I don't know about you...

but I am pooped.

I did spy this … and got there by way of the righties — a post at Weekly Standard, think it was complimenting Tomasky, which I sure as hell won’t be doing.

In the 40 year anniversary issue of New York mag… he says this (and a few other things) about Guiliani.

No one quite understood the force of the tornado that had just hit town. By the end of Giuliani’s first year, the city was a visibly different place—made safe, Toronto-ized, starting down the road toward being Olive Garden–ized (yes, there were downsides!); a place that suddenly was no longer the city where Travis Bickle prayed to God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk and where—in real life, not the movies—display ads for porn films actually ran in the Post right alongside the display ads for Smokey and the Bandit (it’s true; a few years ago I went to the Post’s morgue and looked through old issues and saw the ads, and their blurbs screaming “Full Erection!,” with my own disbelieving eyes). That is inconceivable to us now. But it, and a score of cankers like it, used to be the reality in New York. Lots of forces combined to change that, but the biggest force of all was Rudy.

He then dutifuly chronicles some minuses… He remembers Amadou Diallo and Louima, but charges on!… to this:

The other idea, of course, was the “broken windows” theory, for which chief credit goes to criminologist George Kelling. A few broken windows will lead to a few more broken windows, which will lead to larger blights; so fix the problems when they’re small. When the transit cops started arresting people for fare-jumping, previously considered too penny-ante to worry about, they found that fare-jumpers often had rap sheets including more serious crimes. When street cops started busting people for selling dime bags, they found the same thing.

Crime had dropped by 7 percent in 1993, under Dinkins. In 1994, it dropped by 12 percent. Then 16 percent in 1995 and another 16 percent in 1996. Homicides—2,262 in 1992—went below 1,000 for the first time in decades in 1996, then down to 746 the year Giuliani sought reelection. Now we’re back to pre-Beatles numbers, and New Yorkers take it as a given. But I remember very clearly: The drops in ’94 and ’95 were so astoundingly steep that it was downright confusing. It just didn’t seem possible. Something had to be wrong with the numbers.

But people had started to believe. “We were always thinking about, ‘We’ve got to show that the city is governable,’ ” Powers says. “That was always the most important thing.”

And winds his way to this close:

No—his great destiny was to be mayor, and mayor only. And I might even say: at that moment only, when the city needed someone like him. Remember how often people talked in 1992 and 1993 about giving up on the place. Within one short year, or even less, people weren’t saying that very much anymore. For all the Rudy- craziness that later ensued and that darkened his legacy—the bashing of police-shooting victims and Brooklyn Museum artists and ferret lovers and his second ex-wife and of course Hillary—it has to be acknowledged that he was the man for the moment.

There probably won’t be a moment in New York quite that desperate again in our lifetimes. He helped make sure of it.

Good lord. He is and was a maniac! And his cops have spread out thru the nation. Kelly (running for mayor, people seem to hint), Kerick (where to begin with that one!), Timoney, Bratton and names I am sure I don’t know… Cruel, vicious mean shits, everyone of them.

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