Thursday Reload: Rudy Giuliani

This edition of the TLS Thursday Reload is brought to us by TLS political analyst, The Blue Fox. A lifelong New Yorker who can barely breathe clean air without passing out cold, Fox writes from Billings, Montana, where he’s busy slurping ground beef soup and charting the next stage of the Democratic Party’s political ascendance.

Today, Fox’s target is antebellum Rudy Giuliani, the thin-lipped snake that we elites know and loathe. While the rest of the country may swallow Giuliani’s meretricious self-reinvention as Galactic Prefect of the Events of 9/11, longtime Nyers aren’t taking the bait.

Take it away, Blue Fox:

“Some of you have heard me rant about the pre-9/11 Rudy. In Slate.com, Jacob Weisberg makes the case that Rudy was "a frustrated and not very popular mayor on Sept. 10," but Weisberg overlooks some of His Honor's more exemplary moments. For instance, his crusade against the First Amendment, such as when he had a street artist repeatedly arrested for selling caricatures of Rudy as Hitler (tasteless, yes; illegal, no); his release of the sealed juvenile records of a man who was accidentally shot by cops in order to impugn the victim; or his steamrolling of community gardens mere hours before he knew a court was scheduled to decide their fate in a case in which the city was a party. Then again, a retelling of Rudy's 1-27 record in the courts defending himself in civil liberties suits might rival Gibbon for length.

“If America's dismay over the state of the Bush Presidency is rooted in disapproval of Bush's chest-thumping foreign policy, intolerance of dissent, and aggrandizement of executive power, Rudy is not the antidote. In fact, on each of those counts if nothing else, his pre-9/11 mayoralty suggests he might just be worse.”