AFL-CIO prez: hey, remember 9/11, was a great union moment, right?

By Warner Todd Huston

In one of the most disgusting examples of the self-absorption of the union mind set, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka decided that his 9/11 memorial would not be much about 9/11, but would instead be just another excuse to say how great unions are and how evil conservatives are. This isn't just gauche, but insulting, infuriating, and just plain ignorant. Not only that, but it is most certainly disrespectful of the fallen and just plain un-American.

But, then again, that describes unions in just about every instance, doesn't it?

Disgustingly, the AFL-CIO's Trumka turned a "memorial" to 9/11 into a union snake-oil sales pitch. Worse he began with an almost dismissive attitude to the memory of the attacks on our homeland.

Trumka begins by saying "we need no reminding" of the "horror and anguish we experienced 10 years ago." This is his first paragraph and from here he launches into doing just that, not bothering much about what happened that day, suffice to say that the "solidarity" we experienced is the "cornerstone of the union movement."

Yeah. I don't know about you but as the towers were falling and thousands were dying, all I could think about was the cornerstone of unionism.

Oh, and guess what? Instead of waking us to the dangers of Islamofascism, all 9/11 did was open "doors to hate, suspicion of 'others' and self-centered greed. Our fear was twisted into something much more dangerous."

Then this moron goes on to claim that as a society we have gone from treating our firemen, police and other first responders as heroes to "vilifying them."

Just 10 years after 9/11, despite our vows, the public servants, construction workers and others who lost their lives or still suffer with the cancerous remnants of the Twin Towers haven't just been forgotten. They've been vilified. The extremist small government posse has turned them into public enemy No. 1, as though teachers and firefighters, EMTs and nurses and union construction workers ruined America's economy.

This is a bald-faced lie. No one is "vilifying" first responders. And notice how he slipped "teachers" into the same category as 9/11 first responders. Sorry, pal, but teachers are not just like cops, firemen, and EMTs.

Even more specifically, no one is saying that police, teachers and other public servants have "ruined America's economy." It is their unions and their handmaidens in the Democrat Party that are responsible for that. We who are against public employees unions are against the unions, not the public workers that the unions bully and steal from.

Then this creep gets into name calling.... yes, name calling in a 9/11 memorial address.

Wealthy CEOs, anti-government extremist front groups and frothing talk show hosts — from the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks to the Koch brothers, Karl Rove's American Crossroads group, Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the American Legislative Exchange Council — also pushed open the door to hate.

Shameless.

But wait he gets worse. Now he goes into a rant of non-sequiturs:

We've seen the costs of hatred in ill-thought wars, in shameful attacks on immigrants and our LGBT neighbors. We saw it in the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. We saw it in the racism that has found overt and covert expression since Barack Obama began his run for office — from outright declarations of people who said out loud they would never vote for a black man to the ridiculously persistent obsession with our president's birth certificate. Regardless of his policies or priorities, President Obama is shadowed by the drumbeat of suspicion based on his "other"-ness. And those suspicions are fed and watered constantly by forces that were threatened by his message of "hope and change."

Then Trumka goes on to invoke the memory of those first responders that died on 9/11 and bends their deaths to his own petty cause to rape the public treasury for high salaries and overly generous pensions and benefits lans his fatcat pals created with pliant Democrat politicians over the last forty years.

It is a disgusting display of ignorance.

Now, just imagine how the extremists on the far left, those shrill voices on the left would be screaming bloody murder if some Tea Party guy, a conservative radio host, or a Republican had used the deaths of over 3,000 Americans on 9/11 for his petty political agenda? Imagine how they'd be calling foul and saying how disgusting it would be. And they'd be right, too.

But here we have a union thug, a man with a long, long history of violence and incitement of the same, using the heroes that fell on 9/11 as a foil for advancing his union agenda.

Trumka is using the heroes of 9/11 to shore up his agenda of high taxes, big government waste, and big money for himself and his other union boss pals.

Trumka is using an incident perpetrated by people that hated capitalism and tried to strike a blow against it. He is using that murderous act to promulgate his own attack on capitalism. In essence, Trumka is announcing his sympathies with the Islamofascist terrorists that attacked us on 9/11.

Remember this, as well: Democrats and Obama support Trumka and his actions.

If this isn't appalling, what is?

© Warner Todd Huston