Goodbye, Rudy!

A farewell message to Rudy Giuliani, from the brilliant team at Slate.com:

I can’t say I’ll miss you, but I will say I appreciated our time together. I wasn’t living in New York City when you implemented the broken windows theory, but I was around afterward to be stopped and frisked in Manhattan enough times to know which subway stations to avoid.

I moved in from New Jersey, where I wasn’t aware that the New York Police Department was already spying on Muslims.  You later bragged, “I was the mayor who put police officers in mosques, in New York and New Jersey.”  You made being Muslim probable cause. But that was cool, too, because a suspicion of police brought Black and brown communities together against the shared perceived foe in our neighborhoods.

You made 9/11, and the fear of Muslims, kind of your thing. I was in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention the night you endorsed Donald Trump’s candidacy by screaming about “ISLAMIC EXTREMIST TERRORISM.”  The people outside clearly heard you; they came up to me unpromoted, eyes wide, and asked, “Are you Muslim?”  I did get a kick out of that.

I was across the river in New Jersey when 9/11 happened, by the way.  When Trump said that “thousands and thousands” of us were celebrating, you said it was just an “exaggeration.”  I remember that day a little differently.  My dad, who drove a black car taxi in Manhattan, somehow made it home.  Many of the Muslims in my community had family who didn’t.  Still, it’s impressive that you made walking around ground zero a career-defining political accomplishment.

Later, the president asked you to figure out a way to make his Muslim ban legal.  We know that because you blurted it out yourself.  Many of Trump’s supporters still use your argument to defend the travel ban as having “nothing to do with Muslims.”  I guess that makes you a decent lawyer.

You had other moments recently.  The Trump administration was a pretty hilarious place for you to go out in such spectacular fashion.  In fact, the president may have avoided being impeached if not for your shady trips to Ukraine, so I guess we owe you for that too.  Oh, and that time you went to an Apple Store last year because you couldn’t figure out how to open your iPhone?  Whew, a good one.

I do have one question: What did you mean when you said, “I’m more of a Jew than Soros is”?  I never got that. Oh well, it’s time to go.