In an Iowa interview with Roger Simon, Fred Thompson, promises to fight the good fight to keep the Republican Party principled and conservative.

Fred Thompson has a folksy, good old boy persona on the stump, but it may not last much longer.

When I asked him if he is an 11th Commandment man — Never speak ill of a fellow Republican — he responded, “I am more of a 12th Commandment man: Don’t speak ill of them until they speak ill of me. And then really speak ill of them.”

Thompson’s stump speech contains the warning that Republicans must “stay with our principles” when it comes to choosing a nominee.

I asked him if that was a veiled reference to Rudy Giuliani.

Thompson made a face of mock horror and laughed.

From the New York Times’ point of view, the Council for National Policy (CNP), is some sort of slightly sinister and secretive conspiratorial organ of the Religious Right. When I Googled this organization, and read over the names of members and officers, my own impression was the CNP appeared to be a slightly more diverse networking group of influential and activist movement conservatives, including many famous names. Some, but not all, were prominent figures in the Religious Right.

Not surprisingly, this group of activists did a certain amount of saber-rattling over the possibility of the Republican Party nominating Rudolph Giuliani.

Alarmed at the possibility that the Republican Party might pick Rudolph W. Giuliani as its presidential nominee despite his support for abortion rights, a coalition of influential Christian conservatives is threatening to back a third-party candidate.

The threat emerged from a group that broke away for separate discussions at a meeting Saturday in Salt Lake City of the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative networking group. Participants said the smaller group included James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps its most influential member; Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Richard A. Viguerie, the direct-mail pioneer; and dozens of other politically oriented conservative Christians.

Almost everyone present at the smaller group’s meeting expressed support for a written resolution stating that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third-party candidate,” participants said.

The participants said that the group chose the qualified term “consider” because it had not yet identified an alternative candidate, but that it was largely united in its plans to bolt the party if Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, became the nominee. The participants spoke on condition of anonymity because the Council for National Policy meeting and the smaller meeting were secret, but they said members of the smaller group intended to publicize the resolution.

The CNP leak to the New York Times focussed on the Abortion issue, but I’d say that’s merely one of a number of important reasons that the movement conservative core will never support the former New York City mayor.

Giuliani’s record is that of an opportunist, statist, and populist politician. He originally came to prominence via a series of questionable prosecutions of prominent figures in the financial industry, conducted ruthlessly and in the spirit of class warfare.

Giuliani was so liberal that, back in 1994 when nearly everyone mistook George Pataki for a conservative, Giuliani tried to torpedo his gubernatorial candidacy with a last-minute endorsement of Mario Cuomo.

Neither opponents of abortion nor defenders of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms can have confidence in Giuliani’s current promises or future court appointments.

Nominating Giuliani would be a far greater disaster than nominating Nixon was. A Giuliani nomination would reverse the results of the Conservative Movement’s long and ultimately victorious struggle for control of the Republican Party, and return national control of the party to Northeastern liberal Republicans-in Name-Only.

Giuliani is an unacceptable Republican nominee, period. Real conservatives, both libertarian and traditionalist, will not support him.

The Giuliani campaign takes a nice shot at Hillary.

1:50 video

Recently both ordinary people and rival candidate’s spouses have raised the question of whether a candidate’s less-than-edifying private life does not shed negative light upon his or her qualification for the highest office in the land.

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WBZTV reports that an ordinary NH voter was able to put Rudy Giuliani visibly on the defensive:

Rudy Giuliani is the latest candidate to get caught off guard by a cut-to-the-chase question from a voter.

I spoke with the Derry, New Hampshire woman who brought him up short, and she’s feeling the heat for her question.

Katherine Prudhomme-O’Brien says she was just curious about the apparent lack of support for their father’s candidacy by Giuliani’s son and daughter from a previous marriage, but that query and Giuliani’s dismissive reply have been the buzz of the political world all weekend.

“I asked him how he’d expect the American people to give him loyal fellowship if he was having a hard time getting it from his own family.”

Giuliani’s response: “There are complexities in every family in America. The best thing I can say is kind of leave my family alone, just like I’ll leave your family alone.”

Keller: What did you think of his answer?

Katherine: I thought it was a little defensive. I guess he’s still not ready to talk about the whole thing because it’s very uncomfortable for him.

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Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Michelle Obama made a not-very-cryptic reference of the same kind.

Chicago Sun-Times:

At another stop, in Atlantic, Michelle said she travels with her husband in part “to model what it means to have family values,” adding “if you can’t run your own house, you can’t run the White House.” She didn’t elaborate, but it could be interpreted as a swipe at the Clintons.

Listen to this exchange on Sean Hannity.

That’s not just a slip of the tongue. You don’t get the First and Second Amendments confused, if you are significantly personally interested in the issues associated with either one. You can just tell that Rudolph Giuliani and the Bill of Rights have not had a meaningful relationship since high school civics class about 50 years ago.

Hat tip to Brian Hughes.

John Lott review Giuliani’s dismal record on the Second Amendment here.

One person’s “reasonable and sensible” gun laws aren’t always another’s. So when Rudy Giuliani recognizes that the Second Amendment guarantees people the right to bear arms subject to “reasonable and sensible” laws, it really doesn’t tell us much. Yet one thing is for sure though: Giuliani is hardly a “strict constructionist” on constitutional matters, at least when it comes to the Second Amendment. It is a long ways from “shall not be infringed” to “shall infringe whenever Congress has a ‘reasonable and sensible’ justification.”

For those who support the Second Amendment, the main problem is that Giuliani has rarely met a gun regulation he didn’t see as “reasonable and sensible.” In 2000, he pointed out how he was “a very strong supporter of gun-control legislation” and called for everything from federal gun-licensing and registration to banning guns based upon their price.

Only in the last couple of months has he finally gone on the record as opposing a gun law: he came out against re-imposing the assault-weapons ban. Yet he originally supported this law when it was first adopted, and he wanted it renewed as recently as 2004, when it expired.

His support for all these gun laws isn’t too surprising given his belief that “the single biggest connection between violent crime and an increase in violent crime is the presence of guns in your society . . . . the more guns you take out of society, the more you are going to reduce murder. The less guns you take out of society, the more it is going to go up.”

Read the whole thing.

This rant is taken from an email argument on a Conservative listserv.

I find New Yorkers in general a less than admirable lot.

They are members of a community which allowed the crooks and commies to take over their government; who tamely allowed themselves to be disarmed, and then simply cowered behind abundantly locked doors in fear of the criminal trash infesting their streets, while their judicial system turned violent criminals loose, but vigorously prosecuted anyone who ever defended himself; who selfishly pursued careers, personal gain, and private gratification, while all around them the normal processes of civilized life collapsed into disorder; and who then eagerly genuflected as to a savior before the strongman from Queens for providing a modicum of functioning government, after he ascended into office by a contemptible pattern of abuse of power and ersatz class warfare.

Kissing the boot of the lawless crossdresser, because before he came along you were afraid to cross the street, or because il Duce’s policies raised your property values, is far less than morally impressive. It’s really the same pattern of abdication of responsibility and gross personal selfishness typical of that loathesome city and its unmanly and basically worthless
population which caused New York’s problems in the first place.

New York succumbed to clueless liberalism because that was the fashion of the day, and because New York had no civic virtue, no integrity, and no standard of anything capable of resisting any current fashion. There was finally an inevitable political reaction to liberal goo-goo-ism, which allowed that two-bit man-on-horseback to climb into office. Because he finally told New York’s staggeringly enormous police force (larger than a lot of countries’ armies) to do a little work for a change and to actually do a little something about street crime, New Yorkers think he worked some kind of a miracle. All Giuliani’s vaunted reforms consisted of was a minor dose of erratic and unreliable law enforcement applied to the chaos which had been allowed to develop for decades.

The Amadou Diallo affair demonstrated quite accurately exactly how competent and elite New York City’s elite police task forces had become under your Fearless Leader: 4 armed men facing 1 unarmed man, complete panic, 41 shots, 19 hits. Just as the heroes of King Rudolph’s magnificent police & fire departments were busy looting $1.3 million dollars worth of watches out the WTC Tourneau store before the Towers fell, and one deceased engine company was excavated from the rubble with its truck cabs stuffed full of looted merchandise. The supreme authorities of the City, its safety departments, and its Port Authority stood by bloviating and posing for the cameras, having ruled out any attempts at helicopter rescues from the Tower roofs. Hey! someone might have been hurt.

Why not just start a movement to make Rudolfo the Magnificent permanent Generalissimo of Gotham, Sultan of Babylon-on-the-Hudson, Dictator of Dyckman Street, and keep him? The rest of us, residing in the real America, don’t want him, and wouldn’t take him if you tied a red ribbon with a hundred dollar bill around his narrow and greasy neck.

Sorry to break it to you, guys, but America is not in the habit of electing as president low-life, ethnic urban, cross-dressing grotesqueries like Giuliani. He cannot possibly be nominated. He cannot in the remotest realm of possibility be elected. As they say in New York: fuggedaboudit!

Sucking up to California liberals at San Francisco’s Churchill Club, Rudolph Giuliani hurriedly jumped on the environmental bandwagon.

I do believe there’s global warming, yes,” said Giuliani, in response to reporters’ questions following his talk to the Churchill Club. “The big question has always been how much of it is happening because of natural climate changes and how much of it is happening because of human intervention.”

But “the overwhelming number of scientists now believe that there is significant human cause,” he said, adding the debate on the existence of global warming “is almost unnecessary … because we should be dealing with pollution anyway.”

Meanwhile, the ever-liberal John McCain was editorializing with Joe Lieberman in the Boston Globe:

THERE IS NOW a broad consensus in this country, and indeed in the world, that global warming is happening, that it is a serious problem, and that humans are causing it. The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded there is a greater than 90 percent chance that greenhouse gases released by human activities like burning oil in cars and coal in power plants are causing most of the observed global warming. This report puts the final nail in denial’s coffin about the problem of global warming.

In addition, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has identified a warming climate, and the resulting melting of sea ice, as the reason polar bears may now be threatened as a species.

Right!

Ice Storm Cancels Congressional Global Warming Hearing

A recent scientific study shows that glacier melting can vary from year to year. Surprise!

And some Indian scientists think Himalayan glaciers are not changing, and reports to the contrary have been sensationalized by a few individuals.