I’m not entirely sure why Rudy Giuliani is working so hard to praise Bush and his failed foreign policy in even stronger terms than McCain does. I realize that the Republican base gives Bush higher approval rates than 32%, but still, Giuliani could run as a moderate and let McCain and Browback split the hardcore pro-Bush vote.
Giuliani, 62, a consultant and financier since leaving office, emphasized his qualifications, saying he had been challenged with “having had a job where I didn’t have any choice but to decide, and to make decisions and to move things forward.”
America’s Mayor is of course right. He was challenged at a job where he didn’t have any choice but to decide. He had no choice but to decide what to do with New York’s emergency response headquarters, which experts said shouldn’t be located on the World Trade Center site. He put the HQ in the WTC complex anyway, so it couldn’t be used on 9/11.
He had no choice but to decide how much to invest in getting NYPD and FDNY’s radios to communicate with each other. He decided to do nothing about the problem, so on 9/11, NYPD and FDNY couldn’t coordinate their responses.
He had no choice but to do something about crime. He chose to implement flashy programs like Compstat and the broken windows policy, which helped treat every black person as a criminal but had no discernable effect on crime, which began to drop four years before he took office.
Like every good politician, he was able to capitalize on other people’s achievements while doing nothing useful on his own. He took credit for a crime drop that began nationwide in 1990. He to 9/11 was like Bush to Katrina: he didn’t cause the incident, but his mismanagement worsened it; but unlike Bush, he skillfully manipulated his image in order to look like the hero.
I say the best thing one can do during an emergency like 9/11 or katrina is to cry like Ray Nagin.
We want Giuliani, the most pro-Israel candidate.