JUST AS I PREDICTED A FEW MONTHS AGO, RUDY HAS SELF DESTRUCTED.  HE HAS NO QUALIFICATIONS TO BE PRESIDENT

Things in my life have been somewhat frenzied, leaving me less time than I would like to write by liberally skewed points of view here at THE LIB.  So rather than take my usual course of action, I am going to comment on several things that are going on, mostly related to Presidential politics, but with a bit of additional information only peripherally related to the race thrown in for good measure.

As we all know, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) is the seeking the Democratic nomination for President.  She is the Democrat that most Republicans love to hate.  For some reason that I am at a loss to explain, the Clintons, both Hillary and Bill, seem to have the effect of making the hairs on the backs of Republican necks stand at attention.  My guess is that the party of Pat Buchanan doesn’t seem to deal well with the notion that, as centrist Democrats, the Clintons have managed to steal the Republican’s thunder over and over again.

Now, however, she has gained the ire of many Democrats who fancy themselves to be on the far left.   Their complaint is that Hillary voted to support the war in Iraq.  Well, she did, sort of.  The resolution that she supported called for war as a final option if weapons inspectors were not allowed into Iraq.  By the time we actually attacked Sadaam Hussein, he had pretty well complied with all of the demands that were made of him.  President Bush never planned to follow the letter of the Congressional resolution for which Senator Clinton voted.  His agenda on Iraq was developed in 1996 by The Project for a New American Century, whose members included Vice President Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.   Their notion was that by attacking Iraq, we would establish our beach head of power in the post cold war world.  President Clinton rejected their notion, and the three neo-cons crawled back into their weasel hole to develop plans to steal the presidency and bring their plans to fruition.  Obeying the law was never an issue to them, because, as far as they were concerned, laws are for the common folks.

Speaking of Iraq, it seems that Republican Presidential wannabe, Rudolph Giuliani, has been having some interesting issues pop up, the first having very much to do with the war.  It seems that the former Mayor of New York was supposed to be a member of the Iraq Study Group.  The only problem was that he never showed up at any of the group’s meetings because he was too busy earning millions in speaking fees to attend.  Rudy wants to be the President, but when it comes to matters of national security, lining his pockets seems to be far more important.  Besides, what could he have contributed to those meetings?  He has neither foreign policy nor military experience to support the notion that he was even remotely qualified to be a member of that auspicious group.  They were far stronger in preparing their report than they would have been with him, and he became far richer by staying away.

As long as I am on the subject of the guy who seems to have had no problem marrying his cousin, annulling the wedding several years later, marrying Donna Hanover, cheating on her in the Mayoral mansion and then dating a married woman and marrying her after she got divorced, have you heard about his latest peccadillo? 

It seems that the get tough former Mayor who managed to have a Police Commissioner and later business partner with mob affiliations has just lost another of his confidants to crime.  Apparently, South Carolina Treasurer, and Giuliani campaign chairman in that state, Thomas Ravenel, was busted the other day for possession of a mere 500 grams of cocaine with intent to sell.  Ravenel claimed that he was just planning to share the coke with friends.  He must have a lot of friends, because that much coke could fill the needs of most addicts for a couple of years.  That Rudy, he sure knows how to pick his staff.

There is a reason why former Senator Fred Thompson has passed Rudy in the polls without ever having declared himself to be a candidate.  Oh yeah, just as I predicted a few months ago, Rudy has self destructed.  He has no qualifications to be President.  He was a bad mayor.  As a prosecutor, he nearly set the record for having his convictions overturned.  He located the anti terrorist task force of New York City in The World Trade Center after it had already been attacked, and the list of his failures goes on and on.  Now add to all of the above the awful taste he seems to have in selecting his associates, and you have the perfect guy to stand next to George W. Bush in the next sequel of Dumb and Dumber.

So, while I am dealing with the former Mayor, why not deal with the current one too.  Mike Bloomberg, is doing the same Hamlet act made famous by former New York Governor, Mario Cuomo.  He tells us that he really isn’t planning to run for the Presidency, but he keeps doing things to make us feel just the opposite.   Now, he has decided to exit the Republican Party to become an independent.  Big surprise!  There had to come a time when the deal Bloomberg made to join the Republican Party to get their mayoral nomination, after he had been a life-long Democrat, was going to come to an end, and it has.  Bloomberg knew that there was no way he would ever be seriously considered as the Republican candidate for Presidents, and the Democrats certainly want nothing to do with him.  That means that if he wants to run, he has to do so as an independent.

Now, most independent races don’t work out too well.  Think of Ross Perot, Eugene McCarthy and John Anderson, and you’ll understand.  There is, however, a big difference between those folks and Mike Bloomberg.  No, it’s not his money, although that ain’t hurting him at all.  The real difference is that most people out of New York think Bloomberg is terrific.  Many in the city do too.  Only those who have given serious analysis to some of his schemes and obfuscations understand that the Mayor isn’t really real.  He cooked the books on education by lowering the testing universe and then claiming grades went up.  He has developed a congestion pricing scheme for the city that he says will lower pollution but doesn’t address the biggest issues, double parked trucks and the nightmare of alternate side parking, both of which cause traffic jams and excess pollution.   He is, essentially a lot of sizzle and very little steak.  However, with the combination of that sizzle and his billions, he just could become the first independent candidate to actually stand a chance of winning in nearly 200 years.

Which brings me back to Senator Clinton and her neat little campaign ad that has been showing up all over the web.  OK, I have to admit that I am one of the few Americans who didn’t watch The Sopranos final episode.  I never really liked the few shows I saw, and haven’t seen it in several years.  Yet, the notion of spoofing a highly watched TV show as a method of having the public select your campaign song is pretty cool.  It’s even cooler when you consider that the kids in the scout uniforms sitting in the diner with their father are my friend’s son and grandchildren.  But, secretly, I was hoping that they’d resurrect “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” .  It may be old.  It may have been used by her husband.  But the thought still holds water after the debacle in which our country participates every day that George W. Bush remains in office.

HENRY A. HONIG – THE PUNDIT