Blog | Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is the white Al Sharpton
The way many people feel about the Rev. Al Sharpton, I feel about former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Sharpton is a race-baiter? Isn’t Giuliani?
On his watch, a police officer thought it was OK to shove a broken broomstick up the rectum of a handcuffed man.
Giuliani is sooo patriotic he has been busy praising the leadership skills of a dictator on the most patriotic of all patriotic networks, the Fox News Channel:
After chuckling dismissively at the idea of merely leveling sanctions against Russia in response to its transgression, Giuliani laid it out as simply as he could: “Putin decides what he wants to do, and he does it in half a day, right? He decided he had to go to their parliament — he went to their parliament, he got permission in 15 minutes.”
Cavuto then awkwardly interrupted, noting that Putin’s move was “perfunctory” since Russia’s parliament is essentially a dummy rubber-stamp for the Putin regime. Giuliani completely ignored this point from Cavuto and continued.
“[H]e makes a decision and he executes it, quickly. And then everybody reacts. That’s what you call a leader,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani next compared Putin’s decisiveness to President Obama’s leadership. In this regard, he found the American president lacking: “President Obama [has] gotta think about it, he’s got to go over it again, he’s got to talk to more people about it,” Giuliani joked.
I won’t call him racist, but all that will do is allow him to take up the mantle of victim-hood that he, and others like him, are quick to do anytime anyone pushes back against outrageous claims they make. So I’ll say this instead: He’s a nasty little man who came to fame for going to a bunch of funerals and talking tough when the country needed emotional healing.
That’s it.
He’s also responsible for a lot of the distrust and vitriol that still exists in New York, long after his tenure, between police and the communities they serve.
He loves to pat himself on the back for a falling crime rate in New York but never mentions that crime was dropping throughout the country at the same time - meaning there were structural shifts going on in the larger society that had nothing to do with his purported brilliance or toughness. And most other cities didn’t purposefully, strategicallt turn minorities into second-class citizens subject to Jim Crow-Apartheid like stops and searches the way Giuliani did.
Let me translate some of what he said recently about President Obama.
First this: “I do not believe — and I know this is a horrible thing to say — but I do not believe that the president loves America,” he said at the 21 Club, a former upscale speakeasy in Manhattan, Politico reported. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”
He meant: “I’m so jealous of the dude who won the White House twice when I couldn’t even put together a campaign competent enough to win a single primary or caucus, even though I was the GOP front-runner going into the 2008 campaign. At least Hillary came close. Me? I sucked - and it’s all Obama’s fault. I hate him. I really, really hate him. He stole my presidency!”
Then this: In an interview after the dinner, Giuliani continued to talk, saying Obama “sees our weaknesses as footnotes to the great things we’ve done.”
“What country has left so many young men and women dead abroad to save other countries without taking land?” he said, according to Politico. “This is not the colonial empire that somehow he has in his hand. I’ve never felt that from him. I felt that from [George] W [Bush]. I felt that from [Bill] Clinton. I felt that from every American president, including ones I disagreed with, including [Jimmy] Carter. I don’t feel that from President Obama.”
He meant: “That little black boy is not like us. He doesn’t know his place. He should be sitting in the back of the bus and shut up when powerful white men, like me, tell him to shut up, jump, and high, when we tell him to, speak only when we say it’s OK, and only do what he’s told. But, no, this Obama boy thinks he’s above all of that and can defy me. Who does he think he is? Leader of the free world or something?”
Read more about what he said here.
Giuliani emerged on the national stage after the 9-11 attacks as the so-called “America’s Mayor.” He was there for grieving families and helped channel a lot of people’s anger after terrorists killed almost 3,000 Americans on that awful Tuesday morning.
That meant that, for awhile there, he was a bonafide statesmen. Those days are gone.
Guess what that “America-hating” president Obama has done? Giuliani cried with the victims of the terror attacks - Obama hunted down and brought to justice the bastard who killed all those people.
Giuliani was in office when the seeds of what would become a nationwide financial meltdown were planted. Obama was the one who helped dig the country out of that morass.
Giuliani was in office when police-community relations worsened. Obama has been struggling to repair that relationship.
In other words, that “America-hating” president has been busy cleaning up messes that people like Giuliani either couldn’t or wouldn’t clean up. You’d think he would show a bit of gratitude.
I have no doubt Giuliani loves his country; he just happens to love himself more.
One more thing: That someone, like Obama, acknowledges this country’s sins, is not a sign that they hate the U.S. It shows that they love it so much that they refuse to allow it to rest on its laurels, forcing it to live up to the ideals it was founded upon. It’s funny how when conservatives point out flaws, they are being patriotic, but when Obama does it he’s spreading hate.
I’d laugh if that hypocrisy wasn’t so rank and ugly.
This story was originally published February 19, 2015 at 10:07 AM with the headline "Blog | Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is the white Al Sharpton."