Could the United States actually elect as president a Yankee fan who has been rooting for the Red Sox? A father whose own children would boycott his inauguration? A husband whose first wife was his cousin and whose current wife can’t remember how many times she married? Could the United States, for that matter, elect a cross-dresser? The Rudy Giuliani surge would be comic if its broader implications were not so grave.
Could the United States elect as president someone whose neoconservative advisers have been wrong on a decade’s worth of foreign policy questions? Last week’s group portrait in The New York Times of Giuliani’s national security inner circle makes Rumsfeld and Cheney look like the wise men.
Gay-tolerant and prochoice, Giuliani contradicts, and even demeans, the “values” that have defined conservative America for a generation. That the former mayor of New York is so successfully overcoming what should have been candidacy-killing negatives among Republicans is an epiphany of our national condition. Why is such a figure emerging as the odds-on favorite to carry the right wing banner into the general election?
The answer is obvious. A run-of-the-mill political hack was transformed into the nation’s only hero on Sept. 11, 2001. While President Bush cowered in Curtis LeMay’s SAC bunker in Omaha, Giuliani was striding toward Armageddon.
For the crucial hours during and after the trauma, Giuliani provided an image of resolve and courage in which every American could glimpse a strength of character that the nation sorely needed, and for which, therefore, we were profoundly grateful. As the world’s heart opened to the United States that day, Giuliani’s unfeigned decency shone as a kind of beacon. Encouragement to rescuers, authority to panicked crowds, calm to television viewers, a man in charge - he was there with what was needed.
What followed was not so glorious: the outlandish hubris of his assumption that the transition to his elected successor should be postponed; the commercial exploitation of his accidental status; the partisan belligerence of the lesson he drew from the experience. Giuliani came out of the crisis as a man with a clenched fist - permanently outraged, and looking for a fight. Alas, in that, too, he embodied an essential American esprit.
He’s like a gang leader now, roving the streets, looking for some punk to bash. Iran will do. Thus, his political appeal has two components, one positive - the nobility of his instinctive performance under fire - and one negative - the bitterness of his will not so much to defend America as to avenge it. Giuliani’s gritty, urban toughness seems perfectly matched to the national mood, but that’s because it also carries an unmistakable, if unarticulated, edge of self-pity.
Where the world once looked toward all that Giuliani embodied with admiring compassion, today it flinches. When, for example, the newly named Nobel laureate in literature, Britain’s Doris Lessing, said that the Sept. 11 attacks were “not that terrible,” not as “extraordinary” as Americans seemed to feel, she was speaking for a vast population of humans for whom the shock of violence is part of life.
It is not that this country made too much of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks when they occurred, but that the nation has since constructed an unprecedented existential outlook around them. The United States has never regarded the broader world with more anxiety than it does now, and Giuliani is the tribune of warning. They are out there! They are coming at us! I will protect you.
A variety of unrelated or loosely related problems have been clenched into the one fist that is raised above this country now. Important distinctions have been lost, the way fingers disappear when the hand becomes a weapon.
Criminal terrorism, the threat of failing states, Islamic extremism, nuclear proliferation, the energy crunch - such challenges can be individually handled with practical strategies, but when they are clustered into an undifferentiated mass of global dangers, visceral dread trumps reason. Every aluminum pipe proves the existence of a nuclear weapons program. Immigrants threaten from every direction. Phone calls and e-mails must be monitored by an omnivorous and omniscient government.
What happened to an America confidently assured of its place in the world? There are no dangers that justify the massive insecurity that marks current US foreign policy, even if - punklike - that insecurity manifests itself as bullying. The biggest bully on the block turns out to be Giuliani. That would be a sad reason to make him president.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company
Under dear sweet Giuliani’s watch the NYC cops were more or less allowed to shoot “suspicious” people of color with no real legal consequences.
As President he would likely unleash the American military all over the world while using Blackwater types to keep Americans under control. As our imperial military machine continues to bankrupt the American economy, more and more Americans will become desperate requiring new forms of crowd control.
Rudy is a phony and a fascist !
Pat Buchanan says a vote for Giuliani is a vote for endless war.
WTF? I’m now agreeing with Buchanan? The end times are indeed nigh.
Seriously though, Giuliani is akin to W. Only meaner.
If you like Bush - you’ll love Giuliani.
Just ask any New Yorker.
Sounds a lot like Ronald Reagan to me. A divorcee who’s children wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near him. So yes, America would vote for a candidate like that.
It’s easy to predict who wins. Just think of the worst one. War and chaos are nature’s ways of killing us off.
ezeflyer,
You are right that the worst candidate almost always wins. The worst candidate has a natural advantage as he/she is not weighed down by ethical considerations or concerns for fellow human beings or the future of the country or the world. The news media was supposed to protect us from such frauds, but it abdicated its responsibility long ago.
I would not bet on Hillary if Giuliani is the Republican nominee. It looks like it is up to the Christian Right to stop Giuliani in the primaries and thus save us from Armageddon. Truth is stranger than fiction.
We who call ourselves the 911truthers have a very different view of Giuliani. And his post 911 actions toward the ground zero workers is unconscionable!!! This ” hero” the same mayor who sent first responders in without good comunication equipment, who moved the communications center to building 7 of the WTC earlier even though the WTC was always known to be a terrorist attack target. Only in this our propaganda machine MSM could he ever have been seen as a hero. What a sad, and sick joke!!!! Sometimes I feel I am seeing ” through a glass darkly”.
If Giuliana runs against Clinton he’ll defeat her easily. He will also maintain and hasten the quick march of the extinction of American democracy. Really, if you’ve ever been critical of this regime of gangsters and black shirts led by George Wanker Bush, if you’ve ever said anything which can be remotely construed as critical, especially through email, get ready to run. It appears that a future United States will be a cross between the mercantile tyranny of China and a theocracy reminiscent of the Taliban.
In this case, a vote for Hillary (has she already won? Wow, and not one primary vote has been cast….) is a VOTE against the goulish bastard Rudy G.
At least we’d get a different cast lying to us at the daily press briefings….
“Giuliani is a Zionist pandering jackass. he is more concerned about the Israeli vote than he is of the American vote. His policies are Zionist policies.”
Wow, it took until the 4th comment for a Jew-hating bigot to register a crackpot opinion. You guys must be losing your touch. What I want to know is whether there is any problem on earth that you do not blame on Jews and Zionists?
“He’s like a gang leader now, roving the streets, looking for some punk to bash.”
Rudy is a mafia punk. He took out Tony Salerno to consolidate the power of the five families under the Genovese family, taking the position the Gambino family once held.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Giuliani
Mr. Carroll. Nice piece. I agree with almost everything in it except that annoying fifth paragraph - in which you, like so many have and many more will - heap praise on Giuliani for doing what? His job?
I’ve always been amazed at the way people exalted him on that day. I mean what kind of man would not be there, calming people, focusing energies? (I mean other than GW and Dick C. of course.) That day created many heroes. Many rose to greatness. Some well beyond him. He got on camera. Do we have such low expectations of our leadership that just because this guy does what he’s supposed to do in a crisis, we praise him even as he represents everything we detest?
Good for you, starofthesea, for setting people straight about Giuliani’s real record during 911. Far from saving people’s lives, he endangered them even further.
It is really pathetic that some Americans are so desperate for a “hero” that they’ll reach under a rock and haul out a scum-sucker like Giuliani to worship.
It’s no wonder Giuliani is making 9/11 the lynchpin of his presidential campaign.
If Giuliani cross-dresses for the campaign, how will we tell him apart from Hillary?
Seriously, it’s pathetic that the Republicans can still rally their “base” with fear of terrorism. Islamism is a real threat, but it’s mainly ideological and demographic, not military. We need to start pointing out that automobile accidents and cigarettes killed many more Americans than terrorists in 2001, and they have continued to do so since? If we want to make ourselves safer, we could start by buckling up and stop smoking. And don’t forget to look both ways before crossing the street.
Even if terrorism were far more deadly, invading more Muslim countries that haven’t bothered us recently isn’t going to make it go away. The invasion of Iraq didn’t stop some kids blowing up 50 people in London, nor the murder of Australians in Bali. Are our soldiers supposed to ask passersby in the countries we occupy, “Excuse me, do you know anyone who might travel from here to Switzerland to Canada to the U.S. to blow up a school bus in Wichita, Kansas?” If we’re that worried about Wichita, wouldn’t it make sense to use the troops to protect our borders? Perhaps the Left should adopt this slogan: defend America in America. It sounds more nativist and isolationist than I really am, but it might have a lot of appeal.
I think “elect” is the questionable concept here. If the ruling class king-makers decide their investments are safest with Giuliani than that’s who will “win” the “election.”
Short of an alternative candidacy that unites and builds a strong movement (win or lose),it really doesn’t matter which candidate the ruling class selects. The unfolding ecological disaster makes it a moot point in a game that has, for all purposes, outlived its historic era.
Have a look at Guiliani’s health plan http://peacesource.net/blog
Check out Nathaniel West ‘A Cool Million ‘ and the character Shagpoke Whipple.
Is it established that he is cross-dresser? I need to know for satirical purposes. But hell that is in the Great American Tradition along with Hoover. Now Rumsfeld’s appointment at the Hoover Institute makes sense. Viva Genet!
I can’t help it, but I think the guy’s a twit with about as much substance as a bubble. He has a TERRIBLE record of family relationships, doesn’t actually seem to have any once people know him well.
And his hysterical upping the Bush-ante seems like over-the-top pandering to people who just aren’t there. I know he has supporters, but they have to be half-wits or criminals.
I predict he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected.
Election? We don’t need no stinkin’ election! Presidente for life, Jorge W., will make the elctions go away with a wave of an executive order (justified by another false flag domestic “terrorist attack” or some other trumped-up reason) and he’ll impose martial law. He’s been planning this all along. It’s a done deal. Elections? That would mean flushing everything he has raped our Constitution for seven years to accomplish. Who really believes he’s going to just up and walk away from that? Bush was hired to do a job and he’s not quite done.
I think you got that right inthenow. After observing their behavior patterns over time it seems fair to expect them to scoff at the Jan.22 deadline. I think we’re seeing a political equivalent of MRSA to which the body politic has no known defences.
“For the crucial hours during and after the trauma, Giuliani provided an image of resolve and courage in which every American could glimpse a strength of character that the nation sorely needed, and for which, therefore, we were profoundly grateful. As the world’s heart opened to the United States that day, Giuliani’s unfeigned decency shone as a kind of beacon. Encouragement to rescuers, authority to panicked crowds, calm to television viewers, a man in charge - he was there with what was needed.”
Hmn, that’s odd - when that happened, I recall thinking “That shithead is trying to get re-elected…fuck me. Up until now, New Yorkers finally had started to see him for the asshole he is…”
robgo2
Wow, it took until the 10th comment for the nearest AIPAC troll to chime in with the standard “poor Israel” bullshit.
Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu are on the right track…worse than Apartheid.
Jaded Prole: If the ruling class king-makers decide their investments are safest with Giuliani than that’s who will “win” the “election.”
Most important is the fact that today’s “ruling class” investments are the most destructive resource allocations in the history of the world. Stupidity piled on top of stupidity. Check into the looney capitalists’ fossil methane shipping infrastructure. How about their coal scrubbers and liquid fuel from coal? The list of insanities goes on and on. We are FAR better off if the “ruling class” investments ground to a complete halt. Sensible investment plans come with social democracy. The people are starting to demand it. Capitalism is “in its last throes, if you will”, which explains why the “ruling class” is circling its wagons.
“What I want to know is whether there is any problem on earth that you do not blame on Jews and Zionists?” -robgo2
Do you mean like the King of Paedophilea making saints out of Fascists?
I really don’t understand this.
The entire Republican Party is a complete hubris. Why do we still talk about them ? They should be tossed aside, not even considered: ANY Republican, let alone Giuliani.
You Americans are even more stupid than I always thought, the entire political spectrum can be debated within the Democratic Party, which is like a ‘broad church’. My favorite would be Dennis Kucinich, while a rightwinger could vote for Hillary Clinton. What is the use of this second party ? It does not add anything to the democratic debate. It only adds to the overall hubris of America.
Shame shame shame
If Giuliani wins or even attracts more than 30% of the vote… I really don’t know anymore how to express my disgust of what America has become.
Anyway,
I think it has already been decided who is going to win the election: Hillary Clinton.
The Capitalist Class has invested most money in her, so they will rig the elections in order to get what they paid for.
It is amazing that nobody points to the fact that this criminal removed and wiped out with great rush from 9/11 massacre scene every and any piece of forensic evidence that could have helped an honest investigation into what really hapenend. He knew about 9/11, he participated in its planning, he help set it up . And he was promised the post of US presidency in turn for loyal services. Another criminal at the head of US government. Heil Giuliani. Woe to the civilized world. Welcome the fascist state.
What happened to this Nation’s grown-ups with integrity? Where are they?
“I can’t help it, but I think the guy’s a twit with about as much substance as a bubble.”
“I predict he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected.”
Yeah, and some people were thinking that about Bush back in 2000.
GHUOLiani the mayor or person or tranvestite doesn’t bother me one way or the other.
But GHOULiani the president scares me and i don’t easily frighten.
From CourtTV web site:
“Newspaper headlines alert New Yorkers to the [Amadou Diallo] shooting. Minority leaders are outraged, but Mayor Rudolph Giuliani tells residents not to rush to judgment.”
Forty one shots for brandishing the wallet where he keeps is ID…seems to me the Mayor should be encouraging the police under his command to not rush to judgment. Now that’s what I call reacting coolly in a time of crisis. What a role model!
The only people who see Guiliani as a compassionate leader are those out of earshot of the NYC media. Those within it have seen examples of his fascism on a day-to-day basis. The book ain’t writ yet on this sonofabitch.
I kinda like Guilliani’s free-wheeling style, but as has been pointed out, the collosal stupidity of his placing the emergency communication center in WTC and his closeness to his foreign policy advisor, Norm Podhoretz, sends shivers down my spine.
I just would like to know when some one will stand up and ask
what is well known in the cross dressing community. When will we get to see him in drag as Giuliani is quite the cross dresser.
Although I liked James Carroll’s article, I too, along with Walt and Restive, was mystified at his description of Giuliani as a hero on or after 9/11. As Paul Waldman of Media Matters has written, all Rudy did was give a series of press conferences without wetting his pants. Some hero.
Meanwhile, ‘America’s Mayor’ failed to provide mandatory respiratory masks to the real heroes — the workers at Ground Zero who are now dying from lung diseases and cancer. Contrast that with the Pentagon attack site — the workers there were wearing hazmat suits.
I have some relatives living in NYC — they think even the idea of goofball Giuliani as president is crazy, and the New York cops and firefighters’ unions hate him with a passion.
Right now, I can only ascribe his popularity to name recognition; that will fade.
Fortunately for our nation’s future, and this has been confirmed by people on the scene, most voters emerge from a Hillary speech with a better impression of her than before; they leave a Giuliani speech shaking their heads and wondering what’s wrong with the man. Rudy just doesn’t wear well — just ask his former wives, kids, and millions of New Yorkers.
I hope the GOP nominates him — he’ll be the easiest Republican to beat in 2008.