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16 Aug 2007 08:25 am

Rudy On The World

It's a bad, bad place and we have to keep attacking it until they like us. Or something like that. Actually, the Foreign Affairs piece seemed mainly boilerplate to me. The conflation of all our many enemies in the Middle East into one homogeneous whole called Islamist terror strikes me as unintelligent and not very helpful in advancing our interests in the region. Worse: If the choice is between the tiniest risk of terror and your civil liberties, be assured your civil liberties will be extinguished. Henley is less charitable:

Rudy Giuliani hired a ghostwriter to produce the requisite manifesto, "Don't Say You Weren’t Warned," for Foreign Affairs magazine. It's full of lies, oversimplifications and vagueness, but makes up for all that by being very, very tedious. Because the genre requires him to name-check every part of the world - perhaps to assure the alleged author that it exists, perhaps to reassure the FA reader that the alleged author has heard of the world - you get whole sections of "I see India out there tonight. Keep rocking, India! And lemme give a shoutout to my peeps in Germany!" Those passages read like the fellow who addresses the Mount Pleasant, PA Oddfellows' Hall every year on "The State of the World Today."

The rest of it reads like the fellow who addresses the Mount Pleasant, PA Oddfellows’ Hall every year on "The State of the World Today" after being maddened by bees.

Read it for yourself. Matt has a comment here and another here. Another blogger finds the analysis very 9/12. I was and remain a great admirer of Rudy Giuliani's transformation of New York City. I'm glad he's not a Christianist. He's inclusive and largely right about healthcare policy. I like his low tax emphasis. But if you want a continuation of Cheney foreign policy, with less finesse, you know whom to vote for. We've seen its limits very very clearly. It's silly to pretend it has worked, when it has clearly made us less secure. More salient: I think the Constitution has only a 50-50 chance if another terror-strike attacks and Giuliani is president. Above everything else, that matters.

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