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| The "21" Club on 52nd Street. Photo by Holly Northrop. |
A person close to John Catsimatidis, the grocery store magnate who sponsored the event, said Mr. Giuliani was not originally part of the speaking program or expected to attend.Mr. Catsimatidis, who is prominent in New York political circles, saw the former mayor at an earlier event in the city Wednesday night, and invited him to come by the Walker dinner.
Mr. Giuliani was unaware that members of the news media were in attendance when he began his remarks.
Not that I'd suppose Giuliani wasn't pretty drunk by the time he mounted the dais, because you'd have to be pretty drunk to say, "He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me." To Scott Walker, Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore, Rich Lowry, John Fund, Mort Zuckerman, and a bunch of elderly Republican operatives, not to mention the "members of the news media". But do I believe one Republican anonymus leaking to the Times how he wasn't invited and wasn't invited to speak? Not really.
Is that claim that Giuliani didn't know the media was there meant as an excuse? Like, it would be OK if he talked that way in a private assembly, just not to the public? Perhaps it's not to you and me that he's excusing himself, just to some group of people that talk that way in private all the time, but are embarrassed to see it showing up in the newspapers.
Anyway he himself doesn't mind sounding like that in the newspapers at all. Following up on his remarks at Catsimatisis's party in an exclusive interview with the New York Post, Tailgunner Rudy doubles down:
He's now, as Steve says, your "email-forwarding right-wing uncle", batshit crazy and unable to control his mouth.“From the time he was 9 years old, he was influenced by Frank Marshall Davis, who was a communist,” Giuliani said. The ex-mayor added that Obama’s grandfather introduced him to Davis, a writer and labor activist.
Giuliani also said another bad influence on Obama was Saul Alinsky, a community organizer whom the ex-mayor called a “socialist.”
The man once called “America’s mayor’’ also sharply criticized the president for having been a member of a church led by radical Chicago Rev. Jeremiah Wright....
Giuliani said Obama doesn’t measure up to past presidents.
“He doesn’t talk about America the way John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan did, about America’s greatness and exceptionalism,” said Giuliani.
“He was educated by people who were critics of the US. And he has not been able to overcome those influences.”
Fun thing, incidentally, from National Journal, January 25 2011, I'll just give you the headline:
STATE OF THE UNION: ANALYSIS
Echoing Reagan and JFK, Obama Cites American Exceptionalism
BY RON FOURNIER
As I've pointed out before, of course, the concept of American exceptionalism goes back to the US Communist Party leader Jay Lovestone, and was Stalin's mocking description of Lovestone's belief that the United States was so great it could skip the proletarian revolution phase. Stalin thought Lovestone was an idiot. I think Lovestone was not exactly right, but love his interest in the concept of a nonrevolutionary Marxism. (It now appears that the term was used some months before Stalin could have coined it by the Helmsman's anti-Lovestone allies in the US Party, Earl Browder and Joseph Zack, in an op-ed in the Daily Worker at the beginning of 1929. See William Safire for the correct identification of Browder rather than the OED's inexplicable "Brouder".)
Some wingers like to present Alexis de Tocqueville as the inventor of American exceptionalism, on the basis of a sentence from the 1840 volume 2 of Democracy in America:
“The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one”This is some pretty amusing decontextualization, as T. David Gordon demonstrates, since the chapter it is taken from is devoted to the question whether "the example of the Americans is proof that a democratic people will be unable to have an aptitude and taste for the sciences, literature, and arts", and Tocqueville concludes that no, the US is exceptional, i.e., exceptionally uncultivated and tasteless, and there's no reason to fear that new democratic states will be that bad.
La situation des Américains est donc entièrement exceptionnelle, et il est à croire qu'aucun peuple démocratique n'y sera jamais placé. Leur origine toute puritaine, leurs habitudes uniquement commerciales, le pays même qu'ils habitent et qui semble détourner leur intelligence de l'étude des sciences, des lettres et des arts; le voisinage de l'Europe, qui leur permet de ne point les étudier sans retomber dans la barbarie; mille causes particulières, dont je n'ai pu faire connaître que les principales, ont dû concentrer d'une manière singulière l'esprit américain dans le soin des choses purement matérielles. Les passions, les besoins, l'éducation, les circonstances, tout semble, en effet, concourir pour pencher l'habitant des États-Unis vers la terre. La religion seule lui fait, de temps en temps, lever des regards passagers et distraits vers le ciel. (classiques.ucaq)
The situation of the Americans is, thus, totally exceptional, and it is not to be believed that any democratic people will find themselves in a similar one. Their completely puritan origin, their uniquely commercial habits, the very country they inhabit, which seems to turn their intellects away from the study of sciences, letters, and arts; the nearness of Europe, which enables them not to fall into barbarity even when they fail to study these things; a thousand particular causes, of which I have been able to introduce only the principal ones, must have concentrated the American mind in a unique way on purely material concerns. Passions, needs, education, circumstances, all seem, indeed, to work together to incline the inhabitant of the United States toward earth. Only religion occasionally makes him raise a fleeting, distracted glance toward heaven.What I haven't seen noticed in this context is that Tocqueville argues passionately in volume 1, chapter IX that the US is not exceptional in the matters that count. "Would laws and mores be enough," he asks, "to maintain democratic institutions anywhere else than in America?" (Les lois et les mœurs suffiraient-elles pour maintenir les institutions démocratiques autre part qu'en Amérique?) And he answers resoundingly that they can: stressing, however, that there should be no need for them to have the same laws and mores:
Ceux qui, après avoir lu ce livre, jugeraient qu'en l'écrivant j'ai voulu proposer les lois et les mœurs anglo-américaines à l'imitation de tous les peuples qui ont un état social démocratique, ceux-là auraient commis une grande erreur; ils se seraient attachés à la forme, abandonnant la substance même de ma pensée. Mon but a été de montrer, par l'exemple de l'Amérique, que les lois et surtout les mœurs pouvaient permettre à un peuple démocratique de rester libre. Je suis, du reste, très loin de croire que nous devions suivre l'exemple que la démocratie américaine a donné, et imiter les moyens dont elle s'est servie pour atteindre ce but...
If anyone should suppose, after reading this book, that in writing it I have wanted to propose that all the peoples living in a social state of democracy should imitate Anglo-American laws and mores, they would be committing a great error; they would be attaching themselves to the form of my thinking, abandoning its very substance. My goal has been to show, on the basis of the American example, that laws and especially mores might allow a democratic people to remain free. Beyond that, I am very far from believing that we should follow the example given by American democracy by imitating the means it has used to attain this end...I keep harping on this because it fills me with semiotic rage. There's no reason, as even humor-challenged Josip Vissarionovich understood, to deploy "exceptionalism" except to make fun of somebody, because it has to mean something like "the systematic belief that you're so fucking special." Whether American exceptionalists think they are immune from the laws of nature or the laws of nations, whether the claim is that the doom of other countries will never befall us or that we just don't have to obey the Geneva conventions, they are displaying an especially obnoxious and dangerous form of stupidity, and when they adopt the term by way of praising themselves (like a fashion designer saying "Oh, kitsch is so in this year") or condemning others (like Giuliani thinking it's a valid criticism of Obama to say Obama doesn't love Giuliani), I want to make them stop. They're killing language! Plus, Obama is a pretty gifted writer, and if he gets bullied into using it that's just sad.
On the poet Frank Marshall Davis, who left the literary scene in Chicago to move to relative obscurity in Honolulu in 1948 and there became odd-couple black-guy and white-guy friends with the much more obscure Stanley Dunham, the president's future grandfather, what a great character he is in Obama's Dreams from My Father. I don't care even slightly whether he was a member of the CPUSA or not (though if he was I hope he was a Lovestonian). Those who want to construct a big Communist conspiracy on this slender foundation are people so desperate to have a conspiracy to believe in that they have lost even the minimal judgment that Giuliani used to have (though the man who made Bernard Kerik police commissioner and subsequently almost secretary of Homeland Security is somebody whose judgment has never been very solid).
Davis exceptionalism at the top of that paragraph (he was the only black man in Honolulu who would talk to young Barack about race).
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