I’ve a piece in the new edition of The American Conservative looking at Rudy Giuliani’s trip to London last month – a trip designed to make Rudy seem like an international statesman who can claim, however implausibly, to be the heir to Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Hmmm indeed.
It was an audacious gambit that a co-operative press corps was only too happy to buy. “His foreign policy pronouncements were certainly Thatcheresque,” gushed the Washington Post’s Dan Balz. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was even more enthusiastic, suggesting, “the picture of Rudy Giuliani, America’s Mayor, in front of 10 Downing Street, sends a signal to Republican voters that this guy is ready for primetime.” If only this were true. A more rigorous analysis of Giuliani’s London trip—one that looks at what the candidate actually said, rather than at how he was perceived—reveals a different reality: one characterized by confusion, intellectual incoherence, and a misreading of history so terrible one is tempted to conclude it must have been deliberate.
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