Rudy Giuliani offered up lots of 9/11 stories to the RNC in his Monday night speech, but perhaps none as attention-grabbing as this:
"...as we stood on the pavement watching a cloud come through the cavernous streets of lower Manhattan... I grabbed the arm of then Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and I said to him, 'Bernie, thank God George Bush is our President.'”
The camera quickly panned to Kerik in the convention hall, whose appreciative expression could have been interpreted a number of ways. Perhaps a recognition of a shared recollection? Perhaps an acknowledgement of strategic invention by his former boss?
How would we ever know?
The New York Times' Kevin Flynn pursues the question on behalf of skeptics everywhere.
Especially in an age when battling campaigns are pouncing on each other's rhetoric (Flynn reports that Democratic Party officials were also asking questions), this piece is a great example of a critical media function: the indepenent checker of the record.
Question: Did anybody apply similar scrutiny to Vanessa Kerry's story about her dad rescuing Licorice the Hamster?
Here's an entertaining (fictional) riff by Newsweek satirist Andy Borowitz. Not to make too much of old quotes and soggy hamsters, but still wondering if anybody checked biographies, old friends, etc. to see if they'd ever heard the tale before.
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