Impeachment is now officially under way. That’s not what I’ll write about today, however, because you are most likely hearing about that absolutely everywhere else, and I have little or nothing to add to what’s being said elsewhere. Today I’ll opine on the career and slime trail of former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose evident losing battle with dementia is being televised nightly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people ask, what happened to Rudy? The answer is simple: nothing. Like Trump, he’s just as nasty as he ever was, only older and more scrambled.
Because of the nature and the timing of the 9/11 attacks, many people remember Giuliani fondly as “America’s Mayor”, I think mostly because he didn’t run up the street screaming when the towers fell. What he was then, of course, was a failed mayor at the end of his term, a man with the blood of many people of color on his hands, and an immensely corruptible individual whom Jimmy Breslin once famously described as a small man in search of a balcony. Well … he found that balcony, and then some. Anyone who remembers Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, and Abner Louima knows something about what policing was like in NY City under America’s mayor. His personal abuses were legendary. At one point during his tenure, I remember a random cab driver (unofficial one; the 90s equivalent of an Uber driver) complaining about how Giuliani’s lover’s kids would run wild in the driver’s apartment building, bragging that they had mayoral protection. But I digress …
After achieving hero status in the wake of 9/11 (despite his placement of the emergency command center up a few precarious floors in the World Trade Center after the 1993 attack and his sweetheart contract with Motorola for emergency communications that failed on the fateful day), Giuliani went out into the world, proffering his supposed expertise in security and anti-terrorism, helping police agencies, despotic governments, and corporations keep the rabble in line … for a steep consulting price. I suspect he thinks of Trump as just another despot who needs his services, and he would be right. Now, in his dotage, Giuliani may make a lot less sense, but he is still treated with some deference in foreign capitals, and more so thanks to his close association with the president of the United States.
Let’s be clear: in 2016, Giuliani openly bragged just days before the election about the New York office of the FBI having the goods on Hillary Clinton. A short time later, the story broke about Anthony Weiner’s laptop and the revival of the email probe, effectively torpedoing any chance of a Clinton victory. He and Trump relied on this tactic to get candidate Trump over the electoral finish line. It worked then, and it may work again without some real effort on the other side.
luv u,
jp
The thing about dumpster fires – or any trash-fueled conflagration, for that matter – is that they conceal as well as destroy. It’s hard to ascribe intentionality to the Trump administration; they are without a doubt the dumbest box of rocks that ever rolled into the oval office, so the idea that they could cook up some massive deception campaign is kind of ludicrous. If they are not deliberately distracting people with their antics, they are certainly playing the role of the useful idiot. I’m not suggesting they’re running interference for Russia or anything like that. What their ineptitude facilitates more than anything else is the steady progress of the broader GOP agenda – namely, massive tax cuts for the wealthy, dismantling of our rudimentary social safety net, scuttling the ACA, pulling down regulatory constraints on industry, and so on.