“I think when you approach an action like Iraq, which is after all a major battle in this Islamic war against us, with the notion, “How long can we sustain it?†– you lose. It is positively irresponsible to be giving the enemy a timetable for troop withdrawals.”
That was Republican Presidential Candidate Rudy Giuliani speaking to The Register after his big fundraiser in Anaheim yesterday. Apparently, he thinks it’s “irresponible” to end the Iraq Occupation.
So do YOU think Rudy Giuliani is right on Iraq? Or do you think he’s just completely lost it? After all, isn’t it irresponsible to “go after the al-Qaeda terrorists” by invading and occupying a nation (Iraq) that had nothing to do with those terrorists that attacked us? Isn’t it irresponsible to claim that the US must invade Iraq to rid them of “weapons of mass destruction”, only to discover that not only were there no weapons, but there was no evidence before the invasion started that there were any weapons? Oh, and isn’t it irresponsible to send the troops to battle without giving them the tools they need to fight? Isn’t there a saying about “p*** poor planning producing p*** poor results”?
So when did it become “irresponsible” to begin planning a responsible end to an irresponsible invasion and occupation? Am I missing something, or is Rudy Giuliani just trying to impress the OC GOP by playing “Mr. Tough Guy” and pledging to continue sending our brave troops to fight Bush’s failed war? So is he right, or is he wrong? I want to hear what YOU have to say about Rudy Giuliani and Iraq. Is he talking good policy, or is he playing politics to win favor with the OC GOP power players?
Come on, now. You know what to do now. Go ahead and start firing away. Tell me what you think.
Andrew —
Hizzoner is right about precisious few things; read below/Dan
The Ghost of Giuliani’s Political Past
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070227_the_ghost_of_giulianis_political_past/
Posted on Feb 27, 2007
By Theodore Hamm
According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, if the 2008 election were held today Rudy Giuliani would be our next president. Given his stature as a media celebrity, the numbers are not surprising. A fixture on the cable talk shows, Giuliani in fact announced his candidacy on Larry King.
In New York City, the former mayor is regularly and shamelessly promoted by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which recently featured Giuliani kissing his former mistress and now wife, Judi Nathan, on its cover.
Based on the poll numbers and flattering media coverage, you might think there indeed is some kind of national love affair going on between Giuliani and the American people. But rest assured that there is one place where the former mayor is truly despised: the streets of working-class New York.
The school where I teach, Metropolitan College of New York, is a commuter school made up of the city’s working-class students, the vast majority of whom are blacks and Latinos from the outer boroughs. Recently, I showed my classes the 2006 documentary “Giuliani Time,†which is now available on DVD.
Before starting the film, I received a flurry of hostile reactionsâ€â€e.g., “Is this going to make me sicker than I already feel?†and “This is going to make me angry!†When the documentary ended, not one of my 35 students had a kind word for Giuliani. In fact, the most frequent question asked was a fearful one: “Do you really think he could win?â€Â
Why is there such contempt for the man who never tires of reminding audiences of how he “saved†the city after 9/11? As “Giuliani Time†makes abundantly clear, it’s because in the eight years he reigned as New York City mayor leading up to 9/11, Giuliani ruled as a petty tyrant. And the most frequent target of his animosities was the city’s black population.
After defeating the city’s only black mayor, David Dinkins, in 1993, Giuliani made it crystal clear that he was not interested in a dialogue about race relations. During his first month in office, Giuliani ended the city’s affirmative action program established under Dinkins. For most of the next eight years, he conspicuously refused to meet with any of the city’s black political leadership.
In the documentary, Giuliani’s one high-ranking black political appointee during his two terms, schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, voices his displeasure with his former boss. Crew recalls his surprise when Giuliani announced that he would pursue a school vouchers program, a policy that promised to further deprive the city’s many poor students of color of educational resources. It was during the Amadou Diallo controversy, Crew says, when he realized that there “is something very deeply pathological†about Giuliani’s views of race.
During his two terms, Giuliani’s two biggest policy initiativesâ€â€reducing welfare rolls and fighting crimeâ€â€also antagonized the city’s low-income populations of color. His much-touted Workfare initiative amounted to an increase in the numbers of the city’s working poor, undercutting better-paying city jobs in the process. And as Village Voice reporter and Giuliani foe Wayne Barrett says in the film, “No one knows what happened to the 600,000 people†who disappeared from the welfare rolls during the Giuliani years.
In terms of crime, Giuliani’s overzealous “quality-of-life†policing effectively amounted to a full-fledged crackdown on young men of color, as documented by the NYPD’s record number of wrongful “stop-and-frisk†encounters. Prior to his post-9/11 “heroics,†Giuliani was best known for having “cleaned up New York.†But as Columbia University’s Jeffrey Fagan and others make clear in “Giuliani Time,†crime dropped even more dramatically in other major cities during the 1990sâ€â€and many of those cities did not employ the racially biased quality-of-life approach of Giuliani’s NYPD.
In 1999, after four undercover white police officers shot Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, 41 times, Giuliani described the thousands of pro-Diallo protesters as “silly†and the “worst in society.†A few months later when Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed black man, was killed by an undercover officer, Giuliani said that the victim was “no choirboy†and ordered his juvenile arrest record to be unsealed. Dorismond, in fact, had been a choirboy.
By Sept. 10, 2001, Giuliani had pissed off wide swaths of New York City’s population, including free speech advocates, artists and middle-class liberals of all kinds. If we judge him based on his actions during his two terms in office, rather than by the two weeks after 9/11, the thought of Rudolph Giuliani becoming president should alarm most progressives. And for people of color in New York City and elsewhere, the prospect is terrifying.
Theodore Hamm is the founding editor of The Brooklyn Rail and an associate professor of urban studies at Metropolitan College of New York.
And then there’s this recent post in TPM:
Wayne Barrett has done the political world a great service with a devastating piece in the Village Voice on Rudy Giuliani and the “five big lies” surrounding the former mayor’s claim to fame: his performance on 9/11. The entire piece — which, if read, should effectively end Giuliani’s presidential ambitions — is important, but there’s one part of the story that’s particularly worth highlighting.
It’s Lie #3: Giuliani doesn’t deserve the blame for putting the city’s emergency-command center in the World Trade Center, an obvious, and once-attacked, terrorist target. The former mayor was warned, in writing, about the inherent flaws in the choosing the site, and was offered a better and more effective alternative, but Giuliani moved forward anyway. As Barrett explained, “The 1997 decision had dire consequences on 9/11, when the city had to mobilize a response without any operational center.”
So, why is it, exactly, that Giuliani picked the WTC site? The mayor personally established a specific standard: he had to be able to walk to the command center from his office. (“I’ve never seen in my life ‘walking distance’ as some kind of a standard for crisis management,” said Lou Anemone, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the NYPD. “But you don’t want to confuse Giuliani with the facts.”)
There is, however, an explanation for the walking-distance standard.
The 7 WTC site was the brainchild of Bill Diamond, a prominent Manhattan Republican that Giuliani had installed at the city agency handling rentals. When Diamond held a similar post in the Reagan administration a few years earlier, his office had selected the same building to house nine federal agencies. Diamond’s GOP-wired broker steered Hauer to the building, which was owned by a major Giuliani donor and fundraiser. When Hauer signed onto it, he was locked in by the limitations Giuliani had imposed on the search and the sites Diamond offered him. The mayor was so personally focused on the siting and construction of the bunker that the city administrator who oversaw it testified in a subsequent lawsuit that “very senior officials,” specifically including Giuliani, “were involved,” which he said was a major difference between this and other projects.
Giuliani’s office had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator.
For the city, this meant that on 9/11, the NYC make-shift command center didn’t exist until seven hours after the attack. As for Giuliani’s poor judgment, the most rational conclusion is that he put his center in the wrong place because he was creating a “convenient love nest.”
Kevin Drum wonders how the GOP base is going to respond to news like this.
Right now, they’re probably not aware of the whole story, and simply perceive Giuliani as someone who held some impressive press conferences on 9/11. But it’s only a matter of time. Giuliani’s decisions should be a national scandal that not only force him from the presidential race, but may even shame him permanently.
Inevitably, this is going to become a part of this campaign, and when it does, it’s going to be ugly.