Rudy Giuliani and the Company He Keeps

The New York Times has a followup story today to the blistering front-page piece it ran Saturday on Rudy Giuliani's longstanding friendship with Bernard Kerik--how that relationship fueled Kerik's unlikely rise to police chief, and how Giuliani's characteristic loyalty blinded him to some warning signs. With Kerik now facing indictment on a range of charges, this quote from an interview with the AP in New Hampshire may well come back to haunt Giuliani, who says of his disgraced friend:

"If I have the same degree of success and failure as president of the United States, this country will be in great shape.”

And it reminded me of another statement that Giuliani made in a story written by Jay shortly after the Bush Administration had to withdraw Kerik's nomination to be Homeland Security chief amid a hail of ethical and legal questions:

"Everything seemed pretty normal, at least by Washington or New York standards," his mentor and boss, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, told TIME.