Giuliani's dangerous bluster

Reading Giuliani's pompous foreign policy rhetoric and imagining he might somehow become president induces a deep sense of gloom.

By Joe Conason
Salon.com

Aug. 17, 2007 | Further omens that Rudolph Giuliani aspires to be a worse president than George W. Bush were not long in arriving. First came a fawning profile in the New Yorker, which included assurances from neoconservative panjandrum Norman Podhoretz, who advises Giuliani on foreign policy, that his candidate can be relied upon to bomb Iran.

Then still more evidence arrived in the mail with the new issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, which features a lengthy, pompous and ultimately very confused essay by the former New York mayor.

Giuliani's rhetoric -- which only succeeds in making Bush's oratory sound fresh by contrast -- is a warning in itself. The mind-dulling sentences published under his byline, each the dank spoor of Podhoretz, indicate a heavy proliferation of banal speech if he ever enters the White House.

Captive to his political opportunism and preoccupied with his jaw-jutting image, he simply cannot abide an original phrase, let alone an original thought.

Even more arresting than the moldy language in Giuliani's essay are the toxic policy suggestions. But its rapid barrage of cliché upon cliché is almost enough to conceal those neoconservative nuggets. A few samples, culled from nearly 6,000 words of the same cold-oatmeal consistency, show why digging them out was so onerous: (click here.)