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And Then There’s Rudy

Issues with Democrats aside, the goofball incoherence of Rudy Giuliani on the key national security issues of the day is worth noting:

Mr. King asked if Mr. Giuliani would agree that the Senate would have voted unanimously against the war if it were known that Mr. Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.

“Yes, I guess,” he said, but he added that such a vote would say nothing about whether the war was right.

Giuliani says he thinks the war was right (obviously, he has a low opinion of Republican Senators) but that if he’d been president he would have invaded with “maybe 100,000 to 130,000 more” troops than Bush deployed even though no such volume of additional troops was available. “Of course there were mistakes,” according to Giuliani, which merely proves what a great man Bush is: “Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes.”

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One quirk of American politics is that leading presidential candidates normally go into the campaign with little if any foreign policy experience. Most, however, at least recognize this as a problem and try to study up as part of the campaign effort. Giuliani comes to us as a rare duck — a candidate whose signature issue is national security but who doesn’t know anything about national security, and therefore won’t study. Result: Nonsense, combined with temperamental authoritarianism.