A New York Times reader might well think this an apt description of the Rev. Al Sharpton, the outspoken black minister, who, in last month’s Democratic primary, gave candidate Ruth Messinger a run for her money. But no. It’s Rudy Giuliani, the Republican almost certain to be reelected mayor of New York, who has compiled a record of criminal associations and unprofessionalism that could easily elude all but the most careful Times readers.

Here are the facts:

• Last week Giuliani said that Messinger’s failure to attend Columbus Day Mass showed she wasn’t fit to govern Italian-Americans and Catholics. His accusation is classic Jew-baiting: Giuliani implies that Messinger’s Jewish identity is politically relevant and implicitly proposes that New Yorkers reject her for this reason.

• Giuliani has been fined $220,000 for accepting approximately $300,000 in illegal campaign contributions; he is currently under investigation for other campaign violations. His supporters have openly admitted sending money they know to be in excess of the legal limits; Giuliani, a former prosecutor, has never criticized them for doing so.

• Giuliani has proudly reigned over a police force that has been accused of wrongly attacking and injuring New Yorkers 20,000 times since he took office. His own city manager has conceded that the enormous payments — $66.7 million to aggrieved New Yorkers since 1995 — in exchange for dropping charges, are an “admission of some wrongdoing.” (In nine out of 10 of these cases, officers were not penalized, and the settlements were not noted in their personnel records.) Cases in which the city settled without disciplining the involved officers include that of a van driver so badly beaten he is now a quadriplegic, the near-blinding of a transvestite and cases in which officers called women “spics” and “Chinese bitch.”

All of this information is available in the New York Times. (To be fair, it should also be pointed out that columnist Bob Herbert has relentlessly criticized Giuliani’s police policies on the op-ed page.) The reporters who cover the mayoral race, however, seem not to have seen the many articles in which these matters are spelled out. The Times hasn’t run articles that pose questions like, “What kind of administration tolerates police officers who routinely choke children to death and shoot citizens in the back?” Giuliani first joined the Republican Party a month after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election; shortly thereafter he was named a U.S. Attorney. Just before his mayoral run, he renounced his anti-choice politics. Yet the Times does not characterize him as an opportunist.

Consider also the article on Sharpton’s endorsement of Democratic candidate Messinger: “By the end of his speech, Mr. Sharpton was in full lather, and had turned to the subject of himself. He brought his audience — cheering and swaying and chanting ‘Yes!’ ‘Yes!’ ‘Yes!’ — to its feet as he broke into a bit of autobiographical song, which he apparently improvised.” Full lather? A politician turning to the subject of himself? It’s hard to be shocked by that. White politicians — at least successful ones — talk no less about themselves and are equally self-promoting, but that receives no comment. One wonders whether Adam Nagourney, who covers the Metro politics beat, is pursuing a job as foreign correspondent and therefore thinks it well-advised to demonstrate skills of ethnography in describing these strange black folk who support Sharpton. Would he describe the Mass Messinger missed as an event at which a man in a dress stood in front of a statue of a naked body dripping with blood as the audience spoke in unison in a manner that was apparently scripted and well-rehearsed?

Indeed, virtually all of Nagourney’s coverage of Sharpton leaves the impression that Nagourney is writing about an exotic cult leader, rather than someone who captured one-third of the Democratic vote in New York. The day after the primary election, when it seemed that Messinger would be facing Sharpton in a run-off, Nagourney didn’t even bother asking the Sharpton campaign for a comment on the result, but simply reported on his “beaming in the spotlight” and saying, “This is our day. This is our time. I can fly! I can fly! I can fly!”

Nagourney covered Messinger’s primary event in detail, mentioning that it was held in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt, but didn’t bother to contact Sharpton’s campaign. So Times readers had no reason to associate Sharpton’s celebration with the posh Rihga Royal hotel and its upscale, winning image. Without reference to the recognizable props routinely described in coverage of white leaders, Sharpton and his supporters are figuratively and literally outside the boundaries of New York politics.

Sharpton is no saint. Certainly he has some questionable events in his past, dating back to his defense of Tawana Brawley. That the Times mentions this, as well as Sharpton’s lack of managerial experience, is not itself a problem. But the coverage dramatizes a double standard under which much attention is paid to black politician’s gaffes and troubles, while equally disturbing deeds in the records of white political leaders are glossed over. When Giuliani wins in November, the headlines won’t read, “Giuliani Overcomes Past of Cheating, Lying and Racism in Landslide Victory.” This is Giuliani’s Times.

“My gut tells me right now as I look at it that Gingrich might actually be the stronger candidate, because I think he can make a broader connection than Mitt Romney to those Reagan Democrats,” Giuliani told Piers Morgan. “You won’t have this barrier of possible elitism that I think Obama could exploit pretty effectively.”

With a straight face, Giuliani explained why charges of “elitism” wouldn’t fly against Gingrich. “One of the strengths he has is he’s got a common touch, he’s able to talk to people, he comes from a poor family, understands poverty from that point of view. He doesn’t come from the American elite. It’s going to be hard to paint him that way. There are a lot of other ways you can paint him, but you can’t paint him that way.”

You can’t? The man with the half-million-dollar Tiffany credit line? The guy who wants to do away with “truly stupid” child labor laws? The one who thinks the poor lack a work ethic? The “historian” who earned just under $2 million from Fannie Mac and took in another $37 million for his healthcare think-tank? The candidate whose tax plan overwhelmingly favors the super-rich? How many ways is Giuliani wrong there? More ways than he and Gingrich have wives between them.

Can we also acknowledge there is no such thing as a “Reagan Democrat” anymore? There are white working-class people who now permanently vote against their own class interests, and they’re Republicans, not Democrats. Then there are white working-class people who are understandably sometimes confused about which party represents them, because Democrats have spent so many years sucking up to Wall Street and playing down their populist past. Some of those voters — the ones who are public workers, or union members, or close to retirement and listening to proposals to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare — are starting to realize that they have become the GOP’s latest scapegoat, the 21st century welfare queens, and they’re taking another look at Democrats. Some white working-class voters stayed Democrats. But the Reagan Democrat analysis hasn’t made sense for a long time.

Finally, I love the fact that Gingrich and Giuliani have six wives and two marriage annulments between them. Add in Donald Trump, who seems to be leaning toward Gingrich too, they can start a Three Wives Club. Way to go, family values party!

I’ll be talking about the latest on the GOP field with Ed Schultz and Ezra Klein on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 ET.

Then Giuliani ran for president. And he decided that marriage is between a man and a woman (followed by two more women). His sudden change of heart propelled him to a distant third-place finish in the Florida Republican primary, followed by his exit from the race.

Once Republican voters made it apparent that they were uninterested in the Mayor of 9/11, you’d expect that Giuliani would, with some sense of relief, stop hiding that one shred of basic decency that made him palatable. And now gay marriage will soon be a reality in New York state! But, nope. The New York Post reports:

Ten years later, Koeppel is distressed that his former house guest hasn’t returned the many calls he began making before the legislation was passed last week.

By the way: Rudy Giuliani will address a women’s club luncheon in New Hampshire next month. The dream lives!

Dear Rudy Giuliani: You will never be president. Ever. You will never actually be elected to anything again in your life. No one likes you. Your job now is to just continue cashing in on the day you happened to be in charge of New York when something terrible happened, and that job does not require that you continue to act like a bigot. Just FYI!

Polls this early are, as York should know, total hogwash. It’s a contest based on name recognition, long before most voters have started to pay attention. That’s why Giuliani led the Republican field in national polls throughout 2007, with Fred Thompson in second. Both candidates crashed and burned dramatically in the early primaries and were gone before Super Tuesday. There were four main reasons Giuliani’s campaign failed last time, and none of them have been ameliorated since:

His political record is too socially liberal. This is a guy who started his mayoral campaign in 1989 running to Ed Koch’s left and compared himself to liberal lion Fiorello La Guardia (whom he called New York’s greatest mayor). Although he shifted right when David Dinkins got the Democrats’ mayoral nomination, Giuliani remained pro-choice and pro-gay rights: He even once bunked with a gay couple and famously dressed in drag. Giuliani endorsed Mario Cuomo for governor in 1994. He was a New York Republican, not the sort who can play in South Carolina. His stance on abortion — Giuliani gave up on his brief attempt to pretend he is anti-abortion rights when it was revealed that he had donated to Planned Parenthood, the GOP’s new ACORN — would be a major sticking point. Elite national Republicans like King and York don’t actually care about abortion — see the sections in “Game Change” on how McCain advisors had no objection to putting Joe Lieberman on his ticket — but actual Republicans do. That’s why McCain reluctantly concluded that he couldn’t choose Lieberman. A pro-choice Republican nominee would either trigger significant defections from the religious right to a third-party candidate or simply prompt many of those voters to stay home next November.

He wasn’t terribly popular or successful as mayor. National Republicans may not know this, and New York Republicans like Peter King may have conveniently forgotten, but Giuliani’s political career was over before Sept. 11, 2001. His abrasive manner and controversial policies had resulted in lousy approval ratings. He was trailing carpetbagger Hillary Clinton in the 2000 Senate race before he dropped out. His vulnerabilities have never been seriously exploited by an opponent, but don’t think Mitt Romney would hesitate to unload on him in a close race, especially now that we’re four years further past Giuliani’s post 9/11 beatification.

Speaking of vulnerabilities, Giuliani has nasty skeletons in his closet, even by the standards of a Republican politician. He has been twice divorced: His first wife was his second cousin, and he  dumped his second wife for his quirky mistress, Judith Nathan, at a press conference before informing his wife in person. During the last campaign Ben Smith of Politico reported that Giuliani improperly used police escorts to take Nathan to trysts in the Hamptons. To be fair, Giuliani’s pecadillos pale in comparison to those of Bernard Kerik, a Giuliani crony who started as his driver and was ultimately promoted to chief of the NYPD. When Giuliani recommended Kerik to be secretary of Homeland Security after the 2004 election, a bevy of embarrassing revelations ensued, from his affair with publish Judith Regan in apartments near ground zero that were paid for by taxpayers and intended for rescue workers, to accepting favors from contractors with alleged mafia links.

He also has no message. Giuliani events in New Hampshire in 2008 were depressing affairs. Small crowds, silently bored to death by Giuliani droning on about the importance of lowering the corporate income tax and the various taxes he cut as mayor. It seemed that Giuliani figured he had the national security hawk vote lined up and needed to focus on fiscal conservatives (since he surely could not count on social conservatives). But his only line that drew applause was a throwaway at the end when he would mention the need to “stay on offense” against Islamist terrorism.

But that brings us to the point that Giuliani’s one major selling point — that he happened to be mayor of New York on 9/11 — has been surpassed by events since the last election. President Obama just killed Osama bin Laden, so Giuliani can hardly claim that he would be more committed to taking out al-Qaida. The Iraq war, which Giuliani vociferously supported, is viewed by everyone who doesn’t work for Fox News as a failure. Even the war in Afghanistan is increasingly unpopular. Meanwhile, the news out of the Middle East is of the Arab Spring, which gives us hope that the region will accommodate itself to modernity and democracy rather than being a fount of anger and frustration looking for a target. Giuliani’s dour and militaristic view of Middle Eastern affairs seems especially out of step with the times.

Mostly, Americans are just worried about the economy, and Giuliani already proved last time that he can’t win the nomination with an economic policy focus. Giuliani is unlikely to run, and if he does, he is virtually certain not to win the nomination. The discussion of a Giuliani candidacy is evidence of nothing so much as the desperation of Republicans who want an alternative to their current uninspiring field. But they should take heart: Michele Bachmann might still run.

Among Regan’s many charges against her old employer was the claim that a top News Corp. executive told her to lie to federal investigators about her affair with Kerik, when he was (unbelievably) being vetted to head Bush’s Department of Homeland Security in 2004. (He dropped his bid when legal troubles came to light, and he’s currently in prison for tax fraud.) The exec told her to lie, Regan said, to protect Giuliani, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and a close friend of Roger Ailes. Fox-haters speculated the “high executive” was Ailes himself, given the fawning coverage the former New York mayor got from Fox, but Regan settled the lawsuit for a cool $10.7 million payment from News Corp., and the matter seemed to end there.

Today the New York Times reveals that it was in fact Ailes who told Regan to lie about Kerik – and the paper says Regan had tape recordings to prove it. Fox isn’t even bothering to deny it; where in 2007 a News Corp. spokeswoman told the paper “the company saw no merit in the filing,” Wednesday a spokeswoman said only that News Corp. had a letter from Regan “stating that Mr. Ailes did not intend to influence her with respect to a government investigation,” adding, “The matter is closed.” (News Corp. officially retracted its claim that Regan was anti-Semitic as part of its settlement.) Regan’s lawyer insists News Corp. is misrepresenting Regan’s official statement, but he declined to say more.

He doesn’t need to say more: Affidavits reviewed by the Times show Regan’s former lawyers discussing “a recorded telephone call between Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News (a News Corp. company) and Regan, in which Mr. Ailes discussed with Regan her responses to questions regarding her personal relationship with Bernard Kerik.” The lawyer also said, “The Ailes matter became a focal point of our work” in preparing Regan’s case against her former employer. Key to Regan’s case was her claim she had been smeared with charges of anti-Semitism to preemptively discredit her in case she ever said anything about Kerik that could hurt Giuliani. “Regan believed that Ailes and News Corp. subsidiary Fox News had an interest in protecting Giuliani’s bid for the U.S. presidency,” he wrote.

You’ll recall that, in fact, back when Giuliani still seemed a viable presidential candidate, Kerik was a serious blemish on his record. Giuliani was regularly grilled not only about whether and when he knew about his former police commissioner’s many personal and legal troubles, but also about why he would recommend the man for a cabinet post. (The Bush administration was not amused.) Days before Regan dropped her legal bombshell, the Times revealed that Giuliani had in fact been briefed about Kerik’s ethics troubles by the city’s investigations commissioner before Giuliani appointed him to lead the police department in 2000.

After the Times story, the GOP candidate blithely told the Associated Press: “There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik. But what’s the ultimate result for the people of New York City? The ultimate result for the people of New York City was a 74 percent reduction in shootings, a 60 percent reduction in crime … What Bernie Kerik did wrong did not implicate what the results were for the public.”

Classic Giuliani: Arrogant and stubborn. Now we have classic Roger Ailes: using his media power to protect a Republican political friend. Giuliani officiated at Ailes’ last wedding, and helped when Fox couldn’t get a New York cable channel. The man who started out as an aide to Richard Nixon has never left behind his party politics, despite his claims of being “fair and balanced.” We’ll see if Fox reports on the Times story.

Fittingly, the whole mess came to light because Regan’s former lawyers are now suing Regan herself, claiming she fired them on the eve of her settlement with News Corp. to cut them out of their contingency fee. The affidavits the Times reviewed were mistakenly left public; they have since been removed from the public case file. What a tangled web.

Judith Regan was last seen on the Bravo television hit “Millionaire Matchmaker,” which sets up lonelyhearts moneybags with appropriate partners. (Her TV date went well; no affidavits have come to light revealing whether she found true love.)

Bernie Kerik was last seen on Twitter, railing against the so-called ground zero mosque — from prison. It all makes sense: Fox helped gin up the mosque non-story; Park51 is only blocks from the apartment for 9/11 rescuers that Kerik used as a love nest during his affair with Regan, which Ailes wanted Regan to lie about.

And Rudy Giuliani? His presidential bid imploded in 2008, he had to fold his consulting firm last year, but the New York Post claimed last month that he’s looking at a 2012 presidential bid. The Post is, of course, owned by News Corp.