October 26, 2007--Fanaticism XCIV: Voting For Rudy

Recently Rudy is having all sorts of self-inflicted trouble. He still leads the Republican pack but the gap is narrowing. Perhaps this is in part because Rudy, the world’s most vocal and visible Yankee fan, announced that he’s rooting for the Red Sox to win the World Series. Something no diehard Yankee fan would ever consider doing. But he’s desperate to win the New Hampshire primary, and everyone up there is a Sox fanatic. Then his testimony before the 9/11 Commission is leaking out. It was supposed to be sequestered until after the 2008 election. Why that would be is inexplicable except as a way to induce Rudy to testify honestly about what he knew and when he knew it. From reports about his testimony, it is no surprise that he didn’t want it to be publicly known until after he was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. He fessed up to not knowing about problems with the Fire Department’s radios (in spite of the fact that they didn’t work the first time the Trade Center was bombed and he as mayor never got them new ones that would work). And he acknowledged that he knew nothing about al Qaeda prior to 9/11 even though they had carried out the first bombing and there were very public trials in New York when they caught the perpetrators. In other words, Mr. 9/11 who is now promoting himself as the one man (man) tough enough to protect us from all the Islamofascists who are lusting to attack us was off the case when it came to protecting the city of which he was mayor. But now, perhaps to rehabilitate his reputation as the Baddest Dude running for the presidency, there is a report that back in 1986 when Rudy was Manhattan U.S. Attorney and as such was busting up the Mafia, the five Crime Bosses met and took a vote on whether or not to hit him. It was an election he won, he quipped yesterday, but only by one vote—3-2. Allegedly, the two voting to knock him off were Carmine Persico and the Dapper Don himself, John Gotti. (See NY Times article linked below.) Mafia watchers are skeptical that this actually happened, claiming that the Boys viewed themselves as businessmen and would not order the murder of any U.S. attorney knowing that this would surely bring the house down on top of them. But Rudy, all puffed up with the thought that he was so Bad that they might have made an exception in his case (his office did, truth be told, win 4,000 convictions during his six year tenure, many of them against Mob figures), Rudy is playing it to the hilt. It’s a much better story to get into circulation than the fact that he was asleep at the switch while mayor, chasing down Squeegie Men but not terrorists. Yet I wonder—if Rudy was as kick-ass as he claims, how come he won that vote? If he was such a treat to the Bosses, why wouldn’t they have made that exception and put out a contract on him? If he was sending them to jail as he claims, wouldn’t you think . . . ? Hey, Arthur Flegenheimer (aka, Dutch Schultz) tried to murder Thomas Dewey when he was New York’s crime busting DA. But come to think about it, didn’t Dewey in 1948 lose the presidential election to Harry Truman? One thing we can say about Rudy is that he knows his history. And to quote Rudy, “Go Sox!"