I ❤ Gail Collins

Of course, you could just read her column (“Rudy’s Security Blanket”) in Saturday’s New York Times. But because it would be fun for me, let me recount some of her observations about Rudy Giuliani. Subhead: “Rudy Giuliani is one of those people who doesn’t handle power well. The more important he becomes, the more impossible he becomes.” Lede paragraph: “Rudy Giuliani has been having a bad week. Or, as he might put it, suffering persecutions never seen upon this planet since Mel Gibson was tortured on the rack, castrated, disemboweled and beheaded in ‘Brave heart’.” And then, “Rudy looked bad in that debate in Florida. The protégé he promoted for homeland security secretary, Bernard Kerik, kept showing up on TV in news clips captioned 16-COUNT FEDERAL INDICTMENT.” The bills for his golf and adultery pursuits, Collins said, “were hidden in budgets of obscure city agencies like the Loft Board and the Office for People With Disabilities.” When he was mayor of New York City, at one point NYC was paying for police guards to protect and transport not only Rudy, his children and his elderly mother, but also both his wife and his mistress. Really, they were thisclose to assigning a detail to the family retriever and a springer spaniel he was courting down the block.” “After American embassies were bombed in East Africa,” Collins said, “his administration responded by blocking off the driveways to City Hall, barring protesters and politicians from their traditional press conference site on the building steps, and banishing tourists. Meanwhile, behind the barricades, the mayor was planning to put the city’s emergency command center inside the best-known terrorist target in America.” “Does this sound like a good plan, people?” Collins wonders. “Do you want the next president putting a nuclear missile at Camp David while he moves the Situation Room to the Louisiana flood plain?” That scenario probably doesn’t sound as horrible to people who voted for the ne’er-do-well-alcoholic-mentally-challenged--lying-warmonger George W. Bush as it sounds to people who voted for Al Gore and John Kerry. But Collins adds another sobering thought by reminding us that: “The safety of New York reached its peak on 9/11, when the entire public security leadership of the city left ground zero in order to protect the mayor in his walk uptown. And then there was the aftermath, when he tried to postpone the mayoral election under the theory that the factor most critical to our survival was his continued presence at the helm.” Keep it up, Gail. Keep telling the uninformed and misinformed about what a thoroughly unwholesome corrupt piece of work Rudy Giuliani really is under his thin veneer of being an unethical bullying Republican presidential candidate.