Liberal hate machine turns focus on Rudy

Philip Klein:

"Rudy Giuliani [is] probably the most underqualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency," Sen. Joe Biden declared during Tuesday's Democratic debate in Philadelphia. "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11."

The crowd roared with laughter, and liberal blogger Josh Marshall wrote, "Okay, I may have to endorse Biden after this tear against Rudy."

With the end of the dreaded Bush era approaching, Rudy Giuliani has slowly begun to supplant the president as the leading hate figure among liberals, a reality that will only help Mr. Giuliani in his efforts to overcome his differences with conservatives and win the Republican nomination.

Within the past month, The New Republic, The Nation and The Washington Monthly have all run anti-Giuliani cover stories, with the last one declaring that, "as president, Giuliani would grab even more executive power than Bush and Cheney."

In the Boston Globe, James Carroll wrote of Mr. Giuliani, "He's like a gang leader now, roving the streets, looking for some punk to bash. Iran will do."

This sentiment has dominated liberal blogs, where a general consensus has formed that Mr. Giuliani would be the worst president imaginable. Mr. Giuliani's decision to include neoconservative icon Norman Podhoretz on his foreign-policy advisory team has also triggered liberal paranoia about his determination to attack Iran. Lost in all the fuss is the fact that Charles Hill, a Yale professor, is actually Mr. Giuliani's top adviser. What Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Hill have both emphasized is that if America makes it clear that it will not hesitate to use military force, diplomacy has a much more realistic chance of succeeding. Not that this line of reasoning would win over any of his critics on the left.

"If you want to spend enormous amounts of money and kill millions of people in service of policies that will be counterproductive for both democracy and American national security then Rudy's your man," wrote The American Prospect's Scott Lemieux in a post titled "Stop Rudy." Mr. Giuliani's deviations from conservatives don't score him any points among the left, either. Mr. Lemieux's colleague, Dana Goldstein, pleaded with her fellow progressives to "stop calling Rudy Giuliani pro-choice."

The possibility of a Giuliani presidency had the Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias struggling for words: "One thing I'm wrestling with is finding a way to convey how terrified I am of the prospect of a Rudy Giuliani presidency in terms of its impact on our foreign policy."

But Talking Point Memo's Mr. Marshall comes close to best explaining why Mr. Giuliani is worse than Mitt Romney. "I know I've said before that Romney's profound and almost incalculable phoniness is a terrifying prospect to behold in a possible president. But the danger of phoniness, aesthetic or otherwise, cannot hold a candle to the truly catastrophic foreign policy Giuliani would likely pursue if he got anywhere near the Oval Office," Mr. Marshall wrote.

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What does it say about the left that they are so frightened of conservatives? Did Rudy through his political opponents in jail? Has he tried to criminalize political differences the way the left has? No. What he has done is say that he will go after the people that are trying to kill us and that is scary to the left. It is not uncommon in Presidential elections for opponents to try to depict the other guy as scary, but the hysteria of the left about Rudy may set a new standard in hysteria.