Letters to the Editor
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Rude E. Julieannie
Thank you for helping to explode the myth of Rudy the Heroic Savior of 9/11. We New Yorkers who saw the attacks that day live, and not on their television screens, know all too well that Rudy did little to prepare for or prevent terrorist attacks on the City before 9/11, including such elementary things as providing first responders with a functional communications system and locating the emergency command center in a site OTHER THAN a proven terrorist target. Let's not even talk about his efforts to promote Bernie Kerik -- who adulterously screwed his girlfriend in a city-leased apartment overlooking The Pile, as firefighters and police without protective masks toiled below -- as a terrorism expert. As with so many other things, Rudy ignored advice he didn't like and took his own instead.
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giuliani - non starter
Joe hit this one out of the park. rudy is a punch drunk lightweight trying to land a hay maker before he's counted out.
I've been somewhat confused by rudy's standing in the polls. He's a liberal. I don't know any republican that likes him at all. To the fundies, he is catholic, divorced and abortionist. The the libertarians, he's a fascist. To many, he's a liar propped up by the media.
I don't believe he can win the nomination.
On the other hand, can he beat whoever the democrats dredge up? Probably. The far right will vote for him because the democrat is scarier. The middle could vote for him because he's so liberal that he is standing to the left side of the aisle. He negates an awful lot of wedge issues.
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Why Even Worry About It?
Rudy's not going to be a serious contender for the Presidency. He is not even going to me Miss Congeniality. The Republicans are not going to put their money or time behind him. Why? He's had a juicy personal life. He had a messy and public divorce. He'll never get the vote of the southern pious who the Republicans have been courting all these years. Can you see an embedded Republican campaigner telling a bunch of folks in a backwoods church to vote for this guy? I can't.
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What did he do?
what did Ghouliani do? What didn't he do? He did it all, he may have even committed treason by erasing the crime scene!
In Scoop and Dump we trust. Yeah right. Start building those nations Rudy, since according to you Nation Building is now one of our "things". Maybe one of the countries Scoop and Dump plans on building will elect him into office. He probably has a lot better chance of winning in an country he just built in his mind then he does here or in any real country. At least nation building works in his and his neocon handlers' minds, because it doesn't work outside of that context.
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Rudy can fail
Anyone who thinks that Rudy Giuliani should be president should spend an few hours waiting at La Guardia Airport. Last summer a flight home to DFW was held up by bad weather, and I spent 5 hours wandering around, inside the terminal, trying not to get wet. The terminal has leaks everywhere and the maintenance staff did not have enough buckets to catch all of the water. Last night the same thing happened to my husband and the same problems are still there.
It seems a few sound bites after 9/11 cancel out years of bad management.
Furthermore, after the 1993 attacks, there should have been a task force created to co-ordinate response and communication between the police and fire departments. This did not happen and I blame Giuliani for not making it a priority. I believe that many of the police and fire department personnel died on 9/11 because the were unable to communicate with one another.
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Conason has a very bad memory.
he writes: "As for Giuliani, what did he do after the '93 bombing? In their reporting for "Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11," journalists Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins went to great lengths to find out. The answer, they discovered, was that he did nothing."
Not true. Not true at all. Giulani did do something extremely significant: He put the city's crisis center in the WTC. So the correct answer is that he did do something. Something extremely stupid.
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Rudy can fail
In case no one else has mentioned this, didn't Giuliani supervise the removal of the strucrural steel from the Twin Towers site in direct violation of federal statutes which stipulate that FEMA do the initial investigation of what was a crime scene? If he did this, isn't he guilty of "accessory after the fact" violations of the law, and doesn't that make him a criminal?What the hell is he doing running for President?
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As much as Bush and the neocons are lame and made massive mistakes...
My .02
I also fault Clinton. He had the talent to understand the people you need to lead. If he had selected real "A" team leaders in 1993 as Sec State, Sec Defense, Director of National Security Council, Dir of CIA, UN Ambassador people like
Sam Nunn as Sec Defense, Zbigniew Brzezinski as Sec State, Colin Powell as Dir of National Security, Richard Holbrooke as UN Ambassador & Bobby Ray Inman as Dir of CIA
instead of the "B" team people he selected.
then we would have had a strong team to deal with all the major issues in the 90's.
Russia, Bosnia, Terror, Iraq, WMD's,Africa etc..
So to be specific Rudy is a joke as a Presidental canidate but I have always thought it was right to question Clinton's management of Terror and in general National Security in the 90's.
The idea that he didn't better lead because Republicans made his life "hard" is a lame excuse. If he had a real "A" leaders then they would have managed congress, press & in general the world.
I do blame Clinton for not firing Gen. Shelton as Chairman of JCS and replacing him with Gen. Zinni (another "A" team type leader)
in 1998 when we were hit by AQ 2x on the same day after they declared war on us in 1996.
We can sit around and complain about how lame Bush is, but Clinton had worse leadership for one reason he was 10x smarter then Bush. I didn't expect much from Bush ( I was correct) but Clinton came in as the smartest, wonk, world class thinker and in the end he was lame.