Please Don't Waterboard Santa, Rudy:
Of course Rudy Giuliani had to go to the hospital yesterday. While "shitting blood" might not truly be a "flu-like symptom," it is surely what the fading Republican frontrunner has been doing all this month. Sure, sure, you can say that Rudy's nosedive in the polls is related to the continuing revelations about his relationship with Bernard Kerik, his manipulation of the New York City budget to hide his affair with then fuck-toy Judith Nathan, or Mike Huckabee's unfathomable rise in the polls. Toss into that the coming wave of "No, Rudy, You Are Not the Hero of 9/11" ads. And you wouldn't be wrong. But, mostly, the Rude Pundit's pretty damn sure that Republicans have decided what's been obvious to the rest of us: Rudy Giuliani's just a creepy motherfucker.
To chill you down to your mistletoe berries, you gotta watch Giuliani's Christmas ads. As deranged as that "let's crucify the baby Jesus on this bookshelf" Mike Huckabee thing is, Giuliani's two ads qualify as the Silent Night, Deadly Night I and II of campaign commercials. The web-only one is impressive not only for what seems to be another interruption by Nathan (at least not on his cell phone this time), but for Giuliani ranting about "fruitcake." Did no one on his staff think, "Hmmm, maybe the guy who's kisser is all over the Internet in a dress and huge tits ought not be saying that word"? And, you know, much as the Rude Pundit would like "strict constructionist judges" for Christmas (when you bite 'em, they're gooey on the outside and crunchy on the inside), he'd rather Rudy give him a nice bottle of Patron Gold. Santa, sitting on the couch like he's Rudy's longtime companion, seeming approves of what Rudy says.
But that's nothing compared to the ad that's actually running on TV. It's so over-the-top disturbing that, if there is a war on Christmas, it qualifies as the atom bomb of the offensive, for any kids who saw it would not only never want Christmas to come again, but they'd burn down Santa's workshop with the elves inside in retaliation for destroying their childhoods. After listing the fascist wishes he has "for Christmas," Giuliani says, in a seemingly unconscious echo of Rodney King, he hopes "that all of the Presidential candidates can just get along." This makes Santa, sitting next to him, ho-ho in glee, saying, "I was with you right up until that last one," and this makes Giuliani cackle like a gargoyle over the eviscerated body of a virgin as he shrugs, accepting a candy cane from Santa, saying, "Can't have everything." Then, with the dead eyes of someone who has been sodomized one too many times, Santa stares at the screen, a glint of a plea there, begging for someone to either rescue him or shoot a sugar plum between his eyes.
And, perhaps, everyone's starting realize just how fuckin' bone-rattling creepy Giuliani's policies are. In his epic takedown over at the American Conservative magazine (motto: "Can we just go back to being isolationist xenophobes, please?"), Michael C. Desch, Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security Decision-making at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University (it just seemed appropriate to mention the whole magillah), simply destroys Rudy and his foreign policy advisors. With tons of scary examples, Desch demonstrates that a President Giuliani would fuck us harder than George Bush could ever hope. Giuliani, Desch writes, "is of one mind with some of the most unrepentant, unreconstructed neoconservatives around. Podhoretz told the New York Observer that 'as far as I can tell, there is very little difference in how he sees the war and how I see it.'"
Yeah, Rudy's gonna keep trying to "humanize" himself, as in those Christmas ads, but the more he does it, the more he's gonna seem like the unrepentant asshole, the demi-human, unqualified, vindictive, egomaniacal creep he's always been.
Run, Santa, run.
