However, I
know that Rudy Giuliani isn't serious. At this point, I think he's only running as a means of getting anal from his 22nd wife, Judith. If he does win the nomination, it'll only be by accident. And if he does, Hillary crushes him like a fucking bug in the general.
How do I know that? Because Rudy's pinning his entire candidacy on winning the South Carolina primary. I think he knows that Iowa is a lost cause and beating Romney next door to his home state is next to impossible. Furthermore, with Democrats and independents voting in the Granite State, Mitt's big challenge will come from McCain, who won there by 19 points in 2000. It should also be noted that Michigan is going out early next year and Big John is spending a
lot of time and money there and Rudy isn't.
There's a small problem with Rudy's "South Carolina or bust" strategy: it's never actually
worked before. No Republican has ever lost Iowa and New Hampshire and gone on to win the nomination. Ever.
And Giuliani isn't the first guy to try.
John Connally figured that if he could beat Reagan there, he could win. Connally had Strom Thurmond, who actually walked on water there, on board, too. However you'll notice that Connally is remembered today as the guy who was shot 93 times by the single bullet that took off JFK's noggin and not as the 40th president of the United States.
Small problem. Rudy's running on his record as mayor of New York, and what isn't being undone by Kerik might be undone by the positions he took on abortion, gun control, gay rights and immigration during that time. Sure, Hizzoner has flip-flopped on
all of those issues, but reasonable people can conclude that he (and that motherfucker, Romney) did so because they think that South Carolina Republican primary voters are stupid. Actually, after what happened to John McCain there seven years ago, I think that they're stupid, too, but that's hardly the point. You'll notice that I - like Stephen Colbert - am not on the ballot and don't have to curry favor with those inbred shitheels.
Giuliani adorably figures that his record as a "crime fighter" is enough to win. What he doesn't seem to understand is that most crimes do not fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government, which is something Republicans weren't exactly shy about pointing out when Bill Clinton was president. If you're an elderly woman and worried about getting your purse snatched, there's absolutely no point in looking to a President Giuliani to help you. That's your governor's job.
By the way, there was once another
celebrated New York crime fighter who ran for president. And he lost. Twice. Once to a Democrat nobody thought could win and couldn't get over 50% in the national polls either.
When you ask your average American how crime affects them, the general response is "I don't want to get shot in the fucking head." Unfortunately, unless you happen to be in Baghdad, the president has little if anything to do with your getting shot in the fucking head. Sure, it is within the jurisdiction of the executive branch of the federal government to protect your life's savings from, say, Enron, and they've done a .... remarkable job of it.
Furthermore, Rudy claims extraordinary amounts of credit for New York's declining crime rate during his tenure, but can't seem to recognize that crime fell
nationally during that period. And even if it didn't, that's still undercut by his police commissioner's being
indicted on 16 federal felony counts just yesterday.
Giuliani instinctively knows that he's got to change the perception that he's an unreconstructed liberal cocksucker, and to do that, he needs to bring a lunatic who despises everything he believes in on board.
That's where Pat Robertson comes in.If you're looking for a crazy person to support your campaign, you aren't going to do better than Pat Robertson, although George W. Bush did rather well with Osama bin Laden campaigning for him in the last weekend of the 2004 race. And Robertson isn't a stranger to presidential politics. He ran for the Republican nomination in 1988 because Jesus told him to.
Endorsements are important because they are known to sway the supporters of the person giving the endorsement to the candidate who receives it. Republicans never tire of pointing out the things that, say, Jesse Jackson has said and done when he endorses a candidate, yet they themselves always seem to escape that trap.
Let's look at
some of the crazy shit Pat's said, shall we?
- "Presbyterians are the spirit of the Antichrist."
- "The media challenged me. `You're not going to bring atheists into the government? How dare you maintain that those who believe the Judeo-Christian values are better qualified to govern America than Hindus and Muslims?' My simple answer is, `Yes, they are.'"
- "When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together."
- "We're importing Hinduism into America. The whole thought of your karma, of meditation, of the fact that there's no end of life and there's this endless wheel of life, this is all Hinduism. Chanting too. Many of those chants are to Hindu Gods -- Vishnu, Hare Krishna. The origin of it is all demonic. We can't let that stuff come into America. We've got the best defense, if you will -- a good offense."
- "You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist."
- "The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today."
- "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."
- "I think 'one man, one vote,' just unrestricted democracy, would not be wise. There needs to be some kind of protection for the minority which the white people represent now, a minority, and they need and have a right to demand a protection of their rights."
- "If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom ("Foggy Bottom" being the United States Department of State,) I think that's the answer."
- "If anybody understood what Hindus really believe, there would be no doubt that they have no business administering government policies in a country that favors freedom and equality."
And here's the Big Daddy of them all. You might remember that the United States was attacked by al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001. Nearly three thousand New Yorkers - for whom Giuliani was responsible in his capacity as mayor - were brutally murdered.
Pat Robertson said on national television that the deaths of those New Yorkers was nothing less than the judgement of Almighty God.
"We have allowed rampant secularism and occult, et cetera, to be broadcast on television. We have permitted somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 to 40 million unborn babies to be slaughtered in our society. We have a Court that has essentially stuck its finger in God's eye and said, 'We're going to legislate you out of the schools, we're going to take your Commandments from off the courthouse steps in various states, we're not going to let little children read the Commandments of God, we're not going to let the Bible be read -- no prayer in our schools.' We have insulted God at the highest levels of our government. And, then we say 'why does this happen?' Well, why its happening is that God Almighty is lifting His protection from us."
This, my friends, is the guy that Giuliani is taking to his bossom. Rudy Giuliani is actually accepting the endorsement of a guy who said that Osama bin Laden is an instrument of god!
In accepting the endorsement, Giuliani said Robertson's support brings confidence to the campaign and that it underscores "Ronald Reagan's advice to us that my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy."
Did Rudy Giuliani just say that he's an "80 percent friend" of someone like Pat Robertson? If so, I think moderate, sane Republicans should be asking Giuliani about that 80/20 split.
As a practicing (and one
desperately in need of more practice) Catholic, does Rudy believe that Hindus, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists (which would include President George H.W. Bush) and some poor bastard in Israel are the Antichrist?
Does he believe that God should be a target in the War on Terror? Does Giuliani believe that the president of Venezuela should be assassinated, although that is
clearly contrary to American law? Should the State Department really be nuked and if so, how is he going to get a Secretary of State?
Does he think that Planned Parenthood teaches beatiality and if so, how does he square that with his three contributions to them? Is feminism really " a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians," and if so, does that explain why his literal army of wives left him? Are witchcraft and lesbianism really more enticing than being the 63rd Mrs. Rudolph Giuliani? I'd be shocked to hear that, seeing how Rudy is such a sexy bastard and all.
I can't be alone in wondering which 80 percent of issues Rudy finds himself in agreement with that maniac, can I? How much of that 80 percent will he be comfrtable seeing in a Republican platform, or scarier still, with his pesidential signature attached to?
Giuliani thinks that he's being embraced by conservatives in receiving Robertson's blessing. The problem is that Pat isn't so much of a conservative as he is a fucking lunatic. And Rudy's willing to throw away anything that even remotely resembles credibility for the votes of a few dozen toothless yokels for whom Pat Roberston's endorsement actually means something positive.
There's an iron law in the political endorsement business: whenever possible, an endorsement should bring more people into the tent than it drives out. And the quality of person it brings in should be carefully scrutinized. There is, after all, a reason that Democrats don't actively seek out the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan. Or Charles Manson, I suppose.
In the interest of full disclosure, there was a time when I was actually excited by the prospect of a Giuliani candidacy. It is well past time that the GOP got away from justifying their very existence on stupid issues like abortion and gay rights. Both are beneath serious people and constitutionally beyond the office of the president anyway. I thought that just maybe Giuliani could show the party that they've won presidential elections in spite of their stupid culture war (which they were never all that serious about anyway) rather than because of it.
If anyone is interested, I'll tell you the precise moment that the Republican Party lost me, probably forever. It was at 12:41 am, March 21, 2005 when the president of the United States returned to Washington from Crawford to sign legislation that the Republican congress passed involving the federal government in the sad death of
Terri Schiavo.It is important to remember that President Bush didn't return to Washington on August 6, 2001 when he received a Presidential Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Striked Within the United States." Bush did leave Crawford for a California rally and fund-raiser on August 29, 2005 when the city of New Orleans effectively ceased to exist after Hurricane Katrina struck.
But he did go back to work in a pathetic, stupid effort to reverse over 200 years of case law, family privacy, and the very nature of federalism itself to score points on Terri Schiavo's dying moments. Even though the Republican controlled government wasted literally trillions of dollars on bullshit and invaded a large, hostile country with woefully inadequate resources, it took the Schiavo case to demonstrate that they clearly don't believe in anything at all except securing the votes of Evangelical hillbillies. After what the GOP did to that poor woman, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that they do their budget forcasting with fucking chicken intestines
If you want to know where the priorities of the Republican Party are, look no further than the sad, horrible saga of Terri Schiavo.
For a time I honestly believed that Rudolph Giuliani could change that. He was conservative on the things that matter and liberal on the things that don't. If he had challenged Bush for the 2004 nomination, I would have supported him wholeheartedly. I actually thought that he could change the GOP and by extension, America.
Instead, the GOP changed him. In 2006, he campaigned his heart out for the fattest of the Republican pork farmers and then spoke on behalf of an incumbent who had actually choked his mistress.
Instead of being part of the solution, Giuliani has made a conscious, informed decision to be part of the problem. In short, fuck him. He's the most disappointing major presidential candidate in my lifetime and I'll do whatever it takes to see him lose.
Sure, Robertson and Giuliani agree on a demonstrably failed strategy on the War on Terror, but Giuliani also shook hands with a man who said that Presbyterians are the spirit of the Antichrist on Wednesday. What's next, a whistlestop with Dog the goddamned Bounty Hunter? How low is this man prepared to go in his demented lust for power? You can no longer tell me that he's doing anything on principle because his principles change every 35 seconds.
After accepting an endorsement from a superstitious psychopath like Pat Robertson, I'm amazed that Rudy Giuliani hasn't died of embarrassment for once having written a book called Leadership. I guess that I now have no other choice but to believe in miracles.
I've spent 25 years and god knows how many thousands of dollars learning what I know about the American presidency. And I didn't go to school to learn it, I taught myself, book by godawful expensive book. I didn't do that just to see the third unprincipled punk in a row get elected to destroy everything that office stood for. All things being equal, I probably would have been better off being a fucking Trekkie.
But I learned that I wasted my life a long, long time ago and I'm not entirely sure that I even care anymore. I was in California during the fabled Florida recount and I didn't care a whole lot then, either. I couldn't see what difference it made which horribly unqualified loser became the leader of the free world. That was the first presidential election I felt that way about. In all likelihood, this will be the third in a row.
On the other hand, I'm closing out my fourteenth consecutive year of loathing the president of the United States, and that seems to have done wonders for my writing. I suspect that if he wins, Rudy Giuliani will turn me into
William fucking Faulkner.Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Disease of Conceit By: Bob Dylan
From: Oh MercyPermalink
