What do Bernard Kerik and Michael Chertoff have in common?
- answer: both played a role in mass murder of Americans and were
groomed by ghouliani!
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/15/opinion/main1320191.shtml
What do Bernard Kerik and Michael Chertoff have in common?
Both have proven to be disastrous choices to head the Department of
Homeland Security. But that's not the only thing they share. Both
were enthusiastically championed for this all-important post by
Rudolph Giuliani.
As it happens, Giuliani was largely responsible for putting each man
on the political map and helping launch their careers. Kerik was
once Giuliani's driver. Giuliani subsequently made him his city
corrections chief and, eventually, his top cop. Kerik's 2004
nomination as Homeland Security chief was aggressively pushed by
Giuliani, which helped persuade Bush to take a flyer on nominating
him. We all remember how well that turned out. Kerik's nomination
promptly imploded after a host of ethical and financial problems
surfaced, and Giuliani subsequently had to apologize to the
president.
Chertoff, too, owes a great deal to Giuliani. When the former mayor
was U.S. Attorney in the 1980s, he hired Chertoff as a prosecutor
and mentored him. Chertoff sent a bunch of wise guys to the slammer,
effectively launching his career, and last year, Giuliani was gung-
ho about the choice of Chertoff for head of Homeland Security.
Now Republicans in the House are about to launch a searing report
about Katrina that demonstrates that the choice of Chertoff has been
nothing short of disastrous. As yesterday's Times puts it,
Chertoff "drew some of the most scathing criticism in the report"
for failing to anticipate the damage the storm would do and failing
to determine rapidly that the storm had breached a major levee.
Is Giuliani to blame for Chertoff? Not really. After the Kerik
fiasco, Giuliani understandably didn't appear to play a role the
selection of Chertoff. Still, Giuliani wholeheartedly endorsed
Chertoff. As he told the Houston Chronicle at the time: "Having
already assumed a great deal of responsibility in the investigations
of al Qaeda, Michael Chertoff has made clear his commitment to
keeping America safe. He'll be a superb Department of Homeland
Security secretary."
The fact that Giuliani championed both these men for this job should
tell us something about his judgment. His presidential campaign,
assuming he runs, will rest largely on the same rationale that
transformed him into a national figure to begin with: He led New
York in the aftermath of September 11. If you think Bush's reliance
on Sept. 11 is a tad over-the-top, wait until you see Giuliani in
action. He's given many, many speeches since leaving office, and in
them, he likes to urge his audiences to remember Sept. 11. What
Giuliani really means by this, of course, is that audiences
shouldn't forget his performance in the aftermath of that day. It's
not an overstatement to say that Giuliani wants audiences to see him
as nothing less than the primary living, breathing embodiment of the
city's — and the country's — ability to rally after the Twin Towers
disaster.
Now, however, thanks to the implosion of Kerik and the immense
failure of Chertoff, these audiences may end up remembering
something else about Giuliani. It's clear that the mere fact that
Rudy happened to be mayor that day — and his undeniably admirable
performance after the attack — has not translated into an ability to
recognize in people the qualities needed to carry out the job of
protecting the homeland from all manner of catastrophes, man-made
and otherwise. Being able to pick the right person for a job as
important as this one is, of course, a rather crucial trait in a
president. Giuliani's 2008 primary foes will likely do all they can
to make sure that audiences don't forget this.
There's a larger point here. Both Bush and Rudy chose Kerik, and now
Chertoff, largely because of one reason: They appeared to see the
nature of the terrorist threat in exactly the same light as Bush
did. Kerik was police commissioner on 9-11, and supposedly bonded
with Bush atop the smoking rubble; Chertoff, as assistant attorney
general, was widely criticized for helping implement the Bush
administration's policy of rounding up hundreds of Arab and South
Asian men without charges for months after the disaster.
In both cases, that narrow way of evaluating a potential head of
Homeland Security led Bush, and Rudy, to overlook the enormous flaws
these two men possessed — in Kerik's case, his many ethical
problems, and in Chertoff's case, his well-known lack of managerial
experience. Clearly, then, a willingness to see the terrorist threat
as a dire one is hardly by itself a guarantor of success in a
Homeland Security chief or, for that matter, in a president. If
Republicans — and the rest of us — keep that in mind in 2008, that
could bode ill for a man who's all but certain to try to sell
himself as presidential material largely on the basis of his actions
in the aftermath of that terrible day.
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