Rudy Giuliani is a mean, small, racially-motivated and purely political animal and always has been. Viz: <bq>We had no domestic attacks under Bush.</bq> Giuliani started the primary race for the Republican presidential nomination with a bang. That he was, for a while, running neck-and-neck with Hillary can be in no small part attributed to his near-constant reference to "9--11". In fact, he quickly became known not as a "one-issue candidate" but as a "one-phrase candidate". His orations were nothing but farce, even for many supporters. Though repetition often strengthens memory, in Giuliani's case partisan concerns override: He is quoted above as stating---in public and with a straight face---that 9--11, an attack of which he is demonstrably aware, occurred not under Bush, but under another president. Perhaps he would like to posit that Clinton---president a mere nine months before---was to blame for the attack. In Giuliani's defense, he's not the sharpest crayon in the box and was perhaps never aware of the <i>year</i> in which the attack occurred. That he was, at the time, mayor of the city that bore the brunt of the attack seems reason enough for the event to have affixed itself more deeply to his memory, but perhaps we assume too much. An crude analysis of the times he mentioned the attack concludes that he refers to it only as "9-11" instead of "9--11--01". Though "9--11" is the standard way of referring to the horrific attack on mainland America, Giuliani perhaps employed the expression not only for that colloquial reason but for more a more purely prosaic one: He, like the common goldfish, cannot remember anything beyond the last five minutes with any useful level of detail. Though far-fetched, it is possible that the Giuliani's clearly refutable declaration above is due not to a basically evil nature, but to a basically stupid one.