[NYTr] What Giuliani's Sleazy Sex Life Reveals About Him

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Nation via Alternet - Dec 18, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/70906/

What Giuliani's Sleazy Sex Life Tells Us About Him

By JoAnn Wypijewski

There is something untrustworthy about a man who can't conduct a decent
affair. Rudy Giuliani never could. He flaunted his girlfriend Judi
Nathan (now a proper lady with a proper lady's name, Mrs. Judith
Giuliani) at public events while he was mayor and married to Donna
Hanover, with whom he had no understanding about elective affinities.
He used his son Andrew as his beard, claiming he was teaching the boy
golf those many weekends when he was cavorting with Judi in
Southampton. He announced his new love, and concomitant dumping of the
old, at a 2001 press conference, thus informing Donna their marriage
was over at the precise moment that any New Yorker listening to 1010
WINS learned of it.

Then he tried to push her and the children out of Gracie Mansion so he
could get on with his life.

In the return whiff of scandal around Rudy and Judi the hoary details
of their crass courtship are said to be of no consequence. Let's not
get into his private life, commentators quickly warned, eager to steer
political discussion clear of anything that might actually rub up
against realities of life experienced by the common horde. Let's talk
about the issues, the "new" ones here being hardly newer than what any
New Yorker had long known: that the NYPD accompanied the pair on their
trysts; that, hark!, these police escorts were paid for from the public
purse and involved some finagled accounting.

The parched details and dollar amounts in the latest revelations are
nowhere nearly as telling as the rough picture of things sketched in
Newsday by Jimmy Breslin back in 2000, when he wrote about a cop
nicknamed Wrong Way because once while pulling into Gracie Mansion with
Judi in the backseat he almost collided with the cop pulling out of the
mansion with Donna.

Wrong Way was later part of a five-car police detail assembled simply
to get the king and his court to the ballgame: one car for Rudy, one
for Judi, one for Andrew, one for Donna and one for the Other Girl he's
said to have kept on the side, the two girlfriends given separate
corporate seats at Yankee Stadium. The only evocative tidbits among the
latest are news that someone from the NYPD walked Judi's dog and
accompanied her on a shopping trip when she selected her sapphire and
diamond engagement ring -- in Atlanta, while business in post-9/11 New
York bordered on the berserk insisting that Love NY meant Shop NY.

At least the cops didn't torture or kill the dog, a practice that in an
earlier life was part of young Judi's job. That would have twinned
Giuliani's personal and political deficits, probably irreparably.

In the main, the huff and puff over "taxpayer expense" is not likely to
blow down much to obstruct Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. Once
we collectively concede that some maximum leader requires maximum
protection, and so too his loved ones -- either for the sake of his
happiness or as a hedge against ransom threats -- then there's really
not much difference between the wife, the kids, the dog, the
girlfriend. The reporters at Politico didn't sift through those FOIA
documents out of a passion for fiscal probity. Sex is the story that
sells here, so why not talk about sex?

Granted it was more fun -- the last time adultery and presidential
ambitions coincided so publicly -- to imagine Governor Clinton bound to
a bedstead with silken ties, maddened by the big-haired blonde with her
animal prints and scented light bulbs, a woman who claimed he was never
so happy as when he could bury his face in her muff, than it is to
contemplate Mayor Giuliani panting over his soon-to-be-new-missus, the
"princess," according to Vanity Fair, who's always longed to be "a
queen." To toss around the subject of adultery and politics now is to
raise that specter of Saturday Night Bill, and of the other big-haired
girl, the frisky Monica, with her kneepads and cigar tricks and
oral-anal games in the Oval Office. And no one much wants to do that:
not partisans of Hillary Clinton; not her opponents, who may have to
support her come November or ask for the Clintons' support; not
conservatives, who may find themselves having to back their own
philanderer down the road.

Already, this is a repression election. Rumors are afloat that Rudy
needs a short leash, his eyes wandering toward a former rhythmic
twirler with eclectic tastes, a fan of The Lonely Crowd, The
Indispensable Chomsky and Leadership, by Rudolph Giuliani. Democratic
bloggers bleat pathetically, "At least he [Bill] stayed married."
Although Hillary's great asset, she sometimes wears it like a cross.
Rudy is said to be similarly chafing now that Judith is his wedded
wife. Christians take heart in Mike Huckabee and, maybe, the knowledge
that if Giuliani does turn out to be the chosen one, his sins won't
matter anyway.

David got away with Bathsheba, after all, and with dispatching her
husband, Uriah the Hittite, to the enemy's spears. The rest of us can
take heart that at least Rudy doesn't hold the power of life and death
over anyone. Bill executed a man as the Gennifer Flowers story swirled
in 1992. He bombed Iraq as the Senate considered removing him from
office over Monica Lewinsky. Nothing beats death for distraction.

The trouble, in fact, is in treating sex as a distraction. Usually it
isn't. Usually it's just life, like the mortgage and the bad school and
the checkbook that's balanced or not, the dinner that's sublime or not.
Adultery may thrillingly divert from one reality, but in the form
practiced by Bill and Rudy and millions of others it tends to create
its own parallel universe, with its own set of mores and unwritten
rules. Rudy broke them all. One doesn't bring the paramour to the
marriage bed (unless it's a threesome), or involve the children, or
deliberately humiliate the spouse.

Bohemians, hippies, gay people, adventurers in polyamory have all
experimented with different levels of truth-telling, and have all
decided, at one time or another, when a lie or reticence is the kindest
act of all. But they've also understood, at some deep level, why the
English called adultery a "criminal conversation": the criminal part
could be jettisoned, as it was by English law in the nineteenth
century, but the conversation, measured physically, emotionally,
intellectually, could not.

Only a madman or a monk would count it a moral failure to converse with
more than one person for a lifetime, yet most Americans call adultery
just that, even when they're involved in it. And most married people
probably are involved in it, or have been. Poll numbers are as schizoid
as the culture, with overwhelming majorities telling surveyors they
"know someone" who's not monogamous while only a minority own up to it.

A politics that's similarly evasive -- that counts as irrelevant the
ways in which people arrange their lives, their joys, needs and
sorrows; that cares nothing for how and why they converse -- is no
politics at all. It doesn't matter that Rudy had sex with Judi or
anyone else, or that he had that police escort, frankly. What matters
is that Rudy was a prick. Rudy made it cruel.

[JoAnn Wypijewski writes for CounterPunch, Mother Jones, Harpers and the
Nation. ]

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.