It's sobering to remember that Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich aren't crazy or corrupt enough for today's wingnut purists

Not crazy enough? It seems so unfair.

by Ken

Do you suppose that somewhere in the dark recesses of Rudy Giuliani's brain -- as if there were anything in his brain except dark recesses -- he imagines that the, um, meagerness of the Republican presidential field constitutes an opening for him? In any case, here he is, I suppose along with the other scared-of-their-shadow wingnut bullyboys, now that Mayor Mike has done the plutocratic elite's heavy lifting with the fascist cracking-down.

You have to give Rudy this much credit: Most anyone else with mental and emotional problems of his severity would have lived their lives in closely watched institutional care -- if they could afford it, of course, otherwise homeless in the streets and gutters, or possibly in parks. Which is ironic, because Rudy is here to say that he would never have allowed the situation to reach the point that his pantywaist successor Mayor Mike did. He, Rudy G, the Princess of 9/11, would never have allowed those dirty fucking hippies to congregate in Zuccotti Park.

Jill Colvin reports on DNAinfo.com:

Rudy Giuliani reportedly said he would have stopped the Occupy Wall Street protests "on day one” if he were still mayor of New York City, describing the demonstrators as "bums" and "leftover hippes."

“I would have handled this differently. I took over a city that had had two riots in the two years before I was mayor. I didn't have a riot, because I didn't let it start,” Giuliani said Thursday on Sean Hannity's afternoon radio show, according Newsmax.com.
“I would have stopped it on day one."

The former two-term mayor reportedly said that the First Amendment doesn't give protesters the right to take over private property.

“You have no right to pitch a tent in the middle of New York City, I’m sorry,” he reportedly said. “That is not the First Amendment.”

Now of course back at the start of OWS what Loopy Rudy is talking would have been illegal open-and-shut. The Bloomfield Properties satraps hadn't yet adopted their situational prohibition on tents and sleeping bags and stuff. But then, that's pretty much the way Rudy ran the city, doing whatever damn thing his cracked brain dictated, the theory always being that if the fuckers he was putting the screws to didn't like it, fuck 'em, let 'em sue! Which they did in staggering numbers, winning at a rate that not only put a massive strain on the city's budget but should have caused the turd to be thrown the hell out of office.

In this respect, of course, Rudy is a very different sort of fascist from Mayor Mike. You recall the way His Mikeness intoned like the Pope or somebody how we must always obey the law, explaining why it was necessary for the city to launch a paramilitary raid under cover of darkness in defense of corporate property rights. This was, in fact, in worshipful emulation of the actual Nazis' fetishization of the law. They routinely claimed that all they were doing was strictly upholding the law. The trick, of course, was making sure that the laws were sufficiently depraved. In fairness to the modern-day right-wing conspirators, thanks to benefactors like the Koch brothers, they have bought enough lawmakers to bend the law to their demonic purposes.

But that's irrelevant for slimesuckers like Rudy, or Gov. Rick Perry, whose basic position is: I know what God and ignorant, insane, savagely sociopathic patriots believe, and if the law is different, I don't give a fuck.

Before we leave Rudy, we might take note of some of the expansion of his lunatic raving with that born friend of lunatic ravers Sean Hannity.

While Mayor Michael Bloomberg had repeatedly expressed sympathy for the protesters’ frustrations with the economy, Giuliani described demonstrators as “disgruntled bums” and “leftover hippies from the ’60s and ’70s,” Newsmax reported.

“When I see them on television sometimes, particularly the older ones, it looks like I’m seeing the leftover effects of having taken too many drugs when they were 20 years old… They make no sense. They babble,” he reportedly said.

He goes on to rail against what what the reporter characterizes as "the recent spate of violence at the park." This is, of course, fictional, but a fiction readily espoused by right-wing fantasists who have been trying to pretend from day one of OWS that it was a hotbed of violence. The reality, as sane people know, is that the violence was almost entirely fomented, not to mention almost entirely perpetrated, by the plutocratic elite's storm troopers. Luckily for the right-wing pundits, they're either ignoramuses or pathological liars, and so aren't bound by reality.

It's great to know, however, that in the darkest of those dark recesses of Giuliani's brain, where the deepest terrors play out their torments, what he sees is -- hippies!

Now Rudy, you remember, has been judged foredoomed on the national Republican front by his excessive "moderateness," or at any rate his unforgivable lack of complete immoderateness. And just the other day the Washington Post's Dana Milbank wrote off the Newt Gingrich "boomlet" ("Why Newt Gingrich won't last") on the ground that --

he is entirely too moderate in this field -- and, therefore, in no position to establish himself as the conservative anti-Mitt Romney. The ideas that made him a conservative revolutionary in 1994 make him squishy in 2012.

And as we've had a number of occasions to point out here, this is probably correct. Newt isn't nutty enough for 21st-century wingnuts.

Newt might argue that he offsets his lack of ultimate nuttiness (I'm sure he would argue that he's, you know, plenty nutty, though) with his general thuggishness and overweening greed and corruption. How much purer right-wing can a fellow be?

Which brings me to my favorite quote of the day.

The Center for Health Transformation, which opened in 2003, brought in dues of as much as $200,000 per year from insurers and other health-care firms, offering some of them “access to Newt Gingrich” and “direct Newt interaction,” according to promotional materials. The biggest funders, including firms such as AstraZeneca, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Novo Nordisk, were also eligible to receive discounts on “products and workshops” from other Gingrich groups.

-- from "Gingrich think tank collected millions from health-care industry," by Dan Eggen, in the Washington Post

The obvious question would be, is there a reliable treatment for "direct Newt interaction"? Maybe just a routine course of antibiotics? Or is this one of those pesky viruses? A swine virus, perhaps?

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