Giuliani: McCarthy redux
I have always thought Rudy Giuliani is a horse’s ass. Long before he became the Mayor of New York City, when he was merely a prosecutor, he came across as a mean spirited jerk, someone with a clear case of compassion deficit disorder. (Don’t look that illness up in the DSM, the Bible of psychiatry; I just made it up).
Last week, with his below the belt, brass-knuckle attack against President Barack Obama, Giuliani outdid Giuliani at his most offensive, divisive, abrasive self. His statements that Obama doesn’t love his country and that he was influenced by communism smack of the viciousness and slander of the notorious witch hunter Senator Joe McCarthy. The only response the former New York City mayor deserves is the question a defense attorney for one of McCarthy’s many victims posed the persecutor: “At long last, Senator, have you no decency?”
If there was any doubt, Rudy Giuliani has now proven that, just as was the case with McCarthy, for him the answer is a resounding “No.!”
This is what Giuliani said at a private dinner held, ironically, for Scott Walker, the Republican Governor of Wisconsin, the same state that elected Joe McCarthy to the Senate. Walker is, predictably, both a fierce reactionary and a contender for the GOP presidential nomination:
“I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the President loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”
Giuliani was right on one thing, it was a horrible thing to say. But then Giuliani is a horrible human being. From the incredibly shabby way he treated his first wife on the way to divorce her to his shameless and ultimately failed attempt to milk the 9-11 tragedy for political gain to the criminal corruption of at least one of his former good pals, time and again Giuliani has shown he is in no position to render judgment on Obama or anyone else about love of country or, for that matter, about love in general.
In a later interview on CNN, Giuliani stood by his comments but offered no evidence for his outrageous assertions, only a vague feeling: “I don’t feel the same enthusiasm from him for America,” he said on CNN.
In other words, Obama doesn’t love his country because he fails to show the imperial arrogance, in word and deed, of say, a George W. Bush. We all know what that kind of love of country brought America: disaster in Iraq, the contempt or even hate of most of the world.
While many on the right hastened to justify or even applaud Giuliani, the White House had an understated and undeservedly generous reaction.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said:
“I can tell you that it’s sad to see when somebody who has attained a certain level of public stature, and even admiration, tarnishes that legacy so thoroughly. And the truth is, I don’t take any joy, or vindication, or satisfaction from that. I think, really, the only thing that I feel is I feel sorry for Rudy Giuliani today.”
That’s a characteristically classy Obama administration retort. Yet I don’t feel sadness for Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani chose, quite deliberately, to play to the ugliest sentiments in American politics. That is not sad. It is despicable and dangerous.
Today those hideous sentiments – echoes of the Salem witch hunts, the horrors of racism and xenophobia, the depredations of Joseph McCarthy – come together in a white hot hatred of Barack Obama. By stoking that hate, Rudy Giuliani is playing with fire in order to emerge from a well-earned obscurity. That’s contemptible and irresponsible. There is no love of country in spurring division and reviving the worst ghosts of the past.
To put an exclamation point to days worth of venom, at the end of the week Giuliani “clarified” his diatribe by…dismissing Obama’s identity as an African American and saying that the real trouble is that since the age of nine Obama has been influenced by communism and socialism!
Giuliani might think that by saying he was only red-baiting and not race-baiting, he is dodging the bullet. Instead, the only thing he made clear is that he is as obtuse as he is offensive.
Progreso Semanal/ Weekly authorizes the total or partial reproduction of the articles by our journalists, so long as source and author are identified.
