About five minutes into the show you realize that Ingres’ best subjects were winsome, horny young comtesses with husbands six times their age and the bored, walleyed trophy wives of civil servants in French occupied Rome, all of whose refined and dutiful gazes implored their portrait painter to knock over the easel and shred their foundation garments with his bare teeth; these, one can see, were the works that earned him real love. Not so his lurid Gothic Napoleons; Ingres should have known these would bomb at the Salon of 1806. After all, why turn a macho blue-faced dwarf of an emperor into the Infant of Prague; a fat, angry little head exploding from a regal white pyramid of bunny fur, replete with tiny golden toe-shoes and various holy playthings?

What I came away with was a sense of how gilded a terrarium Ingres lived in; a racially segregated, class-isolated, religiously aloof, white, rich world of opulent comforts, overcivilized enough to be discreetly smarmy. I was musing about this on the subway when the car was besieged by a born-again ex-crackhead, a body-built African-American fellow in razor-pleated slacks and tight nylon T-shirt who dropped his enormous duffel bag full of bilingual anti-Satan pamphlets and began screaming an impromptu sermon on the vengefully xenophobic inclinations of Lord Jesus for a full half hour.

His dogma was ruining my afternoon and hurting my ears, but I wanted to let him do his show. I sat through it because his peculiar mania needed us to sit through it; he thought he was doing us a great, spiritual, humanitarian favor; actually, we were doing him one, by not getting up in a huff and changing cars. “You all gonna die!” He screamed, with an ex-addict’ s smug zealotry. “Maybe you’ll die today! Ain’t no getting into heaven unless you saved and born again! That’s the only way in! Everybody else going to hell!”

Oh, shut up, I thought, silently, unable to read my fantastic Dawn Powell book. It makes me enraged that all organized religions arrogantly assume that they are the Only True Faith and that everybody else is dangerously, infectiously evil and going to hell and it’s their obnoxious mission in life to tell everyone else how tragically wrong they’re living. Patience and tolerance is the only recourse; one must find something positive about the tormentor to concentrate on. When he finally left the car, I clapped. He thanked me. I was clapping for his impressive volume; he would have been audible from a manhole three blocks away.

Recently, I’ve been having to purge myself of a lot of unavoidable xenophobia as a result of doing home renovation. Home renovation will introduce you to a gamut of culturally anomalous characters you would never otherwise have any need or opportunity to deal with. There are the cobra-spined Mexican demo-boys who spit on your floor, the toothless chain-smoking Irish dry-wallers from New Rochelle, the Peruvian werewolves of asbestos-removal and a bunch of other semi-benign characters from the low-rent, blue-collar canal of “It’s a Small World” where you sit in a late-model boat with big scars of Bondo to watch the singing robots argue with each other, and the water is brown and foamy with industrial runoff.

Renovating a house, and working with such a huge variety of worldwide strangers, is a profound and scary education in patience and tolerance that will quickly expose any subterranean racial or class prejudices you didn’t know you had like a wall of klieg lights.

For example, Arabs are great roofers and wonderful masonry craftsmen - it’s an old-world thing they never stopped doing. Abdul, our masonry expert and devotee of Islam, refused to shake my hand when sealing the deal. “It is against my religion to shake your hand,” he explained, with a shrug. “Can I kick you in the knee, then?” I asked brightly. He laughed. I stomped away and fumed. Why won’t he shake my hand? Shit, he’s taking piles of my money. Is it because I dare not wear a black tent over my face? I brazenly display my whorish wrists in the sunlight? Grumble, grumble, seethe. But Abdul was so great at his job, I had to get over my pesky personal need to be regarded as a fully fledged human being. We needed him. I decided to respect his annoying religious limitations and let my husband deal with him.

And it isn’t just religious differences that interfere with people’s ability to love one another. “Ron-o,” our subliterate mustachioed security-door installer from New Jersey, had “WOW” vandalishly spray-painted on the back of his van. When we asked him what it represented, he explained that it was a function of the “Whip-it-out-Wednesdays!” program through the local classic rock radio station; apparently if a chick listening to the radio on Wednesday sees a “WOW” defacing your vehicle, she is somehow obliged, even while driving, to show you her tits. I accepted Ron-o’s appalling love of softcore rock radio antics. Whatever mows your lawn, Ron-o. I decided to let my husband deal with him.

It makes me sick that I actually have to worry about somebody being offended by my saying this, but I’m just going to say it, and if you’re offended, you don’t understand. I have this one consolation driving to my construction site, and that is that every time I pass the Brooklyn Navy Yard I get to see the Hasidim. There is something about Hasidic Jews that fills me with love; they are a people with a totally different agenda. They’re never saturated with advertising, never screwing around, their clothes are always arresting and superformal and they live together in a hermetic community with habits hundreds of years old, totally uninvolved with malt liquor or pizza nuggets or Heather Locklear.

I get a pang of respect and affection in my heart every time I see one of those bearded guys with their tall fur hats in the sun. When it’s raining and they’re all standing around wet and dignified like emperor penguins on the freeway on-ramp island, I keep wanting to give them a ride in my truck out of a pure humanistic impulse toward holy people, but naturally, they’d have to refuse. I am filth to them, after all, a nasty, soulless shiksa in body-conscious dungarees from the GAP who dares to have actual non-wig hair. I know this, it makes me sigh, but I love them nonetheless. Not that I think that makes me cool or anything.

Let it be known that here at the cusp of the millennium, woe betide us, is a New Year’s Eve when citizens of every creed and color are petrified that Jerusalem’s Temple on the Mount will be demolished by God-throttled lunatics and inspire world genocide, or that some extremist asshole will leak anthrax into the subways. If mosquitoes don’t kill New York, surely Armageddon will make some kind of dent; I just hope we can all do enough of a spiritual roof-job on ourselves to keep out the rains of hellfire and terror when the Jihad hits the fan.

Everybody, please calm down! Hosannah!

“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.