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During yesterday's hearing/public trial/modern day version of stockading of former FEMA head Michael Brown, there was this exchange between Congressman Christopher Shays, Republican from Connecticut, and Brown, which is one of the sound bites du jour:
Shays: I can't help but wonder how different the answers would be -- excuse me; you're blocking me -- if someone like Rudy Giuliani had been in your position instead of you, I think he would have done things differently and I think his answers to us would have been very different... [Shays then went on to list various issues with Brown's management/]Look, Gothamist is no fan of Brown, who made his way into FEMA through the buddy system, the old boy network, and the Stonecutters Society. But it's obvious that Brown is no Giuliani. Giuliani's tactics were partly created after the 1993 World Trade Center bombings (think about closing City Hall to civilians) and other paranoias. And God bless him, but Giuliani was not perfect, though he was great for NYC during September 11 and the days after. We just feel that it's ridiculously opportunistic to invoke Giuliani's name (he's a Republican too!) to distance one's self from the troubles during the Hurricane Katrina response. Gothamist wonders if Giuliani will try to brand his name to some sort of home-correspondence civil servant education course, the WWRGD Event Simulator that takes you through various scenarios to see how you would react. Wacky art? Ban it! Your wife? Leave her! Combover? Do it! Dress in drag? Hell yeah!Brown: I never thought I'd sit here and be berated because I'm not Rudy Giuliani...
Read the transcript here.
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I don't think Rudy would do too many media appearances with all that wind. Plays havoc with the combover...
re: "We just feel that it's ridiculously opportunistic to invoke Giuliani's name (he's a Republican too!) to distance one's self from the troubles during the Hurricane Katrina response."
not sure what you mean. shays brought up giuliani, not brown.
I meant that it was opportunistic for Shays to bring up Giuliani. Why, dear God, why? Sure, you wonder it, but, please, not everyone is Rudy Giuliani. The Republicans took this hearing as an opportunity to shell at Brown to show they are concerned, since they're worried about public perception. But this just seemed way too bald to be gracious.
I think they are going to be invoking Rudy's name a lot for the next couple of years, because (right now) he looks to be the Republican's best bet for the White House in '08.
The GOP will never nominate a pro-choice, pro-gay New Yorker even if he would win in a walk. It's better than even money that the kingmakers consider McCain too liberal.
And good for us, because they're the only Republicans who look capable of beating Hillary.
>>"Gothamist wonders if Giuliani will try to brand his name to some sort of home-correspondence civil servant education course, the WWRGD Event Simulator that takes you through various scenarios to see how you would react. "
You mean the Giuliani Consulting Company? At the beginning of Katrina, there were talks of sending Giuliani in to organize everything.
http://www.giulianipartners.com
It was not only opportunistic for Shays to bring up Giuliani, it was laughably hypocritical.
This is the same politician who urged his constituants to stay away from Times Square on New Year's Eve 2003:
Bloomberg said Wednesday on NBC's "Today" that former Iraq POW Shoshana Johnson would be taking part in the Times Square festivities. "She was a woman fighting to protect the congressman's freedoms," Bloomberg said. "She was captured and wounded in Iraq. Maybe he should call her and learn a little bit about courage."
Probably time for him to go.
Yeah, Shays is an unusual character. He appears to me as the Joe Biden of the republican party. Not to nitpick, but Rudy didn't ban wacky art. He uncovered the fact that Charles Saatchi had basically rented out the Brooklyn museum for his own personal art collection. By shaking up the museum he re-asserted the museum's independence. Advertising executives shouldn't be renting public museums.
i can't believe how much giuliani is still being praised for doing what any other competant politician would have done in the same position.
wrong, pug. museums host travelling shows and private collections all the time and BMA made plenty of money off of it. giuliani led a charge against a painting that insulted his own religion on the grounds that it blasphemed the virgin mary and was offensive to catholics. like him.
hijiki - The point is that Saatchi paid cash to have his collection exhibited in a public museum, which increased the value of his collection. It was clearly a corrupt way of managing the museum. Rudy's kneejerk reaction to the content, although kind of funny, was only a sideshow.
many of the artists in the saatchi collection were already widely valued and the show was extremely popular around the world. making money off of private parties actually makes the museum more independent. yes it helped saatchi's investment, but none of this is the point. don't credit giuliani with ending 'museum corruption', his motivation was to punish the museum for offending him. any further discoveries were the sideshow.
While I agree with most everything you're saying, you still have a hard time acknowledging that Saatchi paid cash to rent the musueum. I'm not arguing from a political or religious perspective - Saatchi was a major supporter of Thatcher in the U.K. There's a big difference between a gallery and a museum. The same issue came up when one of the other musueums had a gem show sponsored by Cartier. Perhaps the Saathci show was in part a parody of the selling of the museum and perhaps Rudy should have looked into it sooner. At worst you could say he made the right decision for the wrong reasons.
Don't really understand the virtual deification of former Mayor Guiliani. The reason he (and Bernard Kerik) rushed to the World Trade Ctr. on 9/11 was because that's where Guiliani had set up his emergency command headquarters. Guiliani had chosen this location and spent millions of (taxpayer) dollars on it up despite misgivings by some of his staff. These misgivings were based on the previous terrorist bombing of the WTC in 1993 in which a handful died and hundreds were injured. It was believed that this attack was not as successful as its instigators had hoped and therefore another attempt was a very real possibility.
Mayor Bloomberg wisely has his emergency command somewhere in Brooklyn--away from any well-known terrorist target.