GIULIANI'S UTTERLY UNSURPRISING SHAMELESS HYPOCRISY

Rudy Giuliani last night:

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday evening called it "silly" for President Obama to take on his eventual Republican presidential competition rather than stay focused on the economy.

"We don't want a president to become a commentator on 10 Republican candidates," Giuliani said on CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight." ...

Giuliani ... compared Obama's record unfavorably to his own as mayor.

"I took over NYC when it was in a terrible fiscal mess. I didn't complain about the Democrats, I didn't complain about the liberals; what I did was I laid out a plan, I staked my reputation on it, and it worked," he said....

Giuliani also slammed Obama for continuing to blame former President George W. Bush for the economy. “Three years into it, I couldn’t blame my problems on my predecessor when I was the mayor," Giuliani said.

New York Times, November 10, 1996:

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani gave a glimpse of his re-election strategy yesterday, vowing to link some of his likely Democratic opponents to what he said were problems of the Dinkins administration.

Mr. Giuliani suggested that potential Democratic rivals would bring a return to what he said were the high crime rates and heavy job losses in New York City under Mayor David N. Dinkins.

"Some -- again I emphasize some, not all -- of the people that are talking about running for Mayor were strong supporters of that administration, those policies and those programs," he said. "So of course, if they ran, these would be major issues." ...

New York Times, November 12, 1996:

... Mr. Giuliani has also begun to amplify the harshness of his attacks on his most likely Democratic opponents, linking them explicitly to the administration of David N. Dinkins, whom he vanquished in 1993, and doing his best to remind voters of what life was like during that period.

"All of them have some interesting questions to answer," he said in a telephone interview yesterday. "They have all been perennial parts of the city and state governments for over 20 years and did nothing to change any of this. They are much more the insiders of government than I am. I've done more to change city government in a few short years than they ever did. They just sat by and watched all of this happen and did nothing about it." ...

Of course, the simplest response to this would be to say that any sentence Rudy Giuliani utters that begins with the words "I didn't complain about..." is a lie, no matter what he's talking about.