By Ankush
After Wayne Barrett’s (latest) takedown of Rudy Giuliani came out a few weeks ago, there was some talk about how the piece might have had a greater impact if it had run somewhere besides The Village Voice.
This week Time runs its version of the Giuliani bubble-burster,
and the results, while not nearly as impressive as Barrett’s article,
are still pretty decent. It’s not as thorough or meticulous as the Voice
piece, and the conclusions aren’t as direct or damning, but many of the
important pieces are there: Giuliani’s lies (not “exaggerations,” as Time calls
them) about his work “studying Islamic terrorism” for 30 years; his
substantively counterproductive use of fear mongering as a campaign
strategy; his shameless ignorance of even the most basic foreign policy
issues; even a line on Iran-crazed superhawk and maniac Norman Podhoretz, adviser to the campaign.
Considering
this comes from a national news magazine, it may be a sign that
Giuliani’s campaign rhetoric will start to be treated with the
skepticism it deserves, and that some people in the national press
corps will stop fawning over “America’s Mayor” simply because he had
the dubious distinction of being present on 9/11. It’s one thing to note that
the man is an egomaniac with a tawdry personal life — which is true —
but the more serious problem is that the entire Giuliani campaign is
built on a fraud about his competence, which, by and large, the media
has been aiding and abetting.
