Not All Publicity Is Good Publicity
Rudy Giuliani gets an earful
Rudy’s image may never recover from last week.
Welcome to The Flashpoint.
Some housekeeping, as usual.
I’m at Sludge with a piece on Washington Democrat Adam Smith’s love of the military:
Smith’s reluctance to reduce military spending is putting him increasingly at odds with his party’s left flank—especially as defense military budgets under President Donald Trump have increased. There are now calls from a small but growing sector of the Democratic Party for a roll back on the bloated annual spending. Progressive leaders in the party from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) have demanded that the budget be reduced and for those funds to go instead into social programs, a demand with added urgency in the age of the coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, at The Appeal, I profiled Tarra Simmons:
“If we create thriving and healthy communities, where people have their needs met and where if they have an issue they have someone to talk to about it and have support, I think we can really reduce crime and our reliance on prisons,” Simmons told The Appeal.
Simmons added that she wants to give people “a first chance so they won’t need a second chance later on in life.”
“I guess that’s why I’m really running,” she said.
I’ve also joined the good folks at The Discontents newsletter, a weekly collection of work from progressive journalists.
What follows is a loosely rewritten version of my post today for that newsletter.
Rudy Giuliani's been in the news quite a bit the last week or so, including in the previous edition of this newsletter, with his involvement in the attempted Hunter Biden smear and his self-fondling/shirt-tucking in Borat 2 making headlines.
Rudy last year at a TPUSA event (Flickr)
Not all publicity is good publicity—on Sunday the former New York City mayor was cursed at while driving through Times Square as part of Trump caravan.
"Giuliani, you fucking scum," one counter-protester says in the video.
"Fuck you, Rudy," says another, as Giuliani's car beats a hasty retreat.
Other members of the parade were also cursed at and had eggs thrown at them.
To those of us who remember Giuliani's time as mayor—even, in my case, from Massachusetts—it was a welcome if long-overdue comeuppance. Before he oversaw the security failure that was the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, Rudy was a proud cheerleader for all the worst parts of the city's administrative and policing culture. He oversaw a culture in the NYPD that led to an officer shouting "This is Giuliani-time" during the torture and beating of Abner Louima in 1997 and refused to condemn the cops who killed Amadou Diallo in 1999.
All that, of course, was forgotten when he became “America's Mayor” after 9/11. For a long time Rudy's name was gold (he even got knighted).
But the decline in his image that began in 2007 when none other than then-Senator Joe Biden mocked Rudy for the "only three things he mentions in a sentence—a noun, a verb and 9/11" has gone into overdrive since he's become tied to the president. It’s a welcome corrective.
Rudy being subjected to verbal abuse Sunday in the center of Manhattan is not much, but it's enough to make me slightly less discontent for the time being.