Rudy and Bernie and The Red Sox

Nothing is more illuminating of the character of Rudolph Giuliani than his creepy relationship with Bernard Kerik. The Times story today gives a great background on the history of that relationship and Giuliani's odd loyalty to his noxious friend.

In December 2004, President Bush nominated Mr. Kerik, a former New York police commissioner, to head the federal Department of Homeland Security. Seven days later, Mr. Kerik withdrew as a nominee.

A cascade of questions followed about his judgment as a public official, not least that he had inappropriately lobbied city officials on behalf of Interstate Industrial, a construction firm suspected of links to organized crime. Mr. Giuliani defended Mr. Kerik, a friend and business partner, whom he had recommended to the Bush administration. But he also tried to shield himself from accusations that he had ignored Mr. Kerik’s failings.

“I was not informed of it,” Mr. Giuliani said then, when asked if he had been warned about Mr. Kerik’s relationship with Interstate before appointing him to the police post in 2000.

Mr. Giuliani amended that statement last year in testimony to a state grand jury. He acknowledged that the city investigations commissioner, Edward J. Kuriansky, had told him that he had been briefed at least once. The former mayor said, though, that neither he nor any of his aides could recall being briefed about Mr. Kerik’s involvement with the company.

But a review of Mr. Kuriansky’s diaries, and investigators’ notes from a 2004 interview with him, now indicate that such a session indeed took place. What is more, Mr. Kuriansky also recalled briefing one of Mr. Giuliani’s closest aides, Dennison Young Jr., about Mr. Kerik’s entanglements with the company just days before the police appointment, according to the diaries he compiled at the time and his later recollection to the investigators.

The additional evidence raises questions not only about the precision of Mr. Giuliani’s recollection, but also about how a man who proclaims his ability to pick leaders came to overlook a jumble of disturbing information about Mr. Kerik, even as he pushed him for two crucial government positions.

“Rudy can fall for people big time, and sometimes qualifications are secondary to loyalty,” said Fran Reiter, a former Giuliani deputy mayor who now supports Hillary Clinton. “If he gets it in his head he trusts you, he is extremely loyal.”

Mr. Giuliani has routinely met loyalty with loyalty, standing by political allies and friends in their darkest hours. Giuliani Partners, for example, his consulting firm, employs a high school friend, Msgr. Alan Placa, despite allegations that he sexually molested young men years ago.

Mr. Giuliani has said he believes in his friend, who has denied the allegations and was not criminally charged.

In Mr. Kerik’s case, by the time Mr. Giuliani recommended him for the federal job, his administration knew that Mr. Kerik had acted on behalf of Interstate Industrial. It also knew that he had drawn criticism for a range of other incidents, from sending detectives to search for his lover’s cellphone to using officers to research his autobiography.

And creepy that relationship was.

The men who would become patron and protégé first met at a fund-raiser in 1990 in New Jersey honoring a slain New York City police officer.

Mr. Kerik was a comic book hero come to life, a decorated undercover detective with a ponytail and earrings, thick biceps and a taste for four-letter words as nouns, verbs and adjectives. He cultivated relationships with powerful people, including an influential sheriff who five years earlier had made him the youngest jail warden in the history of Passaic County, N.J.

When Mr. Giuliani ran for mayor in 1993, Mr. Kerik organized his security detail of off-duty officers, reserving the weekend shift for himself.

When Mr. Giuliani became mayor, he gave Mr. Kerik a job in the Correction Department. A year later, the mayor asked him to drop by Gracie Mansion.

The two men sat upstairs and shared a bottle of red wine, a gift to the mayor from Nelson Mandela. Mr. Giuliani said he planned to appoint Mr. Kerik as first deputy correction commissioner.

Mr. Kerik, who wrote of this in his autobiography, “The Lost Son,” was taken aback; he was a year removed from being a police detective.

“Mayor, I appreciate your confidence in me, I really do,” he said. “But I ran a jail. One jail. Rikers is like 10 jails.”

Just do it, the mayor replied.

Mr. Kerik followed Mr. Giuliani downstairs to a dimly lighted room. There waited Mr. Giuliani’s boyhood chum Peter J. Powers, who was first deputy mayor, and other aides. One by one, they pulled Mr. Kerik close and kissed his cheek.

“I wonder if he noticed how much becoming part of his team resembled becoming part of a mafia family,” Mr. Kerik wrote. “I was being made.”

Giuliani's attraction to the comic book hero is similar to Bush's who also decided that vetting the nominee for the Dept. of Homeland Uber Alles just wouldn't be cool. Both men prefer fantasy to reality, comic book moments over policy.

Oh, but we were discussing "loyalty."

"I'm rooting for the Red Sox," the Republican presidential contender Tuesday told a Boston audience, just a few T stops from Fenway Park.

"I'm an American League fan, and I go with the American League team, maybe with the exception of the Mets. Maybe that would be the one time I wouldn't because I'm loyal to New York."

Later in New Hampshire - a loyal dominion within New England's Red Sox Nation and, more importantly to Giuliani, home of the first primary in 2008 - the former mayor expanded on his heresy.

"Somehow it makes me feel better if the team that was ahead of the Yankees wins the World Series," he told a group of mostly local reporters in explaining his sudden backing of the Red Sox, "because then I feel like, well, we're not that bad."

Revering Rudy

The 9-11 Commission leaders admit to giving Giuliani a pass.

“We did not ask tough questions, nor did we get all of the information we needed to put on the public record,” they wrote.

The commission’s gentle questioning of Mr. Giuliani during his May 19, 2004, testimony at the New School University in Greenwich Village was “a low point” in its handling of witnesses at its public hearings, they wrote.

The 10-member commission was established by Congress in 2002 to investigate the government response to events leading up to and including the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said the commission had failed to ask Mr. Giuliani more probing questions partly because of criticism of a comment by one commission member, John F. Lehman, at the previous day’s hearing that New York’s disaster-response plans were “not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city.”

The morning of Mr. Giuliani’s testimony, The New York Post’s cover had the single word “Insult” above a photograph of a firefighter kneeling at the World Trade Center site.

The panel was affected by the controversy “and by the excellent quality of the mayor’s presentation,” Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton wrote.

The commission has been criticized for its delicate treatment of Mr. Giuliani, particularly by some relatives of Sept. 11 victims.

During his testimony at the public hearing, Mr. Giuliani and others were interrupted by audience members imploring commissioners to ask Mr. Giuliani about trouble with radio communications and other problems the day of the attack.

One man shouted, “My brother was a fireman, and I want to know why 300 firemen died,” adding, “Let’s ask some real questions. Is that unfair?”

It's probably too late to put a dent in Giuliani's secular sainthood or in his reputation for keeping New Yorkers safe. But, maybe the rewriting of the record of "America's Mayor"™ may well be in the early stages of being rewritten again.

Who can forget the aggressive efforts the Giuliani administration made in coordinating emergency response, taking the lead in making sure the fire and police depts. could talk to one another?

Among the more striking aspects of yesterday's hearing was the hard-nosed questioning of Mr. Scoppetta by the council members and the blunt testimony from union leaders, fire safety experts and relatives of people who had died.

Many were direct in stating their views of the shortcomings of emergency operations under the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, though Mr. Scoppetta had high praise for the former mayor.

Still, the tone was a major departure from the general acclaim for Mr. Giuliani. Moreover, it was clear that many of those present had moved on from the daze of early loss, when New Yorkers were figuring out exactly where friends, relatives and acquaintances worked in the buildings, and turned into a ''city of floor numbers,'' as Julie Talen, a SoHo resident, put it recently.

Beverly Eckert, whose husband, Sean Rooney, tried to get onto the roof of the south tower but found the door locked, said that after the hearings at City Hall, she planned to go to Washington to monitor a Congressional investigation. ''You either ask the hard questions, or you live with the status quo,'' she said.

Or the thoughtful, ego-free decision to house the city's Office of Emergency Services on the 23rd Floor of Seven World Trade Center?

Or the culture he created to, in which the city's police and fire didn't get into fights over turf at emergencies.

And Giuliani is a emergency preparedness consultant? Funny that "communication" and "accountability" are two of Giuliani & Partners' six "strongly held values.

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.

The manufactured candidated

I've long been writing about the fallacy of Giuliani's "credibility" when it comes to terrorism -- his failure to learn from the mistakes during the first WTC attack in 1993, his refusal to fix the ruptured relations between the NYPD and NYFD, to the point where nobody was in charge in emergencies, the inability to get radios that worked despite numerous warnings, his decision to house his Office of Emergency Management in the bullseye of a high profile terrorist attack -- but even I didn't know this.

Hauer doesn't dispute that he eventually backed the 7 WTC location, but he clearly favored MetroTech. His memo said that MetroTech "could be available in six months," while it took four and a half more years to get the bunker up and running at 7 WTC. He said that MetroTech was secure and "not as visible a target as buildings in Lower Manhattan"— a prophetic comparison. Listing eight positives about MetroTech, the memo also mentioned negatives, but said they weren't insurmountable. "The real issue," Hauer concluded, "is whether or not the mayor wants to go across the river to manage an incident. If he is willing to do this, MetroTech is a good alternative." Notes from meetings indicate that Hauer continued to push MetroTech in the discussions with the mayor and his top deputy.

But Hauer says Denny Young, the mayor's alter ego, who has worked at his side for nearly three decades, eventually "made it very clear" that Giuliani wanted "to be able to walk to this facility quickly." That meant the bunker had to be in lower Manhattan. Since the City Hall area is below the floodplain, the command center—which was built with a hurricane-curtain wall—had to be above ground. The formal city document approving the site said that it "was selected due to its proximity to City Hall," a standard set by Giuliani and Giuliani alone.

---

The 7 WTC site was the brainchild of Bill Diamond, a prominent Manhattan Republican that Giuliani had installed at the city agency handling rentals. When Diamond held a similar post in the Reagan administration a few years earlier, his office had selected the same building to house nine federal agencies. Diamond's GOP-wired broker steered Hauer to the building, which was owned by a major Giuliani donor and fundraiser. When Hauer signed onto it, he was locked in by the limitations Giuliani had imposed on the search and the sites Diamond offered him. The mayor was so personally focused on the siting and construction of the bunker that the city administrator who oversaw it testified in a subsequent lawsuit that "very senior officials," specifically including Giuliani, "were involved," which he said was a major difference between this and other projects. Giuliani's office had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator. Great concern was expressed in writing that the platform in the press room had to be high enough to make sure his head was above the cameras. It's inconceivable that the hands-on mayor's fantasy command center was shaped—or sited—by anyone other than him.

A man cave. Or a playhouse (one that decidedly let in girls).

I read the Village Voice article with a sort of grim pleasure, once again reminded that nothing ever got in the way of Giuliani's massive ego and the utter fradulence of the "great leadership" on which his entire persona has been built.

But when I was finished reading, I realized that Giuliani is sure to be the Republican nominee. While the humidor, monogrammed towels, and the weekend trysts with "Judith" were juicy new details, the rest of Collins' and Barretts' bill of attainder have been identified in plenty of stories. The fact that likely Republican voters seem unfazed by them while the press seems to be gleefully ignoring them, instead citing Giuliani's "credibility" in "fighting terrorism, means that we're getting a replay of 2000, when a callow and deeply dishonest man was not so much nominated as crowned by the Republican party apparatus and its enablers in the press.

Add to that the notion that this pro-choice, pro-Gay rights, thrice-divorced...this Lothario with a comb-over...doesn't seem off-putting in the least to the "values voters" we hear so much about, means that the cynical process is already well underway.

The substance thing

Marc Santora's reporting continues to marvel. Today's headline for his insightful political analysis was Giuliani, Substance Firm, Struggles to Secure Style, and it's a doozy. I mean, you're probably thinking, "Substance? Has Giuliani actually said anything that held more than a thimble full of 'substance." But according to Santora, you'd be wrong, for instance,

The lights were low, the music soft and soothing, a lute was being plucked in the background. The next song, presumably meant to liven up the crowd, was a selection from Yo-Yo Ma.

A sign with the featured speaker’s name was bathed in blue.

A motivational guru? Or perhaps some Jerry Brown-liberal type?

Nope.

As the “Rudy” signs made clear, the room in Savannah, Ga., was packed with Republicans eager to hear Mr. Tough-on-Terror himself, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

The ideological base of Mr. Giuliani’s campaign for president has, by now, come into fairly sharp relief: terrorism and small government. But the stylistic side — the way he interacts with voters and presents himself at rallies, the music he uses to announce his entrances — seems to be a work in progress as he tries to balance his New York persona with his heartland campaign.

"Terrorism and small government" represent meaningful "substance" for this stooge.

And that's it. That's the extent of Giuliani's "substance."

Mr. Giuliani, an avid opera fan, said he would keep arias out of his campaign repertoire.

“I don’t think the crowds are ready for me to pick out who is singing ‘Nessun dorma,’ whether it is Plácido Domingo or Luciano Pavarotti,” he said recently in an interview in Sioux City, Iowa. “But I can do it. It is one of the things I can do.”

Yes, that was written in the pages of The New York Times.

No matter where he is, he says he tries to start each day with 15 to 20 minutes of sit-ups and then a cup of coffee. Munching red grapes from a big bowl, he said he tried to eat three healthy meals a day, adding that the campaign had not yet done any damage to his waistline.

Everywhere he goes, Mr. Giuliani has a duffel bag stuffed with books, said Anthony V. Carbonetti, his campaign manager. He does not read them one at a time, but rather fleetingly dips into several books at once. He sprinkles his stump speeches with references to what is on his bedside table, mentioning books on subjects as varied as Islam in America and Nascar, a world he is just getting to know by political necessity.

At the end of the day, Mr. Giuliani will often indulge in a cigar, which can sometimes be spotted in his shirt pocket as evening draws near.

That's to make sure you didn't think the lute music, ya know, makes him a pussy. Even a man's man can sing arias, dammit! And he reads randomly from books!

Oh, wait. I wrote too soon. We're gonna get a Q&A with the voters. Surely we'll get some...thought stuff, or something... from the candidate now.

Still, the rituals of the campaign trail are not always a natural fit for Mr. Giuliani. For instance, he does not do the soft and cuddly thing very well.

Jill Martin, a teacher from Le Mars, Iowa, her child in her arms, was becoming emotional as she told the candidate how she could not afford the rate increases on her health insurance.

“What are you going to do to make health care possible for people like me and my children?” Ms. Martin asked, her voice cracking.

Mr. Giuliani extended one arm in her direction, not to offer support but to beckon her to be seated.

He did not utter any of the soothing words that can come so easily to a Clinton or a Romney.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Giuliani said brusquely. “I don’t know the answer in your particular circumstance how you are going to afford it.”

He can also react harshly when interacting with voters he thinks are not asking smart questions.

In Laconia, N.H., when a young man asked him if he thought that terrorism sprang from some sense of “desperation” among Muslims around the world, Mr. Giuliani snapped that such wrong thinking was probably the result of a “liberal education.” He softened his response a bit as he held forth on the subject, but his gut reaction was so cutting that the crowd let out a collective nervous laugh.

Oh.

Maybe this is more of that "post-modern" reporting from the Times. Indicate that you're covering the candidate's "substance," than show quite clearly he has none?

Giuliani does not heart New York

New York City suffers from being downwind of coal fired power plants further west of the city. Guess that's cool with America's Mayor™.

For a native New Yorker mounting a first bid for national office, Rudolph W. Giuliani has shown an impressive ability to raise money in Texas, where his Republican presidential campaign collected $2.2 million in the first quarter of the year, far more than any other candidate.

Mr. Giuliani has drawn support from Texans who were notable donors to President Bush, including a former Enron president, Richard D. Kinder, and business executives who direct many of the nation’s oil, gas and energy producers.

And a good part of this success, analysts say, stems from his affiliation with a well-established and politically connected law firm that is based in Houston and bears his name, Bracewell & Giuliani.

That affiliation adds to Mr. Giuliani’s personal wealth but also could pose political risks for him. The firm is perhaps the nation’s most aggressive lobbyist for coal-fired power plants, heavy emitters of air pollutants and carbon dioxide, a gas associated with global warming. Environmentalists say the firm played a significant role in persuading the Bush administration to roll back major provisions of the Clean Air Act.

Mr. Giuliani joined the 400-lawyer firm as a name partner two years ago, and though his legal work has been limited, his association with it has provided him entree into the wellspring of Texas money that meant so much to the Bush campaigns.

In addition to collecting $89,000 in contributions from Bracewell partners and employees, Mr. Giuliani has held a fund-raiser in Houston. The firm’s managing partner, Patrick C. Oxford, is a top-shelf Bush fund-raiser with a wealth of contacts within Republican money circles.

Most significantly, perhaps, the law firm is one of the higher-profile defenders of the oil, gas and energy industries, to which it provides legal help and extensive lobbying services in Washington. It is difficult to say just how much of Mr. Giuliani’s contributions from those industries stem from his affiliation with Bracewell, but employees of companies in those sectors, including several Bracewell clients, have contributed more than $400,000 to Mr. Giuliani’s campaign so far.

Let's face it. New York City is just another combover in Giuliani's climb to power.

UPDATE: There is Giuliani's thirst for power and his ability to pander his way to it, and then there's his insanity. Michael Wolff runs down the symptoms. Wolff gets most of it -- the wives, the ferrets, his hatred for the city's black leaders, and overshadowing all, his demand for constant attention -- but Wolff forgets one of Rudy!'s most important campaigns as mayor: his campaign against dancing.

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.

Giuliani political makeover

Brian Mooney writes in today's Boston Globe

Giuliani has described himself as a backer of civil unions and is frequently described that way in news reports. But he began distancing himself from civil unions in late April, when his campaign told The New York Sun that New Hampshire's new law goes too far because it is "the equivalent of marriage," which he has always opposed for gays.

Giuliani's aides offered little explanation of what specific rights he would support for same-sex couples.

In an interview and follow-up e-mails, Maria Comella, the campaign's deputy communications director, told the Globe that Giuliani supports domestic partnership laws similar to the one he initiated in New York in 1998.

The New York law primarily ensures benefits to partners of municipal employees. The law created a registry of partnerships that also helps city residents obtain partner benefits from private companies that extend them. However, most of the registrants are unmarried heterosexual couples.

Comella said Giuliani has always supported the New York model of domestic partnership laws but she did not explain what is widely viewed as an inconsistency in his position.

"It's really disappointing he's stepped back from his position on civil unions," said Joe Tarver, spokesman for the Empire State Pride Agenda, a group that advocates for gay rights in New York state that worked with and against Giuliani on a number of issues during his eight years as mayor.

Calling the former mayor's shifting stance "pretty un-Giuliani-like," Tarver said: "It's quite obvious he's playing to the people whose votes he needs to get the Republican nomination."

Tarver has company. Representatives of New York groups who advocate for abortion rights, gun control, and rights for immigrants, also said Giuliani's actions on the presidential trail, presenting himself to a more conservative GOP electorate, bears little resemblance to the man they knew as the stand-up mayor of Gotham in the 1990s who was open to moderate and liberal arguments.

More than any candidate in the Republican presidential field, rival Mitt Romney has been tagged with the flip-flopper label. But Giuliani, with late shifts on civil unions and federal campaign finance laws, is a political makeover in progress.

It's actually impossible to know if a political makeover is in progress or whether the political makeover occurred when Giuliani was running New York as an authoritarian with views on social issues that were just centrist enough to not scare away too many voters.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall...

Today's Krugmaniad (still Time$elect).

It’s All About Them

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your father’s political campaign.

Last week, at one of Mitt Romney’s “Ask Mitt” forums, a woman in the audience asked Mr. Romney whether any of his five sons are serving in the military and, if not, when they plan to enlist.

The candidate replied with a rambling attempt to change the subject, but near the end he let his real feelings slip. “It’s remarkable how we can show our support for our nation,” he said, “and one of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping to get me elected, because they think I’d be a great president.”

Wow. The important point isn’t the fact that Mr. Romney’s sons aren’t in uniform — although it is striking just how few of those who claim to believe that we’re engaged in a struggle for our very existence think that they themselves should be called on to make any sacrifices. The point is, instead, that Mr. Romney apparently considers helping him get elected an act of service comparable to putting your life on the line in Iraq.

Yet the week’s prize for most self-centered remark by a serious presidential contender goes not to Mr. Romney, but to his principal rival for the G.O.P. nomination.

Rudy Giuliani has lately been getting some long-overdue criticism for his missteps both before and after 9/11. For example, The Village Voice reports that he insisted that the city’s emergency command center — which included a personal suite with its own elevator that he visited “often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced” — be within walking distance of City Hall. This led to the disastrous decision to locate the center in the World Trade Center, an obvious potential terrorist target.

At the same time, Mr. Giuliani is being attacked for his failure to take adequate precautions to protect those who worked on the cleanup at ground zero from the hazards at the site. Many workers have since been sickened by the dust and toxic materials.

For a politician whose entire campaign is based on the myth of his leadership that fateful day — as The Onion put it, Mr. Giuliani is running for “president of 9/11” — anything that challenges his personal legend is a big problem. So here’s what Mr. Giuliani said last week in response: “I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. ... I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them.”

Real ground zero workers, who were digging through the toxic rubble while Mr. Giuliani held photo ops, were understandably outraged. So the next day Mr. Giuliani tried to recover, claiming that “what I was trying to say yesterday is that I empathize with them because I feel like I have that same risk.” But thanks to the wonders of YouTube, we can all watch Mr. Giuliani’s actual demeanor as he delivered the original remarks. Empathy had nothing to do with it.

What’s striking about these unintentional moments of self-revelation is how much Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani sound like the current occupant of the White House.

It has long been clear that President Bush doesn’t feel other people’s pain. His self-centeredness shines through whenever he makes off-the-cuff, unscripted remarks, from his jocular obliviousness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the joke he made last year in San Antonio when visiting the Brooke Army Medical Center, which treats the severely wounded: “As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself — not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch.”

What’s now clear is that the two men most likely to end up as the G.O.P. presidential nominee are cut from the same cloth.

This probably isn’t a coincidence. Arguably, the current state of the Republican Party is such that only extreme narcissists have a chance of getting nominated.

To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a fairly smart guy — and nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of being stupid. To appeal to the G.O.P. base, however, you have to say very stupid things, like Mr. Romney’s declaration that we should “double Guantánamo,” or Mr. Giuliani’s dismissal of the idea that raising taxes is sometimes necessary to pay for things like repairing bridges as a “Democratic, liberal assumption.”

So the G.O.P. field is dominated by smart men willing to play dumb to further their personal ambitions. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to learn that these men are monstrously self-centered.

All of which leaves us with a political question. Most voters are thoroughly fed up with the current narcissist in chief. Are they really ready to elect another?

And I really don't care, but this is pretty funny.

Yet it was nonetheless widely believed inside and outside the White House that he would walk out the door behind Mr. Bush at the end of the president’s term in January, 2009, and help him solidify his legacy before his exit.

Yeah, how's that legacy thing working out?

A cure for cancer

Incentives!

The decision by Mr. Giuliani to address health care so early in the campaign season is a recognition of the resonance the issue has among voters.

Using explicitly partisan language, perhaps intended to stir memories of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s failed bid to reform health care as first lady more than a decade ago, Mr. Giuliani cited horror stories and selective statistics about health care in foreign countries that provide universal coverage. Mr. Giuliani said that a “socialist” model would bankrupt the government.

“That is where Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are taking you,” he said. “You have got to see the trap. Otherwise we are in for a disaster. We are in for Canadian health care, French health care, British health care.”

But Mr. Giuliani’s speech offered very little in the way of specifics. He said his goal was to outline his “vision,” with more details to come in the fall.

In proposing a tax exemption of up to $15,000 for a family and $7,500 for individuals, Mr. Giuliani said that money could be used by consumers to buy an insurance policy of their liking. The money left over, he said, could be put into a “health savings account” to be used to pay for deductibles or other uncovered medical expenses.

Mr. Giuliani said the resulting flood of competition among insurers for customers would lead them to reduce the costs of their policies, estimating that only 20 million to 30 million of the 120 million who currently get their insurance through an employer would need to sign up for individual insurance plans for that to happen.

“You have to start bringing the price down before you can figure out how many people can you include,” he said at a news conference after the speech. “It can’t be done with a magic wand all at once.”

Mr. Giuliani said that it could take as long as four years for any of the proposals suggested by the Democrats to become reality and that his plan would begin to have an impact more rapidly.

Mr. Giuliani, who is not seeking any changes in the current Medicaid program for the poor, did not promise that all the uninsured would be covered under his proposal.

He was also not specific about a federal government role in helping the poor or lower middle class buy their own insurance, saying he envisioned some combination of vouchers and tax refunds.

The ideas he outlined, steeped in a bedrock conservative faith in the ability of the free, unfettered market to solve problems, are similar to those advocated by President Bush.

The president’s proposals have failed to gain traction and Mr. Giuliani did not try to address the central criticisms of moving away from an employer-based system.

For instance, he offered no assurances that insurance companies would not “cherry pick” by insuring only healthier people, or by charging much higher rates to more vulnerable people — like those with chronic diseases.

Instead, he said, moving to a market system would create incentives for people to remain healthy.

Currently, he said, “there is no incentive to wellness.”

This from a guy who had colon cancer, was given the best treatment available, and nursed back to health by Super Chick. I know the conservative ideology of unfailing devotion to the "free market (when it suits their clients' purposes)" but I did not know that ideology could trump genetic and environmental effects on people's health, not to mention economic factors. Learn something new each and every day.

And if you're thinking, "Heck, I saw Sicko and the French system looks pretty good," remember, the French don't speak English.

And Michael Moore is fat.

UPDATE: Of course, the indispensable Mr. Somerby unpacks teh stupid in Santora's article.

Rudy! AWOL

I have no idea why they'd want Giuliani to be a part of the Iraq Study Group, but given a chance to serve his country, help the Republican administration extricate themselves from Iraq, and burnish his own foreign policy credentials he simply didn't show up.

WASHINGTON -- Rudolph Giuliani's membership on an elite Iraq study panel came to an abrupt end last spring after he failed to show up for a single official meeting of the group, causing the panel's top Republican to give him a stark choice: either attend the meetings or quit, several sources said.

Giuliani left the Iraq Study Group last May after just two months, walking away from a chance to make up for his lack of foreign policy credentials on the top issue in the 2008 race, the Iraq war.

He cited "previous time commitments" in a letter explaining his decision to quit, and a look at his schedule suggests why -- the sessions at times conflicted with Giuliani's lucrative speaking tour that garnered him $11.4 million in 14 months.

Giuliani failed to show up for a pair of two-day sessions that occurred during his tenure, the sources said -- and both times, they conflicted with paid public appearances shown on his recent financial disclosure. Giuliani quit the group during his busiest stretch in 2006, when he gave 20 speeches in a single month that brought in $1.7 million.

Priorities. Meanwhile his BFF continues to suffer in silence.

June 19, 2007 -- Disgraced ex-NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik can't stop crying over his fizzled friendship with former BFF Rudy Giuliani.

"I accept the distance created by Giuliani. I understand it, but inside, it's killing me," Kerik said.

"It's like dying a slow death, watching him have to answer for my mistakes," the former top cop said of the ex-New York mayor-turned-presidential-candidate.

Kerik dished up the surprisingly frank comments in a dark, F-bomb-infused interview in the August edition of Best Life magazine.

In the bizarre chat, he said he is now working for the Jordanian government overseeing its construction of "an underground, seismic-shock proof, oxygen-stowing compound that could withstand a nuclear attack.

"At least here in Jordan, I stand half a chance," Kerik whined.

I guess 9-11 did change everything. It sure elevated to national prominence these two self-absorbed jerks and their delusions of grandeur.

Giuliani's "bullshit" problem

Last Friday, TPM posted the video of a shrieking Rudolph Giulini back when he was trying gain recognition with white voters in the outer boroughs in advance of his campaign to unseat David Dinkins as mayor.

His supporters, reliably, have cried "foul," but Steve Benen explains why it matters.

A year later, Giuliani asked aides to identify potential pitfalls for his mayoral campaign. The "vulnerability study" cited Giuliani's "shrieking performance," and noted that he had inexplicably failed to denounce those who levied racist attacks on Dinkins.

That's why the video clip is important, not because of a candidate's profanity, which is hardly a disqualifier in a presidential race, but because Giuliani's speech appears to have been an attempt to stoke racist animus against an African-American mayor.

Make no mistake, in 1992 every New Yorker knew what Giuliani was trying to do and why he wouldn't disassociate himself from racist cops. Giuliani knew that he wasn't about to crack the African-American vote against an incumbent African-American mayor, so he veered hard right to appeal -- remember this was 1992 -- to the beset-on-all-sides white vote. It was transparent. And it worked. Though barely.

That said, I doubt this revelation will have much impact on GOP voters. In fact, it may help him (Civilians reviewing the actions of the New York City police? "Bullshit!"). But it sure does underscore his temperament issue while also dredging up the fact that this "principled" guy does have a long history of trying to work one group of citizens against the other. Do we really need another president with that kind of ability.

Giuliani hearts child molesters

Giuliani's character judgment is legendary. Bernie Kerik. To a lesser extent, Randy Levine. But he's determined to make the world forget about those two with "Monsignor" Alan Placa.

Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani hired a Catholic priest to work in his consulting firm months after the priest was accused of sexually molesting two former students and an altar boy and told by the church to stop performing his priestly duties.

The priest, Monsignor Alan Placa, a longtime friend of Giuliani and the priest who officiated at his second wedding to Donna Hanover, continues to work at Giuliani Partners in New York, to the outrage of some of his accusers and victims' groups, which have begun to protest at Giuliani campaign events.

"This man did unjust things, and he's being protected and employed and taken care of. It's not a good thing," said one of the accusers, Richard Tollner, who says Placa molested him repeatedly when he was a student at a Long Island, N.Y. Catholic boys high school in 1975.

And, now that you mention it, he does sound a lot like Bernie Kerik.

According to New York property records, Placa also co-owns, with another priest, a waterfront apartment in lower Manhattan in Battery Park City, valued at more than $500,000.

Except Bernie's not gay, as far as we can tell.

Hearting Huckabee, transparent Rudy!

I can't understand why the Republican establishment won't embrace the former Arkansas governor. His GOP credentials are impeccable: opposed health care reform and got paid for doing so.

When Mike Huckabee became lieutenant governor of Arkansas in 1993, he complained of being burdened by college tuition bills for his son, the expenses of two residences — one in Texarkana and the other in Little Rock — and the cost of commuting between the two.

With an annual salary of $25,452, he said he was falling short in covering the bills. “It was costing me money to be lieutenant governor,” Mr. Huckabee recalled in a 1997 newspaper interview.

To bridge the gap between his income and his expenses, Mr. Huckabee and a few close political advisers came up with a plan. They formed a nonprofit organization that raised money for Mr. Huckabee to travel the country promoting conservative politics to fellow ministers and attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health care plan.

In its three-year life span, the organization, Action America, collected $119,916 from a dozen or so donors. Among them were former Senator Bob Dole’s political action committee, an Arkansas cotton gin owner who had been jailed for stock fraud, and R. J. Reynolds, the tobacco giant that had opposed the Clinton health plan. As for Mr. Huckabee, he ended up with $61,500 for his efforts before becoming governor in July 1996 and shuttering the group.

As information about the secretive group began to leak out in 1997, Democrats in Arkansas pressed for the identity of its donors, which Mr. Huckabee has refused to disclose. In addition, he failed to report his Action America income on his 1994 financial disclosure form, resulting in a “letter of caution” from the Arkansas Ethics Commission in 1997.

As Mr. Huckabee moves to the top tier of Republican candidates, his involvement in Action America and accusations of ethical lapses while he held office in Arkansas are drawing new scrutiny. In all, at least 16 ethics complaints, including the one involving Action America, were filed against Mr. Huckabee, with violations found in five of them and a $1,000 fine assessed.

As for Action America, new details have emerged, first reported by Newsweek, about the extent of tobacco money behind it and the way the industry tried to use Mr. Huckabee’s rising profile among conservatives to create grass-roots opposition to the Clinton effort, which would have raised taxes on cigarettes.

Mr. Huckabee, who was president of Action America, has denied knowing that Reynolds money was behind the group — a claim other officers of Action America dispute. But long before Mr. Huckabee began seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he resisted efforts to identify Action America’s donors.

Meanwhile, Jim Dwyer reminds us of the open government Giuliani promises.

A few years back, a man named Russell Harding held a City Hall patronage job that came with a government credit card, which he used to steal more than $250,000.

Crooks happen. What kept Mr. Harding in thievery for three years was that the city government, led by his patron, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, slammed the door on the one person who sought the Harding credit card records, a reporter with The Village Voice who filed freedom of information requests.

These requests were stalled until the next mayor took office and released the documents. Before long, Mr. Harding was packed off to prison.

In a debate among Republican candidates this week, Mr. Giuliani was asked what promises he would make about running an open White House.

“I would make sure that government was transparent,” Mr. Giuliani said. “My government in New York City was so transparent that they knew every single thing I did almost every time I did it.”

That was a daring claim, considering that prying information out of the Giuliani City Hall required teams of lawyers with the persistence of mules. To cite three of the most prominent examples, he tried to block the release of different batches of public records to the city’s Independent Budget Office, to the city’s public advocate, and to the state comptroller. He was sued on each occasion. He lost every time. He appealed each decision. He lost every appeal.

“So,” Mr. Giuliani said during the debate, looking toward his presidency, “I would be extremely open.”

On language

I don't really know what to make of Matt Bai's half fawning, half critical appraisal of Giuliani. But I was struck by Giuliani's repeated invocation of Churchill and Reagan. Nevermind that the "unpredictability" Giuliani praises in Reagan probably isn't a reference to Reagan's decision to pull the Marines out of Beirut, so I guess Giuliani means his hero's twitchy "button" finger. And nevermind there was another politician whose stirring radio addresses got his country not only through a war, but through a depression before that. And without whose support of Britain Churchill may not have been quite so confidant in victory.

Nevertheless, what struck me was that Giuliani has these caricatures of both Reagan and Churchill, as though they appear in his head like old newsreels without sound. He can see his heroes, but it doesn't seem to register to him that Churchill -- along with FDR -- used language effectively to dispel fear of an enemy. Giuliani is the opposite. The menace is everywhere. We must constantly be on our guard. War. All. The. Time. That may appeal to Republican primary voters, who share his view that Islamonazithugs are amassing on our borders AS WE SPEAK, as dangerous a threat as the Soviets when nuclear armed bombers circled the globe. But Americans are beginning to be skeptical of...well, more.

Language is important. Bin Laden understands that better than our president, vice-president, and the leading Republican contendors.

Giuliani's stand on abortion rights? Who cares.

I'm sure much will be made of this Giuliani interview in which he seems to stand by the pro-choice stances he took when he was running for New York City's mayor.

If strict adherence to religious right positions were mandatory, Sam Brownback would be leading in the polls. If strict adherence to conservative Republican principals, McCain would still be the inevitable nominee.

No, as Digby and Greenwall have repeatedly pointed out, this isn't something that's likely to sink Giuliani's chances in the GOP primaries. Giuliani slakes the thirst of the Republican faithful for an authoritarian figure. One that will make them feel safe and won't put niceties such as the Constitution in the way of battling the swarthy men who want to kill them in their beds. Furthermore, Giuliani knows -- and eventually the radical clerics on the Right will come around to agree -- that all he has to do is invoke the code of "strict constructionist judges" to appease those who oppose a woman's right to choose. All he has to do is say that Roberts and Alito are exactly the choice of judges he'd make and he's golden. Best of all, it gives him the leeway he'll need in the general election so that he won't have to veer back towards the center to appeal to suburban moms.

The beauty of it all is, though, that if Giuliani is able to grab the nomination, the culture war issues will be recognizably dead. If Republican "values voters" can pull the lever for a thrice divorced guy (married to a thrice divorced wife), who believes there's a constitutional right to abortion, once roomed with a gay couple, humiliated his children, and now says he'll invite his wife to cabinet meetings, then they just don't care about all of the stuff we've been told matters so much to them the last 17 years.

Giuliani-time

Um, no shit, Sherlock.

Actually, on one infamous occasion Giuliani did play the religion card. That would be when he tried to revoke the Brooklyn Museum's city funding because it had an exhibit that featured a non-traditional depiction of the Virgin Mary. Giuliani demagogued this silly issue to appeal to his outer-borough white Catholic base. I think it supports Mike's point: Giuliani's a panderer on social issues and if he's elected with support from the Republican Party, he'll pander to them in office.

Unlike George W. Bush, Giuliani doesn't necessarily agree with the wingnuts he's currently pandering to. However, like the Boy King, he's interested in only one thing: absolute power. In that sense, he's really more like Cheney. Social issues are out there to be taken advantage of and used. If saying he'll appoint "strict constructionists" signals to the religious right what they want to hear, then fine. The bigger picture is amassing power and control. The rest are just table stakes.

And trust me, a Giuliani presidency will not be pretty. If you think he could be tough on ferret affficianados, imagine what he'll do to anyone trying to get in his way of eliminating civil liberties in the never-ending battle of the War on Terrah.

Giuliani meets his southern base

Giuliani builds his web of supporters by lending his support to Ralph "in Abramoff's pocket" Reed.

For Mr. Giuliani, who is considering a run for the presidency in 2008, the political foray into the South allowed him to pocket a campaign chit from Mr. Reed that could be useful if the former mayor tries to build a national coalition that includes religious-minded Republicans, who are a core part of Mr. Reed's voter base.

Mr. Giuliani was warmly received at a Reed fund-raiser here, though advisers to Mr. Reed noted that most of the donors were politically moderate business people, and that a truer test of Mr. Giuliani's appeal among more conservative Southerners would come in rural counties.

Oh, don't worry about the rural types. Giuliani can always remind them that he was once married to his second cousin. They'll think he's one of their own.

Giuliani's popularity

Drum on Giuliani. It's not just the "sheen of 9/11..."

Actually, I suspect it's Rudy's other campaign plank that really explains his popularity. Sure, 9/11 is a big part of his persona, but his crime reduction record in New York City might be an even bigger one. Think about it: in the eye of the public, he's literally the only presidential candidate who's actually accomplished anything concrete. He made New York City livable. It doesn't matter whether this is true; it only matters that this is what people think. And no other candidate has anything close to it. All they can say is that they sponsored a bill or survived Vietnam or ran a company. Big deal. But Rudy, regardless of how he did it, can say that he actually governed a political entity and made it better. Considering the low opinion most people have of politicians, that's a helluva powerful asset.

I'd go one better. It's how Giuliani is perceived to have made NYC "livable (funny, I lived there pre and during Giuliani, and found the pre quite livable...fun, even)." Giuliani is perceived by the GOP base as having kicked some dark skinned ass and conquered the savages running amok through the five boroughs, something he's not so subtly telling them he'll do with Iran and the Islamowhatevers.

The war president II

Rudy Giuliani shows all the nuanced thinking and extensive knowledge of the Middle East of...the Cheney administration.

At a house party in New Hampshire, Mr. Giuliani suggested that it was unclear which was farther along, Iran or North Korea, in the development of a nuclear weapons program.

Asked about his policy toward the North Koreans, he said he backed the administration’s approach, mentioning in particular a Chinese role in efforts to pressure them. “I think the strategy has produced enough results so far that you have to stick with it,” he said.

As for Iran, Mr. Giuliani said that “in the long term,” it might be “more dangerous than Iraq.”

He then casually lumped Iran with Al Qaeda. “Their movement has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he said.

Mr. Giuliani was asked in an interview to clarify that, inasmuch as Iran had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Further, most of its people are Shiites, whereas Al Qaeda is an organization of Sunnis.

“They have a similar objective,” he replied, “in their anger at the modern world.”

In other words, he said, they hate America.

Even though Dick Cheney won't be in the race (though hope springs eternal), it's good to know that his insistence on spreading fear, war, and conflated threats from unconnected sources will have its proxy in Rudolph Giuliani.