Posted on 08/20/2007 8:34:42 AM PDT by hardback
Websters II New College Dictionary: "ghoul": 1. an evil spirit or demon in Muslim folklore said to plunder graves and feed on corpses. 2. a grave robber. 3. One who delights in the morbid or loathsome.
4. A former NYC Mayor who earns tens of million dollars and catapults to frontrunner status among Republican presidential hopefuls by standing on the corpses of 3,000 dead 9/11 victims and hundreds of dead and thousands of sick first responders.
For anyone who has watched the career of the angry, egomaniacal, authoritarian, thin-skinned, Nixonian, thrice divorced, former Mayor of NY City, it was just a matter of time before the carefully painted facial mask of the hero of 9/11 would start to slip away--revealing the real face of the ghoul beneath.
Hizzoner, whose popularity ratings among New Yorkers had slipped to a Bushian 30% by September 10, 2001, has ridden a single piece of video tape--Giuliani with his entourage marching uptown from the burning World Trade Center, covered with soot, barking orders from a bull horn--first to a multi- million dollar fortune, and now to the status of frontrunner among Republican presidential hopefuls, all of the on the corpses of the 3,000 dead in the Twin Towers (including my cousin) and hundreds more dead and thousands more sick rescue workers. Yet it was Ghouliani's own ego-driven decision, against the warning of his own head of Emergency Management, to place the NYC Emergency Command Center in the World Trade Center, that led him to be wandering the streets with no place to go, ironically creating the very video that catapulted him to hero status.
So far, this one trick pony has gotten away with it. The mainstream press has been reluctant to unmask Guiliani's self-proclaimed status of Dear Leader.
Sooner or later, his out-of-control ego and sense of self-aggrandizement would inevitably lead to his unmasking himself and his carefully constructed hero's image would start to collapse.
That deconstruction process started on August 9 at a Cincinnati campaign stop. Mayor Ghouliani proudly proclaimed that he spent more time after the terrorist attacks at Ground Zero than many of the heroic rescue workers and faced the same health risks as they did--over 10,000 now sick and several hundred already dead from breathing in deadly pollutants while working to dig bodies out of the wreckage without respirators that the Guiliani administration failed to require that they wear.
Ghouliani called himself "one of" the Sept. 11 cleanup workers and said he was "at ground zero as oftten, if not more, than most of the workers...This is not a mayor or a governor or a president who's sitting in an ivory tower...I was exposed to exactly the same things theyr were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them". (You can find Hizzoner's statements at youtube.com/watch?v=wR8SPSA7yga)
The outrage from former rescue workers was instantaneous. "I found his comment to be disgracefully insulting," said John J. McDonnell, a battalion chief and president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association of New York. How could the former-Mayor, whose presence at Ground Zero was taken up with endless photo ops to draw attention to himself, compare himself to the thousands of police, firefighters, and volunteers who worked 12 and 14 hour days for weeks and months to try to rescue the injured who might still be lying beneath the rubble, and to find the bodies and body-parts of those who didn't make it to give victims' loved ones the chance to give them a decent burial?
According to Michael J. Palladino, President of the Detective's Endowment Association of New York City, many of his members logged 30 hours in the first two days after the attacks, and most averaged more than 400 hours at ground zero.
Last Friday, the New York Times reported that exhaustive research of Giuliani's archive shows that in the 3 month period between Sept. 17, 2001 and Dec. 16, 2001, Hizzoner was in and around ground zero for a total of 29 hours, even as rescue workers put in 12 hour shifts. According to The Times, the 29 hours involved 41 appearances, mostly to give tours to other officials and foreign dignitaries.
On Saturday, Salon.com revealed that between Sept. 25 and Nov. 4, Giuliani spent 58 hours at Yankees games or flying to them, twice as long as as The New York Times reported he spent at Ground Zero. According to Wayne Barrett, during his administration, Giuliani frequently used a police boat to haul himself and his guests to Yankee Games. The Yankees gave Giuliani diamond and gold Yankee World Series rings for 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000 worth a minimum of $200,000 for which he only paid $16,000, years after he left office. No mayor of any other American city in recent memory has received World Series Rings from their teams. The rings may have been illegal gifts in conflict with New York Conflict of Interest Laws. Shortly before leaving office, Giuliani renegotiated the Yankee's lease on Yankee Stadium to allow the Yankees to break their lease on 60 days notice, instead of 5 years, if the they determined that the City was unlikely to proceed with a new stadium Giuliani had promised to build them with over $1 billion in taxpayer money. When Mayor Bloomberg took over from Giuliani, he quickly killed Giuliani's plans to subsidize a stadium for the Yankees as unaffordable in the post 9/ll era. As Salon stated "by his own standard, Giuliani was one of the Yankees more than he was one of the rescue workers."
After 9/11, Giuliani showed little concern for the safety of the rescue workers. On September 28, he stated "the air is safe and acceptable". As late as the end of October, only 29% of the workers at ground zero were wearing respirators. According to an exhaustive report by investigative reporter Wayne Barrett published in The Village Voice the same week as Giuliani was claiming he was at Ground Zero as much as the rescue workers, New York City had test result showing hazardous levels of asbestos up to 7 blocks away from Ground Zero, but decided not the make the results public. Federal EPA official Bruce Sprague sent an October 5 letter to the city complaining about "very inconsistent compliance" with respiratory protection, after unsuccessful conversations with Giuliani aides about the problem.
Republican EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman said that there were "telephone calls, telephone meetings, and meetings with the city" every day, with the EPA repeating the "necessity of wearing respirators." Whitman said she "would call my people at midnight after watching the 11 o'clock news and say, "I'm still seeing them without respirators." She said she "was very frustrated."
Meanwhile, Giuliani himself showed up for most of his short photo ops at Ground Zero with no protection against the toxic pollution, helping to set a macho example, and failing to show the rescue workers how to protect themselves. It was like showing up to a meeting on AIDS prevention without a condom.
An internal memo to a deputy mayor estimated early in the cleanup that there would be 35,000 potential plaintiffs against the city, partly because rescue workers were "provided with faulty or not equipment (i.e. respirators). Some estimate that as many may eventually die from side effects of pollution at the site as died from the bombing. Giuliani wrote a letter to Congress asking Congress to pass a law capping New York's liability for 9/11 health risks at $350 million.
Giuliani was clearly lying when he claimed to have spent as much time at Ground Zero as the rescue workers. Beyond that, Barrett's Village Voice article exposes 5 big lies Giuliani has told about 9/11. Readers may find it at www.villagevoice.come/news/0732,barrett,7463,6.html
A few tidbits: --"I think the thing that distinguishes me on terrorism is, I have more experience dealing with it," claims Giuliani. "As a United States Attorney, I investigated the Leon Klinghoffer murder by Yasir Arafat," Giuliani claimed at a July appearance in a Maryland Synagogue. Republican Reagan appointee Deputy Assistant Attorney General Victoria Toensing, who headed the first Justice Department "terrorism unit" and who filed the criminal complaint in the Klinghoffer murder says no one in Giuliani's federal prosecuter's office "was involved at all" . In the only terrorism case Giuiliani worked on as a US Prosecuter, the judge threw out 46 of the 55 counts because of errors by Giuliani's office and Giuliani personally filed papers terminating the case in his last month in office.
--Giuliani's claims that, unlike Democrats, the first World Trade Center Bombing in 2003 woke him up to the dangers of Islamic Terrorism. "I assumed from the moment I came into office that NYC would be the subject of a terrorist attack," in told Time Magazine in 2001 when it made him "Person of the Year". In fact, Giuliani didn't create the NYC Office of Emergency Management until 27 months into his term and he didn't open the OEM's emergency command center until 6 years later.
--The terrorist who engineered the 1993 WTC bombing told the FBI they were coming back to finish the job. Against the advice of Giuliani's handpicked head of OEM, who recommended that the OEM Command Center be located in Brooklyn in a neighborhood less likely to be attacked, Giuliani insisted it had to be walking distance from City Hall and put it a #7 World Trade Center. Lou Anemone, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the NYPD wrote memos slamming the site, saying later "I've never seen in my life 'walking distance' as some kind of standard for crisis management...But you don't want to confuse Giuliani with the facts...I guess you had to be there in 1993 to know how strongly we felt it was the wrong place."
In fact, the only reason that Giuliani was captured on video tape marching uptown covered in dust--the tape that catapulted Giuliani into a national hero, a multi-millionare, and a presidential frontrunner--is that the Command Center had to be evacuated and Giuliani had nowhere to go.
--Giuliani had his private office in the $61 million Command Center equipped with a humidor of cigars, monogrammed towels in the bathroom, and a private elevator so he could come and go without being noticed. He visited his office there often, even on weekends, bringing girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before he announced their relationship in a press conference before telling his own wife.
--New York City Police and Fireman used different radio frequencies so they could not communicate with each other in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. Despite the federal government giving New York City the radio frequencies to make the radios interoperable 1995, Giuliani did nothing to make that happen. In fact on 9/11, firefighters were still using the same radios that "we knew didn't work" in the 1993 attack. The International Association of Fire Fighters claims that as many as 121 firefighters may lost their lives because they couldn't hear evacuation orders to get out of the North Tower, after police helicopters warned that it was about to collapse.
Thus, Giuliani, the man The Onion says is "running for President of 9/11" did little to prepare for a terrorist attack before 9/11, may have led to the deaths of over 100 firefighters on 9/11, and may have taken few steps to protect hundreds or thousands of rescue workers from sickness and death from lung disease in the aftermath of 9/11. Far from showing "Leadership", as Giuliani's best-selling book is entitled, Giuliani's performance both before and after 9/11 reveals incompetence, lack of compassion, and extaordinay egotism.
Ghoul: a grave robber, an evil spirit who plunders graves and feeds on corpses. After leaving office a few months after 9/11, Ghouliani began a speaking tour based on his 9/11 heroism, charging as much as $200,000 an engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He started a security firm with his ex-Police Commissioner and future convicted felon Bernard Kerik to charge companies and governments millions of dollars for advice on how to protect themselves against terrorism and other security threats. Having spent most of his life on a government salary, Ghouliani used 9/11 to turn himself into a multi-mllionaire
At last, it seems, the cracks in the foundations of Giuliani's carefully built image of 9/11 hero are starting to show, as his own ego-driven words as a "fellow 9/11 rescue worker" betray his hypocricy. As a presidential candidate, Guiliani is one-trick pony--supposed the only candidate who truly understands the threat of Islamic terrorism to the homeland and has the experience, courage and vision to stand up to the terrorists.
Soon, all the kings horses and all the kings men, won't be able to put Rudy Dumpty back together again.
Until now, the mainstream press has used kid gloves in failing to raise questions about Giuliani's self-proclaimed status as anti-terrorist superhero. If the blatent hypocricy of Rudy's own words and the devasting facts in the Barrett investigative report don't get the mainstream press off their asses to start asking some pointed questions of America's Mayor, then his Republican opponents have all the opposition research they need to take Hizzoner down.
Excellent!
BTTT!
Well good for you! If you aren’t going to vote, why the hell should your opinion matter?
Here was the headline the next day.
Giuliani Says He Misspoke About His Time at Ground Zero
The honest thing to do would be to acknowledge it.
I stopped reading right here. I can don fine not supporting Rudy but I sure don't have to stoop this low.
>>4. A former NYC Mayor who earns tens of million dollars and catapults to frontrunner status among Republican presidential hopefuls by standing on the corpses of 3,000 dead 9/11 victims and hundreds of dead and thousands of sick first responders.<<
1. I oppose Guiliani - his positions and history are not conservative.
2. This attack is over the top. Lots of politicians including the current President associate themselves with 9/11
3. That said, Guiliani (or any brass in any command) sure is stupid to say he does the same thing as they guys on the front line.
I love a good balanced article.
Well ya know.....this guy writing is obviously a liberal.
But he’s spot on in some cases. It was G’s (can’t spell his name) idea to have command center in the wrongest of places. And I knew about that radio frequency thing as well. Assuming this is all true and there aren’t other things we don’t know, hey, I’ll armchair quarterback and suggest that G should have done something about that radio frequency problem. If what is written is true (and you CAN’T assume this nowadays) it should have occurred to G to have the police and fire people able to communicate with each other. I must wonder if that were a private industry if G wouldn’t have been fired for overlooking something so important.
But it isn’t private industry, is it? It’s government and the world all saw Mayor G walking uptown, covered in dust. We saw him involved in everthing didn’t we? We saw him looking busy and he WAS the NY Mayor at the time. Let’s be honest, that’s this man’s claim to fame. Beyond that, seriously, would a MAYOR be given the time of day for President? I don’t care it’s NY...name me one NY Mayor that’s been Prez. There may be one but the name eludes me.
Now we are to understand that G’s wife purchases a separate airline seat for her handbag, if what I read is true? That just strikes me as wrong.
This guy, he’s no hero. He was at the right place at the right time and I’m supposing, being generous here, that he learned a lot as a result of the experience. I’d almost consider that a plus except it seems he doesn’t have the courage to tell his wife that a separate airline seat for her handbag is just.....wrong.
My tongue was in cheek for the entirety of this post. Although I am, ahem, underwhelmed by Mr. G.
I can’t quite work our whether Miles supports Rudy or not.
Are we supposed to take this author seriously when he calls Rudy “Ghouliani”?
Rudy Derangement Syndrome strikes again.
FYI, this is leftisty crapola originally from the Huffington Post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/the-beginning-of-the-self_b_61052.html
Most hatchet jobs at least try to fake a minimum of objectivity. Kudos for finding one that comes right out and drips venom in the open.
Was the slap at Nixon in the 3rd paragraph and a slap at Bush in the 4th enough of a clue to determine where the author stood?
The article looks as if it comes right out of the “Hillary Move On.org hand book”
I’ll say it. This guy is looking more and more like Billy-Jeff-Clinton every day. The hell of it is that he was all washed out and heading for easy grazing pasture until the events of 9-11 gave him the opportunity that he instantly jumped onto bigtime....I shudder to think of what a man of his character might do or allow in the White House.
Hizzoner was in and around ground zero for a total of 29 hours, even as rescue workers put in 12 hour shifts. According to The Times, the 29 hours involved 41 appearances, mostly to give tours to other officials and foreign dignitaries.
On Saturday, Salon.com revealed that between Sept. 25 and Nov. 4, Giuliani spent 58 hours at Yankees games
Devastating.
Can't disagree with that part. Spot on. I'd add one thing, Rooty is an opportunist who is exploiting the tragic events of 9-11 in order to garner the GOP nomination.
No thanks.
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