Giuliani interrupted his speech — a very important speech — to the National Rifle Association in Washington. His cellphone rang. It was his wife, Judith. Smack in the middle of his talk, he whipped out the phone.
“Hello, dear,” he said in a syrupy voice. “I’m talking to the members of the N.R.A. right now. Would you like to say hello?”
He listened, and laughed. “I love you, and I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m finished, O.K.?” he said.
He listened a bit more. “O.K., have a safe trip. Bye-bye. Talk to you later, dear. I love you.”
Campaign aides said it was a spontaneous moment, with Mrs. Giuliani calling just before she boarded a plane.
Granted, lots of people call loved ones before a flight. But a presidential candidate doesn’t shut off his phone, and instead takes a call, in the middle of a major speech?
The episode was so bizarrely cutesy-poo that more than a few people in the audience went, Eeeww!
"Quite honestly, since Sept. 11, most of the time when we get on a plane, we talk to each other and just reaffirm the fact that we love each other," he said.
This is the man whose supporters recently held a "$9.11 for Rudy" fundraiser for him. His political capitalization on that event is officially out of control.
I hear Rudy also divorced his last wife, decided to shave his comb-over and stop wearing women's undergarments also because of 9/11.
It is amazing how it really did change everything for him.
Loony Rudy
The cellphone routine was not Giuliani’s sole icky moment last week.
While rattling the cup in London, he told reporters that he was “probably one of the four or five best-known Americans in the world.” Oh? And who, someone asked, also makes that rarefied list? “Bill Clinton, Hillary,” he replied before aides hustled him away.
Offhand, we can think of any number of Americans who might be more famous worldwide. President Bush, anyone? How about Muhammad Ali, Madonna, Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey?
The real revelation was Mr. Giuliani’s sense of his own importance. It was on display again in his N.R.A. speech. Freshly returned from London, he told the audience, “It’s nice to be here in England.” Then, seeing an American flag, he said, “Ah, America.”
He meant it as a joke about the mental scrambling that the rigors of campaigning can cause. But the underlying assumption was that people were so focused on him that they knew his travel schedule by heart. Many in the audience didn’t get it.
They found it weird, just as some New Yorkers did when Mr. Giuliani used to begin speeches with raspy imitations of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone — as if everyone knew “The Godfather” as well as he did. Often enough, people wondered if he had a sore throat.
The weirdness factor has a long history.
It kicked in hard several times with the mayor’s cross-dressing skits, including one time when he squealed in delight as Donald Trump nuzzled his fake breasts.
It turned up in 1999 when he joked to a black audience, of all groups, about the hard time he had getting a New York taxi to stop for him.
It emerged when he told reporters that he was leaving his wife — his second wife — before he bothered to tell her.
It resurfaced a few months ago when wife No. 3 allowed that this was her third marriage and not her second, as she had let everyone believe for years.
Other incidents could be cited, up to and including the eeeww-inducing cellphone schmooze at the lectern.
On blogs and in print, some people characterized the phone call as more than weird. They called it a choreographed stunt.
But maybe it is not fair to challenge Mr. Giuliani’s motives. Perhaps we should follow the example that he set the other week when he rebuked Mrs. Clinton for the way she criticized Gen. David H. Petraeus over the Iraq war.
“I can’t imagine why we can’t get beyond maligning other people’s motives nowadays in politics,” said the man who, as mayor, dismissed those who dared disagree with him as intellectually dishonest, morally deficient or simply, to use one of his favorite words, jerky.
George Bush was castigated by European diplomats and found himself isolated yesterday after a special conference on climate change ended without any progress.
European ministers, diplomats and officials attending the Washington conference were scathing, particularly in private, over Mr Bush's failure once again to commit to binding action on climate change.
Although the US and Britain have been at odds over the environment since the early days of the Bush administration, the gap has never been as wide as yesterday.
Five eyewitnesses to a Sept. 16 shooting incident in Baghdad involving the private security firm Blackwater USA insisted that company guards fired without provocation, forcing civilians and Iraqi police to run for cover, and that the Iraqi officers did not return fire.
The eyewitnesses and a senior Iraqi police official close to an investigation of the incident contradicted initial accounts provided by the company and the State Department, which employs Blackwater to protect U.S. diplomats.
At least 11 Iraqis died in the shootings, which have focused attention on the actions of largely unregulated security companies operating in Iraq.
Earlier this year at a campaign rally, Bill Clinton said that when he was at Yale, he told Hillary: “I have met all the most gifted people in our generation and you’re the best.”
Now, it’s always nice to hear a husband say he thinks his wife is tops. But I can’t get past the idea that while Bill Clinton was still in law school he believed he already knew every baby boomer worth knowing.
“I didn’t even know everybody in my dorm,” said a friend when I told him this story.
Obviously, Clinton wasn’t including Barack Obama, who was only about 12 at the time.
Now, Obama’s campaign is the revenge of Gen XYZ — an inconvenient reminder to the 50- and 60-somethings that they’ve become part of the system they used to decry.
His big rally this week in Greenwich Village was an event that Hillary could never have pulled off — politics as a dating scene.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of mostly young people swarmed into Washington Square Park where they were warmed up by a 25-year-old Asian-American rapper named Jin, who announced that Obama was going to be getting “my first vote ever."
In date-rape cases, it's his word against hers. How can juries determine who's lying? Feminists often assume the man must be guilty. Yet some women make false accusations, misinterpret events or even deceive themselves about what's occurred.
Baudrillard in the mid-1970s came upon the concept for which he is best known: simulation - the notion that, in our modern society with its ubiquitous media, reality is not natural but produced, brought about as an effect of its representation.
"Fashion Rocks" is a really terrible idea. It's an event where millionaire rock stars sing a song while models parade in front of them on a catwalk. There's lots of clapping. And backslapping. It's barely much more than mutual masturbation.
Bush is hosting a global warming summit this week. It's not intended to actually deal with global warming but to kick the problem down the road to the next administration, while creating the illusion of progress - just like his Iraq policy.
American foreign policy is built on a deep foundation of Christian theology. Some of the people who make our foreign policy may understand that foundation. Most probably aren’t even aware of it. Foundations are hidden underground.
Ahmadinejad posed many legitimate questions which the Zionists have kept from the world. The fact that these questions were posed and highlighted at the UN where the eyes of the world were focused made the mad dogs of Zionism foam at the mouth.
THE U.S. media and political leaders stoked anti-Muslim stereotypes and whipped up enthusiasm for the U.S. government’s Middle East wars with their campaign this month against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Ahmadinejad was confronted by several thousand protesters at a speech at Columbia University on September 24--one stop on a visit to New York that included a speech at the United Nations the next day.
Columbia became a media zoo, with the Manhattan campus locked down. Outside the campus gates, demonstrators from pro-Israel organizations like the Anti-Defamation League gathered, with signs denouncing Ahmadinejad as the “new Hitler.”
According to this worldview, organized religion has been the most effective institution to promote moral absolutes and self-control.
Religion now needs to be strengthened to stave off a rising tide of moral relativism that, along with secular humanism, is breaking down the bulwarks of social order and threatening to release a flood of selfish impulse to drown us all in chaos.
A favorite neoconservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer, complains that American mass culture, dominated by skepticism and pleasure, is an “engine of social breakdown.”
The best antidote would be a “self-abnegating religious revival.”
Since that is not likely to happen, Krauthammer admits, the best place to recover moral discipline and will power is in foreign affairs:
America must find the will to exercise its strength and become “confident enough to define international morality in its own, American terms.”
It was, it is about oil-unabashedly and shamefully. Even to those lacking experience with U.S. policy in the Middle East, it should have been obvious early on, when every one of Bush's senior national security officials spoke verbatim from the talking-point sheet, "It's not about oil."
Thanks to Greenspan and Kissinger, the truth is now "largely" available to those who do not seek refuge in denial.
The implications for the future are clear-for Iraq and Iran. As far as this administration is concerned (and as Kissinger himself has written), "Withdrawal [from Iraq] is not an option." Westphalia? U.N. Charter? Geneva Conventions? Hey, we're talking superpower!
Thus, Greenspan last Monday with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now:
"Getting him [Saddam Hussein] out of the control position ... was essential.
"And whether that be done by one means or another was not as important. But it's clear to me that, were there not the oil resources in Iraq, the whole picture...would have been different."
The internet revolution has generated and sustained a world in which creating new apparent realities, living in one's own private world, and telling one's own story, even though it does not cohere with anybody else's story, becomes easier and easier.
Capitalism uses racism to justify slavery and war, and to legitimise military occupations and colonialism. It seeks to create division in the working class, to turn us against each other when we should be uniting and fighting the system as whole.
The lack of love between George Bush and the United Nations is an old “dog-bites-man” story. Having put haters like John Bolton at the helm of the U.S. delegation, Bush’s in your face “go fuck yourself” hostility to all things UN is no secret.
Elton John has confirmed that he is the owner of a photograph seized by police from an art gallery over concerns that it was child pornography. He said the picture was by a respected photographer and had been published and exhibited widely.
It's fall premiere week at the National Broadcasting Company, and the Bionic Woman is back. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is dressed in a smart suit the color of a rusting rose, with blond hair so textured it puts Lindsay Wagner to shame.
Porn is not a drug - it is not a substance. But it is a mind-altering phenomenon. It affects the nervous system quickly and powerfully. It is sex crack. It is dangerous and habit-forming. While it is dangerous it's not a good idea to outlaw it.
Contrary to the mainstream U.S. narrative that places the blame for Iraq's plight squarely on the shoulders of insurgents, Ferguson's film argues that the war, in fact, was lost by the coalition in its first month as U.S. forces, at the behest of their leadership, remained on the sidelines and failed to protect Baghdad's citizens from the rampant looting that accompanied Hussein's flight.
Ferguson makes it abundantly clear where the main culpability lies, pointing the finger at the "gang of four": Vice President Dick Cheney; former deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz; Bremer; and Rumsfeld. All four declined to be interviewed for the film.
Curiously, President Bush is described as an aloof leader who does not bother to read National Intelligence Estimates that contradict the predetermined ideological imperatives pushed by his advisors. He is noticeably absent from the decision-making process, and thus becomes a willing victim of the cronyism which he institutionalised.
We live in an era when war is all but a machine for profit and a mechanism for hyping up nationalism to attract votes.
That’s because when you listen to the so-called presidential debates, all you hear is an appeal for more and more war. As if the Iraq war isn’t enough, you now have political candidates of both parties trying to ramp up word wars against Iran.
First come the word wars; then you have the bullets and bombs. Don’t think for a minute that it really matters whether a Republican or Democrat gets elected, for the paymasters behind them both are the same.
The argument between Republicans and Democrats is one of management. Who will manage this madness of imperial war better? When was the last time you voted for an invasion? When was the last time you voted for regime change? When was the last time you voted for bombing?
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