Can I ask a quick little something, since it just came up on CNN yet again? Where on earth is this idea that Rudy Giuliani has "strong national security credentials" coming from?

Rudy Giuliani has essentially no national security credentials to speak of. He was mayor of New York before and during 9/11, yes. Before that day, he was responsible for two critical screwups that greatly hindered the city's disaster response: the incompatibility of emergency responders' radios, and the decision to place the city's emergency response command center in the World Trade Center, one of the highest-profile targets in New York, and one already known to be a terrorist target. During that day, his grand accomplishment was to walk around at the scene of the disaster, making sure he appeared before every television camera that presented itself. And after 9/11, he was placed as a member of the Iraq Study Group, where never attended even one meeting and left after two months in order to more freely pursue his presidential campaign.

So Mayor Rudy Giuliani's primary "national security credentials" would appear to be his capability for simple bipedal motion in televised news footage. That seems a low bar -- although admittedly at the time it may have been more impressive, since when George W. Bush was told of the same attacks on camera, he didn't even leave the chair he was sitting in.



So where's this idea coming from that Giuliani's some sort of national security powerhouse? He's proven in the past to be utterly uninterested in national security questions, instead filling his days with empty, sound-tough rhetoric with little connection to actual national security issues or diplomacy. What's his big national security plan? Is he going to go around with a television camera and videotape himself walking, in order to send stern messages to other countries? Is he really just going to haul off and launch wars against every other even-slightly-threatening nation on the planet, which seems to be the ever-so-thoughtful strategy of his expansively crazy advisor corps?

I know most people in New York don't buy his bunk, but "heroic mayor guy" seems one of those media narratives that's just too darn pretty to not use; it's the sort of thing you can build stories around, whereas "muleheaded perpetual screwup eagerly adopting all the failed neoconservative advisors nobody else wants to be caught dead with" isn't considered as catchy. So he's a "hero" that doesn't actually have any heroism to his name, a "strong national security" Republican who doesn't know the first thing about national security, and post-9/11 "credentialed" guy that could never be bothered to do the things he got credentials to do.

Before 9/11, Rudy Giuliani was merely a controversial and frequently mocked figure. That he, of all people, is now a leading Republican candidate for president should demonstrate rather colorfully how silly the Republican Party has gotten: just when you think George W. Bush was quite possibly the dumbest, least thoughtful, least motivated person to ever be nominated for president, they up the ante yet again.