Joan Swirsky
Guts & gonads make Rudy the only choice in 2012
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By Joan Swirsky
March 1, 2011

If you visit any online or neighborhood bookstore, you will see dozens of books about leadership, all of them — except Rudy Giuliani's Leadership — written by corporate or policy wonks who wrote their treatises based more on high-falutin' theory than on "real life" experience.

In fact, Giuliani's 2005 book is the only book on this subject that doesn't have a lengthy gobbledygook subtitle, but rather stands on that single word alone to describe what millions of people around the world wanted to know after September 11, 2001: How did he rise to the occasion to lead a city — indeed a world — out of the deep despair and paralyzing fear that gripped every sentient person after the worst attack in history on the American homeland?

Giuliani's book explained how he personally coped with that trauma, what books and historical figures inspired him, who he called upon to help his efforts, how his lengthy tenures as U.S. attorney and NY City Mayor informed the choices he made, and most important, what rare qualities — of leadership — he summoned from inside his soul and his character.

Clearly many of the impulses he followed during that traumatic time informed his decision to run for President of the United States in 2008 — an effort I believe was unsuccessful because of a number of logistical errors and misguided advice. But as we all know from our reading of history, some of America's most important and history-changing presidents were, like Truman, thrust upon the stage, or, like Reagan, lost their first-time contests for the presidency.

I hope their examples inspire "America's Mayor" to run in 2012, because right now our country is crying out for a leader. At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., it was clear that while there is talent among the Republican ranks, there are precious few who have either guts or gonads, or, for that matter, those all-important DNA strands of leadership!

THE G & G CROWD

Few — but not none — thanks to:

  • Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona (who may not fit the gonad description but certainly qualifies in the Excellent Estrogen category) for taking on the illegal immigration issue and standing up to the first "president" in history who actually sued a state for following the U.S. Constitution.

  • Governor Scott Walker of Minnesota for actually fulfilling his campaign promise to cut his state's overwhelming debt and stood up to the orchestrated demonstrations by union goons who encouraged teachers to abandon their students and classrooms, doctors to violate their oaths by writing phony prescriptions, and the voracious entitlement crowd to stage massive temper tantrums because free elections and the rule of law don't appeal to them.

  • Former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, who has single-handedly succeeded in driving the entire Left stark raving mad because of her consistent — and I believe correct — skewering of their degrade-America policies and ridiculous political correctness. My favorite example: the inability of Academy Award-winning screenwriter and recovering drug addict Aaron Sorkin to maintain even a facade of civility when he literally "lost it" over Palin during a recent interview with Lesley Stahl.

  • Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) for steadfastly (and brilliantly) telling the American public just how dire our economic picture is and for formulating concrete and doable solutions to fix the drastic problems the Obama regime has inflicted on every American.

  • Congressman Allen West, the newly-elected Republican from Florida, who from day one has flown the banner of Conservatism high and proud and has recently ripped the Koran-wielding executive director of the Council for American Islamic Relations, Nezar Hamze. When Hamze asked West to show him where in the Koran it gives Muslims marching orders "to carry out attacks against Americans and innocent people," West fired back with a long and historically accurate list of Muslim acts of aggression, closing his remarks by telling Hamze not to "blow sunshine up my butt."

  • Governor Mitch Daniels, Republican from Indiana, whose state — unlike most others — has been in the black for several years, thanks to his belt-tightening discipline and immunity to liberal calumny.

  • Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota and an icon of the Tea Party Movement that decisively seized the Congress in last November's midterms, has been an eloquent and refreshingly aggressive spokeswoman on conservative issues. Like Sarah Palin, Bachmann is a lightning rod for leftists who seem to have an anaphylactic allergy to beautiful, accomplished, happily married women with great children (she has five and has been a foster mother to 23) and who are successful in both their public and private lives. (This might explain why the Left tears their hair out over Bachmann and Palin, but are utterly mute when it comes to condemning the genital mutilation and draconian oppression of women in Arab countries whose regimes they support).

  • At one time, I would have included the outspoken Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, until blogger Daniel Greenfield exposed and exhaustively documented what he called "Christie's Dirty Islamist Ties." "New Jersey, the Garden State," Greenfield wrote, "has just taken its first step toward becoming the Sharia State, with Governor Christie's nomination of Sohail Mohammed, an attorney to detained terrorist suspects, to a Superior Court judgeship in Passaic County. The Sohail nomination continues Christie's unfortunate pandering to the American Muslim Union and the Islamic Center of Passaic County."

TO ALL THE NAYSAYERS

If Rudy runs, the leftists will be out in force, lying about and vilifying him with equal if not more hysteria than they have expended on Sarah Palin. That is a surefire measurement of how terminally terrified they are of the man who decimated the 100-year reign of the mob in Noo Yawk, led the nation in welfare reform, and cleaned up the cesspool of filth, corruption, unemployment, and crime New York City had become after only four years under a Democrat mayor.

But conservatives will take their pot shots as well. They will fault Giuliani's positions on social and domestic issues — like abortion, gay marriage, illegal immigration, and gun rights, to name but four — on which he tacks middle to left, but which are bedrock, non-negotiable issues to conservatives.

I am in the latter group, someone who considers herself a rock-ribbed conservative, but who also has opened her eyes to the very real threat of extinction that all Americans must wake up to if our country is to be saved from:

  • The galloping pace at which Sharia law is being insinuated into our system.

  • The degree to which the U.S. Constitution is being systematically undermined and spat upon.

  • The egregious disrespect by Democrats for both the rule of law and the results of fair-and-free elections, as demonstrated by the mob rule currently on view in Wisconsin, and metastasizing rapidly to other states.

  • The way our military is being compromised by suicidal Rules of Engagement, draconian cuts to its ranks, and numerous other insults to the forces that often sacrifice their lives to protect ours!

  • The outrage of Obama's ban on drilling, insuring that Americans have no access to the bounty of oil in our own country — which could provide energy independence for 200 years — while being dependent on oil from the rampaging Arab regimes who hate us more and respect us less today than at any time in history. According to the United States Geological Survey and the Stansberry Report, "we have more oil inside our borders than all the other proven reserves on earth" — i.e., eight times as much as Saudi Arabia, 18 times as much as Iraq, 21times as much as Kuwait, 22 times as much as Iran, and 500 times as much as Yemen. And there is enough natural gas in North Dakota and Montana to shutdown our reliance on OPEC forever.

If these existential threats to our country are not dealt with immediately and decisively, the America most of us love and cherish will vanish under the yoke of tyranny. In just the two years that the Obama regime has held power, we've already tasted what entire continents have experienced under the freedom-loathing systems of Communism, Socialism, and Fascism.

I believe Rudy Giuliani is the only man who not only has both the guts and the gonads to confront our problems and to take bold and decisive actions to solve them, but also the experience and temperament and spine. He is impervious to the threats and intimidations that compromise most politicians — for instance the lily-livered, pork-addicted, spineless politicians who Nancy Pelosi successfully bullied on Christmas Eve last year to exact the votes that crammed and jammed and rammed Socialized Medicine (Obamacare) down the throats of the 80 percent of Americans who didn't want it.

Rudy is allergic to bribes, including the bribes of Middle Eastern potentates like Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who after 9/11 offered the mayor $10 million if Rudy would only say that U.S. foreign policy — specifically its support of Israel and those big bad Jews — was responsible for the attacks that annihilated 3,000 innocent Americans. Rudy stopped short of spitting in his face when he turned down the filthy lucre — which is more than can be said of most American universities which are clearly "influenced" by the largesse of the Saudis and their anti-American and anti-Semitic agenda.

That's all well and good, you may say, but what about the left-leaning social positions Giuliani holds?

For me, that's easy. Under the totalitarian regime that is promised if the left continues its deadly assault on America, all social issues will be off — the-table — forever! For the enviro-fanatics whose mantra is "sustainability," nothing less than zero-population growth is acceptable; abortions will be mandatory. Gun rights will be non-existent. Free speech — which the current regime is already trying to curtail through "net neutrality" and other odious schemes — will vanish. And Sharia law will accomplish the unthinkable, relegating the U.S. Constitution to the trash heap of history.

Therefore I believe that many if not most social issues can be relegated to the back burner until the major issues are dealt with satisfactorily. I would guess that Mr. Giuliani's own consciousness about abortion was formed in the 1960s when the newfound feminist movement made pregnancy termination its raison d'être, in fact telling the world that the developing fetus was "just a blob of tissue." That was before the advent of sonograms, which didn't become widely used until the 1970s, when they revealed that the "blob of tissue" had a beating heart, functioning kidneys, developing lungs, and a visible and quite humbling humanity. Subsequently, most of the women who opted for abortions had complete changes of heart about that "blob of tissue," ultimately referring to the pictures on their own sonograms as "my baby." I hope that Mr. Giuliani has a similar epiphany.

As we face financial ruin at home, the alienation of our trusted European allies, the sabotage of our most reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel, and the systematic destruction of our military, I think people will be willing to put their misgivings aside in the belief that Rudy Giuliani is uniquely qualified to solve these problems.

A BLUEPRINT FOR THE G & G CANDIDATE

Here are the issues I think Mr. Giuliiani should focus on like a laser:

  • Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: The jobs that have been lost to rampant unemployment, which is not nine or 10 percent, but in many states over 15 percent, and in numerous cities in California and Michigan and other states, over 20 percent, even as high as 27 percent! It is crucia, I think, for Giuliani to present huge, multicolored, easy-to-understand charts (like Ross Perot did in the early 1990's and like Cong. Paul Ryan is doing today) to drive home the horrific unemployment figures. And of course to say, exactly, what he would do to drive those numbers down.

  • All Things Economic: The massive deficit and debt and the tyranny of unions like SIEU which have gotten so drunk on their entitlement mentality that they are now defying the will of the electorate and having their typical temper tantrums via massive, orchestrated demonstrations. This would also include a promise to defund liberal propaganda machines like NPR and PBS, and also about a half-dozen "departments" that contribute nothing to the public good but keep increasing their employees and therefore the massive, taxpayer-funded benefits they receive...the department of "education" comes immediately to mind. But most important, Giuliani as candidate should be the front and center in opening the door on the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security entitlements. Also a promise to fire all 200,000 government employees that the Obama regime has hired since 2008! And while you're at it, a promise to make unprecedented cuts in all federal agencies, hopefully eliminating many of them, starting with the Environmental Protection Racket (oops, I mean agency), the Department of Marxist Thinking (oops, I mean Education), and of course the Internal Revenue Service, replacing it with either a flat tax or a fair tax.

  • National Security: This has been drastically undermined by the current regime in the White House. For instance, alienating our most trusted allies like England and Israel and de facto supporting the most anti-American thugs and dictators in the world like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Ahmadinejad in Iran, the Putin Machine in Russia, on and on. Rudy must also re-energize NASA with major funding while permanently rescinding the shockingly ignorant Obama administration's "'mission statement" to "reach out" to a 7th century ideology to make it feel better about its lack of modern scientific and technological advancements. And this is not to omit rescinding the Obama regime's "invitation" to literally multi-thousands of "refugees" from Gaza and Egypt and other anti-American places (no doubt the better to swell their voting base) to come to the United States. The subject of national security must also include securing our borders against the massive influx of illegal aliens — many of them criminals — who are threatening the lives and livelihoods of our own citizens.

  • And most egregious is the embrace by Obama and his minions of the anti-American and anti-Israel policies of the most corrupt organization in the entire world, the United Nations. This includes the U.N.'s vicious Agenda 21, which writer Jim O'Neill has persuasively described as "the death knell of liberty." O'Neill writes: "What have we seen since the Obama Administration took over? The brainiacs in charge of America's finances have been ignoring our debts, and eagerly proposing ways to sink us deeper into a financial quagmire. They want the American dollar replaced by a new global currency. They want America's middle class to hang in the wind, and then die on the vine. They are Globalists, and they want America to fail. It's so easy to see, once you realize what's going on." I know if Mr. Giuliani suggested completely defunding this cesspool on First Avenue and kicking it out of America, the entire country would stand up and applaud ! He should also declare the U.S. a firm and unshakable ally and supporter of the State of Israel, and make clear to the world's bullies that the United States will partner with Israel and support Israel with all diplomatic, military and financial assistance she needs.

  • The Radical Islamic Threat: The radical Islamists have made massive and frightening inroads into American society that threaten to undermine our very way of life. First among them is Sharia Law, which has already invaded our banking system and also found its way to a NJ court ruling in favor of a man who murdered his daughter in an "honor killing" because she was too Americanized. This anti-American, rigid Islamic "justice" system has already contaminated our own system of law and also infiltrated the highest levels of our government. And look at this: on March 3, 2011, terrorist Anjem Choudary is holding a rally in front of the White House calling for Muslims to rise up and establish an Islamic state in America, to overthrow our government and establish Shariah law. And how about this from Pamela Geller at AtlasShrugs.com: The U.S. State Department is now spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Mosques in the Middle East — while American citizens by the millions are out of work and inflation is growing every second. Suffice it to say that this is among the most URGENT issues candidate Giuliani should address. He must deal with Islamofascism with the same seriousness and resolve as we did with Tojo's Imperial Japan, Hitler's Nazism and then the USSR's world Communism agenda.

  • A Constitutional Republic: All of us have witnessed a (so-far) bloodless coup-d'état, in which an unknown and inexperienced far-left radical ascended to the presidency of the United States of America without once revealing — to this day — his college records, his medical records, his Selective Service record, the famous still- missing birth certificate, on and on. In short, we don't know who this guy is! But to most people it is clear that he has deep contempt for our Constitution and our Bill of Rights, and by appointing nearly 40 "tsars" to run our country, that he has zero respect for our country's long-valued tradition of vetting the people who run our country through the elected people in the U.S. Congress. This should be a major campaign issue: Respect and adherence to the U.S. Constitution!

While I'm presuming to advise Mr. Giuliani, I think it would be a great idea, and certainly unprecedented, for him to name his vice presidential choice and cabinet from day one of his campaign. Here are just a few suggestions (with thanks to Char and Bill):

IT'S DO-OR-DIE TIME FOR AMERICA

Rarely do we have the right man at the right time to do the job. I believe this is one of those rare times and that Rudy Giuliani can and will reverse virtually every act, law, policy, signing order, et al, that Mr. Obama has inflicted on our country, and will also spearhead the drive to reclaim America's Manifest Destiny of exceptionalism!

© Joan Swirsky

 

The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
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