A noun, a verb, and fraudulent elections. Why no judges threatened him with contempt of court is a mystery to me.
I don’t think they want to deny the next judge the Crazy Rudy experience. It’s like that classic fraternity paddling. Every judge gets a chance to beat his ass.
This is a guy who is trained as a lawyer, who made his name as a prosecutor, and who was representing the President’s campaign in federal court, and he apparently didn’t even understand a question about what level of review should be applied to his claims.
“The normal one,” he replied, when the judge asked him.
There is no “normal” level of scrutiny. There are, as everyone who has spent more than five minutes reading about federal case law understands, three basic levels of review in federal cases: strict scrutiny; intermediate scrutiny; and rational basis review.
I don’t give Ghouliani any props for his behavior after 9/11. He didn’t do one single thing that any other mayor wouldn’t have done. What specific actions should he have been lauded for? But he made a killing on 9/11 and Biden was dead on years ago when he said that Gu911ini thought every sentence contained a noun, a verb, and 9/11.
Now he’s a completely batshit crazy conspiracy theorist. His legacy, though unearned, is forever in tatters. I hope he dies a bitter and lonely soul. He deserves no better.
You are, of course, entitled to your own opinion, and your own emotional reactions. I don’t know how 9/11 affected you (if it did - I don’t know how old you are). If you don’t want to give Giuliani “props”, that’s of course entirely up to you.
But, frankly, saying “He didn’t do one single thing that any other mayor wouldn’t have done. What specific actions should he have been lauded for?” is pretty close to nonsense. The entire country was in a very real sense traumatized and suffering from various degrees of PTSD, including our elected leaders. That’s something that I think people, at the time an since, tend to ignore or just don’t think about. In the aftermath of that, just coming out publicly and speaking the way he did had to have been pretty damn difficult.
I don’t know much if anything about Giuliani’s behind the scenes actions in the aftermath of 9/11, but his public appearances really, truly, were a comfort to me, and to many, many other people. His steady public presence really, truly, helped me through a horrific trauma. I honestly believe that he may have saved lives.
But, then, that 2008 presidential run…He was awful. Just truly reprehensible. I’m still not sure if the consoler-in-chief Rudy Giuliani that seemed to be there on 9/12 was actually there, or if he just had a stopped clock moment and got really, really lucky. Probably a bit of both.
I understand being outraged by his performance in the 2008 primaries, and by basically everything he’s publicly said and done since 2016. Personally, as I wrote above, I’m just deeply saddened by it.
As for age, I’ve been eligible for SS for a couple years. Of course I remember 9/11. But I don’t get the love for Rudy, Bush did just as good as he did if not better. So he was calm and reassuring to his city. Who the hell wouldn’t have been? If he had just left it there, it would have been fine. But he’s spent 19 years wallowing in recreational grief over it. Whatever good will he earned, he squandered by treating all Muslims like suspects. His complete downfall and humiliation is well earned.
The whole notion of “America’s [insert title of public official]” always made me uneasy, especially when “America’s sheriff” turned out to be a crook.
My memories of 9/11 were that, all day, the TV showed nothing but coverage of the attacks. But there’s only so many times that you can show the same seven seconds of footage, over and over, so they were interviewing everyone they could get their lenses on. Almost everyone they interviewed was in full-on irrational emotion mode, with Giuliani the lone exception, using his air time to say rational things like “stay south of such-and-such street” and “donate blood” (OK, blood donations turned out to be useless, but it was still a rational, productive thing to say).
That said, all of the good will he earned from me on that day, he lost when he started claiming that 9/11 had never happened. And by now, it doesn’t even matter if he really did have any role in cleaning up New York-- His current buffoonery far outweighs anything good he’s ever done.
I don’t know what else to say. I, along with most of the country, was traumatized. Giuliani’s public comments brought me comfort. It’s not complicated. I thought Giuliani’s public comments were significantly better than President Bush’s, but of course everyone’s reactions are going to be different.
Well, one current office holder springs immediately to mind…
But that also entirely misses the point. Rudy Giuliani was the one who was there at the time. He responded about as well as anyone possibly could have. Could someone else have hypothetically done at least as well? Of course. Would they have? I have no damn idea, and neither do you. All that I do know for sure is that I, personally, found some small comfort in his words. If you find that truly incomprehensible, I really don’t know what else to say.
Agreed, for the most part. I don’t think you’re wrong about his downfall, and you’re certainly entitled to your reaction to it. Mine is just different.
[quote=“gdave, post:29, topic:926001, full:true”]
All well and good. I appreciate your feedback and we certainly disagree about Rudy, though I hope we can do so amicably.
As far as I’ve been able to determine, on 9/10 nobody in NYC was really lamenting in woe that Rudy would soon be gone (he was term limited and would be out on Jan. 1 2002).
Giuliani in the immediate aftermath looked good to many outside NYC because as mentioned above he was the one major figure on the spot that projected well as an official doing and saying what we wanted to see an official doing and saying (remember how many people were up on W’s case about his immediate first reaction?)
But remember that just two weeks later, he proceeded to float the idea of extending his term by at least three months. So already very early on he began self-inflicting damage.
One thing that came out some time later was that whenever he could, Guiliani went to funerals for NYPD and NYFD members who died in the attack. And he didn’t put it on his public schedule, or speak to the press if they were at the funeral. He was just there, as mayor, to support the families. That counts for something to me.
What BobLib said in another thread applies here even more:
Giuliani got a lot of good vibes on 9/11 at the time because he was there on the scene, not staying at home or hunkered down in a bunker like W and Cheney did, and there were widely published photos like this one:
Those kinds of pictures had a big impact on how people saw him. (To be sure, Hillary Clinton was a senator from NY at the time, and if I’m not mis-remembering, she was out there on the streets too and in some of those photographs as well.)
That would definitely count more to me. Just being the guy who was calm can be for reasons other than being good–it can be a lack of empathy, which would seem more consistent with the way Giuliani acts today.
But making a point to show up at the funerals in a way that wasn’t actually publicized until much later suggests he was actually trying to do good (and not just in it for the photo op). So now I’m more inclined to believe the man changed, like many Americans seem to have.
Everything Trump touches turns to shit.
Guiliani may have been a comfort for New Yorkers at the time of 911, but he was still human garbage.
A person doesn’t suddenly become this level of degenerate filth. He may not have seemed like a terrible, incompetent clot of shit, but he was. He was just better managed.
He released a statement lamenting not attending more funerals on October 6th.
https://www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/06/rec.giuliani.apology/index.html
So, I’m not sure it was too much on the down-low.
Right, his descent started well before he became attached to Trumpism. His calling card as of 9/10 was “the man who cleaned up NYC” (as prosecutor and mayor, and as mentioned, he took credit for some things he merely kept in place) but already then it was obvious he was not exactly immaculate. Still, one could have said at the time “meh, not that bad for what you’d expect of a Big City politician”. But it was the 9/11 impact that led to this mantle of the super-security guy being placed upon him (in spite of many stumbles of his public safety apparatus during the attacks and immediate aftermath) which led him to be seen as a potential presidential candidate, become a big fundsraiser, and start a career in security consultancies where he made a bundle but also became linked to clients who would be at odds to official US policy. ISTM it’s a case of someone who became sucked up into his own legend, and then when in 2008 the voters said “nah”, he seems to have never recovered from that.
When third wife Judith Nathan (with whom he had been together in one way or another for 20 years) divorced him last year she said “he has become a different man.”
Trump can turn even a clot of shit into a massive steaming pile of shit.