After a frustratingly dull debate, the mainstream media eagerly goes to the spin room, looking for any little soundbyte from a proxy that will help drag out this horse race.
But you need to be a pretty savvy proxy to go up against the best and brightest of MSNBC's debate coverage: Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow. Rudy Giuliani, frankly, isn't that savvy. Those pesky facts about Mitt Romney's tax policy require Mr. "A Noun, a Verb and 9/11" to get quite testy, especially when it comes to his own returns:
After Giuliani stressed the need to stop "feeding the beast" of federal spending, Hayes, the host of MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes, asked Giuliani point-blank about federal contracts he said Giuliani's firm holds with the Department of Homeland Security.
"Does the Department of Homeland Security and related spending through contracts on say, private consulting firms like yourself, does that count as feeding the beast or not?"
Giuliani denied that his firm held such contracts.
You really want to go with that post-fact response, Rudy? Because there's ample proof you're talking out of your posterior:
But in his various roles, Mr. Giuliani does not hesitate to work closely with government officials abroad and at home. As a consultant, he attended two meetings in 2002 to discuss OxyContin with Purdue executives and Mr. Hutchinson, the D.E.A. administrator at the time. As a law enforcement icon who once was one of the top three officials in the Department of Justice, he also stood next to Mr. Hutchinson that same year in Washington at a ribbon-cutting for a new Drug Enforcement Museum exhibit, an event that included a luncheon where the former mayor helped the agency's museum raise $25,000.
About 10 months after Mr. Giuliani's firm began its work for Purdue, it also won a $1.1 million contract from the Department of Justice to look for ways to improve the effectiveness of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. The force's duties included helping investigate OxyContin abuse, and Purdue officials had appealed to its director, Karen Tandy, for help, a Justice Department official said.
There's many more where that came from. But hey, when did truth matter to a Republican?
