What is Rudy Giuliani’s biggest mistake?  You decide…do cast your vote on this one.  Huge thanks to Robert Greenwald and the Brave New Films crew.

Sat down with my cuppa coffee this morning and spotted an op-ed about the world’s most expensive ugly handbag, and then…whammo:

But no moral calculus can justify $52,500, no matter how much you’ve given to good works. This expenditure makes Judith Giuliani look frugal in her reported relationship with her Louis Vuitton purse — according to a Vanity Fair profile, she calls it Baby Louis and insists that it be accorded a separate seat on the Giulianis’ chartered jet.

There are many lessons to be found in a handbag that costs more than my childhood home.

Ex-squeeze me? Rudy Giuliani’s third wife has named her purse and demands that the damn thing has it’s own seat on the chartered plane on which it travels?  After reading through the Vanity Fair profile of Dame Judi[th], I’m just sitting here aghast at the levels of high mantenance and mendacity.  These people make Zsa Zsa Gabor look positively spartan. 

The additional background on the dog killing for clamp demonstration portion of Judi[th]’s career will make you sick to your stomach.  You have been warned.  Jane talked about this last April, but this Vanity Fair discussion is even more detailed:  

“Every salesperson at U.S. Surgical was trained for six weeks with dogs at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, and that was really brutal,” explains a former employee. “They spent days and days with dogs, taking out the spleen or stomach or the lobe of a lung. Then if the dog started moaning or fidgeted, whoever was closest would push more sedative into him from the syringe. It was horrible. Then the dog would be killed with potassium chloride.”

After training, the salespeople marketed the staplers to doctors, and, once again, in many cases large dogs were used, as they had organs comparable in size to those possessed by humans. “After the stapling, sometimes they’d put a big clamp above and below the staple lines of the dog, and fill [the area] with lots of fluid,” the ex-employee says. “It would fill up like a balloon, and the salesperson would say to the doctor, ‘See—it doesn’t leak!’ That’s how they marketed and sold the product.”…

…”Think of all the hacks and politicos who sit down and they say to Judi, ‘O.K., we’ve gone through your background, husbands, etc.,’” he muses. “‘Is there any other thing in your background, some crazy little thing, that might catch someone’s attention?’ It’s at that point you should raise your hand and say, ‘Oh, you mean when I was killing puppies?’”

The whole article is one big freak show revelation after another:  the diamond-encrusted tiara from their wedding (third for each), the travelling entourage of security and sycophants, and then this creepy window of greedy entitlement and hands-on control:

The fashion insider sighs. “But the problem was the dress was a sample, and the designer’s only sample. But she was very persistent. We had almost a metaphorical tugging of the dress away!” And not just that dress. “There were a number of items she tried on she wanted. There was greed in the air. We finally brokered a deal with the designer to give her some sort of discount for the dress.”…

If Giuliani’s third wife became less popular as time went on, it was in part due to the feeling that she had a private list of Rudy loyalists she wanted fired. “The atmosphere is slippery, but not always venomous,” says one. “You just realize there’s an agenda there: she’s worming her way in so she can push you out.” Papir, for instance, was fired five years ago after word got around that he had called Judith a “princess” behind her back. …”And Tony Carbonetti too, that’s the other person Judith hates.… He would never be confrontational. His job is Rudy.” A shrug. “Anyone supportive of him, close to him—Judith wants them fired. A lot of the senior staff … She just gets furiously jealous and treats them like shit!”

Jeebus, I never thought anything would make Jeri Thompson sound positively disengaged …but I was clearly wrong. Who in the hell are these people? Lady MacBeth looks like an amateur by comparison.  And who knew that Romney’s dog torture car trip could look less heinous in any way?  Why on earth would anyone want them running their country?

Puts the President Bush entourage into some GOP-entitlement perspective.  Party of the people, my ass. 

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