9/11: The Final Insult

Today, despite the shameful delaying tactics of members John McCain and Tom Coburn, the U.S. Senate passed a bill awarding extended medical benefits to first responders during the 9/11 attack. While alone this is cause for thankfulness (if not celebration), it also created the opportunity for Fox News to again trot out the most despicable man in America, Rudolph Giuliani.

The person once honored as Man of the Year by Time magazine is, of course, the poster boy for corrupt incompetence. But that's just a personal opinion. Instead, on this day of his rising from the ashes to again self-proclaim his heroism, let's dispassionately deal with established fact concerning his 'leadership':

• In February of 1993, while he was running for mayor, the twin towers were attacked for the first time, by a bomb-laden truck in one of the tower's underground parking lots. Presumably he noticed.
• One of the lessons learned that day was the importance of radio communication between first responders, and with their command centers. During that attack, the radios performed dismally, if at all.
• It took over seven years of Giuliani's term for new radios to be purchased for the fire department. When they were, it was done without competitive bidding. Giuliani's administration made the decision unilaterally.
• The radios were never properly field tested prior to purchase. When they were tested after distribution, they failed field tests repeatedly.
• On the day of the 9/11 attacks, during rescue operations, all police and fire department personnel were ordered evacuated from the building. All police (working on their own radio system) obeyed the radio call, without loss of life for any of those evacuees.
• However, 212 firefighters were killed when they remained inside the building which subsequently collapsed. Surviving firefighters on the scene reported that the radio commands were never heard--the radios failed.
• When subsequently called to testify, Giuliani reported under oath that the firefighters who died simply disobeyed orders. (Apparently, firefighters are uniformly 'braver' than police).
• Members of the fire department rallied to protest Giuliani's version of the facts. Giuliani had them arrested.
• Giuliani never entered the city's unified emergency command center on that day. That's because it was located on the 23rd floor in the WTC complex. Giuliani claimed afterwards it was put there because that's where his director of emergency operations wanted it. That is, until that director presented a memo showing he had clearly stated it should be put in Brooklyn, for exactly the reason that it would be far less prone to attack.
• One of the requirements for the command center was the installation of huge underground fuel tanks to run generators in case of emergency. It was those fuel tanks that exploded and burned violently during the attack, accounting for the immense heat and flame that killed many of the victims.
• Giuliani's hand-selected center was bullet proof and had its own private elevator, cigar humidor and monogrammed towels, making it ideal as a secret weekend location for assignations with his then-girlfriend.
• The reason for today's appropriations are the lifelong lung problems being suffered by those first responders. They worked 8 and 12 hour shifts trying to locate survivors and remains in the rubble. They did so without any city mandate requiring breathing respirators.
• Shortly after the attack, Giuliani had personally declared the site safe. It is interesting that much video shows him greeting and thanking clean-up workers on site. He is wearing a mask. Virtually none of the people actually doing the work are.

Despite all the evidence, we again have to endure the duplicity of Giuliani claiming solidarity with those first responders and their families.

How much better served they would have been had he exhibited any such concern in the eight years of his mayoralty before the attack.

Terrorists in Robes

Ten years to the week, the smothering hand of right wing judicial terrorism again has clawed the throat of democracy.

It was December of 2000 when five Supreme Court puppets of the Republican Party cast aside legal precedence and any pretense of non-partisanship to halt a recount of Presidential votes in Florida...for fear that a full recount might 'cast a cloud' on the presidency of fellow puppet George W. Bush. As such, Anton Scalia and his fellow scum ushered in an era of fiscal disaster, Constitutional travesties, and the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis in order for Fearless Leader Bush to exorcise the demons of his desertion from the same armed forces he presumed to respect.

Today, we have experienced a lower-level travesty. But in its own way, it betrays the degree to which the feared 'judicial activism' so lamented by the right has in reality become their calling card...the central method by which they seek to reestablish the monarchy and class separation for which which our founding fathers risked their lives to deposit in the dust bin of history.

A Bush-appointed Federal judge in Virginia, Henry E. Hudson, has ruled that key provisions of the Obama Health Care Bill--the one that provides health insurance to many more Americans--AND reduces costs--are unconstitutional. Unsurprisingly, Hudson is part owner of an online political action firm that has lobbied against the Obama health bill. And the U.S. Attorney who brought the case to Hudson's court has also purchased the services of the same firm, Campaign Solutions Inc.

Scalia, thug that he is, at least had the decency to attempt a rationalization for the actions crowning Bush the boy king. Of course, those legal pretenses are destined to become a laughingstock of American jurisprudence for centuries to come. The two clowns in Virginia didn't have the same backbone. They quickly asserted that their cowardly conduct would ultimately be reviewed by a higher court...thus attempting to remove themselves from responsibility.

But they've done their jobs. They've set legal wheels in motion that will allow Scalia and cohorts to again overturn the will of the American people.

It's only a matter of time until people wake up...and take the law into their own hands.

And the law will be better for it.