Just Askin': How Long Was Rudy Mayor After 9/11?:
After reading former New York City mayor, presidential candidate, and bald man Rudy Giuliani's manifesto on America's place in the world in Foreign Affairs, the Rude Pundit was left with a few questions, a strong desire to drink straight rye whiskey, and a stomachache that felt like he had been stomped by jack-booted thugs. Because while Giuliani spouts on and on about how theworldchangedafter9/11, someone needs to ask this glowing essence of terrorist fighting light a simple question: How exactly did you help New York City recover from 9/11?

'Cause, using a magical calendar, it's pretty easy to determine that Giuliani was only the mayor of New York (not "America's Mayor," which is more honorific or exploitable) for four months after the World Trade Center was destroyed. And then he spent the next few years making shitloads of money from speaker's fees and Giuliani Partners (financially benefiting enormously from hyping the terrorist threat so that corporations and others would use the services of his "security consulting" firm), fighting Hillary Clinton, fighting cancer, and banging his new wife. And basking in the glow left behind after he was buffed clean of the dust of the Twin Towers.

'Cause, see, New York City's recovery after the end of 2001 had nothing to do with Rudy Giuliani. Mike Bloomberg took over in January 2002 (after an election that Giuliani tried to postpone). All Giuliani did, the sum total of his 9/11 experience, is that he held some hands and was a cheerleader, along with cooperating with the feds. Giuliani's just the skeevy fucker at an accident scene who makes sure he gets in front of the TV cameras, ready to thank God that no one else was hurt or to say anything it takes to keep that red light burning in his direction.

So when you read Giuliani's Foreign Affairs screed (and it is a screed just gussied up for a more prestigious publication than, say, Newsmax), you're getting the opinion of a man whose credentials are: doing little to protect New York City after the 1993 bombing (other than making a really cool love nest/war room that blew up real good on 9/11), leaving office (by law) while the World Trade Center hole was still warm, and massively profiting off the very wars he wishes to foster. Anyone wanna talk some more about Barack Obama's lack of experience?

And you oughta read the thing. As others have pointed out, it's some insane and dangerous shit. It's also hilarious, the kind of hyperbole that seems like it was written in a backwoods shack by a bugfuck nutzoid hermit tweaking on homemade meth, thinking he's surrounded by man-eating bears and scrotum-gnawing weasels. In other words, very Republican.

"We are all members of the 9/11 generation," writes Giuliani at the outset, which is like being part of the Woodstock generation, but with less fucking. Yep, it's a new age, says Rudy, "when old ideas have to be rethought and new ideas have to be devised to meet new challenges." Prior to 9/11, no one ever thought to devise new ideas to meet new challenges - it's why we still fire muskets at incoming RPGs.

Then he goes completely unhinged, like rhino-tranq-that-motherfucker-before-he-kills-again crazed. See, Rudy says we have to try to create a "realistic peace... Achieving a realistic peace means balancing realism and idealism in our foreign policy...realism must help us recognize the road we must travel to achieve them." But watch out - "A realistic peace is not a peace to be achieved by embracing the 'realist' school of foreign policy thought." So we must be realistic with our realism but not be realists. Aw, fuck, that was just like a punch to the temple.

Most of the rest of the essay is like George W. Bush without the nuance, the kind of Manichaeism that'd make Mani go, "Whoa, dude, back the fuck off." It's filled with the "no shit" broad generalizations that mark the idiots' dictums of the neocon movement: "America is a nation that loves peace and hates war...The world is a dangerous place." The kind of bullshit that politicians laugh about later that they put another one over on us yahoos.

But if you want scary funny, the kind of "oh, he can't really mean that" progression of logic, let's just throw two lines up together. Early in the piece, Giuliani says, "At the core of all Americans is the belief that all human beings have certain inalienable rights that proceed from God but must be protected by the state." Later, talking about "Extending the International System's Benefits," he writes, "Securing the rights of men, women, and children everywhere should be a core commitment of any country that counts itself as part of the civilized world." So rights that are gifts from a God, where both "rights" and "God" are defined by Americans (but are never defined by Rudy in this essay, for specifics are the tools of the effete), must be secured for all people of the Earth. Now, how are Muslim nations supposed to feel safe in Rudyworld? Or maybe that's the point - they're not. Either way, the second you introduce the big sky wizard into the argument, you're gonna lose.

Oh, what fun it would be to pick apart the entire thing, a rant disguised as reason, a way to make dumb people feel smart, to justify every past mistake (don't you get it? We really almost won the Vietnam war. Hippies were wrong). He praises events like Van Cliburn playing in the Soviet Union as helping bring down the Berlin Wall, but says of a post-Fidel Cuba, we must "resist any step that allows a decrepit, corrupt regime from consolidating its power under Raúl Castro." Although, again, what those steps might be beyond letting Hannah Montana play Havana are never defined.

In other words, there's nothing this power-hungry motherfucker won't say to pump up his street cred, making him seem like a bad-ass, when, really, he's just another whiny rich dick who wants to take credit for shit he didn't do and out tough guy the other tough guys. It's just amazing, in a Barnum-like way, that people still give a damn about what he has to say.