Rudy Giuliani keeps digging:
Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York on Thursday defended his assertion that President Obama did not love America, and said that his criticism of Mr. Obama’s upbringing should not be considered racist because the president was raised by “a white mother.”
... In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Giuliani dismissed the criticism and said he was describing the worldview that had shaped Mr. Obama’s upbringing.
“Some people thought it was racist -- I thought that was a joke, since he was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools, and most of this he learned from white people,” Mr. Giuliani said in the interview. “This isn’t racism. This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.”
So "most of this he learned from white people," according to Giuliani? Obama learned anti-Americanism from relatives, including his grandparents?
Yes, and not only was Stanley Dunham in the Army in World War II, he was part of the Normandy invasion, as AP reported in 2009:
On D-Day, documents place him at Stoney Cross, England, in the 1830th Ordnance Supply and Maintenance Co., Aviation....
His company supported the 9th Air Force as it prepared for the assault on Normandy and took part in the drive that carried the Allies across France. Dunham and the men of the 1830th came across six weeks after the initial Normandy invasion and followed the front through France....
Madelyn, the beloved grandmother known as "Toot" who helped raise the future president, did her part for the war effort, working the night shift as a supervisor on the B-29 bomber assembly line at the Boeing plant.
Her brother is part of the war story, too. Charles Payne, Obama's great-uncle, in 1945 helped liberate a sub-camp of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald....
By contrast, there's Rudy Giuliani's father, who, like Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, was of the World War II generation:
The book, Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani, by Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett, contains a string of claims about Gotham’s controversial mayor and his family.
According to Barrett, Harold Giuliani served a one-and-a-half year term in Sing Sing prison after robbing a milkman at gunpoint in 1934, a decade before his son, the mayor-to-be, was born.
Rudy also alleges that Harold Giuliani served as the “muscle” for a loan-sharking outfit, claiming that he “broke legs, smashed kneecaps [and] crunched noses” in the 1950s -- even taking part in a gunfight on a Brooklyn street in the 1960s.
And during the war? Barrett reported:
At the time of Rudy's birth, Harold was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a plumber's assistant, the trade he had learned before prison. World War II had lasted more than four and a half years. D Day was just nine days away....
Harold told relatives and friends that he wasn't drafted because of his poor eyesight and ulcers. What, in truth, protected him from military service, however, was his criminal record. The record was almost impossible to find -- then and now -- because it is filed in the name of Joseph Starrett. Harold apparently helped the local draft board locate it.
On April 18, 1941, Morris S. Ganchrow, secretary of the Selective Service System's Local Board #217 in Brooklyn, wrote a letter to the Court of General Session, inquiring into Harold's criminal background. The letter read:
Dear Gentlemen:
We understand that Harold Angelo Giuliani, using the alias "Joseph Starrett," a registrant in this Board, was convicted of Attempted Robbery, 3rd degree, on April 24, 1934.
In order that he may be properly classified by members of this Board, will you please give us the details of his Court Record, as to the charge -- whether a misdemeanor or a felony, and if sentenced, the period he was confined.
Enclosed is self-addressed envelope for reply.
The charge was, of course, a felony, and anyone guilty of a felony was barred from wartime service.
Barack Obama's grandfather fought in World War II. Rudy Giuliani's [father] was barred from military service because he was a felon.
Yeah, maybe Giuliani's right. Maybe we really are formed by the character of the people who raised us.
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UPDATE: I see that Barrett addressed this himself in the New York Daily News yesterday.
Crossposted at No More Mr. Nice Blog
