Instead of backing down from his outright racist lies about the President, Rudy Giuliani proved he's the guy who writes those emails Grandma forwards with all the lies about the scary black dude in the White House.
Someone should tell Rudy when it's time to sit down and think for a minute rather than going on and on. This segment on Megyn Kelly's show even had her slack-jawed, and rightly so.
He led off by refusing to take Kelly's invitation to apologize to President Obama by digging in his heels.
He insisted, “I don’t hear from him what I heard from Harry Truman, what I heard from Bill Clinton, what I heard from Jimmy Carter, which is these wonderful words about what a great country we are, what an exceptional country we are."
Stressing his commitment to his original words, he stubbornly (and bitterly) clung to them.
“I’m right about this. I have no doubt about it. I do not withdraw my words.”
And then he went right on to play the old, tired, bent and worn Reverend Wright card, after first tossing out Frank Marshall Davis as Obama's first communist influencer. The way Rudy says it, you'd think Davis was his second daddy or something.
Then he moves on to Saul Alinsky, because what would a winger rant be without Alinsky?
Megyn Kelly pushed back, pointing out that Obama's grandparents were proud, stolid Americans, but Giuliani was not to be deterred, which is when he laid down Reverend Wright.
"How about being in a church for seventeen years, where the minister says 'It's not God loves America,' it's 'God damn America.' Now if you were in that church, wouldn't you quit that church?"
Of course, Obama did quit that church, and as David Axelrod noted in his just-released book Believer, the Obamas weren't there for that particular sermon and were more or less Easter and holiday attenders anyway.
I could stop here and rant about the fact that Reverend Wright's words were pulled cleanly out of context and the firestorm that ensued was unfair not only to Obama, but also Wright. But why bother? This is all old news. It was a way to smear and "other" Obama with implied racist overtones.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz came out today and flatly called for Republicans to put a stop to this kind of nasty smear. They should, but they won't. This is old and tired. What's next? Asking for Obama's birth certificate?
Giuliani seems old and befuddled during this interview, as if he's half-heartedly tossing out the old tropes as red meat because he knows they've got nothing. No ideas, no plans to move the country forward, just...nothing.
It's sad, but mostly it's infuriating. Obama's race speech in 2008 was prophetic:
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle — as we did in the O.J. trial — or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina, or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
Fox News and Rudy 9-11 Giuliani did that.
They need to stop.
