BREAKING NEWS: GIULIANI IS NOT A NICE MAN; POLITICAL PROS STUNNED

Political pros were so bedazzled by Rudy Giuliani in the aftermath of 9/11 that thirteen-plus years later they still can't see clearly. How else do you explain nonsense like this, from CNN's Stephen Collinson?

... by amplifying his charge that President Barack Obama doesn't love America, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani appears ready to risk sullying the powerful mythology that grew around his leadership when he steadied and steeled the nation in the terrible, confusing time after 9/11.

Since those fleeting days when he was a unifying figure, Giuliani has more often dealt in waspish rhetoric and savage mockery -- especially of a president he says has "failed."

"America's Mayor" has gone rogue, lashing out at Democrats and liberal orthodoxy on the war on terror and saying, for example, during the Ferguson controversy last year that the biggest danger to a black child was not from a white police officer but from another African American.

The latest firestorm over Obama's patriotism may complete Giuliani's political journey from the center left of the Republican Party to the conservative jungles where Sarah Palin and Donald Trump roam.

"Rudy has devolved into this red meat Republican base ideologue who periodically seems to need self identification," said Douglas Muzzio, a political scientist at Baruch College and a New York City media commentator. "Maybe it is Rudy in his dotage, where he has lost whatever boundaries he once had. He sounds like a bitter old man."

Rudy was part of "the center left of the Republican Party" before now, or at least for the past thirteen years, as opposed to being a "red meat Republican base ideologue"? Seriously?

You mean, he was a centrist in 2004, when he delivered this Cheneyesque denunciation of John Kerry?

"We need to understand how to support our military. We need to understand how to support our intelligence services. He's been an opponent of our military for 20 years. He's been an opponent of our intelligence services for 20 years."

Or in 2007, when he made these Cheney-like pronouncements?

"I listen a little to the Democrats, and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense," Giuliani continued. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense."

He added: "The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us."

After his speech to the Rockingham County Lincoln Day Dinner, I asked him about his statements and Giuliani said flatly: "America will be safer with a Republican president." ...

"This war ends when they stop coming here to kill us!" Giuliani said in his speech. "Never, ever again will this country ever be on defense waiting for (terrorists) to attack us if I have anything to say about it. And make no mistake, the Democrats want to put us back on defense!"

And on the inflammatory racial content of some of Giuliani's recent remarks, does Collinson seriously think this is something new?

Black leaders, Mr. Giuliani said in 1994, had to “learn how to discipline themselves in the way in which they speak” if they expected to chat with him. The city’s welfare-state philosophy, he said later, was racist and “enslaved” black New Yorkers....

When [then-Democratic mayoral candidate David] Dinkins called Mr. Giuliani, who served in the Justice Department, a “Reagan Republican,” he fired back. His campaign ran an ad in a Jewish newspaper with a photo of Mr. Dinkins and Mr. Jackson, a year after Mr. Jackson made a comment widely seen as anti-Semitic. Mr. Giuliani began calling Mr. Dinkins “a Jesse Jackson Democrat.”

... In September 1992, he spoke to a rally of police officers protesting Mr. Dinkins’s proposal for a civilian board to review police misconduct.

It was a rowdy, often threatening, crowd. Hundreds of white off-duty officers drank heavily, and a few waved signs like “Dump the Washroom Attendant,” a reference to Mr. Dinkins. A block away from City Hall, Mr. Giuliani gave a fiery address, twice calling Mr. Dinkins’s proposal “bullshit.” The crowd cheered. Mr. Giuliani was jubilant.

And of course, there was

the 2000 killing of [an] unarmed black man, Patrick Dorismond, outside a city bar, after which Mr. Giuliani made the unusual step of releasing Mr. Dorismond’s sealed juvenile police record and saying that Mr. Dorismond was “no altar boy.” (Mr. Dorismond had been an altar boy, in fact, and had even attended the same Catholic school as the mayor.)

So I'm puzzled when I read this now in The New York Times:

To some in Republican politics, Mr. Giuliani’s public eruption looks like the product of slack political instincts, the shoot-from-the-lip behavior of a former champion who has lost self-awareness with each year removed from office.

"Shoot-from-the-lip behavior" is a new thing from Giuliani? What the hell planet have you people been living on for the past quarter century?