Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Have the Judith Nathan Scandals Doomed Giuliani's Campaign?


Posted by Richard Blair, The All Spin Zone at 5:13 AM on December 3, 2007.


Richard Blair: Two revelations this past weekend in Rudy's "Fornigate" seem to elevate the chances that his campaign can't continue.

This post, written by Richard Blair, originally appeared on The All Spin Zone

Two revelations this past weekend in Rudy Giuliani's "Fornigate" seem to elevate the chances that his campaign can't continue. However, his Judy problem isn't even the worst thing about him that's come out this week - the Village Voice did an extensive expose about his ties to the terrorist supporting regime in Qatar.

The title of this post springs from the potential for a new sandwich at Carnegie Deli - the Toasted Rudy - piles of bologna and smelly cheese, dressed with just a squirt of mayo, on a toasted Italian hard roll. (For anyone unfamiliar with this venerable NYC establishment, Carnegie Deli names their fabulous sandwiches after celebrities...)

If I was a betting man, I'd lay some small money on a wager that Rudy Giuliani's presidential candidacy doesn't make it through the next seven days. (Caveat emptor: I also expected Abu Gonzales to resign months before he was actually eased out the back door of DOJ.)

Today, the probe into Rudy's Fornigate is continuing - and the revelation of the moment is that NYC taxpayers picked up in the tab, in October 2001, for escorting mistress Judith Nathan to her parents home in Hazelton, Pa. From the Daily News:

In the fall of 2001, city cops chauffeured Rudy Giuliani's then-mistress, Judith Nathan, to her parents' Pennsylvania home 130 miles away on the taxpayers' dime.
Records show that city cops refueled at an ExxonMobil station down the road from Nathan's childhood home in Hazleton on Oct. 20, 2001, while Giuliani stayed behind in New York attending 9/11 funerals.
A similar receipt pops up at a different Hazleton gas station two months later, when Nathan apparently went home for a pre-Christmas visit with her parents.
The records show that - in addition to using City Hall funds to take Giuliani and Nathan to 11 secret trysts in the Hamptons, as has been previously reported - taxpayers were paying to ferry Nathan on long-distance trips without Giuliani, now a Republican contender for President...

And, WCBS reports this morning:

A source involved with the mayor's operations at the time tells CBS 2 HD that Nathan took flagrant advantage of that police car and driver.

The source says Nathan forced police to chauffeur her friends and family around the city -- even when she wasn't in the car.
That set off alarms with ethics watchdogs.
"The rules are clear, you can't use city resources for private reasons," said Gene Russianoff of the New York Public Interest Research Group. "And if you're using a city car, a police driven car to chauffeur around relatives, unless they're explicitly protected and their deemed to be the subject of potential security threats, it's just wrong."
Nathan's detail was approved by the NYPD after a stranger made an unspecified threat to her. The commissioner at the time was Bernard Kerik...

The weird thing? Fornigate isn't even the worst entry on Rudy's presidential curriculum vitae. Totally buried in the avalanche of New York City accounting documents over the past few days is the Village Voice expose of Rudy's ties to the terrorist supporting regime in Qatar. (No excerpts - because everyone really needs to check out the Village Voice report.) The bottom line? Like George W. Bush before him, Rudy appears to be an enabler of terrorism rather than a faux warrior against Islamic jihad, as he likes to portray himself. Closer to reality, he comes across as an opportunist hack who will work with anyone that puts money on the table. In other words, the perfect corporatist Republican.

Are you lacking the time to read the Village Voice piece? Ok, here's a 7 minute Countdown segment with the author of the expose:

All things being equal, the Village Voice story should have been the final nail in the coffin of the Giuliani campaign. However, terrorism just isn't sexy any more, and a good sex scandal always sells. So, we take what we can get.

I want to be clear about something. Within the boundaries of consenting adulthood, I really don't care what Rudy does (or did) with his pocket rocket, whether it's functional or flacid. It's his libido, and he's gotta live with the personal consequences of whatever trouble his alternate brain gets him into. Defrauding taxpayers to feed his libido? That's a different thing, and with the evidence mounting hourly, it can't be long before the NY Attorney General mounts a probe.

Still, Fornigate should have been little more than a salacious side show; a coup de grĂ¢ce to the Giuliani campaign. In a perfect world, Rudy's post-9/11 business ties to a terrorist-supporting regime would have been the story that heralded the end of his White House aspirations.

The day that he announced his presidential campaign, I opined that we could reasonably assume that hell had frozen over if Rudy were ever to be selected to be the GOP standard bearer in 2008. And it's hard for me to believe that the generous big-money donors to his campaign didn't feel the exact same thing in their gut.

More than anything, that's why it's so confusing that his campaign has actually made it to this point, and wasn't cash-starved from the very start. Thankfully, I don't think it lasts much longer.

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Tagged as: giulaini, election08, judith nathan

Richard Blair is the blogmaster of All Spin Zone.

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