Rudy Giuliani is right...sort of, when he says he exposed himself to the same health risks as firefighters and others at ground zero.
Sort of, in that he claims he was at ground zero after the September 11, 2001, attacks as often, if not more than most of the workers. Michael Palladino, head of the Detectives Endowment Association, totally disagrees.
He argues that Giuliani's assessment of himself and the hours he put in at the destroyed World Trade Center can't be compared to the men and women who spent a full year there going though toxic debris.
They claim that Giuliani is using them as political pawns in his bid to be the Republican presidential candidate, and the reputation and boasting of feats past he's building for himself don't match up with the facts.
Also sort of, is that if Giuliani had really exposed himself to the "real" dangers, he would have moved his offices into the World Trade Center along with the emergency communications center after ignoring all the advice to place it elsewhere.
It's all in how one looks at it.
We did see Giuliani look to be purposefully striding around the smoke and dust-filled streets of New York City, when in reality he was meandering...looking for a place to alight.
While it true that by having breathed in the same air as the firefighters, police, rescue workers and everyone unfortunate enough to be there, he did expose himself to the same noxious air.
While he was taking those walks it was impossible to tell what kind of communications equipment he had with him, or if he had any thing other than his cell phone.
But, if he did have an emergency services radio with him, did he have the same ineffective one that prevented interdepartmental communications? The same defective radios that he didn't have the good judgement to replace.
As far as we know he was as exposed to the same air pollution as anyone else, which calls for much scrutiny, because we have no way of knowing how much he was affected by it.
In most of those photos and video tape we saw of him, he wasn't wearing a protective mask.
Masks aren't photogenic. My guess is the unmasked man chose photo-op opportunism rather than safety.
From all outward appearances, he shows no signs of having been poisoned by the contaminants that wafted through the city for weeks and months. For all anyone knows, they could still be floating around in the air, or kicked around by wind-blown dust on a breezy day.
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