sigh

[sisyphusshrugged]

Does anyone really believe that this actually happened?

Well the President remained there and talked to everyone, the firefighters, the police officers, the healthcare workers, the clergy, but the people who spent the most time with him were our construction workers.

Now New York construction workers are very special people. I'm sure this is true all over but I know the ones here the best. They were real heroes along with many others that day, volunteering immediately. And they're big, real big. Their arms are bigger than my legs and their opinions are even bigger than their arms.

Now each one of them would engage the President and I imagine like his cabinet give him advice.

They were advising him in their own words on exactly what he should do with the terrorists. Of course I can't repeat their exact language.

But one of them really went into great detail and upon conclusion of his remarks President Bush said in a rather loud voice, "I agree." [at this point, the audience wasn't as impressed as he thought they should have been, so he said something like "Can you imagine, you're a construction worker, and you just told the president what to do with the terrorists and he says I agree?"]

At this point the guy just beamed and all his buddies turned toward him in amazement.

The guy just lost it.

So he reached over, embraced the President and began hugging him enthusiastically. [at this point Giuliani showed us how the guy put his arms around Bush and started squeezing]

A Secret Service agent standing next to me looked at the President and the guy and instead of extracting the President from this bear hug, he turned toward me and put his finger in my face and said, "If this guy hurts the President, Giuliani you're finished."

Meekly, and this is the moral of the story, I responded, "but it would be out of love."

Um, yeah. A Secret Service agent just stood by and threatened the big-hero Republican mayor of New York with career death while some construction worker squeezed on POTUS and our legendarily thin-skinned and vindictive mayor put him off with some of his trademark meekness.

This screams Peggy Noonan louder than Peggy Noonan does.

FYI, a not inconsiderable portion of Mr. Giuliani's fires of hell were fed by the fuel supply for the city's emergency response bunker, which he insisted on locating in 7WTC in the face of universal insistence by the city's security consultants that it wasn't a good idea to locate an emergency response bunker in a terrorist target.

Of course, since the Motorola radios his administration insisted on buying for the firefighters through a no-bid contract, which were never field-tested, didn't work properly, a working communications center might not have gotten the message to the firefighters in the towers that they needed to evacuate.

And I will always remember that moment as we escaped the building we were trapped in at 75 Barclay Street and realized that things outside might be even worse than they were inside the building.

We did the best we could to communicate a message of calm and hope, as we stood on the pavement seeing a massive cloud rushing through the cavernous streets of lower Manhattan.

It really does seem like the least you could do under the circumstances.

Comments

[purgatorius.livejournal.com]

Oh, you're awesome.

[dublingal-ny.livejournal.com]

Well I hope he enjoyed the hug, because I work in construction in New York and the tradesmen I interact with are a whooooole lot more like these guys (http://www.construction.com/NewsCenter/Headlines/ENR/20040830l.asp). Whatever love they had for him then is well and truly gone.

[splungey.livejournal.com]

75 Barclay is across the street from where WTC 7 used to be. I know this because my union headquarters are there. I don't know if there was some escape route from WTC 7 (a utility tunnel or some such thing) but I know the front of 75 Barclay was damaged by falling debris and it took a couple of months to get the building up and running normally.