Rudy ran as a real S.O.B., the guy who had the steel to restore order and sanity where no one else could or would. Whatever you think of Giuliani personally, it’s hard to argue that he didn’t succeed; crime and the welfare rolls plummeted for the first time in decades, while jobs and neighborhoods came back.
(Emphasis supplied.) Matt Bai just lied to his readers. What I bolded is simply false. A lie. Does the NYTimes have any factcheckers? Bai is no reporter it is clear.
But even as a fabulist he fails. His whole idea is that Rudy is running as the tough guy who we need on terrorism. And Bai points to his Mayoralty as the basis for this. But this is nonsense. He did not become "America's Mayor" during the "good years" of his Mayoralty (indeed, Rudy was at quite a low ebb of popularity in September 2001).
He became "America's Mayor" because of the press conferences he held on 9/11 and the days after. Let's repeat that - Giuliani did nothing right as Mayor regarding 9/11 except hold press conferences. Wayne Barrett demonstrated that.
Now let's see if anything Wayne Barrett demonstrated made it into Bai's article. Let's see . . . Ok. A thousand words in:
On the surface, it’s an odd comparison, not least because, while Churchill foresaw a threat that few in his time fully understood, there’s not much evidence to suggest that Giuliani spent a lot of time thinking about Islamic terrorism before Sept. 11. Although New York was the target of at least one successful attack before Giuliani took office (the World Trade Center bombing in 1993) and continued to figure heavily in federal investigations into terrorist cells, the closest Giuliani publicly came to battling terrorists before the planes came bearing down on Manhattan that day was to respond to the emergence of West Nile Virus in Central Park (this was briefly thought to be the work of biological terrorists but turned out to be a naturally spreading disease) and to prepare for an attack on the millennial celebration in Time Square (which, perhaps thanks to the diligence of the feds, never materialized). Jerry Hauer, who was Giuliani’s top adviser for emergency preparedness and later had a nasty falling out with the mayor, now refers to his old boss as a “9/12 expert” — that is, one who saw the grave potential of Islamic terror only after it had been realized. “I can’t remember in the whole time I worked for him having a discussion about Islam or Al Qaeda,” Hauer told me. “The words ‘Al Qaeda’ were never part of his vocabulary.”
That's it.
In essence, Bai provides nothing more than the reverse personality driven nonsense we saw in 2000 - except Rudy's not being a guy you want to have a beer with is the positive image to portray.
Even Bai's so called "substantive" questions on terror, Iraq and Pakistan reveal a reporter who simply knows very little about the subjects. Rudy's sidesteps of these amateurish questions was rendered smooth by Bai's clear ineptness.
I have read Bai in the past, liked his article on Howard Dean, one in which Bai clearly had no clue what Dean was talking about and shuddered about. I have seen his piece on Edwards, an extremely weak piece from a reporter who simply knows very little about actual issues. I saw his performance at Yearly Kos and have read his book.
He is a hack. His meteoric rise to the top of his profession seems likely.
And Rudy we all know about. A hacks on a hack is what the New York Times provided us here.
