Fools seldom differ

Desperate situations call for desperate measures, and in response to Hurricane Katrina, Andrew Sullivan uses his Sunday Times column to reiterate his blog's endorsement of the Giuliani '08 Presidential bid:

What people want now is someone who can make the federal government work again. They want an executive who can fight a war and keep them safe. Nobody represents that kind of need better than Giuliani. His social liberalism — which makes him anathema to the religious fundamentalists who control the Republican party — would be overwhelmed by his appeal to law-and-order Republicans.

But there's a problem. Giuliani probably did do better than simply doing his job in the days and weeks after 9-11, but he's spent much of the time since then enriching himself on the cachet, and sank to the lowest sycophantic low at the Republican National Convention last year, when he had these words, inter alia, to say about that same George W. Bush who Sullivan now judges such a failure:

Spontaneously [on 9-11], I grabbed the arm of then Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and said to Bernie, "Thank God George Bush is our President."

And I say it again tonight, "Thank God George Bush is our President." ... . Let us write our own history. We need George Bush now more than ever ... They ridiculed Winston Churchill. They belittled Ronald Reagan. But like President Bush, they were optimists; leaders must be optimists ... President Bush is the leader we need for the next four years because he can see beyond just today and tomorrow. He can see in the future.

Perhaps the Sullivan endorsement is restricted to candidates who were once as infatuated as Bush as he was.