Rudy, You're Wrong

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So, Rudy, I hate to say this -- we puritanical Gemini Catholics share a lot in common -- but, dude, your power-drunk rant last night was totally whack. You let me down. And you let a lot of folks who backed you over the years down. I know where your head is at: You're thinking that James Q. Wilson's broken window theory works just as well as on the international stage as it does on urban streets. But, Rudy, it doesn't quite work that way. When we bust turnstile-jumpers or minor crack dealers in New York City, no one dies, except for the occasional Amadou Diallo. But when we try to lower the threshold of terror tolerance on the world stage by busting up every thug leader who might have some remotely tangential connection to Al Qaeda or Hamas, thousands of innocent people die. Our sweeping preemptive attacks aren't seen as making the world a safer place. Instead, they make us seem like irrational, out-of-control monsters. Like oil-hungry thieves. Like stooges of Ariel Sharon.

I know you don't care what people think of you. And I admire that to an extent. It works when running a madhouse like New York City. But it absolutely does not work in international affairs, where perception becomes reality overnight, and where the weapons of retribution are not Saturday Night Specials, but generations of suicide bombers. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay 'Self Reliance,' 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.' Right now, sir, at this precarious moment in world affairs, we don't need little minds.

Rudy, you've always struck me as a phoenix-like character. As you were putting white-collar criminals behind bars as a federal prosecutor, you were losing a Mayoral election to David Dinkins. As you were winning kudos for transforming New York City into one of the safest cities in the world, you got into an ugly pissing match with your police chief, William Bratton, over who should get the credit. Just when you were ready to go out and capture a U.S. Senate seat, you were beset by prostate cancer and a messy public divorce. And now that you've been almost canonized for your courage and compassion surrounding 9/11, you, the Mayor that championed urban civility like none other, deliver a churlish, childish and strikingly un-civil speech to the RNC that brings up echoes of your party's 1992 convention, when the GOP showed its unmistakably cruel face to the world.

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