Tuesday afternoon quarterbacking

I'd call it Monday morning quarterbacking, but it's been so long after the fact...And most of this seems like anger rather than reason. This story from the AP inspired this post.

Bloggers on the Left (check out this post, and other posts by the same (I wish I could use the words bitter moron, but I shouldn't, so I'll just go with) guy at this hate website) act as though Rudy Giuliani was simply in the right place at the right time on September 11th, that anyone could've held the city together that horrible day, it just happened to be him. Nothing could be more wrong.

There have been many moments in history where the right time and place converged with the wrong people and the wrong thing happened. Anyone remember Neville Chamberlain giving away Europe? If there had been the right person at that right place and time, someone with, say, a backbone to stand up to Hitler, who knows how history would've played out? Instead we got a few months of peace in our time, unless you lived in one of the areas Chamberlain ceded to the Germans, then you got war early.

I understand the anger and hurt feelings, as much as anyone who wasn't there could, but it seems misdirected and, dare I say, political.

Rudy is not simply the harmonic convergence of tragedy and microphones, he turned that city completely around from what it was under Koch and Dinkins. Crime, taxes, and welfare rolls slashed, Times Square taken from a place where you ran risk of a social disease if you inhaled too deeply, to a place where families pose for pictures. New businesses and jobs that come with them replaced barren wastelands; the city was cleaned up, graffiti wiped away.

Giuliani is much more than the "one trick pony" his political opponents try to paint him as, he is a leader who has demonstrated time and again the ability to bring about positive change to a place many had written off. He gave New York more than a face lift, he gave it a blood transfusion with full organ transplants.

Don't believe me, or don't really think the change was that dramatic? Go rent any movie set in New York made in the 80's this weekend. There will be a scene, there always is, set in Times Square, or some other recognizable section of the city. Then watch one made in the last 10 years. Compare the New York of Fort Apache, The Bronx to the New York of even an episode of NYPD Blue. If you don't see a difference, you aren't looking.

The Giuliani mystique is not a media creation, it is more than luck, and is certainly not myth. It is the result of the right place and time intersecting with the right person. History is littered with people who never rose the occasions with which they were presented. But history is made by those who did. Even before his heroic leadership of September 11th, 2001, Rudy Giuliani had risen to the occasions presented him. Without that tragic day, he would still rightfully be regarded as the man that saved New York, only instead of from a terrorist attack, it would've been from itself.

So as the media continue to throw mud, dig up past "scandals," make an issue of his personal life, remember what he has done, all that he has done. Before he was "America's Mayor," he was New York's Mayor. And he did a damn fine job at it.