Doing unsolicited Heimlich maneuvers on us

Forget the authoritarianism and deep un-constitutional thinking, this guy is insane.

It is probably why Giuliani has gone on offense lately, with Walters and everybody else, wanting to make it perfectly clear that he wasn't moving on after wife No. 2 for just anybody. Oh, no. He was doing it for the closest thing he could find to Mother Teresa.

Here is what Giuliani had to say about his wife on Opening Day at Yankee Stadium:

"My wife is a remarkable woman. She has spent her life in medicine, medical science. She has spent her life saving lives. I've actually seen her act as a nurse and do Heimlich maneuvers and help people who have fainted. And this goes back 30 to 35 years.

"She was doing the same thing then - she was trying to figure out how do you save life and get to the point where you have better surgical procedures. She did the same thing with infectious diseases. She did the same thing with my own prostate cancer. She is a wonderful nurse, a woman who really cares about people.

"When I stand here, I think of the Twin Towers Fund she was on the board of; she helped organize it. She was at my side throughout Sept. 11. She was covered in soot."

Soot-covered?

Lupica gets the Giuliani experience exactly right.

But then Giuliani has always wanted things both ways, all along, before and after he became a hero mayor for doing his job in those first days after Sept. 11.

He wants to talk about what hedid at Ground Zero, and nottalk about the toxic quality ofair there. He wants to talk about everything he did after theplanes hit the buildings anddoesn't want to talk about his original command bunker being blown up along with everything else at the World Trade Center, or about the lack of decent radio communication for his firefighters.

He wants to talk to Barbara Walters about single-handedly cleaning up crime the way he single-handedly saved the city, but can't recall - Giuliani, the former prosecutor, trying to sell this - whether he might have been told about alleged mob ties to Bernie Kerik before Kerik became his handpicked police commissioner.

So it is the same now with Giuliani as it was when he was mayor: He's right, you're wrong. Back then, if he didn't like criticism about the shooting death of Patrick Dorismond by an off-duty cop, he releases Dorismond's sealed juvenile delinquency record. Now if you say something about Giuliani's wife, he doesn't just defend her, he acts as if the only thing that prevented her from curing all cancer was falling hard for him.

As for her history of saving lives...

In Sunday's Post, Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign spokesman, Michael McKeon, said of Judi Giuliani's work with U.S. Surgical, "She was in the operating room hundreds of times, using her nursing skills and training doctors in the stapling technique."

Asked yesterday about the procedure being performed on dogs, McKeon said, "I've never heard any of this before."

Then McKeon said he would have to ask Judi.

Finally, he said only that Judi had not been involved in procuring dogs for sales demonstrations - but did not comment on whether she participated in demonstrations involving dogs.

Judi Giuliani joined the company as a saleswoman in North Carolina in 1975 after spending a year working as a nurse.

At age 19, she married fellow U.S. Surgical salesman Jeffrey Ross, who she only recently disclosed was the first of her three husbands.

Giuliani spent four years at U.S. Surgical.

The company, now part of Tyco Healthcare, has long acknowledged its salespeople routinely demonstrated staples on anesthetized dogs as part of sales pitches to doctors.

Mother Theresa.