As I noted yesterday, beyond all the high-button issues about Rudy Giuliani’s record as Mayor, colorful personality and open-minded approach to marriage, what doesn’t get discussed very often is that a Giuliani presidency would be a foreign policy catastrophe from which the nation might simply not recover. As Eric Kleefeld explains in this post, Giuliani’s new ghost-written article in Foreign Affairs shows that a Giuliani foreign policy would best be described as Bush-plus and premised on the idea that President Bush has not pursued his terrible ideas aggressively enough.

What seems apparent about Giuliani is that he’s not kidding when he says that being Mayor of New York City is a lot like being president and running American foreign policy. And reading through not just his emphasis on the War on Terror but the particular way he describes it shows that he believes that being on the receiving end of a mass casualty terrorist attack — even though his record of preparing for it is at best mixed — gives him a unique understanding of how to combat the threat. And into this general ignorance is poured a group of extremist advisors who would likely have us blowing up various other countries in no time.

In other words, he’s the Bush pattern all over again — only this time starting not from a period of relatively high American standing in the world but into the mess Bush has already gotten us.

As with Bush, the agenda Giuliani sets forth is covered with a patina of enlightened foreign policy internationalism, with emphases on nation-building, investing money in helping destabilized countries build rule-of-law based societies. But just as with Bush even a cursory look at the people slated to implement the policies shows a cadre rooted in militarism and ideological escapism.

Republicans looking for a non-insane candidate and Democrats interested in preventing the Rudy disaster should really look into this stuff.

Jon Chait finds the one remaining member of the Rove personality cult: Fred Barnes.

Barnes on Rove: “Rove is the greatest political mind of his generation and probably of any generation.”

Actually the whole quote is even better: “Rove is the greatest political mind of his generation and probably of any generation. He not only is a breathtakingly smart strategist but also a clever tactician. He knows history, understands the moods of the public, and is a visionary on matters of public policy. But he is not a magician.”

In other words, celebrate him as an intellectual giant among men. Don’t fault him for not being God. Is it not enough that he walked among us?

Sadder than reading this stuff is realizing that Barnes probably means every word of it.

As TPM Reader DC puts it, Giuliani combines Bush’s foreign policy genius with Clinton’s sexual impulse control.

(ed.note: Look, I love Bill. But this one was too good to pass up.)

Then there’s TPM Reader TP who notes that had the Captain of the Titanic survived we probably wouldn’t have feted him as the go-to guy on iceberg defense.

From the Cox News Service …

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Tuesday he is “sickened” that President Bush and Congress went on vacation “while young Americans in our cities are massacred” by illegal immigrants.

Gingrich, who is considering a run for the White House, was referring to a recent crime in Newark, N.J., where three college students were murdered execution style in a school playground.

One of the suspects — Jose Lachira Carranza — is an illegal immigrant from Peru who was on bail on charges of raping a child when the murders occurred.

Meet Martin Kramer, Rudy Giuliani’s “Senior Middle East Advisor”. The link is to Kramer’s website.

It will certainly be amusing to watch the press barons and sundry journo worthies ignore all this stuff …

Your “Clinton’s sexual impulse control” crack got me thinking. It’s not easy to choose Giuliani’s most outrageous sexual escapade, but I think from the standpoint of evaluating his fitness for public office, his fling with Cristyne Lategano takes the cake.

Let me refresh your memory, in case the details are a little hazy. Lategano was working as Giuliani’s Press Secretary when their affair began, and was later elevated to Communications Director. When the affair ended in May of 1999, he installed her at the helm of the city’s tourism bureau, a $150k/year plum. Lategano, now married, denies that anything improper took place, but Rudy himself has issued a series of artful non-denial denials. His ex-wife, Donna Hanover, has blamed Lategano in public statements and court papers for the demise of her marriage. Wayne Barrett, a sort of dark Boswell to Rudy’s Johnson, assembled a vast amount of circumstantial evidence backing the allegation. And no one who moved in those circles bothers doubting it for a second; the affair was, by its conclusion, common knowledge in the city – what would once have been termed ‘open and notorious adultery.’

I raise this because, this evening, I performed a Lexis-Nexis search for news references to ‘Lategano’ in the last year. I found a dozen references – every one of them in the New York City media. (The Voice, the Observer, the News, the Post – not even the Paper of Record.) In other words, since Rudy has emerged as a serious national candidate, his relationship with Lategano has received zero scrutiny. Even voters who’ve learned of his tempestuous marriages know nothing of this affair.

And that’s not right. Because the Lategano affair embodies the very worst of Rudy – his penchant for mixing private relationships with public business, his duplicity, and his cronyism. Giuliani had an affair with a (much younger) subordinate, and then pensioned her off on the public dime.

At least Lewinsky was an *unpaid* intern.

I raise it because, unlike so many moral issues that intrude into campaigns, this one actually has a direct bearing upon the crucial issues. And from the press, utter silence. Sure, nothing was ever proven, and Lategano’s subsequent denials make this an awkward subject. It’s a sad, tawdry story. But the NYC media hasn’t had any problem covering it. So what’s up with the national press?

Of course, if that doesn’t pan out, they can look into why his main activity at the NYC terror command headquarters prior to 9/11 seems to have been cheating on his wife.

Interesting analysis of Karl Rove’s career by James Carville.

I haven’t had time to look far enough into this to know all the details. But even in its outlines I can tell it’s a pretty big deal — and one that doesn’t seem likely to get a lot of attention. The short and sweet of it is that Time Warner has proposed and postal regulators have accepted a proposal which is actually reducing postage costs for mega-mags like Time and Newsweek while dramatically raising them for small independent publishers. From small mags on the right and left I’ve been deluged in recent weeks by letters saying the new rates are tipping them into financial crisis.

Here for instance is a passage from a blast email I got this morning from the Nation’s David Corn …

Teresa Stack, The Nation’s president, explains the crisis this way: Postal regulators have accepted a scheme designed in part by lobbyists for the Time-Warner media conglomerate. In short, mailing costs for mega-magazines like Time-Warner’s own Time, People and Sports Illustrated will go up less than other magazines or even decrease. But smaller publications like The Nation will be hit by an enormous rate increase of half a million dollars a year.

To be clear, I’m not pitching for contributions to The Nation, a publication we have no ties to. I reprint that passage only by way of example and because the email was in my inbox this morning. I’ve gotten similar messages from other publications on the left and right and in recent weeks.

Anyway, since TPM mails nothing but an occasional utility bill, I can tell you without reservation that it’s not a matter of self-interest for us as a business. But it is a matter of self-interest for every consumer of independent media. And that certainly includes us and I suspect you as well. It’s one thing to rail against the MSM and say you get your information from the internet. But still today and I suspect for some time into the future a lot of the independent news you read on the web still comes from reporting sustained by independent print-based publications that are going to be heavily affected by these changes.

For two hundred years US postal rate has been geared to support independent media and political discourse. It’s something small magazine publishes and press theory types understand very well but it’s not that widely understood in the general public. If that comes to an end it will be a very big deal. Here’s a link to where you can find out more.

From the LAT …

Despite Bush’s repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

Homegrown U.S. jihadism? The New York Police Department warns that it’s found two dozen “clusters” of U.S. Muslims in the northeast on a “path” to terrorism.