The Trouble With Rudy (Part 2)

I promise this is not going to turn into a rabid "Rudy Sucks!" blog.

At least, not exclusively.

But with Mr. Giuliani the Republican frontrunner, it seems prudent to me to take a closer look at what he says he'd do in office. This New Yorker profile doesn't exactly inpire confidence in his coolheaded decisionmaking skills, judgment, or plans for the future, I'm afraid. There's a lot of the same stuff that was in the Village Voice piece, but (as is the New Yorker's wont) it goes a bit further afield. For me, the most chilling parts are the quotes from Norman Podhoretz, who's been hired as Rudy's foreign policy advisor:

In any case, Podhoretz said to me, he believes that George W. Bush will
settle the matter himself, by bombing Iran before he leaves office. “I’m
probably the only person on the face of the earth who thinks that Bush will
order air strikes,” Podhoretz says. “But we’ll find out. If Bush doesn’t kick
the can down the road, then the issue becomes moot, obviously. But if he fails
to do what I think he will do, Rudy seems to me to be the best bet for doing
what is necessary.”

It seems to me that with the country currently fighting two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with neither of them looking like they're going to be wrapped up soon, the absolute last thing we need to do is to start poking another hornet's nest. Setting aside, of course, the plain fact that Iran (a) doesn't currently have nuclear weapons and (b) if it did, it has no way of doing much of anything to us with them and (c) probably has no real desire to actually use them. Nor is it likely that Iran would use nukes against Israel, since Israel already has nukes and would surely retaliate in kind. So the fact that America's Mayor's senior foreign policy advisor both advocates bombing Iran and thinks Rudy's the guy who'll get that job done ought to give us all some pause.

Also, Rudy had this to say regarding the meaning of freedom just a few days ago:

We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or
50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the
oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our
background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people
can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority.
Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful
authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

[ Interruption by someone in the audience. ]

You have free speech so I can be heard.

Yes, he really said "Freedom is about authority." Rhetoric more evocative of 1984 is difficult to imagine.