ADORING A FASCIST

A right-wing blogger who calls himself Soccer Dad reads today's Maureen Dowd column more astutely than he realizes:

Maureen Dowd observes today("Rudy roughs up the Arabs") that candidate Rudy Giuliani is pro-Israel. And she makes it sound like that's a bad thing.

Rudy would probably only take the hand of an Arab leader to throw him down a ravine, or a wadi.

It's really hard to knock the column because she's correct. Rudy, at least on the face of it, is a pro-Israel candidate. Leave out verbs like "rant" and "preened" and I'd read the column as an endorsement.

I'd absolutely quibble with part of that -- Rather than "Rudy Giuliani is pro-Israel," I'd say "Rudy and his advisers hate any Arab or Muslim not named Chalabi" (if you doubt me, watch this scary Josh Marshall assessment of Rudy's foreign policy team, or read this or this).

But when Soccer Dad says at the end that he would "read the column as an endorsement," it's for a good reason -- the column basically is an endorsement.

The way you know is that Dowd's snark-generating skills are barely in evidence. There are no cute nicknames, no sentences that turn themselves inside out. We get this kind of prose instead:

...[Giuliani] went through his greatest hits: The time he yanked Yasir Arafat out of Lincoln Center during a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. "The thing that really bothered me was, he didn’t have a ticket," Rudy recalled. "He was a freeloader!"

The time he tossed back a $10 million check for 9/11 families from the Saudi prince who urged America to "adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause."

"You know, Israel's not perfect, and America's not perfect, but we're not terrorist states," he said....

When Dowd gives the glibness a rest -- especially when her subject is a macho man (cf. her Schwarzenegger columns from 2003) -- you know she's impressed, even if she doesn't know it herself.

And at the end, we learn who else got "roughed up" by Giuliani:

Rudy lambasted Hillary and Obama for their "strong Democratic desire to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate and negotiate," and suggested again that he would be tougher on Iran than Hillary, and would never let it get a nuclear weapon.

Last night, when he and Judi were interviewed by Fox's Sean Hannity, Rudy ratcheted it up, saying that Hillary’s "ambiguity" and "shifting of position" on Iran was "a dangerous tendency, I think, in somebody that aspires to take on a position where you have got to be pretty darn decisive."

He also bored in where Obama has been skittish about going: her experience. "Honestly, in most respects, I don't know Hillary's experience. She's never run a city. She's never run a state. She's never run a business. She has never met a payroll. She has never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people."

He assured everyone he'd learned how to put his cellphone on vibrate. But he left himself at full volume.

If you're waiting for a real Dowd punchline, one that reduces Rudy to a cartoon and a buffoon, well, don't hold your breath -- chivalrous guy that he is, he did her work for her, attacking her betes noires, Hillary and Obama. You can tell she's grateful to the big lug for that -- and you'll see her treat him with kid gloves repeatedly in the next year or so.