RIP Rudy Giuliani

My wife saw Giuliani speak at least 10 years ago at an industry/organization luncheon. It was your pretty typical speech until he started talking about how he "solved" the NY homeless problem. He went on to brag without any self-awareness of how they would tell a homeless person to move on and if they came back the next night and the homeless person was still there they would light all of the homeless person's belongings on fire. My wife said the luncheon pretty much went silent with everyone kind of looking uncomfortably at each other.

It's almost amazing when you think about how much unearned goodwill he had thrown at him after 9/11 and just how thoroughly and completely he's wasted every single ounce of it.

idk seems to me like he doesn't let a single ounce go to waste

xpost You say 'wasted', I say 'set on fire like a homeless person's possessions', let's call the whole thing off.

Every paragraph in that article is overflowing with gold!

“This guy comes running in, wearing a crazy, what I would say was a pink transgender outfit,” Giuliani told the New York Post. “It was a pink bikini, with lace, underneath a translucent mesh top, it looked absurd. He had the beard, bare legs, and wasn’t what I would call distractingly attractive.

“This person comes in yelling and screaming, and I thought this must be a scam or a shakedown, so I reported it to the police. He then ran away,” Giuliani said. The police found no crime had been committed.

Giuliani continued: “I only later realised it must have been Sacha Baron Cohen. I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me.”

He also agrees – in theory at least – to eat a bat with his interviewer.

Bakalova, 24, is highly plausible in the sting, despite also having to pretend, for the benefit of viewers, to be a feral child posing as a far-right journalist.

Ah, the perfect voice for the moment.

I’ve seen the Giuliani moment in Borat 2. It’s even wilder than it sounds. Beyond cringe.

— Maureen Dowd (@maureendowd) October 21, 2020

Oh dear.

rudy will see your zoom dick and raise you a gloom dick pic.twitter.com/IXFMJWmxB5

— kilgore trout, a crushed algorithm (@KT_So_It_Goes) October 21, 2020

Here's a still from Borat's Giuliani scene. You can thank me later. pic.twitter.com/0gJvLeSrds

— Nikora (@MoaVideos) October 21, 2020

so did the "journalist" say she was underage or was presenting herself in such a way as to make her seem blatantly underage? i'm confused by that bit. obviously if Rudy had very good reason to believe she was underage then that adds a whole thick layer of fucked-up to this story

dowd trailed what i assume is this incident in her interview with cohen:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/style/sacha-baron-cohen-maureen-dowd-interview.html

There’s a scene with a top Trump adviser in “Borat Subsequent Movie Film: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” (premiering on Oct. 23 on Amazon) that will leave you gobsmacked.

this has been a good week for gross dick

xxp I was confused by that, too. From the Guardian article: "Bakalova, 24, is highly plausible in the sting, despite also having to pretend, for the benefit of viewers, to be a feral child posing as a far-right journalist."

If she was posing as a journalist, I don't see why Giuliani would have reason to assume she was underage. But I don't get the feral child part.

I wish I had the Blade Runner photo zoomer to look around the room a little.

right, there's a definite gap between "married (?) guy trying to bang journalist" and "married guy trying to bang what he thinks is an underage girl"

Oh look, we're already into excusing the idea of Giuliani sexually harassing a woman phase of the thread, for fuck's sake.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2d/28/0e/2d280e161ce20f0122656c797127f0e4.jpg

It's not excusing, is it? It's just acknowledging just a sliding scale of wrong. All murder is wrong but we still classify it by degrees.

i'm sorry, i didn't parse every detail of this story yet, man.

jeez get on it

It's not excusing, is it? It's just acknowledging just a sliding scale of wrong. All murder is wrong but we still classify it by degrees.

Sure, but imo it's fucking gross to write this off as "old guy trying to bang journalist". Ffs he's not awkwardly propositioning her via email or at a bar, he's groping himself in a private room, which is way more intimidating, gross and awful.

Fair enough.

Basically I just want to make sure no one excuses this steaming pile for any reason at all and I hope he gets every ounce of fallout from this he deserves.

my understanding was that there was some implied consent, she was elaborately removing his microphone in a private room they went to, the issue was less about harassment and more about giuliani being a complete sleazebag but i guess we'll all just have to see the film! (i will never see the film and am already getting kinda bored with this story tbh)

I’m intrigued by the “feral child” part. Sure sounds like she was presenting herself as a kid!

the impression i got was that she was coming on to him but maybe that's just me wrongly assuming this was some kind of classic honeypot operation and not something way more shitty

This incident pretty much cements my belief that kompromat exists for a number of these Trumpian fuckos. If someone in that position displayed the lack of judgment to get got by SBC, it stands to reason they probably got got by people who aren't international celebrities.

yeah i had 0% interest in watching the Borat movie and that number has not moved. to be fair, if the whole movie was shit like this then i probably would be down for it but my impression from the trailer was that at least 80% of it is him going around and making unsophisticated small-town folks look like idiots.

your sophistication level has little to nothing to do with your capacity to be an idiot

thank you that was EXACTLY the point i was trying to make

I'm just saying, as someone who ran screaming from a small town I have very little sympathy for anyone flaunting their racism/sexism in what they think is a safe space

I got a short clip of that scene:

https://media.giphy.com/media/FqKjtMCOAqEUw/giphy.gif

As someone who grew up in several shitty small towns, DJP very very much otm and fuck small town racists forever.

I mean obvs all of them, everywhere. But especially small town ones that assume everyone thinks like them and that their shitty little towns are exceptional bubbles.

to be clear, fuck racists/sexists from big cities, too

no one gets special dispensation because of their area code

we got chodes
in different area codes

Nothing like the small-town racist who, with a smirk and maybe a little knowing side-eye, slyly drops a racist comment into an otherwise ordinary conversation, never questioning that you might not be a hateful idiot like them. Perhaps with an added 'you know what I mean' or 'you know who I'm talking about'. Nothing like it.

right, there's a definite gap between "married (?) guy trying to bang journalist" and "married guy trying to bang what he thinks is an underage girl"

― Evans on Hammond (evol j), Wednesday, October 21, 2020 12:44 PM (one hour ago)

there are also differences between a 76-year-old man trying to sleep with someone else who is in their 70s, someone in their 40s, someone in their 30s, someone in their 20s, and someone portraying a 15-year-old in a film

Nothing like the small-town racist who, with a smirk and maybe a little knowing side-eye, slyly drops a racist comment into an otherwise ordinary conversation, never questioning that you might not be a hateful idiot like them. Perhaps with an added 'you know what I mean' or 'you know who I'm talking about'. Nothing like it.

this. still fucking happens when I go back to visit my family.

pic.twitter.com/kgw3Ctt37J

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) October 21, 2020

Genius

Rudy seems to have learned his lesson, is tightening protocols, checking ID's, and is now being taken in by someone claiming to be Ivanka Trump but who is in fact the vice president of the College Democrats of Indiana https://t.co/Tv27pygxbu

— David Freedlander (@freedlander) October 21, 2020

I saw something about him replying to anyone who texts him the other day, but this is too much. How the fuck is this guy real?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tun92VU2OkU
this Brazilian smash provides ready-made raw parody material

isnt he literally the head of a cybersecurity firm?

i didn't think borat would enter onto the stage of history again

isnt he literally the head of a cybersecurity firm?

He was the US government's cybersecurity czar:

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article126490159.html
https://mashable.com/article/rudy-giuliani-locked-iphone-password-apple-store/

I was confused by that, too. From the Guardian article: "Bakalova, 24, is highly plausible in the sting, despite also having to pretend, for the benefit of viewers, to be a feral child posing as a far-right journalist."

If she was posing as a journalist, I don't see why Giuliani would have reason to assume she was underage. But I don't get the feral child part.

For the benefit of viewers. She isn't going to have told Giuliani that she is the underage child-bride / daughter of fictional character Borat during the interview, but the audience will have seen earlier parts of the film before this scene, and be reading her performance in context.

(Saw her and Borat's Kimmel appearance on youtube last night, and a minute or two after she entered was impressed enough by her commitment to try and look up the actress - Baron-Cohen has attempted extra obfuscation by crediting a fictional actress with no credits, so it's a shame this Giuliani story has blown kayfabe.)

from the Hollywood Reporter review:

(Editing is a major distraction in the film's ballyhooed scene with Rudy Giuliani. The shaping of the sequence and its music, in service to the film's overall plot, suggest the disgraced former mayor is trying to seduce a young woman who interviews him. But it looks like some microphone-fitting footage is being repurposed here, and if you really want to make the man look like an ass, you could just play his interview straight

Oh what?

that's not at all what Vanity Fair said. wouldn't put it past Borat but the description I read in VF very much didn't sound like "lol clever editing made him look like a lecher"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ek3ofgRU0AAebjP?format=png&name=900x900

'It's not what it looks like!'

damn I was really hoping this movie would definitively prove rudy giuliani is a bad person

he’s the fertilizer

god that was incredible

the four seasons total landscaping press conference. what was he even promoting that day?

jfc there’s a whole wiki about it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Seasons_Total_Landscaping_press_conference

The event was held at the company's garage door and parking lot to discuss the status of the Trump campaign's legal challenges to the ballot-counting process in the state, where the president's apparent lead over Joe Biden in the first ballots counted had shifted to a shortfall as mail-in ballots were counted for Philadelphia, historically a heavily Democratic city.

'the event was held at the company’s garage door and parking lot’ is just incredible writing and reality

next to a porn shop. and remember, Trump announced a press conference “at the Four Seasons” implying it was the hotel

and then acted like that’s what he meant all along. my conspiracy theory was the campaign tried to book the hotel and the hotel refused

oh, i remember, but honestly it was hilarious because of how self-evident it was, it’s at four seasons total landscaping, it’s like “giuliani to announce really big gamechanging news about vote stealing at hilton luxury auto repair”. to have trump announce it was at the four seasons was just the icing on the cake

at the garage door haha that’s awesome. when he dies everyone should hold press conferences at some business' garage door or a nearby parking lot to remember what a racist horrible fraud he is

anyway my favorite Rudy moment was the Trump campaign rally on the White House lawn where he blew his nose into a hanky, mopped his brow with the snotty hanky, and then patted the leg if his rented arm-candy with the same hand he did all that with

“of his rented arm-candy…”

oh his snotty hanky was a classic, he was on a roll back then, unstoppable

Don't forget the streaking hair dye

No, Mr Giuliani, I expect you to die!!