The Rude Pundit was diligently reading the Washington Post article on how Rudy Giuliani has puffed up his alleged terrorist fightin' "experience" like a sage grouse cock looking to get laid. Or, in the real world, how he lies. It's a good read, something like what we call "reporting."
And then the Rude Pundit came across this line that Giuliani said in an appearance in Las Vegas: "I investigated Yasser Arafat before anybody knew who he really was." He was referring to the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking and Arafat's role in it. The Rude Pundit, who remembered hearing about Arafat for most of his life, thought that it had to be a misquote, so he searched it out and confirmed it with another source. My, the Rude Pundit thought, what a curious assertion to make.
Giuliani has said that, as U.S. Attorney, he "led" the investigation into the PLO leader's connection to the ship's hijacking and the murder of a passenger; Giuliani's belief in his role is quickly disposed of in the article. But look at that line quoted above. And think about what that says about Giuliani.
He's claiming that somehow he had some kind of amazing knowledge, superpower smarts that would allow him to go after some unknown shady figure that the rest of us living our lives of blissful ignorance wouldn't have been able to comprehend because we didn't know who the hell Arafat was in 1985. Now look at this Time magazine cover from November 11, 1974:
That could also be covers from December 13, 1968 or March 27, 1978, which also had big damn pictures of Arafat on them. And that's just Time. Let's not talk about the couple of thousand of New York Times articles and countless TV news reports. Man, it must have been hard to figure out who this Arafat fellow was in 1985.
That's Giuliani, fluffing himself like a self-fellater on a homemade porn tape. Whether he's saying that he spent as much time at the World Trade Center site as first responders after 9/11 or miraculously transforming into nutzoid gun owners' bestest buddy after years of hawking the good of gun control, Giuliani is going to make himself out to be the baddest ass in Deadwood. It's the kind of serial exaggerating you do if you have nothing to run on. Imagine if Al Gore had said...oh, fuck it, never mind.
By the way, the best reason Giuliani can offer that he can "fight" terrorism is that he watched people jump out of a burning building that had been attacked before in the city that he led, as the Post article says, and now for him it's "personal." No wonder the Bush administration loves this jerk-off: he believes his own miserable failure makes him the best qualified person on the campaign trail.
