The O'Rudy Factor

Rudy was on O'Reilly last night, and Hotline On Call has the highlights. Looks like he's starting pivot on immigration. (My slogan suggestion: He'll do for the border what he did for crime in New York City.)

Rudy Giuliani stopped by the "O'Reilly Factor."

On the situation in the Middle East: "If you look at the Middle East, you have a lot of incompetent, irresponsible, oppressive government. And the leadership there has been able to get away with blaming their problems on us."

Asked about Iraq: "I don't think we're losing the war in Iraq. I think the war in Iraq is now an opportunity to create an accountable government in Iraq."

On illegal immigration: "When I got into office I had 400,000 illegal immigrants, give or take 100,000. ... The Immigration and Naturalization Service would only deport 1,500 to 2,000 a year. So I said to myself I have 398,000 illegal immigrants because the federal government is not going to do anything about this. It can't. So I had to figure out how do I deal with it. ... We made sure that their children were allowed to go to school for which we were criticized. But if I didn't do that, I would end up with children on the streets. ... And we tried to make their lives reasonable."

More: "You've got to take a practical approach to it. There are 12 million illegals in this country. We got to stop illegals from coming in. And a tremendous amount of money should be put into the physical security that's needed to do that."

At the end of the interview, FNC's O'Reilly told him he looked forward to his '08 run, to which Giuliani responded: "I look forward to the Yankee pennant race" (FNC, 8/2).

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