H
Harry Hope
Guest
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/03/13/swiftboat_rudy/index1.html
March 13, 2007
By Robert Polner
Considering Rudy Giuliani's image
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/12/05/giuliani/index.html as
the hero of Sept. 11, 2001, and the nation's ultimate first responder,
burnished yet again by the warm reception he received at a firehouse
during a recent campaign swing through South Carolina, it might
surprise many of his supporters to learn that the country's largest
union of firefighters hates "America's mayor" with a passion.
The International Association of Fire Fighters, which represents most
of the nation's paid firefighters, initially declined to invite
Giuliani to its bipartisan presidential candidates forum on Wednesday,
March 14.
Giuliani was the only major candidate from either party who didn't get
an invite.
The organization drafted a blistering letter to explain why it was
snubbing him.
After the IAFF leadership relented on March 5 and decided to ask
Giuliani to attend after all, they shelved the letter.
When Giuliani said scheduling conflicts would keep him from attending
the forum, the letter leaked out.
It blasted Giuliani for his "disgraceful" order of November 2001 that
forced hundreds of New York firefighters to stop searching ground zero
for the remains of their fallen brethren.
"Our disdain for him," said the letter, "is not about issues or a
disputed contract. It is about a visceral, personal affront to the
fallen, to our union and indeed, to every one of us who has ever
risked our lives by going into a burning building to save lives and
property."
By now, the average American voter knows that Giuliani offered
important and comforting words to the nation on 9/11, filling a
Bush-Cheney leadership vacuum.
But voters may not know that he is not universally beloved by the
real, rank-and-file first responders of 9/11, and that survivors and
family members harbor bitter, lasting resentments.
The public may also be unaware that Giuliani's preparation for and
management of the crisis that has come to define his career, and on
which his presidential ambitions rest, has actually become a case
study for emergency management experts of what not to do.
In fact, rather than representing his strongest qualification for the
White House, his actions on 9/11 could be a political liability.
Conventional wisdom says that Giuliani is vulnerable to attacks on his
many marriages, his estrangement from his children, his questionable
cronies, and his positions on many social issues that sound
suspiciously liberal.
The man performed in drag and voted for George McGovern.
But the real opportunity for Democrats -- if the Democrats are willing
to seize it -- may lie in going straight at what is supposed to be
Giuliani's strength.
In 2004, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth challenged the established
image of John Kerry as a decorated, wounded Vietnam War hero.
Democrats who had supported Kerry because they thought his military
service made him electable were shocked to find a Republican-funded
527 group using spurious information and savage ads to create doubt in
the electorate about the candidate's war record.
Should Rudy Giuliani be the Republican nominee in 2008, Democrats can
create the same doubt about him, but without relying on distortion.
They could instead use the truthful words of sympathetic subjects who
credibly blame Giuliani for the loss of their loved ones on Sept. 11.
These are people who have no partisan ax to grind -- many voted for
Giuliani for mayor at least twice and would ordinarily have been
considered part of his base.
That will make their burning desire to set the country straight about
his actual 9/11 record harder to dismiss, along with their genuine
fear of what kind of president he would be.
The intensity of their feelings can be heard in the voice of Rosaleen
Tallon.
A stay-at-home mom who supports right-to-life candidates and lives in
the unglamorous New York suburb of Yonkers, Tallon lost her brother
Sean, a former Marine who became a probationary New York City
firefighter, on 9/11.
Six years later she is still enraged that Sean never heard the Fire
Department's radioed "mayday" order to evacuate the twin towers before
they fell.
If he had, she says, he would have heeded the directions of his
superiors and gotten out.
As Rosaleen will tell anyone willing to listen, the vintage radios
that Sean and 342 other city firefighters carried at their deaths on
9/11 were known to be defective.
The faulty radios were the target of years of scathing internal
assessments, bureaucratic wrangling, and accusations of bidding
favoritism, and still the Giuliani administration had never replaced
them.
Here, in the radios fiasco, was government paralysis at its worst, the
sort he frothed about as a reformist candidate for mayor.
The city's firefighters were sent into the towers without the basic
ability to send or receive maydays.
The buck stops with Rudy, who knew that the same radios had faltered
when the World Trade Center was first bombed by terrorists in 1993,
the year he was elected mayor.
What is more, just three months before the 9/11 attack, a city
firefighter trapped in the basement of a burning house in Queens
broadcast a mayday on a high-tech digital radio issued by his
administration to replace the older variety.
When firefighters battling the blaze didn't hear his SOS -- it was
picked up only by radios carried by firefighters a couple of miles
away -- an uproar ensued.
The firefighter survived, but the high-tech replacement radios, which
had never been field-tested, were thus withdrawn, and the firemen went
back to relying on their old radios, just in time for 9/11.
And on Sept. 11, the faulty radios were just part of a tableau of
dysfunction.
Fire Department officials couldn't communicate with police officials,
whose helicopters had bird's-eye views of the unstable towers poised
to fall.
Police and fire communications weren't linked, and no one bothered to
set up a unified police-fire command post on the street near the
towers, which is Emergency Management 101.
Meanwhile, the city's emergency dispatchers fielded a flood of 911
calls from panicked World Trade Center workers and gave out the wrong
advice, or just threw up their hands -- "Do whatever you have to do,
Sir."
Where was Rudy?
He didn't know what to do or where to go because he had put his
emergency command center in exactly the wrong place.
Against the advice of experts, he had built the emergency command
center in the area most likely to be attacked, an area that had
already been attacked, the 23rd floor of No. 7 World Trade Center.
It was off-limits on the only day it was ever needed.
Giuliani's supporters believe it would be impossible to undermine the
ingrained perception of their candidate as a national icon, Rudy the
Rock.
But imagine what a talented and aggressive Democratic media consultant
could do with Giuliani's real 9/11 record.
Imagine Rosaleen Tallon and a Greek chorus of angry, bereaved New
Yorkers in a spate of heart-tugging commercials.
The ads could include not only the family members of men and women
killed on 9/11, but also hard hats sickened by prolonged exposure to
the toxic ground zero air that Giuliani declared safe to inhale within
days of the attack.
And the chorus could include the mayor's downtown constituents, who
were left to rid their homes of chemical dust without city assistance,
risking their own well-being.
The New York City government now estimates that 43,000 people have
significant 9/11-related health problems. Many, no doubt, would gladly
go on camera.
Giuliani's vulnerability can be detected, in part, in his shifting
accounts of his actions.
He has said, for example, that technology for police-fire
interoperability didn't exist at the time the planes slammed into the
towers.
A fawning 9/11 Commission swallowed that line, but the U.S. Conference
of Mayors found shortly before Giuliani's testimony to the commission
that of 192 cities it evaluated, three-quarters had radios
interoperable across police and fire departments.
Giuliani has also said that firefighters remained in doomed towers
because they, as a breed, are wired to their bones and sinews to stand
their ground.
But firefighters are also part of a quasi-military chain of command
and are wired to obey orders during a crisis -- if they can hear them.
Tellingly, Giuliani's Republican successor, Michael Bloomberg, who
took office in January 2002, had little difficulty outfitting the FDNY
with reliable radios, which they now carry with them into harm's way.
"He tells filthy lies, shamelessly parlaying his failures into a
multinational empire and national campaign," said Sally Regenhard, the
mother of a fallen firefighter.
He cut and ran, she says.
"All the heroes of 9/11 are dead or wounded, spiritually, emotionally
or physically."
"He has alienated pretty much everybody in the 8,000-member fire
department -- by and large, we all resent him," said New York City
Fire Capt.
Michael Gala, citing the city's response on 9/11, the very day upon
which Giuliani's presidential hopes will rise or fall.
"We don't forget. That's the big thing -- we don't forget."
Come 2008, will Democrats?
____________________________________________________
That's Rudy "So-Called 9/11 Hero" Giuliani, ladies and gentlemen.
Harry
March 13, 2007
By Robert Polner
Considering Rudy Giuliani's image
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/12/05/giuliani/index.html as
the hero of Sept. 11, 2001, and the nation's ultimate first responder,
burnished yet again by the warm reception he received at a firehouse
during a recent campaign swing through South Carolina, it might
surprise many of his supporters to learn that the country's largest
union of firefighters hates "America's mayor" with a passion.
The International Association of Fire Fighters, which represents most
of the nation's paid firefighters, initially declined to invite
Giuliani to its bipartisan presidential candidates forum on Wednesday,
March 14.
Giuliani was the only major candidate from either party who didn't get
an invite.
The organization drafted a blistering letter to explain why it was
snubbing him.
After the IAFF leadership relented on March 5 and decided to ask
Giuliani to attend after all, they shelved the letter.
When Giuliani said scheduling conflicts would keep him from attending
the forum, the letter leaked out.
It blasted Giuliani for his "disgraceful" order of November 2001 that
forced hundreds of New York firefighters to stop searching ground zero
for the remains of their fallen brethren.
"Our disdain for him," said the letter, "is not about issues or a
disputed contract. It is about a visceral, personal affront to the
fallen, to our union and indeed, to every one of us who has ever
risked our lives by going into a burning building to save lives and
property."
By now, the average American voter knows that Giuliani offered
important and comforting words to the nation on 9/11, filling a
Bush-Cheney leadership vacuum.
But voters may not know that he is not universally beloved by the
real, rank-and-file first responders of 9/11, and that survivors and
family members harbor bitter, lasting resentments.
The public may also be unaware that Giuliani's preparation for and
management of the crisis that has come to define his career, and on
which his presidential ambitions rest, has actually become a case
study for emergency management experts of what not to do.
In fact, rather than representing his strongest qualification for the
White House, his actions on 9/11 could be a political liability.
Conventional wisdom says that Giuliani is vulnerable to attacks on his
many marriages, his estrangement from his children, his questionable
cronies, and his positions on many social issues that sound
suspiciously liberal.
The man performed in drag and voted for George McGovern.
But the real opportunity for Democrats -- if the Democrats are willing
to seize it -- may lie in going straight at what is supposed to be
Giuliani's strength.
In 2004, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth challenged the established
image of John Kerry as a decorated, wounded Vietnam War hero.
Democrats who had supported Kerry because they thought his military
service made him electable were shocked to find a Republican-funded
527 group using spurious information and savage ads to create doubt in
the electorate about the candidate's war record.
Should Rudy Giuliani be the Republican nominee in 2008, Democrats can
create the same doubt about him, but without relying on distortion.
They could instead use the truthful words of sympathetic subjects who
credibly blame Giuliani for the loss of their loved ones on Sept. 11.
These are people who have no partisan ax to grind -- many voted for
Giuliani for mayor at least twice and would ordinarily have been
considered part of his base.
That will make their burning desire to set the country straight about
his actual 9/11 record harder to dismiss, along with their genuine
fear of what kind of president he would be.
The intensity of their feelings can be heard in the voice of Rosaleen
Tallon.
A stay-at-home mom who supports right-to-life candidates and lives in
the unglamorous New York suburb of Yonkers, Tallon lost her brother
Sean, a former Marine who became a probationary New York City
firefighter, on 9/11.
Six years later she is still enraged that Sean never heard the Fire
Department's radioed "mayday" order to evacuate the twin towers before
they fell.
If he had, she says, he would have heeded the directions of his
superiors and gotten out.
As Rosaleen will tell anyone willing to listen, the vintage radios
that Sean and 342 other city firefighters carried at their deaths on
9/11 were known to be defective.
The faulty radios were the target of years of scathing internal
assessments, bureaucratic wrangling, and accusations of bidding
favoritism, and still the Giuliani administration had never replaced
them.
Here, in the radios fiasco, was government paralysis at its worst, the
sort he frothed about as a reformist candidate for mayor.
The city's firefighters were sent into the towers without the basic
ability to send or receive maydays.
The buck stops with Rudy, who knew that the same radios had faltered
when the World Trade Center was first bombed by terrorists in 1993,
the year he was elected mayor.
What is more, just three months before the 9/11 attack, a city
firefighter trapped in the basement of a burning house in Queens
broadcast a mayday on a high-tech digital radio issued by his
administration to replace the older variety.
When firefighters battling the blaze didn't hear his SOS -- it was
picked up only by radios carried by firefighters a couple of miles
away -- an uproar ensued.
The firefighter survived, but the high-tech replacement radios, which
had never been field-tested, were thus withdrawn, and the firemen went
back to relying on their old radios, just in time for 9/11.
And on Sept. 11, the faulty radios were just part of a tableau of
dysfunction.
Fire Department officials couldn't communicate with police officials,
whose helicopters had bird's-eye views of the unstable towers poised
to fall.
Police and fire communications weren't linked, and no one bothered to
set up a unified police-fire command post on the street near the
towers, which is Emergency Management 101.
Meanwhile, the city's emergency dispatchers fielded a flood of 911
calls from panicked World Trade Center workers and gave out the wrong
advice, or just threw up their hands -- "Do whatever you have to do,
Sir."
Where was Rudy?
He didn't know what to do or where to go because he had put his
emergency command center in exactly the wrong place.
Against the advice of experts, he had built the emergency command
center in the area most likely to be attacked, an area that had
already been attacked, the 23rd floor of No. 7 World Trade Center.
It was off-limits on the only day it was ever needed.
Giuliani's supporters believe it would be impossible to undermine the
ingrained perception of their candidate as a national icon, Rudy the
Rock.
But imagine what a talented and aggressive Democratic media consultant
could do with Giuliani's real 9/11 record.
Imagine Rosaleen Tallon and a Greek chorus of angry, bereaved New
Yorkers in a spate of heart-tugging commercials.
The ads could include not only the family members of men and women
killed on 9/11, but also hard hats sickened by prolonged exposure to
the toxic ground zero air that Giuliani declared safe to inhale within
days of the attack.
And the chorus could include the mayor's downtown constituents, who
were left to rid their homes of chemical dust without city assistance,
risking their own well-being.
The New York City government now estimates that 43,000 people have
significant 9/11-related health problems. Many, no doubt, would gladly
go on camera.
Giuliani's vulnerability can be detected, in part, in his shifting
accounts of his actions.
He has said, for example, that technology for police-fire
interoperability didn't exist at the time the planes slammed into the
towers.
A fawning 9/11 Commission swallowed that line, but the U.S. Conference
of Mayors found shortly before Giuliani's testimony to the commission
that of 192 cities it evaluated, three-quarters had radios
interoperable across police and fire departments.
Giuliani has also said that firefighters remained in doomed towers
because they, as a breed, are wired to their bones and sinews to stand
their ground.
But firefighters are also part of a quasi-military chain of command
and are wired to obey orders during a crisis -- if they can hear them.
Tellingly, Giuliani's Republican successor, Michael Bloomberg, who
took office in January 2002, had little difficulty outfitting the FDNY
with reliable radios, which they now carry with them into harm's way.
"He tells filthy lies, shamelessly parlaying his failures into a
multinational empire and national campaign," said Sally Regenhard, the
mother of a fallen firefighter.
He cut and ran, she says.
"All the heroes of 9/11 are dead or wounded, spiritually, emotionally
or physically."
"He has alienated pretty much everybody in the 8,000-member fire
department -- by and large, we all resent him," said New York City
Fire Capt.
Michael Gala, citing the city's response on 9/11, the very day upon
which Giuliani's presidential hopes will rise or fall.
"We don't forget. That's the big thing -- we don't forget."
Come 2008, will Democrats?
____________________________________________________
That's Rudy "So-Called 9/11 Hero" Giuliani, ladies and gentlemen.
Harry