That cell-phone call reveals the essential Giuliani

Giuliani since leaving office at the beginning of 2001 has changed from the lean and hungry civic reformer he once was into a gross ego-balloon of a celebrity, attached at the hip to his grasping third wife with whom he’s infatuated and to whom he is evidently in thrall. His candidacy thus seems to be about Rudy and Judi and their drama rather than about the country and how he would lead it.

Lawrence Auster, VFR, April 12, 2007

Let’s see now, this is my wife calling, I think.
Hello dear, I am talking to the members of the NRA right now, would you like to say hello?
I love you and I will give you a call when I am finished, OK. Have a safe trip, talk to you later dear I love you.
It’s a lot better that way. This is one of the great blessings of the modern age, to be always available—maybe it isn’t. I am not sure.

Rudolph Giuliani, answering a cell-phone call from his third wife while addressing the National Rifle Association, September 21, 2007

Read, see, and hear it here .

Some people say it was planned. But whether it was planned or not, it was equally gross and offensive.

* * *

Larry Sabato agrees with me on Giuliani’s cell phone call, and what it says about him:

University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato said the phone call was inappropriate.

“Rudy was rude. Nobody does this. Can you imagine a president doing that? ‘Can you wait a second, folks. It’s my wife on the line?’ ” Sabato said.

“There are only two possibilities to explain this. It’s an example of his weirdness or an attempt to show late in life that he has family values. You expect this from a teenager experiencing puppy love.”

Here’s more from the same story, showing the reactions of the audience to Giuliani’s rude and weird behavior:

As Giuliani tucked his phone back into his suit pocket, he told the audience it was better to answer his wife’s calls.

“This is one of the great blessings of the modern age. You’re always available,” he said.

“Or, maybe it isn’t.”

Clearly, some NRA members didn’t see it as any kind of blessing.

“You mean you can’t turn off your phone?” steamed Lacrecia Crowell, of Dardanelle, Ark. “I can’t believe it!”

“It just seems to me like he didn’t take the group that seriously,” added her husband, Art.

Another NRA member muttered, “That was just weird.”

It wasn’t the first time Giuliani took an ill-timed call from his wife. The same thing happened at a campaign stop in June

The Giuliani campaign deflected the criticism and suggested the latest call was no big deal.

“It was a candid and spontaneous moment on the campaign trail,” spokeswoman Maria Comella said.

Judith Giuliani, who had traveled with Rudy to London and then D.C., called to let him know she was departing on a flight to New York.

From the moment Giuliani—a nationally renowned gun-control advocate as mayor—bounded onto the stage yesterday, he was off the map.

“It’s nice to be here in England,” he told the confused crowd, many of whom didn’t know that he had just returned from Europe.

“Ah, America,” he said upon spying a U.S. flag.

There was some scattered laughter, but mainly confusion.

“Sometimes on presidential campaigns, you got to be reminded of exactly where you are,” he tried explaining. “It’s really, really exciting.”

The Rudy-Judi phone call had political observers wondering whether Giuliani was too beholden to his wife, or just pulling a deliberate stunt to diffuse the tension with NRA members.

Further notice how this egotistical dork running for president thinks it’s funny that he doesn’t know whether he’s in the United States or not. He thinks that would really win over the NRA members.

What that pathetic “joke” really conveys about him is his own detachment and alienation from America, as is also shown by his long time passionate support for illegal immigration, and his desire to make America even more enslaved to a global democracy campaign than it is as present.

* * *

American Cassandra writes:

Can you imagine going on a job interview and taking a phone call in the middle of it? Do you think you’d get the job? That is what Giuliani just did. There is no way to interpret what he did but as his saying he doesn’t want the support of the NRA. But if you’re sure you don’t want a job, it’s better not to go on the interview at all than to go on the interview and do something so unprofessional you know you’d never get the offer.

Is his candidacy for real or is it some kind of sick joke?

LA replies:

I think his ego is so bloated that he thinks he can do whatever he wants. He doesn’t care what people think of his behavior, he thinks it doesn’t matter.

Putting together his terrible joke to the IRA about not knowing if he was in England or America and his interruption of his speech for the phone call, Giuliani is saying: (1) he’s detached from America; and (2) he’s indifferent to voters, or at least to the IRA. Thus he considers himself above both America and any particular electorate. This is because he’s a global figure, the “fourth best-known American in the world,” a crusader for global democracy via American military prowess. Therefore America itself, and the voters of America, are of no importance. He’s not running for president of the United States but for supra leader of the world.

A reader writes:

It all makes sense when you understand that he is motivated by Judith, to insist that she be accepted as the wonderful person he thinks she is, to gain full approbation of the disgusting behavior he displayed while acquiring her, since after all it resulted in this marvelous love match and the opportunity for America to see her beautiful qualities, and to cap it all off by making her our First Lady. It’s the mainstreaming of the former mistress.

Then there is the simpler explanation that he does want to emphasize what little family he has at this point, so people will see him as a “family guy” and see the two of them as a “family” rather than as the product of adultery, infidelity, nastiness, and advanced homewrecking. Since right now people have told him to keep her a little more in the background, the phone call seems to him a more discreet way to do it (ha ha).

Another aspect is what is probably her insistence that she be involved at every point. Don’t forget her speech at the announcement of his intention to run, presenting the two of them as a “team” devoted to public service. Totally inappropriate, and yet he didn’t nix it and evidently his sycophantic aides were afraid to nix it as well. Don’t forget her determination to marry in Gracie Mansion so that she could stick it to Donna even more than she already had in helping to destroy his marriage and family life and being part of a public spectacle that humiliated her.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 21, 2007 09:28 PM | Send