Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Paul Vitello, Newsday, on Rudy Giuliani's Money-Making Machine

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Sorry George W, you are no Rudy G
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Paul Vitello

August 26, 2004

If a political convention can be said to have a living patron saint, next week's Republican National Convention will have one named Rudolph Giuliani.

He speaks on Monday night, but his spirit will permeate the week.

Sept. 11 is the emotional core of the convention. It takes place as close to the third anniversary as presidential politics and common decency would allow.

And Giuliani was the CEO of Sept. 11 from the moment the planes hit. Firefighters, police officers and construction workers may have done the heavy lifting. But it is Giuliani's name most Americans conjure when remembering the great human wave of resourcefulness and decency that splashed back over the devastation that day.

Giuliani may not have invented 9/11 heroism but he gave it a face.

And then he patented it.

In the nearly three years since he left office, he has become a walking for-profit corporation of 9/11-ism.

9/11 is the authority behind his $100,000-a-pop speaking career. It is the ballast that turns his pretty ordinary observations about life into a million-selling book, "Leadership." It is the source of the celebrity that makes Giuliani Associates, his security consulting firm, a cash machine:

He's been hired to clean up crime in Mexico City, hired to draft anti-terror measures for the broken-down, leaky Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant; hired to decontaminate anthrax-polluted office buildings.

Most recently, he was hired by the pharmaceutical industry to examine the possibility of contamination or terrorism reaching out to grab us by the throats in those drugs imported from Canada.

Whether those threats are real - and whether Giuliani can do anything about them anyway - may be beside the point. Giuliani issues blessings of "security" like a priest swinging incense, and his clients seem willing to buy his blessings for the appearance of "security" they represent.

Standing this year with the mayor of Boca Raton, Fla., as a crew started pumping sterilization chemicals into an anthrax-contaminated building, Giuliani said his work would be "a symbol that we can deal with these new risks we live with in our world."

When he comes to the convention, Giuliani joins forces with another enterprise that has harnessed 9/11 to its cart.

This is the national government of George W. Bush, which has done with the resources of a nation what Giuliani can only imitate in miniature.

Bush, too, while possibly unable to do much against the true threat of modern terrorism, has made the most of the danger for his own gain, in his case political rather than financial.

He has shut the doors on public access to government business - curtailing freedom of information, blocking congressional efforts to examine executive decisions, privatizing the military in a way unprecedented in history - all in the name of 9/11.

On the strength of support given him after the terror attacks, he pushed through tax cuts that, if anything, hurt his so-called war on terror.

He launched a war in Iraq in the name of 9/11 without evidence of a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. Thousands of Iraqis and almost 1,000 Americans are dead as a result.

In a parody of protection, his government periodically terrifies the public with warnings of terror threats. To date, these have increased ownership of duct tape and bottled water, and accomplished little else. All in the name of 9/11.

Just by coming to New York - by standing for the photo op at Ground Zero - Bush will be making 9/11 and all its victims his running mates.

Say what you will about Giuliani - and I haven't said anything nice so far - as mercenaries go he is a piker and a saint by comparison with his president.

Copyright (c) 2004, Newsday, Inc.

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This article originally appeared at:
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/politics/rnc/ny-livit263942539aug26,0,2830787.column

Visit Newsday online at http://www.newsday.com

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