Giuliani Blasted by Rolling Stone's Taibbi

Oh, wow - just wow. Read this Rolling Stone piece by Matt Taibbi about Rudy Giuliani titled "Giuliani: Worse Than Bush". Giuliani - the GOP candidate I call "The Bumper Sticker King" because of his sickening fear-mongering exploitation of 9/11 is worse, when it comes to good character and trustworthy attention to healthy democracy, than even I would have suspected. If what Matt Taibbi's saying has any truth to it, Giuliani's the pits beneath the pits when it comes to character. Look how Taibbi frames him:

Excerpts:

.....In his years as mayor -- and his subsequent career as a lobbyist -- Rudy jumped into bed with anyone who could afford a rubber. Saudi Arabia, Rupert Murdoch, tobacco interests, pharmaceutical companies, private prisons, Bechtel, ChevronTexaco -- Giuliani took money from them all. You could change Rudy's mind literally in the time it took to write a check. [..]

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.....As mayor, Rudy had a history of asking financially interested parties to help shape important government policies. [..]

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.....there's no question that Giuliani has made the continuation of Swift-Boating politics a linchpin of his candidacy. His political hires speak deeply to that tendency. [..]

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....Rudy tried to use the tragedy to shred election rules, pushing to postpone the inauguration of his successor so he could hog the limelight for a few more months. Then, with the dust from the World Trade Center barely settled, he went on the road as the Man With the Bullhorn, pocketing as much as $200,000 for a single speaking engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He's traveled in style, at one stop last year requesting a $47,000 flight on a private jet, five hotel rooms and a private suite with a balcony view and a king-size bed.

While the mayor himself flew out of New York on a magic carpet, thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments like the "WTC cough." This is the dirty little secret lurking underneath Rudy's 9/11 hero image -- the most egregious example of his willingness to shape public policy to suit his donors. [..]

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......"The likelihood is that more people will eventually die from the cleanup than from the original accident," says David Worby, an attorney representing thousands of cleanup workers in a class-action lawsuit against the city. "Giuliani wears 9/11 like a badge of honor, but he screwed up so badly."

When I first spoke to Worby, he was on his way home from the funeral of a cop. "One thing about Giuliani," he told me. "He's never been to a funeral of a cleanup worker."

Indeed, Rudy has had little at all to say about the issue. About the only move he's made to address the problem was to write a letter urging Congress to pass a law capping the city's liability at $350 million.

Did Giuliani know the air at the World Trade Center was poison? Who knows -- but we do know he took over the cleanup, refusing to let more experienced federal agencies run the show. He stood on a few brick piles on the day of the bombing, then spent the next ten months making damn sure everyone worked the night shift on-site while he bonked his mistress and negotiated his gazillion-dollar move to the private sector. Meanwhile, the people who actually cleaned up the rubble got used to checking their stool for blood every morning. [..]

Don't miss this beauty from Josh Marshall. It seem sthat the Bumper Sticker King Rudy got booted off a Congressionally mandated blue-ribbon panel because "he couldn't bother to show up for the meetings." Why? Because he was too busy making his millions making his for-pay hero speeches.

Stick a fork in Rudy. He's done.