A while ago, someone here asked, in light of his pro-gay/pro-abortion rights/anti-gun views, "what makes Giuliani a Republican?"

I think we now have the answer: his willingness to shamefully use 9/11 as a partisan cudgel against Democrats.

If his mantra will be to play offense, my only question is: what experience does this man have to be Commander-in-Chief?

The only card he plays is 9-11. I think when he is further scrutinized, he will have to make a hard decision: either be remembered in history as America's mayor (a title I detest) or have his reputation slowly bled by constant attacks about his "conservative values" and other criticisms (McCain's speech yesterday took a jab) about his actual performance pre and post 9-11 in NYC. I think he is so vain that he would rather be remembered in history in a positive light.

On 9/11 the Mayor of New York City was a Republican.
On 9/11 the Governor of New York State was a Republican.

On 9/11 the US House of Representatives was controlled by a Republican majority.
On 9/11 the US Senate was controlled by a Republican majority.

On 9/11 the President of the United States was a Republican.

On 9/11 he read "The Pet Goat" (holding the book upside down) before running away and hiding abord Air Force One.

That's not the kind of record I would be holding up, and criticizing the Democrats on, if I were Mr. Giuliani.

This is exactly why I'm starting to become concerned about Obama's campaign. It's this sort of weak-footed whining that helped get us into this mess. The ol "How dare they impugn my patriotism!" line that Daschle was firing out back in 2001-2002.

Compare Obama's remarks with Edwards's, and it's starting to look like Barack still has some lessons to learn about campaigning. Edwards fires back that this war has made us less safe, Giuliani is simply wrong, and we can't elect a Republican because of this war. Whether or not you agree with that, everyone here has to admit it's a much stronger response than just the classic "Hey, they're being mean, stop being mean, that's mean, meanie" we've been getting from the Dems for years.

Actually Gregory I think you'll find that the Senate was narrowly controlled by Democrats in 2001.

The Economist is spot on. We should be able to debate the merits of policies while assuming each others' intentions are good. The trick is, we have to actually assume good intentions on the part of those whose policies we find dangerous. I think it's human nature to assume that bad intentions are behind bad policies, and that sort of implication often seeps through in the political realm--whether it be Republicans insinuating that Democrats are siding with the terrorists, or Democrats insinuating that Republicans are seeking war profits for their cronies.

Much as I dislike Bush, he wasn't holding the book upside down. That was a prank after 9/11.

Dave

Sorry Balta, but I believe you have pretty badly mischaracterized Obama's response (and I am not a big fan of Obama).

What he actually said was:
"Rudy Giuliani today has taken the politics of fear to a new low and I believe Americans are ready to reject those kind of politics. America's mayor should know that when it comes to 9-11 and fighting terrorists, America is united. We know we can win this war based on shared purpose, not the same divisive politics that question your patriotism if you dare to question failed policies that have made us less secure."

Granted, it's not as tough as Edwards' response, or even Clinton's, but it's certainly not, "Hey, they're being mean, stop being mean, that's mean, meanie."

"Why can't two fine patriots debate whether certain policies encourage terrorism in the same way they would debate whether certain policies encourage economic activity?"

Because the last time I checked, there is not a single GOP candidate (or prospective candidate - see Fred Thompson's blogging on the subject at RedState.org) who makes a clean break with Bush's Iraq policy, and a now substantial majority of Americans find that policy badly lacking.

In such a situation it may be all too tempting for those GOP candidates unwilling to break with Bush on Iraq to forego the Economist's call for "patriotic debate," and instead go for the low blow.

BTW, I hear the Swift Boaters are gearing up for another campaign.

I agree with JohnS: Obama's response was heads and shoulders above Hillary's, although I did not read Edwards's. Indeed, after reading Obama's resposne I came away impressed. He managed to criticize the statement while still staying above the fray.

I fail to see any hypocrisy in the White House saying to Democrats, "Your intentions are decent, but your ideas are rubbish."

Has the writer at the Economist been living under a rock for the past 6 years?

From a simple click to google news you'll see quotes from the WH and Republicans:

McConnell: "Take out the surrender date..."
Perino: "Tonight, the House of Representatives voted for failure in Iraq."

Give me a break. The WH has never said anything close to "your intentions are decent..."

The defining mark of the negative politics under George W. Bush's America is the impugning of Democrat's motives in the WOT.

Brian, even though The Economist does place that sentence in quotation marks, the use of quotation marks, in this case, is not meant to indicate that the sentence is actually a direct quote from Bush or one of his representatives. This is an attempt by the (I think) editors of the Economist to restate the White House message, and they apparently believe that a complete restatement of that message would include "your intentions are decent," because it clarifies the meaning of the rest of the sentence, even if "your intentions are decent" had not actually been spoken by Bush or the people who speak for him (and The Economist argues that it has, though not in those words). The reason why "your intentions are decent" would not usually be spoken when the White House criticizes Congress' actions is that the objective is to criticize the action of Congress, not to reassure Democrats that Bush's personal opinion of them is high. The quotes from your comment criticize policies, not motives, and are consistent with "your intentions are decent, but..."

Also, thank you, Greg, for repeating what every Democrat on television is saying today. (However, I wonder why you decided to extend blame to Pataki and Congress in addition to Bush and Giuliani.) It presents an opportunity to refute it. First, it is utterly irrelevant (and it would waste precious seconds to respond to this by simply restating your original point with something along the lines of "How can you say that their conduct relating to September 11 is irrelevant to the question of 'who is better on' terrorism?" -- that is the question that I am about to address). Below, I will infer some of the things that seem to be implied in your comment, rather than assuming that you seriously meant to argue that anyone who was in office on September 11 should be blamed for it (even though that would explain why you threw Congress and Pataki into the mix, even though I haven't heard the Democrats on TV going that far).

The talking point seems to assume that if Bush and Giuliani were wrong before September 11, they cannot change their ways and become right and then warn of the dangers of being wrong. This assumption is incorrect. An official who was not adequately concerned about terrorism before September 11 should be encouraged to change his ways and treat it with the seriousness it is due. It is certainly possible for an official to do this. It would make Bush and Giuliani look bad, of course, if you were to show that they did not address terrorism as they should have, but it would not be hypocritical or dishonest for them to later to argue against the kind of approach that they themselves once arguably had. Also, there is nothing hypocritical about Giuliani arguing that the Democratic Party presidential candidates would not do what he now considers necessary to prevent terrorism, even if Bush also had fallen short, in 2001, because Bush and Giuliani are two different people.

The talking point also does not address the substance of Giuliani's remark, which it could have done by questioning whether a "pre-September 11 mindset" existed, what that mindset was, or whether any person or party has adopted this mindset since September 11.

Finally, though the talking point attempts to show that Republicans do not now take terrorism seriously by arguing that some Republicans did not take it seriously enough six years ago, and uses this as a defense of the Democrats, we do not have the basic information that would be required in order to contrast Democrats and Republicans. 1) Bush and Giuliani are only two Republicans, and at least before September 11, there was not a common Republican or conservative understanding of how seriously a president should take certain pieces of evidence related to a possible future terrorist attack, or how a mayor should prepare his city to resist terrorist attacks, so even if Giuliani and Bush did a bad job, what was "Republican" about the way they did it? 2) I see no basis on which we can even guess what the average Democrat president would have done in response to the pre-September 11 intelligence. I also see no evidence that the average Democrat mayor would have done a better job than Giuliani in preparing to deal with the aftermath of a terrorist attack. As a result, the contrast is between a parody of what two Republicans did and failed to do prior to September 11, and an idealized dream-version of what the opposing party would have done in its place (replacing the bad administrative decisions with good ones, without making bad decisions of their own).

I do not intend to suggest that either you or any party's party lines should be expected to go into this kind of depth, or that they can realistically be expected to be this honest. I only intend to point out how empty and irrelevant this Democratic Party line is.

Also, while this is tenuously on-topic, I do not remember ever actually hearing someone connected with Bush questioning the patriotism of a person for disagreeing with Bush or a Republican policy. I have heard a lot of liberals and Democrats claim to have been accused of this (often misquoting John Ashcroft from 2001 or dishonestly summarizing an ad run against Max Cleland in 2002), but I have never actually heard or read about a conservative doing this in real life (though I am sure that a few have, on the margins). The Economist points out in the article to which the update links that it would be difficult to find examples of this, and I agree, because I did a search of my own about a year ago, and all I could find was liberals claiming to have had their patriotism questioned.

It looks to me as though patriotism is almost never questioned explicitly. I think that the myth that it is exists because 1) conservatives do often use patriotism to promote some of their own beliefs and policies (and though Democrats do the same thing, they probably think of it as self-defense, which would prevent them from seeing the same practice by both camps as equivalent), so their opponents read the inverse into this argument: that if it is patriotic to favor a conservative policy, that it is unpatriotic to fail to favor it, even though the speaker may well not have intended that conclusion, and even though logic does not require that conclusion. 2) When Republicans or Bush's people characterize a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, for example, as a timetable for retreat or failure, the intent is to make the policy sound like it would be bad for or embarassing to America. It is easy to mistake such a claim that a policy hurts America as an attack on the patriotism of the people promoting the policy, even if the speaker's words question the policymaker's judgment, not patriotism (as the speaker, possibly a Vice President, may later affirm was also the extent of his intent). This is probably inevitable when the issue is such an inflammatory one -- some approaches really are better for al Qaeda than others are, and there are plenty of Democrats who have not been afraid to say that Bush's approach is the one that has benefited terrorists. Any patriot would cringe to hear it said that his approach is good for terrorists, but it still has to remain acceptable to compare the efficacy of policies while assuming that most people who promote those policies would ultimately like to avoid another September 11. 3) The first two explanations show how a Democrat could honestly and reasonably believe that the Republican Party has a practice of calling Democrats and liberals "unpatriotic," but there are others who are eager to believe anything about Bush and the GOP, if it is bad. Many of these people have questioned Bush and Cheney's patriotism over, and over, and over again. 4) Sometimes, it just excites normal people to believe that their president is doing something very bad, or to jump on a bandwagon of people who are pretending, hysterically, that it whatever he is doing is even worse than it is. There was even an episode of The Simpsons around 2004 that was meant to be some kind of satire, but that was so far from reality that it worked better as a demonstration of what people are prepared to believe about Bush. The Simpsons were arrested after Bart accidentally mooned an American Flag and Lisa quoted the First Amendment, and Clinton and Al Franken were then depicted as prisoners in Alcatraz (or possibly a generic version of it) with the Simpsons for being unpatriotic, when in reality, Clinton pointed out whenever he got the chance that he had never been richer than he was at that point, and Al Franken's popularity probably peaked around 2004 (since I haven't heard anything about him in a while).

Karl

Swift Boat.

Did they call him unpatriotic for disagreeing with Bush? They wouldn't have attacked him if he hadn't been running for president, but did they suggest that running against or disagreeing with Bush was itself unpatriotic? I thought that was what we were talking about.

I typed those two words in response to this, of yours: "I do not remember ever actually hearing someone connected with Bush questioning the patriotism of a person for disagreeing with Bush or a Republican policy."

They questioned Kerry's wartime service and suggested that his subsequent antiwar activities were unpatriotic. They did this because Bush's handlers obviously thought their candidate's military record didn't match up well and wanted to take Kerry and his Nat'l Security cred down a few pegs.

The sentence that you were responding to may be capable of more than one meaning, but I intended the words "questioning the patriotism of a person for disagreeing with Bush or a Republican policy" to mean what I think they usually mean -- that the disagreement with Bush is what would supposedly call a person's patriotism into question, not that the disagreement with Bush motivates someone to find some other reason to question the speaker's patriotism. The former would be an attempt to establish that no one who disagrees with Bush on certain issues can be a patriot, while the latter is just an ordinary personal attack, intended to discredit a particular speaker.

Josh,

Giulani says Democrats would take us back to pre-911 thinking. He also says the country would suffer more terrorist losses under Democrats. It is neither unfair nor inaccurate for a headline to summarize what Giulani is trying to imply without actually saying it: that there would be another 9-11 under Democrats. Similarly, while President Bush may not have actually asserted that Saddam was behind the 9-11 attack, he clearly intended to imply it, so a headline claiming that "Bush links Saddam to 9-11" would not be inaccurate, either. So, I think your conclusion is wrong.