Giuliani: Divorced again!

In his appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Truth he wanted out and took Honor along with him. Oh, and while he was at it, he completely abandoned Reality.

Why do I give a fig about this? I’ll tell you why.

Just as a person who has been attacked by a dog may thereafter fear all dogs, a person who has experienced McCarthyism may forever be vigilant lest we allow it into our society again.

I was in high school during the ascendancy of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and his counterparts in the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and because my father worked at the U.N. I got a pretty good inside look at the tyranny of those people.

Dad, with the rest of the American employees of the U.N. Secretariat, had to complete a 13-page loyalty/security questionnaire; the final page was blank, with the instructions, approximately, to “use the space below to provide information that will prove your loyalty to the United States.”

Any historian will confirm that Joe McCarthy never unearthed a single enemy of the people, and he eventually got into some hot water for trying to play the U.S. Army for fools. But the inquisitorial process was numbing (“Were you aware that your friend Mr. Soandso was a member of the Communist party 20 years before you met him?” “Have you ever entertained the Soandso family in your home?”) — and the collateral damage was fierce.

Mr. Soandso — whose politics were pretty ordinary, it turned out — lost his job, and — the times being what they were — his children were harangued in school as “commies.” His wife went to work to support the family. He never recovered his job, his good name, or his dignity.

Meanwhile, back at the State Department, where Dad had worked before the U.N., a dear friend of our family was subpoenaed to appear in person, no attorney allowed; she was questioned over a period of hours about her loyalty and friendships. It was rough and it was traumatic, and she resigned because she just couldn’t take any more.

No charges were ever filed against either of the people I’ve described.

But I was impressed, and I was terrified. Even half a dozen years later, waiting at a bus stop I spied a newsstand that displayed the Daily Worker; I was afraid to cast a further glance at it lest I be seen by someone who might do that to me.

I finally got over it as the country seemed to get saner (and Joe McCarthy, who was laughed out of power by Judge Joseph G. Welch during the Army hearings, finally succumbed to the ravages of alcohol and hatred), but I’ll admit to being a wee bit paranoid still.

So Mr. Giuliani got my attention when he said, essentially, that Barack Obama’s community organizing was run by "a Saul Alinsky [Red flag!] group," in league with the Chicago machine politicians, and that the real purpose of that group was to use taxes for the redistribution of wealth rather than for the benefit of the country.

“Redistribution of wealth” — you know, like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez; it’s quite a stretch to claim that trying to put people back to work after they've lost their jobs when the steel plants closed is trying to redistribute wealth.

Rudy said this was “socialist,” called Obama the most left-wing candidate ever, and the most liberal member of the Senate. He repeated the “redistribution of wealth” bit three times, pretty hefty for a few-minute comment.

Naturally, I can’t help but wonder how he would characterize Adlai Stevenson, famously called a “pinko” by Nixon back in the McCarthy era; for that matter how might Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern feel about giving up the “most left-wing” title? And as for the Senate liberals, did he just diss Ted Kennedy? And what about Bernie Sanders, for heaven’s sake, who calls himself a “socialist”?

And Saul Alinsky? Alinsky was in fact the father of “community organizing,” and he was very good at it. He fought AGAINST the Chicago machine because he saw that it wasn’t working for the working poor. Let alone the just plain poor. And he succeeded.
Here’s what the Washington Post said about him:

Alinsky was a bluff iconoclast who concluded that electoral politics offered few solutions to the have-nots marooned in working-class slums. … Power flowed up, he said, and neighborhood leaders who could generate outside pressure on the system were more likely to produce effective change than the lofty lever-pullers operating on the inside.

Alinsky took action with an organizing campaign in 1939 in Back of the Yards, the desperate Chicago meatpacking district depicted in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." Fashioning an unlikely alliance of unions, the Catholic church and others to win concessions from industry and government, he said organizers must listen to people's desires, then find leaders to carry the fight.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

So it’s not surprising that when Obama, trained (and by the way, Rudy, having been very successful) in community organizing, talks about the fixing the economy he calls for building from the bottom up, putting people put back to work, rewarding employers for keeping jobs from going overseas, and paying women the same as men for the same work, for example. That’s part of the beginning.

But Giuliani wants you to think, “Commie pinko!”

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy: We’ve been through all this before, haven’t we? And there are a bunch of us who don’t want to go there again. Better take care, lest you be laughed off the stage like Joe McCarthy!

Originally published September 14, 2008

Sauce for the Gander

Last week in this space I wrote about the importance of paying close attention to each candidate as the primary season moves along, because what you see can be a really good indicator of what you would get.

On the other hand, especially in politics it seems, what you see or hear may cleverly mask reality, usually because the reality might also be called the unpleasant truth.
The “Healthy Forests Initiative” comes to mind, designed as it was to expand private logging access to old-growth trees in federal forests.

Since my comments last week on the upcoming primary election focused on the putative front-runner in the Democratic race, it seems only fair to now talk about the man the pundits tell us is the Republican front-runner.

And in this case what you see is most definitely not what you get.

I have to admire, in a way, a person whose aura is so strong as to overcome everything and everyone in the room, including an elephant or two (no pun intended).

Imagine yourself at an elegant dinner in a five-star restaurant; the entree has just been set before you, the hundred-dollar bottle of cabernet has proven to be worth every penny, and a guy at the next table lights up a cheap cigar.

When word began to buzz that Rudy Giuliani was thinking about running for President, the pundits all predicted that he would never be accepted in polite society, so to speak, because of his quite liberal views, and that there was no way he could win the nomination of the Republican party.

So here we are, surrounded by the aura of strength, with a candidate who is not what he seems, and not what the country needs.

On the assumption that most non-New Yorkers don’t really know Rudy (funny, isn’t it, how both front-runners have first-name identity), I’d like to offer a short profile here. (This is where I ‘fess up to part of my roots, the formative years spent in New York, whose vestiges have remained; even though I have now lived in Waxahachie twice as long as anywhere else, formative is formative and I have never stopped paying attention to events in the Big Apple.)

Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as mayor of New York was fraught with controversy and cronyism.

There have been terrible decisions, reckless behavior, outright lies, and disastrous judgment in public appointments. Just this week one of his good-buddy appointments, Bernie Kerik, was indicted for tax fraud, corruption, and lying to the White House. (That old saw about judging a man by the company he keeps persists for a reason.)

Terrible decisions: Giuliani was elected mayor soon after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic terrorists. Nonetheless, in 1997, despite opposition by wiser folks, he insisted that the city’s emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center. A terrible decision that cost many lives.

Reckless behavior: In May of 2000, then-mayor Giuliani revealed at a press conference that he and Donna Hanover, his wife of 17 years, would be separating. It was a surprise announcement, not least to his wife, to whom he had not yet delivered the news.

At that same time he identified Judith Nathan, with whom he had been frequently seen around town, as “a very good friend.” She later became the current Mrs. Giuliani.

Disastrous judgment: And then, of course, Bernie Kerik, the ol’ buddy pal with past mob connections (that Rudy claims he didn’t know about) and a long trail of scandal before, during and after his appointments by Rudy to important positions such as NYC Police Commissioner. He even got the President to nominate Bernie to head Homeland Security, a nomination soon abruptly withdrawn.

Rudy stayed by his friend through it all, until about six months ago when he began to put some distance between himself and Kerik. About the time he declared for President, actually.

Lies: Giuliani told reporters he spent more time than many first responders in the toxic dusts of Ground Zero after 9/11, enraging the New York City firefighters because it was flagrantly untrue.

And of course Giuliani likes to take full credit for bringing down crime rates in New York while he was mayor, when in fact credit should go to William Bratton who, while he was still head of the New York Transit Police and even before Giuliani appointed him Police Commissioner in 1994 initiated the “quality of life” approach that so dramatically cut crime in the City. (After too many people became aware of his role, Bratton was moved on and out.)

Allow me to pause here to say that as I write all this I feel a little seedy, as if this were some gossip column or worse, even though these facts are out there already. I just think they are relevant in assessing the character and qualifications of a man who would be President of the United States and leader of the free world.

But still, enough. There’s just too much.

In short, the candor and authenticity that voters seem to crave this season are not Rudy’s to offer. Nor is there any evidence that he actually has the “strength” that he claims should qualify him for the presidency.

What he has, as any New Yorker can tell you, is Attitude. Now, I don’t think that Attitude gets you very far with the rest of the world, but hey! You want Attitude? Choose Rudy.

There are several quite honorable, worthy and even honest men running for the Republican nomination, but Rudy Giuliani is not one of them.

I will agree, though, that he seems to be really effective at reassuring folks AFTER a disaster, so perhaps the next president will consider him to head up FEMA.