Krugman Asks The Key Question About Rudy's Dissembling, His Character, And The Media
November 2, 2007 -- 8:34 AM EST // //

As you loyal readers know, this blog firmly believes that Rudy Giuliani regards the truth as little more than a nettlesome obstacle between himself and the nuke button. And I've repeatedly asked the following question about Rudy in recent days:

When is Rudy's chronic mendacity going to become part of the official media narrative of Campaign 2008? When will the pundits start talking about this constant dissembling as an overarching character trait, in the same manner that we heard endlessly about alleged Dem flaws such as Al Gore's serial exaggerating, John Kerry's effeteness and obfuscation, John Edwards' phoniness, and Hillary's penchant for political calculation?

Well. today Paul Krugman has taken this question and blared it through his big megaphone. In his column today, which is about Rudy's constant dissembling about prostate cancer, he phrases this key question about Rudy -- and the attendant challenge to his media peers -- perfectly:

Why isn’t Mr. Giuliani’s behavior here considered not just a case of bad policy analysis but a character issue?

For better or (mostly) for worse, political reporting is dominated by the search for the supposedly revealing incident, in which the candidate says or does something that reveals his true character. And this incident surely seems to fit the bill...

By rights, then, Mr. Giuliani’s false claims about prostate cancer — which he has, by the way, continued to repeat, along with some fresh false claims about breast cancer — should be a major political scandal...

The fact is that the prostate affair is part of a pattern: Mr. Giuliani has a habit of saying things, on issues that range from health care to national security, that are demonstrably untrue. And the American people have a right to know that.

Indeed. As this blog has been noting regularly, in the case of Dem candidates, your pundits will cheerfully springboard off the most trivial of anecdotes -- and in some cases, things that never happened at all -- to reach sweeping judgments about Dems' character deficits. But when it comes to Republican candidates, there is, with a few exceptions, a deep-seated reluctance to doing something so crude and impolite. This enormous double standard has been plainly obvious for years and years now. Yet you'd be hard-pressed to get anyone in the media to admit this. The denial about it runs too deep.

Here we have the perfect opportunity for pundits to prove this wrong. It isn't just that Rudy's ongoing mendacity is plainly obvious on a bunch of fronts. More to the point, when you actually watch his mendacity in real time, it's very clear that there's a characterological, even pathological dimension to it, wherein Rudy is perfectly at ease as he casually spews one falsehood after another. Take a look at this video of Rudy talking about health care and tell me that's not the case:

Rudy's cheerfully audacious mendacity is very clearly a window into the man's character. Yet there's literally nothing that will get your pundits and commentators to start saying so en masse, the way they'd already be doing if a Dem were dissembling at even a fraction of the rate Rudy has been.

Prove us wrong, media. We dare you.

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