Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. I would just like to go on the record and thank the person who is doing the most to undermine the Trump transition and the most to let the air out of the momentum of Trump's gigantic one point four percent landslide. I'd just like to thank the person who is making Trump look stupid and amateurish and failureish. And that person, of course, is Donald Trump. He was humiliated with the Matt Gates nomination to the degree that when the thing finally became utterly untenable and potentially destructive to him personally, he didn't even try to blame anybody. He didn't stamp his feet. He just moved on. And he got the famous prosecutor who put Dwight Gooden, the failed Mets pitcher, in jail for seven months. He just punted on Gates. And you know, Trump knows he's in trouble when he shuts up. Now, he has not said a word. He's just standing there next to Pete Hegseth, who will never be Secretary of Defense, who will never run the Pentagon, who right now is probably a poor bet to get his job back on the weekend edition of the Fox News Morning Show. And every time Pete heg Seth's dumpster fire goes out or drops down a little bit in intensity, Trump is there as it reignites. When Mommy becomes part of your story, When it's mommy who called you an abuser of women, when it's mommy who suggested you needed psychological help, and somebody she sent the email to has decided to give it to the media. When mom from eight years ago, seven years ago, it doesn't matter if it was seven minutes ago. When Mom is part of the reason you're not going to get the job, and it's so bad that you have to put Mom on TV, and it's so bad on TV that Mom instead of answering the softball questions, the answering of the softball questions was insufficient. She turned to camera and stared and thanked the furor for his support of her son, the abuser, and then she blamed the media, the awful media, for having threatened her by calling her up and telling her that they were going to print this and they wanted to know what her reaction was and if she wanted to say something, what evil bastard's trying to make it fair to her, we can see where heg Sith got his stupidity and his arrogance. And then as part of the softball questions, this guy Doucey says to her, so will you testify in front of the Senate on your son's behalf? And if you are really trying, if you are debasing yourself, Donald Trump, to the point of having your nominee for Secretary of Defense, the punching power of the Pentagon, the macho, slicked back, greasy haired Pete Hegseth, who's had to turn to his mom to get him out of trouble. When you go to that sense and level of self humiliation for Hegseth, for his mom, for Fox, for the entirety of the conservative fascist operation, and for yourself Trump, when you go to that degree, and this man Deucey turns to this woman and says, will you be testifying on his behalf in front of the Senate? And she says, I don't have an answer for you on that, and she isn't sure. She won't commit. He's meet, He's done, and not only that, instead of bailing out on him when there was still time for people to forget about him when there was still time for him not to come up in every subsequent discussion of whoever becomes the head of the Pentagon the Secretary of Defense, when you could have removed the stain from your red tie instead of doing it then, now just stand a little closer to this. I will quote Bert Lancaster again as JJ Hunsecker talking to the Tony Curtis character in the great film Sweet Smell of Success. Your dead son, get yourself buried heg Sith was supposed to meet as part of the Pete Hegseth, Hey, you want to have a beer with Pete Hegseth. Isn't that how we judge conservatives? Who do you want to have a beer with this alcoholic over here? He was supposed to have a beer or something with Josh Hawley from Missouri, who is his own dumpster fire, But we can leave that alone for the time being. He was supposed to meet with Josh Hawley, and then Hally's announcement came that there was going to be a postponement of this meeting as part of the senatorial tour of Pete Hegseth the dumpster fire on wheels rolling past your Senate Office, Hawley said, it's been canceled. Somebody in the transition team told PBS's reporter on the Hill that they were told the transition team was told that the Hegseth Hally meeting was canceled because Hegseth has to be somewhere else today. The PBS reporter Lisai dejar Dan naturally said, Florida, And there was apparently a shrug and no answer to that. But we were informed by the transition team member that the decision to cancel the Holly Hegseth meeting was in fact on the Hegseth side, and it quote came from a higher power. This is disastrous. It's fantastically, wonderfully disastrous. If you had popcorn leftover from the Matt Gates fiasco, keep it handy, because it doesn't look like Trump's going to get out of this anytime soon, because he's crazy and now he may in fact be lazy and crazy, but lazy in a sense of not maintaining that fisticuff's position that was the hallmark of everything in his life. If there's one thing you'd look at Trump and say, I find that useful and possibly something I want to try to achieve. It's the fact that he's never been satisfied with something. When there is a victory, he wants more. This is his illness. It's not about having money. It's about getting money. It's not about having power. It's about getting power. It's not about defeating you or winning in some way. It's about destroying you and then coming back and destroying you once again. And in this case, both with Gates and now with eg Seth, he took his foot off the pedal. This is after the mom'st worry about the email. All of this now, this is after the drinking at Fox story. NBC News reports ten sources at Fox News who said that he was always drinking there, and let me see if I can read this. One of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him as recently as last month and heard him complain about being hungover this fall. I will confess to you that twice in my broadcasting career I went on the air after having had alcohol at dinner, and once I had too much and was mortified that I was going to just sound like this on the air. I watched the video of the show the next day and it was absolutely fine. Nobody noticed, and I thought, well, I got away with it. I'm never going to try that again. One of the sources said they smelled alcohol and Pete Hegseth as recently his last month. We're not talking about ancient history, because this was also after the story about him drinking so much at Concerned Veterans for America, like eight years ago that there was a whistleblower report about his drinking and he had to quit. And if you thought the idea of Donald Trump again having his little fat fingers on the button, if you thought that was terrifying enough, now imagine that the guy at the Pentagon who would be conferred with in the event that anything was done, including invading Canada. Canada. Hello, if you want to make it worse, just think about Trump calling up the Secretary of Defense and he's drunk. I'm sure this has happened before at some point in American history, but this would apparently happen with Pete Hegseth on a regular basis, and who would talk him out of bombing Vancouver. And all of this was after the story of the serial philandering during his first marriage and the story of the sexual allegations or sexual abuse, allegations at the Conservative Convention and his whole campaign that he started to turn the army into the equivalent of the eleventh century crusaders who slaughtered the infidels because they were true Christians. I'm not making these references. These are the things he said. He wants the nineteenth century version of the US military, or the eleventh century version of the Christian crusaders, just go into a part of the country or the world, or the nation or wherever, and just wipe everybody out, because we know true Christians believe that Christ truly supported infidelity and abuse and alcohol and especially slaughtering. Pete Hegseth says Trump called him yesterday and told him to hang in there. I don't know. Was he drunk. Did Trump just tell him to hang I suppose. I suppose at heart. One of the principal problems that Trump has in assessing other people to work for him is that he's such a piece of crap himself that everybody else looks like I don't know Sigmund Freud or Beethoven or Mickey Mantle or I don't know who. He can't possibly know that just because you are better than he is at a given thing that that does not mean you're any good at it. And after all, I think the number of children that heg Seth has with the number of women that he's had them with is still less than Trump's figure. The only thing that is likely to actually resonate with Trump is this idea of drinking. He doesn't like drinking. There have been alcoholics in his family, his own brother died from it. This has registered in some way that I'm sure Trump does not understand, other than drinking bad. Well, this is why you vet people. This is why, whether you are fitting out your sports department at a local television station or the entirety of your government as president of the United States, why you can't just pick people you see on TV and think they look good. You can't cast an administration, even if you are crazy would be dictator. You should ask other people first, because all you need is for the first two big picks in your draft to blow up in your face and suddenly you are a foot shorter and you're going ten miles an hour slower. And then after he eventually cuts bait with Hegseth, whenever what's next comes out comes out, then he's going to go through this with cash Patel. I'd say keep an eye on cash Patel, but that would be a cheap joke. And then you'll go through this with Musk, and if not with Musk, then with Vivek Ramaswami, because the Department of Government Efficiency is just another confidence trick designed to in some way privatize something or cut the taxes of well Elon Musk. And it turns out, as CNN reported yesterday, there are hours and hours of tape of Vivek Ramaswami trashing Elon Musk, his new co director at the Department of stealing money from the government. I'm sorry, Department of Government Efficiency. And he's saying, and let me see if I can read this quote from the CNN story, this is him on tape. I have no reason to think Elon won't jump like a circus monkey when Jijinping calls in the hour of need, endless interviews, comments, podcast appearances, apparently stopping passers by on the street to tell them this that he's in bed Musk. That is with China, calling Musk a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party. And this again, this is not stuff that his mother wrote about Vivek Ramaswami in twenty eighteen. This is from last year. This is the problem with confidence tricksters. They lie so much, they have forgotten half their lives, and they don't know going into a room whether they hate all those people in there or love them. Back to second Secretary of Defense if it's not heg Seth, and I don't know if you've been able to pick this up from my comment so far, it's not going to be heg Seth. The Trumper has put out a story yesterday that the second choice is Ron DeSantis. I'm not sure I believe this. I suppose the DeSantis willingness to go back and endorse Trump might have registered and pushed its way through Trump's only satisfaction in life, which is to torture people one way or the other. But I still think they might as well have said, oh no, the new Secretary of Defense is going to be Nicki Haley. They've made up. The other big name was Jonie Ernst. You remember her. She is the governor of Iowa who has run on campaigns and more campaigns and more campaigns after that, all of them with the same theme, I'm going to go kill a pig right now. I wish I were making that up. I wish that was a euphemism for something. I wish that was like saying keep an eye on cash Pattel. She just made another reference to killing pigs. But and this is where all of this kind of oh, popcorn time. Let's watch Trump burn down his own house while he's still in it. It's a one nothing lead right now for the good guys. This could make it to nothing. There's one practical thing that could make it far more than two nothing. It could make it one hundred to nothing, CNN reported. And I don't know that anybody picked this up that the other vetted name as an alternate for when hegseeth finally disappears, like the cheshire cat, where all that will be left of him before he vanishes is his slicked down hair. The other guy that they vetted to be Secretary of Defense is Congressman first term Congressman Slea Hunt from Texas and the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations. And so what if he picks another Republican congressman for his cabinet. The Republican threshold right now in the House, their lead in the House, their margin in the House is two hundred and seventeen Republicans to two hundred and fifteen Democrats. So take one away and it's a one vote margin, which is a no vote margin. Nothing. Nothing could be more pleasing than the idea of Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, unable to get anything done because one of the remaining Republicans is out drunk or has been appointed Secretary of Defense. We want hunt, we want hunt, we want hunt, we want hunt, we want just now, I said about a quote. If I can read this, this is not a figure of speech. I am suffering from a Chalasian or Khalasian, depending on your pronunciation, an eye infection in which one of my eyes is pretty much closed and the other one's not too happy with me either. It could be a double Kalaysian. So I'm doing my best here, but I can't really see. So I've had to add lib and thus this thing has had a certain ragged quality that I would rather it did not. I'm doing my best here, but I am playing hurt and I'm supposed to not be doing this. Please do not tell doctor Renee Richards. Now I will mention something else I told you so remember Sunday night when the story broke but Joe Biden was pardoning his son, and everybody went, oh, no, it'll give Trump an excuse to do this, And I said, I love this. Do more ten million pardons by the Biden administration before the Democracy going out of business sale ends on January twentieth. I want Biden signing pardons as Trump goes to the podium seventy two hours after I suggested this, politico, and I am going to try to read this. Biden White House is discussing preemptive pardons for those in Trump's crosshairs. Well good White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who've committed no crimes, both because it could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump's criticisms. Once again, stop stop thinking that Trump needs fuel for his criticisms. Trump is conducting a conversation in his head and has been since sometime in the nineteen fifties. He's holding a conversation at all times. The person he is speaking to is his best friend, his twin, his invisible twin, Ronald Trump, who's even angrier than Donald is that's all this is about. He doesn't need fuel. He has Ronald fueling Trump's criticisms. Trump without criticisms stops breathing. Back to what Politico wrote, Let's see I was here, both because it could suggest impropriety and because those offered preemptive pardons may reject them. Pro tip, don't reject them. Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress's January sixth committee as Senator elect Adam Schiff and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney should go to jail, along with the rest of the Unselect Committee. Also mentioned by Biden's aids for a pardoner is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections and Infectious Diseases. Excuse me, I can't really read. Can I again? Why are we stopping here? I see a list there of let's see Fauci, Cheney shift. That's three people. We're about ten million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand short. I know it's hyperbole to have a one eight hundred hotline hundred pardon me, Joe, but why not? Trump is already mocking the concept of the Department of Justice. We're not talking ineptitude like Garland. This is corruption. This is persecution. This is star Chambers. This is making up laws to prosecute people who are innocent. And the bitterness and the anger and the inability to take the win is limitless in Donald Trump. And if it ever stopped or in some way ebbed, Ronald Trump would be there to make sure he got angry again. I mean, honest to God, the White House should spend the rest of the Biden term offering pardons to every family member of everybody associated with anybody who might get a pardon, every administration staffer, every media member, everybody's ever worked for Amtrak. Be a stack of blank pardons sent to MSNBC and crew and every left wing organization. But I mean, let's be reasonable, no more than five thousand of them per outfit. I'll take one. I will take a pardon. I don't know that I have ever broken a law, not knowingly. I'll take it. Whatever preemptive partner. Sure, these people are going to pervert the justice system. They are going to do it. They are nuts, they are fascists, and all the comparisons to Hitler are obviously hyperbolic in some way, because only Hitler was Hitler and only the Holocaust was the Holocaust. But every time I've referred to Trump as Hitler, it's about the stuff that preceded that. Have you ever seen the movie Judgment at Nuremberg? Trying not to turn this into the Burt Lancaster Show, but Bert Lancaster in that movie plays an eminent German jurist, a combination of several real life figures, who has tried for war crimes along with other Nazi jurists, and as they make excuses, he breaks down and goes through, case by case almost how they perverted the law to turn it into a weapon for Hitler. That's what we're going to face. That's what's going to happen when they go looking through your social media feed, when they run out of other people to prosecute. That's what we're facing. And you think somehow, Gavin Newsom and other Democrats and the New York Times editorial board and other handwringers, you think that this makes the Democrats look bad, makes Biden look bad. On January twentieth, at noon, Trump is going to light the w White House on fire and figuratively the nation on fire, and what Biden is doing by pardoning his son and discussing these preemptive pardons for others is pulling people out of the fire, people who don't deserve to die in a fire started by Donald Trump. Consequences to this, some people are going to judge it harshly f them. The issue here is getting as many people out alive as we can alive to fight back and destroy Trump and trump Ism and create a world in which, at some point in the near future it will be illegal to say the name Trump out loud in America. They want to put cash Patel in charge of the FBI. Do you think he is going to be there because they've suddenly embraced DEI. He is there because they no longer care whether the FBI director even tries to act like actual law enforcement. They care only that he acts like an enforce er. One last thing, and I'm pushing my luck here, but I will now confess I am surprised that the world did not come to an end and the planet did not burn to a cinder on Tuesday, because apparently that's when this happened. Chris Solissa did some sort of podcast where his guest was Chuck Todd. First of all, I'm shocked because I always assumed they were the same person, the same stupid blame everybody but themselves person.

Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. I would just like to go on the record and thank the person who is doing the most to undermine the Trump transition and the most to let the air out of the momentum of Trump's gigantic one point four percent landslide. I'd just like to thank the person who is making Trump look stupid and amateurish and failureish. And that person, of course, is Donald Trump. He was humiliated with the Matt Gates nomination to the degree that when the thing finally became utterly untenable and potentially destructive to him personally, he didn't even try to blame anybody. He didn't stamp his feet. He just moved on. And he got the famous prosecutor who put Dwight Gooden, the failed Mets pitcher, in jail for seven months. He just punted on Gates. And you know, Trump knows he's in trouble when he shuts up. Now, he has not said a word. He's just standing there next to Pete Hegseth, who will never be Secretary of Defense, who will never run the Pentagon, who right now is probably a poor bet to get his job back on the weekend edition of the Fox News Morning Show. And every time Pete heg Seth's dumpster fire goes out or drops down a little bit in intensity, Trump is there as it reignites. When Mommy becomes part of your story, When it's mommy who called you an abuser of women, when it's mommy who suggested you needed psychological help, and somebody she sent the email to has decided to give it to the media. When mom from eight years ago, seven years ago, it doesn't matter if it was seven minutes ago. When Mom is part of the reason you're not going to get the job, and it's so bad that you have to put Mom on TV, and it's so bad on TV that Mom instead of answering the softball questions, the answering of the softball questions was insufficient. She turned to camera and stared and thanked the furor for his support of her son, the abuser, and then she blamed the media, the awful media, for having threatened her by calling her up and telling her that they were going to print this and they wanted to know what her reaction was and if she wanted to say something, what evil bastard's trying to make it fair to her, we can see where heg Sith got his stupidity and his arrogance. And then as part of the softball questions, this guy Doucey says to her, so will you testify in front of the Senate on your son's behalf? And if you are really trying, if you are debasing yourself, Donald Trump, to the point of having your nominee for Secretary of Defense, the punching power of the Pentagon, the macho, slicked back, greasy haired Pete Hegseth, who's had to turn to his mom to get him out of trouble. When you go to that sense and level of self humiliation for Hegseth, for his mom, for Fox, for the entirety of the conservative fascist operation, and for yourself Trump, when you go to that degree, and this man Deucey turns to this woman and says, will you be testifying on his behalf in front of the Senate? And she says, I don't have an answer for you on that, and she isn't sure. She won't commit. He's meet, He's done, and not only that, instead of bailing out on him when there was still time for people to forget about him when there was still time for him not to come up in every subsequent discussion of whoever becomes the head of the Pentagon the Secretary of Defense, when you could have removed the stain from your red tie instead of doing it then, now just stand a little closer to this. I will quote Bert Lancaster again as JJ Hunsecker talking to the Tony Curtis character in the great film Sweet Smell of Success. Your dead son, get yourself buried heg Sith was supposed to meet as part of the Pete Hegseth, Hey, you want to have a beer with Pete Hegseth. Isn't that how we judge conservatives? Who do you want to have a beer with this alcoholic over here? He was supposed to have a beer or something with Josh Hawley from Missouri, who is his own dumpster fire, But we can leave that alone for the time being. He was supposed to meet with Josh Hawley, and then Hally's announcement came that there was going to be a postponement of this meeting as part of the senatorial tour of Pete Hegseth the dumpster fire on wheels rolling past your Senate Office, Hawley said, it's been canceled. Somebody in the transition team told PBS's reporter on the Hill that they were told the transition team was told that the Hegseth Hally meeting was canceled because Hegseth has to be somewhere else today. The PBS reporter Lisai dejar Dan naturally said, Florida, And there was apparently a shrug and no answer to that. But we were informed by the transition team member that the decision to cancel the Holly Hegseth meeting was in fact on the Hegseth side, and it quote came from a higher power. This is disastrous. It's fantastically, wonderfully disastrous. If you had popcorn leftover from the Matt Gates fiasco, keep it handy, because it doesn't look like Trump's going to get out of this anytime soon, because he's crazy and now he may in fact be lazy and crazy, but lazy in a sense of not maintaining that fisticuff's position that was the hallmark of everything in his life. If there's one thing you'd look at Trump and say, I find that useful and possibly something I want to try to achieve. It's the fact that he's never been satisfied with something. When there is a victory, he wants more. This is his illness. It's not about having money. It's about getting money. It's not about having power. It's about getting power. It's not about defeating you or winning in some way. It's about destroying you and then coming back and destroying you once again. And in this case, both with Gates and now with eg Seth, he took his foot off the pedal. This is after the mom'st worry about the email. All of this now, this is after the drinking at Fox story. NBC News reports ten sources at Fox News who said that he was always drinking there, and let me see if I can read this. One of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him as recently as last month and heard him complain about being hungover this fall. I will confess to you that twice in my broadcasting career I went on the air after having had alcohol at dinner, and once I had too much and was mortified that I was going to just sound like this on the air. I watched the video of the show the next day and it was absolutely fine. Nobody noticed, and I thought, well, I got away with it. I'm never going to try that again. One of the sources said they smelled alcohol and Pete Hegseth as recently his last month. We're not talking about ancient history, because this was also after the story about him drinking so much at Concerned Veterans for America, like eight years ago that there was a whistleblower report about his drinking and he had to quit. And if you thought the idea of Donald Trump again having his little fat fingers on the button, if you thought that was terrifying enough, now imagine that the guy at the Pentagon who would be conferred with in the event that anything was done, including invading Canada. Canada. Hello, if you want to make it worse, just think about Trump calling up the Secretary of Defense and he's drunk. I'm sure this has happened before at some point in American history, but this would apparently happen with Pete Hegseth on a regular basis, and who would talk him out of bombing Vancouver. And all of this was after the story of the serial philandering during his first marriage and the story of the sexual allegations or sexual abuse, allegations at the Conservative Convention and his whole campaign that he started to turn the army into the equivalent of the eleventh century crusaders who slaughtered the infidels because they were true Christians. I'm not making these references. These are the things he said. He wants the nineteenth century version of the US military, or the eleventh century version of the Christian crusaders, just go into a part of the country or the world, or the nation or wherever, and just wipe everybody out, because we know true Christians believe that Christ truly supported infidelity and abuse and alcohol and especially slaughtering. Pete Hegseth says Trump called him yesterday and told him to hang in there. I don't know. Was he drunk. Did Trump just tell him to hang I suppose. I suppose at heart. One of the principal problems that Trump has in assessing other people to work for him is that he's such a piece of crap himself that everybody else looks like I don't know Sigmund Freud or Beethoven or Mickey Mantle or I don't know who. He can't possibly know that just because you are better than he is at a given thing that that does not mean you're any good at it. And after all, I think the number of children that heg Seth has with the number of women that he's had them with is still less than Trump's figure. The only thing that is likely to actually resonate with Trump is this idea of drinking. He doesn't like drinking. There have been alcoholics in his family, his own brother died from it. This has registered in some way that I'm sure Trump does not understand, other than drinking bad. Well, this is why you vet people. This is why, whether you are fitting out your sports department at a local television station or the entirety of your government as president of the United States, why you can't just pick people you see on TV and think they look good. You can't cast an administration, even if you are crazy would be dictator. You should ask other people first, because all you need is for the first two big picks in your draft to blow up in your face and suddenly you are a foot shorter and you're going ten miles an hour slower. And then after he eventually cuts bait with Hegseth, whenever what's next comes out comes out, then he's going to go through this with cash Patel. I'd say keep an eye on cash Patel, but that would be a cheap joke. And then you'll go through this with Musk, and if not with Musk, then with Vivek Ramaswami, because the Department of Government Efficiency is just another confidence trick designed to in some way privatize something or cut the taxes of well Elon Musk. And it turns out, as CNN reported yesterday, there are hours and hours of tape of Vivek Ramaswami trashing Elon Musk, his new co director at the Department of stealing money from the government. I'm sorry, Department of Government Efficiency. And he's saying, and let me see if I can read this quote from the CNN story, this is him on tape. I have no reason to think Elon won't jump like a circus monkey when Jijinping calls in the hour of need, endless interviews, comments, podcast appearances, apparently stopping passers by on the street to tell them this that he's in bed Musk. That is with China, calling Musk a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party. And this again, this is not stuff that his mother wrote about Vivek Ramaswami in twenty eighteen. This is from last year. This is the problem with confidence tricksters. They lie so much, they have forgotten half their lives, and they don't know going into a room whether they hate all those people in there or love them. Back to second Secretary of Defense if it's not heg Seth, and I don't know if you've been able to pick this up from my comment so far, it's not going to be heg Seth. The Trumper has put out a story yesterday that the second choice is Ron DeSantis. I'm not sure I believe this. I suppose the DeSantis willingness to go back and endorse Trump might have registered and pushed its way through Trump's only satisfaction in life, which is to torture people one way or the other. But I still think they might as well have said, oh no, the new Secretary of Defense is going to be Nicki Haley. They've made up. The other big name was Jonie Ernst. You remember her. She is the governor of Iowa who has run on campaigns and more campaigns and more campaigns after that, all of them with the same theme, I'm going to go kill a pig right now. I wish I were making that up. I wish that was a euphemism for something. I wish that was like saying keep an eye on cash Pattel. She just made another reference to killing pigs. But and this is where all of this kind of oh, popcorn time. Let's watch Trump burn down his own house while he's still in it. It's a one nothing lead right now for the good guys. This could make it to nothing. There's one practical thing that could make it far more than two nothing. It could make it one hundred to nothing, CNN reported. And I don't know that anybody picked this up that the other vetted name as an alternate for when hegseeth finally disappears, like the cheshire cat, where all that will be left of him before he vanishes is his slicked down hair. The other guy that they vetted to be Secretary of Defense is Congressman first term Congressman Slea Hunt from Texas and the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations. And so what if he picks another Republican congressman for his cabinet. The Republican threshold right now in the House, their lead in the House, their margin in the House is two hundred and seventeen Republicans to two hundred and fifteen Democrats. So take one away and it's a one vote margin, which is a no vote margin. Nothing. Nothing could be more pleasing than the idea of Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, unable to get anything done because one of the remaining Republicans is out drunk or has been appointed Secretary of Defense. We want hunt, we want hunt, we want hunt, we want hunt, we want just now, I said about a quote. If I can read this, this is not a figure of speech. I am suffering from a Chalasian or Khalasian, depending on your pronunciation, an eye infection in which one of my eyes is pretty much closed and the other one's not too happy with me either. It could be a double Kalaysian. So I'm doing my best here, but I can't really see. So I've had to add lib and thus this thing has had a certain ragged quality that I would rather it did not. I'm doing my best here, but I am playing hurt and I'm supposed to not be doing this. Please do not tell doctor Renee Richards. Now I will mention something else I told you so remember Sunday night when the story broke but Joe Biden was pardoning his son, and everybody went, oh, no, it'll give Trump an excuse to do this, And I said, I love this. Do more ten million pardons by the Biden administration before the Democracy going out of business sale ends on January twentieth. I want Biden signing pardons as Trump goes to the podium seventy two hours after I suggested this, politico, and I am going to try to read this. Biden White House is discussing preemptive pardons for those in Trump's crosshairs. Well good White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who've committed no crimes, both because it could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump's criticisms. Once again, stop stop thinking that Trump needs fuel for his criticisms. Trump is conducting a conversation in his head and has been since sometime in the nineteen fifties. He's holding a conversation at all times. The person he is speaking to is his best friend, his twin, his invisible twin, Ronald Trump, who's even angrier than Donald is that's all this is about. He doesn't need fuel. He has Ronald fueling Trump's criticisms. Trump without criticisms stops breathing. Back to what Politico wrote, Let's see I was here, both because it could suggest impropriety and because those offered preemptive pardons may reject them. Pro tip, don't reject them. Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress's January sixth committee as Senator elect Adam Schiff and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney should go to jail, along with the rest of the Unselect Committee. Also mentioned by Biden's aids for a pardoner is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections and Infectious Diseases. Excuse me, I can't really read. Can I again? Why are we stopping here? I see a list there of let's see Fauci, Cheney shift. That's three people. We're about ten million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand short. I know it's hyperbole to have a one eight hundred hotline hundred pardon me, Joe, but why not? Trump is already mocking the concept of the Department of Justice. We're not talking ineptitude like Garland. This is corruption. This is persecution. This is star Chambers. This is making up laws to prosecute people who are innocent. And the bitterness and the anger and the inability to take the win is limitless in Donald Trump. And if it ever stopped or in some way ebbed, Ronald Trump would be there to make sure he got angry again. I mean, honest to God, the White House should spend the rest of the Biden term offering pardons to every family member of everybody associated with anybody who might get a pardon, every administration staffer, every media member, everybody's ever worked for Amtrak. Be a stack of blank pardons sent to MSNBC and crew and every left wing organization. But I mean, let's be reasonable, no more than five thousand of them per outfit. I'll take one. I will take a pardon. I don't know that I have ever broken a law, not knowingly. I'll take it. Whatever preemptive partner. Sure, these people are going to pervert the justice system. They are going to do it. They are nuts, they are fascists, and all the comparisons to Hitler are obviously hyperbolic in some way, because only Hitler was Hitler and only the Holocaust was the Holocaust. But every time I've referred to Trump as Hitler, it's about the stuff that preceded that. Have you ever seen the movie Judgment at Nuremberg? Trying not to turn this into the Burt Lancaster Show, but Bert Lancaster in that movie plays an eminent German jurist, a combination of several real life figures, who has tried for war crimes along with other Nazi jurists, and as they make excuses, he breaks down and goes through, case by case almost how they perverted the law to turn it into a weapon for Hitler. That's what we're going to face. That's what's going to happen when they go looking through your social media feed, when they run out of other people to prosecute. That's what we're facing. And you think somehow, Gavin Newsom and other Democrats and the New York Times editorial board and other handwringers, you think that this makes the Democrats look bad, makes Biden look bad. On January twentieth, at noon, Trump is going to light the w White House on fire and figuratively the nation on fire, and what Biden is doing by pardoning his son and discussing these preemptive pardons for others is pulling people out of the fire, people who don't deserve to die in a fire started by Donald Trump. Consequences to this, some people are going to judge it harshly f them. The issue here is getting as many people out alive as we can alive to fight back and destroy Trump and trump Ism and create a world in which, at some point in the near future it will be illegal to say the name Trump out loud in America. They want to put cash Patel in charge of the FBI. Do you think he is going to be there because they've suddenly embraced DEI. He is there because they no longer care whether the FBI director even tries to act like actual law enforcement. They care only that he acts like an enforce er. One last thing, and I'm pushing my luck here, but I will now confess I am surprised that the world did not come to an end and the planet did not burn to a cinder on Tuesday, because apparently that's when this happened. Chris Solissa did some sort of podcast where his guest was Chuck Todd. First of all, I'm shocked because I always assumed they were the same person, the same stupid blame everybody but themselves person.

I follow the Hunter Biden trial very closely. I read every transcript, all the testimony, because that's what you can. All that was made public, and there is you want to you want to read, you want to you want to get angry, just as a as as somebody in just all these mixed emotions. You read the Halle Biden transcript and that's both widow yes and and essentially he turned her into a crack addict. And this was all happening in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and Joe and Joe Biden were so concerned about their family that they decided to run for president.

I follow the Hunter Biden trial very closely. I read every transcript, all the testimony, because that's what you can. All that was made public, and there is you want to you want to read, you want to you want to get angry, just as a as as somebody in just all these mixed emotions. You read the Halle Biden transcript and that's both widow yes and and essentially he turned her into a crack addict. And this was all happening in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and Joe and Joe Biden were so concerned about their family that they decided to run for president.

YEP.

YEP.

I just so when you talk about the word selfish, I it's almost like the word doesn't I mean I. Their decision to run for president put the entire Democratic Party and the United States of America in the position that is in now.

I just so when you talk about the word selfish, I it's almost like the word doesn't I mean I. Their decision to run for president put the entire Democratic Party and the United States of America in the position that is in now.

Ah. Of course, that was terrible of Biden to run and defeat Trump and save democracy in twenty twenty What a horrible selfish person he is Chuck Todd and Crys. You know who's missing from that conversation. They could have used special guest Mark Halprin and maybe Nate Silver, but I think, I think right now what we need is Chuck Todd and Chris interviewing Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzynski. Also ahead in an unbelievably all new edition of Countdown. I am going to reread to you a special comment that I did in two thousand and nine, which I have identified as the day, not the comment being the cause of this, but what it was about the day in which the idea of the president as the final guard rail protecting American society changed, was erased, was broken irretrievably. You may ask if I'm saying I can't actually see the papers in front of me, and I'm kind of fudging it. I've probably got a couple of quotes wrong. How did I read this well? I actually recorded the next segment a couple of days ago before this chariso got in my eye. I can't stop calling it a cheriso to people. I have a chariso in my eye. Also one other commentary, which I will do live because I don't need to read anything about this. Have you heard about this idea from baseball the golden at bat, where a manager wants a game can summon anybody he wants to hit in a particular situation, presumably a potential game winning situation. And you might have the theory of a game in which show Heyotani bats for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and then since he popped out or struck out and didn't get that run home, the manager Dave Roberts says, Okay, I'm gonna have show Aotani bat next. In other words, destroying the essence of baseball. It's been proposed by somebody in baseball who happens to be the commissioner of baseball and who went to college with me. If you think baseball is dying, this will remove any doubt that you have that baseball is dying. And if you think that it's dying slowly, the good news will be this will speed it up. All that is ahead. That's next. This is a Playing Herd edition of Countdown. I have been ruminating of late as to the start date. How did we get here? I think we may know when did we start going here? That's a little tougher, I guess realistically, it's whatever day the primordial human crawled out of the primordial sludge in which our ancestors lived. And I don't mean Trump's family getting to America. But if you want a date at which all of this was elevated to the presidential level, where the last guardrail, which really is what the president of the United States is supposed to be and has become in the entire world, the last guardrail, when that turned into no more guard rails. I think I have figured out that date or roughly that year, and I don't want anybody to mistake this as I read this piece again that I am blaming Barack Obama for Donald Trump, but there is a main line, straight line connection between two things something Obama did not do and everything that Trump has done since I gave a special comment, and most of them I have forgotten and have seen again or read again with some surprise and not inconsiderable pride, if you will forgive me that. But this one I've always remembered because of the reaction to it. The date it was given was January nineteenth, two thousand and nine, and I can remember it a cold night in Washington, the night before the inauguration of the first non white guy president of the United States, and the euphoria that had come through most of the country, including those people who had voted for John McCain, who said, well, at least we have done this. Seventy five percent of the country seemed to be at least accepting this idea that this was something good, whether or not they liked the man at all. And so the night before, having unintentionally but nonetheless having supported Obama in his nomination bit against Hillary Clinton, I decided to be the one who relieved themselves in the soup I believe would be the youthstic explanation for this. I did a commentary the night before Obama was inaugurated, and the next day people were yelling at me during the coverage of the inauguration, complaining that I had not given the man a chance. As it turned out, I was right. And not only was I right, I was prescient in ways that I did not understand. And as always when you are prescient, the one problem with prescience is you always get the timeframe wrong. I thought we had perhaps fifty years before what happened would happen. It turned out. Let's see January nineteenth, two thousand and nine to January twentieth, twenty sixteen seventeen. Rather we had eight years and one day. This is what I read with no edits on the night of January nineteenth, two thousand and nine, which I will take as the start of how we got where we are right now, where the last guardrail turned out to be made out of paper mache. We have tortured people. You and I. This is the people's democracy. We are those people. These are our elected officials. That they did not come to us and ask us to act thusly in our names is unfortunate, indeed criminal, But it is also almost irrelevant. They work for us. They work for us, and they tortured people, And so we have tortured people. You and I know we have tortured colleague shak Mohammad. We not only know about it, we have now heard it boasted about by one of the men who, as of tomorrow will no longer work for us, George Walker Bush quote. The techniques were necessary and are necessary to be used on a rare occasion to get information necessary to protect the American people. Mister Bush said to Fox News on January eleventh. One such person, who gave us information was colleague Shak Mohammad. I'm in the Oval office. I'm told that we have captured colleague Shake Mohammad and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I asked what tools are available for us to find information from him. They give me a list of tools, and I said, are these tools deemed to be legal? We got legal opinions before the decision was made. I think when people study the history of this particular episode, they will find out we gained good information from colleague Shack Muhammad in order to protect our country. We believe that the information we gained helped saved lives on American soil unquote. Never Mind mister Bush's delusions here. Never Mind all primary sources who witnessed the interrogation of colleague Shake Mohammad said they got nothing from him until they started buddying up to him. Never Mind that mister Bush's supporter's favorite torture construction, the mythical ticking time bomb scenario, not only did not transpire here, but mister Bush has not even had the imagination to pretend it did, just in order to slightly cover his moral tracks. The key is that this statement, if it had been under oath, would have been a confession to a war crime. Mister Bush is proactive. I asked what tools are available. Mister Bush is aware of the legal haze in which he steps, and I said, are these tools deemed to be legal? Mister Bush realizes the tools he has chosen have been used. We gained good information from colleague Shaik Muhammad. Since we know from previous admissions at the Pentagon that colleage Shik Muhammad was waterboarded, we can infer that mister Bush knew he would be waterboarded and knew afterwards that he had been waterboarded. Mister Bush is guilty. He is guilty as sin. Mister President Elect, you were first asked about all this on the eighteenth of April last I am proud to say you were asked about it by a fellow who got onto his high school newspaper while I was the editor Will Bunch the Philadelphia Daily News. I think you are right you President elect Obama told him if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You are also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we have too many problems we have to solve. So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment unquote. Good amen, But in that brief interview was born, or at least elucidated, a loophole genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. Vice President elect Biden echoed this on December twenty first, in a statement to which your transition team has directed all those to whom this is a paramount issue. He said, the questions of whether or not a criminal act has been committed or a very very bad judgment has been engaged in is something the Just Department decides. After his comment last week with straightforwardness that was like water to a lost soul in the Sahara that waterboarding is torture, your nominee at Justice, mister Eric Holder, echoed all this. We don't want to criminalize policy differences that might exist between the outgoing administration and the administration that is about to take over. But mister President elect, you have a confession since this statement of a structure of policy prefacing policy itself for mister Biden, you have had mister Bush's confession. Moreover, since mister Biden's statement, you have a legal assessment from within the bowels of the Bush administration itself. Quote, we tortured Mohammad al Katani, Judge Susan Crawford told The Washington Post a week ago. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. That was why. Judge Crawford added that as the Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether or not to bring detainees at Guantanamo Bay in trial, she decided in Katani's case not too This, mister President elect, was not the obvious waterboarding of colleague Sheik Muhammad. This was a more insidious combination of legally approved procedures that still nearly killed this man Katani. The techniques were all authorized, Judge Crawford continued, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. This was not any one particular act. It was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him that hurt his health. In fact, mister President Elect, the records at GITMO showed that Katani's heart beat eventually slowed to thirty five beats per minute. Quote. It was abusive and uncalled for and coercive, clearly coercive. I sympathized with the intelligence gatherers in those days after nine to eleven, not knowing what was coming next, and trying to gain information to keep us safe. But there still has to be a love that we should not cross. Unfortunately, what this has done, I think has tainted everything going forward. Sadly, as commendable as the intention here might seem, this country has never moved forward without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past. In point of fact, every effort to merely draw a line in the sand and declare the past dead has served only to keep the past alive, and often to strengthen the past. We compromised with slavery in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, and four score and nine years later we had buried six hundred thousand of our sons and brothers in a civil war. After that war's ending, we compromised with the social restructuring and protection of the rights of the minorities in the South, and a century later we had not only not resolved anything, but black leaders were still being as assassinated in the cities of the South. We compromised with Germany in the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War. Nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war crimes trials then and nineteen years later there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heartrending Second World War. We compromised with the trusts of the early nineteen hundreds. Today we have corporations too big to fail. We compromised with the Palmer raids and got McCarthyism, and we compromised with McCarthyism and got Watergate. We compromised with Watergate, and junior members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately at risk, and they grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. But mister President elect, you are entirely correct as you say what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past. That means prosecuting all those involved in the Bush administration's torture of prisoners and starting at the top. You are also right that you should not want your first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt. But your only other option might be to let this set and fester indefinitely, because, mister President elect, someday there will be another Republican president, or even a Democrat, just as blind as mister Bush to ethics and to this country's moral force. He will look back to what you did about mister Bush, or what you did not do, and he will see precedent, or as Cheney saw, he will see how not to get caught next time. Prosecute, mister President elect. Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn. Merely by acting. You will deny mister Bush what he most wants right now, without prosecutions, without this nation standing up and saying this was wrong, we will atone. Mister Bush's version of what happened goes intoe. The historical record of this nation. Torture was legal, It worked, It saved the country. The end, we have tortured people, You and I, mister President elect. This is the people's democracy. We are the people. These were our elected officials. That they did not come to us and act thusly in our names is unfortunate and indeed criminal, but it is almost irrelevant. They worked for us, they tortured people, and so we have tortured people. Thus, beginning tomorrow, it is up to you not just to discontinue this, but to prevent it. At the end of his first year in office, mister Lincoln tried to contain, extualize the Civil War for those who still wanted to compromise with evils of secession and slavery. The struggle of today, Lincoln wrote, is not altogether for today, It is for a vast future. Also, mister President elect, you have been handed the beginning of that future. Use it to protect our children and our distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again. If you are worried about the Republicans viewing any torture prosecution in the way you postulated to Will Bunch a partisan witch hunt, you can remind them that the woman who said all that, Susan Crawford, is a lifelong Republican. So, mister President Elect, beyond whatever else will come out as the whistleblowers began to say what they're going to say just after noon tomorrow, you have your predecessor's unofficial confession, and you have this singular evaluation by a principle in your assessor's administration, this kind of line level confession. They are guilty of this, Mister President elect. They are guilty as sin. Since he talked to my friend Bunch in April, mister Obama's only lengthy comments about this were made to George Stephanopolis on January eleventh of this year. See if a disturbing theme becomes evident, Obviously we are going to look at past practices. I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. Later, my instinct is to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. Later, still, my orientation is going to be to move forward. Finally, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past, asked January nineteenth, two thousand and nine, on MSNBC, the night before Obama took office, imploring him to not let the legal violations of the torture statutes by the Bush administration go unpunished, in large part because it would warn all those to come that all they had to do was to act in some fashion that would cloak their sins as president or around the presidency, and they would not be prosecuted and could not be prosecuted. Before there was Supreme Court presidential immunity, there was de facto presidential immunity. And are we paying the price for it now? Because mister Obama was right. What we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past and doing that we got things wrong in the future. I'm not right, George Crowing A pleasure to have you here. Thank you. This is the best news show ever. I toil that to one of your producers, and I want you to know that I've seen them all and it's just for especially the first thirty five minutes. Thank you. It's just just unparalleled. I got bad news between you and I. We got six minutes to completely still that in here. That's good.

Ah. Of course, that was terrible of Biden to run and defeat Trump and save democracy in twenty twenty What a horrible selfish person he is Chuck Todd and Crys. You know who's missing from that conversation. They could have used special guest Mark Halprin and maybe Nate Silver, but I think, I think right now what we need is Chuck Todd and Chris interviewing Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzynski. Also ahead in an unbelievably all new edition of Countdown. I am going to reread to you a special comment that I did in two thousand and nine, which I have identified as the day, not the comment being the cause of this, but what it was about the day in which the idea of the president as the final guard rail protecting American society changed, was erased, was broken irretrievably. You may ask if I'm saying I can't actually see the papers in front of me, and I'm kind of fudging it. I've probably got a couple of quotes wrong. How did I read this well? I actually recorded the next segment a couple of days ago before this chariso got in my eye. I can't stop calling it a cheriso to people. I have a chariso in my eye. Also one other commentary, which I will do live because I don't need to read anything about this. Have you heard about this idea from baseball the golden at bat, where a manager wants a game can summon anybody he wants to hit in a particular situation, presumably a potential game winning situation. And you might have the theory of a game in which show Heyotani bats for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and then since he popped out or struck out and didn't get that run home, the manager Dave Roberts says, Okay, I'm gonna have show Aotani bat next. In other words, destroying the essence of baseball. It's been proposed by somebody in baseball who happens to be the commissioner of baseball and who went to college with me. If you think baseball is dying, this will remove any doubt that you have that baseball is dying. And if you think that it's dying slowly, the good news will be this will speed it up. All that is ahead. That's next. This is a Playing Herd edition of Countdown. I have been ruminating of late as to the start date. How did we get here? I think we may know when did we start going here? That's a little tougher, I guess realistically, it's whatever day the primordial human crawled out of the primordial sludge in which our ancestors lived. And I don't mean Trump's family getting to America. But if you want a date at which all of this was elevated to the presidential level, where the last guardrail, which really is what the president of the United States is supposed to be and has become in the entire world, the last guardrail, when that turned into no more guard rails. I think I have figured out that date or roughly that year, and I don't want anybody to mistake this as I read this piece again that I am blaming Barack Obama for Donald Trump, but there is a main line, straight line connection between two things something Obama did not do and everything that Trump has done since I gave a special comment, and most of them I have forgotten and have seen again or read again with some surprise and not inconsiderable pride, if you will forgive me that. But this one I've always remembered because of the reaction to it. The date it was given was January nineteenth, two thousand and nine, and I can remember it a cold night in Washington, the night before the inauguration of the first non white guy president of the United States, and the euphoria that had come through most of the country, including those people who had voted for John McCain, who said, well, at least we have done this. Seventy five percent of the country seemed to be at least accepting this idea that this was something good, whether or not they liked the man at all. And so the night before, having unintentionally but nonetheless having supported Obama in his nomination bit against Hillary Clinton, I decided to be the one who relieved themselves in the soup I believe would be the youthstic explanation for this. I did a commentary the night before Obama was inaugurated, and the next day people were yelling at me during the coverage of the inauguration, complaining that I had not given the man a chance. As it turned out, I was right. And not only was I right, I was prescient in ways that I did not understand. And as always when you are prescient, the one problem with prescience is you always get the timeframe wrong. I thought we had perhaps fifty years before what happened would happen. It turned out. Let's see January nineteenth, two thousand and nine to January twentieth, twenty sixteen seventeen. Rather we had eight years and one day. This is what I read with no edits on the night of January nineteenth, two thousand and nine, which I will take as the start of how we got where we are right now, where the last guardrail turned out to be made out of paper mache. We have tortured people. You and I. This is the people's democracy. We are those people. These are our elected officials. That they did not come to us and ask us to act thusly in our names is unfortunate, indeed criminal, But it is also almost irrelevant. They work for us. They work for us, and they tortured people, And so we have tortured people. You and I know we have tortured colleague shak Mohammad. We not only know about it, we have now heard it boasted about by one of the men who, as of tomorrow will no longer work for us, George Walker Bush quote. The techniques were necessary and are necessary to be used on a rare occasion to get information necessary to protect the American people. Mister Bush said to Fox News on January eleventh. One such person, who gave us information was colleague Shak Mohammad. I'm in the Oval office. I'm told that we have captured colleague Shake Mohammad and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I asked what tools are available for us to find information from him. They give me a list of tools, and I said, are these tools deemed to be legal? We got legal opinions before the decision was made. I think when people study the history of this particular episode, they will find out we gained good information from colleague Shack Muhammad in order to protect our country. We believe that the information we gained helped saved lives on American soil unquote. Never Mind mister Bush's delusions here. Never Mind all primary sources who witnessed the interrogation of colleague Shake Mohammad said they got nothing from him until they started buddying up to him. Never Mind that mister Bush's supporter's favorite torture construction, the mythical ticking time bomb scenario, not only did not transpire here, but mister Bush has not even had the imagination to pretend it did, just in order to slightly cover his moral tracks. The key is that this statement, if it had been under oath, would have been a confession to a war crime. Mister Bush is proactive. I asked what tools are available. Mister Bush is aware of the legal haze in which he steps, and I said, are these tools deemed to be legal? Mister Bush realizes the tools he has chosen have been used. We gained good information from colleague Shaik Muhammad. Since we know from previous admissions at the Pentagon that colleage Shik Muhammad was waterboarded, we can infer that mister Bush knew he would be waterboarded and knew afterwards that he had been waterboarded. Mister Bush is guilty. He is guilty as sin. Mister President Elect, you were first asked about all this on the eighteenth of April last I am proud to say you were asked about it by a fellow who got onto his high school newspaper while I was the editor Will Bunch the Philadelphia Daily News. I think you are right you President elect Obama told him if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You are also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we have too many problems we have to solve. So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment unquote. Good amen, But in that brief interview was born, or at least elucidated, a loophole genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. Vice President elect Biden echoed this on December twenty first, in a statement to which your transition team has directed all those to whom this is a paramount issue. He said, the questions of whether or not a criminal act has been committed or a very very bad judgment has been engaged in is something the Just Department decides. After his comment last week with straightforwardness that was like water to a lost soul in the Sahara that waterboarding is torture, your nominee at Justice, mister Eric Holder, echoed all this. We don't want to criminalize policy differences that might exist between the outgoing administration and the administration that is about to take over. But mister President elect, you have a confession since this statement of a structure of policy prefacing policy itself for mister Biden, you have had mister Bush's confession. Moreover, since mister Biden's statement, you have a legal assessment from within the bowels of the Bush administration itself. Quote, we tortured Mohammad al Katani, Judge Susan Crawford told The Washington Post a week ago. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. That was why. Judge Crawford added that as the Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether or not to bring detainees at Guantanamo Bay in trial, she decided in Katani's case not too This, mister President elect, was not the obvious waterboarding of colleague Sheik Muhammad. This was a more insidious combination of legally approved procedures that still nearly killed this man Katani. The techniques were all authorized, Judge Crawford continued, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. This was not any one particular act. It was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him that hurt his health. In fact, mister President Elect, the records at GITMO showed that Katani's heart beat eventually slowed to thirty five beats per minute. Quote. It was abusive and uncalled for and coercive, clearly coercive. I sympathized with the intelligence gatherers in those days after nine to eleven, not knowing what was coming next, and trying to gain information to keep us safe. But there still has to be a love that we should not cross. Unfortunately, what this has done, I think has tainted everything going forward. Sadly, as commendable as the intention here might seem, this country has never moved forward without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past. In point of fact, every effort to merely draw a line in the sand and declare the past dead has served only to keep the past alive, and often to strengthen the past. We compromised with slavery in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, and four score and nine years later we had buried six hundred thousand of our sons and brothers in a civil war. After that war's ending, we compromised with the social restructuring and protection of the rights of the minorities in the South, and a century later we had not only not resolved anything, but black leaders were still being as assassinated in the cities of the South. We compromised with Germany in the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War. Nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war crimes trials then and nineteen years later there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heartrending Second World War. We compromised with the trusts of the early nineteen hundreds. Today we have corporations too big to fail. We compromised with the Palmer raids and got McCarthyism, and we compromised with McCarthyism and got Watergate. We compromised with Watergate, and junior members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately at risk, and they grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. But mister President elect, you are entirely correct as you say what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past. That means prosecuting all those involved in the Bush administration's torture of prisoners and starting at the top. You are also right that you should not want your first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt. But your only other option might be to let this set and fester indefinitely, because, mister President elect, someday there will be another Republican president, or even a Democrat, just as blind as mister Bush to ethics and to this country's moral force. He will look back to what you did about mister Bush, or what you did not do, and he will see precedent, or as Cheney saw, he will see how not to get caught next time. Prosecute, mister President elect. Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn. Merely by acting. You will deny mister Bush what he most wants right now, without prosecutions, without this nation standing up and saying this was wrong, we will atone. Mister Bush's version of what happened goes intoe. The historical record of this nation. Torture was legal, It worked, It saved the country. The end, we have tortured people, You and I, mister President elect. This is the people's democracy. We are the people. These were our elected officials. That they did not come to us and act thusly in our names is unfortunate and indeed criminal, but it is almost irrelevant. They worked for us, they tortured people, and so we have tortured people. Thus, beginning tomorrow, it is up to you not just to discontinue this, but to prevent it. At the end of his first year in office, mister Lincoln tried to contain, extualize the Civil War for those who still wanted to compromise with evils of secession and slavery. The struggle of today, Lincoln wrote, is not altogether for today, It is for a vast future. Also, mister President elect, you have been handed the beginning of that future. Use it to protect our children and our distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again. If you are worried about the Republicans viewing any torture prosecution in the way you postulated to Will Bunch a partisan witch hunt, you can remind them that the woman who said all that, Susan Crawford, is a lifelong Republican. So, mister President Elect, beyond whatever else will come out as the whistleblowers began to say what they're going to say just after noon tomorrow, you have your predecessor's unofficial confession, and you have this singular evaluation by a principle in your assessor's administration, this kind of line level confession. They are guilty of this, Mister President elect. They are guilty as sin. Since he talked to my friend Bunch in April, mister Obama's only lengthy comments about this were made to George Stephanopolis on January eleventh of this year. See if a disturbing theme becomes evident, Obviously we are going to look at past practices. I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. Later, my instinct is to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. Later, still, my orientation is going to be to move forward. Finally, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past, asked January nineteenth, two thousand and nine, on MSNBC, the night before Obama took office, imploring him to not let the legal violations of the torture statutes by the Bush administration go unpunished, in large part because it would warn all those to come that all they had to do was to act in some fashion that would cloak their sins as president or around the presidency, and they would not be prosecuted and could not be prosecuted. Before there was Supreme Court presidential immunity, there was de facto presidential immunity. And are we paying the price for it now? Because mister Obama was right. What we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past and doing that we got things wrong in the future. I'm not right, George Crowing A pleasure to have you here. Thank you. This is the best news show ever. I toil that to one of your producers, and I want you to know that I've seen them all and it's just for especially the first thirty five minutes. Thank you. It's just just unparalleled. I got bad news between you and I. We got six minutes to completely still that in here. That's good.

This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman.

This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman.

And, as promised in an almost completely ad libbed edition of The Big Show, a final comment about sports. You may or may not have heard about this. It is simply the most ridiculous idea I have heard proposed by anybody in any position of authority in any sport in my lifetime. And if I make it to the end of next month, I'll be sixty six years old. I've seen a lot of crap, and this is the worst. Surprisingly enough, it comes from a guy I went to college with, Robert Manfred, Commissioner of Baseball, the man they chose in order to make Bud Selig look like a Hall of Fame. Commissioner Rob Manfred has floated an idea of allowing once a game per team, in every baseball game, presumably during the regular season and in the postseason and in the World Series, to defy the primary cardinal rule of the game, thou shalt bat, in order he wants to have teams have a choice once again to have a golden at batch, a golden ball, a golden well, there's another word I'm thinking of now, but I'll leave it alone, But it would shower you with excitement. The golden ball would be an opportunity for a team to defy the batting order. If it says your worst hitter, the worst hitter of all time is up in the bottom of the ninth inning, with the winning run at second base, you have to have him hit or pinch it for him and remove him from the game. Those are the rules. They have been the rules since the beginning of time. It's not like basketball, and this is always one of the great selling points of the game. This and the fact that there's no clock, which they haven't mentioned in the last couple of years since they installed a clock. But the primary idea was you could not have Lebron James take every one of your crucial shots. Michael Jordan could have the ball at any time. Tom Brady would throw the ball every time, nearly every time the New England Patriots or his other teams needed him two. In hockey, the shot could always be taken by your best shooter. But in baseball, there are nine batters and how they come up, how you order them is the fundamental strategy of a game of baseball and thus a season of baseball, and Rob Manfred wants to change that once again. You can take out your worst hitter and have anybody you want hit for him at that moment. If you have the worst hitter on the Los Angeles Dodgers, Chris Taylor who bat it. I don't know. I believe the number was in negatives last year. If he's due up in that game winning situation, you can take him out and have show Hey Otani bat or anybody else you want. It's a total joke. It is a total prostitution of the point of baseball. The point of baseball is that in that clutch situation, your hero can only be the hero if it's his turn. The reason baseball has been part of America for two hundred years, almost one hundred and sixty years professionally is that it is that balance between the individual star and the team unit. You don't have the choice of giving that at bat to the best player. You can't have the best pitcher throw that one pitch for a variety of reasons. But in the situation with a hitter who could conceivably come up every day every year, you can't just say, Okay, I'm putting Chris Taylor on the bench just for this crucial moment and bringing in Babe Ruth. It can't do it, and he wants to do it now. There has been some version of this in which it would only be allowed in extra innings, which they've already destroyed by having a runner start each extra inning at second base with nobody out, because we want less baseball, not more. But this idea of having somebody be able to come in and hit in the clutch in that critical situation sounds great the way a three point contest in the middle of a baseball game would sound new and exciting and invigorating. Because we're losing the young people, we're not growing the game. There is an argument ongoing in New York between two of the primary announcers for the two teams, Michael Kay of the Yankees, who's been a friend of mine for about twenty five years, and Howie Rose of the Mets, who's been a friend of mine for about forty five years. And they have been going back and forth kind of inadvertently, because Michael thinks this is a way to grow the game and get youngsters interested in it, and how He, of course thinks it's completely crazy, and how he is right because among other things, and I haven't seen this emphasized, if they actually did this in one regular season game, where you could come in and have this guy bat during all games, not just extra inning games, and extra inning games average nine or ten percent a year. So there's every team plays about sixteen seventeen somewhere in there extra inning games a year. But if you could conceivably, in that clutch moment, have show Heyotani come in one hundred and sixty two extra times. And mind you, this is in addition to his other at bats. He could have just popped out to second base and then you give him another chance to give the get the winning run home from second. The same man could bat twice in a row, or you could bat him ahead of himself. Show Aotani is on deck, you could pinch it, show he Otani for the guy hitting ahead of shoe Heotani. It's literally a home run contest in the middle of a game that counts. It further dilutes the concept of baseball. But to the point I was just making one hundred and sixty two, theoretically extra at bats would be given to show Heyo Tani. What would happen to all the records? How many home runs would Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron, or for God's sakes, even Arry Bonds have hits if they had an extra one hundred and sixty two at bats every year. The numbers are meaningless. Now the statistics, the entire history, the contact between baseball and its past, would be totally obliterated, and it would be reduced to, as I said, a home running contest. The reason Michael Kay and others have pointed out that this needs to be done is that baseball is not getting the younger audience, even though the younger audience has increased on TV and radio in any event for baseball over the last couple of years. But the point is that it isn't growing the game, meaning that Michael and many other well intentioned baseball people have over the course of fifty years of the drip drip drip of this term, we're not growing the game. They've fallen victim to this nonsense. Growing the game is the owner's euphemism for we want more money. If you are a baseball fan, you should not and could not have any interest whatsoever in whether or not there are sixty and other people sitting in the ballpark with you or six. You should not care whether there are five million people watching baseball or fifty million baseball fans watching at the same time you are. There are certain important indicators as to the health of a game that those numbers reflect, but no teams are going out of business. The last baseball team that actually went bankrupt was in nineteen seventy. The Seattle Pilots went bankrupt, and the guy in Milwaukee who was thus able to obtain them and move them to Milwaukee, where they had become the Milwaukee Brewers by putting down something like ten thousand dollars of his own money, was a car salesman named Bud Selig, a commissioner of baseball who turned out to have a lot of millions of dollars because a team went bankrupt. No baseball teams are going bankrupt. The worst economic situations in Tampa in Oakland, these are still profit making operations, and any owner who's dissatisfied with how much money he makes can simply sell the team, probably ten to twenty times what he paid for it. Baseball teams are now worth a billion dollars each minimally, how much do you think the Boston Red Sox would get if you suddenly got tired of it? Because the game is not growing enough? And yes, maybe they'll come a day when franchises are worthless and owners make less, and so perhaps the teams will only be worth half a billion dollars in any event, This is not about improving the game or getting the youngsters, or having the Golden Ball, or seeing sho Heo Tani back five times a game rather than four and hit one hundred and thirty three home runs in a season and finish second in the National League with that number. That's not what this is about. This is about getting the owners more money. And it's moronic, and everybody buying into it doesn't even see that they're just serving rich people to help them get richer. It is part of a fundamental issue of what's wrong with this country. We began to fetishize not people having money. There's nothing wrong with people having money. I encourage people to have money. I have money myself to have more money. I often take the opportunity to get more money. But when that becomes the only thing in life, as I've said many times in the nineteen seventies, business coverage investment, the Wall Street Markets and such business coverage on television in this country, other than in the event of economic crashes or depression or price controls. Like Richard Nixon put in, the economic coverage on television consisted of Walter Cronkite somewhere in the middle of the show, just before the second or third commercial on the CBS Evening News saying Wall Street closed, mostly higher today and relatively active trading. This was the CBS Evening News. That was it. There were no networks devoted to business coverage. There was no lionization of great investors or inventors. There was nobody interested in who the hell Warren Buffett was. And yes, these men were important behind the scenes, but then they'll die the day to day lives of ordinary Americans. They didn't amount to a rat's ass. Collectively, owners in baseball were known only when they screwed things up or move their teams to other cities. Walter O'Malley became famous for being hated. And now we are relatively ready to have the commissioner baseball, who by the way, went to the Industrial and Labor Relations College at Cornell where he studied how to screw labor rob Manfred wants to make them even more money because they're not making more money faster enough, instead of doing what previous owners and commissioners have done. When the profit margins were not one hundred and seventy eight percent every year. They've done sillier things in the past. They used to just simply add another team and charge some idiot two billion dollars for a team that didn't exist. The Tampa Bay Rays, the Arizona Diamondbacks exist because previous owners in the nineteen eighties tried to knock down the prices of salaries. This was the price that Baseball paid for the owner's collusion. Again, the owners screwing up, and now they want to complete destroy the uniqueness of the game another one of its ten or twelve unique elements that separates it from basketball, that separates it from hockey, that separates it from football, that separates it from soccer. They want to take away the point, the difficulty. They want to dumb it down. The Golden rule, the Golden at bat, the Golden I don't know, the Golden corral. Its nonsensical, stupid, destructive, and Baseball should fire its commissioner immediately for even giving voice to it. And your understanding of the crux of the problem in baseball is in this this commissioner. The previous commissioner was a baseball fan who used to go to baseball games and enjoy baseball, and he had many stupid, mistaken ideas, and he had a vanity the size of ten knees. But he liked baseball, and he wanted to see good baseball. I have no idea if Rob Manfred likes baseball or not, but I would like to see an adaptation of his rule. I'd like to have a golden Commissioner moment in which, in a matter of a clutch situation, once in every big decision, I could swap him out and put in the best commissioner I had, which in this case would be anybody but him. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening to this unusual edition of Countdown where I could barely see anything written in front of me other than some very large font notes. And again, how did you do the Obama special comment from two thousand and nine? I recorded that earlier. In any event, you know the credits. Brian Ray and John Phillip Scheneil do the music, and there's Nancy Faust with the special pithy musical comments. And the sports music is from ESPN two by Mitch Warren Davis, and some other music in there is from No Horns Allowed. In any event, I did write this number down in big letters on the door to the studio, five hundred and nine days until the scheduled end of the Lane Duck presidency of Lame Donald Duck. The next scheduled countdown is Sunday. We'll see or possibly maybe we won't see. Wish me luck. My vision is not in jeopardy. It's just that I can't really see and I'm supposed to not be doing this, So don't tell doctor Renee Richards. Thank you in the interim bulletins, as the news warrants, as long as I can find my own studio till the next time, whenever that is. I'm Keith Aulderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.