All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 27, 2010 - Jimmy Dore Show
22:26
20101027_Troy_10-26-10
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everybody, and welcome to a brief and special episode of the Jimmy Dore show.
Just for the podcast listeners.
What happened?
Well, George Bush happened.
He's coming to Los Angeles to do the Bush monologues at the Comedy Central stage, as played by Troy Conrad.
And, well, we got him first.
So I wanted to let you guys know about Troy Conrad.
And then I have a special little story that involves my niece and my sister and a baby who needs a liver at the end.
Okay, see you at the end.
On November 9th, President Bush's memoirs will be released, and they're called Decision Points.
We've got a preview.
We got a sneak little interview with main man President Bush.
President Bush, are you on the line?
How are you?
I am good to be with you, Jimmy.
Hi, thanks for coming back on the show.
Now, I understand you wrote a book, and it's about your 14 decision points, correct?
That's right.
14 decisions I made while I was in office.
And I always felt like they were good, you know, basically good decisions.
So talk about how good they are.
What would be your most goodest decision, do you think?
I'd say, you know, most proud of, well, you know, I'll be honest with you, Jimmy.
Most of the things in the book are very safe.
You know, we had like 20 guys from the CIA coming through that thing day and night.
So I wasn't able to get exactly the honest version out.
But I would say, you know, I always like to talk about the bass I caught, seven and a half pound bass or lake just outside.
And that was a really proud moment during my presidency.
So that's the kind of stuff we can look forward to.
You talking about fishing?
Well, you know, they wouldn't let me put in the fish story.
That's what's funny about it.
You know, they kept it to things that were actually public service type of things.
But I'll be honest with you, I didn't pay much attention to that during my presidency.
I didn't like the idea of public service because you can't even say the word public service without sounding like almost like socialist or something.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, can you list some of your, what would you consider your greatest accomplishment while in office?
Well, you know, I would say, you know, what I've been, when I go on, I'm going on Oprah next week and I'm doing the rounds and I've been saying that my greatest accomplishment is keeping America safe.
And, you know, every time I say that, I always go, yeah, I'm keeping America safe.
And then I keep forgetting that we ignored all those memos on 9-11.
So every time I say that, I end up feeling like a little bit of a fraud.
Yeah, I would say a little bit.
Yeah, I would say, because the biggest domestic attack on our country happened while you were president.
Well, yeah, but I'd like to say that my greatest accomplishment is keeping America safe, except for 9-11.
Okay, well, that's a good way to put it.
That's a really good thing.
We learned to read memos after that, Jimmy.
We were only reading about 20% of our memos that had urgent, bold, highlighted prints up until 9-11.
And I'm happy to say, you know, we learned those lessons of 9-11, and we read over half of those memos as they came through.
You read half of those memos when they came through?
No, we had staffers read about half those memos.
There's a lot of them.
It's one of those fax machines that's cranking stuff out.
Sometimes you get ads for travel agencies, and he's trying to look at the ones that stand out the most.
Like, you know, Osama determined to strike in the U.S. Now we know to look for those kind of ones.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Now, what does your conscience ever bother you?
Your conscience ever bother you since you've left office?
Well, you know, that's a good question.
I like to think of myself as a conscience objector.
In other words, it's much easier to deal with your conscience if you just try not to have one.
Go ahead.
And that's been working out.
And that's been working out for you?
Well, yeah, you know, it's amazing.
They have medications now that will actually dull your conscience.
And so it's amazing how I can do things and not even feel.
That was also a benefit, you know, during my presidency.
I was able to make decisions without any type of feeling or emotion or even concern for human beings.
And I'm real proud of that.
And well, that probably helped you make decisions easier, right?
Well, it makes every decision easier if you don't have to look at the human toll or consequences.
And I like to make decisions that have positive consequences for the people I know, which are mostly heads of corporations.
And I've always felt like those are the best people.
I feel like I love people.
I have a great, strong love for people, but only if they're in the form of a large corporation.
Because I like to say I love people even more because of the big groups they're in.
Oh, okay.
I see what you're saying.
Now, are you afraid?
Now, do you share a lot of the country is concerned that the Chamber of Commerce is bringing a lot of foreign money into this year's campaign, and they're afraid that our country is being subverted by foreign interests.
Do you have any comment on that?
Well, I think that just makes, you know, makes the world a little smaller.
And a lot of people criticize corporations having influence.
I look to a day in America where corporations are not judged by the color of their logo, but just by the size, the sheer size of their business.
And one of the things I'm real proud of is appointing Sam Alito and Justice Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts, to the Supreme Court because now we have corporations that have even more power.
And I look to a day in America where there are no more people, just corporations all getting along.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Well, I think we're getting closer to that.
Now, President Bush, you're going to actually be in Los Angeles at the Comedy Central stage.
What is that?
That's right.
I'm giving a special town hall talk.
It's tomorrow, Wednesday, October 27th at 8 o'clock.
At the Comedy Central stage in Los Angeles.
That's right.
And let me say, you know what?
I have a number here, people.
If they want to come see you, they can make a review.
Now, I understand it's free since you're the president, right?
That's right.
We've got certain, you know, I can't reveal who they are, who the sources are, but there's certain corporate donors who've helped offset the costs, I see.
Okay, offset.
So they can call 323-960-5519 and make a reservation.
It's free to come see the Bush monologue.
Wednesday night, October 27th at the Comedy Central Stage.
It's the Bush monologues.
President Bush, I understand Troy Conrad will be there with you.
That's right.
He's going to be there.
And Rick Overton is also a co-creator.
And, you know, it's all the missing memoirs left out of the decision points.
And we also go through the DSM manual of psychological diagnosis.
Talk about some of the things I learned about myself.
Oh, really?
Can you just give us one thing that you learned about yourself?
Well, yeah, I didn't even know this the whole time.
This would have been good to know that I'm actually a sociopath.
And I thought, you know, that would have been good for someone to tell me that before I got, you know, before I even decided to run.
It turns out that maybe that's not the most compatible type of personality.
You know, so I give some, I gave some evidence for that that the psychiatrist gave me.
And, you know, talk about I had a tension deficit disorder.
Most meetings, I was thinking about bacon, and that's why we had some of these problems.
Okay.
Okay.
President Bush, I look forward to the Bush monologues, which I will be at tomorrow night at the Comedy Central stage.
Again, the number of people can call, 323-960-5519.
Thanks for taking time, Mr. President.
Thanks very much, Jimmy.
Okay.
Okay, our thanks to President Bush, as played by Troy Conrad, for stopping in with the Jimmy Door show.
And I'll see you guys over at the Comedy Central Stage tomorrow night.
I wanted to tell you, share a very interesting story.
My niece, you know, I have an sister Dee has, she adopted a baby and he was sick and he was in children's hospital.
Well, everything turned out good for my little baby, my little nephew, Jonathan.
But during that time, my sister was at that children's hospital here in Los Angeles, and they became friendly with a family who had a baby and there needed a liver transplant.
So it's kind of been, it's really an interesting story.
But look, here is my niece, Melissa.
She's organized a charity to raise money for this kid to save his life to get him a liver.
It's a great story.
I talked to her for about four or five minutes, and here that is right now.
Thank you.
Okay, Melissa Labosca, tell me about how you met Baby Daniel.
Well, I met Baby Daniel when my cousin, your nephew, was in the hospital at Children's Hospital.
Now, Children's Hospital, that's a fun place, right?
You go in there, a bunch of sick kids.
It's a joy.
Anyway, it was good.
It was good to go down that.
Farmest place in the world.
Yeah.
So when we were there, like, we didn't really care because he was so sick.
And so we thought he was going to die when we first got in.
And so we were just so consumed with him, we didn't really get caught up in everything else that was going on in the hospital.
And then we found out that the surgery was successful, but he had to stay in the hospital for two more weeks with antibiotics that were going straight to his heart.
So we were there for two weeks and we would take him up and down the halls.
You know, he was getting better and we started meeting other people in the hospital.
And we met this woman and she had this baby and we started talking to her.
And it turned out that she was from San Pedro, Belize, and her baby needed a liver transplant.
And he wasn't going to get it, even though both parents were matching donors and were willing to be live donors.
And they weren't going to get it because they're poor and they can't pay the $350,000 for the transplant.
So it was just such a devastating thing.
I remember even calling you two days after hearing about it and just like crying.
It was so sad.
And then we met a friend and he said, like, why don't we start raising money for it?
And so we had a fundraiser at my brother Mark's house and started a Facebook page.
And then all these people started joining it from like all, like, for Megan set up a website, saybabyDaniel.com.
And just people started donating.
And within six weeks, we had raised over $250,000.
$250,000.
I know, kind of a pretty incredible story, right?
But let me just tell you what I was going through.
When I first heard that they had befriended a family that had a baby who needed a liver transplant but couldn't afford it and they were going to start up a charity and they were going to try and get it.
I just did not think that they had a chance to raise enough money.
I was so proud of my family for doing that.
And of course they would.
Of course, they're going to meet and befriend the baby and want to help people.
But I thought there wasn't a chance they were going to raise that much.
I mean, my friend Jimmy Pardo had done a charity and he raised $12,000 to help kids in poor countries who had cleft palates and can't afford the operation.
He raised money for those kids through his podcast, his very popular Never Not Funny show.
And it was fantastic.
I mean, he really helped directly a lot of people that are going to get that operation now because of what he did, what Jimmy Pardo did.
But I knew how hard it was for him.
And he knows a lot of famous people and they only raised about $12,000.
They raised $12,000, which is an amazing amount.
I don't want to diminish it.
So I knew what the odds my family was up against to raise this money.
So I just couldn't really let myself get involved because if the worst happened, I don't know if I'd be able to handle that if I had opened my heart to this kid and gotten involved.
And I would have to worry about going back on antidepressants.
And I couldn't take that risk.
But here was my little sister and my niece who had taken that risk, who did open their heart to this kid, and then decided to try to do something about it no matter what, no matter what the odds.
And they did it.
I thought that was, I was blown away, as I hope you guys are.
So anyway, guess what?
They raised the money.
there's more to this story.
And so.
Wow, that's pretty impressive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People just, they want to help.
They just don't know where to help.
So.
Okay, so you raised, so you raised $200,000?
Over $250,000 in six weeks.
Wow.
So they went ahead and got that.
And so you took like $100,000 and you went on vacation?
And then...
So you got the money and the kid got the, he got the liver transplant.
So we got, yeah, we got the money and the children still wouldn't give the liver transplant.
What?
They were going to, they wanted to, they wanted us to pay $350,000.
And then when we would get more money and more money in, they would keep on raising the price on us.
And they kept on wanting us to do that.
Why would they do it?
Why did they keep doing that?
You think?
I think it was because they wanted us to donate the money to the hospital.
They kept on saying that we shouldn't be doing it through PayPal or private accounts.
They wanted us to donate it through the hospital.
But what would happen was it would go in his name.
And if we were able to come up with their sum, then they would perform the surgery.
But if we couldn't come up with the amount of money, then it would just go into the fund for donations.
If we couldn't come up with the money for the surgery for the prime.
Oh, so, oh, I see what you're saying.
I see what you're saying.
So if they only came up with half the money, the kids still didn't get delivered, but the hospital kept the money.
Yeah.
Wow, that's great.
The funny thing was when we were going to get a really good donation from England, the price suddenly raised.
And we had to pay for work.
Like, we had people look it over.
They said that the way that we read it, it seemed very clear that that's how much money we would have to raise was $350,000.
But then when we were getting closer to goal, they said that it would be $450,000.
And this is this family.
I mean, they're from Belize.
The dad, he does, you know, he takes tourists on boat trips.
They don't have this kind of money, especially in America.
So, anyway, we started this Facebook page and people start to band together.
San Pedro gets all involved because they have a way to organize.
And they started putting up Save Danielle buckets in the bars and all this stuff.
And so then we were finally able to raise enough money to fly him to Columbia, where the doctors agreed that they would do the surgery.
So then he went to Columbia, and the father was a live donor, and it was successful.
And because of the state that he was in when we got him to Columbia, and the state that he was in was only because they had kept on getting a runaround, I think, in the United States from the different doctors sending them around.
He's been in ICU for all this time.
So he's still going to get better.
But now at this point, we're about $60,000 short of what we need to pay for the ICU bills.
Okay, so you still need $60,000.
Yeah, for follow-up.
And so, and where can people?
So that, first of all, that's quite a story.
And how did it make you feel?
You actually got the livery for the kid.
And you said, do you feel like you saved a life?
I feel like a whole community saved a life.
I think it's like the most amazing thing.
It's the best feeling in the world that all these people came together to help this kid.
They never even met.
And what's so crazy about the whole thing is that he was in the United States.
I know that we can't help everyone because of how it's supposed to be.
But then when we were famering, he had this one surgery where we thought it went wrong.
We went on the website to try to figure out what we were supposed to do.
And they were showing that, like, all their doctors had gone to Haiti to help out with what's going on in Haiti, which I think that's great.
But then I was thinking, like, Haiti comes to you.
Right.
You don't have to go to Haiti.
Haiti comes to you.
I hear what you're saying.
Well, it's the craziest thing, you know, Melissa.
A bunch, the whole country was up in arms just a couple of weeks ago because a fire department wouldn't put out someone's house on fire because he didn't pay the $75 upfront fee.
So he didn't have his, he didn't have, basically, he didn't have fire insurance, so they didn't put out his house.
And people went crazy because they stood by and watched this guy's house.
Well, is that not the equivalent of doctors standing by and watching a baby die because he can't afford a liver transplant?
Why now you have to take an oath?
I mean, isn't, I mean, how I need a doctor to explain to me how that is different.
I guess.
I guess that's what I would need, right?
I don't know what it is, but you know what?
They tried to swear.
But are we turning into a don't you think we're turning into kind of a cold society?
This baby was dying because of $350,000.
And both parents were willing to be live donors.
That's insane.
That's so insane.
So then this money is standing in the way, this life when everyone's there.
And don't they get a lot of donations?
And I know people might be listening to this and saying he's an illegal citizen, but how weird is it to just draw this line in the sand and say, I got lucky enough to be born here.
But what kills me the most, too, is like there's everyday people that are working here.
And the same thing is happening.
You know, those trucks that came to LA last year offering free dental and free health care, people were waiting outside at night.
And I have a job and insurance, and I can't afford to get my dental work done.
I have a teacher friend that I work with who is from Argentina.
It was less expensive for her.
They have insurance.
It was less expensive for her husband to fly back to Argentina to get the root to help them there than to get them done here.
And they're here legally on a visa.
It was insane to me.
So it's broken.
It's broken for the people that live here and it's broken for the people that come here that need help.
So, but where can people go to donate for baby Daniel?
They go to savebabydaniel.com.
Savebabydaniel.com.
And you need $60,000.
Yeah.
But he's in ICU right now.
And okay.
So if you want to go help chip in, Baby Daniel, we saved a life.
Kids in ICU.
And the family is just amazing and the community is amazing where he came from.
And he looks so much better already.
I mean, he looks like a different baby.
And it's just been a few weeks since the surgery.
I mean, so many people have donated that have never met this family, have just heard about it through a friend of a friend of a friend, and they are just filled with so much joy.
And to be able to contribute to something like that, no matter how much you give, is amazing.
When we were in the waiting room, people were coming over, giving us $5, $10, $15, $2.
But everyone has a part in this saving his life.
So I guess it's.
Well, I'm definitely going to take, you know, depending on how much money we raise through this, I'm definitely going to take credit for saving.
That's right.
I saved the kids' life.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm giving credit to anyone who's willing to pitch in.
Okay.
All right.
Well, Melissa, thanks very much for talking with us.
Thank you.
Love you.
Okay, love you.
Bye.
So, what is my niece, Melissa, doing when she's not teaching school?
She's out saving babies with bad livers.
So if you'd like to be a person who also has a part in saving a life, go to savebabydaniel.com.
Thank you.
Okay, so I hope you enjoyed this special.
These two special stories that I decided to drop.
I don't know why I just did.
And after you're done saving a baby, why don't you come this Friday and Saturday out to, if you're in around Ventura, California, come to the Ventura Comedy Club and see me telling jokes.
And Jimmy, what's the number I called for reservations?
You go 805-644-1500.
That's area code 805-644-1500 for the Ventura Harbor Comedy Club in Ventura, California.
See you there, and we're going to have a show on Thursday.
Don't worry about it.
▲
Export Selection