I was listening to Dennis Miller’s radio show yesterday and either he or his guest (can’t remember - I was driving at the time) said that Rudy Giuliani attended 800 9/11 memorials, which is easy to believe, and that HC didn’t attend any. I checked it out at snopes.com since it sounds pretty amazing for a Senator to do something so dumb and insensitive. But they didn’t have anything on it…so what’s the straight dope on this? Did she or didn’t she?
Yes she did. She was famously booed by some people at one of them, it made the news.
Not true. Here’s a newspaper quote about one funeral she attended.
She also attended a memorial service on October 28, 2001 held at Ground Zero and another on October 1, for employees of Windows on the World.
[QUOTE=Plan B]
Oops. I withdraw this post.
By this I mean that I withdraw what I had posted, not what Plan B posted. How I screwed this up is a long story, and a dull one, so I’ll skip it.
Thanks for the responses so far. After I read them I remembered that the statement on the show was more like: “She didn’t attend any. Bill O’Reilly confronted her on that. She then attended a few.” Sorry to have overstated the point.
Also, Rudy was in NYC and Clinton was in DC.
Thanks for the link. Actually I think it confirms the point much more than it disproves it. She went to two memorials, both of them high profile. And of course it’s an overstatement for O’Reilly or Miller to say none when the answer is two. But nowhere is there a statement from HC or a spokesperson saying a specific number of memorials attended.
What’s the score again?
Rudy 800 Hillary 2
Obviously Rudy should be the President of the United States - or is he overqualified?
So what you are saying is that even though O’Reilly has been shown to be a liar, Hillary should still be ashamed that she didn’t go to enough memorials for your taste?
And one presumes (or at least hopes) that the federal legislature was kinda busy in the period following the attacks, so its not like she had a ton of time to fly back and forth. Personally I’d prefere my gov’t officals to just send some flowers to these sort of services and spend most of their time working to make us safer through developing policy and legislation.
I mean most of these services must’ve taken place in a threeish month period after the attacks. Figure that each of them must’ve taken at least an hour, that means Rudy must’ve spent at least half of his waking hours in the weeks after the attacks sitting in various churches listening to funeral services for people he didn’t know.
There is also a diffence in the nature of executive branch versus legislative branch work. An executive branch position is much more of a “head of state” role, responsible for representing the government at various functions. Thus, for example, the ongoing joke that the vice presidency is all about attending funerals. The legislative branch is more about representing the people to the government. Presumably, H. Clinton was doing that, representing the people of NY while discussions were taking place in Washington. This strikes me as sort of a hostile or at least naive way to point out that Giuliani has executive branch experience and H. Clinton does not.
I am not much of a fan of Senator Clinton and I am a fan of Rudy Giuliani, but this seems like a silly and useless way to attack her. I think it is great that Rudy went out of his way to help so many grieving families after the 9/11 attack. However, Senator Clinton had other Duties and I recall her husband, you know the ex-President, represented the Clinton family quite well at this time.
What was O’Reilly even trying to imply with this little bit of stupidity?
Jim
It sounds like more of the “vote for the person you’d like to have a beer with” stuff.
O’Reilly hardly ever has anything good to say about the Clintons, or about any Democratic politician who won’t appear on his show, so there might be another, secondary angle to this. This being GQ, I’ll admit this is just my opinion, but I think O’Reilly also might be trying to provoke her into granting him an interview. I remember him being all over Gore for not agreeing to appear on his show, even to the point of claiming (after the election) that Gore would’ve won if he had agreed to an O’Reilly interview.
You’ll note that O’Reilly often has good words to say about Charles Rangel, who does appear regularly on his show, even though Rangel is (I think) quite a bit to the left of Hillary Clinton.
Of course O’Reilly has made a career out of manufacturing “outrage”, so this could be just another example of that.
Thanks guys, these kind of make sense.
Jim
Exactly. This is O’Reilly and Miller getting their heads together to give each other something to talk about.
It’s also kind of funny to picture someone in Rudy’s office totaling up the tally of memorial services. Does a service for two people count as one service? Does Rudy have to stay for the whole service for it to count? These are the questions which will steer our democracy.
No, not exactly…If you’re having trouble I’ll try to make it simpler. What I was asking was whether it’s true that HC didn’t go to any memorials (later amended to two high profile memorials) while Giuliani went to 800. Sorry if I confused you.
As of now it seems like there’s a lot of emotion against O’Reilly and Miller but no facts to contradict the amended question.
If I wanted to have an inane argument based on negative emotion and ad hominems I would’ve started this thread in the pit.
Maybe, but given his audience, I find it hard to believe that O’Reilly would give up on bashing Hillary even if she was on his show, even if he has done so for other Dems. She’s just to much of an easy target for the kind of manufactured outrage that he enjoys.
What is the source for the 800 number? Assuming these are all hourlong individual funeral services happening between say, September and November 13th, and that Rudy gets by on 6 hours of sleep a night, then that would put him in a funeral ~70% of his waking hours, 7 days a week at a time when I’d imagine that the administration of NYC would take be taking a lot of time.
Also big round numbers are always suspicious, not 801 or 799 but 800?
What do you mean “high profile”? I would imagine that any service attended by Hillary and her husband will be in the media and thus high profile simply by virtue of their attendence.