Why Conservatives Are Fed Up with the Rudy Giuliani Story

On Feb. 13, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani talked for almost half an hour to the Iranian American Community of Arizona. The Arizona Republic dispatched a reporter to interview Giuliani before the speech; the mayor insisted that "it's only the president who refuses to say" that Islamic radicalism is behind terror attacks. Giuliani's speech itself did not make the newspaper.

Yet that speech was a red band trailer for Giuliani's remarks in New York this week—the unannounced, by now much-discussed rant at an event put on by a new Republican economic pressure group, the one in which he said "I do not believe that the president loves America." The preview, Giuliani's Phoenix speech, was pure vitriol, delivered with some hoarseness and some sentences that never made the finish line as new, harsher sentences tumbled forth. In it, he said that Iranian negotiators were "looking into weak eyes" when they looked at the president—a sharp difference from what it was like to look at Ronald Reagan, whose toughness, according to Giuliani, was responsible for the way Iran dealt with American hostages: "The moment he put his hand on the Bible, they released them." (This was not really how or why the hostage releases happened.)