Rudy’s Rhetoric
1999:
“When people overdo it about terrorism, terrorists actually win. You’re sort of like becoming agents and instruments of the terrorists.”
2007:
“They hate you!” says Rudy Giuliani in his new role as fearmonger in chief, relentlessly reminding audiences of all the nasty people out there. “They don’t want you to be in this college!” he recently warned an audience at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. “Or you, or you, or you,” he said, reportedly jabbing his finger at students. In the first Republican debate he warned, “We are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world, and it turns out planning inside our country, to come here and kill us.” On the campaign trail, Giuliani plays a man exasperated by the inability of Americans to see the danger staring them in the face. “This is reality, ma’am,” he told a startled woman at Oglethorpe. “You’ve got to clear your head.”
Conclusion (courtesy of FBI director Louis Freeh):
“If you compare [Rudy’s] remarks to what every politician and most of our citizens were saying on September 12, 2001, you would not find it noteworthy or unusual.”
More:
- In one 15-minute phone interview in August, Giuliani compared the terrorism threat with Nazism or communism six times (Time).
- “If one of them gets elected, it sounds to me like we’re going on the defense,” he said. “We’ve got a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. We’re going to wave the white flag there. We’re going to try to cut back on the Patriot Act. We’re going to cut back on electronic surveillance. We’re going to cut back on interrogation. We’re going to cut back, cut back, cut back, and we’ll be back in our pre-September 11 mentality of being on defense” (Washington Post).
Posted by Jonathan Rick in 
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