Giuliani Not the Leading Candidate with His Kids. I have pooh-poohed here the idea that Rudolph Giuliani is the leading candidate for the Republican Party's nomination for President in 2008. The only people who could believe any such thing are people who know almost nothing about Giuliani except that he was Mayor of New York when the World Trade Center attacks occurred. But he was much more than that, and his public record is filled with items that bar him from serious contention for the Republican Party's nomination.
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Today another very damaging revelation came out about that would-be dictator: his kids can't stand him. You see, he divorced their mother and married a woman with whom he had an adulterous affair right in front of them and the City of New York. He brought his mistress into Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the Mayor, while the kids were present. And this is the man the conservative guardians of traditional morality want to nominate for President? I don't think so.
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I lived in New York City during the Giuliani years, and came to have very substantial contempt for the man and his authoritarian aspirations. I called him "Mussoliani" because of his high-handedness. He even tried to overstay his term of office, in a system (a) that has fixed terms, not movable dates for holding power, and (b) that had enacted term limits, passed by the voters, which required him to leave office promptly at the expiration of his second term. His excuse for proposing to stay past that deadline was that he was The Indispensable Man: the City of New York could not recover from 9/11 without him at the helm. What a load of crap.
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The website NNDB.com's bio of Giuliani contains this startling paragraph:

Shortly after Giuliani left office, he filed for divorce, accusing [Donna] Hanover of "cruel and inhuman treatment." In her response, Hanover blamed the ex-mayor's "open and notorious adultery." When their divorce was finalized, she got a million dollars a year in alimony. In May of 2003, Giuliani returned to Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York's mayor, for a lavish ceremony to marry his former paramour, Judith Nathan. The city's new [Republican] mayor, Michael Bloomberg, officiated.

Bloomberg has also been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate. Is the Republican-inclined electorate as indulgent of adultery as New York City's mayors? I don't think so.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,174 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:24 PM