Il Duce Giuliani

Or “Benito Giuliani”, if you prefer. That’s how he was known to the denizens of the fair city over which he ruled with an iron fist, using and abusing his beloved black-booted police squads to do so. It’s this same Rudy Giuliani—former mayor of New York City and proud owner of an elaborate back tattoo depicting himself holding a bullhorn, an American flag and a New York hot dog while simultaneously digging a fireman out of the rubble of the World Trade Center on which he stands, illuminated from behind by a holy light—who is currently (one of) the front-runners for nomination as the Republican candidate for President of the United States in 2008.

Most Americans (to say nothing of global citizens) would be willing to admit that they would be receptive to pretty much any other President at this point. Even those proud citizens possessed of a worldview with only the most tenuous of relationships with reality must be hearing the irritating drone of that primal, internal alarm that alerts us to imminent danger. For many, it’s been going for years and getting louder with each new, execrable decision emanating from Washington; for others, it’s come about only recently and is still somewhat muffled; for the remaining 26%, it’s there, but actively drowned out by a steady diet of soothing media.

This year, more than most, Bush and his policies have been alienating more and more of even the most die-hard of Republicans, scaring off the last of the conservatives—who have finally given up all hope that Bush is one of them—in a seemingly hell-bent orgy of ineptitude, corporate cronyism and corruption that beggars belief. But this is about Rudy, not Bush. Suffice it to say that Bush is a pretty easy act to follow; it’s kind of like being the leader of Cambodia after Pol Pot: all you have to do is kill fewer than a couple of million of your own people and already you’re doing better than the last guy.

His Track Record

What makes Rudy think that he’s qualified to be mayor of the United States? He was a lawyer, then the mayor of New York City and since then has been touring the country, collecting six figure speaking fees for telling people that they should be pants-shittingly terrified of “the other” every waking moment of their lives. While he was mayor of New York, he introduced draconian law enforcement measures for petty crimes—espousing the thoroughly discredited “broken windows” theory of social planning—targeted mostly at blacks, hispanics and the poor[1].

He justified further abuses of power by pointing to decreasing violent crime statistics without acknowledging that they were already decreasing before he introduced his new measures. Without fail, he backed up the police no matter what travesties of lynch-mob-like justice they visited on the most disadvantaged citizens of the city. He abused non-existent executive powers to rezone the city to the benefit of high-powered corporate friends, destroying legitimate businesses (like street vendors[2]) and neighborhoods (like Times Square[3]) at a whim in order to expand the militantly white “safe zone” in midtown Manhattan. He was a supercilious, arrogant prick with the media, had an incredibly high opinion of his own sense of humor and a violent temper. His cronyism knew no bounds and most of his appointees resigned amid scandal at one point or another during his two terms.

To be perfectly honest, he sounds like the perfect candidate to continue the Bush legacy, were that something America were interested in pursuing.

One-Hit Wonder

As with Bush, 9-11 was the best thing to ever happen to Giuliani. They both rode the wave of emotion engendered by the disaster to revive flagging reputations and careers. Giuliani: Worse Than Bush by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) writes:

“Like Bush’s, Rudy’s career before the bombing was in the toilet; New Yorkers had come to think of him as an ambition-sick meanie whose personal scandals were truly wearying to think about. But on the day of the attack, it must be admitted, Rudy hit the perfect note; he displayed all the strength and reassuring calm that Bush did not, and for one day at least, he was everything you’d want in a leader. Then he woke up the next day and the opportunist in him saw that there was money to be made in an America high on fear.”

Giuliani is basing his whole campaign on the reputation he made for himself as “America’s Mayor” in the days after 9-11. It’s a relatively thin resumé for a president—Bush was similarly well-versed in foreign policy when he took office. As for Giuliani, objective accounts agree that he’s mostly a legend in his own mind and the minds of those he’s managed to convince.

In reality, residents of the city were basically waiting out the last two months of his term when the planes hit the World Trade Center. Riding the carefully crafted wave of his own publicity campaign, Giuliani briefly tried to get the changeover to Bloomberg, who was elected on November 11th, delayed indefinitely – “just until 9-11 blows over” – but was roundly denied by NYC courts (and a slew of editorials and letters to the editor from incensed residents). Giuliani, however, is happy to selectively remember what happened in the aftermath, equating giving interviews to TV crews with actually doing something to help. NY Fire Department Chief on Rudy Giuliani… (Reddit) has some interesting comments and links from the actual heroes of those weeks following the attack—whose opinions of Rudy are much different from the picture his campaign paints.

“Yeah, let’s just forget the fact that Rudy was standing around yakking at cameras while 400+ firemen lay dead in the rubble … For the mayor to take any credit for helping out that day is an affront to all the first responders that died. They were actually doing something to try to help people that were about to die.”

…and…

“The emergency response was a fustercluck because Giuliani had ignored the advice of his security advisers and left the emergency response headquarters in the WTC, which was already a known terrorist target. … 343 fire fighters died because Giuliani had refused to authorize spending the money to update their communications systems so they could interface with the police system. When the order to evacuate was issued, the police heard it and got out, but the fire fighters never heard the order. Giuliani had the gall, later, to claim that the fire fighters had ignored the call to evacuate and that’s why so many died. (emphasis added)”

Taibbi’s article lends more weight to the opinions about miscommunication between police and firemen cited above, noting that the “9/11 Commission concluded that the two departments had been “designed to work independently, not together,” and that greater coordination would have spared many lives.” This kind of truthiness, this 180 degree transformation from screwup to hero is paradoxically easier in a media-rich age. As long as the media is more concerned with making a profit than with disseminating information, it remains simple for a well-oiled machine like Giuliani’s campaign to get people to remember a different story of 9-11 than actually happened. If the Bush years have shown us anything, it’s that the shelf life of the truth is excruciatingly short, after which it can be remembered as the powers-that-be see fit.

Early in September, Giuliani had the city open in no time, fast-tracking the EPA’s crooked approval of air quality so the economy wouldn’t suffer, which was much more important than whether citizens would suffer or not. Years later, it turns out that—OOPS!—the air quality really was bad and “thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments”. Those associated most intimately with the cleanup suffered the most, but many more who went back to work in the area without the benefit of a mask—those who trusted Guiliani and his collection of crooked companies, like Bechtel and inept, crooked agencies, like the EPA, are shit out of luck today.

18 Months to Go?

As for Giuliani’s career since he left office 5 years ago, Taibbi pulls no punches (those familiar with his work don’t expect him to) and lays into Rudy with the following quick bio:

“[He] is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who’ll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That’s Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush. … Now Giuliani is running for president – as the hero of 9/11. George Bush has balls, too, but even he has to bow to this motherfucker.”

And that’s the scary thing. Giuliani was always a pure pycho as mayor of New York, but his influence was limited to only the greater New York metropolitan area. George Bush is the same kind of “go from the gut” unthinking psycho, but has had the whole globe to treat as the playground in which to throw his tantrums. There are so many people who’ve convinced themselves that there are only 18 months to go and that Bush is scraping the bottom of the barrel. It won’t—it can’t—get any worse. Then along comes Giuliani, dragging his knuckles, grinning his cadaverous fixed grin and focusing those dead, beady black eyes of his on the problems of the world. And he starts raving away and sounds crazier, more batshit, than Bush. He’s not alone in the Republican crowd, with their vows of allegiance to God and against evolution and immigrants, but he’s the front runner and he brings that special crazy to the table that New Yorkers were, on the whole, glad to see leave 6 years ago.

“To the extent that conservatism in the Bush years has morphed into a celebration of mindless patriotism and the paranoid witch-hunting of liberals and other dissenters, Rudy seems the most anxious of any Republican candidate to take up that mantle.”

To that end, he’s outfitted himself with many of the same campaign staff that made the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns such an unadulterated pleasure to experience as the acme of the democratic process. There is no shortage of bad feeling toward this guy and its an affront that the media and the Republican party can just blithely treat him as the front-runner without doing any digging into his history whatsoever. He’s polling consistently at 30% or more overall, which means either that his fanatical fearmongering has hit home with voters or that the media is doing their usual bang-up job of informing voters or, most likely, both.

It’s really a shame that Jimmy Breslin has retired because the nation needs him so badly to tell them to wake up, to stop believing in a salesman whose only available product is fear, in its multifarious forms.[4]

Going Nuclear

The Headlines for June 6, 2007 (Democracy Now!) covered more nonsense from Guiliani in the second Republican debate, in which he “refused to rule out attacking Iran with nuclear weapons”. This isn’t too surprising as it’s important to note that he’s much more stridently fearmongering than either Clinton or Obama—and neither one of them has taken the nuclear option “off the table”. Here’s his diatribe in full:

“I think it could be done with conventional weapons but you shouldn’t take any options off the table. And during the debate the other night the Democrats seemed like they were back in the 1990s. They don’t seem to have got beyond the cold war. Iran is a nuclear threat and not just because they can deliver a nuclear warhead with missiles, they are a threat because they are the biggest state sponsor of terrorism and they can handle and they can hand nuclear material to terrorists.‘”

Though his kind of crazy doesn’t truly deserve it, the serious attention paid him by the media warrants a closer examination of his words. The jab at the Democrats being “back in the 90s” is the most subtle way he can think of to segue into yet another mention of 9-11. Iran is not a nuclear threat nor do they have the capability to deliver a nuclear warhead in a missile—stating this in the present tense is a deliberate lie intended to foment fear. In fact, all estimates indicate that they are still eight years away from even having the requisite fissile material, to say nothing of the capability of reliably delivering it via rocket to its intended target.

Consider the debacle that is the Pentagon SDI program, where missiles barely get off the ground, much less actually hit anything close to what they were aimed at. Is Giuliani convinced that the deviousness and mindless hate of the enemy, makes them so much more efficient than America? And they’re purported to manage it all with a much smaller military budget. To cap it off, Giuliani avers not only that they have nuclear material, but that they have so much that they’re giving it away to all of their terrorist buddies, all of whom belong to Al-Qaeda. This a special, manic kind of lying that makes yellow cake and aluminum tubes sound like innocuous blunders. That he doesn’t get thrown out of the election process for this by the Republican Party is a scandal.

Be Very Afraid.

Guiliani has already given the astute and attentive enough material to judge him not only inadequate to rule this country, but incapable of taking part in any informed decisions at all. He has trouble with information, seeking very little of it and accepting only that which can be used to fuel fear or remind the nation of its most fearful moment. His every word serves to remind America that another attack is imminent, certain and long overdue.

Fear it. Go on, do it. Fear.

He knows nothing else. He campaigns on nothing else. When Ron Paul dared suggest that American foreign policy was a direct cause of 9/11, Giuliani spluttered an incoherent, uncomprehending response that impugned Paul with the same, tired litany of information-free, “blame America first” reasoning (if it can even be called that) used by the lowest of the low, the meanest of the mean, the dumbest of the dumb. Terrorist acts are caused only by blind hatred of the other—there can be no reasoning with it, according to Giuliani and others of his intellectual ilk. The only appropriate response—again, according to them—is preemptive genocide fueled by an even greater blind hatred. It’s us or them.

When asked about this blind hatred, he responds:

“‘Respectfully, again, I don’t think you understand the nature of the threat.’ … ‘They hate you’ … ‘[t]hey don’t want you to be in this college’ … Mr. Giuliani wheels around and points toward another middle-aged woman in the front row, who looks momentarily startled. ‘And you can’t wear that outfit because you’re showing your arms.’ … ‘This is reality, ma’am,’ he continues, his voice streaked with just a touch of exasperation. ‘This isn’t me making it up. I saw reality after 9/11. You’ve got to clear your head’”

They hate you. They hate us. They hate our freedoms. They hate our bare arms. They hate our colleges. Bullshit. It’s mindless simplification of complex issues that does no one but the war profiteers and weapons manufacturers any good and only makes Herr Goebbels smile from his grave, just a little.

Giuliani thinks he’s clever, basking in the applause generated by his carefully planned—and oh-so-clever—zingers, like this one: “‘Has any army,’ he says, then pauses, ‘ever been required,’ then another pause, ‘to give a printed schedule of its retreat?’” Oh, yeah! Rim shot, baby! He really stuck it to those 80% of Americans who want out of Iraq. What a bunch of retards! Wanting a printed schedule of a retreat, wanting a plan, wanting accountability. This is war with a faceless, heartless and relentless enemy. Surrender equals annihilation—why can’t you see that? Does only Rudy understand this? Can only he shoulder the immense burden of leading a country blinded—nay, corrupted to the core—by namby-pamby liberalism into the light?

“Right now, as we sit here enjoying breakfast, they are planning on coming here to kill us,” he warns them. “I don’t blame people for not getting it before 9/11. But I do blame people who don’t get it now.[5]”

His style is not meant to convince those with anything other than the smallest of mental capacities for rational thought. On the subject of national health care, he snidely remarks that the “Democrats want socialized medicine”. No, you sanctimonious sack of shit, Americans—about 80% of them, to be exact—want socialized medicine. You and the filthy political swine you count among your small circle of acquaintances—as well as your slightly less-to-the-right compatriots in the Democratic Party—just couldn’t care less what Americans want. Because you don’t really have to. You just shoot more fear in their direction and they quickly forget their medical problems as they scramble for the duct tape to seal up windows in imminent danger of being blown out by car bombs that have magically winged their way over from Baghdad. Any minute now. It could happen.

He also fancies himself a comedian, following up with the rib-tickler, “[h]ow many Americans do you know go to Europe for health care?” Asshole. Nobody does that. Looks like you’re right, Rudy … until privatized American health care is so f*#%ing expensive that it’s cheaper to fly to Europe and back for a checkup, we clearly don’t have a problem. What a dick. Quite a few people are going to Canada though, regardless of how shitty their system is made out to be by Giuliani and his ideological brothers. Their twisted worldview is cheerfully propagandized by a slavish media, happy to weave tales of an America that is such a hellhole that good health care is an ocean away and a car bomb is only seconds away as long as they get to keep their jobs.

That’s Giuliani all over, though and always has been. Can’t afford decent health care? He’ll make fun of you for even wanting it, taunting you that you can’t get all the way across the ocean where they do have decent health care. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the Republican front-runner. He sets the tone which the others strive to match. Giuliani is right about one thing though, if for all the wrong reasons: we should be very afraid. In a rare moment of remarkable—and likely Freudian—candor, he admitted, “I understand terrorism in a way that is equal to or exceeds anyone else”. That you do, Rudy, that you do.