The recent joint appearance of the Republican President candidates on the Fox News Channel highlighted the dangers of one candidate in particular, and it wasn't Ron Paul. In fact, I believe that Mr. Paul has been given a pretty raw deal over a comment that was actually fairly rational and well-reasoned, and it was primarily at the hands of Rudolph Giuliani that Mr. Paul has been smeared. In doing so, Rudy demonstrates exactly why he should never be President of the United States. Mr. Giuliani is a fraud and poses the greatest danger to the United States of any candidate in either party currently running.
The point Mr. Paul was attempting to make is that we should understand the reasons Al-Qaeda are fighting us. Is it so radical that one should understand one's enemies? Does it not help in the fight against them to know why they fight and what they think? Is it, as Mr. Giuliani would have us believe, an endorsement of their beliefs to understand them?
Mr. Paul's point is that Al-Qaeda hates us because we are involved in the Middle East. Giuliani twisted this around into something completely different, to the riotous applause of the Confederate audience of South Carolina reactionaries in the auditorium. Osama himself has said that the reason he started Al-Qaeda was because the United States was “desecrating” the Muslim Holy Land of Saudi Arabia by its presence. To recognize what they think is not the same as agreeing with it. It is simply understanding why they hate us.
And, why are American troops in Saudi Arabia and, now, Iraq, as well as several other Persian Gulf states? It is, quite simply, to protect western investments in and access to the oil in the Middle East. Were we not protecting the oil, we would have no reason to be there. If American drivers did not think they had a God-given right to use everyone else's oil and to sacrifice our young people's lives to protect that so-called right to everyone else's oil, we wouldn't be there and we wouldn't be at war with anyone right now.
This is a simple truth that the Republicans, and Rudy in particular, seem incapable of understanding. Either that, or they deliberately ignore it or don't care. I believe it is the latter. There is too much money at stake not for American forces to be in the Middle East. Let's be honest. Our interest in the Middle East isn't protecting Israel, it's protecting the oil.
Giuliani has been the worst of the candidates in exploiting the alleged threats of Al-Qaeda to American security and there is no one person in America who had profited or benefited more from the attacks on the World Trade Center, or exploited them more shamelessly, than “America's Mayor.”
What specifically did Giuliani do on 9/11 and after that merits all this praise and glorification or that qualifies him to be President of the United States? He was certainly not a very popular Mayor before 9/11. Indeed, New Yorkers who remember their Mayor before the attacks respond in polls today that they prefer Rudy's successor, Michael Bloomberg. Yet, Giuliani has gone down across the country as an inspirational figure for his behavior on 9/11. All he did was seek out cameras and appear at funerals.
9/11 has become the entire basis of Giuliani's current wealth and Presidential campaign. His lectures and books, his positions on boards and the existence of his firm Giuliani Partners, are based solely on his position as “America's Mayor” after his photo ops on and after 9/11. Yet, were it not because of Rudy Giuliani, hundreds of the First Responders who heroically rushed into the Twin Towers would be alive today.
After the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, a review panel faulted the city for it's faulty emergency communications system and recommended numerous changes. During the eight years Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York, none of those recommendations were implemented. None. And, who was responsible for this? Rudy Giuliani. How many fireman in the Towers failed to receive the command to withdraw because the changes to the communications system recommended by the review commission were ignored by Giuliani and his corrupt crony, Bernard Kerrick?
Beyond being the shameless fraud that he is, however, is the danger Giuliani poses to the basic fundamentals of what it means to be an American is far to great to allow him the Presidency. Not only did he show no regard for the Bill of Rights when he was a Federal Prosecutor and Mayor New York, but his slavish support of the Bush Administration's attacks on civil liberties in the name of “national security,” is reminiscent of Vladimir Putin's rapturous return of Russia to the glorious days of Lavrenti Beria.
The 9/11 Commission found that various law enforcement agencies knew who the WTC attackers were and we had all the information we needed at the time to stop the attack. What prevented us from doing so was simply the lack of communications between different agencies, and the near-Freudian protection of turf that prevented the sharing of information. We haven't needed the shredding of the Bill of Rights by Bush, Cheney, and Gonzalez, nor the passage of the horribly misnamed Patriot Act, nor the illegal wiretapping that even John Ashcroft, one of the biggest enemies of individual freedom, opposed as unconstitutional. And, yet, Giuliani has vigorously, rigorously, supported everything the Administration has done, including starting a war in a country the 9/11 Commission has said had NOTHING to do with 9/11. If you want more of the last six years, only worse, Rudy is your man.
Rudy's entire reason for running for President is 9/11. His entire current wealth is based on 9/11. Yet, it was his incompetence and refusal to implement the findings of an earlier review commission established after the 1993 attacks on the WTC that lead to far more people dying on 9/11 than would have if Rudy had been doing his job. And, yet, his platform calls for more of his historic disdain for the very things that make us American, our individual freedom.
Rudolph Giuliani is a fraud and a danger to the American Way of Life. Republicans should relegate him to the gutter of obscurity and contempt where he belongs and refuse to nominate him for President. It would be the worst thing that could happen if this fraud were ever to sit in the Oval Office.
