Hero-For-Sale Rudy Giuliani Trolling for Cash in NM This Weekend

The Albuquerque Journal reports Repub prez hopeful Rudy Giuliani will be in Albuquerque this Saturday looking for big dollar donations from NM GOP bigwigs at a private luncheon fundraiser. It will cost $4,600 to participate in a "round table discussion" with Rudy, and a mere $2,300 for a photo standing next to the former New York City Mayor. When Giuliani goes after the big bucks, playing on his carefully crafted image as an alleged American hero and patriot for his actions during the 9-11 tragedy, he doesn't fool around. He milks it to the nth degree.

To get the full flavor of how craven Giuliani has been in parlaying his 9-11 connections into cash and pseudo-credibility, you really have to read the new article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. According to a sidebar in the print version of the article, Rudy was worth only $7,000 in 2001, as reported to divorce court. This year his net worth is $30 MILLION, as disclosed in federal election reports. Not bad for "America's Mayor," as he bills himself.

Excerpts from the online version:

Although few people outside of New York know it yet, there is an emerging controversy over Giuliani's heroic 9/11 legacy. Critics charge that Rudy's failure to resolve the feuding between the city's police and firefighters prior to the attack led to untold numbers of deaths, the most tragic example being the inability of firemen to hear warnings from police helicopters about the impending collapse of the South Tower. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the two departments had been "designed to work independently, not together," and that greater coordination would have spared many lives.

... Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

You might have surmised by now that Taibbi isn't known for mincing words. Here he is highlighting Giuliani's hookups with Karl Rove's henchmen and a Swift Boat-style attack on Hillary:

... there's no question that Giuliani has made the continuation of Swift-Boating politics a linchpin of his candidacy. His political hires speak deeply to that tendency. Chris Henick, formerly Karl Rove's most trusted deputy, is now a key aide at Giuliani Partners, the security firm set up by the mayor to cash in on his 9/11 image. One of his top donors, Richard Collins, is a longtime Bush supporter who was instrumental in setting up "Stop Her Now," a 527 group modeled on Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that will be used to attack Hillary Clinton. And the money for the smear campaign comes from the same Texas sources behind the Swift Boaters, including oilman T. Boone Pickens and Houston home builder Bob Perry.

... And let's not forget Bernie Kerik, Rudy's very own hairy-assed Sancho Panza, who was nixed as director of Homeland Security after investigators uncovered a gift he received from a construction firm with alleged mob ties that wanted to do business with Giuliani's administration. It is a testament to the monstrous breadth of Rudy's chutzpah that he used his post-9/11 celebrity to push his personal bagman for a post that milks the world's hugest security-contracts tit -- at the very moment when he himself was creating a security-services company.

The article also goes into detail describing how Rudy's inept and careless handling of the clean-up of the 9-11 wreckage is producing medical problems galore for many who participated. And how his stint as Mayor of New York and his subsequent role as a lobbyist were characterized primarily by his jumping into bed with whoever had big bucks to give. Ever since 9-11, Rudy's focused on setting up private companies that benefit hugely from "homeland security" contracts, and grabbing up to $200,000 per speech to talk about his patriotism and how he saved the day in NYC. His main message? Pay me, I'm a hero!" In 2002 he he reported $8 million in speaking income. Last year it topped $11 million. Not bad for someone who basically held the spotlight during the tragedy during one day before the TV cameras while Bush was hiding out.

I'm sure he'll get more than a few standing ovations (and big checks) when he appears this weekend before New Mexico's Repub elite. He's not known for doing anything without a big personal payoff. Cha-ching!