Axis of Assholes: Rudy Guiliani (it's an on-going series)

Forget Republican presidential contender Rudolph W. Giuliani's bad comb over or his friendships with Enron's Ken Lay and Louisiana Senator and prostitute patron David Vitter.

Forget the fact New York hedge fund billionaire Paul E. Singer, a Guiliani confidant and one of the candidate's biggest donors, was the source of a mystery $175,000 donation to a stalled initiative proposal seen as an attempt to help the GOP win a portion of California's 55 electoral votes.

You can forget the fact that Guiliani likes to wear women's clothes or that he has been married three times (once to his second cousin) and guilty of carrying on at least one very public extra marital affair.

And forget that his kids are estranged from him as are many of his former political associates (it's a long list and doesn't even include Bernard Kerik)

This is about character and Rudolph W. Guiliani seems to come up appallingly short in that regard.

As some one else famously said, "To know Rudy is to hate Rudy". His political career was virtually over until 9/11 happened. Up until 9/11, Guiliani was on his way to being an asterisk; completely irrelevant politically, in the midst of a very public affair with the social climbing princess Judy Nathan while his wife and children waited for him at Gracie Mansion. Most people I know who lived in NYC (including me) hated him. My issues with him go back to his changing parties (yeah Rudy used to be a Democrat) and becoming a Republican on through to his stewardship of NYC. And the way his private life played out so badly makes me wonder if he is either obtuse or simply delusional--neither of which makes for a decent president as we now know from the frat boy-in-chief.

Guiliani has an over-sized ego which requires him to take credit for things that he did not do. Rudy got into a snit with Chief William Bratton and fired him. Bratton was the architect of the local community policing initiative which reduced crime in NYC (and elsewhere) and quite earned credit for his work. Rudy's ego was bruised so he fired him. Apparently Bratton was getting far too much--and Rudy not enough--credit for the local policing initiative and so forth. And of course it didn't help Rudy's ego when Bratton moved to LA and turned the police department around there as well. One has to give Rudy credit for hiring Bratton in the first place but one wonders if Rudy's ego is too fragile to have the best and the brightest in the White House. Rudy isn't JFK that is for sure. Kennedy gave us Ted Sorensen, Rudy gave us the ethically challenged ex-chauffeur Bernard Kerik.

Like his estranged (starting to sense a theme here?) former friend Alphonse D'Amato, Rudy never saw a camera he didn't love. So he has never missed an opportunity to promote himself, even to the point of looking ridiculous. Years ago Rudy and Alphonse "My mother dropped me on my head when I was a baby" D'Amato dressed up and went along on some sort of drug bust. They were inappropriately dressed, looking like two dorks out trick or treating on Halloween and looking very much the fools they actually are.

A far more serious Rudy problem is his off-handed comments about Ground Zero and so forth. Many firemen, policemen and emergency workers detest his grandstanding ("I spent as much time there as they did" which he later had to retract) and his apparent lack of concern about their health issues.

But most damning was his controversial decision to put the Office of Emergency Management’s command center at the WTC, even after if had been bombed in 1993. Many involved in the Office of Emergency Management had argued that the command center should be built in an underground bunker at the MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn. Guiliani overrode their objections and built it on the 23 floor of No. 7 World Trade Center, supposed based on the recommendation of Jerome Hauer, the first director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management. Now Hauer and Guiliani have had a very public falling out--yet another falling out for Guiliani-- so there's a good deal of finger pointing. Guiliani contends it was Hauer's idea. Hauer denies ever suggesting that venue. He argues it was Guiliani's call.

Guiliani is on record as saying that he wanted the command center within walking distance to City Hall. Then there is the inconvenient coincidence of a $100K campaign contribution from Larry Silverstein and Frank Lowy to Guiliani's mayoralty campaign just months after the command center opened. They just happen to be the landlords of No. 7 World Trade Center.

Nice job Rudy. God knows how many lives were lost because of your laziness, your greed and your ego.

Guiliani blew it on the command center. It completely undermines his argument that he is the best candidate to confront or fight terrorism.

Of course Rudy has some other issues, mostly with the social conservatives who actually vote in the Republican primaries. He has had to shift or qualify his positions on a number of issues to appease the right wing. And, like the political whore that he is, Guiliani is happy to oblige, though I suspect he'd call it nuancing his position.

Which begs the question: why don't Guiliani's opponents and enemies (of which there are many) call him on it by running any of his TV commercials from his various campaigns or recycle any of the audio from his radio programs where he waxed negatively poetic about the NRA, the radical right and the evangelicals--the same people he is trying to suck up to right now?

Candidate Mitt Romney has the same problem (kind of hard to run as a pro-choice Republican in Massachusetts and then as an pro-life Republican just a few short years later), compounded by the fact that virtually no one think this country is ready to elect a Mormon, unless of course you are an Osmond.

If this race was strictly about character, Guiliani and Romney would be the big losers.