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Baron Dave Romm
Rudy and Me
By Baron Dave Romm
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Rudy and Me
April, 1999, World Trade Center. I had just taken the train from New Jersey, where I had visited online friends, and was returning to my mother's Manhattan apartment. Popping out of the LIRR terminal under the WTC, I aim for the subway. Unexpectedly for a Sunday morning, there was a huge crowd of people milling about, with police and cordoned off lines and various stations and tables. The MS Walkathon (or something) was about to happen. Speakers were speaking and lines of walkers forming.
One of the speakers was New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
I grew up in New York, the state not the city, and keep an eye on NY politics. This was in the heady post-Impeachment days and the run-up to the 2000 elections. The big speculation was the upcoming NY senate race, possibly between Hillary and Rudy.
I've always admired Giuliani as NYC mayor. He was a good mayor, though he missed being a great mayor by his tantrums and arrogance. He pissed off people he didn't need to piss off, and that sometimes got in the way of being an effective executive. If he was running for Governor, I might favor him over Clinton but he'd make a lousy Senator, where you need to get along with people.
On that day, Rudy Giuliani was in full Politician Mode. I gave him high marks for coming out on a Sunday to address the throng. His rah rah speech was only fair, but as good as anyone who spoke.
After the race started, Rudy stuck around, and so did I. Stayed for the sound bites, that is, not the event. The mayor was surrounded by cameras, being interviewed for tv. I sidled up, and stood perhaps eight feet away from him, just outside of the ring of shoulder-held cameras. Most of the questions were about his bid for Senate, which he deflected deftly; just as well, since he wound up not running. I stayed for a few minutes. Nobody said anything to me and security was not overtly present.
I came away from this near meeting with a higher regard for Rudy Giuliani. Sure, he was a glad-handing politician, but sometimes that's what it takes to handle a large city like New York, and his presence at a charity event is exactly the kind of symbolic imprimatur a mayor should confer.
He didn't run for Senate largely due to the sexual scandals that were nipping at his, er, heels. Then came 9/11 and he handled it with the same symbolic ease as the previous event at the WTC. Problems before, during and afterward were pushed aside for the symbolism of Someone In Charge.
Flash forward to 2007
Rudy's Bimbo Eruption
Shtup-gate: Giuliani billed obscure agencies for trips Ben Smith in politico.com, Nov. 28, 2007:
As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.What Clinton did in his spare time he also did on his nickel (though he didn't pay for dry cleaning expenses). Internet porn mogul Ken Starr cost taxpayers millions, and titillated the heartland perverts. Meanwhile, what Giuliani did in his off hours cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands in expenses and misuse of government employees.
Joan Walsh comment in salon.com Nov. 30, 2007 (Premium membership, or click through the ads).
Conason argues that Shtup-gate, the scandal of Rudy Giuliani billing obscure New York City agencies hundreds of thousands of dollars for security on trysts with mistress Judi Nathan, as well as solo travel by his then wife Donna Hanover, deserves less attention than Giuliani's business ties with the al-Qaida-friendly emirate of Qatar, whose Interior Minister Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani has long been accused of harboring 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and helping him escape U.S. capture in 1996.More on Giuliani's business ties in the next section.
Why, Joe? Say it ain't so! Must we really choose between two big scandals? Can't reporters be all over both?
Sex on the city is DailyKos' preferred term for the set of scandals surrounding Giuliani's extramarital affairs and misuse of government funds. I'll let you read at least one of the DK Diaries DK (among many) so you can follow the links to primary sources. You may want to see the YouTube video, but I didn't.
The moral relativism of Republicans is as repugnant as it is predictable. Fun to dis people about their sex lives, but the GOP clearly thinks that "character matters" only for Democrats. The two-faced scum on the right just don't give a damn because the rules don't apply to them.
More Importantly: Rudy's ties to terrorists
Rudy's Ties to a Terror Sheikh; Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice, Nov. 27, 2007:In retrospect, Giuliani's embrace of the emir appears peculiar. But it was only a sign of bigger things to come: the launching of a cozy business relationship with terrorist-tolerant Qatar that is inconsistent with the core message of Giuliani's current presidential campaign, namely that his experience and toughness uniquely equip him to protect America from what he tauntingly calls "Islamic terrorists"-an enemy that he always portrays himself as ready to confront, and the Democrats as ready to accommodate.
The contradictory and stunning reality is that Giuliani Partners, the consulting company that has made Giuliani rich, feasts at the Qatar trough, doing business with the ministry run by the very member of the royal family identified in news and government reports as having concealed KSM-the terrorist mastermind who wired funds from Qatar to his nephew Ramzi Yousef prior to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and who also sold the idea of a plane attack on the towers to Osama bin Laden-on his Qatar farm in the mid-1990s.
There's a great deal more to the Village Voice article, and more to the story.
Giuliani, like the Bush family, made lots and lots of money by associating themselves with the very people they then claim are America's enemies. Another analogy would be the US (and Dick Cheney's Haliburton) deals with Saddam Hussein while the US was declaring Iraq a terrorist state.
Nor is this the first time that Rudy is lying about 9/11. As Democraticunderground's Top 10 Conservative Idiots 294 says in citing Rudy as the #4 idiot that week, catching him in lies and a major flip flop:
That's not all... last week Rudy Giuliani made an appearance at Pat Robertson's Regent University and once again blamed Bill Clinton for 9/11.
So anyway, I wonder how Rudy squares his comments blaming Bill Clinton for 9/11 with his September 2006 comments where he "defended Bill Clinton ... over the former president's counterterrorism efforts, saying recent criticism on preventing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is wrong?"The section does a good, if quick, comparison of Clinton's largely successful efforts to halt terrorism and find Osama bin Laden with Bush Lite's painfully unsuccessful efforts before, during and after 9/11.
Back to Giuliani's terrorist ties by Joe Conason 11/30/07:
The familiar herd instinct of the mainstream media is powerful, unswerving and often plain wrong. While editors and producers are supposed to make judgments based on a combination of news value and public interest, their choices often seem to be based on nothing more elevated than an allergy to complexity or an affinity for smut. And occasionally, as in the case of Rudolph Giuliani during this past week, the sudden appearance of not one but two juicy investigations overwhelms the system's capacity to absorb and regurgitate.
Conservative News Media has giving Rudy a pass on fact checking but the stories are too big
Hallelujah! New York Times Does An Epic Fact-Check Of Rudy's Multiple Falsehoods Horse's Mouth on talkingpointsmemo.com 11/30:
As you regulars know, this blog has been obsessing endlessly about the fact that the big news orgs have yet to take a genuinely tough line on Rudy Giuliani's chronic mendacity, which at this point has taken on a soaring, almost operatic quality.
But today The New York Times has come through in a big way, delivering an epic, front-page fact-check of the multiple falsehoods that have been tumbling forth from Rudy since the beginning of Campaign 2008. The piece is just devastating, saying as clearly as one could expect from the Times that Rudy is, well, full of sh-t: [excerpt from NYTimes, with this sentence on Guiliani's statements]: All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong...
Following up with Washington Post Editors Again Refuse To Label GOP Falsehoods What They Are: False the Horse's Mouth on talkingpointsmemo.com 12/1/07:
You'd think that The Washington Post's editors would have been chastened by yesterday's courageous New York Times piece that aggressively fact-checked Rudy Giuliani's multiple falsehoods and called them out for what they are -- "false." Coming just a day after WaPo's much-criticized article on Barack Obama, which recycled "rumors" that he's a Muslim without calling out those rumors as falsehoods, the Times piece was particularly embarrassing to the Post. Indeed, Post cartoonist Tom Toles relentlessly mocked his own paper yesterday for this failing.The article is about the Washington Post screwing up and repeating lies about Barack Obama, and details Karl Rove's lies, not Giuliani's, but illustrates how the conservative news media is unwilling to challenge GOP lies. Glenn Greenwald has further rambling comments.
The NYT's Michael Cooper demonstrates what real reporting is Glenn Greenwald, salon.com Nov. 11, 2007 (Premium membership, but click through the ads to get the story):
But Romano defends this practice as "setting the record straight." Here again we see an explicit statement of the corrupt view that so many establishment journalists now have of their role: "we pass on factual falsehoods from one side, note that the other side denies them, and call it a day. Then we've done our job." Greg Sargent, who notes that the Post reporter who wrote the article (Perry Bacon) admitted afterwards, in a statement, that the accusations he passed on against Obama are false, explained the obvious:[T]he problem here is that WaPo, and not just Obama, should have "denied the accuracy" of the Obama-is-a-Muslim nonsense. The Obama Muslim smear is based on lies, not "rumors." Bacon in his statement above calls the Obama Muslim smears "falsehoods." But they aren't identified as such in the piece. That's what everyone is yelling about.This is without question one of the most significant problems in how our establishment media functions. They refuse to subject claims -- particularly claims from the GOP power structure and the right-wing noise machine which they fear -- to any critical scrutiny.
For various reasons, they simply will not investigate such claims and, when warranted, identify such claims as false. The most they are willing to do is simply write down each side's claims and treat them equally, even when one side is blatantly lying. GOP operatives know that this is how the press functions and thus know that they can easily get away with spewing lies, and can even recruit the media into helpfully spreading them (using the predominant "he-said/she-said" template). That's the same process that led us into Iraq, kept us there for so long, protected endless presidential lawbreaking and enabled all sorts of fact-free smears. One can see most vividly just how corrupt this process is whenever there is a news report that exemplifies the proper function of journalism. An article in today's New York Times by Michael Cooper, regarding Rudy Giuliani's campaign claims about his own record, is an excellent such example of good, basic reporting. Headlined "Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again," the article reports:In almost every appearance as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, Rudolph W. Giuliani cites a fusillade of statistics and facts to make his arguments about his successes in running New York City and the merits of his views. . . . .After identifying numerous standard Giuliani claims regarding his crime and spending accomplishments, Cooper wrote:All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong . . . .An examination of many of his statements by The New York Times, other news organizations and independent groups have turned up a variety of misstatements, virtually all of which cast Mr. Giuliani or his arguments in a better light.
Conservatives can't stand the light of day. They've spent much of the last half century buying up as many media outlets as possible so that the truth doesn't shine through. Rudy Giuliani was a good mayor and most of his sleaze and corruption were known (or strongly suspected) at the time. But the very short and very selective memory of the right wingers has painted him as an unflawed hero, when his flaws are deep and abiding, and they are worse after 9/11 then in 1999. The stories should come out. It's probably too late for the sleaze and corruption of the Bush Lite Administration to be fixed while he's in office, but let's hope he will serve as a bad example for a long time to come.
Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia who produces Shockwave Radio Theater, writes in a Live Journal demi-blog, plays with a very weird CD collection and an ever growing list of political links. Dave Romm reviews things at random for obscure web sites. You can read all his music recommendations from Bartcop-E. Podcasts of Shockwave Radio Theater. Permanent archive. More radio programs, interviews and science fiction humor plays can be accessed on the Shockwave Radio audio page.
Thanks to everyone who has sent me music to play on the air.
--////
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
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Mia Farrow
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Kashmir Saffron
World's Oldest Geisha
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Kokin
Survivor Cat
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The family saw the cat several times with the jar on its head and tried in vain to catch it. But after not seeing the cat for a week, the Cains feared the worst.
They found the once chubby cat on Wednesday, too thin and weak to flee. They caught her with a fishing net and used some oil to get the jar off her head.
'Wild Oats'
Sold At Auction
Giant Truffle
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The giant fungus was presented on a silver platter by an Italian chef flanked by Chinese models to the flash of cameras ahead of the auction at Macau's Grand Lisboa Hotel.
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The giant truffle, and one of about the same size sold to a Hong Kong bidder last year, were the largest found since a 2.5 kg truffle was found in 1954 and presented to former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, according to media reports.
Giant Truffle
Weekend Box Office
'Enchanted'
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Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Media By Numbers LLC. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "Enchanted," $17 million.
2. "This Christmas," $8.4 million.
3. "Beowulf," $7.9 million.
4. "Awake," $6 million.
5. "Hitman," $5.8 million.
6. "Fred Claus," $5.6 million.
7. "August Rush," $5.2 million.
8. "No Country for Old Men," $4.5 million.
9. "Bee Movie," $4.47 million.
10. "American Gangster," $4.3 million.
'Enchanted'
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