Finally: The NYT does Rudy's "LoftBoardgate"

[cali]

On today's OpEd page, Collins skewers Rudy:

Rudy’s Security Blanket
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: December 1, 2007

Rudy Giuliani has been having a bad week. Or, as he might put it, suffering persecutions never seen upon this planet since Mel Gibson was tortured on the rack, castrated, disemboweled and beheaded in “Braveheart.”

Columnist Biography: Gail Collins As Michael Cooper reported in The Times, New York’s ex-mayor is prone to exaggeration on the campaign trail, stretching facts or replacing them with more dramatic, more interesting, more untrue ones. Still, nobody would deny the last several days have been a downer.

First, Rudy looked bad in that debate in Florida. The protégé he promoted for homeland security secretary, Bernard Kerik, kept showing up on TV in news clips captioned 16-COUNT FEDERAL INDICTMENT. Then Ben Smith reported on Politico.com about the peculiar accounting practices the Giuliani administration had used for security details that guarded Rudy when he was out of town pursuing nonmayoral ventures such as golf and adultery. The bills were stashed away under the budgets of obscure city agencies like the Loft Board and — oh, dear — the Office for People With Disabilities.

Rudy said the story sounded like a “hit job” to him, aimed at reminding primary voters about his divorce-studded private life. Actually, LoftBoardgate is a reminder not of what Rudy does behind closed doors, but of his inability to keep them shut. When he was mayor, his sex life spilled into weird press conferences and court fights over who got custody of Gracie Mansion. Lately, he’s contented himself with interrupting his speeches to accept strange cellphone calls from the latest wife.

It’s fitting that Giuliani’s first big campaign crisis wound up being about his special subject: security. When he was mayor, he got a whole lot of it. The city was at one point paying for police guards to protect and transport not only Rudy, his children and his elderly mother, but also both his wife and his mistress. Really, they were thisclose to assigning a detail to the family retriever and a springer spaniel he was courting down the block

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/opinion/01collins.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin