FRANKNOTE

Here and there, stories from New Yorkers keep popping up that say Rudy isn’t what the rest of the country think he is. Or, should I say, his publicity machine makes us think he is. If he gets nominated and wins, will we have been fooled again like we (ahem, some of us weren’t!) were with Bush?

Rudy giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does
all the things we expect of heroes these days — like make $16 million a
year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars
without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call
his second wife a “stuck pig,” and organize absurd, grandstanding
pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life
being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn’t even
bother to conceal the fact that he’s had a hard-on for the presidency
since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can’t have a hero humble
enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a
cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who’ll accept $100,000 to
talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7
million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That’s
Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of
George W. Bush.