E Pluribus Unum

Lawrence O'Donnell has the scoop on Rudy:

Rudy Giuliani's presidential candidacy is the best thing that will happen for the Democratic candidates this year. He's going to lose...[and on] his way to losing, Giuliani is going to divert a lot of money away from the inevitable Republican nominee, John McCain.

How do we know he's going to lose? He's the front-runner right now, isn't he?

[B]ut Howard Dean was the frontrunner for a while in the last contested presidential primary season.

Yeah, well, Giuliani is no Howard Dean, right?

When Republican primary voters discover how liberal Giuliani has been on social issues--along with how many wives he's had and how many gay men he has lived with while waiting for a divorce to come through--they are going to abandon him faster than Democratic voters fled from Howard Dean. But the only way they are going to "discover" Giuliani's record on social issues is for John McCain to tell them about it. McCain's campaign has the most vicious attackers in politics today, including Bush campaign graduates and the Swift Boat attack team. They are going to make Giuliani look very bad to conservative voters, but, in the process, they are going to make McCain look bad to moderates he will need in the general election.

I wouldn't be surprised if they begin to hammer Giuliani on his alleged "strong point": his leadership in aftermath of 9/11.

Consider this: who was it that put the NYC Office of Emergency Management (OEM) in the World Trade Center to begin with? It was Rudy -- over the objection of his subordinates, one of whom (I kid you not) told him that the building had been bombed once before and it should now be considered "Ground Zero" for a future attack. Yet Rudy insisted because he wanted the command center within walking distance of City Hall.

Of course, on 9/11 he walked all right -- he wandered the streets looking for a place to make a simple phone call because the OEM had gone up in flames.

The mainstream media portrayed his presence on the street as an act of heroism when in fact it was the result of a colossal act of hubris and stupidity. Bottom line: His conduct in the time leading up to, and including, 9/11 and its aftermath makes a nice bookend to Bush's Hurricane Katrina conduct. What a pair of morons.

If you want the whole story, read Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11. I have a feeling someone on McCain's staff knows it forwards and backwards.