Don't Ask "Whatever Happened to Giuliani" -- He Was Always Power Mad

In the old days he built his reputation as a tough prosecutor on insider trading and other securities fraud cases.

Later he leveraged that reputation to become Mayor of New York. Through the luck of the draw, it was Giuliani who happened to be Mayor when airplanes flew into the twin towers, and he became "America's Mayor."

That is the history to which people allude when they ask "whatever happened to" the old Rudi witht he tough cop rep.

The reputation was never based on much, except for the fact that for an ambitious man, seeking higher office and finding himself in possession of prosecutorial discretion. That was enough: the idea of going after Wall Street tycoons made perfect sense.

Tom Wolfe coined the phrase years ago: "the great white defendant." THAT is what a prosecutor wants and what Giuliani triumphantly found is such as Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky.

I argued years ago, on general pro-capitalism grounds, and from the pages of The Pragmatist (ah, memories) that Giuliani was on the wrong side of those cases.

You might call his subsequent career a pragmatic test of my insight.

Now we can let him go down in history as the hair-dye guy who made crazy common cause with the Pillow Guy.

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