Reply #12: Yes. You are wrong

[markses]

As a mayor he prided himself on exacerbating racial tensions and excluding a large segment of the NYC population from the public discourse. He sold out the city to the highest bidder, and left a financial mess of incredible proportions for Bloomberg to clean up. His stewardship was marked by division and irresponsibility.

As for 9/11, I must admit - as a lifelong New Yorker who was in Lower Manhattan that morning - that Mayor Giuliani acted with dignity and honor on that day. The contrast to the cowardly Mr. Bush was striking.

That said, none of this is the problem. As a New Yorker who had to return to work the following Monday, and breathed in the noxious air of Ground Zero for months - every day - I would have liked to see Mr. Giuliani show an allegiance to the people of New York and their safety, rather than to the market bigwigs and their bottom line. And I would like him to be honest about both the air quality issues (will I die young of cancer as a result of the false "all clear"?), and the organization of the emergency services that left so many firefighters in WTC 1 despite the collapse of WTC 2, even as the police in WTC 1 were in full evacuation mode. Of course, to be thus honest would be to smash the veneer of infallibility that Giuliani, Kerick and Bush have wrapped around themselves.

Kerick's answers on the communication problems yesterday were indiciative of such dishonesty. When Wolf Blitzer asked him about the problems, Kerick noted that "protocol had been followed," so he didn't know what the commissioners were talking about. Needless to say, the question is asking about the protocols, so the fact that they'd been followed is of little use. Disgusting.