GIULIANI: AS PRESIDENT I COULD ELIMINATE YOUR GRANDMA'S SOCIAL SECURITY AND YOU COULDN'T DO A FRICKIN' THING ABOUT IT

To be fair to Rudy, that's not exactly how he put it at the Heritage Foundation on Monday night, but that's the gist (emphasis mine):

In talking about the need to institute fiscal discipline in Washington, Giuliani reflected that the term "non-discretionary spending" reminded him of the defeatist attitude of those who used to say that New York City was ungovernable. "If I can convince you that my government is unmanageable and ungovernable, then I don't have to do anything," he said. "If I can convince you that 60 to 70 percent of the budget is non-discretionary, then I don't have to do anything about it. The reality is that the entire budget is discretionary." He called for across the board spending cuts (only defense expenditures would be exempt).

Got that? In Rudy's eyes, we have no commitments we couldn't just decide to welch on. Medicare? Social Security? Veterans' benefits? All optional. Screw 'em all if we want more tax cuts.

I know this is merely the kind of tax bluster that makes right-wingers feel all warm and frisky inside, but I still find it frightening.

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Oh, and there's this:

He dismissed critics who would argue that it would be too difficult to recruit that many soldiers in the wake of the Iraq War. "The war is controversial on CNN, the war is controversial on MSNBC," Giuliani declared. "The war is not controversial at the Citadel."

Hmmm ... I wonder if the war is controversial at Duke, which Rudy's 21-year-old son attends, or Harvard, where his 17-year-old daughter is heading in the fall.