Did You Say Windbag?
Our Dear Leader
As Schaitberger makes his pre-convention rounds, word is seeping back that his propensity to yammer on, well known by many, is on full display.
The average time for these state-of-the-union-stem-winders is about seventy minutes during which he grinds on about all manner of this and that, most of it inane chatter.
He has taken to remarking to audiences that someone says the IAFF is “chicken shit.”
This I hadn’t heard but any number of members have said that very thing about him so perhaps, understandably, he confuses himself with the IAFF, especially given his narcissistic propensities.
Oddly, he has recently been given to informing the assembled audience that because he grew up in the “projects” he is “one of them.”
Exactly what the “projects” are is never fully explained though the reference is apparently designed to suggest that he comes from humble, nay poor, beginnings and beneath the flashy cuff links, handmade silk shirts, chauffeured limos and $200 bottles of wine he is just an aw-shucks-regular-kind-of-guy after all.
Me thinks he doth protest too much.
Having been called out for spending union funds like a drunken sailor, he now overcompensates by asserting that he knows his way around an Outback Steakhouse.
I don’t think so.
If he really cared about rank and file union firefighters and paramedics he would stop using the IAFF credit card like his personal debit card and instead dip into his own wallet to spend some of the $400,000+ he receives from the IAFF every year.
But, I wouldn’t wait for that to happen.
Here’s a guy, who when on the road, expenses EVERYTHING on his IAFF credit card, including Scrabble games, and then puts in for an $80 per diem each day, like he really needs it.
It’s just one of many examples of his low-life and unethical conduct.
He’s one of us?
LOL.
Up Through the Ranks?
Another version of the good-old-boy stump is to talk about how he came up through the ranks, suggesting that he is “also one of us.”
Schaitberger spent but a handful of years as a firefighter, perhaps not even long enough to vest in the pension system or barely so, before scooting off to be a lifetime staffer at the IAFF.
Once there, he almost immediately got into serious trouble over unauthorized use of an IAFF credit card.
More than one district vice president has said they should have fired him then when they had the chance.
His Dear, Dear, Friend
At the Virginia Professional Firefighters Convention he pulled out all the stops by vastly over-reaching once again to associate himself with the much venerated and deceased Duane Dixon.
To hear it, he and Duane were the closest of friends yet that’s not the the truth by any means.
Duane’s lifetime ambition was to end his union career by serving as an IAFF trustee but when the time came Schaitberger refused to support him.
Worse yet, Schaitberger lacked the gravitas to tell Duane himself, having a go-between do the dirty work for him.
Here’s the kicker though, when referring to his dear friend Duane, he said, “Duane Pell”, not Dixon.
Dear friend?
Couldn’t even get his name right.
Many are those who will instantly recognize the heartless disloyalty of Harold Schaitberger at work.
If between now and the convention you have the misfortune to be trapped in the same room with the great bloviator, here’s hoping you can nap sitting up or else you are in for an endless string of lies from an empty, corrupted and fraying old suit.