Rudy's New Campaign Buddy

While Rudy Giuliani's new strategy appears to be lying in wait while Mike Huckabee knocks off Mitt Romney and then pouring money into the Feb. 5 states for a victory, he certainly has to register somewhere before that happens, lest Huckabee just blows past him. With this new poll showing him way down in South Carolina and with Huckabee gaining in Florida, the hopes of scoring an early triumph is looking more and more remote. And now, there's a new friend on the campaign trail.

In front of the inn, two well-dressed men wore masks and held up signs meant to embarrass Giuliani for his close connection to Bernie Kerik, former New York City police commissioner. Kerik was indicted earlier this month on 16 felony counts including fraud, tax evasion and making false statements when applying for Homeland Security secretary. President Bush nominated Kerik on Giuliani's advice, only to withdraw the nomination a week later when Kerik's troubles began to come to light. Kerik could face up to 142 years in prison if convicted of the charges.

A man wearing a Giuliani mask has shown up to several Giuliani events in the state holding a sign that reads, "Free Bernie." Today, he held a "Best Friends Forever" sign and stood next to a man in an improvised mask that resembled Kerik's face.

If you're basing your Republican vote on electability, do you really want your candidate dogged by these kinds of characters, along with NYC firefighters and 9/11 families for 9 months?

The "wait until the big states" strategy has never worked, and when the candidate is fading fast and followed on the trail by the skeletons in his closet besides, the possibility shrinks more.

Now We Know

The White House apparently has a line they won't cross when it comes to hiring employees. They don't care about competence, suitability for the job, whether the applicant previously worked for the company they're supposed to regulate, racial or sexual bigotry, or even if they're "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." But if you're tight with the Mob, hey, even these guys have standards.

On December 2, 2004, President Bush announced that his pick to replace Tom Ridge as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security was Bernard Kerik. On December 10th, a Friday, at 8:30 p.m., Kerik suddenly withdrew his nomination, explaining in a statement that he'd discovered that his former housekeeper and nanny might not be a legal immigrant and that he hadn't paid taxes on her. It was the sole reason given for his withdrawal, both in his statement and in subsequent comments by White House officials.

But Kerik's indictment last Thursday indicates that the White House was dealing with bigger problems: Kerik's ties to the mob.

The centerpiece of the indictment was Kerik's acceptance, from 1999 through 2000, of $255,000 worth of apartment renovations (including a marble rotunda) from executives with Interstate Industrial Corporation, a company with ties to the Gambino crime family. The feds say that Kerik, who was NYC corrections commissioner and then police commissioner during the time in question, worked on Interstate's behalf in return for the money, work that included attempting to convince city investigators that the company was free of mob ties so that it could get city contracts.

Unfortunately for Kerik, the secret of his ties to Interstate began to unravel just about the time of his nomination. On December 2nd, the same day that Bush announced Kerik was his pick, The New York Daily News, which had been digging for six weeks on Kerik's ties to Interstate, sent him a list of questions about those ties.

On December 5th, the indictment alleges, Kerik "made various false and misleading statements about his relationship with [Interstate and it's top executives]" in an email to a White House official (who remains unnamed). It was one of several allegedly false and misleading statements that Keik is charged in the indictment with making to White House officials. However, unlike the other false statements, which appear from the indictment to involves sins of omission -- like failure to disclose -- the language of the indictment suggests that the December 5th email was an affirmative misrepresentation. In other words, in the thick of the vetting process, the White House was asking Kerik about his ties to Interstate.

Arabian Horse Association guy tapped for head of FEMA, OK. Mob, ya gotta go. Good to know.

Tweety Follies

Just saw Chris Matthews give his best Lou Dobbs impression, attacking Eliot Spitzer and Hillary Clinton for their "flip-flop" on driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, saying with full precision why people don't want to allow it, and brazenly speculating if Hillary "coordinated" with Spitzer to shut down the proposal, accusing her of all sorts of backroom dealings. He was joined in the pile-on by Republican Rep. Peter King and, for balance, a writer from the New York Post.

And then he just scratched his head and couldn't figure out what this whole Judith Regan thing is all about and why it has anything to do with Rudy Giuliani. He just can't figure it out and it's all so complicated and what is Judith Regan really saying (um, it's all in the lawsuit, bud) and this is "a media echo chamber" and clearly there's no impropriety here and maybe Rupert Murdoch should "write a big check" to Regan to straighten all this out.

Interesting how he can speculate to his heart's content when it comes to Hillary, but when it's about Rudy, it's all so confusing and there's no there there.

(Also, the whole point of the Regan case is that News Corporation threatened her to shut up about her affair with Kerik to protect Rudy Giuliani's campaign, and he just had a guy from the New York Post on, who might know a thing or two about Rudy's relationship to the Post and the parent company News Corp, but he let the guy go.)

Then, John McCain "hit the middle ground" when he fielded a question about Hillary of "How can we beat the bitch?" by saying "That's a great question." And then he played Rudy Giuliani's new TV commercial, for free, twice.

This is on the "liberal" MSNBC.

The Locus of Big Media, Crime, Cover-Ups, and Rudy Giuliani

Sounds like the makings of a major scandal.

Judith Regan, the book publisher who was fired by the News Corporation last year, asserts in a lawsuit filed today that a senior executive at the media conglomerate encouraged her to mislead federal investigators about her relationship with Bernard B. Kerik during his bid to become homeland security secretary in late 2004.

The lawsuit asserts that the News Corporation executive wanted to protect the presidential aspirations of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Kerik’s mentor, who had appointed him New York City police commissioner and had recommended him for the federal post.

Ms. Regan makes the charge at the start of a 70-page filing that seeks $100 million in damages for what she says was a campaign to smear and discredit her by her bosses at HarperCollins and its parent company, the News Corporation, after her project to publish a book with O.J. Simpson was abandoned amid a storm of protest [...]

“Defendants were well aware that Regan had a personal relationship with Kerik,” the complaint says. “In fact, a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.”

Will THIS get the attention of the traditional media? It has almost everything: sex, adultery, OJ, the Mob, 9/11 (the love nest where Kerik and Regan were getting it on was supposed to house Ground Zero rescue workers) and the 2008 race. Throw in a missing white girl and you've got it all!

This is only the latest in a series of actions that reinforce the belief that News Corp., the parent company of Fox, has their thumb on the scale for Giuliani. Roger Ailes worked for Giuliani prior to heading up Fox News. The network denied John McCain the use of their footage in TV ads, but said nothing about Giuliani's usage. News Corp. apparently got a $20 million dollar tax break from the Giuliani Administration for setting their offices and studios in Manhattan. Sean Hannity has appeared at Giuliani fundraisers. These are more than coincidences.

Regan's lawsuit is here. Get digging, traditional media types!

Bada-Bing Fallout: Your Indicted Supporters Are Worse Than My Indicted Supporters

The indictment of a close personal adviser to Rudy Giuliani has got the other Republican candidates finally taking notice. John McCain started things off by questioning Kerik’s performance in Iraq (read Imperial Life In The Emerald City for the full story on Kerik’s fiasco running the Iraqi police):

Bernard Kerik did an irresponsible job training police in Iraq, presidential contender John McCain said Friday, adding to criticism of Kerik as Rudy Giuliani’s former police commissioner surrendered to face charges in New York.

McCain cited Kerik’s relationship with his Republican presidential foe as a reason to doubt Giuliani’s judgment.

“I don’t know Mr. Kerik. I do know that I went to Baghdad shortly after the initial victory and met in Baghdad with (Ambassador Paul) Bremer and (Lt. Gen. Ricardo) Sanchez. And Kerik was there. Kerik was supposed to be there to help train the police force. He stayed two months and one day left, just up and left,” McCain told reporters traveling on his campaign bus.

“That’s why I never would’ve supported him to be the head of homeland security because of his irresponsible act when he was over in Baghdad to try and help train the police. One of the reasons why we had so much trouble with the initial training of the police was because he came, didn’t do anything and then went out to the airport and left.”

Rudy hit back by discussing McCain’s ethical lapses, in a backhanded way, referring to the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s.

Giuliani surrogate Randy Maestro, who served as Rudy’s deputy mayor and chief of staff, has responded by airing some of McCain’s own dirty laundry.

“It’s no more fair to judge Rudy Giuliani on the basis of one issue than it is to judge John McCain on the Keating scandal,” Maestro said in a phone interview with Jonathan Martin. The message to McCain: Back off.

This is the dirty primary that we’ve all been expecting. What’s funny is, if the campaign is going to come down to a battle of who has the most criminally negligent advisors, they’d have to back up the primaries by 6 months just to fit them all in. I mean, Romney piling on is absurd:

“Governor Romney believes the American people want and deserve change in Washington,” wrote campaign spokesman Kevin Madden, listing some of Romney’s ethics proposals. “They want strong ethics and accountability in government.”

Didn’t he have a staff members impersonating police officers not too long ago?

Get your popcorn, this could get fun.

Bada Bing Indicted

Bernie Kerik, this is your life:

— Allegedly traded $165,000 worth of renovations on his house from a contractor who wanted a license from the city.

– Used the apartment donated for weary Ground Zero rescue workers into his own personal love nest to use with his mistress.

– Was named in a civil suit in 1999 as “the architect of a system to force prison guards to work for Republicans in their off-hours.”

– Had mob ties that include the best man in his wedding, Lawrence Ray, who was indicted in 2000 along with other organized crime figures in a scheme to manipulate the stock market.

And today, that ended in an indictment on multiple counts of corruption and tax evasion.

Apparently, Rudy has come out and admitted a mistake for not vetting Kerik more vigorously when he was hired as police commissioner.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani said he "made a mistake" by not vetting his former police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, indicted today in a public corruption case. Giuliani also said he wouldn't contribute to Kerik's legal defense fund because it "wouldn't be appropriate."

But Giuliani also said the experience would make him a better president, defended the job Kerik did as police commissioner and compared his former protégé to the late President Richard Nixon -- a man with both flaws and accomplishments.

Somehow, I don't see comparing Kerik to Nixon - you know, in a good way - is going to resonate with the public.

At Least He Has A Passing Familiarity With Jails

Ba-Da Bing Bernie... time's up.

Federal prosecutors are scheduled to seek a grand jury indictment on Thursday of Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, on a list of charges that include tax fraud, corruption and conspiracy counts, according to people who have been briefed on the case.

The grand jury, sitting in Westchester, N.Y., has been hearing evidence about Mr. Kerik for about a year as part of a broad federal inquiry into a variety of allegations, including his acceptance of $165,000 in renovations from a contractor who was seeking a city license.

Prosecutors are also seeking to charge Mr. Kerik with failing to report as income more than $200,000 in rent that is alleged to have been paid on his behalf to use a luxury Upper East Side apartment where he lived with his family around the time he left his city post, the people who were briefed said.

But hey, Kerik happened to be in the Police Commissioner's post when William Bratton's crime policies and William Jefferson Clinton's COPS program helped make New York safer, so that puts him well above the law. Even if some of these criminally indictable actions occurred before he assumed that post, and his boss Rudy Giuliani knew it, and ignored them altogether.

An Offer He Can't Refuse

This Rudy Giuliani-Bernie Kerik Mario Puzo novel disguised as an article, ably covered by my friends at The Right's Field, is really quite incredible. The biggest revelation was that we learned how Giuliani was briefed about mob ties before hiring team. Rudy probably saw it as an asset - it meant fierce loyalty and only a passing relationship to the law.

“Rudy can fall for people big time, and sometimes qualifications are secondary to loyalty,” said Fran Reiter, a former Giuliani deputy mayor who now supports Hillary Clinton. “If he gets it in his head he trusts you, he is extremely loyal.” [...]

In Mr. Kerik’s case, by the time Mr. Giuliani recommended him for the federal job, his administration knew that Mr. Kerik had acted on behalf of Interstate Industrial (a mob front -ed.). It also knew that he had drawn criticism for a range of other incidents, from sending detectives to search for his lover’s cellphone to using officers to research his autobiography.

Kerik, who has even stiffed the law firm trying to keep him out of jail to the tune of $200,000, is about to go to jail, and while Rudy's Republican rivals haven't made it an issue, that is not likely to last through next November, should he get to that stage. There's so much in this story, that you really have to read it for yourself, but a good taste is this first hint of the way in which Giuliani values loyalty above all, sounding much like a certain cronyist in the White House at the moment:

When Mr. Giuliani ran for mayor in 1993, Mr. Kerik organized his security detail of off-duty officers, reserving the weekend shift for himself.

When Mr. Giuliani became mayor, he gave Mr. Kerik a job in the Correction Department. A year later, the mayor asked him to drop by Gracie Mansion.

The two men sat upstairs and shared a bottle of red wine, a gift to the mayor from Nelson Mandela. Mr. Giuliani said he planned to appoint Mr. Kerik as first deputy correction commissioner.

Mr. Kerik, who wrote of this in his autobiography, “The Lost Son,” was taken aback; he was a year removed from being a police detective.

“Mayor, I appreciate your confidence in me, I really do,” he said. “But I ran a jail. One jail. Rikers is like 10 jails.”

Just do it, the mayor replied.

Mr. Kerik followed Mr. Giuliani downstairs to a dimly lighted room. There waited Mr. Giuliani’s boyhood chum Peter J. Powers, who was first deputy mayor, and other aides. One by one, they pulled Mr. Kerik close and kissed his cheek.

“I wonder if he noticed how much becoming part of his team resembled becoming part of a mafia family,” Mr. Kerik wrote. “I was being made.”

It's going to make a great movie. The real-life version, however, is chilling.

I should note that we should expect Rudy to 100% lie about this entire experience, and when confronted with the truth, claim that expecting him to be honest is "quibbling."

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200

People really aren't paying attention to how Bernie Kerik will factor in the nomination fight. Romney can easily dip into his own pockets and put out an array of ads on this.

Bernard Kerik's legal nightmare is about to get worse, with federal prosecutors expected to file charges against the former police commissioner that will likely include allegations of bribery, tax fraud and obstruction of justice, the Daily News has learned.

The indictment, expected next month, could prove to be an embarrassing obstacle for Kerik's former mentor Rudy Giuliani, who is cruising at the top of the polls heading into the presidential primary gauntlet.

The bribery allegations against Kerik stem from a secret meeting at a bar in Tribeca, according to two sources familiar with the federal probe.

Kerik's lawyers recently agreed to waive the statute of limitations on the tax charges until Nov. 17, which will allow them to make one last plea to try to ease the pain.

As this is a Justice Department probe, there's always the possibility that this thing gets politicized and the lawyers plead down to a slap on the wrist. But things appear to actually be going in the opposite direction. If judgment about aides and associates is a campaign issue... well, then nobody will get the nomination, because they've all got problems in that department. But it's really damaging, especially with Republicans tarnished as fostering a culture of corruption. It doesn't make it look like the nominee is any different.

Hmm... making money, saving America... I'll go with making money.

Please, please, PLEASE Republicans, pick Rudy Giuliani as your candidate.

Today we learned that Mr. "Terrorist War On Us" guy, the boldest and strongest leader on how to take the fight to the Islamomurderfascists, walked out of the Iraq Study Group to go raise some money.

Rudolph Giuliani's membership on an elite Iraq study panel came to an abrupt end last spring after he failed to show up for a single official meeting of the group, causing the panel's top Republican to give him a stark choice: either attend the meetings or quit, several sources said.

Giuliani left the Iraq Study Group last May after just two months, walking away from a chance to make up for his lack of foreign policy credentials on the top issue in the 2008 race, the Iraq war.

He cited "previous time commitments" in a letter explaining his decision to quit, and a look at his schedule suggests why -- the sessions at times conflicted with Giuliani's lucrative speaking tour that garnered him $11.4 million in 14 months.

Incidentally, the first time MSNBC mentioned this today, they attributed it to Fred Thompson. Love that media.

But Josh Marshall is right, this is the kind of thing that ends a campaign. Once MSNBC got their facts straight, Chuck Todd envisioned the ad, seeing Giuliani smiling as he gives a big-money speech while kids die in Iraq. He's trying to run a race on national security and he'd rather make cash than help formulate a solution.

Not to mention that the firefighters will dog him throughout the campaign for betraying the men who wore the uniform on 9/11.

Really, pick him. I'd like to see the Democrat win 49 states.

UPDATE: David Dreier on MSNBC with David Shuster, moments after saying that admitting mistakes is noble, vis a vis Bernie Kerik, who was crying to himself today about missing his partner in crime.

SHUSTER: David, is it OK to have a candidate running for the President of the United States who has not been to Iraq, and why is it that Rudy Giuliani has not been to Iraq?

DREIER: I can't tell you why Rudy Giuliani hasn't been to Iraq. You don't have to be in iraq to understand the magnitude of the challenge in prosecuting the global war on terror. Rudy Giuliani was at the base of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I think that's being in a line of fire in and of itself.

Is that true? Rudy's never even been to Iraq? And this is how they're combating it? He was on the "front lines" on 9-11 because he happened to be mayor at the time? (and he was only at the base of the WTC because he mistakenly put the emergency command center inside a terrorist target?)

More of this, Team Rudy. This is transparently absurd.

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy

Giuliani 2.0 was rolled out last week, the new pro-choice conservative that wants everybody just to pipe down about those pesky social issues and take a look at his record. Problem is, people are taking the wrong look:

An examination of Mr. Giuliani’s handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of those who worked in the trade center’s ruins, Mr. Giuliani might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the attack.

Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in a lawsuit against New York City, along with more than two dozen interviews with people involved in the events of the last four months of Mr. Giuliani’s administration, show that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators.

At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers.

“The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns,” said David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor group.

See, just like a conservative, what was important to Giuliani was the appearance that something was getting done at Ground Zero, and damn the consequences. Actually, the consequences were hundreds of sick workers who apparently have only Michael Moore willing to help them.

In addition, the Washington Post reports that Rudy's performance making people sick after 9-11 was most useful to his own bank account:

On Dec. 7, 2001, nearly three months after the terrorist attack that had made him a national hero and a little over three weeks before he would leave office, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took the first official step toward making himself rich.

The letter he dispatched to the city Conflicts of Interest Board that day asked permission to begin forming a consulting firm with three members of his outgoing administration. The company, Giuliani said, would provide "management consulting service to governments and business" and would seek out partners for a "wide-range of possible business, management and financial services" projects.

Over the next five years, Giuliani Partners earned more than $100 million, according to a knowledgeable source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the firm's financial information is private. And that success helped transform the Republican considered the front-runner for his party's 2008 presidential nomination from a moderately well-off public servant into a globe-trotting consultant whose net worth is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars.

You might remember that one of the clients of Giuliani Partners was Purdue Frederick, the makers of OxyContin who dragged out an investigation into the addictiveness of the drug for years before having to pay a petty fine. And key partners in the company included Mafioso figure Bernie Kerik and a former FBI exec who was found to have stolen pieces of granite from Ground Zero as souvenirs.

And while his campaign is crumbling around him, Giuliani thinks that he can follow the WEsley Clark '04 path to the nomination:

Republican Rudy Giuliani has been stuck for weeks on a key decision in his presidential campaign: whether to compete in the Iowa Republican Party's straw poll in Ames this summer.

The former New York City mayor's top Iowa advisers have encouraged him to take part in the year's marquee national GOP event as part of building what Giuliani has said he hopes will be a winning campaign for the leadoff Iowa caucuses in January.

But the final say belongs to Giuliani, who plans to decide in the coming weeks how the event could benefit or cost him.

Nobody has skipped Iowa and won the nomination in either party (Clinton '92 being the exception because nobody really went up against local boy Tom Harkin), and if Rudy thinks he can do it, in a year where the primary calendar is MORE front loaded, he's smoking something. Missing the straw poll would be a major setback.

I'm more and more convinced that nobody will win the Republican nomination. Or John McCain, which is effectively the same thing.

This Week In Rudy

Rudy Giuliani will surely be hurt by the imminent arrest and trial of his former Police Commissioner, who Rudy hyped to become Homeland Security chief despite all of the obvious flaws and illegalities in his past. Bernard Kerik was not only a Giuliani appointee, he was a business partner in his consulting firm. The Kerik issue will stick out like a sore thumb, and it speaks to Giuliani's judgment and gullibility.

But what OUGHT to be a scandal were Rudy's statements this week, which show an unwillingness to understand the basic frameworks of American government. I've already mentioned Rudy's belief that the President is an emperor when it comes to funding war, and his support for public funding of abortion has gotten a lot of ink. But what about this complete confusion over Shiite and Sunni Islam:

As for Iran, Mr. Giuliani said that “in the long term,” it might be “more dangerous than Iraq.”

He then casually lumped Iran with Al Qaeda. “Their movement has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he said.

Mr. Giuliani was asked in an interview to clarify that, inasmuch as Iran had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Further, most of its people are Shiites, whereas Al Qaeda is an organization of Sunnis.

“They have a similar objective,” he replied, “in their anger at the modern world.”

This is the pose that so many conservatives make, neglecting the differences between the Muslim sects. This was a major issue when House Intelligence Committee chair Silvestre Reyes got it wrong. But when someone like Giuliani says "once a raghead, always a raghead" and puts forth a policy of "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out," one that makes people like Bill Kristol swoon:

This morning, Kristol again promoted the concept of war with Iran. He said Iran’s kidnapping of the 15 British soldiers has brought the world closer to another war. “We came closer to war with Iran this week,” Kristol said, complaining that the U.S. was “very passive.”

Juan Williams then questioned, “Well, what was the alternative? To go in and strike them while the hostages were there?” Kristol said “yes.”

Giuliani has the mark of this anger, the imprimatur of ignorance in him, which should serve him well in the Republican primaries. So will this discussion, wherein Rudy says universal health care is bad because then insurance companies won't be able to get PAAAIIIIDDD...

“It’s a no-risk society,” Giuliani went on. “If we continue with this idea of collective responsibility, we’ll become a society that deteriorates. And it’s a battle that has to be fought now.”

He offers health care as an example. “Democrats want universal health care, collective responsibility — honestly, it’s their version of socialized medicine.” Even the recent health care reform in Massachusetts, designed by the Republican governor Mitt Romney, was tainted with collectivity, because it required every citizen to get health insurance.

“I don’t like mandates,” Giuliani says. “I don’t like mandating health care. I don’t like it because it erodes what makes health care work in this country — the free market, the profit motive. A mandate takes choice away from people. We’ve got to let people make choices. We’ve got to let them take the risk–do they want to be covered? Do they want health insurance? Because ultimately, if they don’t, well, then, they may not be taken care of. I suppose that’s difficult.” He lets the idea sink in, though it seems to bother his audience not at all. “The minute you start mandating, you always end up with more expensive government programs.”

So. According to Rudy Giuliani, health care works in this country. See, 45 million uninsured Americans CAN be wrong! Apparently there's no Medicare or Veteran's Administration either. And apparently those statistics that "Our system is far more expensive than anywhere else, denies medical services to tens of millions of people except when they have emergencies, and by most measures produces no better outcome" are just some of those facts with a well-known liberal bias.

On a few issues, Rudy Giuliani is a much-coveted "moderate." Those issues happen to have a low salience. On the issues that matter, which involve war and peace and the sick and the dying, Giuliani literally doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. Which you would think is a pre-requisite for being President in the 21st century, but probably shouldn't be.

Bernie: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Bernard Kerik is going to go to jail for a long time. The charges range from tax evasion to conspiracy to commit criminal wiretapping. His rap sheet includes ties to the mob, banging Judith Regan in an office rented to the city to handle post 9-11 organizational duties, filing false information to the government when he was briefly President Bush's nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security (remember that)?, hatching a plan with former New York lawmaker Jeanine Pirro to wiretap her husband to see if he was having an affair, and about 300 other examples of dirty dealing.

And his old boss, Da Mayor, knew all about this.

Rudolph W. Giuliani told a grand jury that his former chief investigator remembered having briefed him on some aspects of Bernard B. Kerik’s relationship with a company suspected of ties to organized crime before Mr. Kerik’s appointment as New York City police commissioner, according to court records.

Mr. Giuliani, testifying last year under oath before a Bronx grand jury investigating Mr. Kerik, said he had no memory of the briefing, but he did not dispute that it had taken place, according to a transcript of his testimony.

Mr. Giuliani’s testimony amounts to a significantly new version of what information was probably before him in the summer of 2000 as he was debating Mr. Kerik’s appointment as the city’s top law enforcement officer. Mr. Giuliani had previously said that he had never been told of Mr. Kerik’s entanglement with the company before promoting him to the police job or later supporting his failed bid to be the nation’s homeland security secretary.

He specifically said that he doesn't remember, adding to the Republican culture of memory loss we've seen lately. It's a get out of jail free card; just blame everything on your darn junker of a mind. This didn't work with Scooter Libby, isn't working with Alberto Gonzales and won't wotk with Giuliani. His close association with what amounts to a common street thug speaks directly to judgment, and as the campaign continues that judgment will be called into serious question.

I don't know which lame Republican candidate I'm rooting for MORE at this point.

UPDATE: In the interest of fairness, I appreciated this from Rudy, though not for the same reasons:

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani said Thursday it was a mistake to coin the term "war on terror" because it allows enemies to redefine the United States incorrectly as a nation that prefers war [...]

But Giuliani told a gathering of newspaper reporters that "America is seen as a country by too many that wants to have war, or exercises its power too much, pushes its weight around too much." [...]

Later, in questions with television journalists, Giuliani explained.

"This is a terrorist war against us. We've got to keep reminding ourselves of the fact that they are in various parts of the world planning to come here and attack us or attack us overseas."

Uh, actually Rudy, it's a terrorist war where a small band of fundamentalists attacked us, and we hauled off and went after a country that had nothing to do with it. This is really "We didn't start this war, but we'll finish it" under different cover. The real reason to disavow the war on terror label is explained here.

The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us [...]

But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that "a nation at war" does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being "at war."

It's not about how foreigners can smear us. It's about how we can smear the truth and use fear to justify literally anything.

Gimme Rudy

In the space of about a week, Rudy Giuliani was lambasted by the nation's largest group of firefighters, his law firm was revealed as a paid lobbyist for a company owned by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and one of his top lieutenants was headed to court on an imminent indictment for tax fraud, illegal eavesdropping and other charges, to which he has already plead guilty in state court.

Let's go Rudy. Make it happen and win that Republican nomination.