George W Bush is going to be a tough act to follow

But Rudy Guiliani is going to give it his best shot.

Matt Taibbi has a great article in Rolling Stone detailing what actually makes up Guiliani.

Rudy giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Which would make you wonder how such a scumball, who's popularity as mayor of New York City was somewhat akin to that of a New York gutter rat until a bunch of suicidal Arabs bailed him out by taking everyone's mind off the corruption and bizarre antics of Guiliani's municipal regime, could stand a snowball's chance in hell of winning the US presidency.

Suddenly, Guiliani grew a halo. And now, he's making hay on the disaster which others dealt with, he's hanging out with Karl Rove's operatives and he's engaged in a smear campaign on his nearest Democratic Party opponent.

Pure Bush.

One would like to think that Guiliani, with a background so corrupt that the good fellas from across the river consider him competition, doesn't stand a chance. But then, Taibbi explains it in classic form.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out.

Maybe a continuously running marquee on the bottom of the TV screen detailing Guiliani's history would solve the problem. You know, during this program.

No?

No. I didn't really think so either.