Giuliani's nearly done.

A Quinnipiac poll of Florida Republicans, reported in the NY Times, shows Giuliani's lead gone.

The numbers:
22% McCain
20% Giuliani
19% Huckabee
19% Romney

Considering that the other candidates are all elsewhere, while Giuliani has practically made Florida his winter home, Rudy's chances aren't looking good.

Well, we already know that Rudy Giuliani screwed New York's firefighters and bears some responsibility for the deaths of so many brave firefighters on 9/11 and the poisoning of many others in the weeks afterwards.

We already know that Mitt Romney is a flip flopping opportunist who openly supports torture.

But both Rudy and Mitt are also chickenhawks in the shameful tradition of Bush, Cheney and the vast majority of hawkish Republicans. McCain, though his record on Veterans issues sucks, is certainly exempt from the "chickenhawk" accusation. But Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani are cowards who evaded service every way they could, but demand that others serve...and are willing to insult real Veterans in the process.

Chickenhawk: A politician whose hawkishness and willingness to put soldiers' lives on the line is matched only by their desperation to avoid military service themselves.

This was covered in Salon.com last week, but only now getting around to covering it.

Pundits all over the television are astonished that Rudy Giuliani is still leading in all the polls of likely Republican primary voters. They shouldn't be.

Explanations abound, of course. Conservative voters are focusing on the "war on terror" to the exclusion of everything else. They don't know that Giuliani is "pro-choice" (although we don't really know where he stands now). The rest of the field is so bad that Giuliani only wins by default. The list goes on and on.

But every explanation offered to date is probably wrong.

It's interesting that none of the pollsters bothers to ask voters why they prefer one candidate over any other. Or rather, nobody is reporting any results of such questions - perhaps because the pollsters only release that information to candidates and campaigns that pay for it. Whatever the reason, the result is that we are left to figure out for ourselves just why the results are what they are.

Meanwhile, all the self-proclaimed "experts" are making the same mistake France made in 1939. They're still fighting the last war.