Dan

Calabrese

Read Dan's bio and previous columns here

January 1, 2008

Why Does Giuliani Talk About 9/11? Why Doesn’t Everyone?

Of all the strange criticisms being leveled at presidential candidates in this election year – and it finally is election year – the strangest is this one, frequently leveled at Rudy Giuliani:

Why do you talk about 9/11 so much?

The implication is presumably that Giuliani is trying to live off his reputation for crisis leadership during 9/11, and he keeps bringing it up because that’s what he wants everyone to remember about him – and he has nothing else to talk about.

For one thing, the charge is not true. Giuliani is well-versed and well-spoken on all the major issues of the campaign. Take a listen to any Giuliani speech or interview, and you’ll find that the time he’s most likely to mention 9/11 is when someone asks him, “Why do you always talk about 9/11?”

But in addition to not being true, the charge is weird.

When did talking about 9/11 become objectionable? When did one of the seminal events in the history of this nation become irrelevant to the presidential campaign?

It’s not hard to see why some people would not want to talk about it. Many Democrats don’t want to talk about 9/11 because it reminds people of the fact that we have to take terrorist threats seriously – and they don’t want to do that. They liked it better when we all had our heads in the sand and labored under the illusion of “peace and prosperity” during the Clinton years.

And it’s not hard to see why civil liberties fetishists don’t want to talk about 9/11, because they are paranoid cranks who are afraid that any time the general public puts its trust in the federal government to root out a problem, they will end up breaking into their houses and reading their recipe cards.

But these people are silly freaks. Why would anyone take them seriously?

And why would relatively normal Americans expect the too-much-9/11-talk charge to resonate? Have we really decided that it’s time to move on and put 9/11 in the past?

The national unity that we briefly enjoyed after 9/11 lasted about as long as it took for the 2002 congressional campaign to start. That was when Democrats were shocked – shocked! – that President Bush and the Republicans actually mentioned national security in the campaign. How dare they! And this after the Democrats even said a few nice things about the president for at least four or five days after the terrorist attacks.

When Bush actually used images of 9/11 in 2004 campaign ads, Democrats were scandalized and the mainstream media reported the “story” as if it were somehow controversial that the president would mention one of the most important events in American history in telling us why he thought he should be re-elected.

Terrorism and how to deal with it is a political issue. Every candidate should talk about it. And 9/11 was a political event insofar as it framed the issue that remains the most dominant on the American political landscape.

If Giuliani did not talk about 9/11, he would be guilty of a glaring omission. Any other candidate who doesn’t talk about 9/11 (or worse, blames America for it like kooky Ron Paul) should be disqualified from any serious consideration.

Like it or not, 9/11 was one of those moments that reminded everyone that ours is a decent nation, and that our enemies are ruthless. It reminded us that we can’t just send weak-kneed diplomats to the United Nations to vote on meaningless resolutions and congratulate ourselves for “doing something” about problems in the world.

It reminded us that there are evil bastards who will kill us if they get the chance, and we need to kill them first. Rudy Giuliani does us all a service by reminding us of this. Anyone who thinks it’s not a worthy subject, or is just sick of hearing it, needs a jolt back to reality.

This is Column # DC140.  Request permission to publish here.