Five Lessons in Ethics and Morality from Rudy Giuliani:
Yesterday, Republican presidential candidate and a man who talks like Woody Allen's evil twin, Rudy Giuliani, sat down for an hour-long conversation with Tim "Behold My Magnificent Pumpkinhead of Query" Russert on Meet the Press. It was like a Master's level lecture on how to weasel one's way out of every ethical discrepancy in one's background. Indeed, in their tree trunk homes in the woods of Minnesota, weasels gathered to watch the interview so they may learn to be better, faster, and fleeter at weaseling.

1. If, at some point in the future, you think you might want to run for president, you can use that as an excuse for anything. Giuliani was part of the Iraq Study Group, but when he realized it would cut into his continued profiting off the corpses of 9/11 victims, he bailed. Now he says that, because he was gonna maybe run for president, he had to resign from the committee: "As I looked at the commission, I realized that the people that were on the commission were exclusively people who had already had a political career, and none of them, at least foreseeably, was going to be running for office. So it seemed to me there was a mistake."

2. As long as you believe what you're doing for someone is good, it doesn't matter who is paying you. Sure, you didn't know that the balloon-making clown you hired for your kid's party is a massive child molester with kiddie corpses buried in his backyard. That's you. But if you did know before the party and you still hired him? Then you'd be Rudy Giuliani. Said Giuliani about his security consulting firm (motto: "Because he watched accountants leap to their deaths from the burning Twin Towers, Rudy's qualified to offer you advice") doing business with the emir of Qatar and people tied to Kim Jong-Il, "When you, when you deal with clients and you take on the problems of clients and you try to help them, it may be that somewhere, someplace they did something that was questionable or arguably questionable. These, these are things people aren’t even convicted of. So you can’t, you can’t vouch for every single thing they did. They thing that, the things we have done with them are honorable, ethical, useful and, and helpful." See? Rudy was trying to make them better entities. He wasn't a greedy, craven teatsucker. No, he was kind of a missionary. He wants to help reform the murdering, raping clown.

3. When you've truly been caught in a fuck up, say it was a fuck up, repeat it as often as you can, and then compare how many times you've been right to this one time of being wrong. On Bernard Kerik's recommendation to head Homeland Security when Tom Ridge stepped down: "I—what I did, here’s what I did do wrong. You want—the mistake was, I should have checked it out much more carefully before he went forward for any of these positions. And I didn’t. I didn’t check it out carefully enough. I should’ve done that. I usually do, and 95, 98, 99 percent of the times I’ve gotten it right. Gosh, I made a mistake. I, I learned from it. In the future, I’ll be much more careful about it. I should’ve checked him out much more carefully, and I didn’t." Holy shit, every defense attorney in the country ought to use that excuse for their clients: "Think of all the times my client robbed a liquor store and didn't accidentally shoot the clerk."

4. Being gay isn't sinful, but fucking people of the same sex is. Spaketh Rudy, "My, my, my—no, I don’t believe it’s sinful. My, my moral views on this come from the, you know, from the Catholic Church, and I believe that homosexuality, heterosexuality as a, as a way that somebody leads their life is not—isn’t sinful. It’s the acts, it’s the various acts that people perform that are sinful, not the—not the orientation that they have."

5. And fucking around on your wife is sinful, but providing your mistress with security paid for by the public is not.

Being Rudy Giuliani seems to mean always having to stumble, hem, haw, backtrack, stutter, justify, and re-state. Imagine what prosecutor Giuliani would have done with candidate Giuliani on the stand.