Below The Beltway

Matt Taibbi has a piece in Rolling Stone this month about Rudy Giuliani and the brand of politics he’s selling now that he’s the Republican frontrunner:

Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days — like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Ch?vez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a “stuck pig,” and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn’t even bother to conceal the fact that he’s had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can’t have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who’ll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That’s Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength — and he knows it — comes from America’s unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they’re probably traitors, and Rudy, well, he’ll keep an eye on ‘em for you. Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully’s disposal.

Rudy’s attack against Ron Paul in the debate was a classic example of that kind of politics, a Rovian masterstroke. The wizened Paul, a grandfather seventeen times over who is running for the Republican nomination at least 100 years too late, was making a simple isolationist argument, suggesting that our lengthy involvement in Middle Eastern affairs — in particular our bombing of Iraq in the 1990s — was part of the terrorists’ rationale in attacking us.

Though a controversial statement for a Republican politician to make, it was hardly refutable from a factual standpoint — after all, Osama bin Laden himself cited America’s treatment of Iraq in his 1996 declaration of war. Giuliani surely knew this, but he jumped all over Paul anyway, demanding that Paul take his comment back. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before,” he hissed, “and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.”

And that is precisely what’s wrong with Rudy Giuilani, George Bush, and, to some extent, American politics today in general. Disagree on the war, or immigration, or abortion, or whatever the issue might be, and you’re not just wrong, you’re evil, you’re the enemy, and your arguments, like the one Ron Paul tried to make at the debate last month, aren’t worthy of serious consideration.

Yes, we’ve seen things like this before. During the Presidential Election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson was attacked personally. The same thing happened to Abraham Lincoln. But it seems like there’s something different this time.

George Bush clearly doesn’t seem like a man interested in listening to opposing points of view. The run-up to the Iraq War certainly confirmed that hypothesis. And Rudy Giuliani is acting like the same type of person. Precisely the type of person who does not belong in the White House.