How Are Your Lungs, Rudy?

"For John Edwards to lecture Rudy Giuliani about September 11 is laughable at best. This is, after all, the same guy who thinks the 'war on terror' is simply a bumper sticker." - Giuliani communications director Katie Levinson

All too healthy, it seems. At a Cincinnati Reds game last Thursday, Rudy Giuliani said, "I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers." The good news?

Former NC Senator John Edwards pushed back against this blatant lie. The bad news? Well, none of the other Democratic presidential candidates piped in to blast Giuliani for his faux macho statements, which seems to suggest that Giuliani‘s reputation as the hero of 9/11 is too sacred to take on.

Nothing’s sacred. The right wing backlash against Cindy Sheehan proved that. You want votes, people, in the straw polls and primaries? Learn to push back against the bullshit lest you make us think that you either don’t care about the truth or, even worse, actually buy into it. Perhaps they’re afraid of being compared to the Swiftboaters that slandered John Kerry like the IAFF was in their damning video about Giuliani last month.

Luckily for the American voter, the NY Times’ Anthony DePalma, bless his heart, has been as instrumental in peeling back the layers of bullshit surrounding Giuliani’s “leadership skills” from 9/11 until the end of his administration as Wayne Barrett and his own verbal 9/11 on Giuliani’s towering tales of personal heroism.

Here are some of the facts, in case you haven’t the time or the inclination to read Barrett’s very lengthy but excellent analysis of the Giuliani myth:

Giuliani, having learned nothing from the 1993 WTC bombing, despite being warned by the mastermind that they were going after the WTC again, seemed to do his level-headed best to not equip the NYFD and NYPD with the proper radios that could’ve saved hundreds of lives.

Giuliani only appeared at Ground Zero for photo ops with Bush and Rumsfeld and other neocons who wanted to vulture some glory while literally standing on the pulverized remains of the victims. The fact that he wasn’t ever once seen wearing a respirator only showed his colossal ignorance of the harmful fallout that even now is affecting countless Ground Zero rescue workers. Later Giuliani would subsequently blame former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman for assuring the public that the air was fit to breathe.

Giuliani, because he insisted on having his OEM’s emergency command center at WTC 7, the one that we know for a fact was deliberately pulled down for no earthly reason since it wasn’t even on fire, so he could have a hide-away for his extramarital tryst with Judith Nathan and to provide “political payback to a major contributor”, to quote the late Steve Gilliard. $61,000,000 was spent on that ill-placed bunker partly so Giuliani could have monogrammed bath towels. Giuliani subsequently blamed Jerry Hauer for that, despite the fact that Hauer, the mayor’s director of emergency management, wanted the command center across the river in Brooklyn. He only supported the WTC 7 site when it became clear that Giuliani was going to get his way no matter what.

And, what Barrett never mentioned was the fact that Giuliani cracked the whip to have the rubble from the WTC carted away ASAP despite the fact that much of the human remains hadn’t been recovered (they would later be found to have been used as road fill for potholes).

Giuliani also closed off streets so he could avoid dealing with the 9/11 victims’ families.

The Democrats have all the ammo in the world to shoot at this balding, lying asshole yet the ammo dump remains untouched. Why? Not calling out this mobbed up, loathsome, vulture fund-loving prick is not supporting the IAFF and the FDNY (which lost 343 union firefighters on 9/11), as far as I’m concerned.