Rudy Flunks The Duck Test*
Rudy Giuliani doesn't believe Barack Obama "loves America" because he wasn't brought up that way, and it happened when he was nine years old, when he came under "the influence of communism and socialism."
The former New York mayor sounded a lot like one of the nutcase birthers when he told a group of Republican fat cats in a Manhattan restaurant on Wednesday, "[Obama] wasn't brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country."
He was speaking a party for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who refused to comment on Rudy's ranting, although he did courageously reveal, "I love America."
Giuliani took a day or two to say he was "not questioning [Obama's] patriotism" – which is exactly what he was doing. Just a week earlier he had questioned the President's patriotism when he referred to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a man who fight for his people "unlike our President," the New York Times noted.
He went on to deny his criticism could possibly be racist. Not possible, he explained, because the President " was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather."
He reminds me of a Democratic congressman who said accusations that he was anti-Semitic were impossible because his daughter had married a Jew and converted.
Apparently no one told the former mayor that once you're in a deep hole, stop digging.
By the end of the week he became Rudy the Red Baiter, saying Obama doesn't love this country the way Rudy does not just because he's an African-American raised by a white mother but more so because of the "communists with whom he associated when he was 9 years old” and living in Indonesia.
Rudy made a disastrous run for president in 2008 and is probably making too much money these days to mount another lost cause. Maybe he thinks this type of Obama-bashing will give him a role in to play in the 2016 campaign.
* If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck and looks like a duck, it's a duck.