It’s hard to imagine that a President Giuliani, for instance, would have let Osama bin Laden slip away back in 2001, or let the Iraq war drag out for all these years, with our military so ill equipped. Giuliani is that rare political combination: moderate ideologically, but not mushy personally. He has the hard edge of an ideologue, but not the rigidity or extremism. ~Jim Pinkerton

Mr. Pinkerton does good work, and I enjoyed his takedown of Chuck Hagel that matched up with so many of my own objections, but this part of his article arguing that Giuliani is the GOP’s best hope didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  I don’t know how you can be described as “moderate ideologically” when you endorse the killing of the unborn and the torture of detainees.  “Use every method you can think of” sounds like a line designed to provide plausible deniability for something you know is illegal and morally dubious, and that is Giuliani’s view of torture.  It seems to me that the “moderate” position relative to that would be to pick one or the other abomination to support, whereas the opposite “extreme” would be to oppose abortion and torture (apparently a difficult task for most of the candidates).  Also, if Giuliani is the mayor who put the city’s emergency response center inside the World Trade Center, known terrorist target that it was, the man who fired the successful NYPD Commissioner who had effectively brought about a reduction in crime for the sake of his own ambition and popularity, and the man who brought in Bernie Kerik to head the NYPD (when the man was a suspected associate of the mafia), do we really trust his decisionmaking skills and his choices of personnel when it comes to important security-related matters? 

It is also debatable whether having a President Giuliani in 2001 would have made any difference (except that it would have spared us a Mayor Giuliani being built into a cult hero).  It is not clear that it was up to the President to “let” anyone go, since it was the very nature of our deployment in Afghanistan (once again, Rummy’s “get in, get out, a man alone” approach to warfare saves the day!), which made us rely on Afghans to secure parts of the border on account of a lack of our own manpower, and the mistakes of Gen. Franks and Rumsfeld during the fighting at Tora Bora that allowed for Bin Laden’s escape.  The failures in 2001 come back to questions of the President’s judgement and personnel decisions.  Does Giuliani really have a very good record here on those things when they are most specifically tied to security?  The record seems spotty at best, which is why it is perplexing that conventional wisdom holds that this guy from Brooklyn, because he railroaded Michael Milken, persecuted the squeegee men squeegeefascists and insulted ferret-owners, among other things, has what it takes to head the executive branch of our government.   

It is even more unlikely that Giuliani would have proven to be somehow more realistic and sensible than Bush on Iraq.  What is Giuliani’s position on Iraq?  He thinks they should have sent more troops, and he supports the sending of more troops now.  He repeats classic War Party canards about “if we leave there, they’ll follow us here,” and he seems to be just as hopelessly committed to persisting in the Iraq war as any other leading Republican.  If he had been President for all this time, would the Iraq war still be dragging on?  The answer would seem to be yes, with the qualification that it might have had to be called off to prepare for the invasion of Iran.  The third leg in Giuliani’s “moderate” tripod would be support for interventionist wars.

Of course, if it is true that the GOP’s best hope is the goombah part-time transvestite, Republicans had better start drinking heavily–starting now.  By the time they wake up, it will already be 2015, just in time to get ready for the next open election (following the impeachment and removal of Vice President Richardson on corruption charges).