Is Rudy Giuliani Too Poor To Be President, and Other Questions

We may be witnessing the last days of Rudy Giuliani as a Republican front-runner. New flavor Fred Thompson is getting ready to formally announce and my bet is that Thompson will come out ahead of Giuliani in the red state/blue statec smackdown.

But while Rudy is still with us, we can ask a few questions about in relation to his dropping out of the Iraq Study Group to business groups at one and two hundred thousand a pop. Not whether Rudy was "greedy" or whether he knows anything about Iraq like other liberal bloggers and writers. Since when has greed been bad for the Gordon Gekko Party and who said Republican candidates needed to know anything about the Middle East. George Bush didn't know a Sunni from a Shiite and Doug Feith used to filter out job applicants who knew too much about the Arab world. Why do we think Republican voters will care what Giuliani knows?

1. CAN RUDY AFFORD TO BE PRESIDENT? The president of the United States only makes $400,000 a year plus perks. Maybe that's not enough. Remember, Rudy's a partner in a big law firm (no doubt a rain-making partner rather than actually practicing law) and a big-time public speaker. You have to assume that he's living a seven or eight figure life as well--the houses, the cars, the clothes, the trophy wife, all the ex-wives and their kids. Hey! Maybe he lost a lot in the stock market slump of 2000-2001 as well. It adds up. Maybe Rudy really needed the $300,000 he got from those speeches. If that's the case, Giuliani probably can't afford to live on a president's salary and should think about dropping out of the race.

2. HOW WILL RUDY USE MAGIC IN IRAQ? This may not seem like a fair question, but I don't see how Rudy can get around the inference that he is going to rely on magic to solve the problems in Iraq. It's pretty clear by now that Rudy doesn't know anything about the situation in Iraq. He even used the Paris Hilton-y line that "other people" were handling Iraq. So, knowledge isn't going to get it done for Rudy. The Bush administration didn't care about knowledge or expertise either. Instead, Bush and Cheney put their faith in overwhelming American military power. Of course, American military superiority only scared the Iraqis for so long. Then the administration put their chips on the adapting a constitution and holding elections. But that didn't work out either. And the current surge policy is such a dud that I'm sure President Bush will soon start denying that the administration ever had a "surge" just like he denied that he had ever said "stay the course."

In other words, the Bush administration has pretty much exhausted all the options for "winning without knowing anything." So Rudy must have some sort of magic in mind. Maybe a spell or incantation--a little wand waving perhaps. Speaking of Harry Potter, Rudy might be thinking of using legilimency (a mind-reading spell) to break into the brains of the Iraqi insurgents and make them surrender. Or maybe Rudy's going to rely on the magic of American racial fantasies, tap his heels three times, and say over and over that he'll put all those non-white people in "their place."

3. ARE YOU GOING TO NULLIFY THE BRIBERY LAWS? Not that several Bush administration officials haven't been caught up in the Jack Abramoff scandal, but most of the law-breaking in the Bush administration has been about the abuse of power. Bush's promotion of torture techniques, extraordinary rendition policy, and maintaining of foreign prisons have all violated U. S. law, U. S. military law, the American Constitution, and the Geneva Conventions. To justify their law-breaking, Bush's legal team has argued that 9-11 authorized them to nullify a chunk of the American legal framework.

Needless to say, all of America expects that you would nullify laws limiting your power in the same way as the Bush administration. Nevertheless, given the example of your great friend Bernard Kerik, the country expects that the people you appoint also will be engaged in all kinds of good ol' financial graft with the money appropriated for Iraq. Does this mean that you're going to "reinterpet" the anti-corruption laws to mean that government officials can skim 5% of the money appropriated for their departments without violating the law? Or maybe that increasing their salaries by 100% is legal but 101% is "crossing the line" just like Don Imus crossed the line. Or are you going to claim that defense dapartment officials are both legislative and executive figures because they are carrying out the laws passed by Congress and are therefore not subject to anti-bribery, anti-graft laws, or any other laws? Of course, if you also nullified the laws that applied to defense contractors, then everybody would make a lot money from the war.

If the Bush administration has taught us anything, it's taught us that some people have more important things to do than serve the public or obey the law. We just want to know how you're going to achieve your goals for American government.