Flip Flopper Says What?

I may be in Georgia now, but I lived in NYC for ten years, most of which were Giuliani years. - I moved there about 5 months prior to the start of Count Chockula's first term. So I was there in 1997, when the Count's semi-sane facade started to crack really badly and the Mussolini-on-the-balcony-esque, unstable megalomaniac started to really show. In other words, it was "Giuliani time."

As most Americans know - and for some reason love - Giuliani "cleaned up" New York, the ultimate symbol of this "cleaning up" being Times Square, which transformed rather rapidly from the candy colored, transsexual prostitute-studded wonderland of Travis Bickle's day into something resembling Epcot center, complete with an Olive Garden. In other words, safe for civilization! What people who didn;t live in NYC failed to realize was that the transformation of Times Square was in fact part of a protracted series of battles in NY courts over zoning laws and the sex industry - and that Giuliani was not completely victorious. Although he was able to manipulate the judiciary to bend almost completely to his will in banishing legal sex workers and adult businesses (eg peep shows and x-rated bookstores) to the dustiest and most vacant of neighborhoods (most notably the apocalyptically industrial strech of Brooklyn's 3rd avenue that runs under the BQE), the courts stopped short of full compliance, allowing several adult-orineted businesses that carried a certain amount of non-adult merchandise to stay where they were. Well, the Count was PISSED. Like, psychotically pissd. The only other time I heard him this pissed was when Margarita Rosario, mother of police shooting victim Anthony Rosario, confronted the Count on his weekly call-in show with the facts she had uncovered regarding the cover-up of the monumental fuck up that led to her son's unjust death (I recommend everyone see the documentary about this case, "Unjustifiable Homicide," which features this phone call and will seriously scare the bejeesus out of you. He is a fucking psycho, and the way he talks to Margarita Rosario is proof). The Count was so pissed that he took to the airwaves and asked all concerned New Yorkers to take to the streets and photograph the patrons of these adult businesses as they entered and/or left the premises (my best friend and I promptly spent the day photographing each other waving and smiling as we entered sex shop after sex shop). He said that if the courts would not close these businesses, ehw ould shame their customers away and force them to close by default.

So tonight I come home and read about how the Count has promised to appoint conservative judges. Here are some excerpts from the AP:

"In a speech marking the 25th anniversary of the Federalist Society, Giuliani spelled out a conservative legal agenda in which he cited Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts as models for the judges he would appoint to the federal bench.

He contended that Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards, as president, would select judges who were 'activists and try to legislate social policy.'

'We're seeking to find judges who understand the very, very important concept that judges exist to interpret the law, not to invent the law,' he said."

Nice. So let me get this straight - the guy who refused to accept a strictly constructed ruling of the NY bench on zoning laws and went so far as to attempt to circumvent it through a smear campaign of businesses deemed legally entitled to operate in their locations - this guy is now preaching about "inventing the law?" Where is that guy who followed Kerry around dressed as a giant flip flop? We are gonna need him this time aroud.