Rudy is not going to get the nomination. Mitt will get it because he is younger and good looking and makes a good impression. Rudy belongs with John, the "over the hill gang."

Speaking of contradictions, old video of Al Gore shows him saying that Papa Bush was too soft on Saddam. Many politicians are like Rudy and Al.

BillyBob, that's not fair to call that a contradiction on Gore's part. I'm a war opponent and I also say Bush Sr. was too soft on Saddam. He let Saddam think we wouldn't care if he invaded Kuwait, and he let Saddam crush the uprisings after the first war. Most important, pointing this out doesn't suddenly turn a person into a neocon or supporter of W's invasion. It just means the Bushes screwed up both times.

I'd also like to point out that this particular contradiction is one that took place within 9 months. I think our national obsession with "flip-flopping" is inherently flawed. When two contradictory statements are issued close together by the same person and no new information has been introduced, this may indeed be a real issue. But, to change one's mind over the course of years and in light of a tremendous amount of new information is not "flip-flopping" it is intelligence. Those of us who refuse to change our views in light of new information are dogmatic and irrational in holding to their beliefs no matter what.

So, if someone can get Giuliani to explain his change of opinion and it is indeed because new information has come to light, then more power to him. Unfortunately, in this case, that appears exceedingly unlikely. This makes the Gore comparison of a change in mind, if there is one, totally irrelevant. Much has changed in the world since Papa Bush was president.

Further, Eric has a really good point about the Bush family being unable to make an intelligent decision regarding Iraq.

Saddam funded the PLO terrorists in their bombing and harassment campaign against Israel. He had a large army and he was looking at Israel as the next target. The Jews contribute a lot of money to the political parties, e.g. AIPAC. Saddam had to go for the good of Israel, not for America's good because he had oil(Israel does not have oil, only problems)and we like countries that have oil. Iran is next on AIPAC's list.

"Doodie Rudy" fits in with the Repo crowd. Everytime he or Cheney claims "that we'll get hit if a Democrat is elected" leads me to believe that they have or would plan future terror against their own country to insure the financial windfalls that Bush has provided. Republicans don't care about facts and follow the FOX news line of BS. Giuliani is a piece of shit for using such a strategy to make himself more attractive to the right wing. It's quite sickening to hear how each Repo is more religious than the next. War is good. Abortion is bad. The great equalizer from out of the sky is coming. Whoopee, were all going to die.

America needs honest capable leaders who are grounded in reality and not pandering to sanctimonious panhandlers and their delusional congregations or gun runners. Blaming Clinton for anything is stupid and base. How lame can they be? Of course Richard Clarke was put down for not playing ball with Bush and having his own take on the situation that he was involved with first hand. Repo Madness is out of control

Capping the oil in Iraq and keeping the prices high for OPEC has been a windfall for the oil companies and a national disaster otherwise for America. It's all about the oil and it's time to send all the geaseballs packing including Giuliani if he is only going to back the staus quo instead of offering any real solutions.

The press is not going to focus on contradictions by anyone who is not democrat because the so-called "liberal" Press is corporate owned.

Rudy might have been a serious contender for the GOP presidential nomination if he weren't such a panderer. Trying to bend over backwards to please every GOP audience he addresses renders Rudy not only dishonest but in the long run unelectable.

The Bush family has never made an inteliigent decision. If they had made just one it wold have started with birth control!

If there is one thing that is constant, consistent and uniform about the republicans it is their unique ability to change their minds as fast as Rudy changes from trousers to a dress. A chameleon would be hard pressed to change its colors as fast as these republicans change their mind. Good God these republicans are giving politics a bad name!
Al Comstock

Clinton's ability to respond effectively to the terrorist threat was hamstrung by the Republican Congress, who were more concerned with undercutting a Democratic President for political gain than they were with protecting the country.

I don't think it matters who the Republican nominee is, since I don't think they can manage to steal another Presidential election.

Back in the 1990s it was the Republicans who whined, "no war for monica" when Clinton was actively pursuing Osama Bin Laden. And it was republicans who criticized Clinton for "wasting" time on Bin Laden.

Bush takes office, ignores Bin Laden, ignores the warning, fails to prevent the preventable 9/11, and then refuses to capture Osama Bin Laden. And Giuliani? His incompetence regarding the command center, radio equipment, and police + fire coordination prevented hundreds of lives from being saved that could have been saved.

Rudy Giuliani perhaps might ask the grand question that Edward R. Murrow wanted to make into a TV program back in the 50's. What are the consequences of American foreign policy in the Middle East? It is indeed difficult to foresee what Murrow meant. I mean was he referring to Iran? Saudi Arabia, Egypt, was it our stance towards Israel, the turning of what was once Palestine into Israel as though we were Gods dividing up the earth? Was it how Oil was determining our foreign policy as well as national security? I think that the potential contradictions involved are indeed staggering? But perhaps that was Murrow's point—what will be the consequence of all these contradictions in policy? If we as a people became clear over these contradictions because our media actually allowed them to be presented, would the American people give their seal of approval to official policy? Americans are no more aware of what our country does today than they were in the 50's, but in the 50's our acts had not yet led to the cataclysmic consequences we experienced on 9/11, yet it was back then we were merely laying the ground work for the terrorism of today. I think Rudy thinks that our actions back then were somehow successful because no one attacked us. Still does the belief that “being hard on terrorism” answer the why behind terrorism? I mean we are a nation that is not without an understanding of why one rebells, we were a nation created out of rebellion—it is in the blood so to speak and that is grounds to why Americans need to ask why. Of course if we remembered why we rebelled then there is the danger we might rebel now because the state of union today has become so ugly that demands a rebellion.

Bill Clinton did not create terrorists by being weak. At least in the sense where “might makes right” is understood as “strength”, which is apparently, the 'security expert' Rudy Guiliani's concept of strength. Clinton maybe created Sudanese terrorists trying to kill Ibn Laden or Somalian terrorists, but not for trying to feed them rice but for the failed black opts mission that forced us out of Somalia—thus from doing good we are made to look bad which in terms of appearances is defeat (this is macho stupidity at its best or worst) or perhaps even Serbian terrorists for the endless bombing—but here Clinton did succeed in bringing the Serbs to the peace table and stopped the complete melt down of the Balkans and beyond. To that end Clinton served us and the world. Clinton tried to build a bridge between Palestinians and the Israelis and it looked like he might have succeeded but it was the murder of Rabin by an Israeli fanatic that destroyed the effort—when Rabin died unfortunately the bumbler squad took over in Israel and what Sharon and Ohmert have accomplished is to empower Islamic fundamentalists at the expense of the secular PLO (Fatah). Look at the demolition of Lebanon because of two soldiers taken prisoner—this too is “being hard on terrorists” according to the Guiliani concept of “being hard”. The vast expanse of chaos that now threatens Lebanon is clearly flawed US policy and here Israel embarrassingly discovered something—they are no longer invincible. I guess there are some who would say that this is directly the fault of Ohmert's but it is more importantly the failure of Bush. His position is to act as a world leader and here he ought to have intervened immediately—but how could Bush intervene? He doesn't seem to have the faintest conception of what is going on—apparently he's only got a mechanical punch line—“I'm tough on terrorism”, while a real world leader would have applied the principle that what serves us best is regional stability the world over, meaning he would have stopped Ohmert before war started. Bush claims he supported Lebanese democracy and when he was tested he failed. I call that weakness not “strength”. The truth of power is knowing when to assert it, but first it demands the comprehension of what power is. Bush, in my opinion has proven that he lacks that understanding, Clinton showed again and again on the world stage that he did know—consequently the world tends to admire him more than they despise him—which in rudiment is power pure and simple. Approval, in the sense of a global consensus for one's actions, is power.

Perhaps Giuliani doubts the significance of the Shah and the 1979 revolution as being related to our acts that put the Shah in power? Does Rudy think that Khomeini was a fluke who took power without massive support? Khomeini carried the people of Iran in the same way Napoleon did when he returned from exile. Yet what was the shape of Iran's finances when the revolution occurred and why didn't the CIA sense the danger? Iran was bankrupt! The West had effectively slaughtered the golden goose, the price for this irresponsibility was revolution—Iran from a client point of view was grossly mismanaged; from a national security strategy Iran's position on our chess board was simply not understood, not even seen—we did not analyze the situation clearly because we were wearing McCarthy spectacles when we installed the Shah and we were still wearing the same goggles when the Shah was was kicked out. Before the Iranian revolution had occurred the regional transformation of the Middle East had already moved beyond Marxism and switched towards “Islam”—but Washington was still lost in the commie cloud (thus what constituted our concept of hegemony was not understood, because we did not evaluate power but locked on ideology. That is why McCarthyism as a security strategy was and will always be flawed—but the aftershock of McCarthyism runs deep and still afflicts the national psyche—merely consider Bush's “axis of evil”). When Iran chose Islam it was partly because it was the only choice they could make and slip through the clutches of Western and Soviet imperialism and a means to be masters of their own house—that is called realpolitik (please note that I am no expert though my tone might pretend to be. I'm merely a subterranean dharma bum doing a stream of consciousness between drinks)

Regardless it is not Clinton that has defined the development of the Middle East but rather how Western influence has held its sway over the Middle East for several centuries, intertwined with the Ottoman dominance that collapsed at the end of WWI. Thus it would seem to me that the search for these Middle Eastern people is a struggle to regain their identity—to recover their ethnocentrism—it's a kind of collective inferiority complex caused by centuries of colonialism and the weapon against it is presently their religion—the common element. Still in the West when religion began to fraction because the Holy Roman Empire crumbled into a multitude of states, the ability of religion to hold sway over the collective mind of the empire vanish because of the rise of states more powerful than the Vatican. In the Middle East, Islam is already divided into sects and some of these sects violently oppose one another—thus it would seem that unity through Islam will prove for these religious oriented terrorists to be a contradiction in terms, it's a dead end—the religion is no longer “one” but several. Perhaps the question is which state or states will rise up as the center or which states might form a polarity or can they achieve a union of Arab States?

I guess that what I find difficult is what Republicans mean by “strong on security”. I mean consider China with its present currency advantage. They have that position because they have at their disposition control over the necessary instruments to set the price of their currency to fit their national interests—while our ability to control the instruments over our currency have be sacrificed by mismanagement (we are owned by our debts and who created those debts? Not Clinton but Bush and the Republican Party and this is the 3rd time in the last 30 years—Nixon caused the collapse of Breton Woods (Vietnam), Reagan/Bush the collapse of the more or less fixed exchange regimes that had replaced Breton Woods (destroyed by Reaganomics), and in the world today all currencies basically float. But how can the world swallow an American leadership that condones economic policy that directly results in a decrease in American currency by 40% and not expect enemies to arise everywhere on earth—and that Guilani is said to be strong on National Security suggests to me merely how hallow the concept of nation security rings in the Republican Party in general. The US is a nation that stands or falls upon its ability to create the conditions favorable to trade, because we are a trading state and by abusing the position of our currency as the world's dominant currency must be seen as a direct threat to our national security as well as global security, because this abuse signals an inability to trust Republican leadership and in this light Clinton offered the world a stable dollar, a balanced budget and a trade surplus—indicators that we stand in relation to the world as a leader and not as an irresponsible autocracy—that to me Rudy Guiliani is what the Republican Party has given the world since the President walked into the White House in 2000.