The truth about Rudy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I think it's pretty clear that Bush is one of the worst presidents in history. But -- bear with me here -- could Giuliani, the current GOP frontrunner, actually be worse than Bush?

That's the case Matt Taibbi makes in a must-read article at Rolling Stone. Here's one of the key passages (but make sure to read it all):

Rudy giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

It's an astonishing piece of biographical political analysis that cuts through the spin to get at the very core of a horrendous human being -- and, again, the GOP frontrunner.

The truth about Rudy is nothing if not ugly.