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This is from a few months back, from Matt Taibbi, but it’s well worth reading. As others have noted, anyone who lived in New York under Giuliani, and was paying attention, has to be somewhat befuddled that his candidacy did not implode in its earliest stages. Yes, he was a calming presence in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 — I believe I noted as much at the time — but that was largely in comparison to the leadership of George W. Bush, who finished reading a children’s book and then ran for a hidey-hole, before eventually appearing on television looking — in the words of an NYC man-in-the-street interviewee I’ll never forget — “like a scared little bunny.” Of course, Giuliani was also the guy who put the city’s emergency command center in the fracking World Trade Center — six years after the first attack in 1993…

But anyway:

Giuliani has good stage presence, but his physical appearance is problematic — virtually neckless, all shoulders and forehead and overbite, with a hunched-over, Draculoid posture that recalls, oddly enough, George W. Bush, the vestigial stoop of a once-chubby kid who grew up hiding tittie pictures from nuns. Not handsome, not cuddly, if he wins this thing it’s going to be by projecting toughness and man-aura. But all presidential candidates have to play the baby-kissing game, and here is an early chance for Rudy to show his softer side.

“So,” he whispers to the kids. “What do you all want to be when you grow up? Do any of you know?”

A bucktoothed boy raises his hand.

“I wanna be a doctor,” he says, “and a lawyer.”

The crowd laughs, then looks at Rudy expectantly. The obvious line is “A doctor and a lawyer? Whaddya want to do, sue yourself?” and you can see Rudy physically straining for the joke. But this candidate’s funny bone is a microscopic thing, like one of those anvil-shaped deals in the ear, and the line eludes him.

“A doctor and a lawyer, huh?” he says, grinning nervously. “Uh . . . whaddya want to do, sue the doctor?”

My notes from that moment read: Chirping crickets.

Rudy moves on. “How about you?” he says to the next boy.

“I want to be a policeman!” the kid says.

Rudy smiles. Then the next boy says he wants to be a fireman, and the crowd twitters: Wow, a fireman and a policeman, in the same room! Rudy is beaming now, almost certainly aware that every grown-up present is suddenly thinking about 9/11. His day. As he leans over, the room is filled with popping flashbulbs. Then, instead of capitalizing on the sense of pride and shared purpose everyone is feeling, Giuliani utters something truly strange and twisted.

“A fireman and a policeman, huh?” he says. “Well, the first thing that I want to do is make sure that you two get along.”

Huh? Amid confused applause, Rudy flashes a queer smile, then moves on to the heart of his presentation, a neat little speech about how the election of a Democratic president will result in certain nuclear attack and the end of the free market as we know it. I’m barely listening, however, still thinking about the “make sure you get along” line.

Although few people outside of New York know it yet, there is an emerging controversy over Giuliani’s heroic 9/11 legacy. Critics charge that Rudy’s failure to resolve the feuding between the city’s police and firefighters prior to the attack led to untold numbers of deaths, the most tragic example being the inability of firemen to hear warnings from police helicopters about the impending collapse of the South Tower. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the two departments had been “designed to work independently, not together,” and that greater coordination would have spared many lives.

Given all that, why did Rudy offer this weirdly unsolicited reference to the controversy now? Was he joking? And if so, what the fuck? It was a strange and bitter comment to make, especially right on the heels of his grand-slam performance in the previous night’s debate. If this is a guy who chews over a perceived slight in the middle of a victory lap, what’s he going to be like with his finger on the button? Even Richard Nixon wasn’t wound that tight.

The latest from Greenwald on the saga of Joe Klein and FISA:

Joe Klein has just posted yet again about his FISA confusion, and it has now moved well beyond farce into an almost pity-inducing realm. If Time has any dignity at all, someone there will intervene and put a stop to this. It’s actually difficult to watch.

In the last five days alone, Klein has now written five separate times about his FISA debacle, and is further away than ever from having any idea what he’s even talking about — first was the column itself; second was the Swampland post the same day in which he emphatically defended the accuracy of what he wrote in response to my post; third was the post yesterday in which Klein said he “may have made a mistake in [his] column this week about the FISA legislation” — the understatement of the year; fourth was an Update he added to that post this morning claiming that he did speak to a Democrat but “may have misinterpreted a Democratic source’s point” and “if [he] did, a correction will appear in the print magazine next week”; and now, his fifth effort in tonight’s post, actually worse than all the others, in which he still professes confusion after “spen[ding] the past few days nosing around in the ongoing dispute about what the House FISA Reform bill actually says.”

The result of all this “nosing around”: “I’ve reached no conclusions.” And he then unleashes this:

I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right.

That’s been the point all along (although one doesn’t need “legal background” — just basic reading skills and a molecule of critical thought).

I now know who Klein’s editor for this piece was and I will have much more to say about all of this tomorrow. In comments to Klein’s new post tonight, the lawyer (and blogger) Anonymous Liberal quickly debunked the new, insultingly false claims from Klein about the alleged “dispute” over the meaning of the House bill. And the normally mild-mannered Ryan Singel of Wired earlier today — prior to Klein’s latest effort — wrote his second detailed post excoriating Klein’s completely ignorant, now-willfully false claims about FISA (“Klein now has two blog posts and one column (printed in Time magazine) that are all shot through with errors. . . . THREAT LEVEL, paraphrasing Klein’s column, continues to believe that Klein is well beyond stupid. He’s dangerous”).

Thus, for now, I just want to ask that everyone ponder the extreme lack of professionalism and corruption required for someone like Klein to write the article that he did accusing Democrats of wanting to give Terrorists the same rights as Americans (therefore showing, as always, that Democrats can’t be trusted on national security), and then — once he is exposed for having spewed outright falsehoods — he announces that he really isn’t interested in bothering to find out (and isn’t even capable of determining) if anything he wrote was accurate.

More, here. And the beginning of the tale, here.

The news, today:

President Bush on Monday signed a deal setting the foundation for a potential long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq, with details to be negotiated over matters that have defined the war debate at home – how many U.S. forces will stay in the country, and for how long.

The agreement between Mr. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki confirms that the United States and Iraq will hash out an “enduring” relationship in military, economic and political terms.

CBS News’ Pete Gow in Baghdad reports the proposals are to offer the U.S. a continued military presence in Iraq, as well as favorable business interests (such as investment opportunities for American companies), in return for guarantees to Iraq’s future security.

TMW, two months ago, here.

Mike Huckabee has a new gimicky celebrity endorsement to add to his list of desperate pleas for free media exposure :

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s endorsements now include retired pro wrestler Ric “Nature Boy” Flair, CNN reported Tuesday.

Flair joins Ted Nugent, a rock musician and hunting enthusiast, and Chuck Norris, a martial arts expert and star of TV’s “Walker, Texas Ranger,” in endorsing Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about politicians using coded language to appeal to portions of their base. Reagan used terms like “states rights” and “strapping young buck” to appeal to racists. In 2004, George Bush made an odd reference to Dred Scott as a way of signaling his desire to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Now with Huckabee, the Ric Flair endorsement seems like a wink towards the more hawkish elements of the GOP base (ie. 99% of them) that he shares their view of “the enemy”.

With John Howard’s defeat in Australia, now’s a good time to look back at the shameless lies he told about Iraq and WMD. I’ve put the details over at Mother Jones.

Farewell, John Howard. Say hello to history’s scrap heap for us.