Before an axe-grinding hack like Joan Walsh comes after me, she ought to get her facts straight.

Salon’s article asserts, “By his own standard, Giuliani was one of the Yankees more than he was one of the rescue workers,” but that’s just flat wrong, as their calculation assumes that Giuliani spent 0 hours at Ground Zero before September 17. That’s laughable, and anyone trying to come anything resembling a fair comparison would have tried to at least assign some amount of time to represent that in their calculations.

My calculation of three hours a day for six days may be completely off (I think it’s probably underestimating the time Giuliani spent there that first week) but at least it’s a non-zero value to an amount that she, reporter Alex Koppelman and I know is not zero. They lopped off the days that where the amount of time Giuliani spent there almost certainly was longest, and when the health risk was probably most significant, because A) the New York Times couldn’t find it and B) it doesn’t enhance the point Salon wanted to make.

Second, I contend including Rudy’s travel time to the World Series games is “goosing” his Yankee-watching total by 22 hours. If you’re going to count travel time, why not count his travel time to and from Ground Zero? I realize that amount probably amounts to only a few minutes each way each time, but the point is that Salon used different standards in measuring time in each category – travel time is counted in the amount they want to look high (Yankee-related activities) but not for the amount they want to look low (exposure to Ground Zero health risks). Any fair comparison would use the same standard. You would think somewhere among Walsh’s sneers at Jonah “typically” missing the point, she would address these objections, but I guess when there’s no justification, it’s easier to attack the messenger.

It’s very dramatic to say, as Salon states, “Giuliani spent about 58 hours at Yankees games or flying to them in the 40 days between Sept. 25 and Nov. 4, roughly twice as long as he spent at ground zero in the 90 days between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16.”

It’s much less dramatic to say the actual facts: “Giuliani spent 36 hours in attendance at Yankee games in the fall of 2001 and 29 hours at Ground Zero between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16, in addition to an undetermined amount of time during the first six days after the attacks.”

She also writes, “Geraghty claimed the mayor of 9/11 only took one round-trip plane ride to Arizona for the last two 2001 World Series games.” No. Check the link. I wrote “As I understand it, it was one trip for two games.” I try to be modest about assumptions, and when I make them, I make sure to include qualifiers. When reporter Koppelman e-mailed me to clarify that it was two separate trips, updated the post. It’s a shame the staff at Salon does’t have the same standards, as they have done nothing to update their report to clarify that by not counting the first six days, they’ve dramatically underrepresented the amount of time Giuliani spent at Ground Zero.

I’ll let the readers decide who to trust.

UPDATE: The unhinged Ms. Walsh responds again, insisting that she and the original report did acknowledge the fact that they didn’t include the first six days. They indeed say, “between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16,” but they still refuse to credit Rudy for any amount of time spent at Ground Zero in those first six days. The side-column blurb for her column says, “our reporting that Rudy Giuliani spent twice as much time going to Yankees games as at ground zero after 9/11.” If you mean “after 9/11,” then count Rudy’s total starting after 9/11, not 9/17.

In her original post jabbing at NRO, she writes, “was at ground zero (29 hours, according to the New York Times) in the months after 9/11.” No, in the months after 9/17. There’s a difference, Ms. Walsh.

The original article still doesn’t acknowledge that including the amount of time Rudy spent in the first six days would have significantly changed their total.

Why, oh why, won’t Salon admit that they should have counted those first six days if they wanted to get an honest total? Why do they consider snickering that I don’t have an intern as some sort of substantive response?

I have no interest in going any further with this pissing match with somebody who won’t admit a mistake; I’m reminded of that old saying about never getting into a bar fight with an ugly man because he doesn’t have enough to lose. I’ll close by pointing to this YouTube video of a short excerpt from the HBO documentary 9 Innings From Ground Zero, which I think illustrates the inanity of criticizing Giuliani for attending Yankees games. An unidentified but delightfully New York-accented speaker describes what the games meant to the city and to the country:

“At that moment, everybody there was there for baseball and to show the world that in spite of what can happen to us, we will pull ourselves together, and what is our life and our way of life will continue.”