"Islamic terrorists are at war with us," Rudy Giuliani told about 300 people at a synagogue in Rockville, Md., one evening in July. He likes to say it that way — that they are at war with us, not the other way around. "They want to kill us," he warned a group in New Hampshire the same month. "They hate you," he told a woman in Atlanta.
That's the first paragraph of the new Time magazine's investigation into Giuliani's record. While pollster Frank Luntz says, "You cannot underestimate the impact of having seen him on television hour after hour dealing with the tragedy. That gives him a level of credibility that nobody else has," to explain how Giuliani's September 11, 2001 demeanor can shape his 2008 presidential bid, that doesn't mean his NYC record is sacred.
This week, his Republican opponents have been attacking his New York City record, with Mitt Romney criticizing Giuliani's liberal stance on immigration and Fred Thompson denouncing Giuliani's gun control attitudes. In fact, Thompson's blogged, "When I was working in television, I spent quite a bit of time in New York City. There are lots of things about the place I like, but New York gun laws don’t fall in that category."
And today's Times looks the financial dealings during Giuliani's mayoral terms. The former mayor, who has claimed to have "turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus," actually left Bloomberg a bigger deficit than the one Dinkins left Giuliani. Hmm.
Back to the Time article, here's one sentence to consider, "Giuliani's penchant for secrecy, his tendency to value loyalty over merit and his hyperbolic rhetoric are exactly the kinds of instincts that counterterrorism experts say the U.S. can least afford right now."
