BOB MCMANUS ON THE DEMOCRATS’ DESCENT: ‘Dreamers’ over heroes — as Albany did — reflects the new norm.
Is there a classier lady anywhere than Shannon Slutman, widow of FDNY firefighter Christopher Slutman — killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan while serving as a US Marine Corps reservist?
No, there is not.
Meanwhile, is there a bigger dope than Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, the pandering jerk from Greenwich Village who was hard-pressed to find a few bucks to help send Gold Star kids to college — while lavishing millions on scholarships for the offspring of New York’s legion of illegal, um, arrivers?
Alas, probably. . . .
New Yorkers who are old enough, and not named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, understand the exquisite pain that attends a death in service to America.
The FDNY’s 9/11 agony — 343 dead in a flash of rolling fireballs and collapsing skyscrapers — would have been unbearable save for a 136-year tradition of allegiance to duty in the face of lethal peril. All give some, some give all is a hoary catchphrase for most — but a sustaining ethic for others.
Shannon Slutman understands this. How could she not?
Her husband was a firefighter, and he was a Marine — another organization that stares down mortal danger every day, but at a price.
She, too, is a hero — suffering exquisitely in the moment but at the same time thinking of others.
“The girls and I thank you for the outpouring of love and support,” she wrote last week. “My husband was a humble man . . . passionate about his family as well as being a firefighter and a Marine. Above all, Chris was a man of integrity and a gentleman in all he did. In honor of Chris, please . . . do something kind for another.”
Do something kind for another. Wow.
Now the skirling pipes and the muffled drums will be for Chris Slutman, an echo from the weeks and months following 9/11 — and the universally recognizable sound of heroes being laid to rest.
Fast forward to Deborah Glick and her colleagues, caught last week short-changing Gold Star families while sprinkling $27 million in tuition aid on so-called dreamers.
They love the “dreamers” specifically because they are not Americans. Love for Americans, or America, is something they regard as, at best, perverted.