A Spork in the Drawer

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Rudy 91ul1ani to give keynote address at the RNC.

A noun, a verb, and 9/11.

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It's Been Awhile

Let's check in with our pals over at the Daily Scaife. It appears that Tom Purcell is really depressed:

Rudy's gone and now I'm really depressed.

Told ya.

Is Tom really depressed because 9iu11ani was going to save us from scary brown people? Surprisingly, no. It's all about the taxes:

And because I'll have to organize and record hundreds of receipts that I keep in a giant box -- a task that will take countless hours -- I get even more depressed.

But Rudy was going to save me from such woes. His tax-reform plan was the best thing to come down the pike since home-delivered pizza and twist-off beer caps.

I have to admit this is different. Most Rudy! supporters were in it for the mass death and authoritarian domestic policies promised by America's Mayor™.

But Rudy is gone and his simplified tax plan is gone with him.

Did you know that Tom is really depressed? He is!

Tom likes Huckster's idea of scrapping the current tax code and replacing it with a national sales tax. That such a tax is astoundingly regressive matters not. Tom, who is really depressed, believes that such a plan is too "sensible" to ever be enacted. He seems okay with Mittens' and St. John's ideas on taxes but is put off by their lack of concrete proposals. Tom mentions Ron Paul as well.

Tom, already depressed enough, looks at the tax plans of Hillary and Obama and is positively terrified. Why?

Don't worry about the IRS making a mistake -- that you owe them a couple million, for instance. I'm sure you'll be able to clear up the matter with only a minimal amount of jail time.

Pointing out that if Hillary or Obama is elected president he, and presumably me and you, will be going to prison over taxes certainly is depressing. Depressing enough to depress a hyena. No wonder Tom is really depressed.

That's why I've been depressed since Rudy dropped out of the presidential race.

See? And Tom is bitter about what might have been:

If only he'd had a better strategy in the primaries, maybe he could have made it to the White House. I had visions of him cleaning up our burdensome tax code the way he did Times Square.

"It's Giuliani time!" writ large.

Now, though, I'm really worried about Tom:

It's all pointless now.

I sure hope Tom doesn't do anything rash. Hide the knives!

Rudy's gone and his incredibly simple tax plan is gone with him. That means I'll spend countless miserable hours this winter and spring getting my tax affairs in order. I'll worry that a Democrat will win the presidency and that filing will be even harder next year.

I'd say that Tom needs a hug but it looks like he's found solace in bitterness:

Thanks for nothing, Rudy.

Chins up, Tom! There's always 2012.

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We'll Always Have Marilyn

9iu11ani to go bye-bye. Judi on suicide watch.

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ADDED: From Taegan Goddard:

"The beast is dead."

-- Former New York Mayor Ed Koch, quoted by ABC News, on the end to Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign.

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The Tears Of A Clown

Rudy! discussing Hillary's "emotional moment":

The reality is, if you look at me, September 11 — the funerals, the memorial services — there were times in which it was impossible not to feel the emotion.

9iul1an1, indeed.

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Republicans Are Insane

Willard:

Well, you know, I think the race in Iowa was really a very clear call that people want change in Washington, not in the White House, in Washington.

The Mittster's referring to President 25%.

Next up, the former NYC Mayor and would be Führer:

None of this worries me - Sept. 11, there were times I was worried [.]

As Joe Biden so brilliantly put it, "I mean, think about it! Rudy Giuliani. There's only three things he mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There's nothing else! There's nothing else!"

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Friend Of Rudy

Bernie Kerik indicted.

I'll let watertiger have this one.

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Chest Thumping

Reg Henry:

Not to worry. By expressing his belligerent views, Mr. Giuliani is able to make dyspeptic conservatives forget all the other stuff. For them and their talk-show thought controllers, the main thing is to be tough, always tough.

Still, this is fairly amazing for the rest of us. What happened to the gay-bashing so popular with the Republican Party faithful in recent years? What about all their other alleged values that Republicans said they cared about? Will they put aside their favorite prejudices just to worship power at the first church of Rudy Giuliani?

Of course they will. Anything to win. Besides, they understand now that there has been a bit of the old "doth complain too much" syndrome at work with the result that ordinary fellows are afraid to go into men's rooms around the country lest they find conservative preachers and politicians playing happy feet.

Read the whole thing.

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Power Over Principle

So Grand Ayatollah Pat Robertson has gone and endorsed Benito Giuliani despite Rudy's long history of social liberalism. (I don't think for a minute that a president Giuliani would govern as a social liberal, but that's his record.)

This just adds to the pile of evidence that the likes of Robertson care about power first and foremost. They know that whatever else, Rudy will bomb and kill and run his administration in a way that will make us nostalgic for the sanity and moderation of BushCheney. To Hell with strongly held Biblical principles so long as they think they'll be able to put a boot on people's throats.

And as Greg Sargent reminds us, somebody ought to ask Rudy if he agrees with Robertson's contention that the United States deserved the 11 September attacks.

I would enjoy hearing Rudy's answer.

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I'm No Fan Of Joe Biden's...

...but this is a damn good line:

There's only three things [Giuliani] says in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9/11

Needless to say, some wingers are freaking out.

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Today In Wingnuttia (AKA The Republican Party)

Top Giuliani advisor Norman Podhoretz has Hitler on the brain. Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!

Meanwhile, Crazy Rudy himself proves that, well, he's crazy:

"This is the world we live in. It's not this happy, romantic-like world where we'll negotiate with this one, or we'll negotiate with that one and there will be no preconditions, and we'll invite (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad to the White House, we'll invite Osama (bin Laden) to the White House," Giuliani said.

"Hillary and Obama are kind of debating whether to invite them to the inauguration or the inaugural ball," he added.

Remember, friends, Rudy is the "moderate."

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Rudy and Willard

Newsweek interviews Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. What fun!

NEWSWEEK: So we wanted to ask you, first of all, about the third party idea and whether it's serious. A number of people are suggesting it is just a threat.

Land: My intuition [is that] this is not a bluff. If Giuliani is the nominee, there will be a third party. There are things that Giuliani could do to help mitigate the damage. But I have been in too many discussions over the last 15 years where evangelical leaders have said, "The one thing we will never allow to happen is for the Republican Party to take us for granted the way the Democrat Party too often takes the African-American community for granted."

This is not a bluff.

[...]

NEWSWEEK: Did I hear you say that there are things that Giuliani can do that could mitigate...

Land: No, he's not going to do that, and if he did, nobody would believe it. He would [have to] say, number one, "This is a pro-life party; I realize I am out of step with where the party is, and I am not going to try to in any way weaken the [pro-life] plank." He could say, "I will only appoint strict constructionists, original-intent jurists to the federal judiciary." Strict constructionists by definition think that Roe v. Wade was an overreach, and is a badly decided decision. If he were to agree to appoint a pro-life attorney general in the mode of a John Ashcroft…

And then Land is asked about Mittens:

NEWSWEEK: Well, I think the term "flip-flopper" was coined by your side, wasn't it?

Land: Well, not by me… But I think that if [Romney] wants to gain the kind of support [from] evangelicals that he wants, he needs to give a JFK-type speech [in which Kennedy said he was "not the Catholic candidate for President," but rather a candidate "who happens also to be a Catholic."]. I have told him this.

Oh, yes, Mitt should definitely give that speech. But Land and his friends would certainly be unhappy. Why? The central point of Kennedy's 1960 speech to Greater Houston Ministerial Association was this:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute...I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source--where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials--and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

This, it should go without saying, flies in the face of the modern evangelical movement. They deny the very concept of "separation of church and state" and proclaim the US to be a (very conservative Protestant) Christian nation.

So Mitt should definitely give a big speech in which he proclaims his devotion to the separation of church and state.

Then sit back and watch Land's head explode.

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RudyMania!

Kevin Drum:

Choosing the best presidential candidate among the 2008 contenders is a tough job. Picking the worst is easy. Rudy Giuliani is the guy you'd get if you put George Bush and Dick Cheney into a wine press and squeezed out their pure combined essence: unbounded arrogance and self-righteousness, a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood, a studied contempt for anybody's opinion but his own, a vindictive streak a mile wide, and a devotion to secrecy and executive power unmatched in presidential history. He is a disaster waiting to happen.

Yep.

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Rudymania

JMM:

I know I've said before that Romney's profound and almost incalculable phoniness is a terrifying prospect to behold in a possible president. But the danger of phoniness, aesthetic or otherwise, cannot hold a candle to the truly catastrophic foreign policy Giuliani would likely pursue if he got anywhere near the Oval Office. Watching him campaign it's pretty clear that the guy has no real sense that posturing and pandering to ethnic paranoia in New York City simply isn't the same as running a national foreign policy. The people he's coalescing around himself as his foreign policy advisors are the ones who are going to help him learn as he goes. And they are simply the most dangerous, deranged and deluded folks you can find in American political and foreign policy circles today. It's really not an exaggeration. Scrape the bottom of the "Global War on Terror" Islamofascism nutbasket and you find they've pretty much all signed on as Rudy advisors.

As I've been saying, a President Rudy would make us nostalgic for the moderation and sanity of the BushCheney regime.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

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Yep

John Dean:

And how does Bush compare with the Republicans seeking to succeed him? "If a Rudy Giuliani were to be elected," Dean said, "he would go even farther than Cheney and Bush in their worst moments."

[...]

I asked Dean to imagine the moment when Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, 2009, presumably to be replaced by a Democrat, presumably Hillary -- will it then be possible to say "our long national nightmare is over"? Dean replied with one word: "Yes."

He quickly added, "I do feel strongly that the Republicans have so abused the law and embedded so many people within the system, within the executive branch, that's it's going to take a couple of terms of Democratic presidents before you have people there who are representing the American people."

I too have been saying for a while now that a Rudy! presidency would make us wish for the sanity of BushCheney.

Hell of a country we live in.

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Rudy9/11Rudy9/11Rudy9/11Rudy9/11Rudy9/11

From Democrats.org:

Rudy Giuliani is now saying that he took a cell phone call from his wife in the middle of a speech last week because of--wait for it--September 11. Of course.

Giuliani also addressed a cell phone call he took from his wife, Judith, last week during his speech to the National Rifle Association...

"And quite honestly, since Sept. 11, most of the time when we get on a plane, we talk to each other and just reaffirm the fact that we love each other," he said.

I've said it before: If Rudy could dig up the corpses of the WTC victims and put them on the stage at one of his rallies he would.

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Rudolph

Will's right, this is sick stuff:

A supporter of Rudy Giuliani's is throwing a party that aims to raise $9.11 per person for the Republican's presidential campaign.

[...]

But Sofaer said he had nothing to do with the "$9.11 for Rudy" theme.

"There are some young people who came up with it," Sofaer said when reached by telephone Monday evening. He referred other questions to Giuliani's campaign.

"I'm just providing support for him. He's an old friend of mine," Sofaer said of Giuliani.

Sofaer was a State Department adviser under President Reagan and is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution

The disparaging nickname "Ghouliani" has never been more apt (and don't think for a moment that his campaign didn't at least sign off on this). This is taking "waving the bloody shirt" to previously unimaginable lows. What's next, digging up the corpses of those killed at the WTC and arranging them on stage for a campaign rally?

The AP story ends thusly:

Giuliani was mayor of New York during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Like Rudy is ever, ever, going to let us forget that.

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A Man Who Could Be President

The latest from Robert Greenwald: The Real Rudy.

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It's TWOU! It's TWOU!

(With apologies to Lily von Schtupp.)

The Terrorists' War on Us.

Rudy - Just like George W. Bush - only more so!

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Kraphammer!

for someone as batshit-insane as Squeaky Wheels Krauthammer to call someone else "naive" is both pathetic and hiliarious:

For Barack Obama, it was strike two. And this one was a right-down-the-middle question from a YouTuber in Monday night's South Carolina debate: "Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?"

"I would," responded Obama.

Now, I'll agree that Obama was being naive - but politically; should he be the Democratic candidate losing all of the Miami Cuban votes could prove fatal. (Gads, I've grown to hate Florida. But I digress.)

What Chuckles is really arguing, however, is that we should never talk to our adversaries but simply bomb them back to the Paleolithic Era. It's a good thing that presidents from Truman on (even Reagan!) didn't hew to the ideas espoused by the likes of Kraphammer and his fellow neocon nutters.

Chuckles' colleague William Arkin quotes Obama:

"When we talk to world leaders, it gives us an opportunity to speak about our ideals, our values and our interests, and I am not afraid to have that conversation with anybody," he said. "If I sit down with the leader of Iran, I will send him a strong message that Israel is our friend, that we will assist in their security and that we don't find nuclear weapons acceptable.... That's not going to be a propaganda coup for the president of Iran."

This is right. (Note: I'm not an Obama supporter.) It should be noted that Arkin takes a similar, but more rationally reasoned, line as Chuckles. And it should also be noted that Ahmadinejad isn't the real power in Iran - a council of Mullahs is. And they have shown a willingness to sit down and have a reasonable discussion.

On the other hand, maybe Chuckles is right. It's safe to assume that if President Obama - or any other president - dared to speak to the like of Chavez or Castro or Kim then the Krauthammers of this country - and they're legion - would unleash a firestorm that would destroy any chance of ratcheting down tensions. Indeed, the neocons are going to continue to work to make sure that enemies stay enemies and to make sure that new enemies are always in the offing.

So, maybe Chuckles is right, but his would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Rudy Vs. Ferrets

Ferrets win:

[Via Ana Marie.]

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KO

Ouch.

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Spin This, Rudy

Giuliiani is in business with someone the right compares to Hitler:

Rudolph Giuliani's law firm lobbies for Citgo Petroleum Corp., a unit of the state-owned oil company controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the U.S.'s chief antagonist in the Western Hemisphere.

Bracewell & Giuliani LLP registered to lobby for Citgo in Texas on April 26, 2005, less than a month after the former New York mayor joined the firm and became a name partner, state records show. Citgo renewed the contract in 2006 and 2007 and pays the firm $5,000 a month to track legislation. Giuliani doesn't lobby, the firm says.

I can't wait to hear his, and his supporters, explanation/rationalization.

[Via kos.]

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Fuck You, Rudy

Giuliani speaking about Iraq last night:

"It reminds me a little of the problem I faced in reducing crime in New York."

There are an awful lot of people who need to be locked up for the nation's good.

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Another Family Values Republican

Children? What Children?

On Rudy Giuliani's new exploratory committee website you can find a bio of the former Mayor and current frontrunner for the GOP Presidential nomination. The bio describes his current marriage as follows: "In May of 2003, Rudy married Judith S. Nathan. Mrs. Giuliani is a registered nurse with an extensive medical and scientific background." Yet intriguingly, Rudy's bio makes no mention of the two children he had from his second marriage to Donna Hanover, who similarly goes unmentioned.

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