Giuliani : He'll Fix America's Town Square

So Rudy Giuliani is running for President.

And why is Giuliani qualified to be the President of the United States.

He was 'America's Mayor'! He was on TV during 9/11 while Bush and Cheney were encased in protective Tupperware! He is personally responsible for cleaning Times Square!

In other words, he basically did the job he was hired to do. Now, that certainly makes him more qualified than somebody like George W. Bush. But it's not enough for me.

- I'm a Texas boy with very little interest in New York City. I realize that the Media has a huge boner for NYC, but I don't. I suspect plenty of NY folks don't give a flying flip for my beloved cities of Austin and Houston. But I'm not trying to shove Kirk Watson or Bill White down their throats. They are good, efficient mayors of large American cities. I bet they would have done their jobs if attacked by terrorists, just like Giuliani did.

- I don't really care about Times Square. I'm glad that it's nice and shiny and clean. But that's about the extent of it. Giuliani took advantage of a wealthy tax base and a booming US economy and spent money cleaning up a wealthy part of a rich city. That doesn't exactly impress me. Come talk to me when Giuliani cleans up Houston's Fifth Ward.

But maybe I'm the wrong person to talk about this. Let's get the perspective of a native New Yorker that covered Giuliani's administration:

I just read in the paper that there was another court settlement that is costing the city millions of dollars for unwarranted strip searches by the police. This was one of the many, many civil liberties, I would say scandals, that occurred across the Giuliani administration.

He prevented people from having protests and from getting access to government records so they could gauge the credibility of his claims about his magical governance against the facts.

That was a problem with the Giuliani years. He was very, very restrictive about the flow of information. His commissioners spoke at the risk of being dressed down or removed if they said the wrong thing or if they spoke with too much candor. His mayoral management reports, which had actually really been under Dinkins fairly interesting tools for assessing the pluses and minus of city services neighborhood by neighborhood, were turned into basically propaganda, rosy -- and very thin --reports.

That was problematic with Giuliani. If he should run for President, I don’t think it will be golden years for civil liberties in America -- if he wins, that is.

The more I read about Giuliani, the less that I like him. He's one of those typical Republicans that puts on this show about caring for all Americans; a "Compassionate" Conservative that really just cares about the upper classes. In other words, he's a George W. Bush with an East Coast accent. He will be so smug and arrogant that he'll make Bush look like a populist.

But then again, the GOP doesn't have anything else. John McCain makes Bob Dole look vibrant. And the rest of the bunch only care about abortion. I think the Republicans should just send their money to Ralph Nader. They'll like him more than they'll like Hillary. (Of course, most of them would prefer to neuter themselves with a rusty Garden Weasel than live with another democratically elected Clinton.)