Year: 2007
Rudy Giuliani’s Home Life is a Mess
Rut-roh! America’s mayor isn’t the world’s greatest dad. According to his son, Rudy’s kids are not that into their dad’s third wife. Then again, Rudy doesn’t seem that into his kids.
Though he supports his father, Andrew Giuliani does not plan on participating in his campaign. “I will not be active in his campaign,” he said. “I am too busy with golf.”
Andrew Giuliani said he and his father have recently tried to reconcile after not speaking “for a decent amount of time.” In the [recent New York] Times article, Andrew attributed their strained relationship to [Judith] Nathan, saying, “There’s obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife.”
According to the Times, Rudy Giuliani used to pride himself on attending all his children’s events, but at some point after his marriage to Nathan in 2003 he stopped. He missed his son’s graduation in 2005 and his 17-year old daughter’s plays in the last 18 months…
Though he supports his father, Andrew Giuliani does not plan on participating in his campaign. As a Duke University sophomore and aspiring professional golfer, he has no time for distractions.
“I will not be active in his campaign,” he said. “I am too busy with golf.”
Now there’s a rousing endorsement. At least one pundit, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, thinks Rudy’s home life could be a liability.
According to Brinkley, the critical area candidates must keep pristine during the grueling race to the White House is their wholesome family image. Scenes like Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., with his irresistible little girls or Republican Mitt Romney surrounding himself with his children and grandchildren when he announced his run for president are priceless.
“The big moment, the memorable moment, isn’t the speech but it’s when the candidate steps forward, the wife comes on, the kids rush on and you hear this great ‘aww,’ and everyone feels there is a specialness to this person,” Brinkley said.
But Rudy is special. How many people have married their second cousin, then moved in with a T.V. personality while still married to her, then had the marriage annulled since it was — after all — to his second cousin, proceeded to marry the T.V. chick and have two kids with her while carrying on a long-term and fairly public relationship with a staffer, then called a press conference to announce he was divorcing the second wife before mentioning it to her, and then married, not the staffer, but a drug company rep?
Yes, there is a “specialness” to Rudy that few men can match. I hope.
Quote du Jour
“He’s not bright enough to be President. For a long time, anyone who questioned Bush’s ability to think was pointed to the opinion polls and told that discussing whether or not the President is borderline stupid was bad manners and counterproductive. Actually, that is the main problem with Bush. He neither reads, nor writes, nor speaks well. It turns out that a C average is not good enough for the Presidency.â€
— Molly Ivins, March 2004
When Will Cable News Report on the U.S. Attorney Scandal?
Now that Anna Nicole Smith’s body has been buried (for the time being anyway) maybe the cable news channels can find time to do in-depth reporting on the Bush administration’s mass firing of U.S. attorneys last December.
With no underlings to blame for the firings, the White House will resort to its next best trick — they will launch a coordinated smear campaign against the prosecutors as early as Monday morning.
If nothing else, they could cover a hearing into the matter announced by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee for Tuesday at 2 p.m. Four of the fired prosecutors — Carol Lam of California, David Iglesias of New Mexico, H.E. “Bud” Cummins of Arkansas and John McKay of Seattle — have been subpoenaed to appear.
Bush officials say they are surprised about the uproar over the firings — and shocked, shocked, I tell ya — that the Dems would say the dismissals were motivated by politics. True to form, however, the excuse they offer for the purge — that the prosecutors all had poor performance records — does not square with reality on the ground. In fact, the fired attorneys appear to have been well-respected, competent and independent. Several had just received exemplary performance reviews, and none have been reported to have had bad reviews.
Democrats suspect that it was the prosecutors’ independence that led to their dismissals — that the White House judged them as not toeing the Bush line sufficiently, and now intends to replace them with Republican hacks.
In a dismaying and rather unbelievable turn of events, Democrats also recently learned that a heretofore overlooked provision in the Patriot Act grants Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzalez the power to fill the vacancies without Senate approval. (Didn’t anybody read that bill before they signed it?)
On top of all this, there are the charges of political meddling in investigations. In New Mexico, David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney who was fired, has said that two Republicans from the state’s congressional delegation tried imprpoperly to influence an investigation into a Democratic politician. He says he received calls last October from a senator and a House member — and that because he would not accede to the pressure, the senator urged the Justice Dept. to fire him.
Today the Washington Post reported that Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, has admitted he made a call to Iglesias, but says he called simply to inquire about the status of the investigation, but did not threaten or pressure Iglesias, which would have been an ethics violation. However, Domenici also admits he did recommend that Iglesias be terminated.
Iglesias also said he would name the senator and the representative (assumed to be Heather Wilson) if asked during the hearings, so Domenici’s admission — released into the Sunday news void — was done preemptively to soften the blow on the ethics charges.
The knee jerk reaction of the Bush White House is to pin blame for controversies and scandals on their flunkies. But they are on the record as having signed off on the dismissals, although they insist it was all just routine.
With no underlings to blame, the White House will have to rely on its next best trick — a coordinated smear campaign against the fired prosecutors, which could start as early as Monday morning.
Bushevik to Chair Giuliani Exploratory Committee
AUSTIN – Houston lawyer and Republican fundraiser Pat Oxford has been named chairman of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s presidential exploratory committee.
Mr. Oxford is managing partner at Bracewell & Giuliani, the Houston-based law firm that amended its name when the Republican former federal prosecutor signed on in March 2005. Mr. Oxford has been the point person in Texas for Mr. Giuliani’s preliminary efforts to seek the White House.
A longtime ally of Texas Republican political figures, Mr. Oxford was a “Pioneer” for George W. Bush, in the elite tier of fundraisers who collected at least $100,000 for the president’s election. He also was chairman of two of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s Senate races.
As governor, Mr. Bush appointed Mr. Oxford to the University of Texas Board of Regents and he’s remained an adviser to the Bush administration on judicial selections.
Testimony in ‘Denver Three’ Case Reveals White House Deceptions
Last month, testimony in the Scooter Libby trial revealed that former White House spokesman Scott McClellan knowingly lied when he told reporters that neither Libby and Karl Rove had anything to do with leaking of the name of a covert C.I.A. agent. This week, testimony in another court case, this one in Denver, has exposed another deliberate on-the-record lie by McClellan, as well as the legally questionable practice of White House operatives allegedly impersonating Secret Service agents at public events.
Results of a separate investigation into whether White House staffers impersonated Secret Service agents were swept under the rug by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver.
The case concerns the expulsion by White House operatives of three non-Republicans, Leslie Weise, Karen Bauer and Alex Young, from a January 2005 appearance by Pres. George Bush in Denver. The event was taxpayer-funded, and the three taxpayers had tickets. Nonetheless the “Denver Three” were escorted out of the area by volunteer Republican Party operatives. Later, men dressed like Secret Service agents told them that they were tossed out because they had arrived in a car with a bumper sticker that read, “No More Blood for Oil.”
On March 30, 2005, McClellan blamed the expulsion of the three suspected liberals on the Republican volunteers:
… I did look into that a little bit more yesterday … My understanding is that it was a volunteer involved in that matter. My sense is that the volunteer thought that these individuals, these three individuals were coming to the event to disrupt it. And those individuals — I think if you look at some of the early news reports even said something to that effect.
Questioned under oath last week, the volunteers said their orders came from the White House staff members. Reporters contacted the staffers who both said they were following White House policy:
A former White House official who ordered three activists expelled from a 2005 Denver public forum with President Bush says it was White House policy to exclude potentially-disruptive guests from Bush’s appearances nationwide.
The former official, Steve Atkiss, revealed the policy today in an interview after two volunteer bouncers identified him and a current White House staffer, Jamie O’Keefe, as the officials who ordered the so-called “Denver Three” activists sent away.
Atkiss is now a U.S. Department of Homeland Security chief of staff.
McClellan cast blame on the volunteers knowing that they were just following orders — knowing all along that it that suspected dissenters were always barred from Dear Leader’s presence.
An earlier investigation in the matter revealed that the Secret Service agents were actually White House staffers:
The Secret Service later investigated whether a Republican volunteer committed a crime of impersonating a federal agent. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver declined to press charges, giving no explanation.
Swept under the rug.
Bush Approval in GOP Drops 13 Percentage Points
Republicans have a remarkable ability to live in denial:
In the months since the Congressional elections, President Bush has lost substantial support among members of his own party, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.
Mr. Bush’s approval rating dropped 13 percentage points since last fall among Republicans, 65 percent of whom now say they approve of the way he is handling his job as president, compared with 78 percent last October.
Over all, Mr. Bush’s job approval remains at one of its lowest points, with 29 percent of all Americans saying they approve of the way he is doing his job, compared with 34 percent at the end of October. Sixty-one percent disapproved, compared with 58 percent in October, within the margin of sampling error.
Gen. Clark: Pentagon Conquest Plans in 2002 Included Iraq, Iran and Five Other Countries
I remember hearing Gen. Wesley Clark tell this story during the 2004 campaign. Here’s the transcript from Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now, from today:
“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
AMY GOODMAN: Do you see a replay in what happened in the lead-up to the war with Iraq — the allegations of the weapons of mass destruction, the media leaping onto the bandwagon?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well, in a way. But, you know, history doesn’t repeat itself exactly twice. What I did warn about when I testified in front of Congress in 2002, I said if you want to worry about a state, it shouldn’t be Iraq, it should be Iran. But this government, our administration, wanted to worry about Iraq, not Iran.
I knew why, because I had been through the Pentagon right after 9/11. About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in.
He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.”
I said, “Well, you’re too busy.”
He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September.
I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?”
He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.”
So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?”
He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?”
And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
I said, “Is it classified?”
He said, “Yes, sir.”
I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?”
He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
