‘TALE OF 2 RUDYS’
DeB: Get your bum story straight
Mayor de Blasio on Monday blasted former Mayor Rudy Giuliani as ”delusional” for blaming the spiraling homeless crisis on Hizzoner’s “socalled ‘progressive’ view” of dealing with vagrants living on the streets.
“I think he’s delusional. If you think about what Rudy Giuliani did as mayor, homelessness went up about 40 percent on his watch,” de Blasio said.
He claimed that Giuliani, mayor from 1994 to 2001, “clearly doesn’t remember the fact that he chased — as he said — he chased and chased people, but he also deprived families of benefits they needed and health care they needed.
“I was very struck by the fact that one day last week, you talk about chasing and chasing and chasing people, then [Timothy] Cardinal Dolan very powerfully reminded New Yorkers that people who are homeless are human beings who need help and need to get their lives turned around,” de Blasio said.
“At that point, you noticed that Giuliani changed his rhetoric and again, in a delusional manner, presented some wonderland in which he governed and provided all sorts of wonderful nurturing services for people.”
“Talk to all the people that worked on behalf of the homeless in those years,” de Blasio added.
“This is really a tale of two Rudys — one who said he likes to chase people away, and the other who suddenly thinks he was nurturing them.”
In an exclusive column for Sunday’s Post, Giuliani ripped de Blasio for letting homeless people live and relieve themselves on the streets, which he said “marked the Dark Ages of Western civilization.”
He also accused de Blasio of failing to provide treatment for drugaddicted and mentally ill homeless people, and shelters for the rest — saying that’s what he did as mayor “to successfully remove the vast majority of homeless from the streets, providing humane and effective solutions for many of their problems.”
On Monday, Giuliani called it a “shame” that de Blasio “has resorted to personal attacks on my position.”
“It indicates a great deal of defensiveness on his part . . . My article wasn’t a personal attack on the mayor,” he said.
Giuliani further faulted de Blasio for launching his broadside in the wake of four people being shot and two more stabbed during West IndianAmerican Day festivities in Brooklyn.
“This is not a day for the mayor to be attacking people,” Giuliani said.