“Run, run Rudolph! Got to cover your be-hind!”
"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."—Satchel Paige
“The past lies upon the present like a giant's dead body”—Nathaniel Hawthorne (House of the Seven Gables)
MR. BURNS: Quick Smithers. Bring the mind eraser device!
SMITHERS:You mean the revolver, sir?
MR. BURNS: Precisely.
—C. Montgomery Burns
I was tempted to use a “Have You Seen Me?” milk carton graphic with this post. Why? Because the post's subject has been hiding out for almost a week—a helluva thing when you consider that the Iowa caucuses said subject's participating in are about a month away.
But when you've had as bad a week as Rudolph W. (“And the 'W' is for 'What the fuck hit me?'”) Giuliani, hide out like an off-his-meds, late-60's Brian Wilson is what you'd better do. Lest the press keep dogging your steps, asking about...well, you signing off on the NYPD's secretly walking your mistress's dog on the city's dime and lying about it.
Ohhhhh, what an awful week. Just an Off-Broadway, avant-garde production of “Murder On The Orient Express” kind of week for dear, sweet (like an almond-scented drink) Rudy. There, in that pivotal scene at the end, the train's riders walk one by one into the hushed berth...
NYC Comptroller William Thompson:
Questions just seemed to mount Thursday about the way Giuliani or his aides handled the security bills. Auditors for City Comptroller William Thompson uncovered the problems in 2001, and he says Giuliani's men slammed the door shut on them.
“"The Giuliani administration just refused to provide answers,” Thompson said.
“Shluk!”, goes the bent, serrated bread knife.
Former New York Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins:
Joe Lhota, a deputy mayor in Giuliani's City Hall, told the Daily News Wednesday night that the administration's practice of allocating security expenses to small city offices that had nothing to do with mayoral protection has "gone on for years" and "predates Giuliani."
When told budget officials from the administrations of Ed Koch and David Dinkins said they did no such thing, Lhota caved Thursday, "I'm going to reverse myself on that.
“Shluk!”, goes the rusty steak knife with the busted tip.
New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly:
"I don't recall anybody, any statements about delay," Kelly told reporters.
He said all bills for the police details for Dinkins and now for Mayor Mike Bloomberg are handled directly "through the police department."
“Shluk!”, is the sound as paring knife makes when shoved in past the hilt...
Former Giuliani appointee NYC Procurement Policy Board head, Brendan Sexton:
“The cover-up of this and the explanations for it have been so disingenuous,”
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“He didn't want anybody to know what he was doing. That's the truth. I don't care about his personal life - it's not shocking to me that he wanted to visit his girlfriend...”
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“The part that's disturbing to me is that my organization or any government organization could be used to conceal from the public how their money was being spent.”
“Shluk! Shluk!”, goes the spork melted into a crude, jailhouse shiv.
And the present (unmarried) NYC Mayor's girlfriend, Diana Taylor:
Taylor, 52, takes the bus every day to her midtown office and rides the subway to business appointments. In the six years Taylor and Bloomberg have lived together, she said she has never had reason to want or need personal NYPD security.
“I don't have security in Bogota or Nairobi or Moscow when I travel there on business, why would I need security in the safest city in the world?” Taylor told the Daily News yesterday.
“Shl-u-u-u-u-u-uk!”, is the sound a melon-baller makes as it plunges into a sucking wound.
When the high point of your week as a politician is the battle between names for your sex/money/corrution scandal, it has been a rough seven days. (Driving Miss Judi, The Shag Fund, Fornigate, America's Playa, and 69/11? Sex ON The City won out.)
And when the low point is your poll numbers cratering to where a Keane-eyed, bible-thumping, ethically-compromised crazy has eliminated your double-digit lead to pull even with you...well, the word abysmal comes to mind.
You would think that maybe with Huckabee's newfound limelight—and the scrutiny it's brought, exposing partisanship-fueled pardons of serial rapists who go out and rape again, and kill on his watch, and Mitt Romney's gardeners becoming a campaign issue along with his declaration of “faith”, and diss of non-faith (¡Azaleas, Si! ¡Atheism, NO!), that somehow Giuilani could manage to sneak his way back to a semblance of respectability by flying through all of that “chaff”
You'd be as wrong as a supermarket selling holiday hams as “Delicious For Chanukah”.
The bubblin' crude keeps a' comin up through the ground. (Via Attaturk at Atrios)
Judith Nathan got security earlier
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS—Friday, December 7th 2007, 4:00 AM
Judith Nathan got taxpayer-funded chauffeur services from the NYPD earlier than previously disclosed—even before her affair with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was revealed, witnesses and sources tell the Daily News...
Thursday, Giuliani aides changed their story. They said Nathan had received previously undisclosed "threats" earlier in 2000, and that protection was provided at those times.
They refused to provide dates, describe the nature of the threats or confirm—as witnesses and a law enforcement source now contend - that the protection began before she was publicly identified as the married mayor's girlfriend in May 2000.
Blub-blub-a'-blub!
It's juicy! It's got sizzle! And it's kicking him in his ass, for as Trapper John said over at Kos's place:
“Two things capture the American attention like no other: sex and money. Only scandals involving sex or money garner any serious public interest. Even then, a money scandal without sex leads most Americans to yawn. And dogged persistence can outlast most sex scandals (see Vitter, David). But when you combine the two -- when you add adultery to misappropriation of taxpayer money -- magical things happen. It's like that beautiful chemical reaction when heat, yeast, and sugar meet. There's an unusual smell, then lots of hot air, and then everything blows up real big.”
Damn straight. But the world's a funny place. The indestructible Achilles was felled by an arrow to his vulnerable heel. The nearly untouchable Al Capone went down on tax evasion charges. And Rudy could well be a'-swirlin' down Le Crappéur himself thanks to this petty thievery and cover-up, but...
There's a bigger story.
Salon's Joe Conason pointed this out when he said last week,
...“When the nation's news executives decided which of two highly embarrassing Giuliani stories to feature, nearly all of them made the wrong choice. While they lavished enormous attention upon a Politico story dealing with adultery and bureaucracy, they should be devoting at least as much time to yet another in the long series of Wayne Barrett scoops in the Village Voice, because this one involves business and terrorism.”
And what was that story? It's the one that forced him to quietly—rat-piss-on-cotton-in-a-vacuum-room-quietly—step down as chairman of the shady-fuck “firm” that bears his name?
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani has stepped down as head of his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, after months of refusing to disclose the firm's clients or the role he played.
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While insisting the firm's client list was confidential, Giuliani has noted the media have named a number of his clients.
Published reports have identified one client as the Persian Gulf country of Qatar, which was accused of sheltering suspected September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, although that country today it is a U.S. ally.
Keith Olbermann picked up the ball on the story the day “Sex On The City” broke—reporting on the tawdry fun, and the more serious story, with it's negative September 11th implications for the supposedly “impervious on 9-11” Giuliani.
There are countless what ifs about 9/11, hundreds of events, maybe thousands of lives, any one of which if just altered slightly might have preempted the attacks. But this one involves a man identified tonight as a close business associate of Mr. Giuliani‘s. A man accused of having harbored in, then helped 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed escape from the Gulf nation of Qatar hours before the arrest that would have been affected by an FBI team.
The war on terror candidate looking tonight, a lot more like the ties to terror candidate. Wayne Barrett of the “Village Voice” reporting that Mr. Giuliani‘s extensive business contracts with the nation of Qatar tie him directly to the man who kept Khalid Sheik Mohammed out of American hands. He is Abdullah Bin Khalid Al-Thani, he was Qatar‘s Islamic Affairs Minister at the time and its Interior Minister since 2001 when the FBI was hours away from closing in on Khalid Sheik Mohammed in 1996, Al-Thani who was harboring the suspect is widely accused of tipping him off to the FBI agent‘s imminent arrival as well as giving him 20 blank passports. Former CIA case officer, Robert Bayer says he did so with the blessing and probably the direct orders of this man, the Emir of Qatar.
You may remember, Sheik Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani from his trip to New York City during the 9/11 aftermath, offering to make a $3 million donation, most of it to go to the families of the victims. Mayor Giuliani more than glad to take that check and to serve as Emir‘s personal tour guide during his visit and to be his fellow guest on the Larry King Show on CNN. That, it seems, was only the beginning of their alliance. Years after his mayoralty had ended, Mr. Giuliani was to begin a far more lucrative partisanship with the government of Qatar, specifically with the Interior Ministry run by, you guessed it, the fellow member of Qatar‘s royal family, Abdullah Al-Thani.
If letting the 9/11 mastermind go were not bad enough for that man, Al-Thani is also said to have hosted Osama Bin Laden on two separate visits to his farm. It is with this terrorist aider and abettor that Mr. Giuliani‘s security firm, a subsidiary of Giuliani Partners has worked on undisclosed number of contracts, reports the “Village Voice,” some of which Giuliani himself and his employees openly have acknowledged. Mr. Giuliani telling a South African newspaper in June 2006, that he, quote, “Recently helped Qatar to transform Doha in advanced of the Asian Games, an Olympic style competition that his firm oversaw for last December.
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OLBERMANN: Even if Rudy Giuliani did not know about the central role that Qatar has played as a facilitator of terrorism, if he didn‘t know that in October of 2001 when he hosted the Emir and was his, you know, tour guide, television pal, was there enough evidence making the case against Qatar by the time the Giuliani Partners started doing business with that country in 2005?
BARRETT: Keith, he would have had to have been deaf, dumb, and blind not to know it because he then in 2005 had running his security unit, two of the FBI agents who had been pursuing the Qatar relationship. In fact, Ali Sulfan (ph) who was the lead FBI investigator in both the Khobar towers case and the Afghan - no excuse me, in the Cole case, he was the lead investigator and the investigation of the embassy bombings in Africa, he was the lead investigator and Qatar. I have a hard time with the pronunciation of it but a Qatar charitable society that the Emir directed the funding of this—they participated directly in the funding of the bombing in—of the African Embassy. So, if he just looked around and listened to his own staff he would have known.
“Sex On The City” is merely the smoke—choking, acrid smoke at that, but smoke nonetheless. This client list for his firm is the fire. He fought the release of their names and affiliations, but what with all the newfound super-scrutiny (The Daily News' relentless digging out the damning, earlier-than-stated police/chauffeuring is a big, flashing alarm to the Giuliani camp that “Gold Fever” has struck the press corps.) into his dealings, for him to ditch the company means he's running scared.
That client list is slowly being unearthed, and my guess is that his firm was starting to get calls from reporters for confirmation of this and that—with this and that being damaging info about the nature and provenance of those clients. The kinds of things that could freeze the lifeboats to their moorings as the S.S. Rudiana takes on water from an hull-ripping iceberg hit.
Run...Run from your past, Rudy! Quick as you can in your orthopedic shoes—run,—if I may paraphrase gen. George S. Patton—you malevolent son-of-a-bitch!
But remember what former heavyweight champion Joe Louis said...
“You can run...but you can't hide.”
And speaking of “run”, the buttah from all this...popcorn is runnin' all over the floor!
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