Black Box Report

The media called him "America's Cop." MSNBC called him a "hero of 9/11." George Bush came within a hair's breadth of calling him Secretary of Homeland Security. But after today, most people are calling Bernie Kerik a crooked, mobbed-up protégé of Rudy Giuliani, who just got indicted on 16 counts of felony:

Just boil it down and say it: when it came time to choose a police commissioner Rudy chose a crooked, mobbed up cop. And he was warned about it all in advance.

That isn't just one decision among hundreds of thousands. It's one of such recklessness, irresponsibility and even a hard-to-figure indifference to criminal conduct that, just on the terms upon which Rudy has asked voters to judge his candidacy, it should pretty much end his campaign in its tracks.

In Rudy Giuliani's book, "Leadership," he says "I believe that the skill I have developed better than any other was surrounding myself with great people." And by great, Rudy apparently means "loyal," instead of "competent" or "honest," a flaw he shares with our current president:

Like the man he wants to replace, Giuliani values loyalty…over all. And this has caused someone who brags about his ability to pick leaders to repeatedly overlook disturbing information and inconvenient questions when they pertain to the people loyal to him.

Disturbing information like ties to organized crime, which Rudy initially claimed he hadn't heard about Kerik, but later said he just plum forgot:

Giuliani claims he doesn't remember being told that the man he was about to nominate to command the New York City police department had ties to organized crime. That's like not remembering when you were warned that the person you hired to babysit your kids was a convicted sex offender.

Why would Rudy stick by such an obvious political liability as Kerik? Answer: they're both very similar:

Kerik engaged in massive cronyism, as Giuliani has always done. Kerik dismantled the separations between himself and people charged with overseeing him, as Giuliani systematically did in the city as a whole. And where Giuliani set up the city's pre-9/11 emergency response center as a love nest for himself and the woman he was having an affair with, post-9/11, Kerik used a rescue worker apartment for his own affair. Of course Giuliani thinks he's a great guy.

Once the "I forgot" excuse fell apart, Rudy's next trick was to employ the ends-justify-the-means argument. Shorter Rudy: "Sure he made a few mistakes (i.e. tax fraud, favors for mob-linked companies, sleeping with Judith Regan), but at least he made the trains run on time!" Except those "ends" weren't all they were cracked up to be either:

It wasn't Bernie Kerik who brought the crime down in New York, it was Giuliani's prior police commissioner, Bill Bratton, who is now LA's police commissioner. While the reduction may have continued under Kerik, he just benefited from policies implemented years earlier by Bratton.
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And there are many who believe it wasn't either Rudy or Bratton (and certainly not Kerik) as crime was falling nationally anyway and a large part of New York's reduction was in how they wrote up the crimes to avoid the violent designation.

Still, Rudy doesn't want anyone to hold Kerik's laundry list of (allegedly) illegal proclivities to reflect on him. It's was an aberration! Give him a mulligan, will ya'? Except, again, this was not an isolated incident, but rather part of a larger pattern:

I’ve been keeping a list of Giuliani’s odd choice of associates, and it’s getting pretty long.

* Kenneth Caruso, a close Giuliani friend and business partner, has been accused of conspiring to steal $10 million invested through a Caribbean bank.

* Giuliani inexplicably backed Bernie Kerik, and made him the city’s police commissioner, after he’d been briefed on Kerik’s organized crime connections.

* Thomas Ravenel, the chairman of Giuliani’s presidential campaign in South Carolina, was indicted on cocaine distribution charges.

* Arthur Ravenel, the replacement chairman of Giuliani’s presidential campaign in South Carolina, has characterized the NAACP as the “National Association for Retarded People,” and has an unusual fondness for the Confederate battle flag.

* Alan Placa was accused by a grand jury report of sexually abusing children, as well as helping cover up the sexual abuse of children by other priests. Giuliani then put Placa, his life-long friend, on the payroll of Giuliani Partners. (Adds Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks suspected priest abuse, “I think Rudy Giuliani has to account for his friendship with a credibly accused child molester.”)

* Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), the family-values conservative caught up in a prostitution ring, was not only Giuliani’s top Senate backer, he was also the regional chairman of Giuliani’s campaign.

I’ve never seen a presidential candidate have this much bad luck, in such a short period of time, in picking the wrong people to be associated with.

Rudy is either the worst judge of character, EVAH, or so willfully obtuse and willing to turn a blind eye to obvious misdeeds as to disqualify him for the office of President of the United States. Would you trust someone like this to look into the eyes of another world leader and get a sense of their soul?

Of course, I'd be remiss not to mention the standard wingnut response to their hero getting all this unwanted attention. It can be summed up, as it is so often, in two words: Attack Clinton!

Between the timing, and the force with which the news media seems to be applying in covering this little affair, something does seem rather obvious...the only reason that Bernie Kerik’s being pilloried (Hillary’ed?) now is because he is associated with the Republican frontrunner...and the Democrat front runner is Hillary Clinton… someone who decidedly needs her own scandalous past to be mitigated by scandals amongst her opponents.

Given the scandals and Hillary Clinton’s past, even her recent past, doesn’t it stretch credibility beyond the breaking point that this indictment against Kerik comes down just now, while Hillary Clinton’s scandal filled past gets ignored? the timing, in particular, would seem questionable.

The long arm of the Clintons...

The "B-b-b-but...CLINTON!!1!!" argument, both laughable and predictable, gets one of the best treatments I've ever seen from Maha:

I would like to explain how “news” works. The reason the Kerik indictment is in the news is that it happened yesterday. Scandals associated with the Clintons are not on the front pages at the moment because there are no new developments. See, that’s why they call it “news.”

Now, the rightwingers who are pro-Rudy (and anti-Hillary of course...actually, all rightwingers are anti-Hillary, just not necessarily pro-Rudy), will have to continue with this kind of denial becauise they've bought into the whole Rudy! package, hook, line and sinker:

Anyone who's fallen for Giuliani has fallen for the myth of Giuliani: that he's some sort of ubermensch, a giant who tamed savage urban beasts, then faced down Death Itself. These starry-eyed hero-worshipping voters -- and there may be enough of them, a year from now, to put Giuliani in the freaking White House -- can't imagine him existing on the same stratum as a hapless mook like Kerik. Never mind the fact that the two of them actually did exist on the same stratum.

I respectfully disagree with Mister NB; for people who've never heard of Bernie Kerik, this will still be a major issue. And the more anecdotes we hear like this, the more that will begin to sink in:

When Mr. Giuliani became mayor, he gave Mr. Kerik a job in the Correction Department. A year later, the mayor asked him to drop by Gracie Mansion.

The two men sat upstairs and shared a bottle of red wine, a gift to the mayor from Nelson Mandela. Mr. Giuliani said he planned to appoint Mr. Kerik as first deputy correction commissioner.

Mr. Kerik, who wrote of this in his autobiography, “The Lost Son,” was taken aback; he was a year removed from being a police detective.

“Mayor, I appreciate your confidence in me, I really do,” he said. “But I ran a jail. One jail. Rikers is like 10 jails.”

Just do it, the mayor replied.

Mr. Kerik followed Mr. Giuliani downstairs to a dimly lighted room. There waited Mr. Giuliani’s boyhood chum Peter J. Powers, who was first deputy mayor, and other aides. One by one, they pulled Mr. Kerik close and kissed his cheek.

“I wonder if he noticed how much becoming part of his team resembled becoming part of a mafia family,” Mr. Kerik wrote. “I was being made.”

I picture a bald-pated Paul Giamatti as Rudy and an even balder Dennis Franz playing Bernie in the inevitable cable TV movie version of this scene.