One Fraud Props Up Another

I apologize because this photo is a bit deceptive. Though I think it’s important to show the close ties of Rudy Giuliani and Dubya, it should really include Mike Fitzpatrick also.

So “America’s Mayor” campaigned for Mikey recently, huh? Oh, but Mikey is so independent of George W. Bush and doesn’t feel dependent upon him in any way at all, right?

And good for Patrick Murphy for sticking it to Giuliani for Rudy's disgusting comment that our troops were responsible for not securing 380 tons of missing explosives in Iraq which quite probably were used to make IEDs. How are our troops at fault if not enough of them were sent over to do the job anyway by the Bushco chickenhawks (and how is that comment "supporting them" anyway)?

This gives us an opportunity to take a closer look at Rudy, so why don’t we then, OK? Let’s start with Rudy’s bravura speech at the Repug National Hatefest in New York City in 2004 (including this excerpt).

At the time, we believed that we would be attacked many more times that day and in the days that followed. Without really thinking, based on just emotion, spontaneous, I grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and I said to him, "Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president."

Ah yes, Bernard Kerik. What an astute choice for Head of Homeland Security, Rudy. I’ll bet Dubya continues to thank you every day for that one.

And this childish attack on John Kerry and John Edwards in his speech still rings as clear to me today as it did then, unfortunately.

He even, at one point, declared himself as an antiwar candidate. And now he says he's pro-war candidate. At this rate, with 64 days left, he still has time to change his position four or five more times.

My point about John Kerry being inconsistent is best described in his own words, not mine. I quote John Kerry, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

Maybe this explains John Edwards' need for two Americas.

(This is partly Kerry’s fault I’ll admit. He could have put this to rest once and for all early on but he didn’t, which is sad because he had a perfectly logical explanation for doing what he did.)

Wow, you’re really a funny guy, Rudy. Do you know that? The only thing funnier than that that I can think of is your notion that you have any chance whatsoever of winning support from the Fundies and the other Dobsonite zombies out there in “the heartland” in your hopeless quest for the ’08 Repug presidential nomination the minute they find out that you’re a divorced, pro-choice Republican (from a blue state, of course) who brought his girlfriend to the mayor’s office when your wife and kids were there (tee hee – what a “laff riot”…even funnier when you consider that such an upright Christian man and father of six kids like Mikey chose to associate himself with Giuliani anyway).

And Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times reviews the movie “Giuliani Time,” which basically states that the events of 9/11 helped save Giuliani’s career, as it turned out.

What New York's aggressive "We Own the Night" policing policy did do was create fertile ground for several scandals involving overzealous officers. This included pumping 41 bullets into an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo and beating and sodomizing a man in custody, Abner Louima.

The mayor's other controversial programs including forcing people off welfare, which critics said created no real jobs and merely enlarged the underground economy, and a hostility to 1st Amendment rights that led to courts ruling against the Giuliani administration in 22 of 26 cases.

More than this, Giuliani consistently fell out of favor with people who had once been closely allied to him. Former New York (and now Los Angeles) Police Chief William J. Bratton says Giuliani "rules by intimidation and fear," and former city schools chancellor Rudy Crew says, "there's something very deeply pathological about Rudy's humanity. He was barren, completely emotionally barren on the issue of race."

Yes, I know he said, during the press conference after the 9/11 attacks, “we can’t let the bastards win” and thus captured how a lot of people thought and felt at that time, and not for a moment am I suggesting that he’s happy 9/11 took place for his own professional benefit (I would hope no one in existence would be ghoulish enough to suggest that).

But Giuliani, like Dubya and many others, has shamelessly milked the inconceivable tragedy of that day to his own advantage. And as far as I’m concerned, doing so in the name of partisan politics is only slightly less despicable than the actual tragedy itself.