Today's game will be about seeing how long the "respectable" news outlets can pretend Rudy Giuliani didn't make the taxpayers pick up the expense of his Hamptons hook-ups.

For the Giuliani campaign, the game will be about denying there were any improprieties (If true, that's a lot of gas money and a long drive for nothing.), or insisting that charging the expense of "guarding" the mayor during his "constituent service" to agencies serving the city's disabled and indigent was somehow good for America.

I don't think there's any denying what Rudy was up to. The question -- if "Family Values" RepublicansTM can successfully slide past the adultery -- will be, why the shenanigans with the accounting?

Rudy will no doubt deny any knowledge of, oh, you know, how the city's finances are run (even as he takes credit for "fixing" them), and then maybe even fall back on the, "Hey, it's a fact of life and everyone has a private life" explanation.

But while it's true that everyone has a private life, it's also true that public leaders know its price. If you want to claim it's no big deal that Giuliani was having an adulterous affair, that's one thing. But why not just be an adult and have it, already? Why the long drives out of the city, when you know full well it's going to cost $3,000 a pop (no pun intended -- and we hope he got a better rate than that by buying in bulk)? What was the taxpayer cost of having his gal pal come by the mansion?

But he didn't want to do that, because that would be unseemly. Family ValuesTM and all, you know. So he snuck out to the Hamptons instead (where everyone America's just gotta "have a beer with" summers, dontcha know) and passed the costs on to the city. Because he couldn't be a man and be honest about what he was doing, and never gave a moment's thought to whether or not it was fair to make you and me pay for his cowardly selfishness. And why would he? He's a Republican. Their entire philosophy of government is to privatize the benefits of public expenditures.

So here we are in round one of the spin game. If there could have been no worse timing for breaking the story than the night of a debate, then there's perhaps no better timing for the spin cycle than during a television writer's strike, when Giuliani will be spared the acid test of political scandal: late night comedy monologues.

Daily Kos, you're going to have to pick up the slack. America needs jokes. And we'll need to work together to make it happen. Can you out-Onion the Giuliani campaign with yet more excuses? Can you capture it all in a one-liner, like ellefarr did?

Rudy got laid, New York paid.

Or can you help me write the set-up to the most immediately obvious punchline for a Rudy Giuliani sex scandal: "Sixty-nine eleven?"