Countdown With Keith Olbermann, S2E171: Trump Didn’t Sleep Through That, Huh?

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• SPECIAL COMMENT: First of several under-emphasized meta-headlines from Stormy Daniels’ testimony: Trump’s lawyer Ms. Necklace seems to have made inroads in her effort to convince the jury that Ms. Daniels would say or do almost anything for money. Uh, she’s a pornographic actress. Whether you approve that profession, or abhor it, or like me you’re agnostic: one statement should not be among those you express in shock or dismay or surprise: “Oh no, she’s a pornographic actress, she will do or say almost anything for money.”
• Which leads to the next meta headline. My GOD the media, especially the television networks, treated her testimony like they were cicadas and Stormy Daniels was the ring girl who stepped between the ropes to announce the start of year 13. My GOD they all awoke from somnambulance about bank records and cell phone extractions and the testimony of comptrollers and people named RONA and were able to say — at least to themselves — good grief, get a load of those rebuttals.
• Which leads into the next meta headline: Stormy Daniels is not on trial here. She’s only incidental to the case. That is NOT what you would have thought if you watched coverage of this case. The sex isn’t illegal, the money isn’t illegal, Trump isn’t illegal, Daniels changing her story isn’t illegal. Buying her story to keep it from becoming public in the weeks before an election and then hiding the payoffs to prevent THEM from becoming public in the weeks before an election — THAT’S illegal and all those boring receipts and records and notations written by hand by a guy named Allan — with TWO L’S — THAT is the case. And denying it as Trump has — LYING about it, as Trump has — is why Stormy Daniels is there. To testify.
• I have to admit I was a little surprised by the last headline. If the Monday juxtaposition of Trump Maybe Going To Jail Over The Gag Order and Kristi Noem Quintuples Down On The Idea That Shooting Puppies In The Face Is A Good Thing underscored how MAGA believes it has the right to kill, then YESTERDAY’S juxtaposition of Noem’s disastrous media tour — more on that shortly — and Trump On Trial underscored that these really deeply disturbed, borderline personalities, do NOT do well when confronted with reality from which they cannot run and they cannot hide.
• And then there’s Noem, who got beaten up on Fox by my old friend Stu Varney and, stunningly, on Newsmax. But it’s all right, she still thinks she’s killing it. Yeah, the way his presidential roll-out killed it for Greg Stillson.

The rest of the podcast is a repeat of the B-Block and C-Block from yesterday, about Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile.

Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck.