ALAS, RUDY ISN'T GOING ANYWHERE

Headline at Crooks & Liars:

Morning Joe Declares Giuliani's Career Over

Headline at Raw Story:

Morning Joe Panel Writes Giuliani’s Political Epitaph: ‘From Mayor of America to Mayor of Trump Tower’

"Political Epitaph"? Oh, if only.

First of all, I don't think it's quite accurate to say that the folks at Morning Joe are writing Rudy's epitaph:

Giuliani falsely accuses Clinton of lying about 9/11... @JoeNBC: I don't understand how people say things like that https://t.co/w95d8eNrK0

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) October 13, 2016

The former mayor of New York City bashed Hillary Clinton while introducing Trump at a Florida rally, claiming the former U.S. senator had lied about being in the city on Sept. 11, 2001.

But Giuliani was the one lying -- because Clinton has never claimed she was anywhere else but Washington, D.C., on the day of the attacks but flew to New York less than 24 hours later, where she was photographed alongside the mayor and governor as they surveyed the destruction in lower Manhattan.

Panelists on the MSNBC program said Thursday morning that the 72-year-old Giuliani shows signs of exhaustion, and Willie Geist pointed out the former mayor had praised Clinton’s post-9/11 response just two months ago, at the Republican National Convention.

“This is the type of stuff people hate about politics,” Geist said, saying Giuliani should not “just make stuff up.”

See? There you go -- yes, a lot of negative things are said about Giuliani in this clip, but the first thing out of Barnicle's mouth is "Exhausted." To Barnicle, Giuliani couldn't have said this because he's a rage-driven Republican apparatchik who'll say anything to try to destroy a political enemy -- he must have said it because he's tired. And then, after we're told that a couple of months ago Giuliani acknowledged Clinton's work on the 9/11 recovery, Geist says the attack is why people are justified in hating politics, not Giuliani.

Yes, there's this:

New York Times reporter Nick Confessore said the biggest casualty of a potential Trump loss, after the candidate himself, would be Giuliani.

“He’s gone from being the mayor of America to the mayor of Trump Tower,” Confessore said.

That's not a bad line. But Joe Scarborough just seems to think Rudy needs a rest cure, or something:

SCARBOROUGH: Giuliani has an important legacy for this city, an important legacy for what he did, along with all of the city workers on September 11.

BARNICLE: Tarnished now.

SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, I just don't understand some of these statements. I mean, is he okay? And I say that seriously. Is the guy okay?

BARNICLE: Well, be charitable by saying it might be exhaustion.

SCARBOROUGH: Did he forget what he said a couple of months ago? ... He's smart enough to know there's videotape out there. That's why I'm wondering: Is it exhaustion?

No, it's not exhaustion, you twits. He always was an anger-driven character assassin. Remember Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed black man who was fatally shot by undercover cops in 2000:

Giuliani typically springs to the cops' defense. But this time he wouldn't even express sympathy to the victim's mother, because it "might imply that the shooting was unjustified." He had no compunctions about implying that the shooting was justified. Dorismond was "no altar boy," Giuliani reported, as if all non-altar boys are subject to summary execution on the sidewalks of New York. The slain security guard had behaved in a way that was "very aggressive toward the police," he added, though there was no proof that Dorismond did anything except perhaps annoy the plainclothes narcotics cop by rebuffing his attempt to buy marijuana. Giuliani also asserted that Dorismond had spent a "good deal of his adult life punching people," a reference to a domestic complaint filed by Dorismond's girlfriend, which resulted in no charge against him. Though Giuliani released Dorismond's adult and juvenile records (the latter are supposed to remain sealed), they revealed that he had never been convicted of anything more serious than disorderly conduct.

Oh, and Dorismond had, in fact, been an altar boy -- a revelation that Giuliani responded to (naturally) with rage:

Mayor Giuliani bristled yesterday when told that -- contrary to his assertion -- police shooting victim Patrick Dorismond really was an altar boy.

“I think that’s not a correct juxtaposition of statements, nor intended for any kind of decent or useful purpose,” the mayor said testily.

“I’m not going to get into an intellectual parsing of that question. That is not a fair question. The question is intended to create a dispute, not to elicit intelligent information.”

But the media never could resist Giuliani for long, even before 9/11. The Morning Joe crew isn't fooling anyone -- as soon as the Trump campaign is over, Rudy will be welcomed back into the East Coast media fold with open arms. He'll be on Sunday talk shows whenever he pleases. He'll be sought out as a savant again. (Newt Gingrich, too, by the way.) If he requests (and I'm sure he will), the name Trump will never be mentioned on the air in his presence. No one in the media really thinks that the real Rudy is the angry man attacking Hillary Clinton in that clip on behalf of a fascist sociopath, even though Rudy's never realer than when he's verbally pounding someone into the ground.