PRINCESS RUDY

I don't buy the theory advanced (half-seriously) by Will Bunch at Attytood -- that Rudy Giuliani might have run for president just to collect and spend lots of money -- but I do appreciate the fact that Bunch reminds us of the luxury level of some of that spending:

Giuliani's spending was elevated at least in part because he traveled in style. He often stayed in luxury hotels, spending $2,010 at the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, $4,034 at La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, Calif., and $5,370 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. He also spent more than $565,000 reimbursing various corporate supporters for private jet travel, and another $800,000 on charter jet travel.

Which makes me even more puzzled than I was a couple of days ago about the fact that the New York Daily News ran a story called "How Judi Killed Off Rudy Giuliani," which mentions Mrs. G's habit of reserving a separate airple seat for her Louis Vuitton handbag.

Clearly, if there was a problem here, it wasn't that Giuliani's wife was overly fond of being pampered -- it's that they both were. If she's a spoiled princess, he's a spoiled prince -- and yet even though Rudy is widely mocked for cross-dressing, the News couldn't bring itself to mention his fondness for the finer things, presumably because that's a girl thing. What's up with that?

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ALSO: Shorter Michael Smerconish in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

If writing negative stories about Giuliani had simply been forbidden, the way it should have been, he would have won the nomination.

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(Attytood link via BuzzFlash.)