The last few weeks have been tough for "America's Mayor." His campaign got shot up by charges that he had the taxpayers of New York fund NYPD escorts for his then mistress Judith Nathan and they even walked her dog. The story lingered for quite some time, even leading Fox News' pundit William Kristol to wash his hands of him.
Despite all that, could this one story really take down the national front runner? Polls suggest he has been slipping, not only in Iowa and New Hampshire, but Florida too. He could always bounce back, right? He still has 9/11 to lean on...that is until Jim Riches has his way with him starting early next year. Firefighters do not care much for a man that used a tragedy for photo-ops, especially when he did very little to ensure the safety of the hundreds in the FDNY that died that day.
Well so much for 9/11, he still has his time as a Federal Prosecutor, right? Didn't he turn around the Southern District of New York so that he could use the RICO Act to take out some of New York's toughest mobsters? Oh wait a second, Rudy has lied to us many times before, do you think he could have lied to us about this story as well? I think there may be someone who has something to say about that.
From John Nathan in the NYT Op-Ed:
ON “Meet the Press” a week ago, Rudolph W. Giuliani attempted to deflect criticism of his close relationship with his former police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, by saying that his misjudgment of Mr. Kerik had to be weighed against his other accomplishments. “How can I not have pretty good judgment about the people who work for me and not been able to turn around the United States attorney’s office?” he asked. But Mr. Giuliani’s claim to have turned around the Manhattan United States attorney’s office is not only untrue, it is an insult to the outstanding men and women who have served in that office over the last 50 years.When he became the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1983 (I was his immediate predecessor), Mr. Giuliani did not take over a moribund prosecutor’s office; he became the head of the premier United States attorney’s office in the country, with a tradition of excellence stretching back 30 years under the leadership of such legal luminaries as Robert M. Morgenthau, the current Manhattan district attorney, and Robert B. Fiske Jr., the original Whitewater special prosecutor. Mr. Giuliani took over an office staffed by a group of the finest young lawyers in the country [...]
Mr. Giuliani claims that he came up with the idea of prosecuting the leaders of each of the major crime families in a single case under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. While that may be his perception, the idea was first broached by the head of the criminal section of the F.B.I.’s New York office in a meeting with me and my staff approximately a year before Mr. Giuliani took office. By the time he was sworn in, the office was laying the groundwork for that case and had in place wiretaps on three of the five organized-crime families in New York City. Among the lawyers already assigned to those cases were Louis Freeh, later the director of the F.B.I., and Barbara Jones, later the chief assistant district attorney for Manhattan and now a United States district court judge.
Oh damn, now that has got to hurt. Too bad for Rudy though, a liar like him deserves nothing from nobody, especially the voters who could possibly make him President. Now that would be a terrible thing for a "man" such as he.
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