In recent polls, Rudy Giuliani leads his rivals in the Republican primary race by about ten points. That's surprising, since he's been a supporter of gay rights, abortion rights and immigrant rights as well as gun control. It suggests that a President Giuliani would be better than Bush. I asked Kevin Baker--he's author of the well-known City of Fire trilogy of novels about New York City--Strivers Row, Dreamland and Paradise Alley. He also writes for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Harper's, where his essay, "A Fate Worse Than Bush," leads the magazine's August issue....Giuliani told the 9/11 Commission that the firemen in the towers died because they refused orders to come out. He said they wanted to save lives of people trapped inside. "That's a demonstrable lie," Baker told me. "The firemen in the buildings were simply waiting for orders. They never got the word. It's easy to second-guess people in such a traumatic event, and anybody could be forgiven for not making the right decisions in the middle of everything. But to go to Congress months later and lie about this--I find that despicable."
The workers at Ground Zero in the following months, we now know, were exposed to significant health hazards. How much of that is Giuliani's responsibility? "He made no real attempt to determine the safety of working there," Baker said. "That was also the responsibility of Christie Todd Whitman, was the EPA Administrator at the time."
So what did Giuliani do after 9/11?
"He very quickly took the disaster of 9/11 as a great opportunity," Baker told me. "He proposed that his term in office be extended to give him more time to deal with things, and he tried to put his mistress of the time, who later became his third wife, Judith Nathan, in charge of a fund set up to give money to survivors and victims' families. Right from the beginning he was trying to exploit this. The words he said on TV were wonderful, but they weren't backed up by any actions at all." ...
A lot of us would be delighted to see the Christian right lose in the Republican primaries. Baker agreed that Giuliani is indeed a real threat to the Christian right. But, he argued, "the problem with Bush is not so much his religious ideology, crazy as that can be. It's the arrogance emanating from this man. It's the cronyism, the incompetence, and the frightening authoritarian impulses. Giuliani embodies all the worst of that, and maybe more."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070813/wiener
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
