“Rudy ducks questions on Judi’s car use”

That’s a headline in yesterday’s New York Daily News.

About which a VFR reader comments:

Ooooeeeeeoooooeeeeee.

And here’s more from the Daily News on how Judi Nathan was receiving taxpayer-funded chauffeur services from the New York Police Department earlier than previously disclosed, even before her affair with Mayor Giuliani was revealed.

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Terry Morris writes:

This is getting more and more Clintonesque. Next thing you know Rudy and Judi will be making an appearance on Sixty Minutes declaring that they experienced stronger family unity through the troublesome year of their secret love affair. Mainstream conservative America will applaud their “courage” for being forthcoming and discussing these private matters with a concerned American public. Rudy’ll be elected and two or three years into his presidency it’ll be discovered that he still can’t control his impulse to infidelity and indiscretion. Then mainstream conservatives who voted for the man, when called on it in a “we told you so” manner, will declare that they didn’t know anything of Rudy’s immoral behavior when they voted for him.

As I told the Clinton voters who made these claims back then, “you’re either lying or you’re stupid, or both.”

A reader writes:

That Giuliani and his staff keep trying to worm out of the Nathan revelations, as shown in the Daily News article, doesn’t speak well for him or them. They try to get away with it rather than confronting it for what it is. So they said charging other agencies than the police department for his protection while visiting her on Long Island was a practice also used by previous mayors, and that turned out not to be true, according to the previous mayors. Then there was the question of her protection. At first the Giuliani campaign story was that she got protection because of threats made after their affair was made public. But then neighbors said they saw security with her months before the May 10, 2000 date when the affair was made public. So then Giuliani staffers said that what the neighbors saw before the affair was made public could likely have been the the mayor’s own security people just dropping her off after their dates. But then the neighbors said that they had seen her frequently with the protectors, that the security cars would idle near their apartment house and in the garage, waiting for her, that she would return frequently from shopping expeditions with her security detail, who were sometimes carrying her packages. Then the staffers admitted that she had some protection even before the affair was made public. Such mendacity. Like kids caught stealing and coming up with one lie after another as each is exposed.

LA replies:

Even if, just for the sake of argument, we conceded that there is a justification for providing the mayor’s girlfriend with a taxpayer-paid security detail, providing her with a NYPD car service to take her everywhere, including officers carrying her packages, is over the line. Moreover, there are reports that she used the NYPD to drive around her friends and relatives.

Terry Morris writes:

Your unnamed reader writes:

“Such mendacity. Like kids caught stealing and coming up with one lie after another as each is exposed.”

Very true. I was always taught never to lie, which, besides being the right thing to do, would prevent my having to lie again and again and again to cover my previous lies. Before you know it, I was advised, you’ll be lying to cover your multitude of lies which started with a single lie, having convinced yourself that you’re telling the truth. And with every lie you tell, the next one just gets easier until you have no conscience left to inform you about the evil of your lies and the potential they have of destroying lives other than your own.

Obviously Rudy did not pick up on that kind of instruction as a young man IF he ever received such instruction, which I find very doubtful.

LA replies:

Your comment about lies being added onto lies is very apropos to a book I’m reading now, “Hoax,” by Clifford Irving, the true story of how he wrote his fraudulent Autobiography of Howard Hughes. It’s amazing.

The recent movie about it with Richard Gere (which was what got me to read the book) is totally false. It has Irving motivated by money. Money had nothing to do with it. He was doing it for the fun of it, for the thrill and excitement of seeing if he could fool a publishing company and the world into believing that Howard Hughes was giving him interviews for a book on his life, and then to write a fictitious biography based on these fictitious interviews. Irving and his friend Dick Suskind made up 1000 pages of Hughes interviews, using their imaginative skills as novelists to fill in the gaps of the known facts about Hughes’ life. Irving is an amiable character, not a criminal type, not meaning to hurt anyone, but he’s completely amoral, a genius at fooling people, at juggling ten different lies at the same time and being able to improvise with new lies as needed.

I categorize Irving as the vitalist type of nihilist. In a world without truth, he seeks fun and excitement as a substitute truth, to make himself feel more alive, as he puts it at one point.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 08, 2007 11:11 AM | Send