Sell Your Souls to Save Your Skins
As a native New Yorker who has lived in the City (albeit Queens) most of his life, I have some reason to be grateful to Rudolph Giuliani. His policies—and the capable police commissioner he hired, then enviously fired, William Bratton—helped reverse the decline of a once vital city, whose coffers had been scraped, its thugs empowered, and institutions corrupted through during two decades of bipartisan (Lindsay/Beame/Koch) leftist governance. You need to have witnessed the change in New York after Giuliani’s election in 1993 to understand the visceral loyalty Giuliani inspires in residents of (and even commuters to) the City. For those of you who weren’t there, I’ll try to evoke life as we then knew it:
The city center, Times Square, was once a repellant cesspool of “adult entertainment,” with luridly obscene advertisements, hawkers giving handbills for strip clubs to school kids, and sex toys on display in shop windows. Drivers stopped at red lights were terrorized by “squeegee men,” strapping derelicts who’d run wet, filthy sponges over windshields and loudly demand payment for this “service.” Street crime, while already declining, was grave enough that women feared to ride subways or walk the streets at night. All the trains and stations were coated with graffiti. No one was fixing the broken windows, or arresting the urban youths who brazenly jumped turnstiles. It seemed that every second heat grate or subway car featured an aggressive mental patient who stank of human waste. ATMs, then a recent and welcome invention, had been colonized by pushy, filthy panhandlers who slept inside and cadged for handouts from scared young women at night.
Some people used to call New York in this period “the Wild West,” but it had none of the wholesome, raw energy of a frontier town where order was slowly being imposed. Instead, the place was much more like Rome in the sixth century, when the last vestiges of ancient order had disappeared, and the citizens skulked behind ruined columns, hiding from the Visigoths. (For a vivid picture of New York in its decline, rent Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, or Spike Lee’s brilliant, underappreciated Summer of Sam.) No wonder so many New Yorkers made folk heroes out of thugs like John Gotti, who while they pumped drugs into the ghettos, made it seem that they “kept their neighborhoods safe.”
With intellectual support from the hard work done by neoconservative critics of leftist social policies (remember when it used to be a pleasure to read Commentary?), Giuliani ran for mayor against the insurgent David Dinkins in 1989, and I supported him. Which is part of the reason he lost. Well, I wasn’t personally responsible, but Giuliani’s narrow defeat was caused, the common wisdom went, by his nominal embrace of social conservatism. At least on paper, the ex-altar boy claimed to be pro-life, and opposed to most demands of the burgeoning NY gay lobby. (Of course, a New York mayor can do little about abortion, except perhaps to avoid philandering and causing a few—as Rudy probably has. I wish that someone like Tom Tancredo would ask him about this at the next debate.)
In a city that had grown nearly unliveable thanks to far-left policies, a good government Republican went down to defeat by a mere by 47,000 votes—roughly the number of people who pass through Zabar’s on a weekend for whitefish. Ironically, it is to their credit that the social liberals of New York preferred to risk being stabbed on the street to voting in a mayor who embodied (for them) intolerance.
The white ethnics who made up Giuliani’s base made a different choice—and one that’s understandable, for ordinary people just trying to get through life in a crumbling city, which decayed even faster under the bumbling, pandering Dinkins. Staring into his cup of defeat, Giuliani read the tea leaves, and reinvented himself in 1993 as a pro-gay, “pro-choice” reformer. He beat Dinkins by almost exactly his previous margin of defeat, some 53,000 votes. George Marlin, the principled pro-life businessman who ran third party, picked up a mere 14,000 votes, including mine.
Giuliani had learned his lesson, and he’s applying it today. He discovered that conservative voters are less principled than liberals, more willing to trade off what they hold sacred so as to save their skins. Too many Americans who watched with horror the events of Sept. 11, 2001 on television have turned to the man who stood resolutely behind a microphone all through the day, reassuring them in a deep, masculine voice that all was well—even as George Bush cowered somewhere with My Pet Goat, and Dick Cheney lurked in an undisclosed location studying oil maps of Iraq.
Not that Giuliani actually accomplished much of anything on 9/11, beyond what any decent mayor (i.e., not Ray Nagin) would have done. I know—I was there that day, and have friends who fled the fires, watching bodies plummet to the ground a few feet away. A priest I am close to administered Last Rites in one of the Towers until just moments before it collapsed.
It was the EMT, cops, and fireman who died that day to save some 16,000 people in the towers. We’ll never know how many cops and firemen died directly because of the obsolete radios with which Giuliani had saddled them. That’s why the NYC firefighter’s union is one of Giuliani’s most dogged opponents. Another group speaking out against Giuliani is the 9/11 Families for a Secure America, who remember that Giuliani championed the policy preventing cops from reporting illegal aliens—like the 9/11 hijackers who murdered their relatives, and almost 3,000 other people. No doubt there’s some bitterness also among the recovery volunteers who breathed asbestos and God knows what else for weeks as Giuliani’s now indicted, mob-connected longtime employee Bernard Kerik cavorted for weeks with his girlfriend in the suite meant for rescue workers. It was this man Giuliani promoted to head the Dept. of Homeland Security.
I suspect that there’s a certain hesitation to vote for Giuliani among the families of the children abused by Alvin Placa, the ex-priest who was defrocked for molesting high-school boys and helping to cover for other molesters. (A grand jury report described Placa as “cautious but relentless in pursuing his victims.”) Placa is Giuliani’s childhood friend and remains his “spiritual advisor.” According to Salon, Placa
was the best man at Giuliani's first marriage in 1968 to his second cousin, Regina Peruggi, then helped Giuliani get an annulment in 1982 -- over Regina’s protests -- so he could marry his second wife, Donna Hanover. Placa officiated at the wedding of Hanover and Giuliani in 1984. In September 2002, while suspended by the diocese over the sexual abuse allegations and no longer permitted to perform priestly duties, Placa received special permission to officiate at the funeral of the former mayor's mother, Helen. He also officiated at the funeral of Giuliani's father and baptized both of Giuliani’s children.
Perhaps, in the cabinet position Giuliani grants him, Placa will prove “cautious but relentless in pursuing” Osama bin Laden.
Much of this moral squalor wouldn’t matter if Giuliani were running for mayor again—or as The Onion aptly quipped, for “President of 9/11.” But it makes a difference now, as he crosses his fingers and promises to name “strict constructionist judges” to Supreme Court, where they will (we hope) reverse the decision legalizing a procedure which Giuliani considers every woman’s constitutional right. To this promise I would act the prosecutor and ask Giuliani, “Were you lying then or are you lying now?” Given the massive arm-twisting it took to get the genuinely pro-life George W. Bush to appoint Judge Alito instead of the hack Harriet Myers, does anyone really believe Giuliani will keep this promise? Or is it just a fig-leaf for the conscience, a loophole we’re saving for the annulment?
Social conservatives who support Giuliani for President do so for two reasons—fear and fantasy. They fear the hordes of faceless terrorists (of the very sort Giuliani wouldn’t deport—but never mind). They fantasize that the U.S. military can do for the entire world what the NYPD did for Queens—hunt down the evildoers and make us safe again. They fear Hillary Clinton as if she were incarnate evil—when in fact, her policies would prove indistinguishable from Giuliani’s, since they both sit on the same point of the center-left. They fantasize that American intervention around the world will prove free of hideous consequence, that we can act the bully in every corner of the earth while still grazing safely as sheep. In this, these “conservatives” are no better than the cafoni named Vinnie and Vito who thronged John Gotti’s funeral. Like them, they’re waving flags.
John Zmirak is author of, among other books, The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Good Living (www.badcatholics.com), and the upcoming graphic novel The Grand Inquisitor. Image courtesy of www.unconfirmedsources.com.
Comments
Everyone seems to know Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for his Henny Penny imitation.
But few people—thanks to a very biased media—know that the Nobel Prize was actually awarded to two people.
Gore’s co-winner is British scientist Lord Monckton.
And Lord Monkton very much dissents from Gore’s views.
Read his views here:
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=22430
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Giuliani is enthusiastically pro-abotion and pro-gay rights, having proclaimed both “Roe v Wade Anniversary Day” and “Out in Government Day” while mayor. He does not deserve the vote of any social conservative.
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Another great overview on the horror that is Guliani, although the aside about GWB being genuinely pro-life gave me pause. Are you entirely sure that this is correct? He certainly hasn’t made the unborn a very high priority during his two terms.
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Fruddee is falling like a rock right now.I had a good argument with my nephews wife saturday night about him. Its mainly the unwashed and unread still supporting him.Its too Bad perhaps, his nomination would probably destroy whats left of the republican party. Not such a bad idea and replace it with a constitutional prolife party.Its going to be a real free for all, nothing like I have seen in almost 60 years of watching politics.Ron Paul is the man to pick up the pieces.
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I was happy to see a note on Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, his best, perhaps only good flick.
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What is the intrinsic(word of the day) value
of painting over graffiti? The sickness still
persists. I could say NY is uglier than ever.
But it’s ugliness exists on the inside.
Kinda correlative to the decay of society in
general, I’d say. Decay is persistent.
No worries. decay stems from money and when
the money is gone, we can get to work on
rebuilding this society from the ground up.
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They fear Hillary Clinton as if she were incarnate evil—when in fact, her policies would prove indistinguishable from Giuliani’s, since they both sit on the same point of the center-left.
The Left/Right paradigm has long fallen into obsolescence, if it ever made much sense. To keep using it obscures reality and promotes the illusion that because two camps are plotted on the line “closer” to another, they might have something in common, and thus might be able to coalesce.
I too applauded Commentary in the 70s and 80s. We Tories and we Jeffersonians have learned since that Whigs (Burke’s “New Whigs”) are quite different creatures, a position that is not “close” to us at all. (I pray we have learned also that nationalists, racialists, and Fascists are not “close” to us either.) So let’s throw away the Left/Right metaphor.
Instead of a line running from left to right, politics is more like a Chinese Checkers board, at best. The September Hero and Nurse Ratched are only “indistinguishable” superficially. Giuliani is a Hamiltonian-Whig, Hillary a Social Democrat. Both positions are indeed statist welfare, but their clients differ, the one megacorporations and megabanks, the other statist school teachers, Sixties leftovers, the Lumpenproletariat, and any individual who gets a paycheck from Leviathan. The deep structures of these two positions and their long term goals differ quite sharply. Not to know Giuliani’s deep structure results in bafflement with respect to his seeming shift from law and order to something else. In fact there’s no shift at all; his positions follows logically from his Whig-Hobbes principles.
Otherwise, a good, fair article that acknowledges the good, the bad, and the shades of grey.
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Giuliani actually switched on abortion during the 1989 mayoral race.
He began the campaign at least nominally pro-life and anti-Roe but switched after Koch lost the Democratic primary and in order to win the Liberal Party ballot line.
Giuliani even criticized the first President Bush’s veto of a bill allow the DC government to publicly fund abortions.
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Why are we even having this discussion?
Giuliani supports communism and war.
That is a well known fact. Americans, in general, support communism and war. That is why Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani are the front runners for the presidency.
If you want to live in a country in which the majority DO NOT support communism or war, I advise you to MOVE! Switzerland is a good choice, as is Estonia, neither have fought an offensive war in at least one hundred years.
However, I will stay here in America, and suffer through the increasing communism and warfare that is bound to bring down the USofA the same way it brought down the USSR.
It is not the Ron Paul Revolution that will destroy the USofA, it is it’s own policies, including the election of either Rudolph Giuliani or Hillary Clinton.
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“Given the massive arm-twisting it took to get the genuinely pro-life George W. Bush...”
Genuinely pro-life Bush? You say this about the man who ordered our invasion of Iraq, based on lies? Who got all pumped up about Shock and Awe? I can think of no better description of Bush than Claude Rains’ of Bette Davis in the movie Deception: Smiling at a mortal wound like a hospital nurse.
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@Henry Barth,
Great article, although I have not been able to find that Monckton has won the Nobel Prize. Did he win as a member of the PCC?
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That should read IPCC.
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Good article. But George Bush is definitely not pro-life.
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I cant but help thinking of Colonel Klink when looking at Rudia.
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In the kind of collective grab-ass that this larval stage of a Security State seems to relish, perhaps the voter can be granted their deepest super-secret wishes of Giuliani as President and Hillary as Veep. This will crown our long-running rush toward some Center of the the Imagination and give the boys and girls what they really long for, a big bad daddy and a a tough-arsed mommy. One will lecture us while warning of impending doom and the other will hector us while warning of impending doom. Both will speak gloriously and at length about the demons we must confront. A giant Jersey Barrier will be carved into Mount Rushmore and our Brand Spankin New Identity Papers will have a Red White and Blue backdrop with a screamin eagle hologram holding aloft a banner that barks “the only thing we have to fear is not fearing enough”. Welcome to the Raw Deal.
We’ll all be as rich as a Weimar Wheelbarrow jockey....swimmen in cash I tell ya, swimmin.
This pair will work hard at turning the White House into a kind of a cross between the Kremlin and Napoleonic France ....a fitting combination given the fight we seem so determined to conduct with ourselves. Although the mind reels at the prospect, we have yet, as a nation, to reach our greatest potential as bloodthirsty sycophants in search of a crusade to whup our own ass. Baghdad and the Hindu Kush are just too remote for the viewership.
To fulfill all fondest wishes, this pairing might finally enflame the militants of the Bible Belt to a reprised insurrection, thus creating perfect conditions conducive to mayhem with the side benefit of increased dividends on Taser Stock. If we’re really lucky, we can get the NRA and our Spectacular Televangelists to lie down with Hollywood and generate an Axis of Swooning that would make Leni Riefenstahl throw up her hands and faint.
What the media-drunk popular culture of this ass-hatted country lusts for is something along the lines of an ARMED NASCAR RACE and these two are just the sorts of demagogues to produce it.........giving us, at long last, the auto-drubbing an unseemly number of our people obviously yearn for. Hopefully, there will be something left worth saving after this romp in the gutter of our discontent.
GW Bush and his faithful Berserker Torquecheney have provided the set-up and a Giuliani-Hillary Centerboink can finish the effort .
Congress can simply continue in it’s longest running and most expensive in history performance of “Waiting For Godot” while the Judiciary hosts another installment of “Whats My Line, yer on Candid Camera”.
But, I of course mean this all in only the nicest way.
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As we mentioned in comment to another recent article, America is a country liberal to its core, and there is no genuine conservative movement here. It is also, beneath its bluster, a cowardly and scared place, which will beg to be saved from foreign boogeymen, and from itself. Watch how fast opposition to feminism and the awful spectre of women in the military disappears from conservative thought when women are being sent abroad to spread the Imperium Americanum and to protect them from a few thousand determined men with small arms. Funny, where I grew up, we rather thought low of men who sent girls to do their fighting for them.
And of course opposition to abortion and gay “rights” melts away as soon as the big, bad red staters have a boogeyman in a turban waved in front of them.
All of which essentially amounts to: “Please don’t hurt me! Take the women and children instead!”
Sickening. America can only wish that it could die as well as Byzantium - that it could produce a Constantine XI, who died proud and beautiful, defeated but not beaten, killed but never broken. Cowards die a thousand deaths. America’s present and future will be tragedy from within, and the darkest of comedy when viewed from a distance.
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Mr. Capp;
There are only two genuine, legitimately American threads of political thought in America - liberalism and libertarianism.
As you mentioned elsewhere, America was born in liberalism (1776), reborn in liberalism (1865), re-reborn in liberalism (1932), re-re-reborn in liberalism (1965), and is incapable of genuine conservatism.
Libertarianism is the only other genuinely American political philosophy (or perhaps one should say, the only other political philosophy of which Americans are genuinely capable). But American libertarianism is not the same as Austrian economic libertarianism. It is instead the political expression of the spirit of the wild frontier - of Lewis and Clark, of Billy the Kid and Bat Masterson, of the Sooner’s Conestoga Wagon. It is also a political expression doomed, in American political life, to eternally play the part of the Washington Generals to liberalism’s Harlem Globetrotters. It will never win the game in the end.
But at very least I had hoped for better than sending girls to do our fighting for us,
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Great post. It reminds me of scoring acid in Times Square back in my college days in the 80’s during the New Year’s Eve celebration. Aside from all the hookers propositioning you, it was a good trip. That’s when New York was a fun place.
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