The Press Box - Keith Olbermann on Political Commentary and Mitt Romney. Plus, Failed October Surprises.

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker break down the top Failed October Surprises, ranging from Hunter Biden’s emails to a Benghazi conspiracy theory. Then, Listener Mail, when they address the most pressing questions regarding the restaurant Ruby Tuesday. Then Keith Olbermann joins to discuss his political commentary on YouTube and how he got denounced by Senator Mitt Romney. Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, at his first rally after being stricken with the coronavirus, Donald Trump told the audience this, I feel so powerful. I'll walk into that audience. I'll walk in there. I'll kiss everyone in that audience. I'll kiss the guys and the beautiful women. Everybody.

I'll just give you a big, fat kiss. What I want to know is, if you happen to be at that Trump rally audience, how would you avoid a Donald Trump kiss? It sounds like a, like a dare, right? Or like, I mean, he's like, he's threatening you. Yes. I mean, it's almost like when you were like a, you know, whatever, a teenager or it's happened to me like my freshman year of college.

And every, every argument in the dorm ended with just like this same jackass trying to make like a $5,000 bet on the subject knowing that no one could ever could ever match that amount of money. Yeah, I mean, listen, he's just saying it because he knows no one in the world is going to call him on it. No one's going to accept that kiss. I don't think, I mean, you know, he does seem to be hailing hardy, or at least haylor and hardier than he was, you know, not too long ago. But I wouldn't be too concerned about Trump catching me in a foot race. So I think I think that, you know, I think I would just use the alligator technique, right? If I just run in zigzags, then he would be perplexed. We know that Trump is a creature of an earlier period of American culture.

And I couldn't help but think that Trump was inspired by Richard Dawson, the old host of the family feud. Remember he used to go down the row kissing all the women, you know, and really Trump kind of wants to be the Richard Dawson of politics. Yes. I think that's kind of where we are in 2020. And you know what? I encourage Donald Trump to pursue his cosplay of former game show host because that is not going to win the election. Today on the press box, David, failed October surprises, your listener mail, and Keith Olderman. Yeah, Keith Olberman.

All that and more, right after these messages. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. Did you feel this week, David, that media Twitter was like that gift from Mad Max Fury Road? The one that says, that's bait. That's bait. As in bait for political reporters who want to be back-breakingly fair. about this election. Mm-hmm.

Who don't want to get accused of ignoring a Joe Biden scandal, even though Joe Biden is 9,000 percent less corrupt than Donald Trump. I think we can group a bunch of the events of this last week under the heading of failed October surprises. All right. Trump gets the coronavirus. That's a classic election upending October surprise. Oh, yeah.

Trump paid $750 in taxes. Yeah, right? That's good. these stories will probably not turn out to be that. So here is failed October surprise number one. On Wednesday, the New York Post published a but-his-emails article about Joe Biden. More to the point, Hunter Biden. In a purported email and advisor to the board of Burisma, that's the company Hunter Biden worked for,

supposedly wrote, quote, Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to D.C. and giving me an opportunity to meet your father. Okay. Well, here's the thing, David. the New York Post published PDF printouts of several emails, but for the email in question, it shows only a photo made the day before the story was posted. The Washington Post tried to but could not authenticate that email.

Also, they found out that the emails were given to the New York Post by, wait for it, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. There is also, and I don't even know if we want to get into this, this incredible backstory where the emails are purportedly obtained from a laptop that Hunter Biden left behind in a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. I'm already confused. I guess this is my question for you. If you are a straight reporter, a not Fox News Trump World reporter, what do you do with a story like this?

How do you treat it? I don't know. I mean, it's a tough call because on the one hand, you don't, if you're skeptical of it, I think the right thing to do would be to ignore it. but if you're utterly skeptical of it, I should say. But, you know, doing a little, if you do the write-around where you say you report on the story and not on the content, then that could be seen as being sort of dismissive or demeaning in either direction, sort of, right?

I mean, if the story turns out to be true, then you just did, you clearly avoided reporting on it, or just from the people, from the Trump side, from the, you know, from the side of Trump, in the position of Trump voters, it seems like you're ignoring an important story. And then from the side of Biden voters or the Biden campaign, you're giving credence to the story. You're giving it oxygen,

even if you're being skeptical of it. So it's a tough decision. I do want to say, though, I mean, I feel like I made this point a while ago, I mean, a couple weeks ago, you know, it used to be that when you wanted to err, when you wanted to tar somebody with lies, or with just like utter falsehoods,

you would do it in, if not a more delicate way, a more conniving way, right? I mean, if you're like, with the Bush campaign like furtively circulated leaflets about John McCain in South Carolina, we don't even know for sure that they did it,

but the kind of implication that they did it persisted or whatever, and we just sort of let that, we'll leave it there. Now Trump is just like, can you print me up some leaflets so that I can wave them around online, right? I mean, it's it's, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, you and I have talked over the past year about how, about how, about the sort of conservative online, you know, libelous storymaking machine where like one person says something on Twitter and then it becomes a, it becomes a post on gateway pundit and it works this way of the food change to some, some, you know, some, you know, specter of legitimacy or whatever, but this is that in real life, you know, and not even in skipping all the steps. just, oh, Rudy Giuliani is going to take this lie and give it to the New York Post,

and now we all have to talk about it. I mean, it's, it's in, it's crazy, but it's functional. And now we are talking about it. Yeah, I totally second your point about the obviousness of it. Donald Trump on Twitter and seemingly every speech saying, you know what, the media should cover that crooked Hunter Biden. They should, they should write about Hunter Biden and all the terrible things he's done. Oh, oh, what have we here? Just the story I've been asking for. That really does on its face make its suspect.

I do feel a twinge. And I totally get the point about amplifying this that people have been making. I think Maggie Haberman, it's usual, just bears the brunt of every one of these Twitter things. But I do feel a twinge because I was just looking through some of the big political reporters Twitter feeds last night and just look at their mentions.

It is all right wingers tweeting this story. Why won't you talk about Hunter Biden and the emails? Why are you not covering this? And these are people that aren't even on this beat. It's like I just wrote a story about Arizona. Why aren't you writing about Hunter Biden in the emails? So they are in this just wacko pressure cooker. And again, they don't want to miss anything, right?

There may be like a 5% chance that this story pans out. But it's not zero. It's like Trump's chances to win the election, right? It's not zero. So you're looking at it and you're like, eh, eh, you know, do I even, even to, as you say, even just to question it, it's a tough one. Before we move on to Twitter and everything else, I want to ask you for a little bit of a newsroom perspective.

If you are one of these journalists, and obviously everybody's different, and this is maybe a minor point in the grand scheme of things. when you look at this story, how much does it play into your perception of the story that the writer is like a former Hannity producer with no other bylines in the New York Post? I mean, obviously, I don't know what this says about the New York Post

if it's worse to give someone, you know, this sort of person with this resume, a platform at such a pivotal time on the front page, blah, blah, blah. Or if taking at face value, if they really believe that this trove was legit, that they don't have a higher level reporter that they would team this person up with on the story. You know, I mean, the hierarchy seems sort of skewed.

But like how much of that, I feel like that's kind of a Twitter conversation, but it must have more salience to other reporters, right? When they see that that's the kind of oddity of all that. Absolutely. I think it's, I think it's the number one thing you think about. When you see something shocking reported, the first thing I do is I look at the byline, whether it's politics or sports or whatever it is. and that's the way that's the way you sort of say oh wow this is probably true or almost certainly true because I trust that person and that person knows the difference between something that's real and something that might not be real or something that is 100% real and something that is you know close enough so yeah absolutely in newsrooms I think they're probably all they all go out and look at this and try to match it right you know somebody somebody at every major news organization is like okay like

let's see if this is real, right? Let's see it. Let's check this out. And it seems like as of yet, they have not found that it is something that they want to, you know, that's either either 100% true or very important. Yeah. Well, that's a good point. I think it's all byline.

It really is. And the news organization. I mean, I think that no matter how, you know, I say this sarcastically, no matter how skewed that politics are at the times of the post or whatever else, have you. came to them with an actual email that showed Hunter Biden, you know, trading on his father's role in the White House. And it can be proven out. The New York Times would write about that. Hell yes.

If they got the primary sources, if they, if this person, if the, if Giuliani had gone to the Times of the Post instead of, I mean, the Times of Washington Post, instead of the New York Post, a million percent they would have reported on it. So the fact that they went to it, this paper has got to, you know, raise some eyebrows, too. we should get into the social media part of this because both Facebook and Twitter tried to prevent the spread of this story, at least somewhat. Facebook's algorithm lowered the placement of the story on feeds while Twitter blocked links to the story altogether. You saw some political reporters experimenting with trying to tweet it and it didn't work. Twitter's safety team tweeted that the piece included, quote, personal and private information like email addresses and phone numbers, which violate our rules. That then prompted us into this feedback loop where Donald Trump has done. announcing social media and everybody on social media is having this big argument about whether

that's the right thing for Twitter to do, right, or the wrong thing for Twitter to do. I love this Ben Smith tweet. He says, if, by the way, Biden's goal is to allow Trump and the media to devour one another in incomprehensible conversations about Twitter while he talks to voters through TV ads about health care, then there goes another day or two. Yeah, I mean, I think Ted Cruz has already threatened to call Jack Dorsey. before Congress to defend this plan. Who was it? I got to check my...

Oh, yeah, Josh Barrow made probably an easy overworked Twitter joke, but I laughed out loud when he said, Mr. Dorsey, remember your under oath. Do retweets constitute endorsements, yes or no. But, yeah, I mean, it's... It is a crazy boondoggle. It is a real boondoggle for the Trump campaign. And yet, I mean, as the...

the past month has shown us, uh, COVID infection aside, Trump seems to be responding to, and maybe it's not the past month, the past four years. Trump seems to respond to any, anytime he feels like he's losing, he always says, well, you got to let me get back. You got to let Trump be Trump, right? Which is a very common refrain in all politics, but no one has ever stopped Trump from being Trump, right? No. Trump, Trump, Trump retreating to his comfort zone is not going to help him win an election necessarily, right? I mean, and, uh, and, and, and, and I think that Ben's is right. As long as Trump is yelling at Jack Dorsey online and talking about section 230 and all this kind of stuff, I think it's a win for the Biden campaign. Failed October surprise number

two, David. Dueling TV town halls. Now, you'll notice that you and I right now are not having a debate reaction pot. We would like to be having a debate reaction pot, but we can't because there's no debate. Trump, who may or may not still have coronavirus, refuse to do a virtual debate with Biden. So immediately, Biden said, okay, we'll do a town hall on ABC, 8 to 930 tonight. But it turns out that team Trump was also in talks to schedule a town hall on NBC. So now at 8 o'clock, both candidates will be doing town halls, which gives Trump a chance to do what he loves, which is obsess about TV rating. We touched on this a little bit in the last episode. It's still just unbelievable.

It's an unbelievable choice by Trump to say, aha, aha, I will turn down a televised high-stakes debate with 60 million plus viewers. I will turn down the opportunity to destroy Joe Biden on the debate stage. Instead, I will obliquely refer to Joe Biden from a separate stage with many, many, many, many less viewers. Yeah, we're assuming there. there's going to be fewer viewers because there have been previous town halls from both candidates. Guarantee. There's zero. This is like saying. And the crazy, I mean, it's just a huge number of viewers from the last debate. So I think that that's a guarantee. You're right. Although, you know, flipping channels worked for pro wrestling in the 90s. So, you know, we'll see. A slightly smaller scale, but yeah. But it is, it is very interesting. And you know if Trump loses. I mean, I think we can all probably expect Trump.

I'm just going to do better because there's certainly more of a wildcard factor there. But if you were to lose, you know, the first thing he's going to do is blame the lead-in, right? He's going to blame NBC's Thursday night program or Thursday evening programming rather than, rather than, you know, anything that's going on vis-a-vis him and his competition. It is, it is very strange. I don't, I don't even know, I don't even know quite what to make him. I mean, like, without, this is a, we didn't know how to really preview the first debate. And this is even more of uncharted territory than that, right?

I mean, presumably they won't be able to respond to one another even indirectly. But, I mean, that is going to be how people are going to be watching it. So it's going to be a very novel experience. Yeah. Are we going to have a version of the thing they do in the halls of Congress where they show the senators something Trump just tweeted? Are we going to, is George Stephanopoulos or Savannah Guthrie going to be like, we have something from your opponent on the other network that we'd like you to go ahead and respond to.

The funny thing about the ratings thing is that, let's say nobody watches Joe Biden's. I mean zero people. You know who wins in that exchange? Joe Biden. Yeah. He's up 10 points. He is sitting on a potential Obama in 2008

electoral college landslide. You don't want people scrutinizing what you say in a national television audience. You really don't care at this point. No, I was trying to kind of game out. I mean, my first reaction when I was looking at this or one of my reactions was that it felt like that I could kind of foresee the headlines and I was, or the Twitter reactions and I felt like the loudest reactions were going to be George Stephanopoulos is being mean to Joe Biden and Donald Trump is being mean to Savannah Guthrie.

Like I felt like those were going to be like the two things that people were going to come away from. I'm not even sure how to game out what Stephanopoul is being mean to Biden means for Joe Biden. I think it's probably a net negative, but I don't know, you're right. I mean, I think that people not paying attention is probably better for him. I think the idea that he opens himself up to questions from Stephanopoulos and from, you know, voters and everything else. And as long as, again, he doesn't trip and fall in his face, then it's a victory for Biden.

Absolutely. Absolutely. By the way, Fanduel just took off, took Trump will be mean to Savannah Guthrie off the They're not taking bets. It was too easy. All right, David, failed October surprise number three. Remember the plot to kidnap Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer? Oh, man.

Any normal newsie or right, that is the biggest possible story, an American governor potentially being kidnapped? Well, the FBI reported on Tuesday that some of the people allegedly involved in that plot had also talked about taking, quote-unquote, Virginia governor Ralph Northam. This is how the White House responded. Governor Whitmer and now Governor Northam are sowing division by making these outlandish accusations, says Kaylee McInananey. America stands united against Hayden in support of our federal law enforcement who stopped this plot. Absolutely incredible tweet by Dave Weigel.

Did you see this? No. It says, unfortunately for the plotters, Ralph Northam is a master of disguise. Because remember that unfortunate news story. Failed October surprise number four, David. The Benghazi blood sacrifice. No, we're not kidding. On Tuesday, Donald Trump retweeted two tweets connected to a far-right conspiracy, which alleges,

and we think we've got this right. Osama Bin Laden's body double was killed in 2011. Right. Four Americans were killed in 2012 in the Benghazi attack to cover up the blood sacrifice of Navy SEALs. And Biden and Hillary Clinton arranged for a Navy SEAL helicopter to be shut down to

keep the truth about the raid from getting out. A reference to a real world helicopter attack in Afghanistan that killed 38 people, including several Navy SEALs. Okay. I love that Biden and Hillary are the two of everybody else and they could possibly be involved.

Just the convenience of Biden and Hillary is great. I'm surprised that the Falconer or whoever put this thing forward didn't include like his cruel landlord in the conspiracy the conspiratority committee there but yeah it's a it is a it's hilarious I mean I just don't even know what else to say

this is this is what rises to the level of the I guess online presidential discourse now it's it's wild and we by the way the dude's name is parrot parrot I don't want to scoop past this. Alan Howl Parrot.

Yeah, yeah. His name is Parrot. But he chose a different, a different bird to commit his life to. So he is a falconer named Parrot. Yes. Okay. I know after the whole JFK, Ted Cruz's dad thing, that we should never rule anything out of any election. But I did not think Osama Bin Laden body double would make an appearance in the 2020 presidential campaign.

no i mean it's listen we all know trump is reckless he retweets conspiracy theories with even greater recklessness than he does other things i mean he just sees you know a like-minded person saying something nutty and he'll just put that out for all the world to see but just just wow the real loser here was that was this navy seal who did i should say purportedly kill osama bin laden who's a huge trump supporter and had to spend like the past 72 hours on twitter defending him himself against other Trumpy and Qanani, like, you know, Twitter talking, you know, Twitter trolls who are insisting that he's part of the cover up. Did the, did the seal call this worse than Watergate?

When you break out the old Carl Bernstein thing? Worse than Watergate, the accusation that I really didn't kill Osama bin Laden. Oh, my God. All right, David, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same. same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. To repeat

David, tonight Joe Biden will not debate Donald Trump because Donald Trump canceled the debate. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, Joe Biden needs to be careful. I saw Clint Eastwood debate an empty chair once and lose. Thanks to Ruben

Alonzo. By the way, another story because our politics is so absolutely insane that has been forgotten. Clint or largely forgotten Clinton Eastwood empty chair moment at the 2012 Republican convention. What the hell was that? David, on October 9th, Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo went on Fox News to talk about Hillary Clinton's emails. State of this investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails at the State Department.

So, Dana, you'll remember I was close to this, even when I was a member of Congress, when I served down the Benghazi Committee now, what seems like a little bit time ago. we've got the emails. We're getting them out. We're going to get all this information out so the American people can see it. You'll remember there was classified information on a private server. It should have never been there. Hillary Clinton should never have done that. It was unacceptable behavior. It was an overword Twitter joke to write, wow, this is really going to hurt Hillary Clinton's chances to become president. Thanks to Leif Bidenson and Corporate Mark. And finally, David, it's almost too easy to make fun of the website, the Federalist, the thirstiest. of Donald Trump. But attention must be paid to this headline from October 5th, quoting here,

how strong women like Amy Coney Barrett submit to their husbands with joy. That is a real headline. How strong women like Amy Coney Barrett submit to their husbands with joy. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, wait, who is joy? Oh, wow.

If you found a new way to tweak the Federalist. genuine congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, time for the notebook dump. But first, a quick break for these messages. All right, in the notebook dump, let us do some listener mail, my friend. First one comes from Dave Shockey. I'm interested in your thoughts on Nate Silver.

He seems to hold a new position as election poll, a data analysis guy. People name drop Nate Silver's statements as a definitive on the state of the race. What do we think about Nate Silver, circa 2020? and how his sort of place in political media has changed. Oh, yeah. People, I mean, his name carries a lot of weight. His kind of public personality, public persona, I think contributes to that, right? I mean, he sort of is like top editing, 538 pieces live on Twitter, you know, explaining

the publication, explaining polls, explain, you know, kind of just sort of dropping in to, you know, add further to add tiny bits to the discourse so on the one hand it seems like a lot of the stuff that he spends his time with this kind of small bore but that's exactly what Nate Silver is right

to be sort of meticulously interested in the details makes you sort of more believable or legitimate as the numbers guy it does feel I mean like he's sort of as zoomed out

as as Nate Silver could ever be, right? It feels, I'm sure he's deeply involved with everything that 538 does and so many other things. But, you know, he's operating in it from a different place than he was four or eight years ago, for sure. What do you think? It's maybe a quirk of 2020, but he tweeted the other day that the conventional wisdom about this election and how it's going basically matches the polling 100%. You know, we've had other times where people look at the polls like, I don't believe that. You know, I don't believe that's the state of the race. I believe Hillary Clinton's leading by more or less or whatever it is.

He's like basically everybody watching this race kind of agrees with the polling. Well, yeah, I mean, on the one hand, we're, we have two campaigns that are about as transparent as they can be. And the contest is, is maybe working more on a surface level than some previous campaigns. I mean, on the other hand, part of this is a great, you know, is part of the contribution that Nate Silver and his ilk have made to our culture. Like, everybody's is tapped into the sort of higher level polling. And I mean, the conventional wisdom is based on the polling. I mean, the things are utterly interchangeable now. Yes.

I mean, the information comes so fast and furious compared to previous elections. I mean, it's shocking now to think that it's faster than it was four years ago. But you talked about the failed October surprises. I mean, some of those are pretty laughable, but we're also operating in a world where these October surprises just sort of like roll, you know, just roll away like water off a duck's back, you know? I mean, there's so much information coming that even something that's supposed to be, quote, unquote, like, earth shattering can just, quote, to be displaced by a new Monmouth pole, you know, or like, and as we digest that into this larger fabric of what's going on, I mean, I just don't think, I think that there's a lot of ways that it's right that, well, I mean, that he's right. I mean, that this is, this, this, this, this is the conventional wisdom. the polling or running parallel. I think he can take credit for that. That was the funny one of those, it's Cal Cunningham, the Senate candidate in North Carolina, who's trying to get, trying to unseat Tom Tillis, right? He had this sexting scandal. And everybody went, oh, my gosh, right? Here's a seat that Democrats thought they were going to pick up.

He's been leading in most of the polls. And then all of a sudden, the new polls came out, and Cal Cunningham was farther ahead in some polls after the sexting scandal. And it just kind of rerout it. Like, everybody was ready to write, oh, my gosh. this guy did this incredibly dumb and goofy thing, and he is going to maybe lose the Senate for the Democrats. And then as soon as everybody saw those polls, he went, eh, maybe not.

And it's sort of just reoriented coverage. This is also from listener corporate Mark, his second contribution to this podcast, he is now two thirds of the way to the Oxford comma. Corporate Mark writes, I have a question about Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings. If instead of the theatrics or saying, I can't speak to hypotheticals,

to every question, She simply said, yes, I would overturn Roe versus Wade in the Affordable Care Act. Would she not get the same exact number of yes votes to be confirmed? It's such an interesting thing because I feel like going back to the 80s, people like Mike Kinsley were writing about this weird thing of Supreme Court hearings where you have to pretend that you have no idea how you would rule on all these things that you clearly have an idea about how you would rule on. And what Mark is saying here is that like, and that's just kind of part of the

and that's what gets you through the confirmation. He's saying, what if she just dispensed with all that? Wouldn't the exact same number of Republicans vote for her if she said, hell yes, I'm going to strike down Roe versus Wade? Then if she went through this elaborate thing where she can't be pinned down? I mentioned this last week, I think. It's a, it's a kind of unbelievable place that the Republican Party has found itself, has placed itself, and that they're on the precipice of these incredible victories.

on the judiciary level, but in general, that they've been gaming for for such a long time. Yes. But they've been so deceptive about whether or not those are their motives that they can't say it out loud, even though, I mean, it would not affect how many votes you got in the Senate in theory, but could the Republican Party run with their, like, national platform being that we're overturning Roe and getting rid of the Affordable Care Act? I mean, I think that the Senate would just be a landslide in the Democrats' favor, right? Because even though every, you know, you and I can say that every thinking person knows that's the goal, the dog whistle kind of works both ways, right?

Like, you can dog whistle to the people who are really, who are really, you know, the ultra-conservative people who want to get rid of Roe versus Wade. And you can give them, you know, at this point, you kind of, you were a little bit beyond the whistling. You got to give them what they want. But you also have to, when you dog whistle somebody that we will get rid of this stuff, but I'm not going to say it out loud, what you're saying to the other constituency that votes for you is,

well, we don't take it that seriously or we would say it out loud, right? So it's a really interesting, I mean, it's a really bizarre, it's a great question. It's a bizarre situation. To ask, why won't they say it? Why won't they, she just say it? Or why won't the Republicans in general just say it?

Yeah, I mean, I think that they've either gotten so used to not to not saying anything directly that they feel like they can't or probably more practically they know if they said it aloud that they would all all all the senators and congressmen would lose their elections too absolutely this is from elizabeth gardner what are your plans to vote early by mail or in person on november 3rd uh in person i just moved to the state of new jersey and uh several months ago and um uh we had made plans to vote by mail But then we're encouraged by our fine president to vote in person. Because I do believe that our, that election day results are going to matter a whole lot to, well, the narrative of nothing else.

And so, you know, we'll be masking up and going down the street and casting votes in real time, maybe waiting in line for a long time to do it. I just voted yesterday. You know, California has the mail the ballot to everybody thing. So you just get it. So, yeah, I filled it out last night and taking it to a drop box. So it can be one of the real drawboxes or one of the fake ones. I don't know. It was a guy with a Make America Great Again sticker on his box.

And he was kind of luring me over, you know. Kind of like when you go to a sporting event, they're trying to get you to park in somebody's yard or a strip mall, you know, they had the flags. He just seemed trustworthy. I don't know. Should I not have given him my ballot? Made sure to tell him, you know, who I was voting for too. But the fake drawbox thing is an utter, I mean, it's just evil and terrible. And I hope people go to jail for a long time to do it.

But I do love that this is what this election has come down to is people like putting vote here signs on trash cans and, you know, hoping for the best. This is from Jeff Hekelman, our pal. He draws us, draws our attention to the lead paragraph of the week, David. It's from a guardian story about Brazilian president, Haire Bolsonaro. I'm going to quote to you the lead paragraph, quote, Bolsonaro's efforts to portray himself as an anti-corruption crusader have suffered another blow after police reportedly seized a wad of banknotes from between the clenched buttocks of one of his allies. First of all, very just the facts, funnyly, you didn't really need to try to do a joke there or anything. but I do love the efforts to portray himself as an anti-corruption crusader

you're leading the reader, right? He was all ready to convince us of that until they found the banknotes and the clinched buttocks of one of his allies. I appreciate Jeff Heckelman for drawing my attention to that because I had not actually seen it. I'm a little bit confused

about how Bolsonaro, with all of his power, allowed this to take place and why the butt cheeks were the, or the clinched buttocks were the best place to be hiding banknot. I mean, at that point, it's like, once the police come doesn't, aren't you less guilty if you're just holding the banknotes in your hands,

you know, or like you have them in your wallet or something? I don't, I feel like you could have something totally legal clenched in your buttocks and having it there sort of gives it all the illegitimacy that, that, you know, anyone could want. I feel there's a,

uh, there's a strain pun headline just waiting to be written for this story that wasn't actually on this story. I mean, dirty money would be the kind of base effort, right? But this money definitely needs to be laundered. Probably another. Anyway, thanks to, thanks to Jeff and also Tom Phillips at the Guardian who wrote that lead. Finally, David, remember the most important question in the universe this podcast is considered?

What exactly is Ruby Tuesday, which recently declared bankruptcy? And how is it appreciably different than TGI Fridays? We have answers from the press box crew. this is from Daniel Cain I bartended at both rubies and Fridays Rubies is a scratch kitchen like hulahans or Maggianos Fridays basically reheats things

lots of glorified microwaving and frying the proteins at rubies are a great bang for your buck fresh salad bar all fresh ingredients reasonable prices that's why they couldn't hang on okay uh Mr Cain I am I feel smarter for knowing this a lot of some people that texted or tweeted us

about the salad bar, which is... Yes, that's their calling card, apparently. Yeah, I'm sorry that I didn't know about that. I wish I had. I would always like to check out a salad bar. Since my days growing up at the windy salad bar, I'm always happy to check those things out. This does sound like Ruby's is, you know,

significantly more enticing than Fridays. But Daniel Kane bartended at both these places and failed to answer my question about whether there was a Ruby Rita or some, you know, some top of the menu drink that I should be showing up for. David, we actually have an answer to that question. it's from Andrew Schaffer, who is the New York Times bestselling author of Hope Never Dies and Obama Biden mystery. Remember that? Yes.

That was so awesome. Yeah. He writes, Ruby Tuesdays has a Ruby relaxer cocktail. The Ruby Relaxer. Perfect for downing as you eat your way through their excellent salad bar. The rye bread croutes are the real standout here, though. Oh, I am familiar with the rye bread croutons.

The Ruby relaxer, on the other hand, sounds... like something they might need to revisit the name of if they if they go back into business. By the way, I was not, I'm not familiar with the term scratch kitchen and I'm guessing that everybody else in the world is. It sounds like a really great like old school hip hop podcast or something, but I just Googled it and realized for the first time that Cheddar's has renamed itself Cheddar Scratch Kitchen. Oh, instead of Cheddar's casual cafe. See, that I knew weirdly. And I have with my wife made fun of the Scratch Kitchen, you know, designation on Cheddars.

One more on this topic from Ben. I used to go to Ruby Tuesdays with my family every Tuesday. I know. Back in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Their signature appetizer was their French onion soup, actually. Just covered in cheese and bread, I bet it was at least 3,000 calories. See, now we have to go. I hate French onion soup, but my wife loves it.

So maybe we can go find a Ruby Tuesdays that's so open. Ruby Relaxer, French onion soup, and Scratch Kitchen. Folks. Salad bar. Yeah, salad bar. That's what you don't, don't say you didn't learn anything on the press box podcast. David, when I saw a particular news story this week, I knew I had to act immediately. The news story was Mitt Romney calling out Keith Olberman in a statement.

So we had to call Keith to get his reaction. Wow, wow, wow. Keith Olberman. All right, Keith Olberman, you moved from ESPN to YouTube to do political commentary. and it took all of four shows for Mitt Romney to denounce you. Romney equated you to Donald Trump and the most powerful politicians in America, and here's part of your response. ... a terrorist, Trump, Governor Michigan, Biden, Pelosi,

Olberman. One of these things is not like the other. I just want to clarify it here. I am not affiliated with any political party. I don't work for any news or commentary outlet, and I have not been elected to any office. but I did stay at a holiday express last night. When you see Mitt Romney put out that statement,

Keith, what's the first thing that goes through your mind? They never learn. This is, you know, Bill O'Reilly in 2003. And going back to my local news days in Los Angeles, it's Fred Rogan in 1985. If you, you know, essentially you punch up.

and I wasn't punching up at Mitt Romney. I don't think he's particularly relevant in the equation at the moment. But if you punch up the smart move on the part of the person that you have punched up at is to just ignore you. And time after time, after time, people don't do that. And the second thing that it reminded me was like, well, if there are people who are actually who think it's both sides doing what we're doing in this current political climate, I think Mr. Romney has just proved my point.

on one side we have we have we have we have he didn't name anybody else in the republican party but by inference i think it was basically everybody who's enabled trump and on as i said in the clip the democrat side uh Biden Pelosi me in other words he ran out after Pelosi and what pelosi by the way she's speaker Pelosi not just Pelosi as he referred to her and what she did was i believe last january and that's the best he can come up with and i think he proved two of my points right there. Is there a sports backstory between you and Romney going back to the Olympics? Yeah, I was thinking about this. Somebody said, is he still mad at you about the 2002 Salt Lake City Games? And I'm thinking, I don't, I mean, it's so long ago, I don't think I have the cassettes of the ABC radio

commentaries that I would have been doing daily in that year. 2002, I worked for CNN as a reporter and guest. And I was just, I did have my own show. I did. filled in on others and did these daily pieces, the old Howard Coasell shift on ABC. And I do remember making fun of Mitt Romney a couple of times. I find it hard to believe that he'd still hold that grudge. But one of the interesting things about being, you know, alternating essentially and sometimes combining sports and politics is that you find out that a lot of people who you would fervently disagree with in politics held you up on some sort of pedestal in terms of sports. can't believe that your politics might not agree with theirs. They've sort of started out with

that assumption and it was like, what happened to you? I was like, nothing. I've been like this since I was born. I was well, how do we not know you were this craven liberal? Like, well, I tried not to put it in sports where it doesn't really, didn't really belong in sports center. Didn't you notice it at any of the times I did political shows or anything like that? But, I mean, John McCain, there's a clip in that book. and the movie they made about him. Whatever. Game changer.

That's what it was. And there's a clip of him. I forgot who played him in that. His campaign manager says to McCain, don't worry about this so much, sir. And stop watching Keith Alberman. Because he was apparently a huge fan of SportsCenter. And I don't mean I don't mean amongst somebody,

particularly somebody who's recently deceased. But it was some of these guys just can't get over that idea that I could have a separate identity than a sports person that they're interested in. But I do think there was something, I said something snide about Romney in 2002. Maybe he wrote it down somewhere. Do you get different pleasures out of doing politics

versus doing sports? Yeah, I wouldn't say I get too much pleasure out of doing politics. It's not, I mean, if that word applied to politics, I never would have gone back into sports in 2013. I mean, I would have stayed in politics. There were opportunities to do that. And I wouldn't have then gone back into politics again in 2016. And I certainly wouldn't have gone back into politics in 2020.

I did my damnedest to avoid it and just couldn't live with myself any longer if I continued to avoid it this year. So I don't think pleasure applies to politics at all. I think that's, you know, when I was doing the GQ series, the resistance, one of the many reasons that I shut that series down at kind of its apex in Thanksgiving. in 2017 was that I literally said, I want to be able to enjoy my work again. And there was no avenue for me. That was the selfish part of it. There were parts that involved other people that I were working with, I was working with who got fired. And obviously there was the belief that things were improving in political media coverage about which I was totally wrong. But my personal reason for making that shift back to ESPN in late 2017 beginning of 2018 was, I wanted to just

you know, do stupid things with highlights and just say, yeah, I had a, I had a fun hour there. And you don't, it's a very rare thing. I did the, uh, the inauguration. I anchored the inauguration for MSNBC in 2009. And that was largely fun because, you know, you'd open a door after being on the air for 13 hours. And there was a crowd outside waiting to roar like, um, the roar was in my mind anyway. quite as big, but the scene in Robert Downey's movie about Charlie Chaplin, where he gets off train and suddenly there's 40,000 people at the train station and they all roar at him simultaneously. This was probably closer to 140 people rather than 40,000. But that memory of, you know, just open the door and this huge roar goes up and somebody shot a video that sent it to

him. It was very nice. But that's really about it. It's like a little ego stroke here and there and then covering politics is like, all right, it's time to reenact. the scene from the hud sucker not the hud sucker proxy from uh that other movie he's that he's in that tim's in that he crawls out through the sewer why my wife shawshank redemption now let's read well let's we have to do the shawshank uh redemption um escape scene again for the next eight and 10 hours then wash it off have a quick meal and then go right back in for another eight hours then a nap and then it's tomorrow that's covering politics and i'm upset I had to say that's the case, but it is.

In your first episode of the YouTube show, you said that Donald Trump is for all intents and purposes a terrorist. How did you land on the word terrorist? Well, this is, I don't think there's any argument about this. I think the debate is whether or not he should not be called that because he happens to occupy the office of president of the United States. Literally, he is a stochastic terrorist. Stochastic terrorism being defined as,

I say something here, like to use an example from history, who will rid me of this meddlesome priest, as an English king did in the Middle Ages, and the next thing in 2004 of his knights, you know, run their swords through that meddlesome priest. Did the King of England kill him? No, the guys with the swords kill him, but the King of England, in that case, was using stochastic terrorism. And if you say liberate Michigan, and the guys you say liberate Michigan to have come into the capital with automatic weapons, and you encourage the governor there to, you know, exceed to their demands and you amplify their demands. And a few weeks later, the FBI breaks up a plot in which these guys are going to kidnap her

and have gone so far as to conduct recon on her summer home and also have added the governor of Virginia to their shopping list. That is stochastic terrorism. And the person who puts that out is therefore a terrorist. I would argue that also you could drop stochastic. and use the term terrorist to describe Trump by, without any qualifier. He has repeatedly in this election told his supporters that if a Democrat is elected, that they will be, their cities will burn.

Their children will be raped by people who come in from other countries, illegally under the Democrats, because we won't have any borders. They're literally going to erase the borders. and next to their homes in imaginary suburbia will be halfway houses for lower income drug-using, disease, COVID super spreaders or whatever it is. What's that? That's the other definition of terrorism. Terrorism is not just the physical act of blowing something up.

It is using fear and or violence to push a political aim. And he's, I mean, that's who Donald Trump is. the only thing he's good at. So I think there's no, I mean, it's literally all this time. I think people have been refusing to use that term because it's so weighted, but it is literally correct. When I think of your political shows, I always think there's like almost like two Keith Olberman modes. There's this wry observer of political life, Oberman, who has this twinkle in his eye. And then there's kind of the genuinely angry, olderman of your special comments on MSNBC on countdown. Am I right in saying that on YouTube, you've been a little more in the last?

ladder mode than in the former mode? Yeah, I mean, the YouTube show is usually a commentary of eight to 12 minutes length that is really venting. I mean, venting and ranting. And it is designed for that purpose. And I find myself sometimes last night, I was thinking of what today's piece should be about. And I was not certain.

And then I latched onto something by just going through these possible topics and going, you know, which one of these really, A, symbolizes a lot of other stories that I don't have time to tell, but it represents it, represents all those, and which one pisses me off the most. And, you know, I don't make any apology for doing that. The GQ series was the same thing. What we do, however, is in almost all of these episodes, as we put up a slate that says standby for the headlines, and the headlines tend to be a little bit more relaxed. Those are opportunities to make jokes. And some of them are, I'd say they're just as pointed as the commentaries are. There was one the other day where Axios, the website, the political website, had said that Trump

had decided he was going to be on the campaign trail every night somewhere between now on the election. And a staffer who was quoted anonymously as saying, you know, he's going to kill himself. And I just looked at it, read the quote, looked up at the camera and went thoughts and prayers. that was the whole thing. So there's, they're both being used, but obviously the point of this, and this is drawing on the experience of both the special comments and the GQ series, the point of this is to validate the way people feel and the people who don't believe that their point is being enunciated clearly enough in any other form of media.

This was the special comments, the number one reaction to the special. comments was not, this has inspired me to donate to such and such a candidate, or this has inspired me to run for office or take, but the number one reaction always was, thank God you said this, that's, I thought I was the only one who felt that way. And that's, that's the point of it. So I think what the media as a whole has missed, as every international news organization and most of the domestic ones have run out to get the point of view of, you know, Mr. W. Chicken, chicken farmer of a chicken city, Iowa for the last five years. What does he think of Trump? I think the sort of large group of people that have not been addressed, the people who are

furiously angry that this has happened to our country, and particularly at this man, Trump, and these Franz von Poppins who surround him and have allowed us to get to the point where if this election puts him back in office, we may never get democracy back in this country or Republican government. So I think just, I'm there to be kind of a cathartic, not spokesman for them, but a cathartic preacher, if you will. You write TV scripts really fast. You were kind of famous for that.

How long does it take you to write a 10-minute commentary? Oh, let me think. If I've got all my materials in front of me, the research is the thing that varies in terms of times. Sometimes you get some sort of story that's just, well, okay, I've read one paragraph. I know exactly what I want to say about this for the next eight to ten minutes. But if it's from soup to nuts, I guess last night was probably, I was very tired last night. It probably took about an hour or 15 minutes.

Okay. To do 10 minute script. And you're writing down every word you're going to say on camera? Is it more of an outline? No, it's, it's, the teleprompter is there for reason. People disparage the teleprompter. I think it's a wonderful invention, one of the great inventions of all time, because it saves you the stress of trying to remember what it was you wanted to say when, in fact, you could just

have right in front of you what it is you wanted to say. If we could have this in life, I was very hopeful with Google Glass. I thought this might be a daily application of the teleprompter in human life where you go, if I run into this woman, I'm just going to say, number 317, number 317, have it just scroll up in front of your eyes, and then you'd never, you'd never be at a loss for words. Now, those are, they're written. Sometimes I will ad-lib in the moment, change something or correct something, but I would say 99% is written. On the other hand, Again, to go back to your point of bifurcation here, the headlines are usually just notes. You gave me this line one time.

God, if you could have a teleprompter in life, how much easier would life be? Which I took you to your point to me and what you just said about having the right words in front of you, but also that writing is at sub-level what makes you happiest. Is that right? Writing out these things rather than performing them? Again, I don't know that I'd use the term happiest. I used to say even in the local news days, when, you know, that massive task of writing a four-minute script once a day used to sit in front of me.

And I used to sweat it. I mean, I used to go over that thing six, seven times before I was satisfied with it. It's satisfying. It's rewarding. And you do feel like you've created something. And often I do say, well, how did I get 10 minutes out of that? and not self-complementarily, but just saying, how in the hell, I mean, is there, are there, could I apply this to something of scientific use?

I don't know how this is done. But it's not, the biggest change in the last two weeks since I started doing this is to readjust myself to this endless parade of very angry deadlines. And you know you have given period of time to read something in, write something in, research something in, promote something in, and then go back and do it again the next day. And it's a master or a mistress. And you are beholden to it. And I think writing to some degrees like that, too, because writing, whereas writing against

the deadline has always been the only kind of writing I can really do. There is a fear that, you know, you're trying to write 1,000 or 1,200 words, and you're at number 283 and you don't have anything else. And that's happened occasionally, obviously not too often. but there's that that little frisson of fear is necessary for that for my creative process. The title of the YouTube show is Worst Person in the World, which viewers will remember as a segment on the Countdown show on MSNBC, also your Oberman show on ESPN. Is that a tribute to the comedians, radio comedians, Bob and Ray? Yes, that's the origin.

That's where I first heard the expression. they had, there was a brilliance to them that, for me, is undimmed 50 years after I first heard their work and I'm still in touch with Ray's youngest son and I knew, I did an event once with Bob Elliot and his son Chris, Elliot obviously, at the Paley Center where I was, we broke into one of the bits that Bob and Ray used to do and I just mentioned it and Bob. went into it and encouraged me to play Ray's part, which was one of the great thrills of my life. But they had a character in a soap opera called The Worst Person in the World, who was sometimes identified as John Simon, the theater and movie critic of New York Magazine, who was perhaps

more universally hated than any other figure in entertainment media since the invention of the alphabet. And he was the only person who gave them a bad review on their Broadway show in 1970. And so the worst person in the world consisted entirely, and I had no dialogue. All he appeared in the background of this ad-lib soap opera that they used to do spectacularly was slurping of soup sounds and crunching, like loud crunching and chewing sounds. And they'd say, oh, no, the worst person in the world is in, is in. the restaurant with us. Look at him. He's eating the sandwich through the wax paper. Oh, John Simon. It's unbelievable. And so the worst person in the world just resonated with me as an

idea and the name that I, that I just, you know, I'm very affectionate towards it. So it was used at the MSNBC series in this sometimes angry, sometimes comedic list of three horrible malefactors to mankind. I often included myself in this list. And now I really picked this out simply because it's familiar to the audience and it does apply to Donald Trump on a daily basis. I believe it was Bob Elliott of the aforementioned Bob and Ray who told you one time that when two hosts do a TV show together, the greatest goal is for one host to make the other laugh because you know you've hit the bullseye. So when you're doing something like this solo and you don't have that validation sitting next to you, how do you know when you've hit the bullseye? well with with the humorous stuff there's still although this is not a very large crew that tapes this the way you know if you're if you're solo and you're doing something humorous is that you will hear

or very quietly the cameramen or the people in the truck or the people in the in the in the booth laughing and if you can get a laugh out of the stage crew and the production crew that hit the mark with the with the not so funny stuff, that's more somebody whose opinion you trust and have worked with for a long time sends you a text or calls up and says, I was just watching that one

and I just had this. I was walking back from the studios yesterday and I got a text from somebody I worked with at NBC and twice with at ESPN. And he said, I love these two minute versions that you're putting out on Twitter. they're fantastic.

And this is not a guy, I'm repeating it just to give it the emphasis. This is not a guy who sends me love notes all the time and is not very effusive in his praise of anything in media. And it just was, okay, yeah, it's like I got it back. And the other way you can tell that, you know, you're hitting your mark is when, when freaking Mitt Romney puts you in there, it's like, Pelosi Biden, Alderman.

It's like, oh, my God, no, there's got to be somebody else. You can come up with somebody, you know, somebody, you know, somebody looked funny at Amy Coney Barrett or something, didn't they? That's the way you tell. I mean, when these guys put you out there, they don't realize they are authenticating you not merely to the people they want to have despise you, but very truly they are giving you your own authentication. I mean, this is, O'Reilly did this to the point where in the first decade of this century, there were very few stories about Bill O'Reilly

that did not mention me. And this is like, he must have felt like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia. He had this incantation that caused the buckets to start arriving and he didn't know how to turn it off. He's like he thought he was going to show me and the next thing, you know, every story. Well, we did this at Fox Sports in 1999

when I went out there to compete with the SPN. Nobody watched it. Nobody remembered it. Nobody saw it. Nobody thought it was any good. I didn't think it was any good. I thought maybe in five years it would be good. The bosses originally thought maybe in five years we'll be competitive.

Every story that we did, every story we participated in, and every story that was about ESPN included Fox Sports. So, you know, you get, that's one of the ways you get authenticated. And it's not, what's nice about it is it's not you calling up and saying, did you really like my work or did you really hate my work? There are people who thought you'd never return to ESPN after your initial run there in the 90s. You've now returned twice. Twice. We're talking about twice. No, I went, and no, it's three times.

Three times? What am I? The Oberman show, the recent time, what am I leaving out? The Dan Patrick show. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was co-host for an hour every day for three years, the last three years of his run on ESPN. And that was the first breakthrough.

Well, that was not the first attempted breakthrough. I had a meeting with the ESPN people came to me, the local ones here, to launch the New York radio station. 2001. That was only three and a half years after I'd left. And that got scuttled because they didn't want to pay me anything. But the second thing about it was then certain people in Bristol found out. But we had talked about that. I talked to Mark Shapiro in 2002 about going back. And then one day, Trog Keller, who was running the radio network, called me and said, can you help us out here? Because we're, you know, Dan needs another, you know, something to really make the show spark.

And they were great. And it was three years of very happy. You know, no violence, no arguments, no, don't say this, nothing for that period of time. And then the 2013 redux with the ESPN2 show, which was happy until, you know, sorry, we ran out of money, everybody's got to get fired by Bill Simmons, by Chris Berman, by Keith, and by 50 other people or whoever, whatever the number was. And then this time, this was a very happy experience. And it ended very, very cordially, and I would say collegiately. This is my final question.

I'm just teeing you up here, Keith. What is it like to do political commentary without Chris Matthews sitting at your side? Well, there is the sense that you have no longer to worry about whether or not the toddler has just turned on the stove and burned that part of the house down and then come back to you and said, I didn't know that the fire would burn down the house. there was a not to go through since this is the final question and and I have to leave in six to eight hours not to go through all the Chris Matthews stories but a few please he he had a unique in my experience and I've worked with everybody for 41 years my first two bosses in radio from 1979 and 1980 are not only still in business but are still active play by playmen so I this record I have as a killer of executives is false. But I've worked with everybody and I've worked everywhere and I've been at ESPN counting the freelance things that I did in the 80s for them. I've been there five times. I've been everywhere. I've not gotten a job in the 21st century. I got one job in the 21st century that was not with an employer who'd had me on their staff in

the 20th century. So I'm into second and third and fourth and fifth times with organizations. I've worked with everybody. I've never seen. anybody who combined this, I don't know what I'm doing. I've never been on TV before. Vibe. Combined that with the ability to then use that seeming incompetence as an excuse for stealing other people's interviews, scripts. We did one of the, I may have been election night in 2008. We had John Kerry, who was one of the guests, and his requirement was.

and he wasn't doing these sort of interviews. He said, I will come on and talk to Keith for five hours, if you want. I was always very friendly with the senator, and we were at a Red Sox game together once, and I just got along well with him on a human basis. And he said, but I will not. Long ago decided life is too brief for me to spend any time with Chris Matthews. So we get to that part in the script where it says on teleprompter, Keith, in parentheses, and lots of X's and things.

and Chris finishes up his whatever it was he was reading and then goes and that's the way that is what we're seeing in Washington. Keith, my next guest is John Kerry, the senator from them, and he just bowled right through it and proceeded to ask three questions before I was able to get him to go in, you know, just to shut up for a second. And it was, they had asked me once. In fact, it was before 2008 election, might have been in the primaries. Do you want to anchor solo? You want us to put Chris off on a different desk

and have him do other stuff? And I thought, well, the first problem with that is he'll jump out the window. And the second problem with that is, particularly before we start getting results, he knew everything that ever happened in politics. I don't think he understood a lot of it,

but he knew everything that ever happened. and that's really good for setting stuff up. I mean, there's so many of these journalists who are very aware of the facts, but really don't know how the facts add up to the truth. And Chris was certainly one of them. And it was not a relationship like me and Dan Patrick. Let's put it that way. Cornerstone with Dan was,

we are in the, we are in the benches in the, in the dugouts of of EAP in the First World War, and we are there to protect each other and thus make a better show. That was not the vibe with Chris. With Dan, the prompter was not community property. It wasn't if I wrote those lines, you're welcome. I mean, I should have prefaced that at also with the fact that we were just, I mean, the first story out of the break was him reading the thing,

and then he just barreled through it and did the carry interview. And the look on John Kerry's face was, you know, I'll never deal with you people again as a network. All right, Rose, thank you. Too many mentions of Chris Matthews for the taste of my dogs. But we were, I mean, we were 45 seconds back from him being told by a producer who had come out because he didn't want to be told things in his ear who came out and said, okay, you read that story and Keith's going to interview John Kerry and then you're going to interview whoever.

And he just, you know, oh, I'm sorry. I just saw it on the prompter. I was like, what part of the parenthesis, Keith, end parenthesis, confused you. And then, you know, when we just soldiered on from there because I didn't want to be responsible for him going out the window. You can subscribe to Keith Olberman's commentary on YouTube where it appears every afternoon and you better watch Mitt Romney's Twitter feed too. Just in case he takes the bait again. Keith, thanks for being on the press box. Yeah, I got to write a special comment about Mitt Romney and just see if he'll do it one more.

I try the entire Republican half of the Senate and see who will fall for the bait. Why not? Just Chuck Grassley? Just go down the list, right? And you get shows out all these guys. I don't think, I don't think Chuck knows how to use YouTube. But in any event. Thank you, Brian.

All right. All right. Time for David Chummaker, guess is a strain pun headline. Monday's headline about a Christian musician conducting a partially maskless concert was Jesus Christ super spreader. This week's strain pun comes from Adrian. It's from Vice Canada. Vice Canada.

I'm going to read you the first couple of paragraphs here, David. Isn't Vice from Canada? Like, wouldn't that just be Vice? Yeah, it might be a little redundant, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's like saying Alex Trebek Canada. A self-driving Tesla hit 152 kilometers an hour on a busy Alberta highway in July, surprising an officer who saw no one inside the vehicle.

the Alberta RCMP I believe that's the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they were alerted to the incident by a driver who called 911 after seeing a 2019 Tesla Model S speeding in the middle of the afternoon on July 9 with what appeared to be two people in the front seats both asleep

both asleep okay so we got the speeding car with the drivers asleep what was vice canadas or just vices strained pun headline i mean asleep at the wheel seems too obvious is it like the it's a little too obvious sleep nap like snooze cruise snoo uh uh uh um those snooze cruise sounds like what you do at your high school paper you were doing this story okay congratulate yourself on a funny headline vice canada uh so

the sleeping matters, right? The two people are sleeping. For sure. Lights out. Bedtime. I have no idea. What if I told you to think of a movie franchise the ringer is obsessed with? Oh, the Fast and the Furious?

Fast and the fast and the... Fast to sleep in the Furious? The Fast to sleep in the Furious. Yeah, there we go. go. Thank you, Chris. Chris Almeida's now 1 and O in those that guy's rankings. Fast asleep and they're furious. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeida, production magic by Erica Servantes.

We're back Monday to get you ready for the big final debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, we think. Plus MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soberoff is going to be here. Join David and I or our body doubles for more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, bye.