Hero 9/11 Firefighter Defends Bush Ads

Hero New York City firefighter Mike Moran, whose words of defiance against Osama bin Laden helped rally the nation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, said Friday that he finds President Bush's campaign ads invoking the attacks "inspirational."

"I think they're inspirational," Moran told No. 1 radio host Rush Limbaugh. "They remind me of how lost I felt on 9/11," explained the hero smoke-eater, whose brother John, also a fireman, perished when he rushed into World Trade Center Tower Two to rescue stranded New Yorkers that day.

"Seeing on the news when George Bush went down to the Trade Center to put his arm around that fireman - the words he spoke - they were inspirational," Moran told Limbaugh. "They made me feel like, wow, this isn't just going to be another terrorist attack where we sit back on our a---- and do nothing."

Moran criticized family members of other 9/11 victims who have complained about the ads, saying, "It's nothing less than slimy." He said too many Americans seem to want to forget some of the images from that day that appear in the Bush ads.

The famed fireman also weighed in on rebuilding efforts now ongoing at Ground Zero, saying he'd like to see the Towers reconstructed just as they were before, with one modification.

"I think we should build them bigger, the same way ... [but] name one tower Mecca and one Medina, and [announce] that as long as those towers are standing those cities will stand," he told Limbaugh.

Moran rose to national prominence five weeks after the attacks when he mounted the stage at Paul McCartney's "Concert for Heroes." As the show was being telecast worldwide, he spoke the words that resonated with Americans from coast to coast:

"All I can say, on behalf of my brother John and the twelve members from Ladder 3 that we've lost ... and all the people from my neighborhood, my hometown, Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York - our friends, our relatives, our neighbors, they are not gone because they are not forgotten."

Then, in one of the most memorable lines to come out of the disaster, Moran added:

"And I want to say one more thing, in the spirit of the Irish people: Osama bin Laden, you can kiss my royal Irish a--!"

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