Despite what a certain milk shake would like you to believe, Rudolf Giuliani Mussolini is As Far From Libertarian As Possible (click on the link to read about his early history as a psychotically deranged persecutor of victimless white collar “criminals”).
Even some of Giuliani’s admirers admit he has fascist tendencies. The amazing record of corruption and perfidy simply boggles the mind. Giuliani even had the incredible temerity to
try to stay on as mayor after his term was over.
Check out the comments at Serf City. Giuliani abused his mayoral office to go after cabbies, artists, street vendors, porn,
sex-related businesses, and anyone who did business without a license. His phony tax cuts were merely deficit spending – putting the tax bill on future victims, plus interest, while ducking the responsibility for his out of control spending, a favorite ploy of scumbag Rapepublicneoconartists.
Ron Moore reports,
Let’s take the pot smokers. One study points out that under Rudy’s Broken Windows policy, public-toking arrests rose 2000% from about 2000 in 1994 to over 50,000 by 2000 ( Harcourt & Ludwig, Reefer Madness: Broken Windows Policing and Misdemeanor Marijuana Arrests in New York City, 1989-2000 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=948753). The study also finds that this had no measurable effect on violent crime.”
Furthermore,
Unfortunately, Rudy’s broken windows policy didn’t apply to Rudy’s buddies in the New York Police Department. An April 1999 article in Crime and Delinquency (Zero Tolerance: A Case Study in Police Policies and Practices in New York City, Judith Greene) points to a 75% increase in new civil rights claims against the police for abusive conduct. The article also points to a sharp increase in the number of complaints which resulted in no arrest and no summons and where there was no suspicion of criminal activity. Um – just why were people being stopped? What was Mayor Rudy’s response to growing concern about police misconduct? According to the article the new Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) funding was cut 17% compared to the agency it replaced.
Victim disarmament? According to Mike Blessing, Giuliani said on one of the
morning empty-talk shows that “We shouldn’t just try one of these [”gun control”] plans, we should try them all.”
Giuliani libertarian?
King George Dubai-ya Dubai-ya III Bush has gone a long way towards creating a fascist Amerikkka. Rudolf the coke nosed Fascist would go all the way. No libertarians should even remotely consider being fellow travellers in helping Ayatollah Giuliani set up his gulag regime.
We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
-Rudy
Less
aynrkey
bostonteapartygoer
Kenn Jacobine
mattdharris
Mike Seebeck
Miche
paulie
Jim Davidson
ponggod
Stuart Richards
Todd Andrew Barnett
Learn to live with it because this is precisely what most voters want.
They want the scum cleaned up and jailed, they want leaders who tell them what to do, they want Santa Claus in office. We libertarians are trying to light a candle in 50mph winds. We can’t give up but we ain’t making headway either and the appearance and support for pols like Rudy and Hillary are symptomatic of collectivist hegemony over the American people.
I don’t have much choice but to live with it. Just don’t call that shit libertarian.
There are a few trends at work here.
One of them is a tempest-in-a-teacup conspiracy theory.
A few years ago — I believe it was in 2001 or 2002 — Eric Dondero publicly stated that his goal is to destroy the Libertarian Party. My bookmark of that statement was about four computers ago, but if nobody else can find it, I’ll try to (I have no doubt that he’s tried to erase it as much as possible, but it’s still out there somewhere).
In any case, his actions confirm his words. He — and possibly a few other like-minded individuals — have brought us atrocities (or, if you prefer, jokes) like “Libertarians for Bush;” “Libertarians for Lieberman;” the promotion of first David Jaye (expelled from the Michigan State Senate for drunk driving convictions and domestic violence allegations) and then Wayne Allyn Root (telemarketing scammer) as prospective LP presidential nominees; and so on, and so forth. “Libertarians for Giuliani” is part and parcel of Dondero’s jihad against the LP, and additional confirmation that that’s EXACTLY what he’s engaged in.
Of course, Dondero isn’t a man of great influence. Fortunately, he has the aid of the “mainstream media” — not in any kind of intentional conspiracy, but in the MSM’s knee-jerk tendency to try to absorb divergent political trends into its existing conception of how things work.
Take any “major party” candidate who bucks his party’s line on anything, and who holds any position on any issue that’s even slightly more pro-freedom than the status quo, and you’ll find some journalistic knob deciding to shorthand the guy into a “libertarian” … because it’s easier to use a word that’s reasonably au courant than to either invent a new term or do a little research to fit the target into some more obscure section of the existing political lexicon. The media is at least as, if not more, change-shy than society as a whole.
I don’t know if Dondero understands that the interplay between his jihad and the media paradigm is coincidentally, rather than intentionally, complementary; or whether he really thinks that some of the “libertarians” he promotes are real libertarians because the media says so; or whether he knows better but at the same time is naive enough to think of himself as some kind of media puppeteer. And I guess it really doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that the abuse of the word “libertarian” is reaching the point where we are in very real danger of that descriptive term being permanently and radically re-defined toward the center (as happened with the formerly useful term “liberal” over the last century or so), rather than pulling the political center toward the longstanding meanings of that term. Dondero’s just a small part of that danger, but he’s one of the most visible and irritating parts of it from within the party/movement bubble.
Does ANYONE besides Eric Dondero REALLY believe that Rudy Giuliani is a libertarian? Does Eric HIMSELF REALLY believe this?
Does anyone besides Eric Dondero really believe that Eric Dondero is a libertarian? Does Eric himself really believe this?
Fit Rudy into my Political Heirarchy Chart. I think I know exactly where he fits (hint- he’s a bottom-feeder).
Kent; you really need to edit that to show a greater degree of overlap between socialism & fascism: the latter is a manifestation of the former, after all.
Wow, Giuliani is appearing scarier by the minute.
To respond to Old Guard, you most certainly have a point about what we’re up against, but if nothing else, it should be our mission to expose these tyrants for what they truly are. The masses may not yet be ready to accept genuine libertarians, but at least we can do our part to wake them up to the evils that await us all if we allow the worst candidates to get elected.
Rudy Giuliani shouldn’t be a candidate for office, he should be in a prison cell.
OK, IanC. I overlapped Socialism and Fascism. I actually had thought about doing that, but your comment inspired me to action.
Overlapping socialism and fascism is what Giuliani is all about.
It appears that Mayor Bloomberg of NY is preparing to run as an independent. This leads to several amusing campaign ads focusing on ‘Bloomberg– was a mayor of New York, too. But with a difference. He was…COMPETENT.”
In any event, the Democrats have already surfaced their killer–quite literally–ad against Giuliani, dealing with his neglect of worker safety issues in the removal of World Trade Tower rubble. I infer it will run, quite appropriately, starting on Labor Day 2008.