Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani told the New York Daily News Tuesday that he definitely has not forgotten the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which have so far defined the United States’ foreign policy in the 21st Century. One would think there’d never be a need for Giuliani to make this statement, but his Monday statements really led folks to wonder.
Giluliani had introduced Donald Trump at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio by telling the crowd, “In [the] eight years before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attacks in the United States.” The obvious oversight caused a firestorm of jokes and criticism, especially considering Giuliani’s personal ties to the September 11 attacks. In addition to being the mayor of New York City during the attacks and their aftermath, he cited his response to them as a testament to his qualifications during his presidential campaigns.
For his part, Giuliani told the Daily News that he was “not [in Youngstown] to give a major, 45-minute policy address,” and that he was speaking in “somewhat abbreviated language.”
“When you’re giving a speech, you only have five minutes,” Giuliani said. “You can’t give an encyclopedic explanation.” He went on to ask himself, then answer a rhetorical question: “Will I say things in the future that can be taken out of context or misinterpreted? Of course I will.”
(Via New York Daily News)