Two Video Views of Giuliani, One Lies, One Truth
A good little video by London's The Guardian by Wayne Barrett, Rudy's nemesis from the Village Voice.
Compare to Giuliani's latest craven exploitation of 9/11.
A good little video by London's The Guardian by Wayne Barrett, Rudy's nemesis from the Village Voice.
Compare to Giuliani's latest craven exploitation of 9/11.
John Martin, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York prior to Giuliani, disputes Rudy's self-aggrandizing mythmaking about his tenure as US Attorney.
In today's New York Times Martin says:
ON “Meet the Press” a week ago, Rudolph W. Giuliani attempted to deflect criticism of his close relationship with his former police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, by saying that his misjudgment of Mr. Kerik had to be weighed against his other accomplishments. “How can I not have pretty good judgment about the people who work for me and not been able to turn around the United States attorney’s office?” he asked. But Mr. Giuliani’s claim to have turned around the Manhattan United States attorney’s office is not only untrue, it is an insult to the outstanding men and women who have served in that office over the last 50 years.
In case after case, Giuliani has misrepresented his role:
...the important cases prosecuted during his tenure did not result from some unique initiative or insight on his part.Mr. Giuliani claims that he came up with the idea of prosecuting the leaders of each of the major crime families in a single case under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. While that may be his perception, the idea was first broached by the head of the criminal section of the F.B.I.’s New York office in a meeting with me and my staff approximately a year before Mr. Giuliani took office.
While the United States attorney’s office under Mr. Giuliani prosecuted a number of high-profile securities fraud cases, including those against Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, the original information from which these cases developed came from Merrill Lynch, whose compliance staff had spotted what appeared to be insider trading in an account in the Bahamas. This account turned out to be owned by Dennis Levine, a leading Wall Street investment banker who, when confronted with the evidence against him, agreed to cooperate with the United States attorney’s office.
Even Rudy's big New York City corruption case was initiated by others:
The principal case that Mr. Giuliani personally tried during his six-year tenure, that of Stanley M. Friedman, the Bronx Democratic leader accused of corruption, had its genesis in an investigation conducted by the F.B.I. in Chicago.
Martin concludes:
There is no question that Mr. Giuliani is an able lawyer. It is unfortunate, however, that he feels he must denigrate the accomplishments of others to advance his own political interests. What has made the office of the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York an example of what a great prosecutor’s office should be is its tradition of hiring the best lawyers available, without regard to party affiliation, and allowing them to do their job free from political influence. Mr. Giuliani did not have to turn the prosecutor’s office around; he simply had to keep it moving forward.
Jim Dwyer of The Times, one of Giuliani's most clear-eyed and experienced observers, notes a particularly grievous lie during the Iowa debate this week:
In a debate among Republican candidates this week, Mr. Giuliani was asked what promises he would make about running an open White House.“I would make sure that government was transparent,” Mr. Giuliani said. “My government in New York City was so transparent that they knew every single thing I did almost every time I did it.”
That statement is comparable to GW Bush saying that he never implied that Iraq was involved in 9/11:
That was a daring claim, considering that prying information out of the Giuliani City Hall required teams of lawyers with the persistence of mules. To cite three of the most prominent examples, he tried to block the release of different batches of public records to the city’s Independent Budget Office, to the city’s public advocate, and to the state comptroller. He was sued on each occasion. He lost every time. He appealed each decision. He lost every appeal.
Steve Benen in The Carpetbagger usefully summarizes -- with supporting links -- Giuliani's most egregious lies.
One should generally be cautious about throwing around words such as “pathological,” but Rudy Giuliani’s inability to describe his record without ridiculous exaggerations is becoming increasingly problematic. The poor guy is apparently convinced that his record is too weak to stand on its own, so constant (and comical) embellishments become necessary.
A must-read and must-bookmark, here.
In London for money and photo ops, Giuliani is trying to add backstory to his fantasy costume drama in which he casts himself as Churchill.
He gets the money shot in front of 10 Downing Street with an enraptured Judi. (One can only imagine the sex play beneath the Egyptian cotton sheets of the Mandarin Oriental hotel tonight: "Blitz me, Winnie, blitz me!")
Earlier in the day, Giuliani dumbed-down Churchill's contribution to history as being the “greatest example of a crisis manager” in an attempt to ease the non-existent equivalency of the two.
Giuliani insists he should be viewed as the modern incarnation of Churchill the prophet, the voice on the margins of power crying out against the Facist threat and condemning appeasement.
There is one problem with this self-characterization: It is without any basis in fact.
In his eight years as mayor, beginning in January 1994, right after the Islamist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, Giuliani said nothing about the threat of Islamist terrorists in general or Bin Laden in particular. And worse, he did nothing to improve the preparedeness of the city and its responders to deal with future attacks.
Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice reports:
In fact, Giuliani was oblivious to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing throughout his mayoralty. A month after the attack, candidate Giuliani met for the first time with Bill Bratton, who would ultimately become his police commissioner. The lengthy taped meeting was one of several policy sessions he had with unofficial advisers. The bombing never came up; neither did terrorism. When Giuliani was elected a few months later, he immediately launched a search for a new police commissioner. Three members of the screening panel that Giuliani named to conduct the search, and four of the candidates interviewed for the job, said later that the bombing and terrorism were never mentioned—even when the new mayor got involved with the interviews himself. When Giuliani needed an emergency management director a couple of years later, two candidates for the job and the city official who spearheaded that search said that the bombing and future terrorist threats weren't on Giuliani's radar. The only time Giuliani invoked the 1993 bombing publicly was at his inauguration in 1994, when he referred to the way the building's occupants evacuated themselves as a metaphor for personal responsibility, ignoring the bombing itself as a terrorist harbinger.
Will someone PLEASE in "mainstream" media stop letting Giuliani keep getting away with this shit?!
Halloween comes a little early to London this year as Rudy Giuliani arrives in his Churchill costume and goes door to door to door looking for treats.
The Wall Street Journal blog has a report:
“America’s Mayor” went to London today to raise money for his presidential bid.In between meetings with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and other dignitaries, Rudy Giuliani raked in cash from American ex-pats working in and around London’s booming financial services sector. The venue: a luncheon for about 100 at the swank Mandarin Oriental hotel in the Knightsbridge district.
Of course, he overplays the whole "I am Churchill" thing, thinking that the Brits are as ignorant of history as Americans:
The ex-mayor and Republican frontrunner’s admiration for (or, some would say, obsession with) Winston Churchill was underlined by a special guest: Churchill granddaughter Celia Sandys, who conducted a Q&A with Giuliani as the guests ate. Giuliani praised Churchill as the “greatest example of a crisis manager” and implicitly likened himself to the British prime minister, one of the first to recognize the threat posed by Adolph Hitler.Giuliani repeated his oft-told story of how he read Roy Jenkins’s Churchill biography for inspiration after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He also said he was in London wh en suicide bombers struck the city’s transportation system in July 2005 — and that Americans could learn from the “resilience” that Londoners showed by going straight back to work the next day.
I look forward to someone doing a Lloyd Benson on him.
Today Giuliani announced how he'd better prepare the nation for natural or manmade disasters. His plan basically says it's up to each region or locality to be prepared. Gee thanks.
Anthony "Fat Tony" Carbonetti jumps right in:
"We will stack Rudy Giuliani's credentials on preparedness and handling a crisis against anyone's," said Anthony Carbonetti, a senior adviser.
Of course, any talk of his "expertise" in emergency preparedeness and management raises all kinds of questions about the reality of his administration's readiness for and performance on 9/11. The Daily News online wastes no time in getting to the point:
As durable as Giuliani's 9/11 image may be, there is also increasing evidence that his emergency planning record could put him on the defensive.Just ask many city firefighters, whose unions have drawn national headlines recently by slamming what they see as flaws in Giuliani's preparedness past.
Most are familiar to New Yorkers: On 9/11, there was no unified command post between cops and firefighters, hampering the exchange of potentially lifesaving information. The radios used by the FDNY that day were all but useless on higher floors, a flaw well-known for years but never really addressed by Giuliani's City Hall.
And Giuliani built his vaunted emergency command post in the doomed 7 World Trade Center, a known terrorist target since a 1993 bombing of the twin towers.
"I think he is trying to cover up for his mistakes of the past," said FDNY Battalion Chief Jim Riches, a member of 9/11 Firefighters & Families for Truth. "He didn't prepare us at all on 9/11."
There will surely be many more comments to come on Giuliani's emergency preparedness campaign announcement.
One of Giuliani's endlessly repeated lines is that he cut taxes in New York 23 times. This is not true.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center analyzed the claim and discovered that Giuliani initiated 15 tax cuts at most:
A new radio ad boasts that Rudy Giuliani "cut or eliminated 23 taxes" while mayor of New York City, a boast he and his supporters have repeated many times on the campaign trail. We find that to be an overstatement. Giuliani can properly claim credit for initiating only 15 of those cuts.In fact, he strongly opposed one of the largest cuts for which he claims credit, reversing himself only after a five-month standoff with the city council. In addition, the ad's claim that Giuliani turned the budget deficit he inherited into a surplus, while true enough, ignores the fact that he also left a multibillion-dollar deficit for his successor, not including costs associated with 9/11.
Giuliani's campaign ads say he “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.” The message he means to convey is that the deficit he found when entering office was a surplus when he left.
That is a lie. Today's New York Times shows how Giuliani is distorting the truth of his fiscal record as mayor of New York.
“He inherited a gap, and he left a gap for his successor,” Ronnie Lowenstein, the director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency that monitors the city budget, said of Mr. Giuliani. “The city was budgeting as though the good times were not going to end, but sooner or later they always do.”In fact, Mr. Giuliani left his successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, with a bigger deficit than the one Mr. Giuliani had to deal with when he arrived in 1994. And that deficit would have been large even if the city had not been attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.
