http://www.alternet.org/stories/58480Rudy: Worse Than Bush?By Jon Wiener, TheNation.com. Posted August 1, 2007.
How much worse a president would Rudy Giuliani be than George W. Bush? Novelist Kevin Baker counts the ways. In recent polls, Rudy Giuliani leads his rivals in the Republican primary race by about ten points. That's surprising, since he's been a supporter of gay rights, abortion rights and immigrant rights as well as gun control. It suggests that a President Giuliani would be better than Bush. I asked Kevin Baker -- he's author of the well-known City of Fire trilogy of novels about New York City -- Strivers Row, Dreamland and Paradise Alley. He also writes for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Harper's, where his essay, "A Fate Worse Than Bush," leads the magazine's August issue.
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"Most of 9-11 was actually a debacle for the city government," Baker told me in an interview, and "Giuliani bears a great deal of the responsibility." The World Trade Center had been attacked in 1993, but Giuliani had "learned none of the lessons that could have been learned. There was no serious attempt to coordinate the radios between the police and fire departments, or even to insure that the fire department had its own communications that would work inside buildings." The consequences? "Probably hundreds of unnecessary deaths that day."
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Giuliani told the 9/11 Commission that the firemen in the towers died because they refused orders to come out. He said they wanted to save lives of people trapped inside. "That's a demonstrable lie," Baker told me. "The firemen in the buildings were simply waiting for orders. They never got the word. It's easy to second-guess people in such a traumatic event, and anybody could be forgiven for not making the right decisions in the middle of everything. But to go to Congress months later and lie about this -- I find that despicable."
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lot of us would be delighted to see the Christian right lose in the Republican primaries. Baker agreed that Giuliani is indeed a real threat to the Christian right. But, he argued, "the problem with Bush is not so much his religious ideology, crazy as that can be. It's the arrogance emanating from this man. It's the cronyism, the incompetence, and the frightening authoritarian impulses. Giuliani embodies all the worst of that, and maybe more."
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