Former New York mayor Giuliani is always entertaining, and he hasn’t disappointed. The most remarkable aspect of his candidacy is its complete immunity from anything that has actually happened in the last five years. For Rudy, it’s still 9/12 and always will be. And why not? He hasn’t felt so significant since – although his speaking fees have. He has no qualms about Iraq. It’s simple, after all. We just have to win.
His entire analysis of the war on terror can be reduced to the notion that we stay “on offense”. Offense means anything aggressive, it appears. He wouldn’t rule out a nuclear strike on Iran, for example. He endorses “any methods necessary” to extract information from anyone who might seem like a terrorist.
He spoke of two recent terror plots – one involving a handful of loons who wanted to invade a military base, another a crew of Caribbeans who dreamt of blowing up JFK airport (they had no weapons and no firm plans) – as if they were an imminent threat to America’s very existence.
As his eyes flash through his wire-rim glasses, and he bobs up and down on his shiny corporate shoes, you can just see him drooling over the chance to fire a few missiles, round up a few immigrants, strip a few more Americans of habeas corpus rights and nuke Tehran. This is the man, remember, who banned ferret-ownership and jaywalking in New York City. Next stop: Falluja. Piece of cake.
I keep meaning to write a post about my own personal brushes with Rudy (when I worked in a criminal defense law firm in NY, Rudy was friends with my managing partner, even though Rudy was a US District Attorney at the time). The reason I haven’t yet is because I keep waiting for his campaign to implode, thus making such a post moot (as we say in the law biz).
Suffice it to say, I was non-plussed.
Rudy really is running on the coattails of all the things he did on 9/12 and the days after — which, when you get down to it, really wasn’t a lot. New Yorkers, of course, know better. They remember Rudy pre 9/11. They remember the FIRST terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, the car bomb which failed to level the buildings but killed 8 people nonetheless.
So, following that 1993 attack, where did Rudy decide to put the Command and Control Center for the entire New York City emergency services apparatus? Against the advice of fire and police personnel, he place it right in the center of the target — within the World Trade Center itself. Because that’s really the first thing that you want in the event of a terrorist attack — the entire communications center of local emergency services to be knocked out. And that’s exactly what happened on 9/11. Smaaaaart. And there are people who still think he’s the man to fight global terrorism?