New York Magazine on Rudy Vs. New York...Were we Really That Bad?

I love New York Magazine. The new one came today with our Rudy on the cover, and Chris Smith unraveling the myth that is 9-11 hero, Rudy. And though it seems like its fish-barrel time, this stuff bears repeating to anyone out there who doesn't know this all by heart already. I can't imagine how many more people that old Rudy can piss off, but he seems to have nailed down every single last one of the 8-10 million New Yorkers and ex-New Yorkers out here, creating more and more material all the time,and Leaving New York Magazine's editorial board no choice but to put him on the cover every other month in terms only as damning as his actions. But then, its really not hard to damn Rudy when you know him like we do.

And really, how much better can it get than: "Rudy has Seen the Enemy and He...is Us," "Rudy Vs. NY," and "Rudy is Running Against the City he Claims to have Saved. He Knows better. So do We." The banner headlines of the piece, quite truthfully, say that the only way for Rudy to fully be the hero that he needs to be in order to win the republican nomination, is to demonize the NYC that was before he became mayor. It was one thing, living through what we lived through after he came to power, to hear his laughable claims, and imagine how fun it would be when the tape started to roll on a tearful Donna Hanover out front of Gracie Mansion, having just found out that he was leaving her on TV, but its quite another when he needs to paint our city and us, as some sort of depraved animals hanging out in sex shops and smoking our crack pipes in alleys. Remember, it was Rudy who was schtupping his Goomah on our dime, the All Spin Zone has the details here....and it must be nice to have a police escort out to the Hamptons, for Christ' sake...that is the most expensive and public place around and he boldly put the tab on revolving city agencies, including an agency for the disabled; has he no shame? No...the answer is NO!

...but the condescending attitude is completely familiar to any New Yorker. The city in the nineties was far from perfect. But were we really living in the hellhole of depravity and despair that Giuliani describes without ever realizing it? And was he the man who single-handedly tamed 8 million misbehaving New Yorkers, delivering us from an economic and physical nightmare?

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fitting snugly between the invocation of his September 11 heroism and his mocking of Hillary Clinton: Rudy Giuliani is the man who saved New York. His campaign TV ads are a perfect distillation of the strategy. Before Mayor Rudy, the city was a black-and-white jungle-land of sex shops, violence, and crushing taxes. After Rudy, New York is Oz: sunshine, happy young couples, and shiny gold-plated statues. The message, which Giuliani hammers in his appearances outside the city, is that he made big bad New York safe for the rest of the country. For the pitch to work, Giuliani has to demonize the city he inherited and claim all the credit for the improvements he left behind. The city itself is his original enemy.

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So far on the campaign trail, the genial Rudy has been showing his face. The city saw plenty of that other guy—the nasty, credit-hogging, conflict-addicted, wife-humiliating Rudy. The man who tried to put himself above the law and stay mayor after September 11. And we know he’s still in there.

The thing is that Rudy did clean up certain aspects of New York City that probably stayed in place due more to our firmly entrenched knee-jerk liberalism, than to what was best for regular New Yorkers. But Rudy took those problems of laxity and a need to tighten up the ship, and parlayed them into an excuse to expunge all texture and individuality, along with most of the middle class, from Manhattan, and to drive the regular folks further and further out, making the island one of rare wealth and wimpy sameness. He made the city safe for the rest of the country, as a tourist destination and an eastern arm of Disney; safe enough for just about anyone to visit without the classic fear of getting mugged on every street corner. But it was his methods that were a little more than questionable, not to mention his cronyism and his not-so-private private life.

As Mayor, Dave Dinkins, was probably not tough enough, and alot of what was going on needed some healthy adjustment. For instance, in Washington Square park, at the height of the crack epidemic, the police were instructed to only give bench warrants to the hundreds of drug dealers who boldly approached passersby. The warrants led to not much, because people didn't show up for their dates and the paperwork was out of control. The police would drive their squad cars into the park and sit there, moving the loitering crowds from one side to another, and the whole thing had a rather gauntlet-like feeling if one were, say, walking the dog or pushing the baby in the stroller. There were also cars parked every night along 8th st (where I lived on the 18th floor,) with huge speakers that, when cranked up, rattled the windows all the way up there. this went on, with the percussive bass going boom-boom-boom, until all hours of the morning, when upon going down to walk the dogs there would be stragglers urinating here and there, and every car window along Mercer street would often be broken...in a row...as the crack addicts who had little care for anything rifled through cars for anything that could be sold. I remember going round to Green street one morning and a strung out guy breaking the window of a car right in front of me. I went into the copy store and the car alarm was blaring...and no one came.

If your car got hit down there in those days, the best course of action was not to call the police, but to run east and look for your stuff laid out on blankets by the junk sellers that lined the streets of the east village in what we used to call the Real Reaganomics. It only took around 10 minutes for bikes and other goodies to end up laid out for sale. Important papers were dumped in garbage cans or dark doorways around the corner, and just running round fast enough one could probably recover the draft of the doctorate or whatever else had been stupidly left in the car. It was usually just replacing the side window that was a drag. I seem to remember that insurers wouldn't write windows into policies for cars that lived in the city, but I cant remember exactly.
Who hasn't bought a video camera box with a brick in it? I haven't, personally, but my ex-brother-in-law did when he first came to live in NYC. If you don't know what I'm talking about then you missed a tiny cultural phenomena that flickered through cities in the days before laptops and cell phones on every hip.

The crack epidemic was a huge problem and how to handle it was not to trust criminals to show up for a court date. The thing to do would have been to arrest truckloads of people over and over until they took it underground, as they tend to do in more controlled situations. The response was bound to be good, and it would look good, and I don't know why Dinkins didn't do more; were his hands tied by bureaucracy? Knowing the answers to my questions would take more time than is warranted, because it was all washed away in the flood of Rudy, who empowered the police to not only arrest the culprits, but also to bend probable cause into an art of gestures and glances, so that just about anyone could be thrown down and basically strip searched right there in Washington Square Park, (which I use as an example only because I can report first hand, having been there.) Throw in a little police brutality, of which we have heard the tales, and the drug dealers got alot more careful. They sort of moved back into the recesses and back to the project neighborhoods.

I met David Dinkins a couple of years ago at the Waldorf at a lunch for Brooklyn Law School, which alma mater he shares with my grandfather. he was quite older than I had realized he would be, and he was very soft spoken and sweet. He talked to the kids, and told us about his kids and grandkids, and how he still played tennis. I realized how much I respected him for his pure liberal vision, but that he just wasn't cut out to play the heavy, and the climate at the time in NYC was one of great frustration. Still, crime had already begun to come down by the time Dinkins was finished and he did beef up the police force. It took Rudy to take the force to another level and give them the power to enforce his ideal of the police state that he envisioned.

At the same time, Rudy was cutting welfare in whatever ways he could. The thing that worked then, and what is working now where I'm living in CT, is to make the forms and process really difficult, and as harrowing as possible. How anyone can take credit for the dropping enrollment numbers, when we all know how he did it, is beyond me. In other words, they made it so hard to get into the system that people left for other towns. With them, left some of the most interesting facets of city life, and possibly those who would be the great city artists or politicians or city workers...we sent away our greatest resource, which used to be our young people raised in a city with public education and diversity...and access to culture and experience like no other place in the world. We sent them away because Rudy thought they were unsightly in how it all looked back then. That was a choice that he made for us; as he cruelly had the cops jostle the homeless off of the heat grates all night until they went away too.

There was no problem solving in that equation. In some cases, more real than urban legend, and confirmed to me by city workers, bus tickets were bought to help in the relocation of the poor. And at the time of the great do-over of Grand Central Station, I used to go on about how the homeless who used to line the walls there with palms outstretched like some old Calcutta film, were actually ground up and put into the concrete of the new walls and tiles and floors. Who wouldn't want to have the station be as nice as it is now? But what did they do with those people in that richest of rich cities? One wonders...and I'm sure there are many answers and alot of legends. My tin foil hat theory was that unused tunnels below the subways became a teeming city of under-dwellers with full, rich lives, who only surfaced from time to time to take in some light or to get supplies. I still study the dark recesses when the train slows to rumble through an old abandoned station, thinking that I will see a family slip into the shadows.

Rudy didn't fix us in the terms that he claims. He just applied a sort of marshal law as the crack epidemic was dying a natural death, and he made it really, really hard for the poor and the lower middle class to survive in the city. He rode a wave of numbers that began in the previous administration and made it his own. He played the heavy full tilt, but what he really did was to put the city into debt while pouring money into superficial and cosmetic fixes, without doing much for the infrastructure in human or mechanical terms. He basically kicked out those that he didn't want to deal with, all the while treating us all like we were some sort of rabble, and acting himself like he was the arbiter of what was acceptable as art, culture, religion, and values. And just like the hypocrite that he is, he held himself to a completely different standard than the rest of us.

So, this is what Rudy did; and meanwhile he was busy making glaring mistakes about security and communications. How rich of a concept it is, that Rudy is a security specialist, telling large corporations and Arab governments how to stay safe. Don't they even realize the nuts and bolts of his mistakes and how bad he was at the design of the security for the people of NYC? Hell, he almost got himself killed!



The truth is that Rudy is all bluster and bullshit. He comes off like a tough guy from the neighborhood, but I know that neighborhood, I grew up there, and most of those boys get dragged off by the ear when their mother found out what they've been up to. This guy is not qualified to be president. A few months ago I wouldn't have given it a second thought but then the ugly swift-boaters slithered out to test the air and see if it was time yet, and I realized that a Hillary Clinton or pretty much anyone (if it could be done to a decorated war hero, then anyone is in danger,)could be swift-boated before the dems could even turn around to fight back, and someone like Rudy could end up as president. I can't state strongly enough how dangerous I think that would be....and I know that a huge portion of the country knows this; but its the others who are just against Hillary or who just don't think that worry me.

...from New York but not of New York....a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic town, a prosecutor not a career politician, an outer-borough Roman Catholic in a Manhattan-centric, agnostic world. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a New Yorker. In fact, many of his character traits—his anger, his blind loyalty—come straight out of the tribal culture of New York’s old neighborhoods. On the presidential-campaign trail, Giuliani defines every issue and problem facing the country—not to mention his political competitors—as “enemies.” He sees an America besieged—by illegal aliens, by liberals, but most of all by Islamic terrorists....

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If I’m president of the United States, it will be crystal clear we will not allow Iran to become a nuclear power. We will take whatever action is necessary to stop them! We will not take the military option off the table. We will not beg to negotiate with them. We’re gonna make them beg to negotiate with us!

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Giuliani is suggesting he’d clean up Islamic terrorists like so many South Bronx crack dealers. He’s repeating one of his favorite phrases, that a President Giuliani would “keep us on offense” against terrorism. But it’s the way he says it that rings suddenly loud and clear. This was the man who told President Bush he wanted to personally push the button to execute Osama bin Laden.

And that's it, right there. This man cannot go further than Iowa or maybe New Hampshire. If the American people allow this to go on much beyond that, then we will have to just realize that this isn't really America anymore; the fringe has taken over and maybe its time to make other plans....maybe Stockholm or Denmark or Canada...But, I am going to try to hold onto Chris Smith and New York Magazine for one more cycle. He says that we, especially us New Yorkers, are wise to old Rudy. But how much sway do we have when the terra talk start in earnest and people want to hear the swagger and brag.

I was looking at my Bush Countdown key chain today. The battery went out a month or so ago and I was afraid that it might mean something. I felt so much better watching the days, minutes, and seconds tick away. It flashes back on from time to time but its set itself back in the 700 +/- range, so I'm just not putting stock in it anymore....but the thing I was thinking was: And then what? Whats next for us? The field is so strange on both sides, and I cant fathom what anyone can do besides start to unravel what amounts to a nightmare of chaos. I've put alot of my fear and anger into despising Bush and his people, but soon, everyone will say that we have to move forward and forget the past.

My fear is that in forgetting the past, we are condemned to repeat it. And if anyone is Bush lite, its Rudy. So, keep those exposes coming boys! Something has to stick on this guy...or maybe just the mass of a million smaller things will take him down....but, as I say...and then what?

What If You Gave a Party and No One Came? The GOPs Got Some 'Splainin' To Do....

The 4 top contenders for the GOP nomination skipped Maryland's Morgan State University debate; a historically African American forum. Oh they had their "conflicts" and excuses, just like they did for the Spanish language debate earlier this month, and I'm sure those conflicts were really, really important, in the face of the racial divide that they supposedly want to address and all ...and where was Rudy?...Must've been important to keep away America's Mayor...the one from the greatest melting pot in the world...uh-huh...



Thanks, as always, to our friends at Brave New Films for this great clip...

Petraeus' Fluff Ball, Krugman's Hardball, Congressional Softballs, and Rudy Guilliani Has No Balls!!

Today Paul Krugman joined the well deserved pile-on urging Congressional Democrats to take a stand and act like they have some balls when General Petraeus testifies about the white house penned report on Iraq this week. It is unreal that we are at a point where we are looking at our representatives as cowards who are afraid, not as much of what we might think of them, but of the political bubble-world of Washington DC that seems to be so hermetically sealed that any statement of dissent is treated like a huge achievement. I think that these politicians might do themselves a service by taking a look around outside of the beltway, because Americans are disgruntled, to say the least. According to Krugman, we should plan on the report to be a bunch of bullshit, twisted facts, and numbers:

Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq — as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.

Here’s what I’m afraid will happen: Democrats will look at Gen. Petraeus’s uniform and medals and fall into their usual cringe. They won’t ask hard questions out of fear that someone might accuse them of attacking the military. After the testimony, they’ll desperately try to get Republicans to agree to a resolution that politely asks President Bush to maybe, possibly, withdraw some troops.

This report is just a piece of fluff which cherry picks information down to the smallest detail, but clearly overlooks the secondary (or, hell, primary at this point,) effect of this occupation on what is left of Iraqi society; in that we might perhaps expect an increase in crime, not just because there is an increase in crime but because we are there and have disrupted everything...of course we have to count those deaths!

Its clear at this point that Bush likes to have something going on that lets him feel like he is "kicking ass," but alot of us have known for a long time that he is a sociopath riding a hobby horse, and even the doubters are beginning to realize the truth, so why are these white house Rovian operatives allowed to shape the debate? How dare any of them call Democrats who question this clearly erroneous report unpatriotic? And where do our representatives get off backing down after promising to go and deliver a strong and brave message for us. The founders would spit on the way that their hopeful plans have been twisted by this crowd. What kind of cowards do we have running this country?I hope to hear something from someone, maybe even a question that makes sense, but I'm not hopeful.

Krugman notes that Petraeus "...has a history of making wildly overoptimistic assessments of progress in Iraq that happen to be convenient for his political masters." And if its true, as Krugman believes, that the democrats will be accused of being unpatriotic no matter what they say or what happens, then I would hope to hear some all out probing of this report and perhaps even some dissent and protest. One thing we can be sure of is that this report is not likely to hint at the very real need for, and the strong possibility of, a draft.

So why bother with this piece of theater? Because Americans like to see committees and circumstance, and guys in suits acting like they are actually solving problems. Americans also like symbols...like, um...Osama Bin Laden, as the universal bad guy killer. Its a shame that Fred Thompson chose now to belittle the importance of the Bin Laden symbolism to American culture, considering that the government already has the pre-release of Bin Laden's yearly 9-11 commemoration tape, and the outrage is already palpable, even all these years later.

Thompson would do well to pull himself up by his bootstraps, get out of his limo, and try to take the pulse of the American people a little more carefully. What the hell is this guy doing talking about where he thinks Bin Laden is? We haven't caught him because we are in the wrong place doing the wrong thing, and the last thing we need is the suggestion that we should invade another country for the hell of it, when its clear that the guy moves around pretty easily in the Middle East and its gonna take good intelligence work to find him.







In other disgusting news, apparently Joementum Lieberman is co-chairing a meeting of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Monday. Again we are in a position where this pseudo liberal "I" who is supposedly caucusing with the Democrats, (but always threatening to flip to the other side,) is going to be the one representing the left side for balance...I have alot of trouble getting my mind around this! This guy gets to keep all of his committee posts and chair all sorts of meetings...representing US!...and who will ask the important questions about our security? No one...forget it.
Its gonna be a clown parade, with Skeletor Chertoff leading other top officials in making assessments about our security and how safe we are..,or not.... The clear fact that we are not safer now than we were before 9-11 points to more of the same; especially knowing how the reports are presented and how afraid our representatives seem to be to make waves.

Its been another day in the car listening to news, podcasts of Ring of Fire, and an old Majority Report rant by Janeane Garafolo about cognitive dissonance, (which has long been one of my favorite subjects.) She was talking about the woman who had the face transplant and the story of how she lost her face: passing out from drugs and alcohol and waking, but not realizing that the dog had removed her face for some reason...that is until trying to light a cigarette and, oops, what the fuck?? Janeane likened the strange shocky feeling of having just had your face eaten off by your dog to what has been going on in this country. Its strange how well some of those Air America shows from over a year ago still hold up...and sad that they still apply, even though the truth is out. Everyone knows that this is all wrong, but they just look uncomfortably at each other and hide their cowardice in some sort of idea of respect for the office and protocol. Fuck that! The feeling of embracing the lie because one can't come to terms with the fact that one was wrong in the first place, or over-identification with the lie, is the only way that some people can live with themselves. Its a form of mental illness that drives itself, in that the stress caused by conflicting belief and evidence needs to resolve so the truth is actively shifted in order to relieve the stress....and then there you are; your dog just took a bite out of your face...but it all makes sense because....because...because...it does!

Here I am in my house of cement pouring, alarm going off, firemen swarming, and contractors moving piles of my laundry round the basement, strangely quiet...for a minute...seeing what it might be like to feel like everything was OK out there...but then, on the news comes Rudy, Rudy, Rudy, who is, against all odds, holding his own in the weak Republican field...the debate, ugh...the news ugh....How did this happen? How did he manage to plow under his extreme weakness as a human being and a leader? His popularity is not dropping the way it should, which worries me, and makes me think that the American people are, as usual, not paying attention.

That Rudy has the nerve to say that he is not a perfect person but was a strong leader in NYC is just laughable. The idea that he could even fill the position of dogcatcher is incredible; but then...look what we have now!
The reign of Rudy in NYC was a strange time of knee jerk over-reaction to Dinkins and his PC liberalism. The swing was not so much to the right, because Rudy is pretty left on social issues, but more towards the Reich.

Among other insanity the homeless folks that were all over the place were hassled all the time and told to move on, with no place to go, and it was said that a large number of them had moved underground into old subway stations or were given one way tickets to places like Bridgeport, CT. I kept wondering where those people went...it was like they were just loaded on trucks one day and removed. The idea of just jostling sleeping people over and over is sort of inhumane, and the lack of real programs to help people made the whole exercise rather abusive.

Rudy set about defining the rules of what he felt was right, as if he was the arbiter of all things social, artistic and monetary. His people were less than sophisticated, and the whole thing echoed a strange mafia novella with goombas and good-fellas. Yeah, Rudy played tough, and he reversed some of Dinkin's soft policing measures, but his real focus was not on infrastructure and safety, but on surface and shine. This was not good management and it alienated many, many people...real New Yorkers for one, were disgusted, and many people who work to make the city work were disgruntled. He didn't solve problems so much as to sweep them away and make things look pretty. But, as we know about those shiny apple Republicans these days, the core is rotten, and sooner or later the worm is gonna crawl out. I'm just waiting for Rudy to blow. He not only lacks the personality for the office but he is rotten to the core.

Rudy left us in a very vulnerable position while he shined up his command center that was in the middle of his universe...with a big target on it. For anyone who doubts that Rudy absolutely sucked as a leader, and for anyone who thinks that it might make sense to have a strong guy like him at the helm, take a visit to The Real Rudy and lift the rock on old Rudy. I don't say this lightly: for anyone who might ever consider giving this guy a job with big responsibility, do some research. Your life may depend on it!

Cognitive Dissonance Rules!! Durbin, Tenant, and Kieth Olbermann on Rudy...

Yeah, what she said!! Jill the Brilliant has been watching Moyers on the selling of the war and how the press has been complicit in the execution of what is turning out to be a crapload of worse, worser, worst lies than we could ever have imagined. Needless to say, She is as disgusted as I am about this whole thing.


What is it that Janeane Garafolo goes on about all the time?...oh yeah, cognitive dissonance! Thats when conflicting thoughts or beliefs cause mental tension that is so intense that one has to adjust what might just be the truth in order to release tension between opposing sides. With the release of tension also comes the adjustment of what the mind knows is truth; if one set of beliefs starts to become untrue, the mind then goes into overdrive trying to rejustify by actually altering the original belief or explaining it away in some convenient fashion that isn't really all that far from the original belief. So, when asked to lie about something, without even a profit motive, if a subject can be persuaded for whatever reason to begin the lie, the internal cognitive dissonance caused by the truth vs. fiction causes the lie to become internalized and embraced as some sort of truth. What other explanation is there in the face of our entire press corps laying down? This is probably the answer to my years old question of how do they sleep at night?... Its all been justified somehow and the evident truth to them, while not actually the real and scientific truth, seems just close enough...








The other troubling thing, which I knew already, but its worth repeating again and again, is that people who watch Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert have a much better knowledge and understanding of what is going in in this country than those who watch Faux news....Maybe its easier to embrace the comedy of the truth than the tragic lies that might make us complicit in the silence that has made the deaths of thousands of people and the physical destruction of a country possible...?
The frightened woman in the gym (up from her winter home in Florida, no less,) was just telling me how her husband tells her, and she believes it, that she must ONLY watch Fox because all the rest are full of propaganda. But why the fear of hearing what everyone else is saying? Why would you want to protect yourself, if you know its all lies? Because the dawning truth is just too hard for most people to deal with, and so they have to embrace the lie harder and harder, closing their eyes tight and humming loudly so as not to have to face the fucking truth of this thing.
Look, I love America, and I am a patriot just the same as any of these people, but patriotism isn't about blindness. Its about knowing what we've done and what has been done in our names, because we are a democratic society and responsible for what these guys do out there in the world! Its is our responsibility to know what is happening, good or bad...and to try to fix what has gone wrong. The longer we put this off, the worse it gets...and its bad.

Then, in the category of "And you're just saying this now??" comes leaked parts of George Tenant's book, in which he finally speaks up about all the lies...now...rather than when it would have made a difference...Apparently, it was OK to be "At the center of the storm" and complicit in all of this crap when it was happening, but as soon as he realized that he was gonna be the one who gets thrown under the bus, and with a multimillion dollar book deal, he found his voice.

And the Senate Intelligence Committee's Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)agonized this week on the senate floor about how the committee KNEW that the American people were being lied to all along but that they were sworn to secrecy. Not one of them would take a chance to break protocol and go public or at least leak something?...As Keith Olbermann said in response to this, not one of those "patriots" could see that this was going to be a disaster of epic proportions and considered that fact more important than their careers or their "oath?" I'm sorry but I don't buy this "oath" nonsense, because obviously, as has been shown over and over by their actions, almost every single one of those guys, on both sides put together, have about maybe 1/10th of the amount of ethical and moral sense as any normal person on the street. So, does that mean they they have now been suddenly released from their oath? Or are they just able to judge the line when the public knows enough that the oath doesn't make a difference anymore? I'm disgusted.






















I love the snowball rolling down the hill behind Cheney and Bush as much as anyone, but I cant imagine that these people were so cowardly as to stay in the pack until it was perfectly safe for them to step forward.












And then in the arena of bald faced liars in the first degree we have Rudy Guilliani, liar extraoridinaire and just plan old nasty guy. Now there is a guy that we really cant have for president...he is on who would literally get us all killed! Here is Kieth's brilliant and angry comment on Guilliani...Its long but well worth it.



**Thanks, as always, to Suzanne Camejo for the nature images...