Pondering the reputation of Rudy Giuliani during his tenure as New York City mayor, I suppose I arrive at the Chris Matthewsism “He got rid of the pee smell in the Subway”.  Delve that a bit deeper than the immediate problem, and it is that he managed the homeless problem — solving it by shoving them to New Jersey.

That is not unattractive or without its virtues to the New York City voting public.  He, I hear, solved (or lessened to a considerable extent) New York City’s crime problem.  As often happens, the crime rate’s drop started with the previous administration — the much maligned Dingle Administration — but this goes along my contention that George Herbert Walker Bush would have been re-elected had Alan Greenspan lowered the interest rates a whiff sooner than he did, as the economic recovery was starting at the end of his administration.  Them’s the breaks!

So it was that Rudy Giuliani fired the police commissioner — Bill Bratton of the “Broken Windows” docrtine – that Time gave a cover feature regarding how the city was turning crime around, lest he receive less credit.  Or so goes the speculation.

Which all may be moot.  By the time the NYPD plunged a plunger up a black man’s anus, Giuliani’s general public approval had dissolved away, taking this to be a bit gratuitious.  I think these general police controversies are the hallmarks of just about every city’s government (LAPD being most famous).  The electorate shifts about a little, and I suppose the core supporters, his most ardent supporters, wouldn’t see anything wrong with any of the racially-tinged police incidents.  The pee-smell in the Subway has been wiped out, after all.

There is a book out which criticizes the before-now unattackable — Giuliani on 9/11 — Grand Illusion, the birth of the tedious title of “America’s Mayor”, the reason for him being quasi-presidential timber.  Traction-wise, the myth (whatever truth may or may not be in the truth) is likely impenetrable.

Zooming around, one facet of his reputation befuddles me, one that if asked to expound on the contours of what I perceive as Rudy Giuliani’s legacy I would end up focusing in as emblematic of what looks both appealing and non-appealing about it — and I have no clear answer.  Times Square.  He “cleaned up” Times Square.  He did so essentially by selling it to Disney.  Mind you, I am the last person that should be discussing the cultural or political history of New York City, but I have come to figure that any wistful nostalgia for the Time Square of of olde is a fraud –romanticized pain — a feeling rushing in that life gave you the worst and you slugged it out.  A thousand David Letterman opening jokes from the 80s and early 90s run through my head right now — all of them the same.  Thus, Times Square is given its quirk, and you smile at it.

My question about Times Square.  Could it possibly have been renovated in any other matter?  It looks like an improvement, but an improvement to a nonetheless unsettling condition.

It’s a question that haunts any area of urban blight, and digging deeper exposes an unsettling reality of who we allow to control our lives, ie: Disney or Drug Dealers — if not one, the other.  Porn or the Vice-Cops.  One or the other.

Giuliani: He’ll do to America what he did to New York City.  Which is to get rid of that pee smell and stick a plunger up your ass!  Is it a Deal?

A random thought that crept into my mind about about Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Through his tenure as Dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein held regular elections, the typical dictator “Yes / No” ballot. They regularly showed him winning by margins of — oh — 11,256,482 to 26 — the fate of those 26 you have to wonder what their fates were.  The final election was held on October 16, 2002, which saw Saddam Hussein win by… get this — 11,445,638 to 0 — every eligible voter voted, and they all voted for Hussein.

Unfortunately, Saddam had not as of yet discovered the joys of purple ink, which would have made the spectacle complete.

Now, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think there was some election fraud in that one.  I think a handful or two did indeed vote against Saddam, but those votes either weren’t counted, or were converted into “yes” votes by… oh, I don’t know, Diebold machines.

Someone should look into that one.

From wikipedia:

There was speculation that Thompson would run for Governor of Tennessee in 2006, but he declined to run against the popular Governor Phil Bredesen. There recently has been a movement to encourage Thompson to run for President in 2008. He has not announced a run but has said he will “leave the door open”^[10]. On March 11, 2007, Thompson said on Fox News Sunday that he has not ruled out running for president.

On March 27, 2007, a USA Today/Gallup [1] poll placed Thompson in third place among Republican candidates with 12%. According to Gallup, Thompson’s support was drawn primarily from Guiliani supporters, evidenced by Guiliani’s drop of 13% from the previous poll. This indicates that Thompson’s yet-to-be-announced candidacy may be more viable than previously thought, and his support could increase dramatically upon an announcement that he will seek the office in 2008. However, some pundits argue that the longer he waits to announce, the less likely his chances become of securing the Republican nomination.

This does raise the interesting question for me, which is: Who the Hell is Fred Thompson?  Apparently he was a Senator, filling out the term left over from Al Gore, and won a full term fairly easily.  He didn’t run for anything in 2002, though he would have won something had he wanted to, thus he pursued his much more important career on the tv series Law and Order, and the two spin-offs — I think one of them is entitled Law and Order Jaywalking Unit?

Thompson is also a special program host and senior analyst for ABC News Radio and fills in for Paul Harvey.

Is there a “Draft Paul Harvey” movement, and if not why not?

Fred Thompson exists in a vacuum of discontent with the politicians of McCain, Giuliani, and Romney.  I suppose he is a more viable election figure than Martin Sheen — or Jed Bartlet — would be for the Democrats, (in Sheen’s case, the support is for the character he plays — I don’t know what Thompson plays — does he play a hard-nosed prosecutor who shuns away the CRAP of Bureucracy or something?) and I suppose we should be thinking outside the box for our presidential hopefuls (He has a career of the traditional presidential aspirant type, and a career not of the traditional presidential aspirant type).  His support remains telling, and that is about what one can say about him.

A man walks up to me, someone who I initially thought might be asking for spare change — but he only just barely passes into that rubric — I wouldn’t have thought that if I just happened to see him.

“Hey!  How do you circumsize a hillybilly?”

I blink.  “Don’t.  Care.” I say, coldly, and turn away.

“Kick his sister in the –”
I did not catch the end, as I walked out of earsight and make a concerted effort not to hear him.  I turned around, though, to get a good glimpse of this man for a mental profile of People I Despise By an outsized margin exceeding the level deserved by the offense.

Please.  Don’t be this guy.

I watch the following exchange happen between two people — one a wheel-chair bound older gent with silver sparks in his hair, the other a 20-something fat black man.  But even those descriptors are meaningless — I’ll just say two guys.

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Yes.”

Awkward silence follows, the older gent smiles self-knowingly, the fat black guy stutters.  It is at this point that I think to myself, “Quit being a Dick,” which can be brought out as “Just tell him the time or don’t.”

“So, um, would you tell me what time it is?”

“Sure.”  He looks at his watch.  “2:55.”

“Thanks.”

“You asked me the wrong question.  You asked me if I knew what time it was.  I did.  I answered your question.”

I turn to him, thinking if he was going to play this stupid game he may as well have gone all the way, and say, “You answered him incorrectly, because you did not know   You did not know what time it was until you looked at your watch.”

He apparently did not catch what I said, because he remained smug, reiterating how he answered the question.

Please.  I beg of everybody.  Don’t be a Dick.  Running for the literal as a means of toying with your fellow citizens does not behoove anyone.

You know, I think I’ve posted one item about Famed Political Cult Leader Lyn Marcus this month, after a month-long moratorium on the topic.  For some reason or other, I am itching to post something more about him — so, here goes.

So, is Lyndon Larouche stalling or is he throwing his dice to what he perceives as the next big thing?  I am referring to the notable tick I noticed, and posted a week ago, toward plastering on Al Gore.

Understand something.  Lyndon Larouche has posited himself as somewhere on the Bill Clinton bandwagon.  I suppose he never could fully attack Clinton, because his previous storyline had it that he was serving prison time as a political prisoner to the George Herbert Walker Bush Administration, after undoing his 1980 presidential bid by bringing up Skull and Bones and the Council of Foreign Relations in the 1980 Democratic Primary in New Hampshire.  Hence, the Clinton Administration let him go at the earliest opportunity, and hence he spent the 1990s attacking Greenspan and Gingrich.  His literature posits Clinton favorably (I understand this because I have seen favorable captions in silly photographs of his pamphlets — that is roughly what I read before throwing the things back into the trash pile.)  I understand his taking Carville’s side of a Dean — Carville dispute over DNC funding as taking Clinton’s side against Dean — who may be perceived as part of the Gore Cabal, perhaps.  Larouche appears to have had a vein of anti-Gore material in the past ready for the day Al Gore might be elected president in 2000 — never used.  George W Bush came into office.  Upon the confirmation hearings of John Ashcroft, he made weird references to the Reichstag Fire.  Had he been patient and waited a few months, he could have joined his fellow conspiracy theorists and done so in proper order.  But imagine Al Gore had come to office.  I suppose he would have had to make weird references to the Reichstag Fire for someone Gore was appointing.
I suppose Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but I have to wonder.  Hillary Clinton becomes president.  She pursues some of Al Gore’s Global Warming initiatives.  Wherefor aren’t thou, Lyn Marcus, and your merry band of currently anti-Cheney idiots?

But one can switch on a dime pretty easily.  He has Al Gore to kick around at this moment.  Did he have anything to say about that monstrosity in the summer of 2002 when he came out against the upcoming Iraq War, or was his position in a grand conspiracy muted for the moment?  There is a vein of consistency that travels alongside the vein of inconsistency: Lyn Marcus was right where he is on the environment during his semi-respectable days as a minor semi-Trotskyite leader when he was supposedly not operating a cult as of yet.

No.  I do not know the difference between man and beast.

Taken from the Reason blog, who in turn took it from Warren Ellis’s blog:

from wikipedia:

Some motifs contained in this poster:

The immorality of beauty pageants (unclad “Miss America”, scantily-clad “Miss Victory”, “The World’s Most Beautiful Leg”) — or more generally, the putative sexual laxness of American women, a theme which strongly resonates with extremists today.
Gangsterism and gun violence (the arm of an escaped convict holding a submachine gun).
Anti-black violence (a lynching noose, a Ku Klux Klan hood).
General violence of American society, in addition to the above (boxing-glove which grasps the money-bag).
Mistreatement of Native Americans (“Miss America” wears plains-Indian head-dress).
The pure materialism or commercialism of America, to the detriment of any spirit or soul (moneybag with “$” symbol).
The presence of blacks in U.S. population, contributing to its “mongrelization”, adding undesirably “primitive” elements to American popular culture, and constituting a potential danger to the white race (strongly muscular arms of a black male, a stereotypically-caricatured black couple dancing the “JITTERBUG – Triumph of Civilization” in birdcage, which is portrayed as a degraded animalistic ritual).
Decadence of American popular culture, and its pernicious influence on the rest of the world (dancing of jitterbug, hand holds phonograph record, figure of a European gullible “all-ears” dupe in lower foreground).
Indiscriminate U.S. military violence (bloodied bomb for foot, metal legs, military aircraft wings), threatening the European cultural landmarks at lower right.
Hence the falsity of American claims to be “Liberators”. (The word “Liberators” was also the name of a U.S. bomber plane.)
American jingoism and war fervor (a business-suited arm literally “beating the drum” of militarism, “Miss Victory” and her drum-majorette cap and boots).
Malevolent influence of Jews and Freemasons (Star of David on Masonic apron descending from drum, caricatured Jewish figure holding on to money-bag).
Demonization of national symbols of the United States (“Miss Victory” waves the reverse side of 48-star U.S. flag, and the WW2-era Army Air Corps roundel — of small red disk within white star on large blue disk — is shown on one of the wings).

……………

I’m talking with this guy, a few years younger than I, who I will just say for good or ill (good and ill?) whose worldview has been influenced by a bit of recreational drug use. I have seen that this both helps and hinders a coherent and cognent view of the world — if at once it clears away some artifice of how we organize society, it also leads to sophomoric insights half-baked (better than not baked at all, I suppose) posited as PURE GENIUS. (It also, in some people, leads to being well-read in certain aspects of history and culture, in certain predilications of a conspiratorial view of history — again — good or bad, good and bad. This is more than can be said for much of — my generation or maybe any generation, case in point the current popular game show: Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?)

Come to think of it, none of that digression mattered one iota, because I can strip away all descriptive accounts of it and it will come out as General Bland. So forget I typed any of that.

I think he posited that he’s always believed that the the war in Iraq was all a precursor to Iran, the unmovable and creeping on military bases permanent by design, except anytime that he has thought that, the circumstances never come together into fruition. I mentioned the habit of Fox News to intermittently go on for day or so where they drum on about the “Threat from Iran”, and then move on without a trace. Obligatorily, I referenced Fox News as “essentially Pravda”. He nodded, though somehow a lack of recognition pervaded which I couldn’t put my finger on because he clearly knew what I just said.

Then it hit me. Pravda. There is no real reason he should understand that reference. Come to think of it, despite the fact that I will make the reference as second-handedly as anyone, there is no real reason that I should understand the reference– though I think there is no reason that I should not understand it either. I can’t assuage that for him, but he’s reasonably well read. At any rate, there’s no reason for an eleven year old — fifth grader — to understand the reference to “Pravda”.

Thinking about this dropped reference that I make without a second’s hesitation, a remnant from a world order that I did not quite come of age in, one which Condi Rice is an expert on…

I suddenly feel strangely… young.

And disoriented, slightly off from my generation.  Every June (or May), there is this asinine list sent around (since the advent of the Internet, chain-emailed — before that, we just had to do with USA Today and before that Reader’s Digest for quick dissemination on morning radio “relatables”) — of “Things the current graduating class never knew”.  It is tedious, and I remember my graduating class said something to the effect of relating the difference of what ‘Morning After’ conjures up — along with a long list of items I did indeed remember or had an intellectual awareness of.
But my question for the peanut gallery: at what point does a reference fall into the realm of needing a footnote?