Former NY mayor says president sets tone and is obligated to ‘explain to the American people and the world – that our police are the best in the world’

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said on Thursday morning that Barack Obama should be more like embattled comedian Bill Cosby, and blamed the president for the shooting of two police officers in Ferguson on Wednesday.



In a wide-ranging interview with AM970 radio’s John Gambling – which included the revelation that for a while Giuliani’s best friend was “a dog named Goalie” – the former mayor said that blame for Wednesday’s attack “starts at the top”.



“It’s the tone that’s set by the president,” Giuliani said, adding that it was “the obligation of the president of the United States to explain to the American people –and the world – that our police are the best in the world; they are the most trained; they are the most restrained.”



“There are very few incidents that turn out to be bad incidents,” he said, calling the shooting of the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson by a police officer that sparked nationwide protests “a justifiable homicide”.



Moving on to the shooting of two police officers in Brooklyn, New York, in December, Giuliani said that they, too, “were assassinated because of this atmosphere that was created”.



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Giuliani also said that Obama’s only chance to leave a legacy was if he “stood up and said – and I hate to say it because of what happened afterwards – the kinds of stuff that Bill Cosby used to say” about black-on-black violence.



(By “what happened afterwards,” Giuliani was referring to the fact that in the last few months more than 20 women have put their names to allegations of rape against Cosby, in some cases dating back to the late 1960s. Cosby, through his attorneys, has strenuously denied all the allegations.)



Giuliani compared Obama’s position with the black community with Nixon’s position with the anti-communist factions before his famous diplomatic trip to China in 1972. “This guy has credentials as an African American,” he said, adding magnanimously that he thought the president was “a good family man and a good man”.



If Obama failed to take his advice, Giuliani said, “I don’t see where his place in history is.”

