The far left press happily ignores Rudy Giuliani’s fun-loving cross-dressing and his support of abortion. These, after all, are “liberal” attitudes.
However, on Nov. 10, New York Times columnist Gail Collins writing on “Rudy and Bernie: B.F.F.’s,” asks if Americans want a president who “values loyalty above all else.”
She answers: No! “Loyalty is a terribly important consideration if you’re choosing a pet, but not a Cabinet member.”
In fact, whom the president trusts can become a matter of life or death.
Within the last year, Rudy stood before the TV cameras defending Bernard Kerik and Monsignor Alan Placa, two devoted friends accused of unconscionable crimes.
Kerik had magically matriculated from Rudy’s mayoral chauffeur to commissioner of the New York Police Department, a partner in Rudy’s consulting firm and Rudy’s nominee to President Bush for director of the Department of Homeland Security.
Some have questioned what stunning services prot?g? Kerik could have performed for Rudy to rate such a meteoric climb from cabbie to caliph.
Collins says Giuliani rewards his friends. She notes that Robert Harding became the city’s budget director after the Liberal Party chairman, daddy Harding, helped Rudy become mayor. Then Mayor Rudy gave the New York City Housing Development Corporation to second son Russell Harding, who embezzled over $400,000 of the taxpayers’ money.
Collins sweetly avoids discussing sonny Russell’s pornography addiction, just noting that “of the 15,000 sexually explicit images found on his computer, only a few were of children.”
Russell’s child pornography crimes are a natural segue to Giuliani’s dear old friend Monsignor Alan Placa. A recent ABC News story cited Placa as employed at Giuliani Partners, “though he’s been credibly accused by a Long Island grand jury of both covering up and engaging in child abuse,” of two former teenage students and an altar boy.
The report noted that Placa toured Italy recently with Rudy and his latest wife. (Collins points out that Placa had Giuliani’s 14-year-long marriage annulled after Rudy remembered his first wife was his second cousin.)
Although Giuliani has distanced himself from buddy Kerik, he has stayed loyal to Placa, saying on YouTube: “I know the man. I know who he is, so I support him.”
However, one of Placa’s accusers, Richard Tollner, says, “This man did unjust things, and he’s being protected and employed and taken care of. It’s not a good thing.” Tollner, now a mortgage broker in Albany, N.Y., testified to the grand jury in 2000 that Placa molested him repeatedly when he was a student at a Long Island Catholic boys high school in 1975.
Tollner was one of three male victims to testify against Placa. When he and the others were ready to charge Placa with abuse, the five-year statute of limitations was past. Still, the news reports all note that despite Rudy’s loyalty, by 2002 the Church banned Placa from carrying out his priestly duties.
“This man harmed children. He still could do it. He deserves to be shown for what he was, or is,” says Tollner on ABC News’ “Good Morning America.”
As a prosecutor, Giuliani dismisses the investigators, prosecutors and the Suffolk County grand jury’s acceptance of the multiple witnesses whose testimony of Placa’s abuse was accepted as trustworthy.
The grand jury determined that Placa suppressed valid child abuse complaints, asking that victims not be told he was a lawyer and bragging, in print, that the diocese he counseled had the “lowest ratio of losses to assets of any diocese.”
In dismissing the judgment of the grand jury, Giuliani dismissed the extensive evidence the panel had analyzed and adjudicated.
Some men from the same high school as Tollner say that the “Giuliani organization” asked that they contact ABC News on behalf of Placa. In an e-mail to ABCNews.com, Matthew Hogan said he knew nothing about “sexual predatoriness on the part of Rev. Placa.”
However, David Clohessy, the national director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is one of many who are challenging Giuliani.
“You can say you believe your pal is innocent [of abuse], but how do you address the fact that there is substantial, credible evidence of a cover-up?”
An election is coming up – stay tuned.
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