"The unraveling of Rudy Giuliani."

Or, as another writer sought to explain, "How Rudy Giuliani went from a respected federal prosecutor and beloved NYC mayor to Trump's bag man."

Whenever they say it isn't about the money ...

The unravelling of Rudy Giuliani, by Lexington (The Economist)

No one member of Donald Trump’s coterie has fallen further than “America’s mayor”

Had Lexington’s 2007 incarnation been informed that the next Republican president would be a pro-gay, pro-choice, thrice-wed New Yorker, the name of Donald Trump would not have leaped to his august mind. Rudy Giuliani led the Republican primary by a big margin throughout that year. There were, to be sure, doubts about whether the former New York mayor was too socially liberal for small-town conservatives. He had once shared a house with two gay people and a Shih Tzu and, what was worse, acted in a comic skit alongside Mr Trump, that symbol of louche metropolitanism. Moreover America was not given to electing “abrasive” New Yorkers, Lexington cautioned then. But, like many others, he suspected Mr Giuliani’s dynamism and the broad support he enjoyed for his calm leadership after 9/11 and record of crime-fighting could compensate for such handicaps.

It has been pretty much downhill ever since for Mr Giuliani—culminating this week in what appears to be the worst crisis of his increasingly scandal-plagued career ...

(snip)

In truth it is hard to find any altogether convincing explanation for Mr Giuliani’s behaviour. He was once a serious politician prone to indiscipline; now he is wild. Yet a former colleague of his, who knows both men, suggests resentful envy of his old co-star Mr Trump—whom he must secretly disdain—may be eating him alive. If so, Mr Giuliani is going to really hate it when the president and his entire party flatly disown him. That looks like the inevitable next stage in his disgrace.

"Why community policing should focus on helping to resolve personal and domestic disputes, not signs of physical decay."

My hunch is that most of us would agree with the utility of community-oriented policing. While mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani famously subscribed to the "broken window" theory, which he extended to include the removal not only of visual signs of physical decay, but also humans he associated with them.

How's this theory holding up?

Private Conflict, Not Broken Windows: Why community policing should focus on helping to resolve personal and domestic disputes, not signs of physical decay, Richard Florida (City Lab)

... The authors’ key findings provide little support for the claim of broken windows theory that visual cues of neighborhood decay precipitate disorder and crime. As O’Brien and Sampson write, “Public denigration had no predictive power, belying the role of literal broken windows; and the link from public social disorder to later public violence was half the magnitude of the reverse pathway from violence to social disorder. Put more simply, both physical and social forms of public disorder were weakly predictive of future violence and disorder, if at all.” This is a big deal because these are the very things on which broken windows policing focuses.

It's ironic: As Florida's essay was being disseminated, Giuliani was back in the news.

Rudolph Giuliani’s Outrage on Homelessness, and Richard Gere’s, by Ginia Bellafante (New York Times)

... In an interview with NBC’s local news channel in New York, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani explained, with both glee and self-regard, that not long ago he had paid a visit to the 19th Precinct station house on the Upper East Side to complain about a homeless man who had taken up residence on his block.

“Do you know when people lived on the streets and didn’t use bathrooms inside?” he said. “It’s called the Dark Ages.”

Needless to say, Mr. Giuliani did not pause and follow up that remark with, “And how disgraceful that so many centuries later we are still not able to house all of our neediest.”

He instead went on to remind us how in the 1990s, his “brain” and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton’s “people” got rid of the homeless, the panhandlers, the nuisances. “You chase ’em and you chase ’em and you chase ’em and you chase ’em, and they either get the treatment that they need or you chase ’em out of the city.”

Taibbi: "Rudy Giuliani is giving me Soviet flashbacks."

How many times have I heard it? "If you don't like it here, leave,"

In fact, I've heard it so often that it occurs to me to spend the remainder of the year turning the idiocy on its head, and pre-empting it:

"No, that's wrong. If YOU don't like me being here, then YOU leave."

Rudy Giuliani, American Soviet, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

Rudy Giuliani is giving me Soviet flashbacks.

With his bizarre foot-in-mouth rants about how Barack Obama doesn't love "America" the way "we" do, Rudy — and other "They hate us!" exceptionalist 'Muricans like Eric Erickson and Steve Forbes — are starting to remind me of the frightened, denial-sick communist die-hards I knew as a student in Russia.

Not to go too far down memory lane, but in 1990, I went to Leningrad to study. The Soviet empire was in its death throes and most people there, particularly the younger ones, knew it.

But some hadn't gotten the memo yet, and those folks, usually nice enough, often older — university administrators, check-room attendants, security guards, parents of some of my classmates, others — were constantly challenging me and other exchange students to East-versus-West debates, usually with the aim of proving that "their" way of life was better.

By the time I left Russia a dozen years and a couple of career changes later, a lot of those people still hadn't gotten the memo. They were deep in denial about the passing of the USSR and spent a lot of time volubly claiming ownership of words like we and our and us in a way that quickly became a running joke in modernizing Russia.

U Nas Lusche — roughly, Ours is Better or It's Better Here — was the unofficial slogan of the pining-for-the-old-days crowd in post-communist Russia.