You know, I thought I had long since seen the limits of Rudy Giuliani's obsessive self-aggrandizement, of his cavalier willingness to exploit a national tragedy and the deaths of thousands in order to prop up his sputtering political career.

Heck, I thought there were limits, even for Rudy.

I shouldn't have been so naive.

Here is the Ghoul's latest campaign ad...this time with actual 9/11 footage included.

I cannot believe the gall of this megalomaniac. There is footage here of a tower falling, of the simultaneous deaths of hundreds of people...all now used as a prop for the Giuliani campaign.

What class. Giuliani has made his political Hail Mary pass, and it is a tragic, tragic snuff film.

And Giuliani would have you believe, of course, that "the world wavered, history hesitated", but he never did. While the great grinding behemoth of history, the unceasing progress of the entire universe, apparently stopped for a moment to ask for directions or something, he was the guy, the one guy, who could pick up the ball.

Never mind, of course, the thousands of other heroes of September 11. Never mind the firefighters, never mind the heroes of United Flight 93...it's all about Rudy, constant as the North Star. As Steve Singiser writes in his excellent diary:

I might be reading too much into this, but did you notice that when the ad talks about the "world wavering", his ad-man specifically used imagery of people running away? The image tries to convey as message: the rest of these pansies ran, but I stood stalwart. Perhaps a coincidental use of video editing. If not, a sick, sick moment.

Indeed.

As for history...I have no idea how it is even possible for history to hesitate. Apparently Giuliani is such a superhero that he holds the ability to stop time itself in his arsenal.

I myself would posit this:

History does not hesitate. Ever. It is one of the only phenomena in the world we can always count on; history will always keep chugging along, with or without our help.

This is because history is a greater thing than any of us, greater than mankind, greater than the Earth itself.

History has quietly and impartially overseen all the events of humanity's brief period on Earth: wars, famines, genocides, Shakespeare, Beethoven, the advent of democracy, the fall of Constantinople, the invention of the wheel, the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It has overseen every event before we showed up, and it will continue long after mankind is gone.

History operates without loyalties, without any kind of human attachment. History doesn't care who wins wars, who loses them, who makes headlines, who wins elections. History, frankly, will not care very much if humankind destroys itself within the next 200 years, or if a meteor comes along and does it for us. History will endure, even if we do not. It will continue. That is all it has ever done.

Yet Rudy Giuliani, in his infinite arrogance, would not just put himself on the same plane as history itself, but he would exalt himself above it-for when history paused, apparently, he did not!

What positively Bushesque hubris. Giuliani has, it seems, appointed himself more than a man.

I call bullshit.

I have one hope for history. I hope that history will marginalize the man who sought so boldly to trivialize it. I pray that the man who exploited tragedy and attempted to transcend history for the sake of politics, will be someday dismissed as a footnote in the annals of history itself.

I hope that thirty years from now, the name of Rudolph William Louis Giuliani will be mentioned only by political pundits as a clever joke referencing the complete and utter disintegration of some poor fellow's political campaign.

I hope that this maniac, with delusions of grandeur that put our current president to shame, will every day be reminded that history ultimately dismissed him as a detail. Every day, for the rest of his natural days.