if he was a Democrat. The media would be all over this 24/7. But since he's a rethug, the stories will fade amazingly quickly-you know, with the liberal media and all. He is corrupt. Plain and simple. I cannot believe he would get the nomination. But nothing shocks me anymore with this crowd.

What a shame.  I was hoping that Rudy's dirty secrets would have remained hidden and not revealed until after he won the Republican nomination.  

A Guiliani nomination would have more less ensured a Democratic victory.  

If Rudy implodes now, the Republican nominee might be Huckabee.  And he's just enough of the aw-shucks, "kind of guy you'd like to have a (root) beer with" to con 50.00001% of the electorate into voting for him.

They'll continue broadcasting all Rudy all the time as long as there's hope.

Rudy's still polling at the top of the Gerrymandered Old Pygmies nationally, and despite the shellacking he'll take coming out of Iowa and New Hampshire, he won't concede before Super-Duper Tuesday.

It'll be ugly, but never doubt the damage that can be done when a few rich sociopaths control the media.

Now that he is getting more exposure, stuff will come up. I am sure that Rudy's and Romney's teams are digging dirt as we speak since his campaign has taken off.

Just keeping the powder dry my friend.

where have I heard that before?

is how I would describe Mr. Giuliani. His connections to terrorists is not as deep as Bush's, when you consider the close relationship the Bush family has with the bin Laden family, and the Saudis in general.

What do the typical Republican voters see in Giuliani? A tough authoritarian father figure (or so they imagine, encouraged by Fox News) who will protect them. This trumps any moral questions, as Pat Robertson has made clear. What scares me is that Giuliani is much smarter than Bush, and would be well able to perfect Bush's destruction of the Constitution as well as Bush's overwhelming impulse to ride to war anywhere, any time.  

Rudy is, above all, an authoritarian.  And that's what the GOP base craves.  And really, they've got a pretty decent track record for putting up with hypocrisy, when it comes to their so called values.  I think he'll remain a serious candidate for quite some time.

Rudy is a disaster.  He's got a lovely image, but the reality is horrendous.  Whomever gets the nomination will have plenty of $$ to make voters see the real Rudy, and 527s will come out of the woodwork to lacerate the fake.

Republicans may consider him serious, but in the general he'll be a laughing stock.

That Rudy was collecting all of the unemployed neo-cons to work on his campaign.  If Guiliani's fortunes wane, I don't know who they will gravitate towards next.

I was kind of hoping that these sorts of things wouldn't come out until after Guiliani had sewn up the nomination.  That would leave the Republicans in a real pickle.

batshit crazy Republican presidential candidates?  Did you actually WATCH those guys the other night?  They range from frightening to terrifying.  For instance, see here.   Also, see this amazing diary from Teacherken's wife, "Leaves on the Current."  Frankly, if any of these Republicans, with the POSSIBLE exception of John McCain, is elected, I'm looking into property in Costa Rica or Australia.

Because they all have major defects.  

This is an excellent diary, because Rudy has a long list of problems.  Last night I was reading through "Rudy" by NY reporter Wayne Barrett, and in the whole Judy Nathan affair Rudy comes across as a complete heel.  And today, by coincidence, my doctor's office had a copy of Lloyd Grove's May 21 piece in New York magazine on the Rudy-Judy-Donna Hanover story.

Although Rudy did have Bernie Kerik vouch for his character today.  http://thinkprogress.org/2007/...  Bwa-ha-ha

if any of these lunatics gets elected.  

The Republican Party does not turn on a dime.  The GOP is headed straight for an iceberg, but nobody (except Hagel) dares to touch the steering wheel for fear of being called a RINO.

I think Rudy gets the nomination anyway.

That gives us plenty of time to distill all of this insanity into an easily digestible soundbite (2 words?), that will gut Rudy and give the presidency to the Dems.

in 2004 there was no end to the use of the term "flip-flop", this year we can use that if Filp Romney gets the nod.

If 9ui11iani gets it, what will we use?

I like:  "The only man on earth with worse judgment than Bush", but that'll need to be simplified.  "Bush's dumber twin"?

Training a parrot to say "9/11".  A few years ago, you would use "tax cut" instead, but this would be funnier.

Early dirt at:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/f...

In the 1992 contest with Bumpers, Huckabee used campaign funds to pay himself as his own media consultant. Other payments went to the family babysitter.

In his successful 1994 run for lieutenant governor, he set up a nonprofit curtain known as Action America so he could give speeches for money without having to disclose the names of his benefactors. He failed to report that campaign travel payments were for the use of his own personal plane.

After he became governor in 1996, he raked in tens of thousands of dollars in gifts, including gifts from people he later appointed to prestigious state commissions.

In the governor's office, his grasp never exceeded his reach. Furniture he'd received to doll up his office was carted out with him when he left, after he'd crushed computer hard drives so nobody could ever get a peek behind the curtain of the Huckabee administration.

There's more in the above article.

And then there's the Dumond rape case:

http://www.arktimes.com/Articl...

I actually believe the Dems will crush most of these guys because the public has not yet been made aware of their backgrounds.

Jeffrey Feldman is shocked by the same dynamic that I tried to address in this post:  http://jeffrey-feldman.typepad...

He goes through it with a focus on how diametrically Rudy stands opposed to the proclaimed values of the party.  

I can't help but see real disaster ahead for Republicans if Rudy is the nominee.  They will prove themselves so desperate for a daddy to protect them, that like a drunken sorority girl at a frat party, they'll go home with this guy drunk on their favorite 9/11 addiction, only to wake up to realize what an adulterous, terrorist and mob tainted candidate he really is.

Republican cowardice has transformed itself into 9/11 Goggles and the Republican party is going to wake up mourning its tattered virtue on a long walk of shame with the world whispering knowingly as they pass ignominiously out of popularity for a generation or more.

Rudy's excuse that the police department wanted the bills paid that way so the policemen could get their expenses paid faster has been contradicted:

http://blogs.abcnews.com/thebl...

Giuliani said Thursday the unusual billing practice was not intended to hide anything but instead to speed payment of American Express credit card bills.

But the current New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said today he knew of no problems with the delay of payments before Giuliani was mayor, when Kelly served under Mayor David Dinkins, or since.

And --- his handlers won't let the press near him today.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/ar...

in 2001, apparently with an eye to future globetrotting, Giuliani's administration sent a check for $400,000 to American Express. Though it was billed to the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, an office that provides lawyers for indigent defendants, the money served as an advance against future travel and other expenses later incurred by the mayor's office and his security detail.

The unusually large prepayment, as yet unreported, adds weight to the theory that the Giuliani administration was using accounting gimmicks to obscure his office's travel expenditures.

With $400,000 prepaid on the Amex account, the mayor and his staff drew down on the credit card for a number of trips, including a handful out to the Hamptons, where Judith Nathan had her condo. Giuliani's administration ultimately spent approximately $100,000 of the $400,000 before leaving office in January, 2001.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, confirmed to us that his administration put a stop to the practice of putting funds for future travel in bulk on a credit card.

I won't clog the tubes with more updates on Rudy -- unless there's an absolute bombshell -- but instead I'll suggest keeping an eye on the story at TPM.