Once again, the inimitable Rachel Lucas nails it (emphasis mine -- ed.):
Rudy Giuliani sure is proud of what he did in NYC, which is fine, but dude, NYC isn't the USA. Plus, he made no sense. He "had" to welcome the illegals because it was the only way to prevent crime against the rest of us? Or something like that? I liked what he said about focusing on criminals instead of guns themselves to reduce shootings by 75%, but I don't think he gets the fact that again, NYC is not the whole country, and most of us gun owners couldn't give two shits that a gun ban in NYC might possibly have helped reduce crime there - first of all, I don't believe in the correlation and second of all, most places where people have a lot of guns aren't overrun by illegals and gang members. It always confounds me that these big city wankers on the coasts seem to have no clue about the entire middle part of the country.
Yeah, Rachel, me too, even while it does make perfect sense that the coastal leftists in both parties have no clue -- after all, they don't call it "flyover country" for nothing. What confounds me more, though, is that so many people seem to think that Giuliani is the great hope for the GOP in 2008. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if it were not for 9/11, everyone who's trumpeting Giuliani as the savior of the Republican Party would see him as the authoritarian fascist he is. As for this supposed focus on criminals and not on guns...if that were really the case, then he wouldn't have gotten in line with certain other mayors in the '90s to file frivolous suits against various gun manufacturers. If that really were the case, he would not have supported the so-called Assault Weapons Ban, licensing and registration for gun owners, or any other infringements of the right of the people to keep and bear arms -- including the odious Sullivan Laws in his own city. Giuliani talks a good game like any semi-decent politician -- and I mean semi-decent at the game of politics -- but his record utterly betrays him. We all would be wise to see through that.
In other news, of course, Fred Dalton Thompson has finally manned up and officially declared his run for president. Here's his 15-minute video announcement.
Like I say, it's 15 minutes long, but well worth your time. Thompson has his flaws, most notably his support of the McCain-Feingold "campaign finance reform" act, but overall I honestly believe he's the best man for taking on whoever the Democrats end up nominating. And here's something I think is pretty funny -- if you go here, and scroll through the comments, you'll see people questioning Fred's conservative bona-fides by citing his support for McCain-Feingold, but little to no calling out Giuliani or Romney for their support of gun control or pandering to hunters a la John Kerry. Bit of a double standard there, don't you think?
I wouldn't mind at all seeing a Thompson/Hunter or Thompson/Tancredo ticket before it's all said and done. Thompson/Giuliani or Thompson/Romney, not so much. Somehow I think Thompson and his people have a better reading on the conservative base than that, though. Go, Fred, go.
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