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.