Clinton Fatigue vs. Giuliani Fatigue

...The mayor pointed out that the seal on such records does not continue after death—and later added, for good measure, "you cannot libel a dead man...

...He's not going to get any minority votes, that much is clear...

...But then the police department released every piece of paper it could find on Dorismond—which included two disorderly-conduct citations, a domestic-disturbance police call, and details of a juvenile arrest when Dorismond was 13 years old...

...The cops involved in the incident were having trouble subduing Dorismond...

...Three times in the past 13 months, unarmed black men have been shot dead by New York City cops...

...Giuliani's response was, first, to say that everybody needed to wait and see what had happened...

...One witness, though, gave the game away: "They could have shot his hand, they could have shot him in the leg, or kicked the weapon out of his hand," complained Mordechai Lefkowitz...

...They are not snipers, not sharpshooters (nobody is at close range...

...When a schizoContributing editor John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post...

...But it takes only a few well-publicized incidents to impress upon New Yorkers the idea that the 40,000-strong New York City Police Department features thousands of out-of-control whites whose hatred of minority groups makes them trigger-happy...

...And the riot that broke out at Dorismond's funer-al—in which 23 cops were injured for doing nothing but trying to protect the crowd—may help strengthen his hand with ethnic whites who see that kind of disorder as a reminder of the urban violence Giuliani has helped bring to historic lows...

...And the only strong countervailing force against that slander has been Giuliani's wholehearted and full-throated defense of the cops...

...Somehow a gun was unholstered...

...BY JOHN PODHORETZ New York IN A SENATE race between two of the most famous political figures in America, it may come down to this: By November, will New Yorkers be more afflicted with Clinton fatigue—or Giuliani fatigue...

...Somehow the trigger was pulled...

...But the success of his Senate candidacy depends on his ability to steer a careful course through a state with an ideologically complex electorate...

...Dorismond was approached in the middle of the night by undercover cops working as part of something called Operation Condor—an effort to roust drug dealers in the area just south of Times Square...

...The idea is ridiculous—there are nearly 2 million African-Americans living in New York City, and after the Dorismond incident the odds of an unarmed black man's being shot by cops in New York City rose to something like .0000015 percent...

...No matter...

...But right now, the mayor's two hole cards in his seven-card stud game against Hillary Clinton are that women voters don't seem to like her, and that he scores far better among Jewish voters than most Republicans do...

...Ethnic and racial communities often respond to an attack on one person as an attack on all...

...Giuliani's laudable gut instinct to defend the cops turned into something far less laudable when he began to assail Dorismond's character...

...This is where Giuliani fatigue may come to be a problem for the man who has been the greatest mayor ever to govern the nation's largest city...

...But two-time New York mayor Rudy Giuliani's response to the March 16 police shooting of an unarmed security guard named Patrick Dorismond has ignited fatigue in some of his supporters, albeit of an entirely different stripe...

...he didn't know the people who had accosted him were cops...

...Compassionate conservatism, anyone...

...People do act in conformity very often with their prior behavior...

...And the mayor has done just that...

...But while a cop doesn't have to accept injury from a perpetrator—and Dorismond wasn't even a perpetrator, he was the subject of a failed effort to entrap him into selling drugs he wasn't carrying—a cop doesn't have the right to shoot someone who's punching him...

...That's understandable for a politician who has managed to make major changes in the way the city is run with almost no support from any quarter—either other politicians or the media...

...We've all heard about Clinton fatigue—the sense even among liberals that the nauseating moral loop-the-loop of the last eight years needs to come to an end...

...The details of the killing are still confused, but even the story the cops are telling in their own defense can't explain why one of them had cause to pull his weapon...

...He lives his professional life with his dukes up...

...Real-life cops are not trained to shoot people in the leg, or the pinky, or to shoot the gun out of somebody's hand, or to use kung-fu moves against someone wielding a weapon...

...So three undercover cops with a quota to meet as part of a marijuana-sweep went after a guy who came out of a bar having had a beer after work...

...Still and all, Giuliani's mayoralty has been marked by a for-better-or-worse loyalty to his police department that is now exacting a price...

...It was not a case of five different things going horribly wrong in 10 seconds, as was true in the killing of Amadou Diallo—or the simple matter of a drug dealer fleeing a cop and then trying to wrest the officer's gun away, as was true in the case of Malcolm Ferguson, the second black man killed in the supposed NYPD murder spree...

...This has, of course, given rise to the opinion—abetted and encouraged by racial arsonists Al Sharpton and oth-ers—that New York's cops have declared "open season" on black men...

...Not that he has been entirely uncritical...

...When an evil cop named Francis Liv-oti killed a 29-year-old Hispanic man named Anthony Baez with a choke-hold in 1994, Spanish-language newspapers declared it a sign of open season on Hispanics...

...They are public-safety officers, and they are in no way obliged to allow people to do them injury with weaponry...

...Dorismond didn't have any sort of weapon...

...It seems increasingly the case that people who are not police officers believe cops are the superhuman figures they see on television shows and in movies...

...phrenic 31-year-old terrified residents of the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn last year and was shot and killed by cops he was smashing with a hammer after being pepper sprayed, politicians and residents in that neighborhood decided it was open season on Hasidic Jews...

...The reason is simple: To prevent the ricochet of bullets from hitting either other cops or passers-by...

...This death bore little relation to the two that preceded it...

...Fair enough...

...Dorismond has spent a good deal of his life punching people is a fact," he said at one point...

...If these folks, whom he needs in November, look at the headlines and look at his angry face and listen to his angry words, they may decide he's too mean-spirited for the Senate...

...For all that he can be extraordinarily charming in private, Giuliani in public is a man as bereft of charm as he is fluent with facts...

...When, in the most horrifying example of police brutality the city has seen in recent times, a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was sodomized with a broken plunger in a precinct-house bathroom, Giuliani reacted with appropriate indignation...

...and he was evidently fighting his way through what he might have perceived to be some kind of mugging— or at least a dissing...

...That Mr...

...And that lack of charm has been on distressing public view from the moment Patrick Dorismond was shot and killed...

...Immediately, publicity hounds and anti-cop demagogues in the city jumped down Giuliani's throat for releasing juvenile records that are supposedly sealed...

...He was angered, and ended up dead...

...If a man does not respond to police calls to drop his weapon, the rules of engagement in every police department are to fire a shot directly into his torso...

...Legally, you can't—but morally, you can...