Thompson Takes Bites Out of Giuliani, Romney

GMTA:)

Thanks so much, Peach. I definitely want to be included to try and counter the venom that is spewed every time Rudy's poll ratings go up. lol

Then when he drops in the polls, well, what then?

Soft on Gay Marriage

Other than tax cuts, the biggest domestic issue of the 2004 election was President Bush's support of a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. Unfortunately, Rudy Giuliani has taken a "Kerryesque" position on gay marriage.

Although Rudy, like John Kerry, has said that marriage should remain between a man and a woman, he also supports civil unions, "marched in gay-pride parades" ...dressed up in drag on national television for a skit on Saturday Night Live (and moved in with a) wealthy gay couple" after his divorce. He also very vocally opposed running on a gay marriage amendment:

His thoughts on the gay-marriage amendment? "I don't think you should run a campaign on this issue," he told the Daily News earlier this month. "I think it would be a mistake for anybody to run a campaign on it -- the Democrats, the president, or anybody else."

Here's more from the New York Daily News:

"Rudy Giuliani came out yesterday against President Bush's call for a ban on gay marriage.

The former mayor, who Vice President Cheney joked the other night is after his job, vigorously defended the President on his post-9/11 leadership but made clear he disagrees with Bush's proposal to rewrite the Constitution to outlaw gays and lesbians from tying the knot.

"I don't think it's ripe for decision at this point," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"I certainly wouldn't support [a ban] at this time," added Giuliani..."

Although Rudy may grudgingly say he doesn't support gay marriage (and it would be political suicide for him to do otherwise), where he really stands on the issue is an open question.

Apparently so. They fear the Fred.

Grin. Good one. (I'm a Baghdad Bob fan myself!)

I always wonder about the naysayers on this forum (and I've been around here for nearly 9 years). Many seem to be shills or plants from the opposition ;-).

that is what I think too. Pro gun control and pro choice is not my idea of a conservative.

" Pro gun control and pro choice is not my idea of a conservative."

That's not my idea of an *American*.

We must abandon every conservative principle we hold dear, and vote for Rudy

Hey, no problem.............

ROTFLMBO!

You are too creepy for words. Quit pinging me.

The GOP Should Dump Its Litmus Test By Michael Reagan FrontPageMagazine.com | February 16, 2007

The philosopher Diogenes is said to have wandered around ancient Greece holding a lantern and seeking to find an honest man.

My fellow Republicans, sans lanterns, are now wandering around the political landscape seeking to find the perfect Republican presidential candidate.

I don’t know if Diogenes ever found that honest man, but I do know that those Republicans are never going to find the perfect candidate, simply because he does not exist.

Some Republicans insist that the only perfect candidate would be a clone of my Dad, Ronald Reagan. Aside from the fact that there is no such thing, it’s important to recognize that Ronald Reagan, as he often admitted, was anything but perfect.

One of the criticisms about former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney focuses on his record concerning the abortion issue. We are told by the modern day Diogenes clones that he can’t be trusted to fight abortion because he once, more or less, supported a woman’s right to butcher her baby.

It may come as a surprise to these purists, but Ronald Reagan once supported abortion too. Yet nobody ever questioned his strong pro-life credentials after his conversion to Republicanism. They accepted his sincerity. Why can’t they accept Mitt Romney’s?

Romney’s record shows he should be totally acceptable to all conservatives, yet because of one dubious question concerning the validity of his conversion to the pro-life side, he is deemed unsuitable to carry the conservative banner.

The same is true of Rudy Giuliani. On every major issue, he is a solidly conservative and extraordinarily adept executive, but because he backs abortion and some form of gun control, America’s mayor -- the hero of 9/11 and the man who did the impossible by cleaning up New York -- is all but ruled out as a 2008 candidate.

Not one of the major candidates is free of some real or imagined flaw that offends some conservatives.

This is madness, and if it does not stop, the GOP is going to lose the presidential election in 2008. In the search for the perfect candidate we are going to end up with an imperfect candidate. Keep in mind the truism that agreement with someone on most issues and disagreement on others is seen as normal, but should you agree with someone on every single issue imaginable … well… to put it plainly, psychologists say you’re nuts.

I recently got a letter from a conservative Christian organization that asked me if the current GOP candidates are the best the Republican Party has to offer.

“Is it possible that GOP conservative ranks are this thin?” the letter writer asked. “Has the GOP nothing better to offer? Should not pro-family pro-life voters also want a low taxes and limited government candidate before they vigorously support him? Increased taxes and expanded government hurts everyone. Was Ronald Wilson Reagan an anomaly and did he represent the values of his party?

“These GOP candidates,” the letter instructed me, “are little better than Bob Dole, Gerald Ford, or [George] H.W. Bush. Did anyone notice they all lost?”

This makes me wonder if anybody can stand up to the litmus test these people are applying to candidates.

Ronald Reagan had one litmus test he applied to candidates. Were they Republicans? If they were he backed them all the way. He would let the party choose the candidate and he would support and vote for the candidate. He didn’t go sniffing around trying to find some flaw in their character or their past. Once nominated, they were his choice.

And nobody was more candid in admitting that he was anything but perfect than my Dad. He knew that like all men, he had his flaws and he spent a lifetime combating them. Had today’s GOP litmus test been seriously applied to him, he could not have passed the test.

The Democrats don’t have litmus tests. If the nominee is a Democrat, they support their candidate all the way, and if they lose it isn’t because they didn’t fight like demons for their man or woman.

If we want to win in 2008, Republicans had better wake up, and quit talking Ronald Reagan and start being like Ronald Reagan.

With City Hall behind barricades, Mayor Rudy Giuliani is getting ready to take his show on the road.

BY JOHN LEONARD | NEW YORK -- Our only mayor, Bob Newhart's Evil Twin, opened the new year in Arizona, where he showed off his crime statistics to the right-wingers at the "Dark Ages" frat blast in Phoenix and took in the Fiesta Bowl football game. During his absence, it rained four inches on us, while three feet of snow fell on Chicago. That very same week we learned New York also had fewer homicides last year than Richard Daley's city on the lake. So not only are there more murders in Chicago than in New York, among 4 million fewer residents, but the weather is worse. Which is another reason for Rudy, after his two terms are up, to run for senator, if not vice president.

Nevertheless, and even though we were very wet, we worried more about the mayor than we did about ourselves, or even Chicago, while he was gone. To say that Rudolph Giuliani is a control freak is to say that Attila the Hun was antsy. There was reason to fear for his mental stability out there in the wild West, in the painted-desert whereabouts of Kit Carson and Zane Grey. Suppose they didn't give him a whirlybird to napalm Thelma and Louise? Suppose those Navajos refused to convert their kivas into condos? Suppose Geronimo demanded more than his fair share of TV face time? What if Grand Canyon mules insisted on crossing at the wrong midtown intersection?

Imagine our relief when Rudy returned to his bunker without conniption. His very first day back, he threatened to defund New York City's Campaign Finance Board because it proposed giving $4 for each one raised privately by candidates for a City Council election next month, if those candidates forswear corporate donations. Although this proposal had been endorsed by a coalition of the League of Women Voters, the Citizens Union, the City Bar Association, the New York Times and Common Cause, the mayor accused them all of "stubbornness," "arrogance" and "intellectual dishonesty." It's the tone he takes not only with critics but with any Chicken Little or Tiny Tim who thinks out loud without his permission -- with judges who say that the voters, instead of Rudy, should decide if the Yankees play baseball in Manhattan or the Bronx; with members of the City Council who override his vetoes; with journalists who want information on how "workfare" is playing out; with the comptroller, the public advocate and the Independent Budget Office, who all had to sue to force him to give them the facts and figures they needed to do their jobs; with City University of New York students who seek in lawful assembly to protest tuition hikes.

The last five years in New York have been less about government than they've been about obedience training. Rudy's a guy with a built-in balcony, from which he barks our marching orders. Lawful assembly, and such free-speechifying as may attend its occasion, are particularly sore points around here. Before he was even elected the first time, in October 1993, candidate Rudy opposed letting Louis Farrakhan speak at Yankee Stadium. In March 1995, a wall of cops surrounded City Hall, with horses, scooters, nightsticks, riot gear, barricades and Mace, to keep 20,000 high school and college students from marching on Wall Street. That June, Rudy kicked Yasir Arafat out of Lincoln Center. The following May, he would use armored cars against homeless squatters. The first official act of his second term, last New Year's Day, was to close his own inauguration to the public, after which he directed the Metropolitan Transit Authority to remove from buses and subways a New York magazine ad that took his name in vain, which was followed by checkpoints and roadblocks in Greenwich Village against anarcho-syndicalists and other rowdies, and video surveillance cameras in Washington Square Park.

When cabbies last spring objected to a new set of onerous regulations, they were met with ridicule by Rudy, an accusation by his police commissioner that a proposed convoy of protesters constituted a "terrorist threat" (wonderfully coded, since many cabbies are Middle Eastern), a deployment of livery drivers as scabs (later ruled unlawful by an appellate court) and an army of cops with tow trucks who closed the East River bridges to any taxi without a fare, forcing angry drivers to walk from Queens and Brooklyn to Manhattan. "They know we broke their strike -- destroyed it really," Rudy boasted. "Nobody showed up today. And that didn't happen just because we allowed business to go on as usual. That happened because we had a plan to stop them from doing it."

In May, when street artists whom he'd hounded from the city sidewalks tried to heckle his appearance at Cooper Union, they were arrested. In September, the city refused a permit to Khallid Abdul Muhammad for his Million Youth March, suggesting that he agitate instead on Randall's Island. And when Muhammad won won his right in court to gather on Malcolm X Boulevard, the cops closed all the subway stations and cross streets so nobody could join in along the route. In December, demonstrators seeking to observe World AIDS Day and mourn the 77,000 New Yorkers who've died of the disease were likewise denied a permit to rally in City Hall Park, and likewise went to court to win their case. Then, when 150 of them showed up, they had to pass through motorcycle cops and metal detectors before they arrived at a parking lot surrounded by a brand-new eight-foot chain-link penitentiary fence and looked down upon by sharpshooters.

Nor was it an accident that the organizer of the rally, Housing Works, had already seen its $6.5 million worth of contracts with the city canceled. Why should a thrift-shop sponsor of drug treatment, job training and employment programs for homeless people with HIV expect anything better from Rudy than, say, the City Council, whose time-servers till a couple of weeks ago were forbidden to stage photo ops on the steps of City Hall because maybe they were closet Montana militiamen. Or Repohistory, denied permission by the Department of Transportation to put up posters commemorating famous civil-liberties cases. Or Bill Weinberg, the radical journalist who spent a night in the Tombs and the following Saturday cleaning up dogshit in Tompkins Square for pasting a "GIULIANI IS A JERK" sticker on a lamppost. It's not as if any of these people were baseball players or astronauts or Disney puppets or Columbus Day Italians.

I am reminded of another great leader, who complained in Moscow in 1920: "Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?" This was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

He [McCain] just doesn't have it any more. The fire in the belly.

Actually .... maybe that's a relief, considering McCain-iac's previous rantings.....

I know I'd feel a helluva lot better trying to push my guy to catch a conservative frontrunner than a liberal one. That way, if I fail, the GOP won't disintegrate as a conservative party.

"We must abandon every conservative principle we hold dear, and vote for Rudy "

Caesar! Caesar! Caesar!

Why exactly do I see you on practically every Fred Thompson thread bashing him? He most certainly is electable over any democratic opponent with the possible exception of Bill Richardson, which I think most republicans might have a hard time beating in the general-election. Polls today mean very little except to show some trends.

Sorry Peach, if you post to me, I will answer.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1777111/posts?page=290#290

The words of Jim Robinson on pushing a liberal like Rino Rudy.

This is a partial transcript from "Hannity & Colmes," July 20, 2005...

COLMES: Now, on abortion — now, you are pro-choice, right?

GIULIANI: Yes.

COLMES: You're a pro-choice Republican.

GIULIANI: I am.

~snip~

COLMES: Now, Roe vs. Wade -- You are pro-choice. How important is it to you as a pro-choice Republican to have a pro-choice on the court as someone...

GIULIANI: That is not the critical factor. And what's important to me is to have a very intelligent, very honest, very good lawyer on the court. And he fits that category, in the same way Justice Ginsburg fit that category.

I mean, she was — she maybe came at it from a very different political background, very qualified lawyer, very smart person.

Why exactly do I see you on practically every Fred Thompson thread bashing him?

I'll take "He's a Liberal" for $200, Alex...

At some point he'll take on so much water that the Rooty-toots will be claiming that he was a submarine all along...

Being a successful mayor of a cesspool doesn't change the fact that is still a cesspool nor does it change any of the stances Rudy has had in the past.

His previous record, and one we should use to gauge his positions in the future, show he would be the front runner on the DEMOCRAT side.

The fact that FDT garnered 13% of a poll AND IS NOT EVEN RUNNING, should indicate to all of you what a poor pool of candidates we have to choose from. The results mean FDT is one who will probably rocket to the top of any of the polls AFTER he announces.

Reagan was 64 when he ran for his first term. Thompson is 62.

I think this is great. A Rudy/Thompson ticket could be very strong in the general election.

Thanks narses, Jim like Ann Coulter believes Guiliani would be one of the few potential nominees that would lose and I agree.