Rudy Knows Best

Rudy Giuliani is an idiot. Not that you didn't already know that. It just felt nice to say. I was thinking about this after reading his proposal to "solve" an impending crisis of mass retirement by federal employees simply by not hiring people to replace many of them; thus turning a bad situation worse. Genius! I can understand this kind of drivel coming out of the know-nothing nimrods advising him, but you'd think someone who had actually run a government would know better.

He apparently already suggested such an idea as Mayor of New York, before realizing how jackass stupid it was. As it turns out, government employees actually do things, and citizens kind of like to have those things done. Because for as much as people complain about government services, it's usually because they're not getting good enough service, and not because they wish the lines were longer and the workers more surly. But apparently, what wouldn't work for a large city will work much better for a government considerably larger.

And it's obvious why this would appeal to his voter base. Most conservatives consider government work to be little more than a form of welfare; similar to the make-work programs used to keep most conservative "thinkers" from abandoning conservatism the first time they actually had to earn their money. And that attitude has been quite apparent ever since the Bushies took over and turned the government into a giant cashcow for anyone savvy enough to bribe them. It doesn't matter whether or not your services are needed, just as long as you make sure to pony up the cash.

Burning Money

And so it's no surprise that they see Washington as a giant money pit. These people generally aren't competent outside of their limited field of expertise, and usually not even there. They just can't fathom how big things work or how complicated modern life can be. And so because they can't actually see what they're buying with their money, their puny brains insist they're being robbed. From the way they talk, all I can imagine is some sort of giant cash incinerator designed so that tax dollars don't accidentally end up in the hands of the contractors and local governments, where it might accidentally be pumped back into the economy.

Giving tax breaks to rich people on the off-chance they might want to hire more employees is the backbone of a booming economy, but if you use those same dollars to hire those same people to work for the government, it somehow becomes an inexplicable drag on the economy. As if they imagine government workers to be faceless clones who throw their paychecks into that giant incinerator. Apparently, only rich people know how to boost the economy; and their wisdom is obviously well proven, as evidenced by their ability to get richer while the rest of us get poorer.

And so Giuliani plans to play to that ignorance by promoting a scheme that only a child could love; or at least someone with the maturity of a child. It's so simple. As if the problem is that it's too hard to fire government employees, rather than that Americans have a high standard of living which can't be maintained on the cheap. And this just goes hand-in-hand with all the "small government" gurus who can talk endlessly about the evils of government waste, without ever getting around to mentioning exactly what they think we should cut. And how could they? They don't really know what the government does. All they know is that they don't like it.

Beating Rudy

But at this point, I guess Rudy's willing to say any damn thing he needs to to get elected, and figures that if he's elected most conservatives will be too busy battling the newly minted "Rudy-Haters" to bother remembering this idiotic proposal. And maybe he's right. But all the same, most Americans aren't the mindless nimrods Republicans imagine them to be and this is yet another nail of absurdity that Dems should use to showcase how nutty Republicans really are.

The only question is whether they'll use it, or if they'll be kept on the defensive too much to try. And hell, this is one reason I'm leaning against the Hillary nomination. Apparently, she's already given some factish sounding proposal about the number of government employees she'll shed, and I can easily see her getting into a pissing match with Rudy about it. Why not? She'd have little to lose, as she eats into Rudy's territory and forces him to out-conservative her. That's Clinton politics for you.

But at this point, I think this thing can be won pretty straight forward and we don't need all the fancy triangulating and bankshots. All we need is a steady hand and a deft war room and we should be just fine with anyone willing to run a moderately liberal campaign. After the Bush fiasco, America is ready to greet us with open arms.