IF YOUR EMAIL-FORWARDING RIGHT-WING UNCLE WERE FAMOUS, HE'D BE GIULIANI

Rudy Giuliani is now like a little spoiled brat who's been told by his parents not to repeat a four-letter word and is responding by repeating it over and over again at the top of his lungs. Here he is repeating it to the New York Daily News; here he is repeating it to the New York Post.

And what exactly is he saying? This is what frequently surprises me about prominent wingnuts: I expect rank-and-file wingers to repeat the ignorant nonsense they pick up from Fox and Free Republic and World Net Daily verbatim. I'm not surprised when right-wing entertainers (Ted Nugent, Victoria Jackson, Nick Searcy, Charlie Daniels) parrot the same simple-minded talking points -- they're just ordinary Americans who got famous.

But it always surprises me when people who have power and clout utter pronouncements that are indistinguishable from the crap your right-wing uncle forwards you every few days. When we've seen billionaires who travel in the best circles comparing Obama to Hitler, or Jack Welch declaring that good job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics must be the result of Obama administration manipulation ("Those Chicago guys will do anything"), or billionaire Joe Ricketts concluding that the best way to defeat Barack Obama in 2012 would be an ad campaign rehashing the Jeremiah Wright story, I've always found myself thinking: Aren't these people too sophisticated for this? Don't they avail themselves of serious sources of news and information, if only because they need to in order to maintain their place at the top of the heap?

Apparently not. Apparently they watch just as much Fox as your uncle. Apparently they don't get information from sources that are any more nuanced than Fox.

And that seems to be true of Giuliani. He may have once been a serious candidate for president of the United States and he may now be a globetrotting international security consultant, but he wallows in the same pool of ignorance as your uncle. The Daily News interviews him and tells us,

The former mayor also brought up Obama’s relationship with “quasi-communist” community organizer Saul Alinsky and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

("Relationship"? Um, Saul Alinsky died when Obama was ten years old.)

In the Post we get Alinsky again, Frank Marshall Davis, and (of course) Jeremiah Wright (“Obama never left that church,” Giuliani says, ignoring the fact that Obama actually did leave the church).

There isn't an original thought here; there's nothing that wasn't said first by gutter-scrapers like Dinesh D'Souza and Glenn Beck.

But that's what are right-wing elites are like now -- they're ignoramuses with money.