Live from East Palestine, it’s Rudy Giuliani!
“Welcome to ‘Talk With the Mayor’ or America’s Mayor, whichever you would like better,” he said as he introduced his live podcast on Thursday night. “America’s Mayor sounds kind of nice, right?”
That was the moniker by which he became known after the 9/11 attack, which killed 2,753 people in downtown Manhattan and catapulted him from being a lame-duck embarrassment into a hero among those who saw him on TV. On Thursday, he was podcasting from the scene of a different kind of disaster: a railroad derailment that has left a town of more than 4,700 to wonder if their future is poisoned by dangerous toxins.
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“I’m here to help as a former mayor with extensive crisis management experience,” Giuliani said.
He then proceeded to say what he should have said in the aftermath of 9/11, but did not, when confronted with concerns that the toxic fallout from the collapse of the twin towers could cause serious health problems.
“There’s still a lot of questions, and I don’t think those questions are gonna be answered by anyone right away if they’re telling the truth,” Giuliani said in East Palestine. “One of the problems in government is in order to satisfy people, the people in government give the answers that either they think people want to hear, or the answers that they think businesses want to hear, or the answers they want to hear.”
He spoke as if he had not been one of those people in government who gave answers that were expedient at the moment.
“They don’t do the more difficult thing of saying, ‘I’m sorry, we’re not at a stage yet where we have enough evidence to really make a determination like that,’” he went on.
He said that he initially thought that deaths from the World Trade Center attack ended that day. But, he continued, “it turned out many, many people died of various forms of toxic poisoning that was undetected at the time, even though testing was done,” he continued.
Lie.
As Giuliani knows—and as New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting five weeks after the attack—testing at Ground Zero after 9/11 detected dangerous levels of a host of poisons, including benzene, dioxins, and PCBs. Giuliani nonetheless sought to minimize the threat in an Oct. 26, 2001, press conference.
“The Daily News today had a story about how the zone is a ‘toxic danger,’” Giuliani said. “And the reality is that although obviously very, very close to where the work is being done there are dangers and risks, the reality is far different than the way the article described it.”
He had New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Neal Cohen on hand to further refute the column.
“We don’t believe that there are any risks here with respect to long-term health effects and that occasional uptick in elevated readings that are taken with some of these with pollutants, generally those return to acceptable levels,” Cohen said.
The exact number is hard to determine, but the World Trade Center Health Registry has said that more people have died of 9/11-related illnesses than perished in the attack.
In Ohio on Thursday night, Giuliani gave a warning that would have applied to him 22 years ago.
“No matter what you hear, and no matter how definitive it sounds, I do not logically believe that at this stage people can give you definitive information,” he said. “And if they are, they’re… probably not even lying unless they have some monetary motive, they’re probably trying to feel important.”
The man who made himself into America’s mayor by standing in front of TV cameras then said, “One of the problems with television is we put too many people on television, they have to have opinions, and then they make them up.”
One result of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s shameful days-late arrival at the scene of the derailment is that he ended up having to wait while Giuliani was meeting with East Palestine’s mayor, Trent Conway. Giuliani still seemed pleased as he gushed about Conway on the podcast afterward.
“He’s a very, very fine man,” Giuliani said. “A very nice man. A very straight, direct, and honest man. An intelligent man. And that's all you need. You don't need to be fancy Mayor Adams to be a good mayor.”
Giuliani then let slip his actual self: the vindictive, jealous, and just plain mean Rudy.
“Sometimes fancy mayors go to jail,” Giuliani said, going on to again name-check the current mayor of New York City. “I’m not saying Mayor Adams would go to jail, but we’ve had some fancy mayors that have gone to jail.”
Adams does not seem to be in any immediate danger of landing behind bars. But the same cannot be said for Giuliani, who was so unfancy when he assumed office that he used paper clips to hold up the cuffs of his suit pants. He is now being investigated for everything from perjury to insurrection.
After his visit to East Palestine to advise them how America’s Mayor would handle a toxic event, he is lucky hypocrisy is not a felony.
