As yet more snow settles on New York, today’s Times
revisits the horrors of the season’s first big storm
, when goldbricking union thugs supposedly
(or, if you get your facts from somewhere other than the New York Post, when the Bloomberg Administration’s techno-/plutocrats were unwilling to
cut short their holiday travel
to manage the cleanup):
[O]ne man, Councilman Daniel J. Halloran, Republican of Queens, said five city workers had come to his office during the storm and told him they had been explicitly ordered to take part in a slowdown to embarrass Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
But the more that investigators look into Mr. Halloran’s story, the more mystifying it becomes.
The phrase “more mystifying” is a bit of Times scrupulousness. What would really be mystifying would be if there were some workers coming forward to endorse Halloran’s account, while other workers were contradicting them. What the Times means is that the evidence is straightforward: the slowdown didn’t happen. Or, as the headline politely puts it, “Evidence Elusive.”
[I]nvestigators had hoped that extensive publicity would bring out others with knowledge of the purported plot. That has not happened, according to the people briefed on the investigations, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigations are continuing. This leaves prosecutors with no proof that anything occurred.
“When you’re talking about establishing a negative, I don’t know how it’s going to get firmer,” one person briefed on the inquiries said.
Earlier this month, the Queens district attorney charged that an infant whose death had been blamed on slow ambulance response in the snow had actually been shaken to death by a babysitter. The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby, who demanded on Twitter that
union bosses be charged with manslaughter
because their sabotage killed the baby, has yet to retract or modify that opinion.
