Rudy Giuliani knows a lot about love.
Ask Regina Peruggi, the second cousin he grew up with and married, who
was "offended" when Rudy later engineered an annulment from the priest
who was his best man on the grounds, strangely enough, that she was his
cousin. Or ask Donna Hanover, the mother of his two children, who found
out he wanted a separation when he left Gracie Mansion one morning and
announced it at a televised press conference.
Or ask Judi Nathan, his third wife, whom he started dating while still
married to Hanover and New York mayor. In two SUVs, he and an entourage
of six or seven cops traveled 11 times to Judi's Hamptons getaway at a
taxpayer cost of $3,000 a trip. That's love.
Rudy knows so much about love that he declared the other day that
President Obama "doesn't love you" and "doesn't love me" at a private party of GOP fat cats.
The onetime presidential candidate also revealed at the party that
Obama "doesn't love America," an echo of a speech he'd delivered to
delirious cheers in Arizona a week earlier when he declared: "I would go
anywhere, any place, anytime, and I wouldn't give a damn what the
President of the United States said, to defend my country. That's a
patriot. That's a man who loves his people. That's a man who fights for
his people. Unlike our President."
Rudy may have forgotten the half-dozen deferments he won ducking the Vietnam War,
even getting the federal judge he was clerking for to write a letter creating a special exemption for him.
And remember Bernie Kerik? He's the Giulaini police commissioner,
business partner and sidekick whose nomination as homeland security
secretary narrowly preceded indictments. He then did his national
service in prison.
Handout A
Department of Correction receiving blotter from Sing Sing prison shows
the name of Harold Giuliani (aka Joseph Starrett), Rudy's father.
Giuliani went so far as to rebuke the President for not being "brought
up the way you were and the way I was brought up through love of this
country," a bow no doubt to the parenting prowess of Harold Giuliani,
who did time in Sing Sing for holding up a Harlem milkman and was the
bat-wielding enforcer for the loan-sharking operation run out of a
Brooklyn bar owned by Rudy's uncle.
Though Rudy cited Harold throughout his public life as his model
(without revealing any of his history), he and five Rudy uncles found
ways to avoid service in World War II. Harold, whose robbery conviction
was in the name of an alias, made sure the draft board knew he was a
felon. On the other hand, Obama's grandfather and uncle served. His
uncle helped liberate Buchenwald, which apparently affected him so
deeply he stayed in the family attic for six months when he returned
home.
Rudy also said Obama is "more of a critic than he is a supporter of
America," an odd admonition coming from a security salesman who told a
Tijuana audience of consulting clients in October: "America needs to
stop lecturing other countries and start working on how to stop drug use
in its citizens," shifting the onus for the Mexican drug trade onto us.
He's a consultant in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the
very countries where right-wing governments, traffickers and/or gangs
are driving children and teenagers across the U.S. border.
He was a consultant for the government of Qatar, the country his friend
and FBI director Louis Freeh accused of hiding 9/11 mastermind Khalid
Sheik Mohammed before the attack. That's the ultimate triumph of money
over memory, since he's still talking, as recently as a week ago, about
the
10 friends and 343 firefighters he lost on 9/11.
While Giuliani finds Obama's rhetoric insufficiently pro-American, his
2012 RNC speech was filled with catchphrases like Obama's "a complete
and absolute failure," and he just branded the President "a moron" in
his Arizona invocation of Neville Chamberlain at Munich, all of it
presumably a new form of nationalist celebration. In 2012, Rudy even
blasted Obama, without a glance in the mirror, for "attempting to
exploit" the killing of Osama Bin Laden, calling it "disgusting."
Rudy contends that his not-like-us Obama insights have nothing to do
with race, adding in day-after doubling down that the President "was
taught to be a critic of America," while pointing out that his mother
and grandparents were white. There are few in New York now, after 12
years of Mike Bloomberg and a year of Bill de Blasio, who doubt that
Rudy was a conscious, almost energetic, polarizer. He never acknowledged
his dark side then and he's not about to now.
Barrett is author of "Rudy: An Investigative Biography."
