tygerland.net

Obviously the US media is buzzing with stuff about next-year’s Presidential Election, but over here it’s still the current incumbent that dominates the copy. However, over the next twelve-months or so, we’ll wake up to the fact that next November the most important election of our time will happen. Who’ll win the nominations? On the Dem side it looks like a shoe-in for Hillary. But Barack Obama and John Edwards are still running hard. The GOP is looking at Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani with interest, with John McCain still hanging on by his fingernails.

I have just finished reading an excellent article in Time Europe about Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid (I’m sorry I can’t find the link – Time’s search facility is worse than rubbish). Amazingly, Giuliani is standing on a foreign policy platform, arguing that he has more foreign policy experience and knowledge than anyone else running; more than long-term senator Joe Biden (chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations), Hillary Clinton (who let’s remember lived in the White House for 8-years, and has been heavily involved in foreign affairs since taking her NY senate seat), and even John McCain.

I suppose Giuliani has to appear the most hawkish on international issues, as he’s unlikely to win the nomination if he allows the debate to be on social or value issues. Giuliani has been married 3-times, is a native New Yorker, has ambiguous positions on several conservative touchstone issues, and even co-habited with a couple of gay dudes. In the eyes of many conservatives, he’s about as damned as it’s possible to be. But if the former mayor of New York can convince enough GOP’rs that he’s the man to hammer “Islamofascism,” he maybe has a chance.

His campaign team argue that as mayor of New York (home to the United Nations) he has significant international experience. This doesn’t really wash with me. Dealing with a few precious diplomats’ parking tickets is hardly the same as cracking down on North Korea, sorting out Iraq, or dealing with Gaza.

Okay, as mayor of New York he did turn around a corrupt police force and clean up the streets (even if many of his own key people have since been indicted), but to claim that he has more understanding of international affairs than say Biden, is just plain bollocks.

Giuliani is also doing a fine job of surrounding himself with the sort of hawkish fuckers that have made President Bush such a popular international superstar. Neo-con ‘political scientist’ and columnist Norman Podhoretz is on the staff, which will have the hawks in Tel Aviv doing monkey-flips and passing around cigars. Seriously, do we really need another 4-years of myopically pro-Zionist US foreign policy? Things have got worse since Arafat died, not better.

Another Neoconservative administration would be exactly what bin Laden and his band of vicious fruitcakes want. Another generation of young Jihadis willing to join a brand of radical Islam that achieves little more than parting people from their limbs. And of course when Islamists try the legitimate political route (take Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Turkey and others), we scream blue bloody-murder and throw a load more money at wanker-dictators like Hosni Mubarak. Let’s just chain ‘em up and be done with it – we obviously can’t stand them gaining any sort of legitimacy or political unity.

So Giuliani is the choice for more of the same. After all, he’s the fuckwit who asked Republicans in 2004 to, “Thank God for George W. Bush.” I think you got the wrong guy, Rudy, surely you mean to thank the guy downstairs?

There is also the fact that Giuliani is just sooooo disingenuous. You can see it in that smile. He looks like he’s just screwed your girlfriend and now he wants you to buy him a beer. I know he’s a politician and that’s par the course, but he’s obviously telling the GOP voters what they want to hear (to get the Republican nomination), and will change his tune when he takes his dirty little campaign to the nation.

Americans will decide whom they want to be president based on their own order of priorities. The Republicans will seek to shape the debate around security because they have no answers to the other domestic issues (if truth be known, they have no solutions to America’s security problems either, but this is an issue on which they can grandstand and call the Dems pussies, something they can at least do). The real dangers to America are within. Many citizens are straddled with sub-prime mortgages, no healthcare, and facing a precarious economic future. America has no answer to the low dollar or Far-Eastern manufacturing might. It may still lead the world in computer software and other high-tech industries, but these will not employ the vast swathes of workers who once relied on the automotive and steel industries.

Rudy Giuliani and the other Republicans are repeating the same Rovian approach that delivered two presidencies to George W. Bush. Fear: the strategy the right have always employed when faced with problems they have no answer to. If we want a different America, one that faces up to a new multi-polar reality, rather than wallowing in American exceptionalism, we should hope they choose change, rather than more of the same.