SOMETIMES, SPOTTING REPUBLICAN HYPOCRISY IS LIKE SHOOTING FISH IN A BARREL

Rudy Giuliani -- the guy who put New York City's terror command center in a known terrorist target, the World Trade Center, and then saw it destroyed when it was most needed on 9/11, is attacking President Obama on Benghazi again:

Not long after taking a few seconds of silence for those affected by Superstorm Sandy, Rudy Giuliani began ripping into President Barack Obama on Friday while speaking at a major campaign event for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in Ohio.

The former New York City mayor delivered a series of blistering zingers against the president, rallying the massive crowd with line after line of reasons why Obama should "resign" and faulting him for "incompetence" over the Libya consulate attacks.

Giuliani also called on Obama to resign because of the struggling economy. (Is that a sign that Giuliani doesn't think Romney is going to drive Obama from office on Tuesday?) And Giuliani attacked Obama's response to Hurricane Sandy:

Rudy Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, accused President Barack Obama in a Friday appearance on CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight" of putting his own campaign ahead of handling the fallout from Superstorm Sandy.

"If I were the president of the United States, I sure wouldn't be flitting around the Midwest and the West," Giuliani said. "My job would be making sure this thing was followed through to the very end. Maybe the first couple of days he was keeping his eye on the ball, but we got gas lines now that are a mile long. We got bodies still being discovered, and we got a president who is playing campaigner in chief."

OK, let's go back in time....

Giuliani Warns Against Hasty Katrina Analysis
Friday, September 09, 2005

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani says now is not the time to assess the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. He says people withheld their analysis for some time after the Nine Eleven attacks.

GIULIANI: People weren't critiquing this a week later and two weeks later and three weeks later. They appropriately waited a period of time and then the September 11th commission did it and they did it in a responsible way, they tried to point out the things that were done right, the things that were done wrong and how you can improve from it.

Katrina made landfall in Louisiana on August 29, 2005. Giuliani thought it was too soon to criticize the government's response eleven days later. Last night, when Giuliani spoke to Piers Morgan, it was four days after Sandy made landfall in New Jersey.

I'm also curious as to what Giuliani thinks Obama should be doing that he isn't doing. Gas lines are long? Here's what the federal government is doing:

The Obama administration ... authorized the Defense Department to hire hundreds of trucks that will be used to deliver 12 million gallons each of gasoline and diesel fuel, mostly from commercial suppliers, to staging areas in New Jersey....

From the staging areas, the fuel will be distributed throughout the region in coordination with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help resupply stations....

The Pentagon has also been authorized by the Energy Department and the White House to tap the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve. It will draw as much as two million gallons of diesel fuel -- part of the 12 million total -- for government emergency responders....

Earlier Friday, the Homeland Security Department temporarily lifted a rule prohibiting foreign-flagged ships from delivering fuel between United States ports, a move that should soon bring additional tankers to the New York area with refined gasoline and diesel.

And as for Giuliani's complaint that "We got bodies still being discovered," what is Obama supposed to do? Put on a wet suit and look for drowning victims?

A big problem right now is that power companies -- y'know, private-sector firms like Con Ed in New York and PSE&G in New Jersey -- can't restore power to all areas very quickly. Funny, I thought Republicans believed that government screws everything up when it intervenes in the work of the private sector, and the federal government screws up most of all. I thought -- as Mitt Romney so famously put it in that debate -- that everything works better if it devolves to states and localities, or, better yet, to private industry.

Giuliani's idea of how you respond to a crisis was getting himself photographed at Ground Zero in an FDNY hat, even as he denied that the site was toxic ("The air quality is safe and acceptable," he said). It made his post-mayoral career, in business if not in politics. I suppose that's what he'd recommend for Obama -- on-site showboating. But then he'd be complaining about the meddling of "big government."