Lash wrote:You popped in quickly enough to criticize.
How about this?
Umm, shock news, I havent followed the thread post by post, and responded only to what I saw now that I did pop back in.
I'm a horrible person, I know.
But since you ask:
Lash wrote:Do you remember the unsafe environment at Ground Zero--and how firefighters were becoming quite ill working there??--K-9 Unit dogs were dying...
Rudy did the right thing getting them out of there.
Thats an argument you can make. It's an argument one can disagree with, but there's nothing indefensible about it - it's a reasonable argument to bring up.
One thing I'd question about this argument is that it submits that the efforts to recover bodies had to be suspended for the sake of the firefighters - which seems an odd line of argument to take considering it was those very firefighters who were
protesting the suspension.
I dont know when I'd suspend the efforts myself, if I were the mayor - it all depends on the details of what "quite ill" is, how many people, etc. Weighing the risk of endangering the firefighters doing the rescue work against the virtue of rescuing the remains of the firefighters who died in the line of duty on 9/11.
I'd certainly give prime importance to what the firefighters themselves had to say about it.
Lash wrote:To use it against him for political expediency is about as low as it gets.
Huh? OK, so here's the weird jump in logic I dont get. Because in
your view the suspension was justified, it is now "as low as it gets" for the firefighters to keep protesting about it?
Granted - you have a defendable argument
for suspending the recovery efforts there. But it's hardly a be-all and end-all thing, considering the questions one can raise about it. So I suppose you'd agree that there are also defendable arguments
against the suspension. Many of the firefighters whose fate you use to argue
for suspension, for one, themselves were
against it. So what you have here is an honest disagreement.
These firefighters disagreed with the argument you bring up. They thought the recovery should have been continued. They are angry: it's their colleagues' bodies who were carted off to the garbage, the bodies of people who laid down their lives on 9/11. So they have protested,
and will keep on telling anyone who cares to listen that they think Giuliani was
wrong on this. That's "as low as it gets"?
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And then the broader question, here.
If the man stands for Presidency, the most powerful office in the world, would you not
want to hear everything that the people who actually experienced him as their mayor have to say about him?
The people of New York know what he was like as their mayor. Now that the rest of the American people have to review his credentials as possible President, of course they are going to tell them what they think of the man. And I'd hope that those other Americans will be asking New Yorkers what they think of the man.
Well, what the unionised firefighters think of the man is that he prematurely had the bodies of their colleagues, heroes of 9/11, shoved onto the garbage, and they've been very angry about that. And yes, if you are readying yourself to now vote for the man as President, they
do want you to know. Is that a low thing, even the lowest of the low?
I'd say that rather than calling it a scandal that they're telling you, you (the collective you, "the American people") should want to hear - just like you should want to hear the complaints and compliments of any group or people who actually experienced the man you are considering voting for President as their mayor.
