Joshua Malbin

I hate him more than any other politician I know. I hate him more than George W. Bush, who was merely smarmy, self-righteous, and stupid. I hate him more than Dick Cheney, a principled champion of evil. I hate him more than the Joe Lieberman, Exhibit A for narcissistic personality disorder.

See, most other politicians do bad things because they come to view people as abstractions. Rudy Giuliani does bad things because politics, to him, is an endless series of personal blood feuds, and he is out to screw everybody he believes ever screwed him. And he will use all the power of his office to do it.

Here, then, is a brief review of Rudy Giuliani’s loathsome history.

1. Patrick Dorismond. Explained by The Nation:

[I]n March 2000… the unarmed Patrick Dorismond was shot and killed by undercover narcotics police in midtown Manhattan. Dorismond, 26 and black, an off-duty security guard, was standing outside a bar when a plainclothes cop, part of a narcotics detail patrolling the area, tried to buy crack from him. “What are you doing asking me for that shit?” Dorismond asked.

A fight developed, and one of the cops killed him. The shooting came just three weeks after a jury had acquitted four white police officers in the death of another unarmed black man–Amadou Diallo–who was shot forty-one times on his Bronx doorstep. The cops claimed they had mistaken his wallet for a gun. So Dorismond’s shooting occurred in an atmosphere of tinderbox racial tension.

At first Giuliani called for calm, asking the city to withhold judgment until all the facts were established. But the next morning he ignored his own counsel and started demonizing the dead man. Instead of trying to be fair-minded and reassuring, Giuliani made a series of prejudicial and venomous remarks about Dorismond–even before his funeral. The Mayor seemed unable to express any human sympathy for the dead man’s mother, or to grasp the fact that this was a citizen of his city who was killed–by police–for saying no to drugs.

Giuliani authorized the release of Dorismond’s sealed juvenile arrest record, which contained nothing more serious than a violation punishable by a summons, to discredit him. Juvenile arrest records are supposed to be kept confidential, and Giuliani violated legal ethics by breaking the seal without getting a court order. Dorismond was 13 at the time his arrest was entered into a police computer. At a press conference Giuliani argued that the dead man’s conduct at age 13 was “highly relevant.” Dorismond, he sneered, was “no altar boy.” But Dorismond had actually been an altar boy. He had even attended the same elite Catholic high school as the Mayor–Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn.

Patrick Dorismond, who’d done nothing wrong, had, by his death, become a political threat to Rudy Giuliani. Therefore he had to be destroyed and discredited, even after death.

2. Homeless shelters as political bludgeons:

When the City Council overrode his veto of a bill to change the operations of homeless shelters in December 1998, Giuliani sought to evict five community service programs, including one that served 500 mentally ill people, in the district of the bill’s chief sponsor, and to replace them with a homeless shelter.

What’s more, he released a list of sites for other shelters that would be housed in the districts of council members who voted in favor of the override. (He backed down two months later, after much public outrage.)

3. Say what you like about William Bratton, but he was generally credited with the drop in crime under Giuliani’s mayoralty. And since he got most of the credit, he had to go.

[A]n administration that prized unwavering loyalty to the mayor could not stomach Mr. Bratton’s celebrity. Mr. Bratton dined with celebrities and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He tried to organize a parade for the Police Department’s 150th anniversary, prominently featuring himself, but Mr. Giuliani killed that plan.

Mr. Bratton left the job after just two years — it was generally acknowledged that he was forced out — and publicly toyed with the idea of running against Mr. Giuliani.

4. All the petty little things that won him the Lifetime Muzzle Award from The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

5. Chris Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum. Having never seen it, Giuliani declared it sacrilegious. And therefore…

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani stepped up his attack on the Brooklyn Museum of Art Thursday, threatening to terminate its lease with the city and possibly even seize control of the museum unless it cancels a British exhibition that features a portrait of the Virgin Mary stained with elephant dung.

Giuliani said that the exhibition, which is to open next week, would violate the terms of the lease, because the museum does not intend to allow children under 17 to view it unless they are accompanied by an adult. His remarks came a day after he vowed to cut off all city subsidies to the museum if it proceeded with the exhibition, which he described as “sick stuff.”

(By the way, that “stained” is tendentious in the extreme. The painting incorporated elephant dung shaped into small mounds, shellacked, and brightly painted. It was supposed to be an African appropriation and celebration of the Madonna, not in any way a defilement.)

6. The divorce. Now, I don’t usually care what politicians do in their private lives…except when they use their public position to humiliate their families. Take it away, Steve Gilliard (RIP):

By the spring of 2000, there was a new woman in Rudy’s life, Judith Nathan. She had been camoflauged in the mayor’s entourage from the fall of 1999 on. No one knew who she was, at least not obviously. But, as Giulani’s bout with cancer became news, Nathan, who was trained as a nurse, was seen to have been accompanying him to doctor’s meetings. …

Finally, on a rainy late spring day, as the Giuliani senate campaign gained steam, he annouced he was leaving his wife. Well, a couple of hours later, Hanover, now seen on the Travel Channel, announced her reaction … Seems he forgot to tell he wanted a seperation and she found out when we did.
…
Within a week or so of the breakup, Mother’s Day weekend came. So how did the then mayor celebrate? While his wife was home in LA visiting her family, he took a stroll along 2nd Avenue with the press in tow. The pictures of the mayor and his paramour greeted his now estranged wife as a Mother’s Day gift.

Things only got uglier, of course. New York is not a no-fault state. You need grounds. And only Hanover had them.

Now, this is why this story becomes evil.

Over the next year, they fought like pit bulls over control of Gracie Mansion. Giuliani reduced his wife’s security, fired her press aide. She banned Nathan from the parts of Gracie Mansion. For the next year, they fought over control of the building like the Red Guards and German 6th Army fought over the Tractor Works in Stalingrad. No advantage was too slight to gain. Giuliani’s lawyer, showboat Raoul Felder, once called Hanover a greedy pig after a contentious court session.

At one point, Giuliani banned Hanover’s parents from staying in the city-owned building. While Giuliani’s own father was a convicted felon who avoided military service in WWII, Hanover’s father had survived the kamikaze attack on the USS Intrepid in 1945, and was attending a reunion of the ship’s surviving crew.

In the nadir of his behavior towards the mother of his children, mayoral aides forcibly ejected Hanover, who rushed to see her children’s grandmother after she had been taken ill and rushed to the hospital. The shouting match was heard throughout the ER as Hanover was forced to leave.

7. The ferret rant.

I could go on. There were the random, illegal searches. There was the crusade against squeegee men. There’s Bernie Kerik. There was the grandiose, pigheaded gesture of housing New York’s crisis response center in the World Trade Center, the one place in the city already attacked by terrorists. Feel free to add your own.

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He just won’t die.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has decided not to run for governor next year – but will run for U.S. Senate instead, sources told the Daily News.

Let’s be clear: I don’t care what the polls currently say about his chances against Gillibrand. A lot of New Yorkers still don’t know who Gillibrand is, and Giuliani still has the Kerik albatross. I don’t believe he’s going to win. But I’m not looking forward to seeing his smug, hateful face on the news for another year and worrying about it.

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Please God, no. Please, please God. No.

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