Earlier this year, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani was campaigning so eagerly for Donald Trump that he confused Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima. In a “Face the Nation” interview he wrongly stated that an officer who savagely “attacked” Diallo, the immigrant from Guinea, was currently serving time.
Most New Yorkers know that it was Louima who was sodomized by Justin Volpe in 1997. Diallo was killed in the Bronx in 1999 after four officers unleashed a fusillade of 40 bullets, 19 of them riddling his body.
And most people in the known world remember the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the historic 9/11 date. But Giuliani, in his determination to cast aspersions on President Obama and elevate Trump, seemed to have forgotten this unforgettable moment.
During a speech introducing Trump in Youngstown, Ohio, Giuliani told the audience that there were no terrorist attacks during President George Bush’s term in office.
“Under those eight years, before Obama came along,” he said, “we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States. They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.”
It is rather baffling, but not incredible, that a mayor who has capitalized so widely and so intently on his role as a “hero” during the attack that left thousands dead has conveniently blocked it from memory. And this gaffe wasn’t his first at the event. He probably has also forgotten or misremembered the Patrick Dorismond incident, in which he chose to open the dead man’s juvenile file after he had been shot and killed by undercover officers in 2000.
Perhaps in the same way he was willing to criminalize Dorismond to rationalize the shooting, he is working overtime to sell the American public on the virtues and the need to elect Trump as the next president.
Some may be willing to cut Giuliani some slack on his failing memory and concede the recent fall and bump of his head in the shower may have been more damaging than even he realizes.
A failing memory is one thing, but his support of Trump’s comments about the Second Amendment and how the advocates of it should take action to stop Hillary Clinton from nominating the judges of her choice is reprehensible.
But being reprehensible and despicable places the former mayor on common ground, and it also positions him in fine company with a man, many believe, is equally abominable.
