Rudy Giuliani: Man At Work

2008-06-09T21:30:28Z

This video takes Rudy to task for all of his "mistakes" from the Command Center in the World Trade Center (you may remember we had a thing or two to say about that) to recommending convict Bernie Kerik for the Department of Homeland Security cabinet position to my personal favorite, making Judi Nathan the best-protected mistress in all the land.

Set to the wonderful tunes of Men At Work and an interview on Meet The Press. It's good stuff.

Watch it!

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FOX: "A Myth in the Unmaking"

2008-07-09T19:41:16Z

I haven’t yet addressed the Judith Regan lawsuit against News Corp. (owner of FOX, the NY Post, MySpace, etc etc). You can read the court filing at the SmokingGun.com — it really reads like a corporate mob hit, where people at News Corp. saw that Regan could be a liability to Giuliani’s campaign due to her affair with indicted Giuliani BFF Bernie Kerik and set her up to be whacked. I repeat: “senior executives” at News Corp. told Regan to lie to people investigating Kerik because it would hurt a presidential candidate. It’s a pretty fascinating read and I’ll be writing more about it in the future.

But Michael Tomasky of the UK Guardian knows what this lawsuit could mean. First, he nails what FOX really is, “a lock, stock and barrel servant of the Republican party,” then goes on to what FOX clearly is not:

Journalism with a point of view is a fine thing. It's what I do. The difference is that I say I'm a liberal journalist while Fox executives and "reporters" insist they play it straight. But everyone in the US knows that my description is true. This is precisely why its fans watch it. Walk into any bar, hair salon, gym or motel lobby in the country; if the TV is tuned to Fox rather than CNN, you know that the owner or clientele or both are Republican. It's a secret - although not actually secret any more - sign of fraternity among conservatives

Giuliani's Dirty Record Finally Starting To Get The Scrutiny It Deserves

2008-07-09T19:59:20Z

A whole host of articles have come out taking a look into Mr. Wonderful lately. One can only hope our widely-viewed video on the Loveable Waterboarder of New York Mafiosas (in his mind anyhow) will have the never-ending parade of filth in his personal, political and financial lives fully vetted.

We have this great piece in In These Times by Lindsay Beyerstein, appropriately called Rudy Giuliani: Criminal Or Liar (ed. note: Are they mutually exclusive?):

Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani raised serious questions about his record as a public servant when he announced on television that he had used "intensive questioning techniques" on New York mobsters and other criminals, and that his brand of intensive interrogation was difficult to differentiate from torture.
Giuliani put on his best tough-guy act in an interview with Al Hunt on "Political Capital with Al Hunt," which aired on Nov. 2.

You see, oh law giver Rudy, that would have been illegal. I am guessing it is just more of your bombastic bravado.

In, "What Regan Knows," Frank Rich gives us another glimpse into the Madness Of Rudy Giuliani:

Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik. Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he talked only of the finer points of memoir writing or about his theories of crime prevention or about his ideas for training the police in the Muslim world (an assignment he later received in Iraq and botched). But it is also plausible that this couple discussed everything Mr. Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani's side before, during and after 9/11. Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously, that his city's $61 million emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.
Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor established after leaving office. Mr. Kerik worked at Giuliani Partners and used its address as a mail drop for some $75,000 that turns up in the tax-fraud charges in his federal indictment. That money was Mr. Kerik's pay for an 11-sentence introduction to another Regan-published book about 9/11, "In the Line of Duty." Though that project's profits were otherwise donated to the families of dead rescue workers, Mr. Kerik's royalties were mailed to Giuliani Partners in the name of a corporate entity Mr. Kerik set up in Delaware. He would later claim that he made comparable donations to charity, but the federal indictment charges that $80,000 he took in charitable deductions were bogus.

Uh oh, your pal from the family values party who was having that affair in the apartment set aside for Ground Zero rescue workers. Yeah, he may talk a bit too much between the sheets.

Next, Reuters takes aim at the scary Rudy:

Giuliani's critics take issue with his choice of foreign policy advisers that includes neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, who is outspoken on a need to bomb Iran, and Daniel Pipes, who advocates singling out Muslims at airport security points.
Worrisome to them too are Giuliani's calls for a larger U.S. military and his refusal to call waterboarding, which simulates drowning, a form of torture.
"This is one dangerous man: it's George Bush with brains," wrote Michael Tomasky, editor of the Guardian Online.
Online, the blogging community uses similar descriptions.
"There is a sense Rudy Giuliani isn't just wrong but is genuinely scary. Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson or John McCain are wrong, and they're perceived as putting the country on the wrong track, but Rudy Giuliani is genuinely scary," said Steve Benen, editor of The Carpetbagger Report.

Steve Benen, as always, is right on. And full disclosure, Mike Tomasky is the editor of my new weekly Guardian column. Which means, he edited this, a column by that very goofy guy named Cliff Schecter talking about this Giuliani person:

But I'll share with you a something even goofier - an industry term - than Rudy's Franco-paranoia: many Americans still think Rudy Giuliani is a 9/11 hero.
It's still an uphill battle to question Giuliani's Churchillian poses of that day; the majestic manner in which he carried himself while George Bush was preoccupied with reading mono-syllabic phrases to school children and using Air Force One as the largest hide-and-seek hiding spot in the world.
But even though Rudy hasn't yet donned his Top Gun flight suit, that doesn't change the fact that the serial-marrying former mayor of New York was in fact quite the opposite of a "hero" in the years before 9/11. In fact, his actions, or inaction, are responsible for getting firefighters killed.

Now wasn't that fun kids? Sorry Rudy, your sleazy past is going to get the light of day places squarely upon it. And that just can't be a good thing. At least for you.

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