Team Trump Rebukes Hillary Clinton, Sounds Like a Defense
I grabbed my ear lobe and jiggled it in disbelief of the words I was hearing from former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani's mouth.
Giuliani, a surrogate for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, was responding to a very good question from NBC's "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd on Sunday morning.
Todd wanted to know whether Giuliani's own history of marital infidelity disqualified him to be "the right person" to lead the Trump campaign's latest tactic: criticizing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's response to her husband then-president Bill Clinton's sexual behavior with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
"You have your own infidelities, sir," Todd reminded the former mayor.
"Everybody does," Giuliani casually responded. "You know, I'm a Roman Catholic, and I confess those things to my priest."
Those of us who were paying attention during his mayoral years don't need a priest to tell us that Giuliani and Trump -- with their three marriages apiece -- make an odd couple.
"Just bizarre," tweeted lawyer-journalist Glenn Greenwald, founder of The Intercept news site. "Trump & Giuliani have 6 wives between them & are sermonizing about marriage to the Clintons, who have been married 41 years."
And none of that's a secret. Trump's affairs were carried out on the front pages of New York's tabloids and gossip columns. Giuliani announced the end of his second marriage in a news conference in 2000 before he told his wife at the time, Donna Hanover.
When she refused to leave the official residence with their two children, the mayor's divorce lawyer said someone would have "to pry her off the chandelier to get her out of there."
Yet Giuliani's casual attitude toward infidelities today sounds even more bizarre when compared to the shock and outrage of Republicans who voted for Bill Clinton's impeachment in the late 1990s.
...continued
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
