September 8, 2007 - A Special Remark
Disgust"If any Republican is elected president - and I think obviously I would be the best at this - we will remain on offense and this will anticipate what [the terrorists ] will do and try to stop them before they do it..." Rudy said, insisting that the election of any Democrat would mean the country is back on defense. Continued the former mayor, "But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have? If we are on defense, we will have more losses and it will go on longer." He said this with no sense of irony, no sense of any personal shortcomings... no sense whatsoever.
And if you somehow missed what he was really saying, somehow did not hear the none-too-subtle subtext of vote Democratic and die, Mr. Giuliani then stripped away any barrier of courtesy, telling Roger Simon of politico dot com, quote "America will be safer with a Republican president." At least that Republican president (on which we have not been safer) has even at his worst maintained some microscopic distance between himself and the campaign platform that blithely threatened the American people with "casualties" if they next year elect a Democratic president, or, inferring from Mr. Giuliani's flights of grandeur in New Hampshire, even if they elect a different Republican.
How dare you, sir. How many casualties will we have? This is the language of bin Laden. Yours, Mr. Giuliani, is the same chilling nonchalance of the mad man, of the proselytizer, who has moved from even some crude framework of politics and society into a virtual Roman coliseum of carnage, and the conceit over your own ability and worthiness to decide who therein lives and who dies. Rather than a reasoned discussion - rather than a political campaign advocating your own causes and extolling your own qualifications - you have bypassed all the intermediate steps and moved directly to trying to terrorize the electorate into viewing a vote for a Democrat not as a reasonable alternative and an inalienable right, but as an act of suicide.
This is not the mere politicizing of the War in Iraq, nor the vague, mumbled epithets about Democratic softness from a delusional vice-president; this is casualties on a partisan basis of the naked assertion that Mr. Giuliani's party knows all and will save those who voted for it and to hell with everybody else; and that he, with no foreign policy whatsoever, is somehow the messiah of the moment. Even to grant that that formula - whether posed by Republican or Democrat - is somehow not the most faced, the most indefensible, the most unamerican electioneering in our history; even if it is somehow acceptable to assign casualties to one party, and safety to the other; even if we have become so profane in our thinking that it is part of our political vocabulary to view counter-terror as one party's property, and the other's liability, on what imaginary track-record does Mr. Giuliani base his boast?
Which party held the presidency on that September 11th 2001, Mr. Giuliani? Which party held the mayoralty on that morning, Mr. Giuliani? Which party assured New Yorkers that the air was safe, and that the remains of the dead were covered and not being used to fill potholes, Mr. Giuliani? Which party wanted what the terrorists wanted - to postpone one of our elections - and to whose personal advantage would that have redounded, Mr. Giuliani? Which mayor of New York was elected eight months after the first attack on the World Trade Center, yet did not emphasize counter-terror in that city for the next eight years, Mr. Giuliani? Which party took this country into the most utterly backwards, utterly counter productive, utterly ruinous war in our history, Mr. Giuliani? Which party has been in office as more Americans were killed in the pointless fields of Iraq than were killed in the consuming nightmare of 9/11, Mr. Giuliani? Drop this argument, sir, you will lose it.
"The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us," Mr. Giuliani continued to the Rockingham County Lincoln Day Dinner. "Never, ever again will this country ever be on defense waiting for [terrorists] to attack us if I have anything to say about it. And make no mistake," he concluded, "the Democrats want to put us back on defense!"
There is no room for this. This is terrorism itself, dressed up as counter-terrorism. It is not warning, but bullying substituted for the political discourse now absolutely essential to this country's survival, and the freedom of its people. No Democrat has said words like these; none has ever campaigned on the Republicans' flat-footedness of Sept. 11, 2001. None has the requisite, irresponsible, all-consuming ambition to say "I accuse" rather than recognize that, to some degree, all of us share responsibility for our collective stupor. And if it is somehow insufficient - that it is morally, spiritually, and politically wrong to screech as Mr. Giuliani has screeched - there is also this: that gaping hole in Mr. Giuliani's argument of "Republicans equal life, and Democrats equal death." Not only have the Republicans not lived up to their babbling on this subject, but last fall, the electorate called them on it.
And doubtless they will call you on it, Mr. Giuliani. Repeat: go beyond Mr. Bush's rhetorical calamities of 2006; call attention to the casualties on your watch, and your long, waking slumber in the years between the two attacks on the World Trade Center. Become the candidate who runs on the "Vote for Me or Die" platform. Do a Joe McCarthy. Do a Lyndon Johnson. Only, if you choose so to do, do not come back surprised nor remorseful if the voters remind you that terror is not only a matter of casualties; it is just as certainly a matter of promulgation of fear. Claim a difference between the parties on the voters' chances of survival, and you do Osama bin Laden's work for him. And we, Democrats and Republicans alike - and every variation in between - we, Americans, are sick to death of you and the other terror mongers trying to frighten us into submission - into the surrender of our rights and our reason - into this betrayal of that which this country has always stood.
Franklin Roosevelt's words ring true again today and, clarified and amplified, they are just as current now as they were when first he spoke them seventy-four years ago. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." And, apparently, those who would exploit our fear for power, and for their own personal, selfish, and cynical gain.
Good night, and good luck.
Devious Comments
i am SO not a fan of Guiliani
he stepped on me and tried to make it better with a peanut
plus he totally gave me a "politician" answer to my yes or no question.
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You call me crazy. I call you brainwashed.
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Nobody grows old... We just crease and fold, like the laundry
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