Giuliani in over his head

[pgabriel]

Giuliani says he misspoke

link (http://news.aol.com/elections/story/_a/under-fire-giuliani-says-he-misspoke/20070810195209990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001)

Aug. 11) - Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he misspoke when he said he spent as much time, if not more, at ground zero exposed to the same health risks as workers combing the site after the Sept. 11 attacks.

[pgabriel]

btw, of course this is in reference to all the obama attacks that he's in over his head


edit: seriously, does it bother you that he is still running on 9-11

[Deckard]

btw, of course this is in reference to all the obama attacks that he's in over his head


edit: seriously, does it bother you that he is still running on 9-11
It bothers me. He's an empty suit, as far as I'm concerned, running on a national tragedy and fear, just as Bush did after 9/11. No real program to offer the people, just an attempt to scare them into voting for him.



D&D. Impeach Bush and His Puppeteer.

[Trader_Jorge]

Giuliani is hands down the most intelligent person running for President. That's obvious.

Obama is just totally in over his head on a number of issues:
1) Intelligence
2) Foreign policy matters
3) Political savvy
Basically the guy just sounds good when reading. That's all he's got as far as I'm concerned.

The guy has very little experience. Giuliani on the other hand is battle tested, being the mayor of New York for so long. 9-11 is only one part of the tremendous job that he did as mayor. He totally turned that city around from a safety and cleanliness perspective. His career in law was very distinguished prior to politics.

[Space Ghost]

btw, of course this is in reference to all the obama attacks that he's in over his head


edit: seriously, does it bother you that he is still running on 9-11

why would it bother anyone. Why would you ignore someones claim that they kept their city together during one of the worst disasters in American history, versus a certain other mayor in the south.... or are you more interested in hearing false promises from unproven canaditates?

[Batman Jones]

why would it bother anyone. Why would you ignore someones claim that they kept their city together during one of the worst disasters in American history, versus a certain other mayor in the south.... or are you more interested in hearing false promises from unproven canaditates?

Well, it bothers the hell out of NY firefighters and the other true heroes of 9/11, especially when he claims he was working at ground zero as often or more often than anyone. For someone who had a signature memorializing 9/11 heroes and victims for so many years, you're really letting him off easy. The real heroes of 9/11 won't. If Giuliani gets the GOP nod, those people will be this cycle's Swift Boat vets -- the difference is, their attacks will be true.

[Trader_Jorge]

If Giuliani gets the GOP nod, those people will be this cycle's Swift Boat vets -- the difference is, their attacks will be true.
A little wishful thinking on your part? Funny how you denounce the Swifties yet applaud a separate smear campaign. Typical LIBPOCRISY.

Two key dynamics make your analogy dead wrong.
1) Politico's have seen how impactful the Swifties were and saw how pathetic Forbes Kerry's response to it was. The lesson has been learned. REACT SWIFTLY TO SWIFTIES.
2) 9-11 was a tragedy. Pimping it for political gain is done at your own peril. The backlash from the Libs using NY fire fighters as political pawns to disgrace a man considered a hero by his courage and valor during 9-11 is very risky business.

[Batman Jones]

The Democrats aren't "using" the firefighters. They've had a mad on for Giuliani ever since 9/11. And they will be heard.

If nothing else, he destroyed the 9/11 glow he's been sporting when he claimed to be "one of" the responders and to have worked as much or more often than any of the rest of them. You can damn well expect that statement to star in a campaign ad if he gets the nomination. It's not a smear tactic. He did it to himself.

[pgabriel]

-why would it bother anyone. Why would you ignore someones claim that they kept their city together during one of the worst disasters in American history, versus a certain other mayor in the south.... or are you more interested in hearing false promises from unproven canaditates?


I hope you aren't comparing 9-11 to Katrina. that certain city in the south was destroyed entirely. I'm not arguing that nagin did a good job but its hardly a comparable situation.

[jo mama]

9-11 is only one part of the tremendous job that he did as mayor.

the new york fire fighters dont think he did such a tremendous job.

texx, how can you go around continually calling other "liberals" when you support this tranny?

he is pro-choice, anti-2nd amendment and not very strong in the "family values" department as evidenced by his string of failed marriages and the fact that his children do not speak to him. true, the fact that his first marriage was to his cousin should shore up the appalachian vote, but tranny giuliani has no shot with REAL conservatives.

all he has going for him was that he was mayor of nyc...ON 9/11!!!

hey texx, guess what???

9/11!!!

http://www.infowars.com/images2/cartoons/nosferrudy_dees.jpg
















9/11!!!

[SamFisher]

Wow, I knew htat Trader_Jorge hated September 11 heroes, but man I never thought the woudl be so bold about it.

Very disturbing.

[jo mama]

Typical LIBPOCRISY.

Two key dynamics make your analogy dead wrong.
1) Politico's have seen how impactful the Swifties were and saw how pathetic Forbes Kerry's response to it was. The lesson has been learned. REACT SWIFTLY TO SWIFTIES.
2) 9-11 was a tragedy. Pimping it for political gain is done at your own peril. The backlash from the Libs using NY fire fighters as political pawns to disgrace a man considered a hero by his courage and valor during 9-11 is very risky business.

talk about "LIBPOCRISY", who is the one exploiting 9/11 for political gain?
http://blog.lolzllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/giuliani_911.jpg

tranny giuliani's entire campaign is based on 9/11 and fear mongering.

either you are being deliberately obtuse or you are just plain ignorant, but the "libs" are not using NY fire fighters. the firefighters are speaking for themselves. i suppose we can expect you to start smearing firefighters now. :rolleyes:

[rimrocker]

The backlash from the Libs using NY fire fighters as political pawns to disgrace a man considered a hero by his courage and valor during 9-11 is very risky business.

http://www.powers-point.com/uploaded_images/workers-723055.jpg

http://www.abqjournal.com/pix/1worker09-17-01.jpg

http://static.firedoglake.com/2006/09/wtc.jpg



































http://www.un.org/av/photo/unhq/images/du5.jpg

[rimrocker]

Note on the last post: if you do a Google image search for "Giuliani ground zero," you get nothing but him leading tours for politicians. (At least for the first ten pages... there may be something after that.)

Hell, at least Bush climbed up on a pile once.

Edit: I know the guy in the middle photo... he's from Albuquerque FD. I also know the last guy out of WTC I. I'd be very happy to arrange a meeting with them for TJ so they have a discussion about who is "political pawn."

In the meantime, TJ, try reading this...

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/nyc-fdny-pdf,0,7550635.htmlstory

[RocketMan Tex]

I had no idea Trader Jorge was in love with a transvestite!

[tigermission1]

Yeah, he's sooooooo in over his head, which is why he will be the next president of the United States...

[Deckard]

Yeah, he's sooooooo in over his head, which is why he will be the next president of the United States...
So you are using the George W. Bush standard of Presidential Suit Measurement? Incompetence is OK? The Peter Principal the ruling philosophy? :)



Impeach Doofus and His Dildo.

[FranchiseBlade]

Rudy has screwed up royally. He pushed his public perception of him and 9/11 too far. Even though it was undeserved his heroic 9/11 persona was his greatest strength. He just tried to stretch it too thin with this BS.

TJ is owned quite a lot on these boards, but rarely is it such a thorough thrashing as he has received in this thread.

[Space Ghost]

-


I hope you aren't comparing 9-11 to Katrina. that certain city in the south was destroyed entirely. I'm not arguing that nagin did a good job but its hardly a comparable situation.

I am comparing two mayors, each who had a major disaster on their hands. Neither had the power to fix things over night, so there is no argument there. While one can dispute this opinion, Guiliani did work on unifying the city. Nagin did everything in his power to put the blame off on everyone else.

Our biggest problem is this nation is not the war, or terrorism, or illegal immigration, or healthcare or many of the other hot topics. Our biggest problem, which i have yet to see any of the candidates address, is the unity of our country. When the new "savior congress" has a lower rating than our president, we have problems. When our left wing is signaling the rest of the world that we don't want to win this war and retreat, regardless if victory is possible, we have problems.

You can throw in skewed perspectives of Guliani's accomplishments while he was mayor, which of course is the nature of our current politics and division in our country, but the question is whether he should upstage his 9/11 accomplishments. If he's about unifying the country, then its completly ok in my book

[Deckard]

I am comparing two mayors, each who had a major disaster on their hands. Neither had the power to fix things over night, so there is no argument there. While one can dispute this opinion, Guiliani did work on unifying the city. Nagin did everything in his power to put the blame off on everyone else.

Our biggest problem is this nation is not the war, or terrorism, or illegal immigration, or healthcare or many of the other hot topics. Our biggest problem, which i have yet to see any of the candidates address, is the unity of our country. When the new "savior congress" has a lower rating than our president, we have problems. When our left wing is signaling the rest of the world that we don't want to win this war and retreat, regardless if victory is possible, we have problems.

You can throw in skewed perspectives of Guliani's accomplishments while he was mayor, which of course is the nature of our current politics and division in our country, but the question is whether he should upstage his 9/11 accomplishments. If he's about unifying the country, then its completly ok in my book
And, of course, every problem with politics today is because of "the left wing." Talk about skewed perspectives.



Impeach Doofus and His Dildo.

[mc mark]

When our left wing is signaling the rest of the world that we don't want to win this war and retreat, regardless if victory is possible, we have problems.

link please

[tigermission1]

So you are using the George W. Bush standard of Presidential Suit Measurement? Incompetence is OK? The Peter Principal the ruling philosophy? :)



Impeach Doofus and His Dildo.

No, I am saying save your venom for the upcoming eight years of the Guiliani administration. Slow your roll, that's all I am saying, or you'll risk running out of insults ;)

[rimrocker]

I am comparing two mayors, each who had a major disaster on their hands. Neither had the power to fix things over night, so there is no argument there. While one can dispute this opinion, Guiliani did work on unifying the city. Nagin did everything in his power to put the blame off on everyone else.

Here's Rudy's campaign number: 212-835-9449. I provide this as a service to you. You should have the credit for Rudy's new slogan: Rudy for Prez: He's Better Then Nagin!"


Of course, there's one quibble with your analysis: Rudy still had a city.

[rimrocker]

Oh my.

'He had his own elevator'

Wayne Barrett has done the political world a great service with a devastating piece in the Village Voice on Rudy Giuliani and the "five big lies" surrounding the former mayor's claim to fame: his performance on 9/11. The entire piece -- which, if read, should effectively end Giuliani's presidential ambitions -- is important, but there's one part of the story that's particularly worth highlighting.

It's Lie #3: Giuliani doesn't deserve the blame for putting the city's emergency-command center in the World Trade Center, an obvious, and once-attacked, terrorist target. The former mayor was warned, in writing, about the inherent flaws in the choosing the site, and was offered a better and more effective alternative, but Giuliani moved forward anyway. As Barrett explained, "The 1997 decision had dire consequences on 9/11, when the city had to mobilize a response without any operational center."

So, why is it, exactly, that Giuliani picked the WTC site? The mayor personally established a specific standard: he had to be able to walk to the command center from his office. ("I've never seen in my life 'walking distance' as some kind of a standard for crisis management," said Lou Anemone, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the NYPD. "But you don't want to confuse Giuliani with the facts.")

There is, however, an explanation for the walking-distance standard.

The 7 WTC site was the brainchild of Bill Diamond, a prominent Manhattan Republican that Giuliani had installed at the city agency handling rentals. When Diamond held a similar post in the Reagan administration a few years earlier, his office had selected the same building to house nine federal agencies. Diamond's GOP-wired broker steered Hauer to the building, which was owned by a major Giuliani donor and fundraiser. When Hauer signed onto it, he was locked in by the limitations Giuliani had imposed on the search and the sites Diamond offered him. The mayor was so personally focused on the siting and construction of the bunker that the city administrator who oversaw it testified in a subsequent lawsuit that "very senior officials," specifically including Giuliani, "were involved," which he said was a major difference between this and other projects.

Giuliani's office had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator.

For the city, this meant that on 9/11, the NYC make-shift command center didn't exist until seven hours after the attack. As for Giuliani's poor judgment, the most rational conclusion is that he put his center in the wrong place because he was creating a "convenient love nest."

Kevin Drum wonders how the GOP base is going to respond to news like this.

Right now, they're probably not aware of the whole story, and simply perceive Giuliani as someone who held some impressive press conferences on 9/11. But it's only a matter of time. Giuliani's decisions should be a national scandal that not only force him from the presidential race, but may even shame him permanently.

Inevitably, this is going to become a part of this campaign, and when it does, it's going to be ugly.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/


More from the article:

Great concern was expressed in writing that the platform in the press room had to be high enough to make sure his head was above the cameras. It's inconceivable that the hands-on mayor's fantasy command center was shaped—or sited—by anyone other than him.

When the 280,000-member International Association of Fire Fighters recently released a powerful video assailing Giuliani for sticking firefighters with the same radios that "we knew didn't work" in the 1993 attack, the presidential campaign attacked the union. "This is an organization that supported John Kerry for president in 2004," Giuliani aide Tony Carbonetti said. "So it's no shock that they're out there going after a credible Republican." While the IAFF did endorse Kerry, the Uniformed Firefighters of Greater New York, whose president starred in the video, endorsed Bush. Its former president, Tom Von Essen—currently a member of Giuliani Partners—was the fire commissioner on 9/11 precisely because the union had played such a pivotal role in initially electing Giuliani.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0732,barrett,77463,6.html/full

[rimrocker]

Via Kos, an old Rudy quote:

What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E2D9173CF933A15750C0A962958260

[jo mama]

When the new "savior congress" has a lower rating than our president, we have problems.

their approval ratings are lower than bush's b/c they are not doing what the american people elected them to do and they said they would do, which is put a check on the criminals in the white house.

When our left wing is signaling the rest of the world that we don't want to win this war and retreat, regardless if victory is possible, we have problems.

70% of the american population and 50% of the troops are "left wing"? anything you say schickelgruber.

with regards to iraq, what exactly does it mean to "win"?

[pgabriel]

I am comparing two mayors, each who had a major disaster on their hands. Neither had the power to fix things over night, so there is no argument there. While one can dispute this opinion, Guiliani did work on unifying the city. Nagin did everything in his power to put the blame off on everyone else.

Our biggest problem is this nation is not the war, or terrorism, or illegal immigration, or healthcare or many of the other hot topics. Our biggest problem, which i have yet to see any of the candidates address, is the unity of our country. When the new "savior congress" has a lower rating than our president, we have problems. When our left wing is signaling the rest of the world that we don't want to win this war and retreat, regardless if victory is possible, we have problems.

You can throw in skewed perspectives of Guliani's accomplishments while he was mayor, which of course is the nature of our current politics and division in our country, but the question is whether he should upstage his 9/11 accomplishments. If he's about unifying the country, then its completly ok in my book

first of all if he's running against nagin then its a slam dunk, he's not. second of all, I'm not skewing what he did. he only had to deal with the loss of the inhabitants of two office buildings and there families, the other had to deal with the entire loss of a city, along with its police department, along with an inherant incompentance in city and state government along with corruption that proceeded his birth. the two situations are hardly comparable.

the only thing giulliani had to deal with in the aftermath was cleanup and planning of the future site. the population of new orleans is still displaced. its a ridiculous comparison.

[Trader_Jorge]

the only thing giulliani had to deal with in the aftermath was cleanup and planning of the future site. the population of new orleans is still displaced. its a ridiculous comparison.

The 9-11 recovery process was as simple as clean-up and planning? That is RICH. Nevermind the grief involved with 3,000 people dying, new security measures being implemented, a restoration of the city's confidence, dealing with the economic/financial fall-out at several levels, trying to keep downtown Manhattan as a viable place to do business, I could go on and on.

But thanks pgabs, for reducing the 9-11 healing process to clean-up and planning. Nice.

no cred...

[pgabriel]

The 9-11 recovery process was as simple as clean-up and planning? That is RICH. Nevermind the grief involved with 3,000 people dying, new security measures being implemented, a restoration of the city's confidence, dealing with the economic/financial fall-out at several levels, trying to keep downtown Manhattan as a viable place to do business, I could go on and on.

But thanks pgabs, for reducing the 9-11 healing process to clean-up and planning. Nice.

no cred...


so giulliani now gets credit for the entire economic recovery of 9-11 which went well beyond nyc. that's rich

[SamFisher]

The 9-11 recovery process was as simple as clean-up and planning? That is RICH. Nevermind the grief involved with 3,000 people dying, new security measures being implemented, a restoration of the city's confidence, dealing with the economic/financial fall-out at several levels, trying to keep downtown Manhattan as a viable place to do business, I could go on and on.

But thanks pgabs, for reducing the 9-11 healing process to clean-up and planning. Nice.

no cred...

Giuliani was out of office within about 3 months of September 11, genius. :D

[Trader_Jorge]

Giuliani was out of office within about 3 months of September 11, genius.

Sam, you are showing the naivete of Obama if you believe that Rudy's leadership of post-911 recovery ended the day he left office.

Perhaps you should throw your hat in the ring for a job as Obama's public relations gaffe recovery team? You could man the Pakistani triage effort.

[FranchiseBlade]

Sam, you are showing the naivete of Obama if you believe that Rudy's leadership of post-911 recovery ended the day he left office.

Perhaps you should throw your hat in the ring for a job as Obama's public relations gaffe recovery team? You could man the Pakistani triage effort.
Perhaps you could provide specific examples of how Rudy continued to show leadership following the time he left office.

And since Rudy agrees with Obama's statement on Pakistan, perhaps you could head Rudy's triage.

[rimrocker]

The 9-11 recovery process was as simple as clean-up and planning? That is RICH. Nevermind the grief involved with 3,000 people dying, new security measures being implemented, a restoration of the city's confidence, dealing with the economic/financial fall-out at several levels, trying to keep downtown Manhattan as a viable place to do business, I could go on and on.


So none of this would have happened without Rudy?

[pgabriel]

another article about the same subject

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20312799/


As Rudolph W. Giuliani campaigns around the country highlighting his stewardship of New York City after the Sept. 11 attacks, he is widely hailed for bringing order to a traumatized city. But he has also raised the hackles of rescue and recovery workers by likening his experience to theirs.

On at least three occasions, in responding to accusations that the city failed to adequately protect the health of workers in the wreckage, he has boasted that he faced comparable risks himself. In one appearance he declared that he had been in the ruins “as often, if not more” than the cleanup workers who logged hundreds of hours in the smoldering pile.

Another time he brushed aside safety claims by asserting that his long hours at the site had left him susceptible to “every health consequence that people have suffered.”

A complete record of Mr. Giuliani’s exposure to the site is not available for the chaotic six days after the attack, when he was a frequent visitor. But an exhaustively detailed account from his mayoral archive, revised after the events to account for last-minute changes on scheduled stops, does exist for the period of Sept. 17 to Dec. 16, 2001. It shows he was there for a total of 29 hours in those three months, often for short periods or to visit locations adjacent to the rubble. In that same period, many rescue and recovery workers put in daily 12-hour shifts.

“I think Mayor Giuliani did a fine job as mayor during probably the most difficult time in American history, especially in New York history,” said Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association of New York City. “Having said that, it’s unfair for him to characterize himself as being in the same position as the first responders.”

Mr. Palladino said many of his members logged 30 hours in the first two days after the attacks, and most averaged more than 400 hours at ground zero and in the debris pile at the Staten Island landfill. They are among thousands who claim long-term health damage from the exposure.

Pillar of Giuliani's campaign
The details of those weeks are important for Mr. Giuliani’s campaign as he seeks to win the Republican nomination for president. His performance in those harrowing months after the attacks has become the main pillar of his case to become the next commander in chief, and something he reminds voters of frequently in debates and speeches.

The logs illuminate in minute detail what it was like to be mayor of a damaged city seeking to regain its footing after the attacks. The more than 600 pages include unscheduled stops and time blocked out for events with his children.

The months after the attack have emerged as the focus of a contentious battle over the health effects of the cleanup, with workers at the site saying that their long-term exposure to toxins there caused serious illnesses, and that the Giuliani administration failed to recognize the risks in pushing for a speedy cleanup.

The firefighters’ union has also taken umbrage at Mr. Giuliani’s rhetorical claims of being “one of them.”

John J. McDonnell, a battalion chief and president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association in New York, said many of his members worked weeks of consecutive 12-hour shifts on the rubble pile, interrupted only by nights sleeping on the floor of a nearby church.

It was in the context of the debate over health effects at ground zero that Mr. Giuliani said he spent at least as much time at the site as most of the rescue and recovery workers.

“I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers,” Mr. Giuliani said last week in Cincinnati. “I was there working with them. I was there guiding things. I was there bringing people there. But I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them.”

The next day, in an interview with Mike Gallagher, a talk show host, he expressed regret for the tone of his remarks, but reiterated the substance of them.

“I wasn’t trying to suggest a competition of any kind, which is the way it came across,” Mr. Giuliani said. “You know, what I was saying was, ‘I’m there with you.’ Gosh almighty, I was there often enough, even though they were there, people there more and people there less, but I was there often enough so that every health consequence that people have suffered, I could also be suffering.”

And in September 2006, The Associated Press quoted him as saying of ground zero, “I spent as much time here as anyone,” and then adding, “I was here five, six times a day for four months. I kind of thought of it as living here.”

Crushing burden of events
A sample by Mount Sinai Medical Center of 1,138 participants in its study of health problems among rescue, recovery and debris removal workers found that they had spent a median of 962 hours at the World Trade Center site, or the equivalent of about 120 eight-hour days.

The days after the attack for which no detailed records exist were when the dust from smoldering rubble was its thickest, and were also the most dangerous for exposure. Mr. Giuliani was engulfed in the smoke and debris from the collapsing towers the day of the attacks, and escorted President Bush to the site three days later.

The schedules, beginning Sept. 17, show a mayor wrestling with a crushing burden of events. MSNBC video


Giuliani's Ground Zero claims probed
Aug. 17: NBC Political Director Chuck Todd offers his first read on Rudy Giuliani's Ground Zero claims and Fred Thompson's first foray into Iowa.
MSNBC



On Thursday, Sept. 20, for example, he gave three nationally televised interviews before his daily 8 a.m. staff meeting at the command center on Pier 92. At 9:15 a.m., he presided over the opening of Nasdaq trading at Times Square. At 11 a.m., he led a United States Senate delegation on a tour of ground zero, followed that afternoon by a news conference and meetings with Muhammad Ali, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and another staff meeting. At 5:30 p.m., he left for Washington to attend President Bush’s address to Congress and returned to La Guardia Airport at midnight.

Alan I. Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University who specializes in voter behavior, said the Giuliani campaign’s focus on his Sept. 11 record has raised the stakes for any mischaracterization of his actions during that period.

“Its sort of like John Kerry making his war heroism a central focus,” Mr. Abramowitz said, “which may have contributed to the attention that was given to the swift boat veterans’ attacks on him.”

[rimrocker]

Hmmm. During the aftermath of 9-11, Rudy spent more time at Yankee games then he did at Ground Zero...

After 9/11, Rudy wasn't a rescue worker -- he was a Yankee
Giuliani said he spent as much time at ground zero as many rescue workers. Where was he really? Much of the time, at baseball games.

By Alex Koppelman
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/18/rudy_yankees/print.html

Aug. 18, 2007 | On Friday, a New York Times story examined Rudy Giuliani's schedule in the months after 9/11 to verify his controversial claim that, like rescue workers, he'd spent long hours at ground zero, and so was "in that sense ... one of them." In fact, the Times found, he only spent 29 hours at the terror site between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16.

What was he doing instead? Giuliani's beloved New York Yankees made it to the World Series in 2001. We decided to compare the time he spent on baseball to the time he spent at the ruins of the World Trade Center.

The results were, considering the mayor's long-standing devotion to the Bronx Bombers, unsurprising. By our count, Giuliani spent about 58 hours at Yankees games or flying to them in the 40 days between Sept. 25 and Nov. 4, roughly twice as long as he spent at ground zero in the 90 days between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16. By his own standard, Giuliani was one of the Yankees more than he was one of the rescue workers.

During three postseason playoff series that began Oct. 10, 2001, and ended Nov. 4, 2001, Giuliani attended every one of the team's home games, with the possible exception of the third game of the American League Championship Series, for which Salon could not confirm his attendance. According to Salon's arithmetic, Giuliani spent about 33 hours in stadiums -- this includes two World Series games he watched in Phoenix -- during the Yankees' 2001 postseason run, four hours more than he spent at ground zero. (We do not know if he stayed for every pitch, but famed baseball writer Roger Angell described Giuliani in the the New Yorker as a "devout Yankee fan, a guy who stays on until the end of the game.")

Giuliani also attended the first regular season game the Yankees played in New York after the attacks; that game lasted almost three hours. (We do not know if he was present for any of the Yankees' other seven post-9/11 home games.) And he spent one of the away World Series games in a specially reserved box with his son at the ESPN Zone in Times Square, London's Daily Mail reported. The Daily Mail said he did that, in fact, for every away game of the American League Championship Series and the Yankees' first-round Division Series against the Oakland A's, but Salon could not independently verify that report. (Giuliani watched the first game of the World Series from his City Hall office.)

Then there's the whirlwind tour Giuliani made traveling back and forth to Arizona for games six and seven of the World Series. Granted, he and his now-estranged children were traveling with a small entourage composed of the families of some of 9/11's victims; Major League Baseball had chipped in free tickets, Continental Airlines had donated a charter jet, and hotel rooms were comped as well. Still, once those families were in Arizona, Giuliani -- who had been predicting that game six would bring a Yankees victory and an end to the series -- made an extraordinary effort to ensure that he could attend to his responsibilities in New York and still make it back for game seven.

Giuliani left game six midway through, the Associated Press reported at the time, so that he could make his 12:30 a.m. flight back to New York, where he needed to spend some time discussing the U.S. anthrax attacks, which by then had touched New York's City Hall. The mayor was in Staten Island by 9:30 a.m. to kick off the New York City Marathon. Then it was back to the airport a few hours later, and on to Arizona for game seven. That, in total, meant 22 hours in the air.

But Giuliani's involvement with the team went far beyond a time commitment. He was, in fact, a visible, constant presence at the postseason games and, more than once, a participant in the team's victory celebrations. Dave Johnson, executive sports editor of the Evansville Courier & Press, even wrote a column at the time bemoaning Giuliani's omnipresence and saying, "If I didn't already dislike the New York Yankees, I'd root against them just because of Rudolph Giuliani ... Who anointed Rudy baseball's new Super Fan?" The mayor was pulled on the field after the Yankees clinched both the American League Division Series and Championship Series, and spent time in the clubhouse after those victories as well.

Nor did Giuliani's involvement start as some attempt to boost the city's spirits after the tragedy it experienced. As the Village Voice's Wayne Barrett has previously reported, Giuliani has four Yankees World Series rings from the time he was mayor; by contrast, Barrett reported, no mayor in any other city that's won a championship since 1995 has any Series ring at all. Barrett also reported that Giuliani attended at least 20 of the Yankees regular season games each year he was mayor.

Giuliani also found time during the period studied by the Times to, for example, make a call to slugger Jason Giambi exhorting him to leave the A's and sign with the Yankees. Giambi did, on Dec. 13. A day later, Giuliani introduced Giambi at City Hall, where, according to the Associated Press, Giambi said, "[Giuliani] was going to help me find somewhere to live, so I'm going to take him up on it."

And though the final budget he submitted as mayor called for serious belt-tightening around the city -- cuts as high as 15 percent for most agencies -- in the wake of the attacks and the $40 billion debt New York faced, Giuliani wasn't quite prepared to subject the Yankees or their counterpart Mets to the same penny-pinching. In fact, though nearly everyone expected 9/11 to cause the city to abandon the plans for new stadiums for the teams -- Long Island's Newsday reported that "since Sept. 11, several city officials, including [then-Mayor-elect Michael] Bloomberg, have said the projects were on the back burner because of the city's other pressing needs" -- Giuliani wanted to push forward. The stadiums were projected to have cost $1.6 billion in city, state and private funds.

Giuliani did need a place to play, after all. Though rumors were swirling at the time about what his future held after the end of his final term as mayor, Giuliani was generally unwilling to give specifics. He was willing, however, to jokingly suggest one possibility -- "right field for the Yankees," the Associated Press quoted him as saying while swinging an imaginary bat.

A spokeswoman for Giuliani did not return a voice-mail message left seeking comment.

[rhadamanthus]

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