It's like we want the Right to like us. We readily grant them the benefit of the doubt in the vain hope that they'll listen with an open mind. It won't happen. The discourse in which they engage is never honest, never direct, and the idea that they will suddenly join us in a reasonable debate is about as likely as Bush apologizing for putting on the codpiece and announcing "Mission Accomplished." We are negotiating against ourselves.
Rudy Giuliani exemplifies this. The Washington Monthly has a piece about him which quite correctly examined the danger of a guy with Rudy's record becoming the "unitary executive" especially because of his history of considering himself above the law. Hoping to make the argument more acceptable to Republicans, Rachel Morris wrote that in the New York of 1993; "On sidewalks, you'd be flanked by piles of garbage bags" because of the city's fiscal problems. Not true. And in fact when Mayor Giuliani left office the city was more in debt than when he was inaugurated. She lets Rudy get away with his oft-stated characterization of New York as the "crime capital of the nation" which is a flat out lie. It is vital to point out how "extra legal" Rudy was in N.Y. But we don't need to allow him to take credit for things he did not do in an attempt to make the point palatable.
Similarly, there is a lot of shock and surprise about Rudy's endorsement of the Red Sox in order to get support in primaries in New England. The real surprise is that no one asked Donna Hanover, Christine Lategano, or even Rudy's first cousin, first wife, about his ambivalent relationship with loyalty.
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