(1)
I don’t know about the wages of sin, but the costs of adultery can certainly be huge. Maybe not to the adulterer (Rudee), or to the adulteree (Judee), but certainly to the adulterated (no, not Donna Hanover, but New York City taxpayers).

Since Rudee’s running mostly on his record as mayor of NYC, here’s a newly excavated part of that record:

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”*

The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.

“Billed obscure city agencies” is possibly the most damaging phrase in that story. Why bury these expenses like that if you didn’t think there was anything objectionable about them? Furtive attempts to cover up are usually a reliable indicator of perceived wrong-doing.

So not only was Rudee trying to hide how much his lustful-fornication-outside-the-bounds-of-marriage habit was costing NYC taxpayers,* * he also loftily deemed himself to be above accountability.

I wonder if this is what most people are looking for in the next President of the United States? (That is to say, a unitary executive with a perpetual hard-on.)

I wonder what somebody has to be thinking in order to contribute money to Rudee’s campaign at this point?

I wonder what Rudee will do with the unspent funds left over from his failed presidential campaign (I mean, after it has formally failed)?

I wonder if any part will go (surreptitiously, of course) to finance and/or conceal future adultery? (Assuming always that no part is currently going to conceal currently ongoing adultery…)

(2)
But hiding the cost to taxpayers of Rudee humping Judee in the Hamptons is surely not worse than putting NYC’s emergency command center in 7 World Trade Center so that it could serve as a convenient hump-central for Rudee?

Nobody cared about the latter, so why will the former matter one bit?

(3)
It’s probably too much to hope for, but what if some intrepid member of the press corps asked Rudee: “Do you think it would be okay for the President to lurch off in Air Force One on weekends for purposes of lustful-fornication-outside-the-bounds-of-marriage?” followed up by: “Which account would you bury the expenses in, if you were president?”

(4)
Rudee responded to the Politico story during Wednesday night’s debate:

Rudy Giuliani dismissed a report Wednesday that he expensed the cost of his security detail to obscure city offices for trips to a Long Island resort as the then-mayor began an extramarital affair with current wife Judith Nathan.

“First of all, it’s not true,” he said during a GOP debate hours after the story broke.

But it turns out he’s not denying that his security expenses for Judee-humping were buried in obscure accounts in which they did not belong. He’s just saying that the NYPD is solely responsible. They were so ashamed of his adultery that they buried this documentary evidence of it, all without Giuliani flexing a muscle (or anything else).

Of course, it was clearly his office that refused to answer auditors’ questions about the buried expenses once they were exhumed:

At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”

I can’t imagine that’s why Rudee never addressed that part. The amount of lying this man has already done in pursuit of the presidency, he could surely have cooked us up a nice little whopper?

Josh Marshall of TPM, incidentally, is convinced that Bernie Kerik’s DNA will be found all over the burial of the expenses.

(5)
NYC taxpayers weren’t paying only for Rudee’s humping-in-the-Hamptons security:

Well before it was publicly known he was seeing her, then-married New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani provided a police driver and city car for his mistress Judith Nathan, former senior city officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

“She used the PD as her personal taxi service,” said one former city official who worked for Giuliani.

Stay tuned. We still don’t know how the condoms were paid for.

(6)
Here’s a scary thought in connection with President Giuliani. If this sleazy heartless opportunistic bastard is ever elected President, how many people will be in a position to blackmail him into doing certain things, or else?

That would surely include not just bum-chum associates (nullus), but also agents of foreign powers? I can’t imagine that Mossad, for example, doesn’t have a dossier on Rudee several inches thick, full of all kinds of dynamite stuff, complete with incontrovertible evidence. The Russians too, surely? The Chinese, naturally. And what about al-Qaeda—are we thinking of them as chillingly professional, devilishly cunning master-planners this week, or as harmless dodos who couldn’t scare the tail-feathers off a goose?

* Funny how they didn’t say “9/11!”

* * Not exactly a piddling amount either. $400,000 was billed to one account alone (the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, which provides lawyers for indigent defendants). That may be a lot of money but, in all fairness, there must have been a lot of diddling.