Brodeur v. Rudy

My name is Christopher, and I have hated liars my whole life. They are the worst kinds of human beings. They are the ultimate cowards who don’t even believe their own arguments, hence their need to lie. I’ve made a point of exposing liars and hypocrites wherever they appear, and, boy, are my arms tired.

Due to tremendous bad luck, I moved to New York City from Boston just as Rudolph Giuliani, the Mount Everest of liars and hypocrites, took office. I spent the next eight years of my life investigating and exposing the mayor, and the more I investigated, the more corruption turned up–corruption that the media kept secret on behalf of a man who gave them billions of your tax dollars in kickbacks, er, corporate welfare.

Yes, the media kept his secrets, big and little. They’ve since admitted to covering up his adultery for months, until a gossip columnist finally went public with the scandal. Even Time magazine admitted that they ignored their own criteria to give Rudy their "Person Of The Year" award. It should’ve gone to bin Laden or the NYFD, but Rudy did AOL Time Warner a favor amounting to millions of dollars when he gave their Columbus Circle building the go-ahead, and that can buy a lot of white lies.

Our vapid and crooked NYC press corps covered up literally dozens of Giuliani scandals that I told them about, choosing instead to kiss the ass of a power-mad mayor. How much of a bastard was he? This is a guy who violated federal handicap laws that require curbs to be wheelchair accessible and instead gave more than one hundred million dollars to buy the Yankees and Mets farm-team stadiums in Coney Island and Staten Island.

Giuliani hated me so much that he repeatedly called me "sick and dangerous" and "mentally ill" on television and radio (after at least nine shrinks hired by him said that I was none of the above). He also sent his personal detectives to arrest me five times on false charges. I even got my own special prosecutor (because Robert Morgenthau’s district attorney’s office is just another crooked wing of City Hall). In the end, the charges against me bounced like rubber checks, because Giuliani is the world’s worst "crime fighter."

I snuck past the screeners on Rudy’s WABC call-in radio show 22 times (out of 24 tries) and each time, the cowardly, feeble and immature mayor refused to debate me on the issues. He’d simply kill my line and then insult me without allowing for a rebuttal. Those aren’t the actions of a "tough" man. That’s a coward.

Even today, every problem the city is facing–from the worst financial crisis in the city’s 300-year history to the unprecedented rents we’re paying–is the result of this maniac, and yet the media still refuses to tell you the real story. I can’t rest until this crook pays us back for the billions of dollars he indirectly stole. Bloomberg just settled one of my lawsuits against the city (due to Giuliani’s actions), but will the man responsible pay the $35K price tag? Nope. You will.

Like history’s great totalitarian minds, Giuliani knows that propaganda is everything. Everyone still believes that Rudy lowered crime and led the city on September 11–two complete falsehoods. They probably also believe Rudy isn’t bald.

And you thought the Giuliani administration was bad? Well, the movie about the Giuliani administration, shown last Sunday on the USA Network, is even worse.

Surely you saw the (thankfully vandalized) ads all over town, and perhaps you gave it a moment of thought before remembering that you don’t care about our ex-mayor. And surely you heard some of the furor over the use of real 9/11 footage, which turned out to be some of the only accurate images in this incredibly bad film. (They were edited down prior to broadcast.)

The film stars James Woods, the highly acclaimed actor who in this film couldn’t act his way out of a cardboard box. In fact, it seems as though he is portraying a cardboard box, stiff yet weak throughout this clumsy picture. Woods, who didn’t even attempt to recreate Giuliani’s legendary annoying lisp, claims to be a fan of the mad mayor. This is surprising, as artists usually hate right-wing thugs, but lucky for us that admiration never rears its ugly head.

Ugly: The Giuliani Story would’ve been a more appropriate title for this picture, because the entire film is, well, ugly. It’s hideous. A made-for-tv abortion. From the garish "cinematography" and the bizarre screenplay to the abominable acting by all, this film may be the biggest disaster I’ve seen since 9/11. Based on the excellent anti-Giuliani book by Wayne Barrett, the film somehow fails to accurately portray the really "bad" Rudy, despite the fact that its director, Robert Dornhelm, has said he’s no fan of the ex-mayor.

Rudy lazily rehashes the myths of Rudy’s "leadership" on 9/11, and (understandably) milks it, as this was probably the only way this film would find an audience or the funding to be made. What the marketing campaign didn’t tell us is, however, that the movie is a total fictionalization based very loosely on Barrett’s book (which, sadly, came out before 9/11). This is actually perfect considering that "Rudy in charge on September 11th" is equally fictional.

Giuliani’s leadership in the wake of the Twin Towers’ collapse was completely inept. His reputation is as justified as Bush’s Sept. 13 approval rating of 86 percent, which was earned by simply being a president with a pulse and vowing to catch Osama. If you don’t believe me, watch again the video footage of Rudy on that deadly morning. He’s walking up a cloudy gray Church St. like a headless chicken, shitting his pants in confusion while police commissioner Bernie Kerik is clearly the only level-headed, in-charge presence.

(That’s not to mention Rudy’s remarkable and criminal failures regarding 9/11, such as the real story about the Office of Emergency Management bunker, which Moron Rudy put in 7 WTC, defying even his own aides. But that’s another story.)

People want Big Heroes, of course, not Idiot Cowards. Rudy is a career camera-chaser, hungry for attention and any kind of validation to quell his super-insecurities, and on that day it paid off better than ever.

But back to the crap movie. Every single scene is a "dramatized" retelling, like the bad "reenactments" you see on tabloid television. The screenwriters simply made up most of the dialog, a fact that should’ve been explained to the viewers but wasn’t. (Giuliani himself would have nothing to do with the movie, probably because it didn’t paint him as Supreme Chancellor.)

In one especially painful encounter, we’re forced to watch Giuliani on his first date with future (second) wife Donna Hanover, as portrayed too reasonably in the only good performance in the flick, courtesy of Penelope Ann Miller. She’ s a liberal local-tv reporter in Miami; he’s the number-three big shot in Reagan’s Justice Dept. sent down to violate international law by blocking asylum to Haitian refugees fleeing the regime of Baby Doc Duvalier, a murderous, U.S.-approved dictator. Rudy and Donna are the perfect opposites-attract contrivance. How quaint.

And is it true that Rudy is not as "tough" in private? ("You never see his soft side," complained Eva Braun to her husband’s critics.) In fact, he is just as "tough" in private as in public, and the film correctly shows Rudy as a selfish prick to everyone, including his closest friends. He also neglects his family at every turn, like the good Christian family man he always boasted of being.

Unfortunately, the film shows Rudy’s unpleasantness to be motivated by "the law" and "improving NYC," two preposterous pretensions about a mayor who broke more laws than his 106 predecessors combined and who neglected his city in every way, all the while focusing his efforts on getting more attention and fame for himself. Portraying Rudy Giuliani as a law-and-order guy is like doing a movie about Bill Clinton and pretending he was a faithful husband with eyes that never strayed.

Ultimately, however, it’s the 9/11 scenes that people will care about. Yeah sure, without Rudy we’d have been up shit’s creek without a paddle. And without Rudy–

Wait a minute. Back up. Under Rudy’s watch, we went up the biggest shit’s creek in the city’s history. Three thousand New Yorkers were murdered in two hours, and we still don’t have a paddle.

Is there something I don’t know? Did Rudy stop a third plane from hitting us? Because even Rudy himself has admitted he abandoned good friends buried under rubble to get the fuck outta there, and he’s admitted to being on autopilot in the following months, going through the motions.

Al Sharpton had it exactly right: Rudy did not do one thing Bozo the Clown couldn’t or wouldn’t have done. This movie nonetheless keeps smoking the fiction dick, maintaining that Rudy was The Man Who Took Charge. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t 9/11 a series of amazing failures stacked upon amazing failures, most of them brought about by our government?

I laughed out loud (and cried inside) during the scenes of Rudy healing a wounded city. Silly me–I thought it was the booze and drugs, friends and family, terror sex and jingoism that comforted the citizenry. Along with Bono’s American flag jacket.

I actually enjoyed the crapalicious aspect of this film, but in the end it’s most definitely not So Bad It’s Good. For the Giuliani novice, I suspect the film would be nothing more than irrelevant crap with some chilling footage of real people jumping from the burning Twin Towers.

Will this film help Giuliani achieve his lifelong goal of becoming the first Italian-American president? Probably. So stock up on booze and drugs and cigarettes and terror-sex while you can. I hear they’re still closing down clubs where people are caught dancing–just another accomplishment on Rudy’s resume.