"Do you think Rudy Giuliani has lost it?
@PressSec: "I don't know"
— @ByronTau
Jeet Heer:
I have two shameful family secrets. The first is that when I was growing up, almost all gatherings of my extended clan would include buckets and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a staple of our diet. The second and more serious source of self-mortification is that some of my kin—almost all of whom hail from rural India—sometimes vent anti-black racism.
Wayne Barrett, who knows
the real Rudy, delivers a devastating anti-valentine:
What Rudy Giuliani knows about love — a response to his 'doesn't love America' critique of Obama
Rudy's meltdown plays poorly in the Village.
Chris Cillizza:
Here's the thing: Giuliani was once a very important -- and intriguing -- player in American politics: A tough-on-crime, take-charge guy tasked with running the biggest city in the country. Now, thanks to comments like this one on Obama, he is turning into something far more run-of-the-mill in the political world: A rank partisan willing to say the most outlandish of things to get attention.
Don't miss either one.
MSNBC:
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani created a firestorm this week when he argued that President Obama doesn’t love his country and then later doubled down, insisting his remarks weren’t racist because the commander-in-chief was “brought up by a white mother.” And, now, those remarks are putting potential 2016 Republican candidates in an awfully tough spot.
White House hopefuls have a fine line to walk – they need to hammer the country’s Democratic president to appeal to a conservative base that is sick and tired of Obama, but going too far risks alienating mainstream voters who find the over-the-top rhetoric off-putting, if not downright vile.
There’s a rule for all 2016 candidates, said Republican strategist and former John McCain campaign adviser, Ford O’Connell: “Never take aim at the president personally, only his or her policies.”
More politics and policy below the fold.
Here's two that look at Rudy's critique rather than what kind of a jerk he is (the latter is too, too easy.)
Philip Bump:
There's clearly an element of Giuliani's attack which stems from Obama's political persuasion. The former mayor would almost certainly not say something similar about a Republican political leader who offered similar critiques of our past — if one were inclined to do so. But he's also echoing a very old refrain in American politics: Love it or leave it.
Oh, yay. Nixon's Silent Majority, brought up to 21st Century speed.
Philip Bump again:
With the 2012 election approaching, Newt Gingrich embraced D'Souza's argument. To the Post's Robert Costa (then at the National Review), Gingrich declared that D'Souza had made a "stunning insight." What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension," he said, according to Costa, "that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."
Gingrich's comments kicked up much more furor than D'Souza's, given that the former speaker of the House planned to run for president. A reporter dug up Gingrich's avowedly pro-colonial dissertation, while the Los Angeles Times lamented that "Gingrich used to be a serious figure." The topic faded.
Until this week. What prompted Giuliani to throw the expression into the mix isn't clear. It was, perhaps, simply a less contentious rationale than racism. Which is true. But that doesn't necessarily make his comments much more believable.
Point being, it isn't just Rudy. There's a history on the GOP side of this nonsense including convicted felon Dinesh D'Sousa and failed candidate Newt Gingrich. Yay, R team. Keep it up.
Jamelle Bouie:
On Wednesday, Rudy Giuliani spoke to an audience of businesspeople, conservative elites, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. He made news.
“The former New York mayor,” reports Politico, “directly challenged Obama’s patriotism, discussing what he called weak foreign policy decisions and questionable public remarks when confronting terrorists.”
To Politico’s credit, this is a generous summary of Giuliani’s remarks, which in reality glowed with aggrievement and disdain. “I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”
There’s no need to litigate this charge; outside of campy political thrillers, no one devotes his or her adult life to national politics—or the presidency, for that matter—without an outsized patriotism and belief in the basic worth of the United States. But if we’re feeling generous, we can say that in the course of his rant, Giuliani touched on a real difference between Obama’s brand of national exceptionalism and the kind we tend to see from America’s presidents.
CBS:
Two-thirds of Americans (66 percent) think parents should be required to vaccinate their children, and a similar percentage (64 percent) say children who are not vaccinated should not be allowed to attend public school.
Nearly nine in 10 Americans think vaccines for measles are safe. Most do not think they are likely to cause disorders such as autism, but a quarter of the public thinks this is at least somewhat likely.
San Jose Mercury News:
In a move that could give California one of the nation's toughest vaccine laws, two state senators Thursday introduced legislation that would eliminate most exemptions that allow parents to avoid requirements to vaccinate their children.
If enacted, California would join only two other states -- Mississippi and West Virginia -- that permit only medical exemptions as legitimate reasons to sidestep vaccinations.
And just because, this on modern journalism from
Fredrik deBoer:
The mix changes; Grantland is some more sports and a little less news and whatever intern is currently writing the “Bill Simmons” column. Slate is a little less sports and a little more politics and Troy Patterson endlessly writing the word “gentleman” into his Mead notebook in cursive while admiring his new glasses in the mirror. New York is a little of everything with some soothing noises to remind New Yorkers that they are very very important. The revamped New York Times Magazine is a lot of the same edited by people who think you can get more sexy Millenials to your website by adjusting the kerning on your font. The Atlantic is a lot of the same plus Ta-Nehisi Coates plus Coates’s creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins. Business Insider is a lot of the same only written for the illiterate. The New New Republic is the same stuff written by every non-white male Gabriel Snyder could find to exorcise the vengeful presence of Marty Peretz’s farting ghost, and thank god for that, plus Jeet Heer with an essay made up of 800 numbered tweets. Buzzfeed is a lot of the same only if life was a Law & Order episode about the Internet from 1998. Salon is the same stuff but every single piece is headlined “Ten Things You Won’t Believe Rethuglicans Said on Fox News” regardless of content. Vox is a lot of the same stuff plus a new-fangled invention called the “card stack,” an innovative approach which allows webpages to “link” to other pages. The Awl is a lot of the same stuff brought to you by the emotion sadness. Gawker is a lot of the same stuff, cleverly hidden across 1,200 sub-blogs along with several thousand words of instructions for how to read the site that are somehow still an inadequate guide. Vice is a lot of the same stuff written by that guy you knew in high school who told you he did cocaine but seemed to only ever have that fake marijuana called Wizard Smoke you could buy at a gas station. Five Thirty Eight, I’m told, exists, although whenever I try to open it my browser seems to show me a strange lacuna into which the idea of a website was, once, meant to congeal. But one way or another, you could take 90% of what each of these sites publish and stick it on any other, and nobody would ever know the difference.