September 19, 2024 • 38 mins
SERIES 3 EPISODE 31: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Quinnipiac Poll: Harris by five in Pennsylvania (include Stein and Oliver and it's SIX). Harris by five in Michigan. Harris 50-48 in the Fox News poll. I’m beginning to suspect the Trump is this-close to offering anybody in a swing state who votes for him, a nude photo of Melania. I mean that’s neither as gratuitous nor crazy as it sounds. I heard about the post on Twitter and I thought this was going to be a Sarah Cooper bit or the rebirth of Jib-Jab and then I clicked on it.
She says: "Why do I stand proudly between my nude modeling work?"
That’s where we are. Ex-prosecutor Vice President swapped in for the retiring President, versus insane proto-Nazi racist would-be-dictator adjudicated sex offender with the nude model first lady and her stepsons are both appearing with an Oklahoma religious crackpot who has called the Vice President a quote “lying whore” and their Dad’s campaign is about the scary illegal black people eating cats but the grotesque misogynist Russian-produced sexual memes are about the Vice President.
THE WHOLE OHIO STORY about the cats and the migrants in Springfield, the WHOLE raison-d’etre of Jayvee Vance’s stochastic terrorism attack on the residents of his own STATE, has now been revealed as two LIES. The first was the woman who posted to Facebook about somebody’s friend’s neighbor’s aunt’s uncle’s condom salesman seeing somebody eat a cat. Vance’s campaign knew it wasn’t true – it called the Springfield city hall on September 9th – and was TOLD it wasn’t true. That didn’t stop Vance. The SECOND lie turns out to be by the woman in Springfield who told the police HER cat Miss Sassy had been taken and killed – that’s the story Vance keeps using as a fallback – oh there’s a police report! My constituents insist there IS a missing cat! The woman is named Anna Kilgore and guess what, the cat is alive. Sweet Sassy Molassey, the cat is alive. The Wall Street Journal did something that Trump and Vance and their fellow scumbags would never do – they fact-checked Vance. And Kilgore. And Miss Sassy. Who was discovered safe and sound in Kilgore's basement.
But Vance is still out there lying.
B-Block (19:36) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Maria Bartiromo explains that the director of Homeland Security is using P. Diddy to get the world to stop talking about Trump. The University of South Carolina lets its campus be used for an event assaulting the Vice President's sexuality. Chris Cuomo apologizes to Trump because...I have no idea.
C-Block (29:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Oh like you don't have a story like this. I went past my first NYC apartment the other day. The one that somebody lit on fire. While I was inside.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Quinnipiac poll,
Paris by five in Pennsylvania, and I'm beginning to suspect
(00:27):
the Trump campaign is this close to you offering anybody
in a swing state who votes for him a nude
photo of Millennia. I mean, that is neither as gratuitous
nor as crazy as it sounds. I first heard about
the post on Twitter, and I thought this was going
to be a Sarah Cooper bitch or the rebirth of
(00:49):
JibJab and then I clicked on it.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Why do I stand proudly behind my nute modeling work.
The more pressing question is why has the media chosen
to scrutinize my celebration of the Human Forum in a
fashioned photoshoot?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Have we known? Michigan Harris by five, Quinnipiac, Wisconsin Harris
by one, Quinnipiac, Georgia, Trump by just three. That's Donald
not Milania. Atlanta Journal Constitution poll it had been five,
and as mentioned, Pennsylvania Harris by five, Quinnipiac, oh. Also
Pennsylvania throwing Stein and Oliver. It's Harris by six Quinnipiac. Nationally,
(01:31):
Harris fifty Trump forty eight, and a poll by Fox
News a month after they had a Trump fifty Harris
forty nine. How about vote for Trump and order Millenia's
book and get two free nude photos of her. That's
where we are, or almost where we are. Ex prosecutor
vice president swapped in for the retiring president versus insane
(01:56):
proto Nazi racist would be dictator adjudicated sex offender with
the nude model first lady and her step sons, who
are both appearing with it. Oklahoma religious crackpot who has
called the vice president a quote lying whore and their
dad's campaign is about the scary illegal black people eating cats,
but the grotesque, misogynist Russian produced sexual memes are about
(02:22):
the vice president. As a movie, it would be hilarious
if the title hadn't been taken. You could call it
doctor Strangelove.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Why do I stand proudly behind my nute modeling word?
Speaker 1 (02:36):
As the old joke goes, Hey Donald, got any nude
pictures of your first lady? Would you like them? Holy crap? Okay,
back to the numbers. The Pennsylvania and Michigan leeds are
outside the margin of error, So, to borrow another phrase,
stop the count more nationally, you go for the economist
(02:57):
has it Harris by four, Active vote has Harris by six,
And literally two weeks ago it was Harris by two,
and the five thirty eight average ticked up to Harris
by three point three. Okay, okay, My final offer vote
for Trump in Pennsylvania, and you can take a photo
with the first lady. And that's as far as I go.
(03:18):
The Trump people remain utterly mystified by what is happening.
Like all Republicans ever since Newt Gingrich crawled out of
the primordial slime. They live by one mantra and one mantra.
Only if it is evil and it worked, do more
of it. If it's evil and it didn't work, do
(03:40):
twice as much of it. They cannot figure this out.
Crazy won them the White House in twenty sixteen. Crazy
almost won them a coup in twenty twenty. So why
is Crazy losing and losing a little bit more every week?
To her? Naturally, the response is the evil once worked,
(04:02):
but it hasn't been working, so we won't stop it,
and we won't double it. We have to do three
times as much of it as we did previously. I
mean Axios. Far right reactionary axios headlined all this last night,
the no shame strategy. The interior headline Vance's zero shame strategy.
(04:25):
It's also Vance's zero truth strategy. This whole thing, this
whole thing about the cats and the migrants in Springfield, Ohio,
the whole Riizon detra of JV. Vance's stochastic terrorist attack
on the residents of his own state. This has now
been revealed to originate from two lies. The first lie
(04:52):
was from the woman who posted to Facebook about somebody's friends, neighbors, aunts, uncles, condoms,
salesman seeing somebody eat a cat. The woman's name was
Erica Lee. She has at least expressed remorse. Vance's campaign
knew this was not true. It had called the Springfield
(05:13):
City Hall on the ninth of this month and was
told by people there that it was not true, and
that did not stop them. It didn't even slow them down.
The second lie, revealed yesterday, turns out to have been
by the woman in Springfield who told the police her cat,
Miss Sassey, had been taken and killed. Maybe that's the
(05:38):
story Vance keeps using as a fallback. Oh there's a
police report. My constituents insist there is a missing cat.
The woman is named Anna Kilgore, and guess what her
cat is alive? Sweet Sassy Melasses, the cat, Miss Sassey,
(05:58):
is alive. The Wall Street Journal did something that Trump
and Vance and their fellow scumbags would never do. They
fact checked Vance's story and kill Gore's story and Miss
Sasse's story. I quote. A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided
The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which
(06:19):
a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken
by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna
Kilgore's house Tuesday evening, she said her cat, Miss Sassey,
which went missing in late August, had actually returned a
few days later, found safe in her own basement. Kil Gore,
(06:42):
wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to
her in Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter
and a mobile phone translation app. And again, as stupid
as all that sounds, at least she did that. At
least she made some effort to put one pinch of
the toothpaste back into the tube. Vance Vance got up
(07:07):
on a stage and insisted not only that he has
multiple reports from his constituents, but that the legal immigrants,
virtually everybody Republican or Democrat is generously welcomed into Springfield,
Ohio acknowledge that they have improved Springfield, Ohio. Vance got
up there yesterday insisted they are not legally here and
(07:28):
that it's just a legal trick played by the Vice
president and he's going to keep calling them illegal. JD.
Vance is a menace to the peace and safety of
the citizens of this country. He is a liar. He
is an amoral son of a bitch. And guess what
if we start kicking people out of America, if we
(07:50):
start saying, oh, you think you're here legally, We've decided
you're not here legally. If we start deporting them, we
need to make sure Trump is first and JD. Vance
is second, or maybe it should be the other way round,
because Trump can't run as fast as Vance can. For
(08:12):
all the hyperbole here, it is essential to remember at
all times that Trump is the psychotic in this equation.
Vance is the one pretending to be psychotic, deliberately, exploitatively, reprehensively.
CNN reported yesterday that right after the twenty twelve election,
Vance then still at Yale law wrote a seemingly heartfelt
(08:33):
rebuke of people like the JD. Vance of twenty twenty four.
Vance twenty twenty twelve attacked the GOP platform on migrants
and minorities, calling it quote openly hostile to non whites
and alienating to blacks, Latinos, the youth. He wrote this
on a non partisan blog run by one of his
(08:55):
former teachers, and four years later, as he cynically mapped
out this path to political horedom we see him living today,
he decided it needed to be erased. He asked his
ex professor to delete it. Well, there's deleted, and then
there's deleted. It is still on the Internet archive. I
(09:16):
quote JD. Vance twenty twelve. A significant part of Republican
immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting twelve million
people or self deporting them. Think about it. We conservatives
rightly mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and
regulate our food supply, Yet we allegedly believe that it
(09:38):
can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to
pass the laugh test. The same can be said for
too much of the party's platform. That is exactly what
Vance without a second thought for truth or humanity, or
how much we laugh at him or who he used
(09:59):
to be when he was still a human being. That
is exactly what jd. Vance is pushing on America right now.
It is even if he and Trump go down in
record breaking flames, indescribably damaging to this country, he should
be ashamed of it. Remember the practicalities here too, which
(10:21):
I've been hammering since twenty sixteen, and I've never asked
anybody to delete the record of mass deportations require mass
concentration camps, and mass concentration camps require this nation to
move just one small step away from ethnic cleansing. The
Vice President underscored the point yesterday while talking to the
Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Quote, massive raids, massive detention camps.
(10:46):
What are they talking about? She said, as the room
understandably went silent coverage of her speech. It was married
to an ipso's poll indicating fifty four percent of the
country at least somewhat supports apprehending and removing undocumented immigrants.
How about the net pole asking if America supports death
(11:08):
camps for them, because that as Kamala Harris rightly implies
is the inevitable trumpion outcome. And JD. Van's is still
out there every day selling lying about what he was
once ashamed of, and he should be ashamed of it still.
(11:31):
But I assume he asked his old propht to delete
his conscience for him as well. The overall picture can
(12:04):
used to verify something I guessed weeks ago. The Trump
campaign will just get darker and darker, and many of
its leaders will abandon hope of an electoral victory and
focus entirely on forcing a contingent election in the House
of Representatives or another coup attempt. We're both. This is
a dangerous cult full of stupid, failed people looking for
(12:28):
somebody else to blame. When they were told yesterday at
advance event that the FED had cut interest rates, they
booed because in their echo chamber, any economic improvement now,
including economic improvement for themselves, is bad news for Trump.
(12:50):
It is madness. And no. Lemmings do not actually follow
each other blindly off of cliffs, but metaphorically, Trump thugs
do follow each other blindly off of cliffs. For my
next guess, the next flashpoint is going to be a
really difficult one. Those two charges against the guy at
(13:11):
the Trump golf club, the weapons possessions violations that may
be it. The Department of Justice may not have any
other legal action to take against him, although clearly it
wants more. It is combing his life to look for
something else to charge him with, as is the state
of Florida. But as the Wall Street Journal put it, quote,
(13:32):
additional charges would present challenges for prosecutors, since law enforcement
officials have said Routh never fired a shot or had
Trump in his line of sight before a Secret Service
agent spotted his rifle poking through the golf course fence
and open fire, sending him fleeing. If you've noticed, even
(13:55):
places like the Wall Street Journal and Fox are backing
away from referring to this event at the golf course
as a quote assassination attempt unquote, still had that term
on its front page last night, in mice type at
the bottom. Given less prominent play than Woje leaving ESPN,
(14:16):
the journal has adopted quote apparent assassination attempt unquote. What
happens when the cult figures out that the suspect is
facing like six years in jail for a crime they
consider worse than the crucifixion. Well, I'm just going to
(14:41):
guess that at that point they send out dvance to
claim that the man is also an undocumented immigrant. Also
of interest here the response to this from the former
Trump critic and fired CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. He phoned
Trump to apologize to him because I don't know, I
(15:06):
stopped understanding anything he was doing. Five years ago, Chris
Cuomo used to think the correct journalistic answer to how
to have CNN cover the implosion of his brother's tenure
as governor of New York was to just ignore the
story every night. Now he's apologizing to Trump for I
(15:32):
don't know. That's next, then, an all new edition of Countdown.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
This is Countdown with Keith Oberman, my crazy friend set
(16:04):
of us on this all new edition of Countdown. It
dawned on me the other day that I have been
living in apartments in New York City for more than
two thirds of my life now, and that inevitably led
me to think back to the day and how many
times has this happened to you? How many times have
you flashed back to the day when somebody came over
(16:25):
to the apartment building you were living in and lit
it on fire, the story of Hey, why is the
light through yonder window breaking so much brighter than usual?
Next in Things I Promised not to tell they let
my building on fire. First, there are still more new
(16:46):
idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the miss Grants,
morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's worst
persons in the world, or, as the number three here
would say it, whoo the bronze worse.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Maria Badauomo. Maria was once a business anchor at CNBC
and then she was hit by lightning or something that
was transformed into a Saturday Night Live weekend update character
who could have been played by the late Gilda Radner
in her theory as expressed on Fox to Murdoch's Australian failure,
(17:25):
Miranda Divine of the New York Vanity Press Post, who
restrained herself throughout this somehow from exploding and saying, boy,
are you nuts? Maria. It's Maria's theory that the world's
media is being manipulated by you ready, Alejandro majorcis the
(17:46):
head of Homeland Security. No, no, seriously, I mean, even
even as a conspiracy theory, even in the conspiracy theory world. Seriously,
the one time I would ever say this sentence. You
sure you don't mean George sorows where Joe Biden or
at least like Aaron Rodgers or somebody. Bartiromo's theory is
(18:10):
that the head of Homeland Security is manipulating the country
to stop talking about the guy who had the gun
at Trump's golf course. Once again, they take that same
strategy out, and that is change the conversation. She said,
the timing of the p Diddy arrest, Please, they must
(18:33):
have had the p Diddy arrest on the shelf, waiting
to take it off the shelf for when they needed it.
And yesterday, boy, oh boy, did they need it. Because
the questions were spiking everywhere as far as how it
is possibility that another assassination attempt happened, that another would
be assassin was within a couple of hundred yards of Trump.
(18:56):
What questions were spiking? Trump plays golf every day at
the same three courses. He walks slowly when he walks,
and he likes having people film him play golf as
if he were good at it. And his golf course,
the one in Florida, the main one he uses next
(19:16):
to Mari a lago. It abuts public streets. He has
been warned endlessly while in office and out not to
do this, but he does it anyway. The only questions
that are spiking here are how is Trump this stupid?
Not from Awa. As we are all asking these questions, boom,
(19:38):
they take P Diddy in and now we're all talking
about that. I saw right through it as soon as
it happened. Ah okay, I got it now, so uh sorry,
I'm who's P Diddy? The rapper guy with the sex
trafficking thing? Who is not R Kelly? I got it right?
(19:59):
Ah okay? Was that this week? Maria? The only thing
you saw right through his reality and into your own
little fantasy, paranoid world. The runner up worser the University
of South Carolina. I'll just read this intact from the
South Carolina Daily Gazette, the nonprofit news site in that
(20:19):
state Columbia. A social media message circulating among the University
of South Carolina alumni is criticizing the state's largest university
system for allowing the student event featuring a pair of
controversial far right political provocateurs, including the founder of the
Proud Boys. In response, a college spokesman said, allowing the
(20:40):
event as a matter of free speech. The September event,
sponsored by the USC chapter of Uncensored America, bills itself
as a roast of Vice President Harris with roast masters
Milo Ianapolis and Gavin mckinness. It's Gavin mckinness from the
Proud Boys. Proud is a brand name. They don't have
(21:02):
anything to be proud about. The event's title uses a
crude spelling of the Democratic presidential nominee name, which the
sc Daily Gazette is intentionally not repeating. Unquote, the newspaper
The Guardian is quoting a South Carolina student name Nick
Stewart is saying, as someone who normally has a lot
of school pride, this ordeal has made me feel ashamed
(21:24):
of being a student at USC. Well, yeah, look, it's
South Carolina, so our expectations for you doing the right
thing were next to nothing. But Jesus suffering f you're
actually hosting this on campus, an attack on a vice
president of the United States and making a sexual joke
(21:45):
about her. In the title of the thing with these
two idiots, mckinnis but our winner worse than all this
the worst Chris Cuomo I was explaining this. In fact,
Chris Cuomo's name came up during it to a media
reporter the other day. There are those of us who
(22:05):
suffer from being on TV, radio, podcast disorder. It's a
minor personality disorder. And if you recognize you have it,
and that it's not quite one hundred percent healthy, you're
coping with it. You're not dangerous, You're not harming anybody.
I mean, you know, you might humiliate yourself now and again,
(22:26):
But if you get fired from CNN for not understanding
that there are rules about journalism and nepotism, and you
think you were right and so you must remain on TV,
you have the disease that says you must be on
TV to such a degree that you're willing to accept
a job on the nick at night of TV news
(22:46):
called News Nation. This is no longer a minor disorder,
it's no longer coping and you should seek help. Then
if you decide that what happened to Trump on Sunday,
what didn't happen to Trump on Sunday has never happened
to any politician before, even though your own father and
your own brother were governors, and you choose to call
(23:07):
Trump to apologize for something, and then you go on
the air and talk about calling Trump for twenty minutes.
I'm afraid, Chris Cuomo, you are in the tertiary stages
of this disease.
Speaker 4 (23:21):
I called him today because I am ashamed of how
we are responding and not responding to the threats on him,
and I feel for his family. And I know you
can roll your eyes and say, oh, yeah, he asked, right, listen,
that's your choice, and I think it's a wrong choice.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
Okay, we got to get out of.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
The judgment business, unless it's judging ourselves. A guide point
in AK forty seven at him while he's playing golf,
and we take solace in the fact that the guy
didn't get any rounds off.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
That does not work for me.
Speaker 4 (24:01):
If I had been through what that guy's been through
in the last two months, you would not know where
I am. You would never see me on TV again.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
My god, Chris, get help, Chris. That happened to me.
You'd never see me on TV again. You're a news nation.
We never see you on TV now. Today's worst Person
nor She was the number one story on the Countdown
(24:32):
and my favorite topic, me and things I promised not
to tell. I first lived in a New York City
apartment in nineteen fifty nine. I mean, truth be told
nineteen fifty eight. But I was in the womb then,
so I don't remember much about the apartment Grand Avenue
in the Bronx off Fordham Road. Full time. We live
(24:53):
there until October nineteen sixty, then roughly one day a
week in another apartment, the one my grandparents lived, same
block until like my folks, my grandparents, it's moved out
of the Bronx to the suburbs round about when I
was seven. I did not get my own apartment in
New York City until nineteen eighty, which seems so long
ago that if you ask me now, was it still
(25:16):
called New Amsterdam, then I'd have to stop and think
about my answer. Anyway, I was there the other day,
a block away from my apartment. Could look right into
the window and at just the right angle to see it.
So I stood and stared and took some pictures with
my phone, and I shook my head and I went
(25:36):
into full flashback mode, and I saw the flames and
the glow and the blackened lobby. Because one night somebody
threw a Malata fn cocktail into the building in which
I had my first New York City apartment. The address
was it is two hundred and forty East fifty fifth Street,
(25:57):
Apartment ten F. It was two doors west of Second Avenue,
south side of the street. It was the center apartment
on the streets side of the building, and I was
directly above the front entrance and above the only thing
of note in the whole place, a full fledged, old
fashioned New York City apartment building canopy. You could get
out of a cab and a rain storm and under
(26:18):
that canopy in like a second and a half and
pretty much not get wet. No doorman, no amenities, rather dubious,
live in super but it had that canopy. I moved
in on June seventeenth, nineteen eighty. It was a big
studio apartment. The view was of a big video warehouse
across the street, though if you leaned out the westernmost
(26:40):
window you could see the City Corps Center, which was
always an impressive sight on a foggy night. The neighborhood
and the building were safe and quiet, at least they
thought they were safe. It was a fifteen minute walk
from my first job and then a twenty five minute
walk from my second job, and when I first rented there,
it was are you ready four hundred and eighty three
dollars a month, which sounds unbelievable except that was about
(27:04):
a third of my salary. And I think when I
moved out in nineteen eighty four the rent had gone
up to five hundred and ten dollars a month, And
that low price might have had something to do with
the fact that one night somebody threw them all a
top cocktail into the building. You know how, once you've
been in any place for any length of time, you
get used to the physics of it, the feel of it.
(27:27):
Not just someplace you live, any place you spend a
lot of time in an office, a classroom, a theater,
or an apartment. You know what it sounds like. You
know what it feels like in the summer, or how
it feels differently in the winter. You know what it
looks like, the building, noise, the smells, if it's too hot,
if it's too cold, and especially, and think about this
(27:50):
for a second, especially what the light looks like at
every hour of the day. I don't know if there
was a day when I could have said this is
what the light looks like in Apartment ten f two
forty East fifty fifth Street during a snowstorm, or what
the light looks like coming in through the shades at
eight in the morning or eight at night. But it
(28:11):
probably didn't take long. June nineteen eighty was when I
moved in. I bet I knew the various lights of
the place by September, so by New Years of nineteen
eighty three, I knew it all instinctively, exactly reflexingly, boringly.
I would go to my bed in the southeast corner
of my studio apartment. I'd get in sleeping north south,
(28:33):
but with my head at the south end, and as
I lay on my back, I could look out the
windows and see the faint orangey glow from a couple
of street lights that shone through the four windows that
opened to on either side of a kind of small
picture window in the middle. The light would be brightest
from the window on the farthest right, which was the
one closest to Second Avenue and the closest to one
(28:53):
of those street lights. So on Sunday, January ninth, nineteen
eighty three, as that night turned into Monday, January tenth,
nineteen eighty three, I hit the sack around midnight because
I actually had one of those rare nine to five
jobs in television as a field reporter for CNN. I
shut off the light on my nightstand. I laid down
(29:14):
on my back. I stared out my right hand window,
and immediately I thought, boy, the light is slightly more
orange than it should be. What the hell's wrong? I'm
guessing it was no more than five or ten percent
different from usual. But as I've gone to such lengths
to point out, if you see the same light through
the same window in all conceivable conditions almost every night
(29:38):
for more than two years, five or ten percent difference
is a lot, I think. I lay there trying to
figure it out for a minute or so when I
realized it was now ten or fifteen percent different. Cleverly,
I got up and went to the window and rolled
up the shade and looked down to that canopy ten
floors below, and I must say, to my credit, I
(30:01):
quickly discerned that the canopy was on on fire. I
reacted as almost everybody does, matter of factly, thinking, maybe
even saying out loud, hey, the canopy is on fire.
And then registering the fact that the fire had already
burned through the building end of that canopy, and it
(30:21):
was moving quickly outwards towards the street, suggesting again, I
must say, I figured this out for myself, suggesting that
there was probably a fire in the lobby. I put
a robe on over my pajamas, I put on some shoes.
I grabbed my wallet and my keys, and I ventured
into the hallway. No smell of smoke, which I took
(30:42):
again intelligently, is a good sign. Two elevators were staring
me in the face, but I knew better than to
try them. I was, after all, the grandson of a firefighter.
So I opened the stairwell and then I smelled the smoke. Faint,
but it was there. I went down two floors, and
every step I took the smell got a little stronger.
(31:04):
I went back up. I went back into my apartment.
I did not really know what I was going to do.
Needless to say, ten floors is not jumpable. Also, there
was no outdoor fire escape like in many of the
New York City older apartment buildings. And even if I
went down the elevator or the stairs or the side
of the damned building. I would wind up right in
(31:26):
the middle of the fire. For a few seconds, I
really didn't know what to do next. Me, the grandson
of the man who was not only a firefighter, but
who drove the hook and ladder irony also fire. That's
when the sound of the fire engines broke me out
of self absorption and cheered me, I must say considerably.
(31:48):
They parked right near where that convenient canopy used to be,
but was now pretty much a charred hunk of the
metal framing in a little burned fabric. I'm sure you've
seen a fire. Maybe you've seen firefighters arrive at one
and get going with their amazing speed, But there is
something different in seeing it from the vantage point of
(32:08):
being above the fire. First there is an extraordinary amount
of water, then a lot of smoke, then an almost
unstoppable instinct to say cool. And then you go and
check the stairwell again and joyfully inhale the smell of
stuff that had been on fire but was now no
longer on fire and just inundated with water. Hallelujah. I
(32:31):
waited until after they left before I decided to go
back to my bed. I did not feel the need
to add to whatever loud chaos was going on in
the lobby or what have been the lobby, nor to
get any details about the fire other than the key one,
which was it's out. But in the morning, since I
had to go to work anyway, I saw the elevator
(32:53):
door open onto the little linoleum covered landing in the lobby,
and saw that everything else but it in the lobby
was jet black. They were still hosing some of it down.
They were already pulling up burned carpet, installing new windows
and doors, and carting away what was left of the canopy.
And it was evident that as thorough a job as
(33:16):
had been done there, nothing else in the building had burned. Nothing.
In the days and weeks to come, the other residents,
knowing I worked in news, clued me in on the
rumors and asked me to check them out. There was
a dispute, somebody said, involving the owner. There was something
about a woman. No, there was nothing about a woman.
But all of them, every story, every rumor, included the obvious.
(33:42):
That was no boating accident. Somebody had thrown a milo
toof cocktail into or against our front door, and then
there was the best of the stories, born out or
at least lent plausibility by the rapidity with which the
firefighters arrived, which thinking back on it was no more
than three or four minutes after I first saw the
(34:02):
extra orange glow. The best rumor was that the fire
department had been called by somebody before anybody in the
building had called. The implication was somebody called in a
fire and then started the fire. For forty years plus
(34:23):
I have been unable to find the truth. The fire,
doing superficial but ultimately not serious damage did not make
the New York newspapers. Hell that year, I took a
subway to work in the morning and there was a
guy sprawled over three seats. And when I went home
that night, I happened to get on the exact same
train car and there was the exact same guy sprawled
over the exact same three seats because he was dead.
(34:46):
And that didn't make the New York newspapers of nineteen
eighty three either. We old timey New Yorkers, we lived
on the edge. Baby. All I know is that within
weeks a doorman was hired. His name was Jane and
he had a strong Irish accent. And he was still
there as of two thousand and two, and then the
(35:08):
building suddenly went co op. All of us renters were
suddenly offered the chance to buy our apartments. But I
didn't want to take out a loan, and I expected
to be moving to Boston in the near future, and
I kept thinking about that Molotov cocktail. So I turned
down that apartment at the price of are you lying
down thirty six five hundred dollars. Turned it down because, yeah,
(35:36):
there was the fire and the loan and Boston. But
ultimately I turned it down, even just to keep as
a storage unit. I turned that apartment down because when
it comes to investments, I'm a moron. I've done all
(36:05):
the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
We're now back to five episodes a week, posting nightly
just after midnight Eastern. Once again there is a Monday countdown.
I was just thinking as I read that, if you
said to me in nineteen eighty, you know you'll still
be doing this when you're sixty five, only you'll be
doing a podcast. I wouldn't have had any idea what
(36:27):
you were talking about. Of churs. I was pretty dim then.
I probably wouldn't have had any idea what you were
talking about, no matter what you brought up. Brian Ray
and John Phillip Shanelle, the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Shanelle handled the
orchestration and the keyboards. Mister Ray was on the guitars,
bass and drums, and it was produced by Tko Brothers.
(36:47):
Our satirical and fifthy musical comments are by the best
baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is
the Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren
Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed
by the group No Horns Allowed and out here today
is my friend Tony Kornheiser in honor of the retirement
(37:08):
of WOJ. Good Luck Adrian. Everything else was pretty much
my fault. That's countdown for this the forty eighth day
until the twenty twenty fourth presidential election, the one and
forty sixth day since convicted felon domestic jay terrorists first
attempted coup against the democratically elected government in the United States.
(37:28):
Use the election, use the mental health system, use presidential
immunity if you have to to keep him from doing
it again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown
is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news requires till the next
one on Keith Olderman good Morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(38:04):
of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Quinnipiac poll,
Paris by five in Pennsylvania, and I'm beginning to suspect
(00:27):
the Trump campaign is this close to you offering anybody
in a swing state who votes for him a nude
photo of Millennia. I mean, that is neither as gratuitous
nor as crazy as it sounds. I first heard about
the post on Twitter, and I thought this was going
to be a Sarah Cooper bitch or the rebirth of
(00:49):
JibJab and then I clicked on it.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Why do I stand proudly behind my nute modeling work.
The more pressing question is why has the media chosen
to scrutinize my celebration of the Human Forum in a
fashioned photoshoot?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Have we known? Michigan Harris by five, Quinnipiac, Wisconsin Harris
by one, Quinnipiac, Georgia, Trump by just three. That's Donald
not Milania. Atlanta Journal Constitution poll it had been five,
and as mentioned, Pennsylvania Harris by five, Quinnipiac, oh. Also
Pennsylvania throwing Stein and Oliver. It's Harris by six Quinnipiac. Nationally,
(01:31):
Harris fifty Trump forty eight, and a poll by Fox
News a month after they had a Trump fifty Harris
forty nine. How about vote for Trump and order Millenia's
book and get two free nude photos of her. That's
where we are, or almost where we are. Ex prosecutor
vice president swapped in for the retiring president versus insane
(01:56):
proto Nazi racist would be dictator adjudicated sex offender with
the nude model first lady and her step sons, who
are both appearing with it. Oklahoma religious crackpot who has
called the vice president a quote lying whore and their
dad's campaign is about the scary illegal black people eating cats,
but the grotesque, misogynist Russian produced sexual memes are about
(02:22):
the vice president. As a movie, it would be hilarious
if the title hadn't been taken. You could call it
doctor Strangelove.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Why do I stand proudly behind my nute modeling word?
Speaker 1 (02:36):
As the old joke goes, Hey Donald, got any nude
pictures of your first lady? Would you like them? Holy crap? Okay,
back to the numbers. The Pennsylvania and Michigan leeds are
outside the margin of error, So, to borrow another phrase,
stop the count more nationally, you go for the economist
(02:57):
has it Harris by four, Active vote has Harris by six,
And literally two weeks ago it was Harris by two,
and the five thirty eight average ticked up to Harris
by three point three. Okay, okay, My final offer vote
for Trump in Pennsylvania, and you can take a photo
with the first lady. And that's as far as I go.
(03:18):
The Trump people remain utterly mystified by what is happening.
Like all Republicans ever since Newt Gingrich crawled out of
the primordial slime. They live by one mantra and one mantra.
Only if it is evil and it worked, do more
of it. If it's evil and it didn't work, do
(03:40):
twice as much of it. They cannot figure this out.
Crazy won them the White House in twenty sixteen. Crazy
almost won them a coup in twenty twenty. So why
is Crazy losing and losing a little bit more every week?
To her? Naturally, the response is the evil once worked,
(04:02):
but it hasn't been working, so we won't stop it,
and we won't double it. We have to do three
times as much of it as we did previously. I
mean Axios. Far right reactionary axios headlined all this last night,
the no shame strategy. The interior headline Vance's zero shame strategy.
(04:25):
It's also Vance's zero truth strategy. This whole thing, this
whole thing about the cats and the migrants in Springfield, Ohio,
the whole Riizon detra of JV. Vance's stochastic terrorist attack
on the residents of his own state. This has now
been revealed to originate from two lies. The first lie
(04:52):
was from the woman who posted to Facebook about somebody's friends, neighbors, aunts, uncles, condoms,
salesman seeing somebody eat a cat. The woman's name was
Erica Lee. She has at least expressed remorse. Vance's campaign
knew this was not true. It had called the Springfield
(05:13):
City Hall on the ninth of this month and was
told by people there that it was not true, and
that did not stop them. It didn't even slow them down.
The second lie, revealed yesterday, turns out to have been
by the woman in Springfield who told the police her cat,
Miss Sassey, had been taken and killed. Maybe that's the
(05:38):
story Vance keeps using as a fallback. Oh there's a
police report. My constituents insist there is a missing cat.
The woman is named Anna Kilgore, and guess what her
cat is alive? Sweet Sassy Melasses, the cat, Miss Sassey,
(05:58):
is alive. The Wall Street Journal did something that Trump
and Vance and their fellow scumbags would never do. They
fact checked Vance's story and kill Gore's story and Miss
Sasse's story. I quote. A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided
The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which
(06:19):
a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken
by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna
Kilgore's house Tuesday evening, she said her cat, Miss Sassey,
which went missing in late August, had actually returned a
few days later, found safe in her own basement. Kil Gore,
(06:42):
wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to
her in Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter
and a mobile phone translation app. And again, as stupid
as all that sounds, at least she did that. At
least she made some effort to put one pinch of
the toothpaste back into the tube. Vance Vance got up
(07:07):
on a stage and insisted not only that he has
multiple reports from his constituents, but that the legal immigrants,
virtually everybody Republican or Democrat is generously welcomed into Springfield,
Ohio acknowledge that they have improved Springfield, Ohio. Vance got
up there yesterday insisted they are not legally here and
(07:28):
that it's just a legal trick played by the Vice
president and he's going to keep calling them illegal. JD.
Vance is a menace to the peace and safety of
the citizens of this country. He is a liar. He
is an amoral son of a bitch. And guess what
if we start kicking people out of America, if we
(07:50):
start saying, oh, you think you're here legally, We've decided
you're not here legally. If we start deporting them, we
need to make sure Trump is first and JD. Vance
is second, or maybe it should be the other way round,
because Trump can't run as fast as Vance can. For
(08:12):
all the hyperbole here, it is essential to remember at
all times that Trump is the psychotic in this equation.
Vance is the one pretending to be psychotic, deliberately, exploitatively, reprehensively.
CNN reported yesterday that right after the twenty twelve election,
Vance then still at Yale law wrote a seemingly heartfelt
(08:33):
rebuke of people like the JD. Vance of twenty twenty four.
Vance twenty twenty twelve attacked the GOP platform on migrants
and minorities, calling it quote openly hostile to non whites
and alienating to blacks, Latinos, the youth. He wrote this
on a non partisan blog run by one of his
(08:55):
former teachers, and four years later, as he cynically mapped
out this path to political horedom we see him living today,
he decided it needed to be erased. He asked his
ex professor to delete it. Well, there's deleted, and then
there's deleted. It is still on the Internet archive. I
(09:16):
quote JD. Vance twenty twelve. A significant part of Republican
immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting twelve million
people or self deporting them. Think about it. We conservatives
rightly mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and
regulate our food supply, Yet we allegedly believe that it
(09:38):
can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to
pass the laugh test. The same can be said for
too much of the party's platform. That is exactly what
Vance without a second thought for truth or humanity, or
how much we laugh at him or who he used
(09:59):
to be when he was still a human being. That
is exactly what jd. Vance is pushing on America right now.
It is even if he and Trump go down in
record breaking flames, indescribably damaging to this country, he should
be ashamed of it. Remember the practicalities here too, which
(10:21):
I've been hammering since twenty sixteen, and I've never asked
anybody to delete the record of mass deportations require mass
concentration camps, and mass concentration camps require this nation to
move just one small step away from ethnic cleansing. The
Vice President underscored the point yesterday while talking to the
Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Quote, massive raids, massive detention camps.
(10:46):
What are they talking about? She said, as the room
understandably went silent coverage of her speech. It was married
to an ipso's poll indicating fifty four percent of the
country at least somewhat supports apprehending and removing undocumented immigrants.
How about the net pole asking if America supports death
(11:08):
camps for them, because that as Kamala Harris rightly implies
is the inevitable trumpion outcome. And JD. Van's is still
out there every day selling lying about what he was
once ashamed of, and he should be ashamed of it still.
(11:31):
But I assume he asked his old propht to delete
his conscience for him as well. The overall picture can
(12:04):
used to verify something I guessed weeks ago. The Trump
campaign will just get darker and darker, and many of
its leaders will abandon hope of an electoral victory and
focus entirely on forcing a contingent election in the House
of Representatives or another coup attempt. We're both. This is
a dangerous cult full of stupid, failed people looking for
(12:28):
somebody else to blame. When they were told yesterday at
advance event that the FED had cut interest rates, they
booed because in their echo chamber, any economic improvement now,
including economic improvement for themselves, is bad news for Trump.
(12:50):
It is madness. And no. Lemmings do not actually follow
each other blindly off of cliffs, but metaphorically, Trump thugs
do follow each other blindly off of cliffs. For my
next guess, the next flashpoint is going to be a
really difficult one. Those two charges against the guy at
(13:11):
the Trump golf club, the weapons possessions violations that may
be it. The Department of Justice may not have any
other legal action to take against him, although clearly it
wants more. It is combing his life to look for
something else to charge him with, as is the state
of Florida. But as the Wall Street Journal put it, quote,
(13:32):
additional charges would present challenges for prosecutors, since law enforcement
officials have said Routh never fired a shot or had
Trump in his line of sight before a Secret Service
agent spotted his rifle poking through the golf course fence
and open fire, sending him fleeing. If you've noticed, even
(13:55):
places like the Wall Street Journal and Fox are backing
away from referring to this event at the golf course
as a quote assassination attempt unquote, still had that term
on its front page last night, in mice type at
the bottom. Given less prominent play than Woje leaving ESPN,
(14:16):
the journal has adopted quote apparent assassination attempt unquote. What
happens when the cult figures out that the suspect is
facing like six years in jail for a crime they
consider worse than the crucifixion. Well, I'm just going to
(14:41):
guess that at that point they send out dvance to
claim that the man is also an undocumented immigrant. Also
of interest here the response to this from the former
Trump critic and fired CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. He phoned
Trump to apologize to him because I don't know, I
(15:06):
stopped understanding anything he was doing. Five years ago, Chris
Cuomo used to think the correct journalistic answer to how
to have CNN cover the implosion of his brother's tenure
as governor of New York was to just ignore the
story every night. Now he's apologizing to Trump for I
(15:32):
don't know. That's next, then, an all new edition of Countdown.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
This is Countdown with Keith Oberman, my crazy friend set
(16:04):
of us on this all new edition of Countdown. It
dawned on me the other day that I have been
living in apartments in New York City for more than
two thirds of my life now, and that inevitably led
me to think back to the day and how many
times has this happened to you? How many times have
you flashed back to the day when somebody came over
(16:25):
to the apartment building you were living in and lit
it on fire, the story of Hey, why is the
light through yonder window breaking so much brighter than usual?
Next in Things I Promised not to tell they let
my building on fire. First, there are still more new
(16:46):
idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the miss Grants,
morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's worst
persons in the world, or, as the number three here
would say it, whoo the bronze worse.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Maria Badauomo. Maria was once a business anchor at CNBC
and then she was hit by lightning or something that
was transformed into a Saturday Night Live weekend update character
who could have been played by the late Gilda Radner
in her theory as expressed on Fox to Murdoch's Australian failure,
(17:25):
Miranda Divine of the New York Vanity Press Post, who
restrained herself throughout this somehow from exploding and saying, boy,
are you nuts? Maria. It's Maria's theory that the world's
media is being manipulated by you ready, Alejandro majorcis the
(17:46):
head of Homeland Security. No, no, seriously, I mean, even
even as a conspiracy theory, even in the conspiracy theory world. Seriously,
the one time I would ever say this sentence. You
sure you don't mean George sorows where Joe Biden or
at least like Aaron Rodgers or somebody. Bartiromo's theory is
(18:10):
that the head of Homeland Security is manipulating the country
to stop talking about the guy who had the gun
at Trump's golf course. Once again, they take that same
strategy out, and that is change the conversation. She said,
the timing of the p Diddy arrest, Please, they must
(18:33):
have had the p Diddy arrest on the shelf, waiting
to take it off the shelf for when they needed it.
And yesterday, boy, oh boy, did they need it. Because
the questions were spiking everywhere as far as how it
is possibility that another assassination attempt happened, that another would
be assassin was within a couple of hundred yards of Trump.
(18:56):
What questions were spiking? Trump plays golf every day at
the same three courses. He walks slowly when he walks,
and he likes having people film him play golf as
if he were good at it. And his golf course,
the one in Florida, the main one he uses next
(19:16):
to Mari a lago. It abuts public streets. He has
been warned endlessly while in office and out not to
do this, but he does it anyway. The only questions
that are spiking here are how is Trump this stupid?
Not from Awa. As we are all asking these questions, boom,
(19:38):
they take P Diddy in and now we're all talking
about that. I saw right through it as soon as
it happened. Ah okay, I got it now, so uh sorry,
I'm who's P Diddy? The rapper guy with the sex
trafficking thing? Who is not R Kelly? I got it right?
(19:59):
Ah okay? Was that this week? Maria? The only thing
you saw right through his reality and into your own
little fantasy, paranoid world. The runner up worser the University
of South Carolina. I'll just read this intact from the
South Carolina Daily Gazette, the nonprofit news site in that
(20:19):
state Columbia. A social media message circulating among the University
of South Carolina alumni is criticizing the state's largest university
system for allowing the student event featuring a pair of
controversial far right political provocateurs, including the founder of the
Proud Boys. In response, a college spokesman said, allowing the
(20:40):
event as a matter of free speech. The September event,
sponsored by the USC chapter of Uncensored America, bills itself
as a roast of Vice President Harris with roast masters
Milo Ianapolis and Gavin mckinness. It's Gavin mckinness from the
Proud Boys. Proud is a brand name. They don't have
(21:02):
anything to be proud about. The event's title uses a
crude spelling of the Democratic presidential nominee name, which the
sc Daily Gazette is intentionally not repeating. Unquote, the newspaper
The Guardian is quoting a South Carolina student name Nick
Stewart is saying, as someone who normally has a lot
of school pride, this ordeal has made me feel ashamed
(21:24):
of being a student at USC. Well, yeah, look, it's
South Carolina, so our expectations for you doing the right
thing were next to nothing. But Jesus suffering f you're
actually hosting this on campus, an attack on a vice
president of the United States and making a sexual joke
(21:45):
about her. In the title of the thing with these
two idiots, mckinnis but our winner worse than all this
the worst Chris Cuomo I was explaining this. In fact,
Chris Cuomo's name came up during it to a media
reporter the other day. There are those of us who
(22:05):
suffer from being on TV, radio, podcast disorder. It's a
minor personality disorder. And if you recognize you have it,
and that it's not quite one hundred percent healthy, you're
coping with it. You're not dangerous, You're not harming anybody.
I mean, you know, you might humiliate yourself now and again,
(22:26):
But if you get fired from CNN for not understanding
that there are rules about journalism and nepotism, and you
think you were right and so you must remain on TV,
you have the disease that says you must be on
TV to such a degree that you're willing to accept
a job on the nick at night of TV news
(22:46):
called News Nation. This is no longer a minor disorder,
it's no longer coping and you should seek help. Then
if you decide that what happened to Trump on Sunday,
what didn't happen to Trump on Sunday has never happened
to any politician before, even though your own father and
your own brother were governors, and you choose to call
(23:07):
Trump to apologize for something, and then you go on
the air and talk about calling Trump for twenty minutes.
I'm afraid, Chris Cuomo, you are in the tertiary stages
of this disease.
Speaker 4 (23:21):
I called him today because I am ashamed of how
we are responding and not responding to the threats on him,
and I feel for his family. And I know you
can roll your eyes and say, oh, yeah, he asked, right, listen,
that's your choice, and I think it's a wrong choice.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
Okay, we got to get out of.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
The judgment business, unless it's judging ourselves. A guide point
in AK forty seven at him while he's playing golf,
and we take solace in the fact that the guy
didn't get any rounds off.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
That does not work for me.
Speaker 4 (24:01):
If I had been through what that guy's been through
in the last two months, you would not know where
I am. You would never see me on TV again.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
My god, Chris, get help, Chris. That happened to me.
You'd never see me on TV again. You're a news nation.
We never see you on TV now. Today's worst Person
nor She was the number one story on the Countdown
(24:32):
and my favorite topic, me and things I promised not
to tell. I first lived in a New York City
apartment in nineteen fifty nine. I mean, truth be told
nineteen fifty eight. But I was in the womb then,
so I don't remember much about the apartment Grand Avenue
in the Bronx off Fordham Road. Full time. We live
(24:53):
there until October nineteen sixty, then roughly one day a
week in another apartment, the one my grandparents lived, same
block until like my folks, my grandparents, it's moved out
of the Bronx to the suburbs round about when I
was seven. I did not get my own apartment in
New York City until nineteen eighty, which seems so long
ago that if you ask me now, was it still
(25:16):
called New Amsterdam, then I'd have to stop and think
about my answer. Anyway, I was there the other day,
a block away from my apartment. Could look right into
the window and at just the right angle to see it.
So I stood and stared and took some pictures with
my phone, and I shook my head and I went
(25:36):
into full flashback mode, and I saw the flames and
the glow and the blackened lobby. Because one night somebody
threw a Malata fn cocktail into the building in which
I had my first New York City apartment. The address
was it is two hundred and forty East fifty fifth Street,
(25:57):
Apartment ten F. It was two doors west of Second Avenue,
south side of the street. It was the center apartment
on the streets side of the building, and I was
directly above the front entrance and above the only thing
of note in the whole place, a full fledged, old
fashioned New York City apartment building canopy. You could get
out of a cab and a rain storm and under
(26:18):
that canopy in like a second and a half and
pretty much not get wet. No doorman, no amenities, rather dubious,
live in super but it had that canopy. I moved
in on June seventeenth, nineteen eighty. It was a big
studio apartment. The view was of a big video warehouse
across the street, though if you leaned out the westernmost
(26:40):
window you could see the City Corps Center, which was
always an impressive sight on a foggy night. The neighborhood
and the building were safe and quiet, at least they
thought they were safe. It was a fifteen minute walk
from my first job and then a twenty five minute
walk from my second job, and when I first rented there,
it was are you ready four hundred and eighty three
dollars a month, which sounds unbelievable except that was about
(27:04):
a third of my salary. And I think when I
moved out in nineteen eighty four the rent had gone
up to five hundred and ten dollars a month, And
that low price might have had something to do with
the fact that one night somebody threw them all a
top cocktail into the building. You know how, once you've
been in any place for any length of time, you
get used to the physics of it, the feel of it.
(27:27):
Not just someplace you live, any place you spend a
lot of time in an office, a classroom, a theater,
or an apartment. You know what it sounds like. You
know what it feels like in the summer, or how
it feels differently in the winter. You know what it
looks like, the building, noise, the smells, if it's too hot,
if it's too cold, and especially, and think about this
(27:50):
for a second, especially what the light looks like at
every hour of the day. I don't know if there
was a day when I could have said this is
what the light looks like in Apartment ten f two
forty East fifty fifth Street during a snowstorm, or what
the light looks like coming in through the shades at
eight in the morning or eight at night. But it
(28:11):
probably didn't take long. June nineteen eighty was when I
moved in. I bet I knew the various lights of
the place by September, so by New Years of nineteen
eighty three, I knew it all instinctively, exactly reflexingly, boringly.
I would go to my bed in the southeast corner
of my studio apartment. I'd get in sleeping north south,
(28:33):
but with my head at the south end, and as
I lay on my back, I could look out the
windows and see the faint orangey glow from a couple
of street lights that shone through the four windows that
opened to on either side of a kind of small
picture window in the middle. The light would be brightest
from the window on the farthest right, which was the
one closest to Second Avenue and the closest to one
(28:53):
of those street lights. So on Sunday, January ninth, nineteen
eighty three, as that night turned into Monday, January tenth,
nineteen eighty three, I hit the sack around midnight because
I actually had one of those rare nine to five
jobs in television as a field reporter for CNN. I
shut off the light on my nightstand. I laid down
(29:14):
on my back. I stared out my right hand window,
and immediately I thought, boy, the light is slightly more
orange than it should be. What the hell's wrong? I'm
guessing it was no more than five or ten percent
different from usual. But as I've gone to such lengths
to point out, if you see the same light through
the same window in all conceivable conditions almost every night
(29:38):
for more than two years, five or ten percent difference
is a lot, I think. I lay there trying to
figure it out for a minute or so when I
realized it was now ten or fifteen percent different. Cleverly,
I got up and went to the window and rolled
up the shade and looked down to that canopy ten
floors below, and I must say, to my credit, I
(30:01):
quickly discerned that the canopy was on on fire. I
reacted as almost everybody does, matter of factly, thinking, maybe
even saying out loud, hey, the canopy is on fire.
And then registering the fact that the fire had already
burned through the building end of that canopy, and it
(30:21):
was moving quickly outwards towards the street, suggesting again, I
must say, I figured this out for myself, suggesting that
there was probably a fire in the lobby. I put
a robe on over my pajamas, I put on some shoes.
I grabbed my wallet and my keys, and I ventured
into the hallway. No smell of smoke, which I took
(30:42):
again intelligently, is a good sign. Two elevators were staring
me in the face, but I knew better than to
try them. I was, after all, the grandson of a firefighter.
So I opened the stairwell and then I smelled the smoke. Faint,
but it was there. I went down two floors, and
every step I took the smell got a little stronger.
(31:04):
I went back up. I went back into my apartment.
I did not really know what I was going to do.
Needless to say, ten floors is not jumpable. Also, there
was no outdoor fire escape like in many of the
New York City older apartment buildings. And even if I
went down the elevator or the stairs or the side
of the damned building. I would wind up right in
(31:26):
the middle of the fire. For a few seconds, I
really didn't know what to do next. Me, the grandson
of the man who was not only a firefighter, but
who drove the hook and ladder irony also fire. That's
when the sound of the fire engines broke me out
of self absorption and cheered me, I must say considerably.
(31:48):
They parked right near where that convenient canopy used to be,
but was now pretty much a charred hunk of the
metal framing in a little burned fabric. I'm sure you've
seen a fire. Maybe you've seen firefighters arrive at one
and get going with their amazing speed, But there is
something different in seeing it from the vantage point of
(32:08):
being above the fire. First there is an extraordinary amount
of water, then a lot of smoke, then an almost
unstoppable instinct to say cool. And then you go and
check the stairwell again and joyfully inhale the smell of
stuff that had been on fire but was now no
longer on fire and just inundated with water. Hallelujah. I
(32:31):
waited until after they left before I decided to go
back to my bed. I did not feel the need
to add to whatever loud chaos was going on in
the lobby or what have been the lobby, nor to
get any details about the fire other than the key one,
which was it's out. But in the morning, since I
had to go to work anyway, I saw the elevator
(32:53):
door open onto the little linoleum covered landing in the lobby,
and saw that everything else but it in the lobby
was jet black. They were still hosing some of it down.
They were already pulling up burned carpet, installing new windows
and doors, and carting away what was left of the canopy.
And it was evident that as thorough a job as
(33:16):
had been done there, nothing else in the building had burned. Nothing.
In the days and weeks to come, the other residents,
knowing I worked in news, clued me in on the
rumors and asked me to check them out. There was
a dispute, somebody said, involving the owner. There was something
about a woman. No, there was nothing about a woman.
But all of them, every story, every rumor, included the obvious.
(33:42):
That was no boating accident. Somebody had thrown a milo
toof cocktail into or against our front door, and then
there was the best of the stories, born out or
at least lent plausibility by the rapidity with which the
firefighters arrived, which thinking back on it was no more
than three or four minutes after I first saw the
(34:02):
extra orange glow. The best rumor was that the fire
department had been called by somebody before anybody in the
building had called. The implication was somebody called in a
fire and then started the fire. For forty years plus
(34:23):
I have been unable to find the truth. The fire,
doing superficial but ultimately not serious damage did not make
the New York newspapers. Hell that year, I took a
subway to work in the morning and there was a
guy sprawled over three seats. And when I went home
that night, I happened to get on the exact same
train car and there was the exact same guy sprawled
over the exact same three seats because he was dead.
(34:46):
And that didn't make the New York newspapers of nineteen
eighty three either. We old timey New Yorkers, we lived
on the edge. Baby. All I know is that within
weeks a doorman was hired. His name was Jane and
he had a strong Irish accent. And he was still
there as of two thousand and two, and then the
(35:08):
building suddenly went co op. All of us renters were
suddenly offered the chance to buy our apartments. But I
didn't want to take out a loan, and I expected
to be moving to Boston in the near future, and
I kept thinking about that Molotov cocktail. So I turned
down that apartment at the price of are you lying
down thirty six five hundred dollars. Turned it down because, yeah,
(35:36):
there was the fire and the loan and Boston. But
ultimately I turned it down, even just to keep as
a storage unit. I turned that apartment down because when
it comes to investments, I'm a moron. I've done all
(36:05):
the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
We're now back to five episodes a week, posting nightly
just after midnight Eastern. Once again there is a Monday countdown.
I was just thinking as I read that, if you
said to me in nineteen eighty, you know you'll still
be doing this when you're sixty five, only you'll be
doing a podcast. I wouldn't have had any idea what
(36:27):
you were talking about. Of churs. I was pretty dim then.
I probably wouldn't have had any idea what you were
talking about, no matter what you brought up. Brian Ray
and John Phillip Shanelle, the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Shanelle handled the
orchestration and the keyboards. Mister Ray was on the guitars,
bass and drums, and it was produced by Tko Brothers.
(36:47):
Our satirical and fifthy musical comments are by the best
baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is
the Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren
Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed
by the group No Horns Allowed and out here today
is my friend Tony Kornheiser in honor of the retirement
(37:08):
of WOJ. Good Luck Adrian. Everything else was pretty much
my fault. That's countdown for this the forty eighth day
until the twenty twenty fourth presidential election, the one and
forty sixth day since convicted felon domestic jay terrorists first
attempted coup against the democratically elected government in the United States.
(37:28):
Use the election, use the mental health system, use presidential
immunity if you have to to keep him from doing
it again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown
is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news requires till the next
one on Keith Olderman good Morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production
(38:04):
of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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