(from here)
"He hit me."
Having lived in the NYC area for a few years, I kept reasonably close tabs on the doings of NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani. But over at the Group News Blog, there's a brilliant roundup of all the awful crap Giuliani has done. My favorite part:
The ex-wife, and former local news anchor Donna Hanover. Now, ain't nobody a saint in this miserable world. And you can best believe that if as rumored, Giuliani's hired some of Rove's people to work for him, they've spoken to every store clerk Hanover's ever cut an eye at or loudly "harrumph"-ed. But Hanover's ability to sink Rudy like a lead-loaded fucking Titanic with the least effort of anyone, is something his people are desperately fearful about. Donna and the equally estranged Giuliani kids, to be precise. Witness the firestorm that developed when Rudy's man-mountain of a pissed-off son took him to task, "Harry Chapin/Cats In The Cradle" style over his years of non-parenting.Hanover you'll recall, didn't say a fucking word. Rudy's son and daughter threw shit at him and he found himself stammering in trying to answer for it, falling back on the lame-o "P-p-please give my family privacy" schpiel.
Understand...Hanover...didn't say a fucking word.
And didn't have to, either. Seeing her relationship with Rudy, it's like watching a friendly game of Mortal Kombat--benign and entertaining to see as a spectator, until you realize that she knows that special, sick button combo that enables her to unlock and effortlessly use that fucked-up, grisly-ass move where she can chop off all of his appendages, electrically skin him, and then jab her hand into his back and rip his spine out, waving the damn thing around and laughing as the basket-cased body crumbles to dust. And he has no defense against it whatsoever.
That's how badly she can kick his ass if she--or anyone in her camp--and there's a lotta sympathetic people--chooses to drop dime on just how shitty he was to her and the kiddies. Let leak his verbal abusiveness? Revive the talk of possible physical abuse? Slip mentions of his unbridled callousness, and ugly, hushed-up public humiliations? There are scores of people--connected people in this town with horror stories of this sort, practically bubbling the lids off the pots. And all Donna Hanover has to do is say, "serve 'em up"...and baby, everybody's gonna get fed. She's held her tongue for quite a while...and something tells me that it ain't gonna last forever--the kids' early "test" salvoes seem to be harbingers for some big torpedoes to be fired from her "camp".
That would make Mark Foley look like choir practice. I've always wondered why Mario Cuomo never ran, and I figured he had some awful mayoral shit in his closet. But Giuliani....damn.
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I like Fred!
He presided over NY during perhaps the most draconian, heavy-handed crackdown on crime and petty disturbances that the town has ever seen.
The serious crime rate also plummeted on his watch. Unlike, say, Philadelphia, which continues to have serious crime problems as a result.
A relative in the advertising business who travels to New York on occasion said that when he went to New York a few years before Giuliani, the place was an absolute dump. When he went back a few years after Giuliani, the place had done a complete 180. Like it or not, Giuliani was far more effective than left-wing morons like Koch or Cuomo.
Still, I like Fred!
Guiliani did improve NY, or at least it improved under his watch (Im willing to give him much credit). However, I think that was done in part because Guiliani essentially suspended the Constitution in NYC. Its fairly easy to get societal improvements in a totalitarian system, which is how Guiliani ran aspects of the city. Based on the last 6 years, I doubt we need more leaders who find the Constitution a quaint historical document.
In a crime ridden dirty city, that approach works (also there are places to turn to battle abuses). In a country, that approach isnt as appealing, unless you happen to be a member of the ruling click (few to no places to turn in cse of abuses).
I would say that it absolutely depends on how you approach the constitution and the suspension of the legalities within the document.
Comparing our nation as a whole to NYC, I would say that it closely resembles a crime-ridden dirty city. That being said, I don't think there's anything in the US constitution that would need suspension or ignoring to turn things around. I would say, in fact, that the constitution would probably be our best resource in that scenario. Part of that stems from the differences between a city gov't and a country gov't, as well as the duties and responsibilities of both.
Giuliani would love to take credit for NYC's turnaround, but the stats show that crime started its descent in the last year of the previous mayor's term, and was dependent on new policing strategies formulated and led by police chief Benjamin Bratton, whom Giuliani summarily fired after Bratton got cover-page treatment in TIME Magazine for his crime-fighting effectiveness.
thanks.