The Turning Point For Rudy

I think this latest comment from Rudy Giuliani, where he showed his true narcissistic colors and equated his photo-ops at Ground Zero to being a rescue worker, is really going to hurt him. This would have been a bad weekend anyway, with Mitt Romney sucking up all the good press from the Straw Poll he bought. But now, Rudy's 9/11 bona fides are getting some scrutiny. And while this devastating article in the Village Voice won't get national press attention, enough people have seen it to give them a blueprint of Rudy's vulnerabilities on his self-created mythology.

The story, by Giuliani biographer Wayne Barrett, details five big lies that Giuliani has been spreading on the campaign trail about his response to September 11. As John Kerry leaned on his Vietnam experience to provide a campaign narrative in 2004, so too is Giuliani leaning on his 9/11 story; it's told on practically every stop on the stump. There is no real policy apparatus to the Giuliani campaign, so his entire argument for being President seems to be "I protected you on 9/11, Democrats are bad, vote for me." But this theme is littered with inconsistencies and outright lies. Here's just one example.

1. 'I think the thing that distinguishes me on terrorism is, I have more experience dealing with it.' This pillar of the Giuliani campaign—asserted by pundits as often as it is by the man himself—is based on the idea that Rudy uniquely understands the terror threat because of his background as a prosecutor and as New York's mayor. In a July appearance at a Maryland synagogue, Giuliani sketched out his counterterrorism biography, a resume that happens to be rooted in falsehood.

"As United States Attorney, I investigated the Leon Klinghoffer murder by Yasir Arafat," he told the Jewish audience, referring to the infamous 1985 slaying of a wheelchair-bound, 69-year-old New York businessman aboard the Achille Lauro, an Italian ship hijacked off the coast of Egypt by Palestinian extremists. "It's honestly the reason why I knew so much about Arafat," says Giuliani. "I knew, in detail, the Americans he murdered. I went over their cases."

On the contrary, Victoria Toensing, the deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department in Washington who filed a criminal complaint in the Lauro investigation, says that no one in Giuliani's office "was involved at all." Jay Fischer, the Klinghoffer family attorney who spearheaded a 12-year lawsuit against the PLO, says he "never had any contact" with Giuliani or his office.

That's just a small example. Giuliani blew the only terrorism case he ever prosecuted (most of the charges were thrown out); he never really discussed terrorism in the 8 years leading up to 9/11; he waited 6 years to even create an Office of Emergency Management; he put the HQ in the World Trade Center complex instead of a secure site in Brooklyn, even though the WTC was hit in 1993 (mainly so he could walk to it easily); he didn't change the non-functional radio systems that caused hundreds of firefighters to never hear the evacuation order, or make them inter-operable with the police radios; he assured rescue workers that the air was safe at Ground Zero for cleanup; he hid the results of his own Administration's field studies showing dangerous levels of toxicity; and then there's this:

The mayor was so personally focused on the siting and construction of the bunker that the city administrator who oversaw it testified in a subsequent lawsuit that "very senior officials," specifically including Giuliani, "were involved," which he said was a major difference between this and other projects. Giuliani's office had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator.

The emergency management center was a freakin' love nest!

The harm here is that this is the ultimate oppo research document, a story from which a thousand TV ads can be culled. And they have the added benefit of being true. Rudy has scrupulously created a hagiographic reading of his role on 9/11 through the years that simply doesn't match the facts. And this slip-up this week is the crack that was needed to call his entire story into question.