I'd always wondered about Rudy Giuliani's switch during the 1980s from Associate Attorney General to US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The latter job clearly has certain advantages if you're looking to run for mayor, but at the same time it seems like a demotion. Mark Kleiman explains that part of the issue is that Giuliani's signature policy initiative at Justice was failing. "The speculation when Giuliani took what was at best a lateral transfer (Associate AG is the #3 job in the Department) was that he'd figured out that his counter-drug efforts had been a disaster and wanted to be out of the way when the fecal material hit the air-moving equipment." Team Giuliani notes in its defense that, sure, Reagan may have thought Rudy was crazy, but at least he passed along a form letter praising Rudy when he nominated him for his demotion to the US Attorney job.
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Reagan on Giuliani
28 May 2007 12:34 pm
Comments (13)
You can almost hear the wingnut reappraisals of Reagan-Christ's presidency in advance (after St. Rudy becomes Emperor of Apple Pie and Vanilla Ice Cream Land): he was kind of bitchen but maybe not like totally bitchen.
You have to wonder though if this guy isn't America's Olmert in waiting: the man who was supposed to be the Good and Rational Centrist Who Unifies a Divided Land but ends up finding out that you can't hold Iraq or Afghanistan together or satisfy angry conservatives and angry liberals at home.
There are going to be those who point to the Schwarzenegger administration in California as the model for President Giuliani, but apart from all the sweet and tidy sounding initiatives around alternative energy and health care this guy (with next to no opposition from the Democratic majority in the legislature) is still cooking the books, and putting off the hard choices.
Schwarzenegger is trying to sell off the lottery (and god knows what else) and borrow billions for his Big Plans while doing nothing to cut the size of government in the state (in this sense Republicans in the legislature are starting to sound rational again), and what this is going to mean down the road (especially as all those state pensions for retiring boomers come due) is big tax increases.
And it's going to mean big tax increases on middle class whites and blacks and other native-born Californians in part to pay for services and niceties for illegal immigrants and kind of sort of legal immigrants. If you think this is going to be resolved by the passage of the immigration bill you've got another thing coming. There is major nastiness ahead.
The way Giuliani saw it, in an account by Wayne Barrett that he's never denied, is that the job switch was a move from head coach to star player. Giuliani was partly responsible for the job opening up in the first place, since one of his (off the books) roles as Associate AG was gently encouraging Carter appointees, like SDNY USA John Martin, to spend more time with their families. Rudy's family considered the job a demotion, but his allies (like Peter Powers) knew it would set him up for a mayoral or U.S. Senate run.
Jeebus, Matt, will you please go to the beach and relax?
To be fair, lots of Right Wing Authortarian Douche-Bags are crazy. Pretty much all of them now that I think about it.
I'm with Reagan. Is there anything crazier than indicting a long-time loyal ally when he finally falls from power? How many allies would the US retain?
Pithlord, you'd better have a talk with the Bushes. You might remember that they've jailed one former American ally (Manuel Noriega) and overthrown another one (Saddam Hussein).
Indicting former allies isn't necessarily such a bad thing, though. Naturally it depends on what they've done (or been caught doing). Indicting the occasional corrupt dictator after they've been overthrown could conceivably have the effect of making the other corrupt dictators behave better while they're in power.
This is not to justify invading their country, though.
I don't see how you can compare Marcos's years of loyalty to the American imperium with the short-run bloc of convenience betweeen Saddam Hussein and America during the war with Iran. America surely discharged its obligations by looking the other way when the Ba'ath decimated the Kurds.
If "corruption" is a reason for the US to welch on its obligations to its friends, it isn't going to have many friends, human nature being what it is.
I agree that pineapple face was shamefully mistreated.
You missed the point--decisions on whether or not to indict former allies should be based on what they've actually done. Being a former ally shouldn't be a get-out-of-jail-free card.
(And we happily kept Hussein as an ally for 3+ years after he decimated the Kurds. If he hadn't been stupid enough to invade Kuwait, he might still be our ally.)
No, you missed the point. If you want to be moralistic about your choice of allies, the time to do that is at the beginning. If someone has been faithfully in your service for decades, and is cast out in some populist insurrection, you have an obligation to provide for a comfortable retirement
I suppose you can always screw over your sons-of-bitches once, but only by increasing your default risk premium in the future. That strikes me as "nuts".
Also, Saddam Hussein just was not a US ally in the sense that Marcos was. He was a Soviet ally with whom the US had a brief convergence of interest as a result of the Iranian revolution. The US didn't owe him the same way.
If there was a superpower patron who screwed over Saddam, it was Gorbachev. You don't want to emulate that guy. He was a bigger disaster than Carter.
Al-Bakr was the Soviet's guy, Saddam from the minute he seized power oriented Westward. The first thing he did on formally taking power was to round up and execute all the communists he could find.
Saddam fell out with the Iraqi Communist Party for internal reasons. His regime oriented to Moscow in the Cold War.
Comments closed June 11, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I'm more than open to a "crazy Giuliani" meme, but note that Reagan's statement was in regard to a 1988 plan by Giuliani to indict exiled kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos. Reagan had a notorious soft spot for Marcos because of his anticommunism. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming by Schultz to finally pull the plug on him during the People Power uprising of 1986. I'm not sure Reagan's annoyance about Giuliani hounding of his arch-embezzler buddy is the best evidence for Giuliani's craziness.
Posted by rd | May 28, 2007 1:06 PM