July 15, 2007

RUDY REVISITED. During the weeks after September 11, Rudy Giuliani was the human face of authority in a besieged New York City, a ubiquitous presence, part official, part paternal. He appeared daily on our television screens, walking the streets, offering interviews, holding press conferences, attending memorials. His somber, sympathetic manner, confidence, resolve, and hands-on management style reassured a grieving and beleaguered populace.

But now that Giuliani is running for the Republican presidential nomination, many are questioning the depth of his post-9/11 leadership and pointing to various cracks in that veneer. This week, the International Association of Fire Fighters released a 13-minute video, VIEWABLE HERE, that uses on-screen testimony from many New York City firefighters to undercut Giuliani's image as New York's consummate 9/11 commander.

You be the judge.

NEW BIN LADEN VIDEO?Today there are news reports of a short clip, posted online, that may very well show recent footage of Osama bin Laden, who hasn't appeared in a new video since last summer. His subject: the blessings of Martyrdom.

It is important to note that bin Laden's modus operandi throughout the 1990s and ever since he was chased out of Afghanistan has been to signal an impending attack with some video or audio foreshadowing or call to arms. The footage--still unconfirmed as "new"--has surfaced, however, during a time of heightened security concerns. This week it was revealed that the U.S. intelligence community believes the al Qaeda threat is more acute today than at any period since 9/11.

The Associated Press is reporting today that "a new U.S. intelligence assessment being released to Congress this week is expected to say that al-Qaida is stepping up its efforts to sneak terrorist operatives into the United States and has acquired most of the capabilities it needs to strike here. The National Intelligence Estimate is expected to point in particular to al-Qaida's growing ability to use its base along the Pakistan-Afghan border to launch and inspire attacks. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff last week said he had a 'gut feeling' that the nation faced a higher risk of attack this summer. "

I hate to say it, but: When in doubt, go with your gut.

AND IN THE "QUICK READ" DEPARTMENT...

BUSH FLUNKS HIS HISTORY LESSON. David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, war correspondent, and sage, perished in a car crash in California this spring, at age 73. In its current issue, Vanity Fair, where Halberstam was a contributing editor, publishes his final dispatch—on how Bush and his cronies are trying to veil their mistakes in the cloak of “History,” even if their evocations of Yalta and the Cold War, Roosevelt and Truman are sorely strained and off the mark. (Also viewable at VanityFair.com).

One of the highlights of the piece:
“Many of us have always sensed a deep and visceral anti-intellectual streak in the president, that there was a great chip on his shoulder, and that the burden of the fancy schools he attended—Andover and Yale—and even simply being a member of the Bush family were too much for him. It was as if he needed not only to escape but also to put down those of his peers who had been more successful. From that mind-set, I think, came his rather unattractive habit of bestowing nicknames, most of them unflattering, on the people around him, to remind them that he was in charge, that despite their greater achievements they still worked for him.”

GLAND-EMONIUM. Given the hi-resolution blare of the new glossy tabs and the paparazzi Web sites, we now get our celebrities served up like sushi: raw, fresh, and bite-sized. In today’s Times, Virginia Heffernan writes about this relatively recent phenomenon:

“Us Weekly and its copycats quickly reinvented celebrity photography, eschewing production stills and party pictures in favor of snapshots. But they didn’t only go for red-carpet fashion photos, or the gotchas that come along once in a lifetime: Gary Hart with Donna Rice, Kate Moss with cocaine. Instead they focused on the mundane: stars in supermarkets, dog parks, parking lots. In all that natural light they looked indistinct, sometimes homely. At first I thought, who cares? But then the magazines taught me to care, and mistake the new unkempt images for intimacy, if intimacy is something I might achieve by rooming with a celebrity at a mental hospital….

“Forget the hourglass figures of stars of old; now fans and anti-fans simply seem to want small pink dots of light, partially obscured, that seems to represent human glands.”

PLOP VALUE. On a related note, the Times media columnist David Carr recently referred to the alluring, unquantifiable "plop value" inherent in the best of the glossy magazines. Great phrase, that. (VIEWABLE HERE, if you have Times Select.)