Letters to the Editor
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Holy cow!
Did you actually revist that crap and sit through it (again?)
With that kind of intestinal fortitude, you should go on "Fear Factor"!
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Just How Stupid is Rudy?
Rudy put the emergency center for the entire city of New York in the WTC area, AFTER the 1993 attack. Now he wants to be your President.
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Bamage
Did you actually revist that crap and sit through it (again?)
It actually wasn't easy (I'm tempted to give a Giuliani-like tribute to my own courage for having done it). I was looking for something else, found it, started watching, and just couldn't stop. I only picked out a couple of parts - the whole thing is like that. One forgets how much was squeezed out of that day - and remember, this was two full years later, with the Iraq War in full swing.
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Rudy's bravery in the face of his own stupidity
The fact that Rudy had allowed the City's emergency response team to be placed in the WTC just shows how clueless he was.
As I've mentioned before, a number of us who lived in the area stayed away from the WTC after 93 because we figured a) terrorists had targeted it in the future and b) terrorists were still p.o.'d about our Middle East policy and would probably go for the Towers again. (Not to mention that they Hate Us For Our Freedoms, or used to anyway, since we don't have so many freedoms anymore.)
And you're right, Glenn, about Rudy's constant references to his own heroism during 9/11. As someone who lived in the area, I do know lots of people who were personally affected (not to mention many who were killed). The survivors have many stories to tell -- stories filled with sorrow, fear, awe, amazement, even sometimes humor in the face of bizarre circumstances, and stories about people acting well or terribly selfishly. I've heard lots of stories about other peoples' bravery or courage -- but I've never heard ANYONE brag about their own exploits. It just isn't done. Well, except by people with serious ego problems.
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I'm sure you didn't mean it like this...
...but I've gotta tell you I interpreted it in a scatological manner.
When you said "squeezed out of that day", I caught one godawful visual. Entirely inappropriate, (scratch that, maybe not) but I laughed out loud nonetheless.
And I only sat through snippets looking for your cites, but I still wanted to hurl.
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Love shack
Apparently Rudy wanted the command center in WT7 so he could have a place to meet his mistress in walking distance from his office, thus putting the ease and facility of commiting infidelity more important than the security of the city. Watta guy!
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Was This Interview
Before, during, or after Kerik was screwing Regan?
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Burnishing credentials or putting lipstick on a pig?
On Rudy's crisis skills... One might think rule one would be to adequately plan for them.
NY Times; http://tinyurl.com/27wa8a
THREATS AND RESPONSES: ASSESSMENT; Contradicting Other Evidence, Giuliani Says Firefighters Heard Order to Evacuate
By JIM DWYER
Published: May 20, 2004
...For all the power of his voice and stature, however, Mr. Giuliani's account must compete with a substantial and diverse body of evidence that flatly contradicts much of what he and his aides say happened that day, particularly on matters that could be seen as reflecting on the performance of his administration.
On perhaps the most painful of these, the loss of at least 121 firefighters in the north tower, Mr. Giuliani suggested that they stayed inside the trade center because they were busy rescuing civilians -- never mentioning that they could not hear warnings from police helicopters, that many of them never learned the south tower had collapsed or that they were having serious problems staying in touch with their own commanders....
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Is that it?
Huh. Normally I wouldn't complain, but was the entire post? It seemed like you were going somewhere and then it ended. I would have thought it was canon by now that Rudy Giuliani is a verb plus a noun plus 911.
Glenn, you are awesome and I love your writing beyond all description, but... Yikes.
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But seriously, folks.
Ghouliani's RWA impulses as amply documented by GG and others, scare the bejeezuz out of me. But then I think, SURELY, there will be a thorough examination of the man and his "record", and the American public will come to their collective senses. Right? Right?
Uh, never mind.
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Mr. Greenwald,
The depths to which Mr. Giuliani will descend seem bottomless. My previous quetion posted on your site remains unanswered. How did Giuliani have the foreknowledge to know that the Twin Towers were going to collapse? (ABC news interview) Who told him, and why weren't those in the towers privy to that information? If anything, Giuliani's admission that he knew the towers were coming down suggests at best a miserable failure of leadership(he did not make the NY Firemen aware, nor those innocents who died), and at worst, it suggests complicity.
It seems to me that this is a topic worthy of discussion. One wonders why no one will pursue the origins of Giuliani's self- made myth.
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@bystander
You've got crisis management all wrong. If you plan for a crisis, you won't have a crisis. What kind of crisis planning is that? Try planning a surprise party that way!
Seriously, some people do enjoy being "firefighters," no joke intended. They don't set fires, but they derive personal satisfaction from going around an organization reacting to crises. They get a rush from it.
Giuliani isn't quite an arsonist, but he is no planner. He's like one of those wannabes who has a police radio and rushes to the scene of fires to watch them burn and later brag that he was there.
Unfortunately, the best way to get promoted in a hierarchy is to oversee a massive failure---the bigger the failure, the better for your career. It makes one Serious, you know.
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I guess I don't mind...
...if someone feels some of these feelings during a disaster or an emergency. After all, you have to try to concentrate on the feelings like, "I know how to do this, I can do this, I'm trained to do this, this is what I do, I've done this before, I'm the right man for this job." And you do get dumb feelings like, "Why is this happening on a Tuesday, I hate Tuesdays," that aren't appropriate but somehow bubble up.
What bothers me is the filtering. There were also feelings of, "I can't handle this, I'm having a heart attack." You know, classic panic attack. There must have been feelings about the command center, there must have been feelings of mistakes made. But you won't hear them. This man is already running for office and writing his place in history. The dishonesty demanded by his audience, and by a media that holds glare as a virtue above all else, is something this man caves in to, and that's an indication of craven, not courageous, character.
Of all the qualifications Giuliani has highlighted that prove he is a true successor to George W. Bush, the fact that he blanks on all of his mistakes is surely the most telling. Richard Clarke had the feelings that, "This is what I do, I know how to do this," too, no doubt about it. But he's honest about all the other ones. And he makes Giuliani look like a fraud.