A little late, perhaps, but worth repeating nonetheless. From Peter Girnus, "a senior coordinating producer for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner".
I was backstage at the Washington Hilton when the shots were fired.
The first thing I heard was not the gunfire. It was glass.
A champagne flute hit the floor of the International Ballroom at approximately 9:47 PM. Then a second. Then the sound that I have since been told was a 12-gauge shotgun, which from inside the ballroom sounded like a heavy door slamming in a parking garage. Then the Secret Service moved. They moved the President, the Vice President, the First Lady through the east corridor in under ninety seconds, which is protocol, which is practiced, which is the one part of the evening that worked exactly as it was designed.
Everything else was improvised.
I know this because I ordered the wine. 94 tables. Two bottles per table. 188 bottles of a Willamette Valley pinot noir that the Association selected in February after a tasting committee spent three meetings debating between Oregon and Burgundy. Oregon won. The budget was $14,200. I signed the invoice. I can tell you the vintage. I can tell you the distributor. I can tell you the per-bottle cost because I negotiated it down from $89 to $76.
What I cannot tell you is how 147 of those bottles left the building during an active shooter evacuation.
I can tell you what I saw. A correspondent from a network I will not name picked up two bottles on her way to the east exit. Full bottles. One in each hand. She was wearing heels and she did not spill. A man in a tuxedo tucked one inside his jacket the way you'd shoplift a paperback at an airport bookstore. A woman picked up a bottle, looked at the label, put it back, and took a different one.
She checked the vintage. During an evacuation. That's editorial judgment under pressure.
. . .
2,600 guests were directed to the exits by Secret Service agents, one of whom had just taken a shotgun round in his ballistic vest and walked to the ambulance on his own feet.
The agent's vest costs approximately $800. The wine that left the building was worth $11,172 at Association cost. At restaurant markup, roughly $29,000. The guests saved more in wine than the vest that saved the agent.
That's priority.
. . .
I have produced eleven of these dinners ... I have never, in eleven years, seen a guest leave a $76 bottle on the table during an evacuation. I have also never seen a guest check the label first. Both observations are consistent. The bottle is worth taking. The evacuation is worth surviving. The instinct is to do both simultaneously.
188 bottles placed. 41 recovered. 147 unaccounted for. One agent shot. Zero guests injured. Zero bottles broken.
A free press for a free people. The press is free. The wine was $76 a bottle. They took it anyway.
There's more at the link.
Mr. Girnus' post on X (formerly Twitter) has so far attracted over 4,000 replies and comments. Click over there to read them if you're interested. I particularly liked his reply to one comment:
They took the wine at a pace that suggested familiarity with hotel evacuation corridors. That's not elite behavior. That's logistics under pressure. I've seen worse at a Marriott fire alarm in Phoenix.
Word!
Needless to say, my opinion of most alleged journalists has not been improved by this fiasco . . .
Peter
13 comments:
This is the behavior of small-time crooks not of people deemed to be guests of the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, which tells everyone the class of the so-called political elite...
I heard a radio report that the smurf (Secret Service officer) was actually shot by another smurf.
Smurf was a "term of affection" for all
Dept of Treasury trainees at FLETC in Glyco, GA way back in the 1980s. They all wore a blue uniform...
Here's a different perspective. About a decade ago we were hit in an instant with a Derecho storm. Thinking it was a tornado 4 of us hit the cellar for cover. After a few minutes we voted for one of us to go back up and get a bottle of wine. If we were going to die at least it would be with a wine glass in our hands. If I was at that event the wine would be the first thing I grabbed before escaping. But it would have been opened.
Peter Gurnis posts first-person, highly realistic satire.
I was a volunteer on the clean crew after a fund raiser once. They let me have a dozen 1/2 bottles of $15 dollar wine. It was an unexpected perk. I traded 1/2 bottles of white for reds. The pros picked up the partial bottles of hard liquor first. It is also a perk for catering clean up crews.
I have a cousin,who in his heyday was a well-known, well-respected (by his peers) journalist; he, like many of his co-scribblers, rarely had a sober day.
Your comment at the end is, seriously, nonpareil.
So the typical journalist is also a thief. Why should that be a surprise to anyone...
One mans perk, Another mans felony. Not my circus.
You are aware that the OP is a known parody account? Funny, very close to the mark but not necessarily factually accurate
I cannot fathom the stupidity of buying $76 bottles of wine. When you get above $30 a bottle there is little difference in a $30 bottle of wine and a bottle costing $75 or much more.
Right. What Francis Turner said. Basic IQ test.
In any case, there is video evidence of at least a few women taking bottles AND checking the vintages. Honestly, is anybody really surprised???
If the bottle is open, it's going flat. I'm not much for waste. What a thing to have. Another God saved Trump moment! I would have snagged one. After That, I would have most assuredly been ready for a drink.
Doesn't even almost look like Maxwell.. Nope, the woman in prison looks like someone else. The truth of who did what to whom? I doubt we ever know. Too many powerful people involved.
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