Rudy The Sunshine Patriot

I’d like to institute a rule among the media punditocracy and our political establishment that, when a member of this self-important group does something manifestly ignorant and stupid (as Rudy Giuliani did here), then that person should disappear completely from sight for at least a week (a month would be better, but there’s no sense being greedy).

And yes, I know there’s no chance whatsoever that that will happen, but all I can do is take a shot.

And since that is the case, Rudy! has appeared once more to inform us here that “the military option is definitely on the table” concerning Iran.

So I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at “Mr. 9/11” and his own military history. Let’s see what this guy who invented the “perp walk” did in the service of his country.

Joe Conason tells us the following (from here)…

Born in 1944, young Rudy was highly eligible for military service when he reached his 20s during the Vietnam War. He did not volunteer for combat -- as (John) Kerry did -- and instead found a highly creative way to dodge the draft.

During his years as an undergraduate at Manhattan College and then at New York University Law School, Giuliani qualified for a student deferment. Upon graduation from law school in 1968, he lost that temporary deferment and his draft status reverted to 1-A, the designation awarded to those most qualified for induction into the Army.

At the same time, Giuliani won a clerkship with federal Judge Lloyd McMahon in the fabled Southern District of New York, where he would become the United States attorney. He naturally had no desire to trade his ticket on the legal profession's fast track for latrine duty in the jungle. So he quickly applied for another deferment based on his judicial clerkship. This time the Selective Service System denied his claim.

That was when the desperate Giuliani prevailed upon his boss to write to the draft board, asking them to grant him a fresh deferment and reclassification as an "essential" civilian employee. As the great tabloid columnist Jimmy Breslin noted 20 years later, during the former prosecutor's first campaign for mayor: "Giuliani did not attend the war in Vietnam because federal Judge Lloyd MacMahon [sic] wrote a letter to the draft board in 1969 and got him out. Giuliani was a law clerk for MacMahon, who at the time was hearing Selective Service cases. MacMahon's letter to Giuliani's draft board stated that Giuliani was so necessary as a law clerk that he could not be allowed to get shot at in Vietnam."

His clerkship ended the following year but his luck held firm. By then President Nixon had transformed the Selective Service into a lottery system, and despite Rudy's renewed 1-A status, he drew a high lottery number and was never drafted.

“So necessary as a law clerk,” huh? And this guy who bailed out of Vietnam has no problem with sentencing untold numbers of our men and women in the military to fight, suffer, struggle and die in Mesopotamia and perhaps other locations in that area ad infinitum.

And another darkly humorous aspect of this is that he expressed his wish for “regime change” in Iran (those should be the two scariest words in the English language) in response to a question from Dennis Miller who, as noted here, polled as the lowest-rated commentator in the history of Monday Night Football according to this survey in the Philadelphia Inquirer (even behind career defendant O.J. Simpson).

Too funny, babe…