Seriously, Giuliani is kidding himself
There's an unreal quality to this whole Rudy '08 business, but now that the former mayor has filed an exploratory committee for real, it seems it should be taken just a mite more seriously than it deserves. To be clear, the idea that anyone, let alone Giuliani himself, considers him Presidential timber is thigh-slappingly hilarious, but seriousness is the order of the day, I guess.
So let's take a look. Ed Koch, back in the day when he too was taken seriously, was a columnist for the Daily News; as such, he wrote a series of articles about His Rudyness; they were later serialized in a volume titled Giuliani: Nasty Man. The book appeared in 1999, before Rudy was sainted, and it's juicy.
July 10th, 1998 (p. 119f): 40,000 construction workers demonstrate - the word used is 'riot' - in Midtown, leading to twenty injuries; Giuliani goes campaigning in Nassau County with the republican AG candidate, Dennis Vacco.
July 24th, 1998: faced with an NYPD sex-for-protection racket, in which cops 'protect' a brothel in exchange for sexual favors, Giuliani blames his predecessors.
January 8th, 1999: Under the headline "Rudy's vindictive and foolish", the tale of Rudy's retaliation against recalcritant City Council member Stephen DiBrienza; the latter had opposed a plan of the mayor's, and found a mental health clinic serving 500 patients in his district turned into a homeless shelter.
May 3, 1996: Headline: "When politicians try to intimidate judges".
There's much more, but the point is this: any serious review of Rudy the mayor, as opposed to Rudy the myth, should tell reasonable people - the existence of which is rumored even in the republican party - that this man can't be President. Rudy Giuliani was and is a vindictive, spiteful man temperamentally unsuited to office, with a troubling lack of judgment and a propensity to make decisions in anger. His finger on the nuclear button is the stuff that should give all Americans nightmares.
Seriously.
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2008 Elections | Accountability | Corruption | Crime | New York City | Rudolph Giuliani
Rudy
Just ask Norman Siegel about Rudy Guiliani. Norman was Guiliani's arch-enemy during his mayoral terms, as head of the New York Civil Liberties Union. He'll tell you how many times they had to sue Guiliani over his willingness to violate citizens' first amendment rights in the name of "law and order" Of course, since Guiliani's problem is going to be conservatives thinking he's too liberal, maybe he'd welcome a liberal like Norman Siegel pointing out how he's really too conservative.
People forget that right before 9/11, as Rudy's second term was winding down, his mayoralty had been floundering and he was turning into a joke. Then 9/11 happens and all of a sudden the whole pathetic last two years of his administration was wiped away. Rudy was reborn in the media, he went from media joke (remember when the Post put pictures of the hotel room bed where he and his girlfriend were shacking up on the front page, under the headline, 'we found the rudy/judy lovenest!) to media hero