Giuliani Would Make a Worse President Than Bush
Republican magazines have begun their pimp operations for the GOP's 2008 presidential candidates.
In a recent issue of National Review, Jennifer Rubin, described as "a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.," pumps up Rudolph Giuliani as "America's mayor" and "America's prosecutor."
Giuliani is a media creation. Giuliani was unknown until, in search of name recognition, he staged a stormtrooper assault on the financial firm Princeton/Newport involving 50 federal marshals outfitted with automatic weapons and bulletproof vests. On another occasion, he had two New York investment bankers hauled off their trading floor in handcuffs.
Giuliani's victims had done nothing and were exonerated. But Giuliani's media stunts served to turn public sentiment against white-collar defendants.
Giuliani once bragged that by giving negative treatment to his targets, "the media does the job for me." Giuliani certainly had no difficulty manipulating Wall Street Journal reporters James B. Stewart, Daniel Hertzberg and Laurie Cohen or The Predators' Ball author Connie Bruck. Milken, who had done nothing except make a lot of money by proving Wall Street wrong about non-investment-grade bonds, was branded the "Cosa Nostra of the securities world."
Milken's "junk bonds" financed such household names as CNN, Barnes & Noble, Stone Container Corp., Time Warner, Safeway and Mattel. Milken provided capital to companies with promising futures that lacked investment-grade credit rankings. Milken operated out of Los Angeles, not Wall Street. His earnings and those of his upstart firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, aroused envy and hatred among the Wall Street hotshots. Milken failed to use his money to purchase political protection in Washington. Instead, he gave his money to organizations that help poor black children.
Milken was set up perfectly for an ambitious and unscrupulous prosecutor like Giuliani.
Giuliani leaked to his media pimps that a 98-count indictment was coming down against Milken. As Milken had done nothing and Giuliani had no case against him, Giuliani's strategy was to coerce Milken into a plea bargain. When Milken failed to send his attorneys to work out a plea arrangement, Giuliani used to report 18 times in The Wall Street Journal that Milken soon would face an expanded superseding indictment of between 160 and 300 counts.
To increase the pressure on Milken, prosecutors threatened to indict Milken's younger brother, Lowell, unless Milken made a plea deal. U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh quipped to his deputies, "A brother for a brother." Afterward, Giuliani's assistant U.S. attorney, John Carroll, told Seton Hall Law School students in April 1992 that Lowell Milken was a "sort of ready chip in the negotiations." Giuliani even went so far as to send FBI agents to hound Milken's 92-year-old grandfather.
Milken's attorneys concluded that Giuliani, lacking any case, was far out on a limb and desperate for a face-saving plea. They worked out a plea to six minor technical offenses that had never carried any prison time. But Giuliani was determined to have his victim, and Milken was double-crossed by sentencing judge Kimba "Bimbo" Wood and spent two years of his life in prison.
Carroll bragged that in the Milken case "we're guilty of criminalizing technical offenses. . . . Many of the prosecution theories we used were novel. Many of the statutes that we charged under . . . hadn't been charged as crimes before. . . . We're looking to find the next areas of conduct that meets any sort of statutory definition of what criminal conduct is."
It is a damning indication of the collapse of American law that an assistant U.S. attorney can be well received when he brags to law school students that federal prosecutors frame Americans with novel interpretations that create ex post facto law and violate mens rea—no crime without intent—the foundation of the Anglo-American legal system.
In his book Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and His Financial Revolution, University of Chicago law professor and dean Daniel Fischel proves Milken's innocence. But when prosecutors are corrupt, innocence is no protection.
Giuliani's crimes were not limited to Milken and Princeton/Newport. After investigating, I concluded that Giuliani framed Leona Helmsley with the suborned perjury of one of Helmsley's accountants, whose own infraction in helping to defraud Miller Brewing Co. was dropped in exchange for false witness against Helmsley.
I wrote about Helmsley's frame-up in National Review, and my story was picked up by one of the TV shows of the era. Both Alan Dershowitz and Robert Bork share my belief that Helmsley was framed with suborned perjury.
Today, National Review is a Giuliani partisan, as is the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. During Giuliani's "white-collar crime heyday," the Wall Street Journal editorial page was busy exposing Giuliani's duplicity and misuse of the media to create cases against innocent targets.
Giuliani rode his prosecutions of the rich to the New York City mayoralty, just as he rode 9/11 to become a GOP presidential candidate. Giuliani's career never served justice—it served his personal ambition, his ego. That a person so short on integrity could become a candidate for president is a damning indictment of the U.S. political system.
COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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Rudy's character was revealed by his shameless demagoguery in the SC GOP debate. What a liar. He's never heard of "blowback." Yeah right.
Hillary or Rudy? What a choice. I pray that Americans--not just Southerners--will re-examine secession as an option to the coming tyranny. After all, when the ship he's on is sinking, a prudent man starts looking for a lifeboat. The USS American Empire is going down. It's just a matter of time.
Michael Hill
I imagine we shall see more energetic regionalist movements. As the third-world invasion reveals the treachery in D.C., as judicial tyrants continue to legislate more globalism and secularism, and as the American Empire bankrupts us, more people will begin to realize that we have a federal government that has all but declared war upon Middle America.
This piece is a good reminder of an unsavory era, that of the Wall Street perp wals, in the man's career. This kind of abuse of power is distasteful in itself, and may be a key to understanding the man's character.
The good news is none of the Republican candidates can possibly get the nomination. The bad news is that one of them will.
Perp "walk," that should be.
I wonder if RG mentored Mike Nifong!
"Hillary or Rudy? What a choice. I pray that Americans–not just Southerners–will re-examine secession as an option to the coming tyranny."
I have a feeling secession is a moot point at this stage. The way I see it is this: Giuliani is less divisive and less incompetent. Hillary, on the other hand, is not only polarizing but so bad at managerial and executive tasks as to ruin everything she tries to run. Frankly, if she wants to ruin Washington, I say let her. Among the presidential hopefuls, she's probably the ripest for removal from office by a coup d'état; I would bet two to one that a Clinton presidency ends in such. We have been overdue for a real military government since at least 1964.
On the other hand, perhaps that is the logic behind the Clinton and Bush policies of keeping U.S. troops engaged in silly and costly wars across the globe: keep them from protecting the homeland from the White House. I must remember that Hillary supported the Iraq invasion all along.
When I wrote editorials at The Washington Times during the Milken affair, a Wall Street bigshot came to the paper to denounce Milken.
Apparently, he was on a one-man crusade to discredit Milken.
I asked him one simple question: Please explain what laws Milken broke, and what he did wrong, either legally or morally. He couldn't answer.
My suspicion is that this individual was less concerned that Milken had done something wrong than that Milken was making more money, as PCR says above: "His earnings and those of his upstart firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, aroused envy and hatred among the Wall Street hotshots."
For what it's worth, James Dobson announced in an editorial this week that he would not vote for Guiliani and would not vote if he were the GOP nominee. Given Dobson's influence among the Religious Right, that announcement is a blow to Guiliani (particularly, since by putting it in writing, it's not something Dobson can retract later with any integrity).
I can Clinton getting the nomination, but not Guiliani. No offense to anyone, but midwest Methodist liberal woman from New York is more likely to get the nod than an NYC Italian. Swap Rudy' red power tie for a white one, and he'd fit right in with the Sopranos. Too mobster looking for the heartland, no matter how much Faux News tries to spin it. And in the end, the Baptists and other Southern Fundamentalists won't go for him.
Just my inkling, Rudy is this cycle's Howard Dean and he will be finished by New Hampshire.
Congressman Ron Paul is the most constitutionally sound presidential candidate:
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/html/Issues_fx.html
Rudolph Giuliani, if elected as president, would eviscerate the Constitution and mislead the country into a police state. His autocratic record as mayor, criminal family history and dysfunctional family life indicate this:
http://zephyr.unr.edu/?q=node/21
Mr. Roberts, this is one of the finest pieces you have yet turned in. Giuliani's active misuse of power has been blatant, appalling, grandly calculating. Note too that Leona Helmsley's prosecution was fueled by Guiliani's exploitation of nothing more than public dislike of her cheezy image from ads, aided and abetted by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. And this during a year when she actually, by other accountants' mistakes, overpaid her federal taxes.
On March 17, 2003, I switched my party registration from Republican to Democrat, in protest of the then-impending invasion of Iraq. I've been thinking of switching back to Republican in order to vote for Ron Paul, but I just can't associate myself with a party that appears set to nominate a neo-"conservative" thug like Giuliani. And Romney's almost as bad. If either of those two get the GOP nomination, I hope the Republicans lose in a historically massive landslide.