With friends like these…

His unreconstructed racism, his cocksure arrogance, his personal nastiness, his incompetent governance (which, quite frankly, must be recognized to include failing, despite clear warning, to provide adequate emergency communications equipment to firefighters and to locate the emergency response center in the likeliest target), and his clear likelihood of following in Dubya’s footsteps as a xenophobic institutional torturer (Abner Louima anyone?)… all seem to be features, rather than bugs, as St. Rudy Giuliani marches toward the Republican nomination (NOT: his front-runner-ness is actually by and large a media creation, insofar as the actually moderate and not bat-shit-insane-like-Rudy Mitt Romney is way ahead in both New Hampshire and Iowa, and hence, will win the nomination… but hey, let’s play along anyway.)
While the “family values” party toys with a [pro-gay rights, pro-abortion rights, pro-gun control] candidate on his third wife (and she on her third husband) and whose own children not only won’t campaign for him, but evidently won’t talk to him… one of America’s Mayor’s leading political time-bombs still remains his best-friend-forever, Bernard “America’s Cop” Kerik, today indicted in a 16-count indictment on a variety of federal charges, including lying to White House officials, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice associated with a mobbed-up company that, among other things, performed renovation work on Bernie’s apartment, apparently gratis (while it was being investigated… or thanks to Bernie, not being investigated.)
Anyway, serious enough charges to warrant $500,000 bail (arranged easily enough if you’re St. Rudy’s best-friend-forever). Once again, this is not a guilt-by-association thing: most of us have friends who have disappointed us in one way or another, and in the case of politicians, those disappointments often come with jail time. But Kerik has– and has always had– more skeletons in his closet than the average anatomy lab. And St. Rudy still thought he could foist Kerik upon the rest of us as his choice for Homeland Security Secretary. And in response to being called on his… questionable judgement… on the campaign trail, St. Rudy adopts the Roveian misdirection ploy, and points 9-11 to the 9-11 great record that 9-11 he singlehandedly achieved 9-11 as mayor (because his predecessor David Dinkins hired Ray Kelly as his police commissioner who got all the trends in motion, and because of demographic and economic reasons, and some things within St. Rudy’s control and many more things that were not.)
Which, once again, is a feature, rather than a bug. Just ask Pat Robertson. As Stephen Colbert says, reality has a disturbing liberal bias.