Rudy Giuliani and the height of idiocy
After spending a couple of months recovering from his abysmal showing during the Republican primaries for the nomination to vie for the presidency in this year’s general elections, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has come out of the woodwork making us wish he never came out. We understand the tendency of political underlings to utter frivolous statements in support of their “bosses”, but we also expect more from someone who recently aspired to lead this great nation.
Giuliani’s recent attack on Barack Obama’s experience vis-a-vis his traveling abroad almost makes one groan. Haven’t we heard that broken record before? If experience was such a big factor in winning elections, how come Mayor Giuliani’s abandoned him during the Republican primaries? Was he not the mayor of New York at one point? How far did that carry him? Did he not garner a lot of experience supervising the recovery of New York after the disaster and tragedy of 9/11? Why did he not, at the very least, make a decent showing in the said primaries? Could we explain his decision to go vacationing in Florida while others where campaigning in the guise of needing to win Florida a mark of his great experience?
We have to learn to live with the times and abandon old concepts and theories when events and circumstances dictate. We expect the mayor to know by now, after, hopefully, a couple of months of reflection on how disastrous his campaign was, that Senator Obama may well be on his way to becoming the president of the United States, while he, Giuliani, is still fighting for relevance in the political dispensation of today. For Giuliani to argue that “the fact that Barack Obama is now making his first tour, in essence, of the world is an indication that John McCain is the man with the experience. John doesn’t have to go for the first or second time to these places. He has been going there for 20-30 years. He knows the world. He understands the world.” is the height of idiocy and political butt-kissing.
Even if we grant that Senator McCain has been “going there” for 20-30 years, what has that done for the international image of the United States? Could it be that those decades of “going there” informed senator McCain’s hard line thinking in terms of dealing with the leaders of the Arab world? What experience has he actually brought to bear on matters of executive policy making and foreign policy other than advocating the sending of cigarette bombs to the Iranians?
It is even more amazing that given what has transpired within the last couple of weeks, mayor Giuliani demonstrates, perhaps, why we are lucky that he will definitely not be our next president. Anyone who makes the argument that the former mayor makes, that, “…if you look at Senator McCain’s record on Iraq – you don’t fail to elect him president. He was right about Iraq when almost everybody else was wrong. It has turned out that if we had caved in the way Barack Obama and the democrats wanted we would now have a defeat. America would have a defeat rather than a possible victory.” can only be described as either being horrendously out of touch or a master sycophant to say the least.
If former mayor Giuliani has been paying attention, the debate is not about “victory or defeat”, but about the best strategy to save the lives of young American men and women who are being butchered in Iraq and Afghanistan daily. It is about abandoning dogmatic thinking in policy making and embracing pragmatism; it is about changing the mind set that every crisis has to be resolved by lobbing a couple of 5000-ton bombs at some people; it is about understanding the political, economic, social, judicial and cultural history and heritage of a people before deciding to force “civilization” on them through the use of force.
Even the Iraqis are telling us they would like us to leave. Would that be embracing defeat too?