Commitment to Paranoia

Rudy Giuliani unleashed his "12 Commitments" yesterday, and Steve Benen has has the best takedown of them. I will say that Rudy has understood the campaign tactic of speaking in short, declarative bromides that mean absolutely nothing and are designed to make people feel good. Considering we've had 6 1/2 years of this infantilizing rhetoric, we'll see if we're ready for more substance.

But if you want to play the short and declarative sentence game, here's one: Rudy has a 9/12 mentality.

Unlike its precursor, the "9/12 mentality" seems to actually describe a widespread phenomenon, of which Giuliani is certainly an exemplar. Like the archetypal trauma victim, he seems to be perpetually reliving the now-tedious epiphany that there are people out there who want to kill us, and constitutionally incapable of believing that anyone else might have managed to apprehend this fact and still disagree with him. He shows no sign of having moved beyond the blind rage we all felt in the aftermath of the attacks to the cooler analysis required to prevent the next one. (Hence his sputtering reaction to what should have been an uncontroversial suggestion: that some terrorism is fueled by perceptions of U.S. meddling abroad, and that a wise foreign policy takes that perception into account.)

Rudy Giuliani has spittle at the corners of his mouth, and is perpetually holding the machine gun while laying in bed like Tony Soprano in the second-to-last episode. He's a paranoid authoritarian that projects his own fear onto the rest of the population, assuming that their fear is just as strong that they support rage-filled and vengeful incursions into foreign lands six years after the fact, no matter what the facts suggest. Rudy Giuliani wants you angry and afraid. That's they only way he has any possibility of sounding sane. As Matt Taibbi says in his wonderful account:

Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they're probably traitors, and Rudy, well, he'll keep an eye on 'em for you. Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully's disposal.

This is the worst possible person to follow George W. Bush - someone more paranoid, more cruel, more narcisissitic. And he's resilient in that Republican primary no matter his social stances, because those character flaws are seen as positives to the conservative base.