Phony tough, and stupid to boot

Jonathan Chait explains GOP voters' attraction to Rudy! and, by extension, to Fred Thompson.

The war on terrorism, boasts Giuliani, "is something I understand better than anyone else running for president." This would be very scary if it were true. In recent weeks, Giuliani mistakenly said that it was unclear whether North Korea was further along toward a nuclear bomb than Iran, casually lumped together Shia Iran and Sunni Al Qaeda, and confessed he didn't know enough about the Bush administration's approach to terrorism detainees to take a position. In fact, Giuliani wasn't even a particularly good terrorism fighter as mayor. A mere six years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he decided to locate the city's emergency headquarters in the World Trade Center itself--the one spot in all New York City he knew had been targeted for attack. He also failed to ensure that police and firefighters could communicate with one another, with disastrous results.

But Giuliani isn't really saying he has the most expertise fighting terrorism. (After all, he has never held office beyond the municipal level.) Rather, he's trying to conjure the glow that Bush himself had in the days after September 11. Bush, his adoring fans used to say, "got it." To "get it" meant you had some metaphysical understanding of the war that transcended--indeed, was largely incompatible with--any actual knowledge. To the extent that "it" meant anything specific, it was the understanding that the war on terrorism was a war, not a police action, requiring land invasions of countries like Iraq. Most conservatives have quietly backed away from this particular vision, but the larger notion that the president must be a swaggering tough guy remains.

So, while Giuliani's boast may be absurd by my standards--he thinks he understands the war on terrorism better than, say, Joe Biden?--by Republican standards, it's simply obvious. Giuliani may not have any expertise as a war leader, but he excels at acting like one.

Kind of pathetic, really. It's short, it's pithy, and it captures the Giuliani mystique/mistake precisely.

This is not news. Giuliani ran New York like it was his fiefdom and he made decisions on security matters based, apparently, on his mood that day. Giuliani refused to order the New York police and fire departments to coordinate disaster response and protocol (i.e., who's in charge), for instance, let alone decide on which radios to use. His decision to put his emergency command center in the World Trade Center was laughable to nearly everyone in the city at the time.

And I can't wait for someone to unearth the video of a pre-mayor Giuliani leading a police riot at City Hall over wages during the Dinkins administration.*

He's transparently awful, and yet GOP voters seem delightfully unconcerned.

UPDATE: More from Roy on the Right's desperate desire to be lied to by their Bad Boy.

* UPDATE 2: The police riot Giuliani touched off in 1992 wasn't over wages at all.

Contrast the Mayor’s swift reaction to this technical violation to his own unpunished contribution to a police riot in 1992. Giuliani’s rhetoric egged on a crowd of cops demonstrating at City Hall against a proposal by former Mayor David Dinkins, the city’s first African American mayor, to create an independent board to review charges of police misconduct. A large section of the demonstrators, including officers who were drunk and shouting racial slurs, illegally blocked and marched over the Brooklyn Bridge, halting traffic for hours – no mere technical violation.