The Mayor of Nothing But Incendiary Pants

Mr. Giuliani, you may want to check that flame on your trousers.

First it was Rudy the Saint of 9/11 claiming that he was as much at risk as the workers who spent weeks cleaning up "the pile" at Ground Zero when in reality he spent more time at Yankee Stadium than he did at Ground Zero, and if his health is at risk it's from those stadium hotdogs rather than the toxic stew which Bush Administration flack Christine Todd Whitman claimed was completely harmless.

Now he's boasting of leaving New York City with a budget surplus -- another lie:

Rudolph W. Giuliani has been broadcasting radio advertisements in Iowa and other states far from the city he once led stating that as mayor of New York, he “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.”

The assertion, which Mr. Giuliani has repeated on the trail as he has promoted his fiscal conservatism, is somewhat misleading, independent fiscal monitors said. In fact, Mr. Giuliani left his successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, with a bigger deficit than the one Mr. Giuliani had to deal with when he arrived in 1994. And that deficit would have been large even if the city had not been attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

“He inherited a gap, and he left a gap for his successor,” Ronnie Lowenstein, the director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency that monitors the city budget, said of Mr. Giuliani. “The city was budgeting as though the good times were not going to end, but sooner or later they always do.”

The Giuliani campaign defended the advertisement, noting that it merely states that Mr. Giuliani created a multibillion-dollar surplus, not that he passed one on to his successor.

Are we supposed to believe that this is the intent of Giuliani's ad -- to remind voters that he built a surplus and then squandered it? I hardly think so.

It's ironic that Rudy Giuliani wants to run on the Clinton-era surplus, which through the financial markets pumped boatloads of money into the city's coffers, but at the same time wants to run against the Clinton record.

What a craven bunch of liars and weasels these Republican candidates are. From Mitt Romney, former governor of MASSACHUSETTS, now ready to brand the most popular methods of birth control as "abortions" and the ridiculous lies of Rudy Giuliani, it's hard to imagine why anyone in this country puts any stock in these guys anymore.

This is the party that Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove built. I hope they're proud of it.