PLEASE, SOMEONE, MAKE AN ATTACK AD FROM THIS

Why, oh why does Rudy Giuliani have a 61% favorable rating among Americans overall -- Democrats and independents as well as Republicans -- when he says things like what he said in Texas on Friday?

President Bush has brought the same aggressive approach to the global terrorism struggle his father and Ronald Reagan used to win the Cold War, Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani said Friday.

Before Bush's response to the Sept. 11 attacks, "we were on defense against terrorism," Giuliani told about 1,500 students and other guests at Texas A&M University. "They were setting the agenda."

... After the 1993 attack on New York's World Trade Center, "the people who did it were arrested and convicted of crimes," Giuliani said. "But it wasn't just murder. It was an act of war."

Bush's grasp of the realities of terrorism, he said, is not matched by Democratic leaders in Congress who support a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

"They don't see the big picture," Giuliani said. "They don't see it as part of the overall war on terror."

The same naivete is evident in Democrats' efforts to limit electronic surveillance to investigate suspected terrorists, he said. This tool is needed to gather intelligence and stay on the offensive rather than retreat to half-measures, Giuliani said.

The ad would write itself. The tag line would be: "Four more years?"

Oh, and by the way, so much for Frank Rich's claim a couple of months ago that Giuliani is sidestepping the issue of the Iraq War and "actively avoids speaking about it in any detail."

Oh, and I love this from Giuliani:

Responding to questions from the audience, Giuliani drew an analogy between fighting terrorism and preventing domestic kidnappings. He said kidnapping is far more common in Mexico than in the larger, more prosperous United States.

The difference, he said, is Mexican authorities typically pay the ransom kidnappers demand, while U.S. officials recognize that doing this encourages more kidnappings.

"Mexico has a lot of kidnappings because Mexico treats kidnapping the way we used to treat terrorism," Giuliani said....

Got that? Convicting terrorist conspirators and putting them in jail for life is the equivalent of paying ransom to thugs for the return of hostages. If I were one of the people who helped bring the people responsible for the WTC bombing to justice and I ran into Giuliani, I'd spit in his face.