Rudolph Giuliani for President

Jonah Goldberg has a very telling article on Rudy Giuliani that I can heartily endorse. While I am a social and a fiscal conservative, I have my political priorities. And these begin with winning the war against Islamofascism.

But Goldberg also reminds us why I loved Giuliani before 9/11.

... Giuliani was considered a raging right-winger as mayor. No doubt this had much to do with the city’s political center being so far to the Left. But there’s more to it than that. When I grew up in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, the job of mayor was, essentially, to manage the city’s decline. Crime was not only seen as permanent, some on the Left even tried to rationalize it as part of the city’s charm.

By the time Giuliani arrived, social chaos was seen as the natural order of things. Giuliani heroically challenged these assumptions. He and his first police commissioner, William J. Bratton, refused to accept that mere containment was the best anyone could hope for.

Some are familiar with Giuliani’s quality-of-life campaign against turnstile jumpers, welfare cheats, squeegee men, graffiti artists and porn shops. What’s forgotten is that Giuliani was reviled for these efforts by the New York Times, the entertainment industry and the intellectual left — whose numbers are so great in the Big Apple that they actually constitute a voting bloc — and that every day he leaped back into the breach.

It’s true; Rudy turned New York City around. Not everything he did was pure as the driven snow, he was – after all – a politician who craved the limelight. To show how tough he was on “white collar” crime he once invaded the offices of Kidder, Peabody subjected several of it’s executives to a “perp walk,” ruining their careers before releasing them – uncharged.

But he was good for the city. Tough in the face of the entire Liberal establishment who were content to see the pimps, pushers, robbers and thieves make New York a living sewer while they insulated themselves from all that with limousines, luxury apartments with doormen and houses in the Hamptons.

I was sorry to see Rudy refuse the race for Senator because of prostate cancer. But in a primary and in the general election, I would vote for him in a New York Minute.