OK, so maybe he wouldn't make a great president, and maybe he wasn't really the mayor he's cracked up to be, but here in Salon's New York office we love Rudy Giuliani. Why? Because the man is just fun to cover. Clearly, we're not the only ones who enjoy Giuliani -- and, frankly, miss him. From the looks of it, it appears that some Democrats are glad he's back on the national scene too, even if it does mean he's attacking Barack Obama.
Of course, the prime candidate to have a little fun at Giuliani's expense is Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, famed for his quip, "There's only three things [Giuliani] mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11." In a statement today, Biden said of "America's Mayor":
It's no surprise that it takes a man with zero national security and foreign policy experience to defend the policies of John McCain and President Bush.The facts are that the policies President Bush has pursued and Senator McCain would continue, have not made us safer. We're bogged down in Iraq with no end in sight and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- the people who actually attacked us on 9/11 -- have regrouped and are plotting new attacks. In fact, terrorist attacks around the world have increased since 9-11.
The Democratic National Committee didn't hold back, either, attacking Giuliani with surprising fervor. An e-mail about the former New York City mayor went out under a subject line that reprised Biden's earlier joke about him. It read:
Democrats are not going to be lectured to on security by the mayor who failed to learn the lessons of the 1993 attacks, refused to prepare his own city's first responders for the next attack, urged President Bush to put his corrupt crony in charge of our homeland security, and was too busy lobbying for his foreign clients to join the Iraq Study Group. Rudy Giuliani can echo the McCain campaign's false and misleading attacks, but he can't change the fact that John McCain is promising four more years of President Bush's flawed and failed policies on everything from energy security and the economy to the war in Iraq.
Below are two videos of Giuliani. The first is of an interview he gave on Wednesday's edition of "Morning Joe." (He comes in at about the one minute mark.) The second is from his historic appearance in the final game of Notre Dame's 1975 season.
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