He Played First Base For The Yankees, Too

by digby


Steve Benen and Josh Marshall are keeping track of Giuliani's serial exagerrations about his own accomplishments. I'm sure you've all noticed that whenever he talks, you'd think he'd been running the Roman Empire for 25 years and planned and executed D-Day, for all of his experience as a great and wonderous world leader. He's also an expert in just about anything you mention. Josh says:

...the pattern of personality-cult-in-making kinds of silly claims of expertise and experience.

You know, the way that most dictator's bios have them not only being experts in power politics but also accomplished scholars, great singers, script writers and various other nonsense.

But there's one really choice one Steve has that really belongs in the line up. Rudy apparently claims that he's been "studying Islamic terrorism for 30 years." That one comes from an August article in Time. So basically, back in the 1970s and 1980s, Rudy was already a student of Jihadism. Time's Amanda Ripley shows pretty handily that all the available evidence shows that Rudy gave little or no attention to Jihadism before 9/11. But I'm less taken by the falsity of the claim than the boffo personality-cult-in-his-own-mind wackiness of it. Is there any topic he can allow himself not to be the most expertest person there is on the subject?



Nope. I've got another one:

GIULIANI: I honestly think we might have gotten tougher questions during the Fox interview, but they were substantive questions. During the MSNBC situation, we got some really good questions. But we also got some of the trick questions: Shia and Sunni.

You know, do I know the difference between Shia and Sunni? I felt like I was, you know, defending my doctoral thesis. It happens that I am a student of the history of religion.

HANNITY: Sure.

GIULIANI: So I knew the answer to that.


He's actually something of an expert:

"I have very, very strong views on religion that come about from having wanted to be a priest when I was younger, having studied theology for four years in college," he said. "It's an area I know really, really well academically.


Perhaps it was in his study of the history of religion that he also became an expert on torture.


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