The Grand Illusion: Rudy Giuliani’s Leadership On 9/11
Read More About: 2008 Presidential Election, Republicans, Rudy Giuliani,
Lots of gleeful talk around the Lefty-Net today about the revelation that Rudy Giuliani is a draft-dodger and an adulterer.
Not so fast.
Seems to me that Democrats won’t get much mileage out of chiding Rudy for this because conventional wisdom has it that Democrats are “soft” on those issues anyway, you know? So who cares what they think.
Also, some have suggested that voters will be turned off when they discover that Rudy was really a “crazy, mean, dangerous authoritarian” as mayor of New York. But, as Andrew Golis points out, this may be the very reason that Republicans give him the nomination. And it won’t hurt if he starts spewing hatred toward Muslims, which I believe he is fully capable of doing.
If Democrats want to stop Giuliani, I believe it is much smarter to attack him where his base thinks he is strongest — on his 9/11 reputation.
For example, here’s what Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins wrote in The Village Voice (“Rudy’s Grand Illusion,” August 29, 2006):
Everyone agrees that a critical problem [on 9/11] was that the police and fire departments could not communicate; that’s one of the reasons the lack of inter- operable radios became such a focus of fury.[But] if the top brass of the two departments were at each other’s sides, they could have told each other whatever they learned from their separate radio systems. Many of the command and control issues that might have saved lives could clearly have been better dealt with had Giuliani stopped, taken a deep breath, and pushed Kerik and Ganci to fully and effectively join forces. Insisting that Kerik, McCarthy, Esposito, or Dunne stay at the incident post would have established a joint operation.
What they’re describing is now (post-9/11) called unified command and control and it has become the standard protocol for emergency management. But more than that, it’s just common sense and Rudy didn’t follow it. As a result, dozens and dozens of firefighters died on that day.
Will the surviving firefighters (who revere Giuliani) accept that? Probably not — after all, the truth would be too painful.
But the truth must be told.
UPDATE: This post contains material I gleaned from a longer post by Barbara O’Brien entitled: What America Needs to know about Giuliani, Parts I & II .
There was a point where he was boo’d today at the Concervative PAC gathering. But what do you expect of a group that opens with Cheney and closes with Coulter.
He was dumb enought to say that we need to work with our allies, even France.
What a bunch of ‘tards.