The media is picking on Rudy Giuliani because they hate minorities. That’s right, just because only 8.2 million people live in New York, compared with the 292 million people who live in the rest of the country, according to the CIA, doesn’t make it acceptable to pick on the candidate from New York.Leading this charge is New York-hating reporter, Ben Smith, who works for Washington-based Politico, which used a five-year-old story about Mr. Giuliani billing obscure city agencies for tens-of-thousands of dollars in security expenses while he was having an affair with Judith Nathan to get back at the former mayor for upsetting the glitteri in the nation's capital. Just because Mr. Smith isn't running for office, doesn’t mean he should force Mr. Giuliani to abandon his dream of being president—his last dream of becoming a senator was dashed when the liberal media did a beat-up on his cancer many years ago.
Mr. Giuliani is a hero. Not only did his city take a terrorist hit for the rest of the country, his actions made the rest of the country safer for everybody else: everyone now takes off their shoes when they get on a plane and people can no longer take dangerous liquids such as water into an airport.
While most people are grateful, criminals are angry. So angry that many of them threatened the mayor's life—forcing the NYPD to guard him 24 hours a day—regardless of whether he was in New York running the city, in Paris promoting it, or in the Hamptons having an extra-marital relationship.
Bloomberg reports that $930,000 was spent by the city on out-of town travel in 2000 and 2001. Where this money came from is irrelevant. Whether it came from the police department, the office that provides lawyers for the indigent, the Office for People with Disabilities or the city’s Loft Board doesn’t matter—every cent of this money came from the same place—the taxpayers who elected Mr. Giuliani mayor.
And, even if the money should have been taken out of a police department account, how would Mr. Giuliani know? He’s a lawyer—not an accountant! He can’t tell an abusive tax shelter from a zero-coupon convertible security. The man knows nothing about money. If you need the facts on an amicus curiae or words of procreation, Mr. Giuliani’s your man. For information on painting the tape, you must talk to his expert advisors—the ones who told Mr. Giuliani which account to pull the money out of.
Not content with bashing Mr. Giuliani for having an affair, The New York Times and reporter Michael Cooper are crusading against the former mayor whenever they get an opportunity.
Just because Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was the only city in America that had reduced crime every year since 1994: that New York had averaged 1,800 or 1,900 murders a year for 30 years and claimed that spending went down by 7 percent when he was mayor—doesn’t make it OK to hang the man out to dry.
The fact that Chicago had also reduced crime every year since 1994, and that spending grew an average of 3.7 percent for most of his tenure, doesn’t make his statements less true. Mr. Giuliani was speaking intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to the evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. The fact that he believes that they were facts, makes them facts according to Stephen Colbert’s definition of truthiness.
These things happened a long time ago. I say let bygones be bygones. Mr. Giuliani cannot be expected to remember anything that happened during his regime. He cannot be held responsible for events that occurred so long ago. He must look to the future and hope everyone does the same.
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