Wayne Barrett has written a piece in the Village Voice about Rudee.

If Rudee somehow still entertained any residual hopes of capturing the Republican nomination, this article should have put paid to them with absolute finality. In 6,758 hard-hitting words, Rudee’s trousers are surgically removed beyond any hope of re-covery. When this has finished percolating through the national consciousness (by attack ad if not via the mainstream media), Rudee will be finished for all practical purposes. Of course, those last throes could last a good long while. But honestly no one in his right mind could contribute money to Rudee’s campaign after digesting this article.

It may be long, but it’s well worth reading in its entirety. Here are some of the highlights:

‘I think the thing that distinguishes me on terrorism is, I have more experience dealing with it.’ This pillar of the Giuliani campaign—asserted by pundits as often as it is by the man himself—is based on the idea that Rudy uniquely understands the terror threat because of his background as a prosecutor and as New York’s mayor. In a July appearance at a Maryland synagogue, Giuliani sketched out his counterterrorism biography, a resume that happens to be rooted in falsehood.

“As United States Attorney, I investigated the Leon Klinghoffer murder by Yasir Arafat,” he told the Jewish audience, referring to the infamous 1985 slaying of a wheelchair-bound, 69-year-old New York businessman aboard the Achille Lauro, an Italian ship hijacked off the coast of Egypt by Palestinian extremists. “It’s honestly the reason why I knew so much about Arafat,” says Giuliani. “I knew, in detail, the Americans he murdered. I went over their cases.”

On the contrary, Victoria Toensing, the deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department in Washington who filed a criminal complaint in the Lauro investigation, says that no one in Giuliani’s office “was involved at all.” Jay Fischer, the Klinghoffer family attorney who spearheaded a 12-year lawsuit against the PLO, says he “never had any contact” with Giuliani or his office. “It would boggle my mind if anyone in 1985, 1986, 1987, or thereafter conducted an investigation of this case and didn’t call me,” he adds. Fischer says he did have a private dinner with Giuliani in 1992: “It was the first time we talked, and we didn’t even talk about the Klinghoffer case then.”

The dinner was arranged by Arnold Burns, a close friend of Fischer and Giuliani who also represented the Klinghoffer family. Burns, who was also the finance chair of Giuliani’s mayoral campaign, was the deputy U.S. attorney general in 1985 and oversaw the probe. “I know of nothing Rudy did in any shape or form on the Klinghoffer case,” he says.

It boggles the mind that someone running for President would utter such a bald-faced lie in a public speech — a lie so easily proved to be bald-faced — but that’s precisely what this is.

The fact that Rudee finds it necessary to lie on the stump about his anti-terrorism credentials tells its own sad story about the hollowness of those credentials, the complete lack of substance. But it’s actually worse than that. It’s not even that Rudee has no proven record of fighting terrorism and therefore needs to invent an anti-terrorism resumé. He does have a track record when it comes to fighting terrorism. Unfortunately, it is a record of bumbling ineptitude:

Though Giuliani told the Conservative Political Action conference in March that he “prosecuted a lot of crime—a little bit of terrorism, but mostly organized crime,” he actually worked only one major terrorism case as U.S. Attorney, indicting 10 arms dealers for selling $2.5 billion worth of anti-tank missiles, bombs, and fighter jets to Iran in 1986. The judge in the case ruled that a sale to Iran violated terrorist statutes because its government had been tied to 87 terrorist incidents. Giuliani has never mentioned the case, perhaps because he personally filed papers terminating it in his last month as U.S. Attorney: A critical witness had died, and a judge tossed out 46 of the 55 counts because of errors by Giuliani’s office.

Way to win TWAT, Rudee!

And that, strangely enough, provides the perfect segue to the next segment, which has to do with siting New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) Command Center in the World Trade Center complex. Much has been written since 9/11 abut how totally ludicrous and incompetent that decision was. And I’ll rehash some of that in a minute. But Barrett has new details which shed light on why Rudee was so adamant about putting the Command Center in WTC7. And this is the one story that, when it hits the fan, it will stick forever. Rudee is never going to be able to live it down. It will shame him forever, and destroy not just his political career but also his very lucrative lecture circuit operation (the one that made it so inconvenient for him to serve on the Iraq Study Group that he resigned).

First the rehashing:

Of course, the consequences of putting the center there were predictable. The terrorist who engineered the 1993 bombing told the FBI they were coming back to the trade center. Opposing the site at a meeting with the mayor, Police Commissioner Howard Safir called it “Ground Zero” because of the earlier attack. Lou Anemone, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the NYPD, wrote memos slamming the site. … Anemone had done a detailed vulnerability study of the city for Giuliani, pinpointing terrorist targets. “In terms of targets, the WTC was number one,” he says. “I guess you had to be there in 1993 to know how strongly we felt it was the wrong place.”

But Rudee had laid down that the Command Center had to be walking distance from his office:

Denny Young, the mayor’s alter ego, who has worked at his side for nearly three decades, eventually “made it very clear” that Giuliani wanted “to be able to walk to this facility quickly.” That meant the bunker had to be in lower Manhattan. … The formal city document approving the site said that it “was selected due to its proximity to City Hall,” a standard set by Giuliani and Giuliani alone.

So why was walking distance such a major issue for Giuliani? Here (if you’ll pardon the term) comes the money shot:

Giuliani’s office (in the Command Center) had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator.

And there you have it — to Rudeee, it was just a taxpayer-financed love nest. He was only looking for a convenient place to bang his girlfriend. All he had on his mind was lustful fornication outside the sacrament of marriage. (Funny how that seems to loom so large in the resumés of so many Republican presidential candidates and candidate-wannabes. Almost a uniting principle.)