To get a sense of the debate, I’m over reading The Corner.
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All my negative feelings about Giuliani aside, I thought he seemed weak tonight — neither effectively standing on principle with his positions that are not in sync with GOP primary voters or effectively pandering to them. And in a lot of his answers he just seemed awkward and unfocused. That said, Ramesh Ponnuru has what I think may be a decent point, that Guiliani had a good night because Huckabee had a good night. But I still have a hard time seeing how Rudy didn’t really damage himself on the gun and abortion questions.
So it seems we’ve got the first response from Rudy on the Shag Fund controversy. From the AP …
Rudy Giuliani dismissed a report Wednesday that he expensed the cost of his security detail to obscure city offices for trips to a Long Island resort as the then-mayor began an extramarital affair with current wife Judith Nathan.
“First of all, it’s not true,” he said during a GOP debate hours after the story broke. “I had 24-hour security for the eight years that I was mayor. They followed me everyplace I went. It was because there were, you know, threats, threats that I don’t generally talk about. Some have become public recently; most of them haven’t.
“And they took care of me, and they put in their records, and they handled them in the way they handled them,” Giuliani said. “I had nothing to do with the handling of their records, and they were handled, as far as I know, perfectly appropriately.”
So he sort of denies it. But he actually just said he left it to the police and he figures they did it right. “They handled them in the way they handled them” — what you might call Rudy’s trademark aggressive truism.
Read closely, Rudy isn’t denying anything. He’s just saying he’s not responsible.
He says the security detail went with me everywhere, i.e., they had to come when I went to visit Judy too. And I can’t be responsible for where they billed the expense to. So Rudy’s argument is that in the city he runs, actually in the office of the mayor, someone else was hiding these charges to shield the affair. But not him and he didn’t know about it.
A few points on this. Rudy seems to be leaving a pretty big door open to suggest that if these funds weren’t handled in a normal way it was the cops who did it not him. I’ve been told though that Bernie Kerik took a hands on supervisory role running Rudy’s security detail all through his administration. When he was over at Corrections and when he was Police Commissioner. Bernie and Rudy are sort of bird’s of a feather on this sort of thing. So I’d say you want to give Bernie Kerik a pretty close look on this whole thing.
If not Kerik, what about the NYPD? He’s saying whatever happened was their doing. Can we talk to them and see what they say?
The AP article also says …
Later, an aide said that for accounting purposes, the expenses appear to have been temporarily allocated to city offices and paid for out of the mayor’s budget but that the police department ultimately picked up the tab and reimbursed the mayor’s office at the end of each year.
Is that really true? Can we get an answer on that?
Snap poll of voters in Iowa and Florida says Huckabee creamed everyone.
From a longtime and very shrewd Republican TPM Reader …
I have no idea what kind of governor Mike Huckabee has been. But I’ll bet he was an awfully good minister.
Fred Thompson seemed barely to have a pulse. John McCain stepped right up to the border of saying something negative about George Bush (responding to the question about the Vice President’s role) after going out of his way to repeat nearly verbatim the President’s rhetoric about Islamic terrorists following us home if we withdraw from Iraq. Ron Paul just seems to try and wing it every time he shows up for these things, and did it again tonight.
I made myself watch Mitt Romney, just to try to figure out what he is thinking as he goes through this process. I don’t really know, but here’s a guess: to Romney, getting elected President is a lot like putting together a business deal. The details of getting the deal done matter, because the deal doesn’t happen without them, but the main thing is getting the deal done. I think Romney has personal beliefs, but not political principles; he wouldn’t do anything in this campaign that would hurt his family or someone he cared about, but he’ll change positions the way most people change socks. Whatever it takes to get the deal done.
Giuliani talks like a prosecutor if you listen to him long enough to get past his prepared material; McCain’s is the career naval officer’s reflex to support the wartime commander in chief embattled by critics. Romney is different because he’s more calculating, but his business career was all about putting deals together, and he was in business for a long time. I could be off-base here. I just don’t think people reinvent themselves past a certain age.
I think he’s totally got Mitt’s number.
Washington Post: With so many rumors about Obama being Muslim, some of it’s just got to be true.
I flagged it in a sarcastic way below. But this piece in the Post about ‘rumors’ of Obama being Muslim really is craven and gross. The author concedes at various points that Obama isn’t a Muslim, actually that he ‘denies’ it. But the whole structure of the thing is written as though he were — how much public opinion resistance he’d face as a Muslim, what it’s like for Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison (D) as a Muslim. Interviews with fellow Muslims. Or, I guess they’re not really ‘fellow’ since Obama’s not a Muslim. But close enough, right? Maybe he kind of is, since there are so many ‘rumors’? Sort of Muslim by right-wing osmosis?
The piece actually breaks new ground in the use of the word ‘rumor’. In public writing, ‘rumor’ generally refers to a wholly or partly unsubstantiated report. To the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence that Obama is a Muslim any more than I am. So I would think the Internet sludge that has him attending Madrassas in Indonesia and being a covert Muslim today who plans to turn the US into a Muslim theocracy with mandatory gay marriage are not really ‘rumors’ but rather scurrilous lies which the Post has chosen to peddle (wink,wink) second hand.
Tell us where your favorite news site, newspaper, etc. has the Rudy Shag Fund story today. All I’m hearing is crickets so far. You see it anywhere? Let us know.
Trent Lott’s nephew and brother-in-law, hot-shot trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs, are indicted for allegedly trying to bribe a state judge in a multimillion dollar dispute over attorney fees.
Missed last night’s GOP YouTube debate? We’ve got all the ugly highlights — just be sure you’re wearing a bib and a bulletproof vest …
We’ve got more debate highlights over at TPM Election Central.