fiction. If one year ago tonight we had been here on January nineteen, twenty sixteen, And I had told you that in one year's time, a deranged, infantile, imbecilic, paranoid, sexist, racist, militaristic, fascist, perverted, vulgar, stupid, paper thin skinned man baby would not merely be nominated for president by a major political party in this country, but would swamp all his rivals, including the brother and son of one former president. And if I then told you that after unleashing all that is worst in America, he would be able to conjure the perfect electoral storm inside the electoral college, storm to defeat in the election the wife of another president, a woman who would get two million, nine hundred thousand more popular votes than he did. And I told you further that in one year's time, all we would be left asking here was not whether or not the Russians had tampered with our sacred election, but how much they had tampered with it. Would you have called that political science fiction? Because I would have. And I like to think I'm smarter than I have turned out to have been on this, So it is important. It's not happy, but it's important to remember that we need to not assume the nightmare ends in some way. When Donald John Trump puts his hand on the Bible tomorrow and John Robert says, do you solemnly swear that you will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, And, presuming the Bible does not leap from his hand or spontaneously combust, Trump replies to this call of our history and our democracy by answering, whatever, this is not the last scene of the Manchurian candidate, nor the last scene of seven days in May, nor the last scene of it can't happen here. There are countless possible nightmare scenarios ahead of all of us. We have seen some of them before, the last time we let the antiquated math of the Founders elect a Republican president in defiance of the will of the people. We also have seen a terrorist act and flames and collapses and ashes and pyres, and the immediate exploitation of that act by Republicans who demanded that what we should do was what they called patriotic bipartisanship, which was in fact monopartisanship, in which they were to make all the decisions, and our role was to acquiesce to them, or to be branded disloyal. We know what they will do if that opportunity presents itself again. And we know from a year of his lies and calumnies and gas lighting and or well grade perversions of light into dark and fiction into fact, that they are all now practiced and prepared and ready to create an opportunity if none presents itself, a phony threat that requires a curtailment of liberties, some plot he and he alone could stop. And we must be prepared to call such a stunt exactly what it is, and to be patriots and to wrap ourselves in the flag that we love and shout from the hills. Why what has happened to this country two months from now, six months from now, two years from now. Why that has happened was because there is a Donald John Trump. And we know that this time they have tilted the playing field against us in advance in these areas. They have spent eight years delegitimizing a president so that we might look foolish delegitimizing an actual, illegitimate president. They have spent the length of a campaign refusing to promise to recognize a defeat on the premise that it could only have been obtained by chicanery and dishonesty, so that we might look foolish, refusing to honor a defeat that was actually obtained by actual chicanery and dishonesty. They have month after month insisting the election, the media, the opinion polls, now, the polls about the transition, that these are rigged and fixed, so that we might look foolish, insisting that an election, the media, the opinion polls are actually rigged and fixed. And we know that now we will and must play by rules that sicken us, against which our souls cry out, But we must our moral force, our moral high ground, our patriotic self defense is simple. We did not seek any of these rules. We did not seek this battle. We did not seek this treachery. The rules and the battle and the treachery are Trump's. We will fight him on his terms, and we will defeat him, and we will restore democracy, and we will defeat Trump's Russian masters. Some of us have been warning since the beginning of the presidential campaign that Trump's connection and the connection of those around him to a dictator who has had the foresight to replace expensive and very complicated human war with the far more efficient cyber war invasioned by remote control. We have noted that Trump's connection was not mere admiration nor the perverted envy of a sick American monster gazing at a sick Russian monster. And we were right. The Russians did this. All we need to learn, and we will learn it, is how much they did, how many acts of war they directed against this country, how much they had on Trump, how much they expecked him to deliver. How many of the mainstream Republicans will remain loyal not to the Constitution of the United States, but to Vladimir God damned Putin. I wish to quote three men, and only three men tonight, Sidney A. Chayefsky, John Lewis, and first of these three Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill speaking after what was in his time in his country, in his context, his Trump election. We know it in history as Munich and from the wilderness of his parliament, with a coalition government cheering itself deafeningly for having averted war, with the formal leadership of this nation shunning him and marginalizing him and giggling at him, say nothing of his nation shunning him and marginalizing him and giggling at him. When everybody roared how well they had done, Churchill began in all to whisper. The people should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road. They should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history. And here I will briefly update Churchill's words. If I could make that offense, when the whole equilibrium of the free world has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the American democracy, thou Art weighed in the balance and found wanting. And don't suppose Churchill said that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first fore taste of a bitter cup, which we will be proffered to us year by year, unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time, Churchill, Tonight, in our country, which we all love in words and in ways that we cannot express, tonight is the end of the olden time. In the comparison to what Churchill said in nineteen thirty eight, Tonight is the night before disaster. Tonight is the night that we will look back at with some longing and some nostalgia. Tonight is the night to which the whole of our beings, and all of our priorities, and all of our efforts must now be focused on getting our country back to democracy as we have known it. With the rules by which we have played ends at noon. The fight. Our fight begins one second later, and it begins, as you will hear at this conference this weekend, on a series of fronts. The fight can begin in the media. You everybody here can confront anybody, reporter, anchor, spokesman, shill, anybody who tries to publicly characterize all this as just some sort of political swing, as if it was not the seizure of power by the worst possible person to be found to serve as president, as if that person had not appointed the worst possible candidate to run each agency, As if Betsy de Vos was just some sort of an alternative to traditional education. Once she really is an alternative to traditional education, in the same way stupidity is an alternative to traditional education. This weekend we will will show you ways to make this clear to the media, and it will introduce you to people whose job it will be to shine a constant daily light on every broken promise, every shady nominee, every awful policy, and everything you can do to help directly. The fight can also begin in the courts. Trump will come as close to privatizing the presidency as anybody in our history before sunset tomorrow, and whether he believes it or not, much of what he will try to do is actually illegal, and there are still laws. And this weekend will show you ways to pursue him and to have at the head of this fight a cliche Justice with her shining sword. Or you can look at all this more practically. Trump is coming for your money. You might as well spend some of it to prevent him from taking all of your money. And this fight certainly begins with a state of mind. More than nine years ago, I ran into John Kerry in line to pick up World Series tickets at Fenway Park in Boston, and as we came past each other in the line, he congratulated me and he said thanks to me, and I said, you're welcome for what By the way, he said, it was you who decided to run headfirst into the brick wall of the Bush administration. You said, this terror color code system was uncomfortably in sync with Bush's political needs. And then you said, I think they may be doing this deliberately, and just enough of that wall fell down and the rest of us could storm through and start talking about it. And that's what turned around the two thousand and six midterms. And I said, ah, I doubt it, but okay, I'll defer to you on it, Senator. So never think, no matter what has happened in the last few months, that you individually don't matter, or that an opportunity for you to prevail over this will not arise, or that your state of mind does not matter, or that even an act of symbolism by you does not matter. And to that point, John Lewis, I will contend that something he did on January thirteenth, twenty seventeen was just as important, or nearly so, and certainly just as dangerous and will in the end prove just as saving and redemptive as was his agony on the Edmund Pettis Bridge. As you know, Congressman Lewis was asked if he planned to try to forge a relationship with Trump, and he said, I believe in forgiveness. I believe in trying to work with people. It's going to be hard, it's going to be very difficult. I don't see the president elect as a legitimate president. I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected, and they helped roy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. I don't plan to attend the inauguration. You cannot be at home with something that you feel is wrong. The questioner was stunned. That's going to send a big message, said my ex friend Chuck Todd, a message to a lot of people in this country that you don't believe he's a legitimate president. And John Lewis, as always, would not back down, would not equivocate, would not protect himself. I think it was a conspiracy on the part of the Russians and others to help him get elected. That's not right, that's not fair, that's not the open democratic process. And John Lewis in thirty seconds, moved legitimacy center stage. In the week since, he said that more than sixty elected Democrats followed him. It should have been all of them. John Lewis leads us yet again, And there is the organizing principle of resistance. It is simple, as hard as it may be to believe and to put into proper historical contexts. And just because none of us have seen it before does not mean it cannot be true. It is simple. This is not a legitimate president. This was a conspiracy involving, to great or small degree, another country. This is not the open democratic process. And John Lewis said it perfectly. You cannot be at home with something that you feel is wrong. Every day we bring up Russia. Every day we shout Russia. Every day we scream Russia. Never do we speak this man's name without invoking what Churchill called the defeat without a war. Never do we criticize or discuss or analyze his actions or those of his White House filled with the crew of a pirate ship, without reminding everyone that the Russians put him there, and that the Republicans who enable him to stay there are passively collaborating with a foreign enemy of the United States of America. At the other end of the extreme in terms of simplicity versus complexity, never ever do we refer to Donald Trump as president he is Trump. Certainly that is sufficient and accurate, and it is also easier for when it is finally time for us to erase his name from American history. For now, it is our task to erase what is left of his legitimacy. I don't see the president elect as a legitimate president. John Lewis said, you cannot be at home with something you feel is wrong. Wise words stand the test of time and the test of struggle, And these words from John Lewis R. Wise, this weekend will be devoted to many means, practical and philosophical with which we can fight this nightmare on the terms the Republicans and their coalition partners, the American fascists and the neo Nazis have chosen, and to consider the first of the Republican hammers, which which we can grab from their hands, and which we can then use to chase them to hell. This weekend will be devoted to many means, practical and philosophical, with which we can resist Trump, reproach Trump, and ultimately repeal and replace Trump. Already we see the outlines of this. The boycott against the Bright part advertisers was a spectacular success. It can be easily repeated, and it's fun for the entire family. There are other media inroads to make. As I mentioned, my GQ series crossed one hundred million views a network. I don't know if this is a pipe dream of mine that is largely liberal in its orientation. That I could speak to you from every night would be a nice thing to have, But I don't know if we could ever see that. But why does it sound so vaguely familiar? But practically again, with or without networks, we now know that we are under no obligation to be nice or cooperative or vs or bipartisan. That we can fight just as dirty and just as viciously, and we will beat them at their own game, because, as I have observed many times in my commentaries, democracy has survived not so much through the efforts of those who would protect it as it has survived because of the stupidity of those who would destroy it. And this time side which would destroy it includes Rudy Giuliani. We know the twenty eighteen midterms must be fought on a wedge issue. You Congressman Roora Bacher, You Congressman Chafits, You Congressman Ryan, do you believe in democracy, or do you support Russia and General Lisimo Francisco Trump. You can tone that down as the circumstances warrant district by district as you please. We also know those midterms are of an importance that cannot be overstated, because while the Republicans may realize soon or late, maybe by this time tomorrow, that they themselves might have to impeach Trump or use, more likely the twenty fifth Amendment on him because he's crazy, we must take no chances. We must have a democratic Congress to impeach him two years from tonight. And we know that in the interim we must adopt the fighting style of Muhammad Ali. Yes they will hit us, Yes it will hurt. Yes it has already begun to hurt. But each time they come in to land a blow, we hit them back. As Richard Pryor phrased it, voicing Ali's inner dialogue during a fight, Boom, there you go. You take that with you, And we know that, yes, that means that Trump, the man baby, the stay puffed marshmallow man whose psychosis can be inflamed by trolling him on Twitter, must hear the words and phrases weak soft lost the popular vote twice no mandate, Russia putin assange, disloyal, treachery video tape. He must hear these words and phrases every time he turns around, and we know that, yes, that means we shall actually have to learn from what we watched him and them due to Barack Obama. So never again should Trump or this Russian operative guy of his, Michael Flynn, or the native of the country of Exxon, mister Tillerson, or Kelly Ann Khan Job or any of them. Never again will they get to speak in public without somebody rising and yelling, not necessarily rudely to interrupt them, although you can do that if you want, but somebody rising somewhere when they say these things and responding with every fiber in their being before, during, or after they speak, and responding by shouting, you lie. And yes, we know that nothing has ever changed for the good in the history of man without men and women rising up and saying, whether they whisper it or yell it, but by starting by saying this is wrong. However, behind all this, behind every strategy, behind every plan made this weekend, behind everything we can do and everything we must do to restore our bloodied democracy. There must be one emotion with which our side of the political pendulum is seldom associated. This emotion must now, in some ways become our animating principle, and about that animating principle, and penultimately, in my remarks, having already quoted Churchill and Lewis, I want to now quote again, with revisions formissible, I hope Sidney Chaiefsky. Who the hell is Sidney Chaiefsky. You may know him by his nickname Patty, or you may know the name of a character he wrote for the movie Network A mister Beeal, I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a coupe detas. Everybody's out of home or scared of losing their freedom. Foreign governments by influence at the White House. Businesses are terrified of a Twitter account. Shopkeepers keep a clan hood under the counter. White supremacists are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know Trump is unfit to pass a sanity test, and his enablers are unfit to lead. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen attacks on Obamacare and sixty three racist bills, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad, they're crazy. It's like everything everywhere has gone crazy. So we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller. And always say is please at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my steady income and my sanctuary cities and my warm Obama memories, and I won't say anything, Just leave us alone. Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I want you to protest. I want you to write. I want you to call a Republican congressman, because we all know exactly what you should say to him. I know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the corporate graft in the street. And I know that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say I'm an American citizen, goddamn it, my democracy has value. So the rest of it, the part about going to the window opening, it's sticking your head out and yelling the rest of it, you know, but to keep you motivated, and to keep you mad, and to keep you unwilling to take it anymore. As Howard Beale said, let me close by noting one overarching fact that has occasionally gotten lost since November eighth, twenty sixteen, And that is the essence of everything, to my mind, Even with this nightmare that comes at sunrise, even with the temporary end of much of our democratic experience in this country, even with a gold dollar sign spray painted on every American flag and spit on the grave of every American patriot, even with the confluence of Komi and the Russians and the lies and the greatest grifter in the history of this country, Even with the worst possible outcome that all of that could produce, even with the greatest possible grief, no matter what we have to face, no matter what we have to do, no matter how long the trip back is from tomorrow, remember and take strength from and remind all those who forgets, and remind all those who deny, and remind all those who lie. Remember one thing, we are the majority. January nineteenth, twenty seventeen. After that, there was silence seemed like it went on for quite a while. Apparently not. I've heard a recording of this speech. It was only two or three seconds. And then there was an anguished roar, and then I must immodestly note there was cheers and applause. Wasn't a big crowd. Standing ovation is a generous term, but whatever it was, it helped. We fought and fought, and we won the midterms, and we won in twenty twenty, and we minimalized the damage in twenty twenty two, and somewhere along the line we assumed he would go away. So now today anyway, we are exhausted. We have been defeated, although every day that defeat gets a little smaller, doesn't it, statistically? And from somewhere we must summon the energy of twenty eighteen and twenty twenty and twenty twenty two. And when we defeat them this time, we must not make a mistake. We must destroy them because I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. So I haven't done one of these since the election because there hasn't been a lot to laugh about, so there's probably a need to laugh about something. And thus we returned to the old familiar topic things I promised not to tell. And I was speaking a couple of days ago about the coverage of the two thousand and eight presidential election. You remember two thousand and eight, ancient history, back when there was an American democracy, back when there was hopey, changey things, as opposed to I hope you change into something other than the president of the United States. I was talking about two thousand and eight and was asked a series of questions about our coverage at MSNBC, and the person asking me questions had yet to mention the most significant roadblock to getting things done, to getting that broadcast and the other broadcasts that we did politically at MSNBC all those years ago off the ground and then again safely on the ground when it was all done. The assets we had were extraordinary. Through most of the primary campaign that year, and through all of two thousand and six in the midterms, we'd had Tim Russert, who would come on and after the network coverage was completely over, would just sit there with us for another hour on the air. What a pleasure that was. And then we'd go out in the hallway and talk about baseball. The good part of it, plus dozens of people and that then knew and sincere Rachel Matdow, other people who really knew what they were talking about and were trying to make a point and make an inroad in what was then all conservative corporate media, even at NBC. But the person had not asked me one question about the major impediment, and the major impediment was my co anchor for almost all of this was Chris Efing Matthews. Over the years, I have made allusions to Chris Matthews and just how rare it was when he was actually in the same plane of existence as the rest of us in the universe. And I know Chris never heard me say any of these things, because Chris never listened. If Chris listened, Chris would probably still be on the air every night with a nightly show on MSNBC. There's a Dorian Gray picture of him somewhere because he hasn't changed in appearance since the late nineteen nineties, even though he's now well you know how old he is. He's two hundred and six. The story I want to tell about Matthews, though, that I think symbolizes and summarizes the entirety of my experience with him, which began in two thousand and three. I was on the set with him when he discussed the fact that this was George Bush's day and mission accomplished was not an exaggeration. And look at how well he fits in that flight man's uniform, and he was talking about how he looked good in the pants. That was the beginning of it. And I said, don't you think there's something about bringing up the whole flying experience and the Texas Air National Guard and that whole question. You think that's a bad idea or declaring mission accomplished while American servicemen's lives are still at risk in Iraq and will be no. No, this is his day, This is his day. Chris can always point to being right about any issue that ever came a cross his desk, because he took every possible point of view on every possible issue. He was anti Bush, pro Bush, anti Trump, pro Trump. He was everything at all times. And the way you do that is the way Trump does it. You just don't remember what you said last time, You don't think it's relevant, you don't think that anybody else is going to remember it. There's a lot of similarity. There's a lot of overlap in the ven diagrams of Chris Matthews and Donald Trump. But I'm diverging. I promised you the Chris Matthews story I could have before I sat down in front of the microphone gone and looked this up to get the exact date. I'm sure it was two thousand and six or two thousand and seven, doesn't matter much. It was cold, it was the winter. It was deep in the winter, probably January or February. And I had traveled to Washington on short notice because they wanted me to co anchor with Matthews. The the memorial coverage of the funerals, two of them a former president Gerald R. Ford. Gerald Ford ultimately is down there with what Harrison and a couple of other really short term presidents like Chester Allen Arthur who just didn't make a huge impact except for in his case one event the pardoning of Nixon. Really didn't do much as president of the United States and yet president of the United States state funeral. Plus they were also going to give him a second funeral the next day in Michigan, back in his home state Grand Rapids, if I remember correctly. So we were there for two days, me and Matthews all day doing the state funeral one day, and then the next day the funeral in Michigan. The state funeral was just a typical day with Chris Matthews. I would say something and he would then repeat it as if he had heard it in his own head rather than coming out of my mouth. Chris heard things that were said, he just never heard who had said them. So he tended to repeat a lot of the things I had just mentioned, and he would jump in on interviews that he was not supposed to be a part of, and all the rest of the usual nonsense. He would read things on the teleprompter that said Keith. He would read everything except the word Keith, the usual stuff. So that was a good day. The next day, when we moved to Michigan, that was not quite as good a day. The Michigan part of the two days of the burial, Gerald Ford was, well, I'll make the joke now that I made off set then and off air then, which was took two days to bury him. What he wouldn't stop moving. The second day was conducted out of a Protestant church in Grand Rapids. If I remember correctly, that had an overhead window. And I forget the technical terms. Although my dad was an architect, I don't think he did a lot of churches. But there was an overhead length of the church glass ceiling, and it provided extraordinarily bright and mood altering light. And on that day, in the middle of winter, at the middle of the day, the light came in at such an angle that it really did look kind of otherworldly, if not heavenly. And so as all the leading Michigan politicos and many of the national politicos who had traveled to Michigan to attend both halves of the doubleheader of the burial of Gerald Ford, as they filed in, and to his credit, Chris Matthews knew every one of them by sight, even if they were on the monitor in front of us half an inch tall. He knew that that was the dog catcher from Grand Rapids, Michigan from nineteen thirty eight who convinced football star Gerald Ford to go into politics and not football. He knew every one of them. He knew the former mayor, He knew the Attorney General of Michigan seventeen attorneys General Wigo. And that was great. That was why when they once gave me the opportunity in two thousand and eight, I think it was to go solo and leave Matthews out. I said, no, See, he's too valuable for stuff like that. You couldn't possibly get a researcher to give me that information. It would not be genuine and it would not be timely. Chris Matthews knows off the top of his head who that is. He has no idea why he's important. He has no idea whether he has served democracy or undermined it. But he knows who the hell that guy is. Why that's Milton j. Erseg the twenty third still Solicitor General of Michigan one hundred and six. So, now, when the former governor, then the governor of Michigan came into this church at high noon with light coming in above her, the great former governor of Michigan came in, he knew exactly obviously who she was. We all knew who she was. She was Jennifer Granholm. Jennifer Granholm, whose public career began as the woman contestant on an episode of the Dating Game. Jennifer Granholm was then on the Dating Game in the seventies. Was in two thousand and six seven at the funerals of Gerald R. Ford. Is today a most attractive woman, fetching, handsome, beautiful, whichever word you would like to use that is both complimentary and yet not sexist. Well, on that day she appeared in a very formal kind of mourning hat and a black dress, and the light shining from above her was perfect, and she hit a perfect hair day. All the things that could combine to render one essential element to this story. He wasn't wrong. Matthews was reeling off the names of these other people. And there's the front row in which the former deputy assistant dogcatcher of Kalamazoos. And then he saw Jennifer Granholm walk in, and he said, and now we see coming down the aisle the former governor, the governor of a He started to pant on the air. It's Governor Jennifer Granholme and she's perfectly attired. This went instantaneously from the usual Chris Matthews high speed patter to something akin to Robert F. Kennedy Junior on FaceTime. There's no other way to describe it. If you were just listening to Chris Matthews and everybody but me was just listening to him. I was seated next to him in a studio at NBC headquarters in Washington. I could see the look on his face, the look of astonishment, him putting his head down next to the monitor so he could see her better. And as again I noted, she was extremely fetching that day. In all of her great days of fetch she was very fetched that day. This is absolutely true. On the other hand, we are covering the burial of the former President of the United States, Gerald R. Ford, and Chris Matthews is panting about the pulkratude of the governor of Michigan and stop, look at the shape of the dress and how the light comes in through the whatever the word was for it, of the church. And she's this event is he began to lose the ability to form sentences. And I don't mean in the normal way that he would lose the ability to form sentences. I mean he would get to that. They were clearly telling him to stop doing this because it was not just sexist and not just inappropriate. But we were covering the burial of Gerald R. Ford, I mean in the front row next to as we continued the shot of Governor Granholm on a pool camera. I must admit that nobody at NBC said, yeah, I got me more of that hot governor. As the pool shot gave us this of Governor Granholm, there was a coffin out there with Gerald R. Ford inside, and he's talking about Governor Granholm and how great she looks. I can't imagine that anytime. She should just hope they took photographs of her for her next campaign for whatever. It's like, oh my good God. And they're clearly talking to him from the control room telling him to stop, because every once in a while he stops and speaks to them like no, no, I won't. And finally the producer of this, Court Harson, who was the producer of Hardball Matthew's show on MSNBC, gets into my ear and says, for God's sake, is there anything you can do? Can you stop him? And I just looked at the camera and shook my head and put my arms up in what would be the hands up. Nothing I can do about it emoji. I may have been the model for that emoji. This is two thousand and six or seven, after all, And they said, can you try can you write him a note or something? So I took a piece of script and I wrote on the back of it, Chris stopped talking about Grand Holme that way, we are at a presidential funeral, and I underlined we are at one two three line at one two three lines a one to three presidential one two three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten lines under that funeral circled and I slipped it to him, and he kept talking about her, and he looked at me, paused and nodded yes, like I was asking him a question. About five minutes later, we threw to a break, and I saw one of the executives of MSNBC come out and tell Chris that he had to go and prepare hardball for later that afternoon, and that the rest of the thing would be anchored by me. So every time and they did the pool camera go back to reaction shots of Governor Granholm. I made sure that that piece of paper that I had handed Chris to which he thought was some sort of some sort of question chestian like are we at a president at funeral, not an admonition that he was making an absolute jack wad out of himself. I kept that note in front of me, just in case I veered back into this. I later told this story to Governor Granholm, who was briefly a colleague of mine. Although you wouldn't remember this because the network no longer exists, and I don't know by that point if ten thousand people were watching our shows on it, but it was a colleague of mine on current TV. Even as I was trying to explain to her, don't take this job. They're never going to pay you. They're already running out of money. Jennifer Granholme laughed coquettishly and said, Oh, that's not the first time that's ever happened. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Yes, yes it is, he said, with his eyes like I didn't know. Thanks for listening. Follow me on the podcast, promo videos on Blue Sky YouTube, Facebook, Instagram threads for the moment, Twitter x and Tickface. I got banned from TikTok, so I went to Tickface. Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanel, the musical directors have Countdown, arranged, produced and performed most of our music. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass and drums, and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Olderman theme for me ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy BESPN Inc. Other music was arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. Countdown for day just one, five and twenty five days until the scheduled end of the term of lame duck Dictator Trump. Probably the next scheduled countdown is Thursday, still playing the scheduling by ear, especially since the heart surgery for my rescue pop kit is Tuesday. And yes, I'll post developments on social media and hopefully I will rejoin you on this platform early Thursday morning. As always, Bolton says, the news wars till the next one. I'm Keith Aldremman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Oldremman is a production of iHeartRadio. More podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.