Couldn’t Help But Notice (112107)

Rudy the Terrible (HT The New Editor) – at least according to Ellen Wulfhorst at Reuters:

“He is a scary guy,” said Jerome Hauer, who ran the city’s Office of Emergency Management for Giuliani. “He was probably one of the more divisive mayors the city has ever seen.

Tom Elia at The New Editor notes, as Ms. Wulfhorst “somehow” didn’t, that Hauer has given $9,000 to Democratic candidates since 2000.

As to the “substance” of the story, here is how Gotham felt after enduring four years of “scary, divisive” Rudy:

….. a late October 1997 Quinnipiac University poll showing him as having a 68% approval rating; 70% of New Yorkers were satisfied with life in the city and 64% said things were better in the city compared to four years previously.

Throughout the campaign he was well ahead in the polls and had a strong fund-raising advantage over (Democratic opponent Ruth) Messinger. ….. All four daily New York newspapers—The New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, and Newsday—endorsed Giuliani over Messinger.

In the end, Giuliani won 59% of the vote to Messinger’s 41%, and became the first Republican to win a second term as mayor since Fiorello H. LaGuardia in 1941. ….. The margin of victory included gains in his share of the African American vote (20% compared to 5% in 1993) and the Hispanic vote (43% from 37%) while maintaining his base of white and Jewish voters from 1993.

He’s “scary” because he’s a strong candidate, baggage and all.

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Read this (near the end at link; HT Taranto at Best of the Web), and you’ll see why Giuliani is a “scary” candidate — to those who might end up having to opose him:

So every generation of American is called upon to lead. I get very, very frustrated when I hear Americans talk about or hear certain Americans talk about how difficult the problems we face are, how overwhelming they are, what a dangerous era we live in. I think we’ve lost perspective. We’ve always had difficult problems, we’ve always had great challenges, and we’ve always lived in danger. Do we think our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents didn’t live in danger and didn’t have difficult problems? Do we think the Second World War was less difficult that our struggle with Islamic terrorism? Do we think that the Great Depression was a less difficult economic struggle for people to face than the struggles we’re facing now? Have we entirely lost perspective of the great challenges America has faced in the past and has been able to overcome and overcome brilliantly? I think sometimes we have lost that perspective. Do you know what leadership is all about? Leadership is all about restoring that perspective that this country is truly an exceptional country that has great things that it is going to accomplish in the future that will be as great and maybe even greater than the ones we’ve accomplished in the past. If we can’t do that, shame on us.

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Michelle Malkin follows up on the Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland, where a lot of the “baking” appears to have been cooking of the books, involving massive welfare fraud.

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I’m afraid we’re going to have to endure years of this deception (bold is mine):

Terri Schiavo’s family is upset with the media for again erroneously depicting the disabled woman as “brain dead” when she was able to interact with them before her former husband took her life. This time, the Schindler family says ABC News and the New York Times wrongly reported on her condition.

Yesterday on ABC’s “This Week” program, George Stephanopoulos, in an interview with Senator Fred Thompson, commented that Terri Schiavo’s autopsy proved she was “brain dead.”

….. “We are requesting that the media take a few minutes to research the facts regarding Terri’s case and, more importantly, her condition,” he added. In doing so they would learn that not one doctor ever diagnosed Terri as being ‘brain-dead.’”

Schindler said that included those physicians who wrote her autopsy report.

He told LifeNews.com that media reports on Terri’s painful 13-day starvation and dehydration euthanasia death rarely mention the more than 40 doctors’ affidavits submitted to the court.

Those legal papers either contradicted that Terri was in a so-called persistent vegetative state and they indicated she could have been helped with proper rehabilitation.

Schindler said the media also fails to report the medical records confirming that Terri at one time was beginning to speak, or the videos of Terri interacting with her family and her surroundings. Those prove she was alive and responsive, he said.

Oh, how determined the anti-life crowd and their Old Media sympathizers are to rewrite history.