I see from today's New York Times that Rudy really is a Reagan Republican:

As he embarks on a campaign for the presidency, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is going forward without two people who once played supporting roles in his political life: his children, Andrew, 21, and Caroline, 17.

... Mr. Giuliani's relationship with Andrew has grown strained and distant since his very public and bitter divorce from Andrew's mother, Donna Hanover, and his marriage to Judith Nathan, according to Andrew and others familiar with the relationship.

...While he would not say how long he had been estranged from his father, others close to the family said it appeared to have been for at least a year.

Similarly, a distance appears to have developed between Mr. Giuliani and his daughter, now a high school senior who is to attend Harvard University in September....

I'm sure I don't need to remind you that Reagan, that earlier hero of the "family values" crowd, was estranged from most of his children throughout his presidency.

And, of course, none of his supporters cared. Conservatives are champions of traditional values by definition -- empirical evidence is irrelevant. Liberals, however family-oriented they are (see, e.g., the Gores), never get credit for strong marriages or strong family ties. (However, if you're, say, the Clintons, everything's fair game -- never mind the fact that the three of them aren't estranged at all.)

From The Wall Street Journal's editorial page a few days ago:

As part of Mr. Giuliani's quintessentially conservative belief that dysfunctional behavior, not our economic system, lay at the heart of intergenerational poverty, he also spoke out against illegitimacy and the rise of fatherless families. A child born out of wedlock, he observed in one speech, was three times as likely to wind up on welfare as a child from a two-parent family.... he added that changing society's attitude toward marriage was more important than anything government could do: "If you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, ... I guess the social program would be called fatherhood."

One might be tempted to use words like "hypocrisy" in reference to this. But Rudy's a Republican, so it's OK, right?

So nice try, Times, but this kind of thing goes one way -- the strength of the family unit is something Republicans get to criticize in others, but nobody gets to criticize them back.

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Ah -- the right-wingers at NewsBusters already want to shoot the messenger.