Rudy's non-conservative attack rhetoric
Politics ain’t beanbag, so perhaps one shouldn’t be too critical of the escalating silliness in the war of words between the Romney and Giuliani camps. But Giuliani’s attack on Romney’s law enforcement record casts Rudy in a pretty bad light, it seems to me.
Giuliani wants to make something out of the fact that a judge Romney appointed to the superior court released a thuggish criminal on bail, only for that criminal to commit murder. The judge’s decision, of course, is indefensible. However, she is a former prosecutor, and to my knowledge, the Giuliani camp has failed to identify anything in her record that might have caused Romney to believe when he appointed her that she would make this sort of deplorable decision.
Romney, naturally, has denounced the judge’s ruling and stated that she should resign. Giuliani responded by criticizing Romney for “throwing the judge under the bus.”
But, as any true conservative should recognize, the judge is responsible for her own ruling. Thus, it’s hardly throwing her under the bus for Romney to express his disgust with that ruling. To be sure, Romney would share some of the blame if he knew or should have known that the judge would issue a ruling like the one in question, or even that she was soft on crime. But, as I just noted, there appears to be no basis for such a claim.
In the absence of such evidence, the Giuliani camp wants to suggest that Romney appointed the judge because of her gender. Rudy supporter Deroy Murdock makes this argument, noting that the judge in question was one of four females Romney appointed to the superior court in April 2006, and that the Romney administration enthused at the time about having advanced the cause of diversity.
But Murdock presents no evidence that any of these women was appointed at the expense of better qualified males. Moreover, if Romney did take gender into account, he was only following the lead of every modern president including Ronald Reagan. Or maybe Murdock believes that Sandra Day O’Connor was the most qualified person in America for her Supreme Court judgeship.
Giuliani has also tried to connect the ruling of the clueless superior court judge to Massachusetts’ less than stellar crime statistics during the period when Romney was governor. According to Rudy:
[Romney] had an increase in murder and violent crime while he was governor. So it’s not so much the isolated situation which he and the judge will have to explain. He’s kind of thrown her under the bus, so it’s hard to know how this is all going to come out, but the reality is, he did not have a record of reducing violent crime.
This is mixing apples and oranges, to put it kindly. Clearly, there is no relation between a terrible decision by one judge in a bail proceeding involving one defendant, and the Massachusetts crime rate.
To be sure, Giuliani can (and does) boast of a substantial reduction of crime during his time as mayor of New York. Murdock trots out some of the numbers, and shows that Romney suffers by comparison, as would virtually any governor. But this analysis, while legitimate politicking, is quite superficial. Crime rates in a jurisdiction are determined by many factors other than the politician in charge. Demographics play a huge role, for example. Moreover, it’s easier to preside over a reduction in crime when the crime rate is astronomical to begin with.
Rudy deserves credit, of course, for the reduction in crime that occurred under his watch. But when he repeatedly makes statements like “I reduced shootings by 75 percent,” he raises doubts about his bona fides as a conservative. True conservatives, those who understand the complex interplay of forces within a society, don’t believe that, in a democracy, one man can reduce shootings by 75 percent And any man who actually believes he can have that sort of impact may be a little dangerous.
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