CT Blue

By now, everyone who has access to the Internet knows that Rudy “9/11, 24-7” Giuliani recently said this:

“Under those eight years before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States,” Giuliani said.

Now, looking at it logically, there are three possible reasons why Giuliani might have said this:

1. He forgot about 9/11. Yes, I know, but we are talking about logical possibilities. If the multiverse theory is true, then there has to be at least one universe in which Giuliani could forget 9/11, if only for a moment, and there’s no reason why that particular lightning bolt couldn’t strike here.
2. He was intentionally lying.
3. He has, as a result of his interactions with the Trump campaign and Trump himself, descended into a delusional madness in which facts are fluid things, and in which a statement can be be both true and not true, in a way totally unlike the way Schodinger’s cat can be both dead and alive. Trump appears to be suffering from such a disease, and perhaps it is contagious.

Well Rudy has now spoken again, and we can apparently eliminate the first possibility, but it’s quite difficult to figure which of the other two applies:

I’m not there to give a major 45-minute policy address,“ he told the New York Daily News on Tuesday, referencing his introduction ahead of a speech by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on foreign policy.

“You speak in somewhat abbreviated language,” Giuliani said. “All human beings speak in abbreviated language at times.

“I didn’t forget 9/11. I hardly would. I almost died in it.” (Bloggers note: actually he didn’t. Other people did die, and lots of others almost died in it, but not Giuliani)

…

“Could I have repeated it at that point? In a way that you wouldn’t be asking me this question today? Sure,” he told the paper when asked if it was likely he would “find his foot in his mouth again.”

“But will I again say things in the future that can be taken out of context or misinterpreted? Of course I will,” Giuliani said.

via The Hill

Now, on the one hand, he is saying that he did in fact remember about 9/11 while he was speaking, so we can eliminate the “I forgot” defense. So, let’s turn to the other two possibilities.

Here’s the relevant definition of a lie, taken from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:

1. An act or instance of lying; an intentional false statement; an untruth. oe.

So, at one point Giuliani is saying that he made a statement that he knew to be false at the time. That means he lied and the sentence within which he makes that statement can be read, in isolation, as an admission that he lied.

But the rest of the statement appears to veer toward the delusional belief in shape shifting truth. He was speaking in “abbreviated” language. I won’t bother you with the dictionary definition of “abbreviated”, but I can assure you that Giulani’s usage here is pathbreaking. It can only be interpreted to mean that when one speaks in an abbreviated fashion, one is licensed to ignore facts that are at variance with said abbreviated statement, making the abbreviated statement true in the moment it is uttered, albeit it may not be true when an unabbreviated statement is more in the speaker’s interest. Thus, 9/11 both did and did not happen, depending on which set of facts (or, perhaps, which multiverse) is more convenient to the narrative Giuliani is pushing today.

One can almost feel Giuliani’s pain here. Even Trump has never had to weasel out of a lie this big, and to be perfectly honest, given the fact that Giuliani ran for president on the platform of “I was in New York on 9/11 and therefore know how to deal with terrorists”, it is difficult to see how even the finest Republican spinmeisters could put lipstick on Giuliani’s pig. One has to wonder why Giuliani even spoke to the Daily News about his “gaffe”, if he couldn’t come up with anything better than the standard Trumpian “taken out of context or misinterpreted” excuse, particularly because it’s fairly obvious that the statement 1) hasn’t been taken out of context, and 2) can’t be misinterpreted.

Assuming Trump loses, he will be doing the country a big favor, as he will be destroying Giuliani in the process, not to mention Chris Christie and Mike Pence. Who knows, maybe Bill Clinton really is behind all this.