"That is a pretty distorted view of things," said Frank Fraone, a Menlo Park, Calif., fire chief who led a 67-man crew at Ground Zero. "Whether they're a couple of planes or a couple of missiles, they still did the same damage."
"New York was attacked by Al Qaeda. It doesn't have to be attacked by Congress," added Long Island Rep. Pete King, a Republican.
"I'm really surprised by Darrell Issa," King added. "It showed such a cavalier dismissal of what happened to New York. It's wrong and inexcusable."
Lorie Van Aucken, who lost her husband, Kenneth, in the attacks, slammed Issa's "cruel and heartless" comments.
"It's really discouraging. People stepped up and did the right thing. They sacrificed themselves and now a lot of people are getting really horrible illnesses," she added.
New York Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler and Anthony Weiner and GOP Rep. Vito Fossella also added some heated criticisms of Issa. Issa, however, remains mostly unrepentant:
"I continue to support federal assistance for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks," he said.
But he didn't retract his wacked-out rhetoric claiming the feds "just threw" buckets of cash at New York for an attack "that had no dirty bomb in it, it had no chemical munitions in it."
He went on: "I have to ask ... why the firefighters who went there and everybody in the city of New York needs to come to the federal government for the dollars versus this being primarily a state consideration."
In his statement yesterday, Issa insisted he only "asked tough questions about the expenditures" during a hearing Tuesday on an aid bill for sick New Yorkers.
And if that wasn't enough, contrast this with another recent dumbass maneuver by Issa in which he DID scurry to apologize for his missteps. Back in February during hearings into a million missing White House emails, Darrell Issa enthusiastically did his water carrying for the Bush administration, declaring it entirely reasonable that converting from Lotus Notes to Outlook would cause such a loss of information. He went so far as to compare Lotus Notes to wooden wagon wheels and Betamax. But once big business got agitated about it, Issa fell all over himself and even officially correcting the Congressional record. But 9/11 rescue workers? Apparently not on the same level as keeping Lotus happy. I mean after all, according to Issa, 9/11 "simply was an aircraft" hitting the World Trade Center and causing "a fire."
I don't know what world Darrell Issa is living in, but he certainly doesn't have much company.
