Jim and Jonah posted on Salon’s hit piece on Rudy today, with Jonah writing:

In other words, most of some 8 million (or whatever the number is these days) New Yorkers were unable to see anything wrong with Giuliani’s behavior at the time (and as Jim suggests they saw it as a welcome return to normalcy for a shaken city).

Pulitzer Prize winning sport’s columnist Dave Anderson actually touched on some of this in his Thanksgiving column in 2001. Some excerpts (Times Select required):

IN sports, Thanksgiving has a greater meaning this year. It’s still a time to thank those who make sports’ little corner of the world a better place. But since Sept. 11, many have earned special thank-you notes for honoring those who died and for drying the tears of the rescue workers as ground zero continues to smolder: […]
The Mets, the first team to wear FDNY and NYPD caps when the baseball season resumed; they also were the first to donate one game’s salary to the relief effort. […]
Vinny Testaverde, who twice visited the ruins of the World Trade Center only a few blocks from where his late father, Al, had worked as a mason. He has a crushed chunk of cement in his locker at the Jets’ practice complex in Hempstead, N.Y. […]
The three dozen Giants who, within a week of the attack, visited ground zero and several Manhattan firehouses; the Giants also invited firemen’s children to join the coaches and players in a team picture. […]
Bobby Valentine, the Mets’ manager, who spent long hours at the Shea Stadium staging area where supplies were routed to ground zero. […]
Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson and all the Arizona Diamondbacks who visited ground zero only hours after arriving in New York on an all-night flight for the middle three games of the World Series, which they would win with a ninth-inning rally in Game 7 in Phoenix. […]
And all the others in sports who contributed money or time, or both, especially those who preferred to keep it quiet even if they couldn’t. As the legendary owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the late Art Rooney, once said: ‘’If you talk about it, it’s not charity.’’ But both before and after Sept. 11, others in sports deserve a thank-you note: […]
And a gilded thank-you note to Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the Yankee fan who set the style of wearing FDNY and NYPD caps while guiding the New York area through the sorrow of ground zero.