Punt! Punt now!

Goodbye Giuliani. It must be sad to realize that even Florida Republicans think you're a worthless piece of crap.

Giuliani. Man of acts

Rudy Giuliani was on Meet The Press this Sunday morning taking it from Russert. The whole thing was a commenters dream and left a target rich environment wide open for pot shots.

Towards the end of the show however, Giuliani said something which is truly mind boggling.

MR. RUSSERT: But you don’t believe homosexuality is aberrant...

MR. GIULIANI: Oh, no, no, no.

MR. RUSSERT: ...unnatural or sinful.

MR. GIULIANI: My, my, my—no, I don’t believe it’s sinful. My, my moral views on this come from the, you know, from the Catholic Church, and I believe that homosexuality, heterosexuality as a, as a way that somebody leads their life is not—isn’t sinful. It’s the acts, it’s the various acts that people perform that are sinful, not the—not the orientation that they have.

MR. RUSSERT: The Congress is discussing and...

MR. GIULIANI: Which includes me, by the way. I mean, you know, unfortunately, I’ve had my own sins that I’ve had to confess and had to deal with and try to overcome and so I’m very, very empathetic with people, and that we’re all, we’re all imperfect human beings struggling to, to try to be better.

At that point, for some inexplicable reason, Russert dropped the subject and moved on to the energy bill recently passed by the House of Representatives... as though Giuliani had not just stepped in it.

How in the hell does he reconcile that statement? The orientation is OK but the acts are sinful?! That's sort of like putting the ball on the tee eighteen times and walking away without hitting it, isn't it?

Who cares about the acts? If the sexual orientation of a person doesn't matter to Giuliani, why should he even concern himself with the acts?

Truth Wins Out also noticed.

“Have Giuliani’s long held convictions on gay relationships changed in a New York minute to win the GOP nomination? If they have, then he lacks the character to be president,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “Giuliani’s answer on Meet the Press seemed to parrot the religious right’s cruel and empty ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ rhetoric. We call on Giuliani to clarify what ‘acts’ he thinks are sinful and we hope he continues to respect all relationships.”

Allow me.

Rudy Giuliani suddenly remembered that a lot of those church-goin' voters he's hoping to nail down might just have a Tivo or a VCR, or they might have even skipped-out of church just to see what he was going to say. He went into instant recovery mode and tried to backtrack far enough to make himself look like bought into the religious right agenda.

Howard and Mark are probably pretty justified in feeling completely betrayed right now.

Giuliani's world is shrinking

Maybe he was suffering from shock. Republican US presidential contender Rudy Giuliani, the self-styled hero of 9/11 seemed to think that, even in the wake of attacks on his city, that he could abuse the money of New York City taxpayers.

In the fall of 2001, city cops chauffeured Rudy Giuliani's then-mistress, Judith Nathan, to her parents' Pennsylvania home 130 miles away on the taxpayers' dime.

Records show that city cops refueled at an ExxonMobil station down the road from Nathan's childhood home in Hazleton on Oct. 20, 2001, while Giuliani stayed behind in New York attending 9/11 funerals.

A similar receipt pops up at a different Hazleton gas station two months later, when Nathan apparently went home for a pre-Christmas visit with her parents.

The records show that - in addition to using City Hall funds to take Giuliani and Nathan to 11 secret trysts in the Hamptons, as has been previously reported - taxpayers were paying to ferry Nathan on long-distance trips without Giuliani, now a Republican contender for President.

Keep in mind, it was his mistress; not his wife. Despite attempts by some to obfuscate this point, Nathan possessed no status in New York's official life and was entitled to no more than any other New Yorker.

So, you're not surprized. OK. But this is bursting all over the place. The traditional media is jumping all over this, and quite rightly so. But, as John Cole points out, the super-sleuths of the citizen media seem to be a little quiet right now.

Malkin? Total silence. Ace of Spades? Nada. Kathryn Jean Lopez? Too busy trying to get Dana Perino a raise. Mark Steyn? Nope, too involved making things up for a future column. Jonah Goldberg? Hard at work on a book about.... well, never mind.

– When a 12 year old kid had the nerve to state that he benefited from a government program and thinks other kids should too, a massive orgy of ‘Truth detecting’ took place. Counters were examined. Houses were visited. Property records were scrutinized. Statements were parsed.

– When a private in the army wrote some tales with a few anecdotes about what he had experienced in the war in Iraq, and a few disagreed, no grain of sand was left unturned. Scale models of armored vehicles were built. Experts were called, emailed, and interrogated. Myspace accounts were looked up. Entire fields of Cray Supercomputers had to be brought online just to handle all the “debunking” and commentary from the wingnuts.

But now, a Republican front-runner FOR THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT has clearly played fast and loose with the public’s money to hide/finance his extramarital dalliances, and the truth detectors on the right are silent. When an NRO columnist admits straight-up to making shit up to radically overstate a military threat to a key ally, perhaps to agitate for American military involvement, our fact-checkers snooze. The sum total of the response can be summed up as a giant yawn.

Crickets. Not even a “heh, indeed” can be found on these topics from our brave and intrepid citizen journalists. Hell, they are lagging FAR behind all the traditional media, who are cranking out tons of stories about Giuliani. Greater Wingnuttia should change their motto from “We’ll fact check your ass” to “We’ll fact check your ass, if you aren’t a Republican.” At least that would be honest.

OK. So someone else can do the fact checking. Oh! What's this? Why, look at what Josh Marshall found.

Giuliani's administration sent a check for $400,000 to American Express. Though it was billed to the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, an office that provides lawyers for indigent defendants, the money served as an advance against future travel and other expenses later incurred by the mayor's office and his security detail.

The unusually large prepayment, as yet unreported, adds weight to the theory that the Giuliani administration was using accounting gimmicks to obscure his office's travel expenditures.

With $400,000 prepaid on the Amex account, the mayor and his staff drew down on the credit card for a number of trips, including a handful out to the Hamptons, where Judith Nathan had her condo. Giuliani's administration ultimately spent approximately $100,000 of the $400,000 before leaving office in January, 2001.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, confirmed to us that his administration put a stop to the practice of putting funds for future travel in bulk on a credit card. Shortly after Bloomberg took office, American Express refunded $298,000, the remaining unused balance on the account. The move came shortly after the city comptroller sent the mayor a letter critical of the Giuliani adminsitration's practice of billing obscure city agencies for mayoral travel expenses.

And you can find more here.

But you won't find anything at National Review Online.

The bloody-minded endorses the torturer

Televangelist and extreme Christian religious nut-ball, Pat Robertson, (Let's face it. His real name is Marion), endorsed Rudy Giuliani in his bid for the Republican nomination for President today.

Televangelist Pat Robertson today endorsed Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani, saying the former New York mayor's promises to appoint conservative judges and protect Americans "from the blood lust of Islamic terrorists" should trump conservatives' concerns about Giuliani's support of abortion rights.

Un huh. That's wonderful. Before you go running off with your hair on fire, however, there's more. You might even call it good news.

Robertson's endorsement came one day after another prominent social conservative, Paul Weyrich, endorsed Giuliani rival Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, a social conservative who ended his own GOP presidential bid earlier this fall, today endorsed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Looks to me like they're all split. And why do I get a niggling feeling there is the promise of money somewhere in this deal between Giuliani and Robertson? Neither one of them is beyond a little corruption and Robertson doesn't do anything for free.

Lest it's slipped your mind, Robertson was once espousing the holy virtues of Liberia's Charles Taylor. Taylor, in the meantime was responsible for a bloody civil war in that country while he siphoned off vast quantities of Liberia's wealth for his own use. In 1999 Robertson signed an agreement with Taylor giving Robertson's Freedom Gold Limited, (A Caymans registered company), a big fat gold mining concession. In return, Taylor got even richer. All the while Taylor was laying waste to Liberia, turning it into a nightmare of murder, rape and factional warfare. Years after his departure his legacy is a population of mutilated and mauled women, and an entire generation of child-soldiers requiring deprogramming.

While Taylor was perpetrating this holocaust on Liberia, Robertson was putting his arm around Taylor's shoulder. They were buddies.

A few years later, after Taylor was indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Robertson was his biggest defender, chastising the US government for demanding Taylor step down and turn himself over to authorities. He didn't mention his $8 million investment in his Liberian gold mine at the time.

That's just one of Roberston's dirty little deals with one of the worst people on earth. He had earlier capitalized on another disaster in Africa which should have seen him prosecuted for fraud and breach of trust.

Far from the media's gaze, Robertson has used the tax-exempt, nonprofit Operation Blessing as a front for his shadowy financial schemes, while exerting his influence within the GOP to cover his tracks. In 1994 he made an emotional plea on The 700 Club for cash donations to Operation Blessing to support airlifts of refugees from the Rwandan civil war to Zaire (now Congo). Reporter Bill Sizemore of The Virginian Pilot later discovered that Operation Blessing's planes were transporting diamond-mining equipment for the African Development Corporation, a Robertson-owned venture initiated with the cooperation of Zaire's then-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

That attracted the attention of the Virginia Office of Consumer Affairs.

After a lengthy investigation, Virginia's Office of Consumer Affairs determined that Robertson "willfully induced contributions from the public through the use of misleading statements and other implications." Yet when the office called for legal action against Robertson in 1999, Virginia Attorney General Mark Earley, a Republican, intervened with his own report, agreeing that Robertson had made deceptive appeals but overruling the recommendation for his prosecution. Two years earlier, while Virginia's investigation was gathering steam, Robertson donated $35,000 to Earley's campaign--Earley's largest contribution.

Those are just the prominent events. There is a litany of episodes marking Robertson as a crook, a liar and an unrepentant con-man.

So, Rudy, go ahead. Accept the endorsement of Marion Gordon Robertson. We already know you endorse torture. And by accepting Robertson's public endorsement, we can safely assume you're as dirty as all others he's promoted through his "Christian ministry".

Giuliani dabbles in foreign policy. Blames the rest of the world for his stupidity.

Shorter Rudy Giuliani: I have knowledge of 9/11 beyond that of all others. I was there. I know the terrorists. I can save you. I know where the terrorists came from. They came from Logan International, Dulles International and Newark airports. We will get them there and create a lasting, realistic peace. I will call in Batman.

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Canadian Cynic dangled Giuliani's piece of foreign policy tripe in front of me. He's right. I started screaming. Giuliani seems content to compare his role as the mayor of a city to that of an international statesman. And we're all supposed to swallow it. Believe me, there is a brighter student of foreign relations on holiday in Crawford, Texas at the moment, and I thought he was as low as one could go.

Luckily, Fred Kaplan, at Slate, took Giuliani's unbelievable and "shoot-in-the-dark" foreign policy bomb and counter-mined it.

Rudy Giuliani's essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, laying out his ideas for a new U.S. foreign policy, is one of the shallowest articles of its kind I've ever read. Had it been written for a freshman course on international relations, it would deserve at best a C-minus (with a concerned note to come see the professor as soon as possible). That it was written by a man who wants to be president—and who recently said that he understands the terrorist threat "better than anyone else running"—is either the stuff of high satire or cause to consider moving to, or out of, the country.

At which point I would ask where Kaplan found the generosity to issue it a C-minus.

Giuliani rambles on in deluded grandeur, making bizarre statements and suggestions without the slightest acknowledgment of the realities of today nor even a basic understanding of history.

Kaplan had a difficult enough time picking out the most glaringly grotesque bits of Giuliani's essay, so much so that he simply started at the beginning and, with little effort, tore it to shreds.

Giuliani describes the Viet Nam conflict in a way that demonstrates something very clearly. He wasn't there and he wasn't paying attention when it was happening.

His view of how to deal with Iran would do nothing short of starting an even bigger war in South Asia, probably sucking in the rest of the world.

And his vision for a constellation of satellites peeking into every nook and cranny of the globe is so beyond the realm of sanity that one could stop reading right there and be satisfied that Giuliani has lost complete possession of his faculties. If he ever had them to begin with.

If there is one thing which should alert people to how this narcissistic asshole would deal with the world, it's this statement:

The time has come to refine the diplomats' mission down to their core purpose: presenting U.S. policy to the rest of the world. Reforming the State Department is a matter not of changing its organizational chart -- although simplification is needed -- but of changing the way we practice diplomacy and the way we measure results. Our ambassadors must clearly understand and clearly advocate for U.S. policies and be judged on the results. Too many people denounce our country or our policies simply because they are confident that they will not hear any serious refutation from our representatives. The American ideals of freedom and democracy deserve stronger advocacy. And the era of cost-free anti-Americanism must end.

Does that rattle you? If not, it should. Giuliani thinks diplomacy is a one-way operation where the US is involved. The US speaks and the world heeds the words. No mention is made of even the slightest attempt to gain an understanding of the rest of the world or the grievances other countries may have. In fact, before he even gets there, he dismisses any possible complaint with US foreign policy with his little line about "cost-free anti-Americanism".

Does Giuliani understand that anti-Americanism has a root, and that the root is people just like him? It is a regurgitation of the principles laid out by uber-wanker Bill Kristol and the Project for a New American Century. The hubris and sense of entitlement are overwhelming.

What Giuliani seems to miss is that anti-Americanism is a disease lodged in America. Most of the world has a huge hate on for the US right now. From the bungling of a righteous incursion into Afghanistan to the mindless perpetration of a slaughter in Iraq, the US is not viewed as a collection of thoughtful world leaders. Indeed, the country is collectively assessed as a reactionary bully out to steal the lunch money of anyone and everyone they can in as short a time as possible.

Giuliani doesn't get it. America is soaked in the blood of its victims. The world isn't going to suddenly provide water for a bath without serious evidence of a reversal of the tendency to threaten or beat the daylights out of anyone who objects to the way the US does business outside its borders. Any good the US has done in the past century has been erased from the tote by the actions of the Bush administration, and Giuliani suggests that those actions be increased and expanded. He writes like a drug-dealer demanding personal respect at the point of a gun.

Giuliani's exaggerated style is nothing new. It might have worked in New York City - for a while. It has no place in global affairs and his flights of fancy should underline how bad this turkey would be for America and the world.

But then, Giuliani isn't beyond exaggerating. It suits him well. And I'd bet if you ask him, he will tell you he knows Batman.