EPISODE 109: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: We're really doing "But Hillary's Emails" again, huh, CNN? Huh, NBC? Huh, CBS? Huh, New York Times? Huh, Washington Post? THE HELL WE ARE. CBS's website broke the story accurately ("Documents MARKED classified...found at Biden's think tank") and then Norah O'Donnell dropped the caveats and mitigations and tarted the story up. The Post bothsidesed and whataboutismed the Biden story, invoking Trump in the subhead. The Times comped Trump in Paragraph 5. And worst of all, an hour after CNN broke a genuinely important story: Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaing Rudy Giuliani in the Trump Post-Election "Save America PAC" Fundraising crimes, what did Anderson Cooper lead with? His network's own, important, resonating scoop? Nope. The Paste Eaters of CNN buried their own scoop - six nights before their Giuliani Documentary Series starts, too! - so television's longest-running failed marketing experience Anderson Cooper could alter the facts and mislead the nation by saying "Turns out the former president is not the only one with a classified documents problem. The CURRENT president has one as well." Sure, Coop. If a Swiss Army knife is the same as Jack The Ripper's Murder Weapon.

Fire. Them. All.

B-Block (20:02) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL PART 1: That "bronchial thing" turned out to be a sinus infection, but happily in September I brought you the career story that fits perfectly this descent into "But Her Emails 2". I would've just re-read it anyway: It was June 5, 1998, when I tried to quit as the anchor of MSNBC's top Clinton-Lewinsky-Starr show and two NBC News executives asked me to see an NBC official as part of a process to leave the network - except she turned out to be their leg-breaker and told me NBC versus me would be "David and Goliath" and NBC would crush me.

C BLOCK (33:35) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL PART 2: But it was even worse: she promised that if I quit, NBC would put my parents "out on the street." That's how closely Ken Starr forged the link between his live made-for-tv political reality show and the profits at all the networks.

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