New York Post Online Edition: news
August 25, 2004 — WASHINGTON
House Speaker Dennis Hastert is charging in a new book that New York lawmakers’ attempts to win financial aid after the 9/11 attacks amounted to an “unseemly scramble” for money.
Just days before the GOP convention is set to begin in the city � and three years after the catastrophe from which many city businesses have yet to recover � the Illinois Republican’s ugly slap at the Big Apple infuriated New York legislators.
“The only thing unseemly is the three years it has taken us trying to get the president and Congress to fulfill their promise,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.).
“What’s unseemly is that the $20 billion became the ceiling, not the floor, in help to New York, when so many needs remains,” she added.
The headline on the Post that accompanies this is “Speaker Of The Louse”.
Folks, if you thought Republicans were going to get a hostile reaction before this story came out, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Unseemly? Hastert may not realize that this little attack wiped entire Zip Codes off the map. Acres of real estate. Major transportation hubs. Hundreds of businesses. Hundreds of thousands of lives affected.
Hastert should be out as House Speaker for this crack. And luckily, you can help do that, even if you don’t live in his district– all you have to do is vote against the Republican candidate for your local US Representative seat.
I think Hastert is expressing the feelings of a lot of people who weren’t directly affected by the attacks. I know people in this part of the country (Dallas-Ft. Worth) who looked at the aid going to 9/11 victims (millions) and the aid going to the Oklahoma City victims (zero), and thought it looked a bit – well – unseemly.
In this case, unseemly is affected a lot by proximity, but Hastert shouldn’t show up in New York City any time soon 🙂
Then Hastert’s in biiiiig trouble– he’s acting as the chairman of the Republican National Convention, taking place next week in– aw, you guessed.
While I don’t know for a fact that no money was sent to help out Oklahoma City victims, and although what happened was extremely tragic, there are a few differences that may or may not make a big, uh, difference. One, OK was perpetrated by some jerk off disgruntled Americans, while NYC was a large scale attack by a terrorist group. Second, almost 3000 lives were lost in NYC, businesses collapsed or were at least severely set back, two of largest buildings in the country fell down and required being picked or cleaned up. This isnt’ to say that what happened in OK isn’t significant or tragic (kinda like how losing a finger is better than losing an arm, but it still sucks), but it was much smaller scale. Whether that makes one or the other more or less worthy of financial aid I don’t know, but the two incidents are very different.
Monkeys.
Well, with all due respect to both you and New York, The tragedy at best was like loosing your thumb, not an arm. It caused some trouble to the economy no argument, but at best it was like having to learn how to live without your thumb as opposed to Oklahoma which could be likened to learning to live with out the tip of your little finger. The difference would be stark.
Do you really want to tell a OKC widow that they were less deserving of federal aid than a NYC widow because of who performed the attack or how large it was?
Yeah, that’s a conversation I want to have.