Our first drag star President?
Josh Marshall on Rudy Giuliani's dreams of glory:
...do we really have to pretend that Rudy Giuliani has more than a snowball's chance in hell of getting the Republican presidential nomination? Or can we all just stipulate that a multiple adulterer, who supports gay civil rights and choice, has deep and on-going ties to mobbed-up and now-disgraced Police boss Bernie Kerik, has a largely unscrutinized (outside of New York) resume, and had the bright idea of locating the NYC disaster center in the already-once-bombed World Trade Center probably will have some rough sledding in Republican primaries?
Josh forgot to mention that Giuliani doesn't even look pretty in the pictures of him in drag * that his opponents are certainly going to make sure are all over the place in every state with a Republican primary.
I don't believe that Rudy thinks he has a real chance---I can't believe it! It's just too mind boggling to think that anyone could be that deluded by vanity and ambition and not be walking around in a cocked hat with his hand inside his lapel talking about what a drubbing he was going to give Wellington at Waterloo.
Probably he's running for Vice President, although it seems doubtful that the Party that decided that the best way to bounce back from the shellacking they took in last week's election was to bring back Trent Lott will decide that it needs a Northeastern Italian on its national ticket for balance.
McCain-Brownback anyone?
What I'd like to believe is that this is Giuliani's secret plan to save the country from a President McCain. Rudy's thinking he might be able to peel away just enough of what's left of the non-Religious Right, non-Permanent War, non-Wishing they were in Dixie primary voters to deny McCain the nomination.
All six of them.
Maybe he thinks that enough of the Media Elite who fawn over McCain will rush to fawn over him that some serious journalists might get at McCain to show him up for the pandering, Right Wing hypocrite and tool that he is.
After all, Giuliani is the true social liberal McCain's Media groupies keep insisting he is despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Never going to happen, my friend.
The elite of the chattering classes go all gooey and goofy over McCain and Giuliani because loving them makes them feel tough and manly at the same time it allows them to pretend that the Republican Party they kowtow to is not the party of Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove, not the Party of K Street and the Preachers, not the party of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, not the party of the misogynists, homophobes, religious nuts, xenophobes, know-nothings, and racists, and not the party of the apologists and champions of Permanent War, torture as erotic thrill and spectator sport, executive over-reach, and contempt for the Constitution.
But McCain was their first and true love. He was their first anti-Clinton. What shivers them down to their socks about McCain is their own projection onto him of all the virtues they convinced themselves Bill Clinton lacked. On top of that, McCain is a genuine war hero, but unlike John Kerry he's of the type that doesn't make baby boom journalists feel bad about themselves for having sat out the War in Vietnam.
They couldn't have been John McCain because they weren't career military, their fathers weren't admirals they had to impress by going into the family business so to speak.
They could have been like John Kerry and chose not to be and they can't forgive Kerry for that.
What has Rudy got on his resume to compare? He cleaned up the subways, made it a matter of civic pride to refuse to give panhandlers a dime, and didn't show any outward signs of panic on September 11, 2001. But that last one just makes him an anti-George, and until this generation retires the Media Elite will be determined to elect anti-Bills.
But that's really more evidence that what they are truly in love with, even more than with the image they've created for McCain, is their own sense of themselves as Solons and Major Players.
They decided years ago that John McCain would be a great President and they will be determined to prove themselves right.
Whatever good things the chattering class will say about Giuliani will be by way of assuring us that McCain is the Man.
Giuliani's deciding to run would have been the height of self-delusion if he'd made it last month. Coming after last week's election suggest that he suffers from something more than vanity and delusions of grandeur.
Illiteracy and innumeracy.
He didn't read or can't understand the returns.
Whether or not last week was a victory for Progressive Democrats or Moderate Democrats, there is no denying that it was a victory for Democrats.
Maybe Rudy just gets his news exclusively from the Sunday Morning talk shows and the op-ed page of the New York Times.
The chattering classes don't care about politics as the process of governing the nation. They care about it only as a game played inside the Beltway, which might explain why so few of them have bothered to notice just how widespread the Democratic victory was and how far down into the local levels of government it reached.**
More astute observers have noted how the Blue-ing of America has gone well beyond the fact that come January there will be only one Republican member of the House of Representatives from New England and that Karl Rove's legacy to the Republican Party will apparently to turn out to be to have turned it into a minor regional party. What Republican victories there were last week were largely confined to the South.
If Giuliani knows this, then he must be thinking that the party will want to recover from the disaster by moving left and reaching North and West.
Yesterday, the Republicans in the Senate, at least, by bringing back Trent Lott, told him and the rest of the country, Don't hold your breath. We're happy to be the New Dixiecrats. No Northeastern Liberals need apply.
To sum up by answering Josh Marshall's question, why pretend that Giuliani has a snowball's chance in hell, pretending is a way for the chattering classes to indulge their crush on John McCain and deny that they are shilling for the party of the likes of Trent Lott.
Maybe Rudy knows all this and doesn't care.
Maybe he just wants all the world to see what he looks like as a blonde.
*Hat tip to Shakes, writing at AlterNet, for the link to No More Mister Nice Blog.
**Digby links to this article by John Judis in the New Republic, but registration is required if you want to read the whole thing.
posted by Lance Mannion @ 4:02 AM
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