Perhaps the most annoying part of Rudy Giuliani's Presidential campaign is the candidate's insistent flogging of 9/11, of the dead of that day and of the heroism of others. Giuliani has managed, with remarkably little public questioning, to clutch at the heartstrings of the nation, and to channel grief and horror into a narrative that places his aspirations to advancement squarely in the center of the national consciousness.

If you think you've seen this before, you have: Giuliani's maneuvering recalls nothing so much as George Bush's 2000 positioning as 'a uniter, not a divider', a branding effort born out of a deliberate misrepresentation of his record in Texas. Of course, then as now, the press disseminated the glowing falsehoods and drowned out any facts that might sow discord with the comfortable storyline. Then as now, the actual record of a republican candidate is one of cronyism and incompetence.

This time around, however, there are some uncomfortable questions occasioned by a pile of corpses sitting squarely on the former mayor's doorstep. These are, of course, the firefighters that rushed into the burning towers on 9/11 with malfunctioning radios, to be killed in their hundreds.

The Real Rudy is taking on the history and asking some questions that the former mayor's speechifying and truthiness have failed to address.

The Albany Project sums up:  read more »