ferret.jpg
REUTERS/Rick Wilking 

[h/t Swopa for the photo] 

"There is something deranged about you.… The excessive concern you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist.… There is something really, really very sad about you.… This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness.… You should go consult a psychologist.… Your compulsion about—your excessive concern with it is a sign that there is something wrong in your personality.… You have a sickness, and I know it's hard for you to accept that.… You need help."

– Rudy Giuliani, during his weekly mayoral radio show, to call-in protester 

Ah yes, the notorious Season of the Felonious Ferrets.  Not since Fiorello LaGuardia and the Great Depression had a mayor of New York City had to grapple with such weighty social issues as weasel possession. Because, in Giuliani's words, owning a ferret is as dangerous as owning a tiger.  Or not.  Regardless of the relative perniciousness of button-nosed, fuzzy eared pets, this is what he was wasting our tax dollars on.

I raise the ferret issue because it's symptomatic of Giuliani's pinheaded, freakish obsession with micromanagement and the transposition of his personal to the public.  (Psychologists: note how rabidly he displaces all his mishegas onto the hapless caller.)  Rudy Giuliani has made a career out of his personality, of fighting only those things that get a bug up his ass and coopting the acclaim, even if it's not his due. Look at his performance during the debates tonight, taking credit for the lower crime rate that was actually attributable to former Mayor David Dinkins, inserting Reagan's name in every answer he gave. 

Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair writes:

New York magazine, for instance, has been covering Rudy's antics for a generation. The magazine was, itself, subject to a famous blitz of Rudy loopiness: he banned from city buses an ad for the magazine with a tagline saying it was "possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for."

And for some reason that befuddles New Yorkers, "the heartland" keeps excusing this narcisisstic grandstanding.

Again, Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff: 

the developing view among tolerant Republicans and receptive independents seems to be that what happened in New York concerning Rudy ought to stay in New York (except for 9/11, which is an officially nationalized experience, and the Disneyfication of Times Square, which plays in the heartland as well).

As if Giuliani is capable of keeping a lid on his egomaniacal hogging of the spotlight?  Unpossible! 

I suspect that we will, as a nation, not just a city, witness the patented Giuliani implosion sooner rather than later . . . if not at the Republican debates tonight, then maybe in the next Friedman Unit, after I've I donned the ferret costume and spend my days badgering Giuliani's campaign.  He's starting to show signs of wear, what with the constant flip-flopping on, inter alia, abortion and immigration, and his affiliation with Big Oil through his Houston-based law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani.  If anything, Giuliani is working hard to prove to the country that he's the Weasel King.