Wednesday, November 28, the Republican debate started out a bit hot and nasty – “Republican presidential rivals Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney scornfully debated immigration Wednesday in a provocative, no-holds-barred CNN/YouTube debate just over a month before the first votes are cast.”
Actually it was eight or nine old white guys trying to argue who hated Hispanic immigrants with the purest hate, and who really, really hated gays and could prove it, and who most wanted to stop the swarthy folks with the odd religion from taking over Cleveland or something. It was the usual. Add to the mix questions concerning who actually believed every word in the Bible was literally true, and questions about having any sort of requirement one must meet before purchasing a gun, and you see what was up here. The usual Republican stuff these days, with the addition of the issue of torture – would any of them turn all wimpy and left-wing and say we shouldn’t torture anyone at all who might know anything we’d kind of like to know?
There were the mild surprises – Giuliani said some of the Bible might be, well, allegory. He had a little problem with Jonah and the whale. And Giuliani still says a minimum written test for gun ownership seems like a good idea, kind of like a driver’s license test. He got booed long and hard for that answer. McCain is still the only one of these folks who thinks waterboarding is torture, and clearly illegal, and manifestly wrong, and that it doesn’t work. The others got to mock him for that. But those are the exceptions one could note, save for the odd man out, Ron Paul, arguing for a return to the gold standard, abolishing the income tax, ending the war right now and all the rest. He doesn’t count, it seems (ask the folks at Fox News). The field, but for him, is a bit homogeneous, like white milk with white bread (with white mayo from the Kraft jar), served at an Iowa diner.
What did you expect? This is when the candidates appeal to the party base – what they say at this point has little to do with the general election that the follows the caucuses and primaries and the nomination. The audience is a bit narrower. The debate might have been fun for political junkies, but for the rest, as we learned in the Clinton years, we really don’t perk up until sex comes up. That’ll grab your attention.
That’s why it was a shame the story from Ben Smith at “Politico” broke only an hour or two before the debate began. It was late. But it was good. It seems that Giuliani had been criminally expensing his extramarital affairs to the taxpayers of New York City –
As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.
The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.
At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”
The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.
Giuliani’s relationship with Nathan is old news now, and Giuliani regularly asks voters on the campaign trail to forgive his “mistakes.”
It’s also impossible to know whether the purpose of all the Hamptons trips was to see Nathan. A Giuliani spokeswoman declined to discuss any aspect of this story, which was explained in detail to her earlier this week.
Giuliani often says things like this – “I had to teach New York City how to use principles of fiscal conservatism.” This could be good.
Steve Benen notes here that Giuliani is the first thrice-married serial adulterer to ever even run for president – true enough – and laments that this is “a fact that most reporters have ignored entirely.” And he mentions that when the Village Voice reported a few months ago that Giuliani kept his emergency command center in 7 World Trade Center “in part so he could maintain a convenient love nest for his extra-marital affairs” – true enough – the media, once again, yawned. And this time? Benen says we’ll see –
A Giuliani campaign spokesperson declined to comment on any aspect of the story, including the travel documents or the billing arrangements. It’s just as well. Some things are just un-spinnable.
The matter did come up at the debate –
“First of all, it’s not true,” he said during a GOP debate hours after the story broke. “I had 24-hour security for the eight years that I was mayor. They followed me everyplace I went. It was because there were, you know, threats, threats that I don’t generally talk about. Some have become public recently; most of them haven’t.
“And they took care of me, and they put in their records, and they handled them in the way they handled them,” Giuliani said. “I had nothing to do with the handling of their records, and they were handled, as far as I know, perfectly appropriately.”
Ah, he was a national hero in mortal danger that even he cannot disclose, even now, and some low-level flunky handled the books anyway. That may work. It can be spun.
But then Andrew Sullivan notes that we have only just begun to see the depth of Giuliani’s ethical problems, suggesting that we not forget “his undying support for and employment of a priest suspended because of serious and credible allegations of child molestation.” Well, there is that. But it could be the kids’ fault or something. The press is too polite to run with that story too.
And would any of it matter to the Republicans, really? “Hunter” at Daily Kos argues that we’re dealing with an odd lot –
Is there any Republican politician out there who just has normal, run of the mill sexual relationships? Anyone at all?
No gay airport bathroom propositions, no asking underage congressional pages to email you their penis size, no secret visits to prostitutes in multiple states? No divorcing your cancer-stricken, hospitalized wife in order to better carry on an affair with someone else? No weird sex trysts overlooking the smoldering ruins of New York’s ground zero, or billing your secret mayoral booty calls to the budgets of city agencies tasked with helping poor people? No meth-addicted gay sex while preaching about the horrors of gay sex? No calling your coworkers at night while masturbating, telling them how much you’d like to falafel them up in the shower? No shoving pictures of fetuses in people’s faces, or taking their own daughters into “chastity vows”, or pontificating about the dangers of man-on-dog relationships?
Okay, Newt Gingrich asked his Christian brothers to forgive him for that affair and divorce request at the hospital while his wife was dying of cancer, and they did. Everyone makes mistakes. Bill O’Reilly and falafel – settled out of court, and he’s not a politician, or at least not an office-holder. As for Rick Santorum and his obsession with man-on-dog relationships, the man is no longer one of the two senators from Pennsylvania. He was creeping people out, as they say.
But the question Hunter asks is interesting - is this why Republicans are always so obsessed with governing everybody else’s sex life - because it’s simply inconceivable to them that any two people would have a healthy, non-messed-up relationship? Perhaps so.
And if so, then this –
Forget politics - these people are apparently in serious need of an intervention. How much of American policy over the last six years have revolved around these people’s apparently obsessive attempts at weirder and weirder sex obsessions? Are we going to find out that Bush invaded Iraq to impress Condi? That Republicans have been funneling SCHIP money into secret all-goat bordellos in Mississippi? What could possibly, at this point, be next?
That is a question it would be wise not to ask. Deal with the present –
Fine, so Saint Rudy was having an affair. Not an unheard of concept. What on earth would make someone bill the expenses related to that secret affair to the city of New York? Did he think his penis was declared a city landmark? Did he think that his sexual exploits made the subways run on time? Was it somehow titillating for Rudy Giuliani to hide expenses for his sex romps to city agencies charged with helping the disabled? Did it make it more sexually satisfying for him to know that his Hamptons-based Republican affair was being paid for by agencies to help the indigent? Is this how Republicans make their sex “fun” - to attach a monetary price to it, and then screw as many other people as possible in the process?
Or is this just a perfectly normal case of a crook being a crook, and doing what a crook does - squeezing for every dime and dodge and cheat, just for the sake of the thing? Is Rudy simply so damn corrupt that to him, his now-indicted friend Bernard Kerik really did seem like a great fellow?
Never mind Rudy running for President. The question I have is this: are there any Republicans left who have relationships that are not, in some manner or another, crooked and depraved?
That is also a question it would be wise not to ask.
And there is the other Giuliani problem, far more serious, but without sex and with too many odd names –
Three weeks after 9/11, when the roar of fighter jets still haunted the city’s skyline, the emir of gas-rich Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani, toured Ground Zero. Although a member of the emir’s own royal family had harbored the man who would later be identified as the mastermind of the attack - a man named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, often referred to in intelligence circles by his initials, KSM - al-Thani rushed to New York in its aftermath, offering to make a $3 million donation, principally to the families of its victims. Rudy Giuliani, apparently unaware of what the FBI and CIA had long known about Qatari links to Al Qaeda, appeared on CNN with al-Thani that night and vouched for the emir when Larry King asked the mayor: “You are a friend of his, are you not?”
“We had a very good meeting yesterday. Very good,” said Giuliani, adding that he was “very, very grateful” for al-Thani’s generosity. It was no cinch, of course, that Giuliani would take the money: A week later, he famously rejected a $10 million donation from a Saudi prince who advised America that it should “adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause.” (Giuliani continues to congratulate himself for that snub on the campaign trail.) Al-Thani waited a month before expressing essentially the same feelings when he returned to New York for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly and stressed how important it was to “distinguish” between the “phenomenons” of 9/11 and “the legitimate struggles” of the Palestinians “to get rid of the yoke of illegitimate occupation and subjugation.” Al-Thani then accused Israel of “state terrorism” against the Palestinians.
But there was another reason to think twice about accepting al-Thani’s generosity that Giuliani had to have been aware of, even as he heaped praise on the emir. Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network based in Qatar (pronounced “Cutter”), had been all but created by al-Thani, who was its largest shareholder. The Bush administration was so upset with the coverage of Osama bin Laden’s pronouncements and the U.S. threats to bomb Afghanistan that Secretary of State Colin Powell met the emir just hours before Giuliani’s on-air endorsement and asked him to tone down the state-subsidized channel’s Islamist footage and rhetoric. The six-foot-eight, 350-pound al-Thani, who was pumping about $30 million a year into Al Jazeera at the time, refused Powell’s request, citing the need for “a free and credible media.” The administration’s burgeoning distaste for what it would later brand “Terror TV” was already so palpable that King - hardly a newsman - asked the emir if he would help “spread the word” that the U.S. was “not targeting the average Afghan citizen.” Al-Thani ignored the question - right before Giuliani rushed in to praise him again.
In retrospect, Giuliani’s embrace of the emir appears peculiar. But it was only a sign of bigger things to come: the launching of a cozy business relationship with terrorist-tolerant Qatar that is inconsistent with the core message of Giuliani’s current presidential campaign, namely that his experience and toughness uniquely equip him to protect America from what he tauntingly calls “Islamic terrorists” - an enemy that he always portrays himself as ready to confront, and the Democrats as ready to accommodate.
The contradictory and stunning reality is that Giuliani Partners, the consulting company that has made Giuliani rich, feasts at the Qatar trough, doing business with the ministry run by the very member of the royal family identified in news and government reports as having concealed KSM - the terrorist mastermind who wired funds from Qatar to his nephew Ramzi Yousef prior to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and who also sold the idea of a plane attack on the towers to Osama bin Laden - on his Qatar farm in the mid-1990s.
This royal family member is Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani, Qatar’s minister of Islamic affairs at the time, who was later installed at the interior ministry in January 2001 and reappointed by the emir during a government shake-up earlier this year.
Okay, he did business and continues to do business with the bad guys, or at least those who hide the main bad guys and run the propaganda machine against us. But it’s just business, as they say in the mafia movies, and Digby adds this –
There is not necessarily anything illegal about doing business with Middle Eastern countries. Lord knows that they are a major reason why the US is as involved as it is there. But Rudy is being extremely cagey about Giuliani Partners, saying that he doesn’t have to reveal any information because nobody has suggested that there’s anything wrong with them.
Well, somebody is. This man is running almost entirely as an islamofasicst terrorist fighter. And here he is, after 9/11 kissing up to supporters of Osama bin Laden. For profit.
It’s not a sexy as hiding his and Mistress Judy’s room service expenses in the department of motor vehicles budget, but it’s actually quite a big deal. Read the whole thing. He’s been raking in millions selling “security” to terrorist sympathizers. When you think about it, it makes perfect “Shock Doctrine” sense.
But the story won’t get much play – as the debate began Olbermann on MSNBC led with it, but the rest of the press will be polite, and respect the one hero of 9/11, and just about everything else. Ah well.
But at least we can talk about sex now.
