Rudy Giuliani on 9-11, five years after

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2006/09/we_cannot_let_d.html#more

Hope everyone reads this with an open mind.

 

Don't agree with everything Rudy says, but it's still a good column. Thanks for pointing it out Hondo.

 

Gee, Rudy Giuliani admires Vladimir Putin.
Who'd have guessed?
Anyway, other people disagree.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11973

 

Think of all the trouble Rudy saved by ridding NYC of all of the terrorists who were masquerading as homeless people and badgering motorists with squeegees on street corners.

 

There's enough blame to go around for everyone for not being better prepared for 9-11. You also could argue that no one could conceive the evil that would hijack planes and fly them into buildings. But Giuliani's response after 9-11 was a textbook case of grace and courage under pressure.

 

Man, I accidently clicked on that 911 was an inside job ad. That's some freaky scary shit.

 

No argument -- except that the NSA knew of plots to fly hijacked airliners into both the Eiffel Tower and the G-8 summit earlier that year. "Nobody could have imagined" is, well, wrong. However, that doesn't mean I want to hand an obvious authoritarian like Rudy Giuliani the keys to the intelligence community and the FBI.
Not a chance there.

 

What exactly did he do to demonstrate "grace and courage under pressure"? Maybe I'm jaded because the guy had burned every bridge in this city by 9/10/01 and has been dining off of 9/11 for the past five years, including that ridiculous "Thank God George Bush is our President" line during the '04 election, but what did he do which was so wonderful.

 

He was THERE. And he was there from minute one. I'm no fan of the guy, but he was the closest thing we had to a national leader for about 12 hours.

 

Can you imagine what NYC would've been like with someone clueless (i.e. David Dinkins) in charge? OBL definitely would've come back for seconds, thirds and fourths.

 

He was there because his command center was in WTC 7.

I remember him walking to his command center with his nose covered so as not to breathe in debris.

And I remember a pretty good speech he gave that day.

And that, really, is all I remember from this hero from that day.

 

Good thing, too, because in the months leading up to 9/11, his public attacks on his soon to be ex-wife during their divorce showed him to be nothing but the biggest schmuck on the planet.