“Rudy Giuliani [is] probably the most under-qualified man since
George Bush to seek the presidency,” Sen. Joe Biden declared during
Tuesday’s Democratic debate in Philadelphia. “There’s only three
things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”
The crowd roared with laughter, and liberal blogger Josh
Marshall wrote, “Okay, I may have to endorse Biden after
this tear against Rudy.”
With the end of the dreaded Bush era approaching, Rudy Giuliani
has slowly begun to supplant the President as the leading hate
figure among liberals, a reality that will only help Giuliani in
his efforts to overcome his differences with conservatives and win
the Republican nomination.
Within the past month, the New Republic, the
Nation, and the Washington Monthly have all run
anti-Giuliani cover stories, with the latter one declaring that, “as president, Giuliani would
grab even more executive power than Bush and Cheney.”
In the Boston Globe, James Carroll wrote of Giuliani, “He’s like a gang leader now,
roving the streets, looking for some punk to bash. Iran will
do.”
This sentiment has dominated liberal blogs, where a general
consensus has formed that Giuliani would be the worst president
imaginable. Giuliani’s decision to include neoconservative icon
Norman Podhoretz on his foreign policy advisory team has also
triggered liberal paranoia about his determination to attack Iran.
Lost in all the fuss is the fact that Charles
Hill, a Yale professor, is actually Giuliani’s top adviser.
What Giuliani and Hill have both emphasized is that if America
makes it clear that it will not hesitate to use military force,
diplomacy has a much more realistic chance of succeeding. Not that
this line of reasoning would win over any of his critics on the
left.
“If you want to spend enormous amounts of money and kill
millions of people in service of policies that will be
counterproductive for both democracy and American national security
then Rudy’s your man,” wrote the American Prospect’s Scott
Lemieux in a post titled “Stop
Rudy.” Giuliani’s deviations from conservatives don’t score him any
points among the Left, either. Lemieux’s colleague, Dana Goldstein,
pleaded with her fellow progressives to “stop
calling Rudy Giuliani pro-choice.”
The possibility of a Giuliani presidency had the
Atlantic’s Matthew Yglesias struggling for words: “One thing I’m wrestling
with is finding a way to convey how terrified I am of the prospect
of a Rudy Giuliani presidency in terms of its impact on our foreign
policy.”
But Yglesias noted Talking Point Memo’s Marshall comes close to best
explaining why Giuliani is worse than Mitt Romney. “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,” Marshall wrote.
The Giuliani hate fest has also infiltrated the airwaves, where
Keith Olbermann has made bashing Rudy a daily feature on his show.
On Monday, an Olbermann segment entitled, “Rudy Giuliani — The
next Dick Cheney?” was about Giuliani’s penchant for “secrecy” and
“proclivity for executive power…”
This was followed up on Tuesday with a segment that began with a
graphic featuring Giuliani, Bush in the background, and the words
“Bush on Steroids” — a reference to John Edwards’s comment that
Giuliani shares Bush’s love of “crony capitalism.”
The segment revealed, just as with Bush, the media has no
problem broadcasting factual errors when targeting Giuliani.
Olbermann misquoted
Giuliani as saying that Democrats wanted to invite Osama bin
Laden to the White House. In actuality, Giuliani didn’t say Osama,
he said Assad, as in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, one
of the leaders whom Barack Obama did in fact say he would be willing to meet with in
Washington with no preconditions within the first year of his
administration. Making the incident even more absurd, Olbermann ran
the video clip of Giuliani’s remarks on his show, and it was clear
that Giuliani said Assad. How clear? The transcript appearing on the official MSNBC website for
Olbermann’s show had Giuliani saying Assad in the video clip.
Nevertheless, Olbermann asked his guest Arianna Huffington to
comment on whether the former mayor was being hyperbolic or
lying.
“Well, he’s lying and also every day he reveals more and more of
himself,” Huffington said. “And you can see that he really has the
soul of a thug and the disposition of a tyrant.”
Huffington repeated the false Giuliani-Osama quote, and later in
the interview, she added: “He’s kind of channeling Rush Limbaugh.
He’s making the lunatic fringe mainstream.”
And Olbermann wondered, “Has it reached a level yet where we
should be considering examining whether or not this is compulsive
lying that there is something endemic to [Giuliani]? Or this
specific purpose driven lies?”
One might ask the same about Olbermann. Even though the AP
issued a
correction to its story that misquoted Giuliani following a
report on AmSpecBlog,
as of this writing, Olbermann has not corrected his erroneous
segment. His spokeswoman did not return three calls or an email
sent from TAS asking whether the news channel planned to
correct the error, and if not, to explain its corrections
policy.
The irony, of course, is that the more vocal, vicious, and
unfounded liberal attacks on Giuliani become, the easier it is for
him to make his case to conservative primary voters that they agree
on a lot more than they
disagree. Giuliani has often cited his liberal foes to burnish his
own conservative credentials.
“I find it difficult understanding those who try to make me out
as an activist for liberal causes,” Giuliani said at his recent
speech to the Family Research Council’s Value Voters’ Summit. “If
you think that, just read any New York Times editorial
while I was mayor of New York City.”
For a long time, Giuliani’s liberal adversaries from New York
were convinced that there was no way that Giuliani could win the
Republican nomination, but as it has become a more realistic
possibility, their
worries have grown.
“It’s totally unbelievable,” Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY),
lamented in the New York Observer of
Giuliani’s resilience in the presidential race. “I refuse to
believe that this could possibly happen to our country. I have too
much confidence in our country to believe that this could really
happen.”
With enemies like Rangel, does Giuliani need friends?
