Mystique of 'America's Mayor' Tarnished
Things aren't looking good for Ghouliani. Ghouliani's staff is treating this as if it were nothing more than a partisan attack by a group (NY Firefighters Union) who traditionally have supported Democrats. While that may be true in a small part, we know that there is more of a rejection of Ghouliani due to his callous disregard for Ground Zero rescue workers and 9/11 victims families that he sustained long after 9/11. Ghouliani's 9/11 profiteering on terror by way of his fictional hero role has resulted in an utterly ridiculous ascension of his personal wealth off of their sacrifices. All the while the health of the true heroes declines and they are are dying for lack of adequate protection then, and now. Firefighters had a legitimate complaint in that Ghouliani rushed to clean up ground zero, preventing the remains of many firefighters from being recovered. However, the removal of the steel, crime scene evidence that probably held darkest secrets related to the explosions in the towers and building 7, should never be forgotten.
I never believed that Ghouliani, if chosen by the Republicans, could beat Hillary Clinton. It isn't the repukes, but globalist elites who really own the polls. I have always felt that Ghouliani was the setup man that would ensure Hillary's occupation of White House. I believe that a Ghouliani win would be totally impossible now. He has never had anything more than 9/11 to run on anyway. It is quite humorous to see this fake spat between Jerome Hauer and Ghouliani over the location of the NYECB, each laying the blame on the other. Ghoulini has made his coffin and now it is time for him to lie there and wait for his end. As much as I would like to see Ron Paul drive a stake through the heart of this Nosferatu of New York in New Hampshire on June 5th, I think Paul should now be setting the sites of his biggest guns on ROMknee. MacCaine is history.
This author of this article, Rick Klein, is the same lousy excuse for a journalist at ABCnews who wrote articles dismissive of Ron Paul's meteoric rise after the first two Republican debates. Those articles resulted in massive comments ultimately censored and removed by ABCnews.
Mystique of 'America's Mayor' Tarnished
9/11 Firefighters, Families Protest Giuliani's Rise
By RICK KLEIN
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http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3209656&page=1
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May 24, 2007—
The mystique of "America's mayor" shows signs of fraying.
The nation's largest firefighters' union is planning to send out 280,000 videotapes attacking former New York Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his pre-9/11 record -- including his decision to place New York City's emergency operations center in the World Trade Center before Sept. 11, 2001.
9/11 Families, Firefighters Protest Against Giuliani
In recent months, families of 9/11 victims have planted themselves outside Giuliani fundraisers, and several critical books and documentaries have been released.
Reports have emerged sharply questioning Giuliani's response to the 9/11 attacks, with critics portraying a bullying mayor who, in his zeal for a quick cleanup, brushed aside health concerns about the air at ground zero.
And Giuliani's former emergency management director, Jerome Hauer, is now a prominent Giuliani critic, questioning the former mayor's handling of the turf wars that divided the police and fire departments before 9/11.
"In terms of preparedness, response and leadership, Rudy fell down," said Jeff Zack, a spokesman for the International Association of Fire Fighters, which is preparing the video for distribution to its members.
"Rudy has created an image of himself that he likes to expand upon: that he's the hero of 9/11," Zack said. "And it's not true, especially from the point of view of the firefighters who lived through that day and the families of those who died on that day."
The Giuliani campaign casts the accusations as politically motivated attacks.
While they concede that mistakes were made in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, they express confidence that voters will stick with the image of a strong Giuliani they have in their minds.
"There are groups that for political reasons are going to criticize, but Mayor Giuliani is focused on how the American people can tackle the terrorists' war on us,'' said Maria Comella, a campaign spokeswoman. "There are millions of people around the world who saw the mayor's strong leadership for themselves in the days surrounding Sept. 11."
Firefighters Endorsed Kerry in 2004
Giuliani campaign aides note that the firefighters' union has long closely aligned itself with Democrats. And the campaign issued a statement from a retired New York firefighter, Lee Ielpi, defending the mayor's record.
"It should be no surprise that a politically motivated attack is coming from union leaders who backed John Kerry for president in 2004," Ielpi said. "The sentiments expressed in this video are out of step with the IAFF's membership -- clearly there's a difference between the rank-and-file members and these union leaders."
Raising questions about Giuliani's leadership on and around 9/11 threatens to undercut the central rationale for his candidacy: that he understands the nature of terrorist threats and has shown strong leadership during the worst attack the nation has ever experienced.
Aftermath of 9/11
Yet as Giuliani's campaign has heated up, new revelations continue to pour out.
Wednesday, New York City's medical examiner -- for the first time -- linked ground zero dust to the death of someone who inhaled it: a 42-year-old woman whose office was a block away from the World Trade Center and died five months after the attack.
The Democratic National Committee Thursday cited that fact to argue that Giuliani did not do enough to protect firefighters and other workers at the site.
"The more Americans learn more about Rudy Giuliani's poor decision-making after 9/11 and his role in this tragedy, the more they will question his ability to lead the country," said Karen Finney, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, though the woman who died did not work on the rescue operations.
The Giuliani campaign also pointed out that the former mayor did mandate that Ground Zero workers wear respirators, a point confirmed by city reports filed in the months after 9/11.
"I don't think it's right to blame Rudy Giuliani for what's going on here," Joe Lhota, former New York Deputy Mayor for Operations said on MSNBC last week. "What I think we need to focus on are the people who did work there, who did come down here to work with the rescue effort and the cleanup effort, that we take care of them now."
One strategist for a rival campaign said the other Republicans in the race have an incentive to highlight areas where Giuliani's 9/11 record is less than stellar, though he acknowledged that all candidates have to proceed carefully given Giuliani's wide popularity.
"People don't know much about him outside of 9/11, but over the last couple of weeks and moving forward they're going to become better acquainted with his record," said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He doesn't have much other than this to run on."
Fred Siegel, a Giuliani biographer and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic Innovation, said he sees an early parallel between the current attacks on Giuliani and the withering campaign organized against Kerry in 2004 by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
But Siegel added that Giuliani is so well known by the public that it may be impossible for rival campaigns to tar him as an ineffective leader, even if some of the critiques have some validity.
"This is potentially damaging, but I wouldn't overplay it. People saw for themselves what happened, and it's very hard to counteract that," Siegel said. "People have their own experience with how he handled 9/11, and their own experiences visiting New York, and that will make it much harder to 'Swift Boat' him."
Siegel said he views some of the attacks on Giuliani's record as unfair.
He called it "bizarre," for instance, to suggest that Giuliani wasn't focusing on terrorism before 9/11, since he was emphasizing emergency preparedness throughout his tenure as mayor.
Still, his decision to put the emergency command center in the World Trade Center -- which had previously been the target of a terrorist attack, in 1993 -- certainly proved to be an instance where his judgment was "less than acute," Siegel said.
Asked about that decision last weekend on Fox News, Giuliani blamed Hauer, who was then his emergency management director.
"He recommended that site as the site that would be the best site. It was largely on his recommendation that that site was selected," Giuliani said.
But Hauer sharply disputes that account.
"That's Rudy's own reality that he lives in," he told The New York Times this week. "It is not, in fact, the truth."
The accumulation of recent news stories about Giuliani's leadership -- including new information about the health hazards of the air around ground zero -- contribute to a portrait of a mayor whose seminal moment is far more complicated than myth suggests, said Wayne Barrett, a veteran Village Voice editor who co-wrote a recent critical biography of the former mayor, "Grand Illusion."
"We're learning the recklessness with which ground zero was run, and Rudy Giuliani was the king of ground zero," Barrett said. "If this is the rationale for the candidacy of the leading candidate for president, it's about time that this is getting examined."
Ground Zero Campaign
The firefighters' chief complaint is that Giuliani's rush to clean up ground zero prevented the remains of scores of firefighters from ever being recovered.
That complaint is legitimate, Siegel said, but has to be weighed against Giuliani's understandable desire to move as quickly as possible in clearing the wreckage from the World Trade Center site.
The key for the former mayor will be how he handles the questions that are being raised -- whether he takes it in stride and defends his record, or whether he loses his temper with those who are criticizing him, Siegel said.
"In a way, it might not be bad for Giuliani, in the sense that it's already out there and it's early," he said. "If he mishandles it, it can rise to that level of harming his campaign. If he doesn't handle it well, we'll know he can't handle the White House."
For his part, Giuliani has mostly brushed aside criticism of his record, saying he'd rather look forward than back.
"The best way to proceed there is we don't blame anybody; what we try to do is learn from it," candidate Giuliani said last month in Iowa.
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Devils Advocate
I am a truther for sure.
Had some questions to pose as devils advocate.
1. The government ,or real conspirators, must have known that the second plane to hit the towers would be heavily photographed and filmed as a result of the immediate visual coverage the first tower strike would cause. Why would they then obviously militarize the second jet or use some military (non passenger) jet that could be photographed or filmed to prove a conspiracy?
2. We know that jets of some identity struck both towers so why would the conspirators not have used a similar jet of some identity to hit the Pentagon?
They used jets at the towers, why is it a stretch to think they used a jet at Pentagon?
3. What would the motive be to use jets at the towers but use a m issle at the Pentagon?
Really curious about your answers.
Paul
Answers
Glad to see your interest.
You will probably find the answers you seek at www.911Research.com
Regarding the Pentagon, see: http://www.911research.com/pentagon/attack/index.html
The website has a useful sidebar that enables you to dig deeper into the items you need answers about.
Note that your questions are off-topic for this post so don't expect a reply from the author.
Questions and Suggestions for the Devil's Advocate
Paul,
To whom are you posing these questions? Uncle Dick don't read the blogger. Besides, isn't it a little early to go OT?
What does any one of your questions have to do with Ghouliani, Ground Zero Heroes, or anything else in the article for that matter?
Since you obviously have an account, why not pose your questions in a blog entry of your own? I think that you will find a lot more people will look at your entry. That should ensure for you answers ranging from substantiive to wildly speculative such that some just might satisfy your curiousity.
Quite frankly though, I think only the perps themselves are capable of answering your questions.
--
"But truthfully, I don't really know. We've had trouble getting a handle on Building No. 7."
~~ Dr. Shyam Sunder - Acting Director Building and Fire Research Laboratory (NIST)