Unsurprisingly, Rudy Giuliani Has the Worst 9/11 Take So Far

3 min readScarfed some extra holiday time this weekend to refurbish the shebeen and recharge the staff before the midterm rush. However, long about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday night, sitting at Fenway, watching the Sox lose to the largely anonymous California Angels, I looked back at the time I took off, and at the prospects for the week ahead, and I seriously considered doing a Gauguin and heading for French Polynesia.First, we are coming up on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which means the National Hot Take Derby is well underway. The biggest noise is coming from a chorus of bigots in NYC that is demanding that Mayor Zohran Mamdani not attend the ceremony at Ground Zero. Mamdani, who was 9 years old when the attacks occurred, stands accused of extreme public Muslimhood by various community leaders. There is nothing that livens up a solemn memorial ceremony like a display of red-faced xenophobic hysteria.However, Mamdani is not to trifled with. After some ranting from Rudolph Giuliani, Mamdani released 170,000 documents demonstrating that NYC officials at the time—Hi, Rudy!—lied to the entire city about the dangers of toxic air in and around Ground Zero. A noun, a verb, and asbestos poisoning. From the BBC:Asbestos was found "nearly everywhere" tested near Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers collapsed in 2001, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said. "People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air," he said, announcing the release of 170,000 documents related to the attacks. Illnesses related to the dust and smoke from the towers' collapse have claimed more lives than the nearly 3,000 who died in the attacks, U.S. health officials say. Thousands of people have experienced health effects like cancer, including many who have died, after breathing in hazardous contaminants after the Twin Towers collapsed.It's beginning to look as though the country is never fully going to fit into the flow of the American narrative. Too many people find it too handy a cudgel and, apparently, always will.Speaking of which, the MAGA crowd's latest weaponized tragedy is the killing of three children up here in Duxbury by their mother, Lindsay Clancy, whose case became one of Those Trials and ended in a hung jury. Apparently, there was one holdout juror for conviction, who is now being lionized on social media by the likes of soon-to-be-former Congresswoman Nancy Mace and half the podcasters in the universe. None of these people, of course, care a damn about the three murdered children except as handy talking-points. There is something obscene in that.Meanwhile, back in Our Nation's Capital, the president has gone around the bend. He spent Labor Day weekend posting AI slop, most of which was laughable own-the-libs crackpottery.“For nine months, rescue and recovery crews worked day and night on the site. I want to just thank my people; I took a lot of my me(n)—I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened,” he said. “And they were—they had no hesitation—everybody went down with me. We went down, it was a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest—it was, you know, it was raw, and nobody’s seen anything like it, ever. We had other buildings; the United States Steel building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down; the truth is it creaked a lot, it creaked. It still creaks. But it never came down, and I re(member)—I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen—big, strong guys—and I’m not the smallest guy in the world—they grabbed me under the arms, said, ‘Gotta get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing, but they thought it was coming down; it didn’t come down. U.S. Steel.”And now he's off to Dallas for his two-day ego-stroking midterm convention, and I am fighting the temptation to say that it's the worst political event that city ever has seen, at least the worst that didn't involve Jack Ruby. This country ain't right.