Rudy Roundup

Lots of buzz on Rudy emanating from the media today.

First, the money article. Richard Brookhiser tells us why Rudy is his guy for 2008. Brookhiser is a conservative and a Republican who voted against Rudy during his 1993 mayoral run because of the Mayor's views on cultural issues. Brookhiser now describes this as supreme folly, and went on to vote for Rudy in 1997 after seeing how Rudy governed: as a conservative. Here's how Brookhiser put it:

"I heeded (Conservative Party mayoral candidate) Marlin's call, and so cast the unwisest vote of my life. Giuliani won in a close race, and then proceeded to save the city."

Brookhiser talks a lot about Giuliani's ability to make government work the way it's supposed to, as well as the Mayor's clear understanding of the threat of Islamist terrorism that long predated 9/11. Finally, Brookhiser echoes many of we pro-Rudy conservatives on the blogosphere in pointing out that Rudy's heterodoxy on social issues could be nearly completely neutralized with a promise to appoint judicial conservatives to the bench. Brookhiser sums up with the following:

"RUDY Giuliani saved a city with a larger population than Arizona, Massachusetts or Virginia - the states of John McCain, Mitt Romney and George Allen. He helped city and country take a harder blow than Pearl Harbor. These are two serious public achievements, which are two more than anyone else in the 2008 race, Republican or Democrat, can show.

Achievement is not an infallible guide to performance in office. Abraham Lincoln, wrote the New York diarist George Templeton Strong, was nominated in 1860 "because he cut a great many rails," and he did fine. But achievement or the lack of it is all fate lets us see of our candidates in advance. You can choose a leader. Or you can choose someone else."

Indeed.

Next comes Bartle Bull, who worked with both Bobby Kennedy and Rudy. Bull opines on the similarities between the two men. Money quote:

"Both approached politics as Catholic intellectuals, inclined to study a problem with open-minded mental rigor, then, once decided, to attack it with moral fervor and an intolerance of other views."

Which, I would say, is quite a positive trait in a leader. Once one has determined an objective truth, the correct course of action is to defend that truth with the utmost tenacity. But in order to determine what is objectively true, reason and empiricism must be utilized, the application of which is a staple of Catholic intellectualism over the centuries.

And then there's this:

"'The collectivist urge of the Democratic Party, I think is very destructive,' [states Rudy]. 'The Republican Party, when it functions correctly, has more confidence in the individual human being, and more willingness to allow the individual human being to emerge.'"

That's Rudy, as quoted by the New York Times back in August of 1999. The emphasis is mine. This is a man who could save the Republican Party. And all we have to do is let him.

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