Can you believe that I started this blog back in 2003? Four years later, we're at post number 600. Whoa! Of course, I've had help from people like Brian, Elizabeth, Mike, and Rich Erlich, who contributed articles. I mustn't forget them!

Post number 600 is about Rudy Giuliani, courtesy of Digg. Here, we have a speech made by Rudy Giuliani in 1994. He's talking about freedom, and here's what he thinks of it:

We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

So, what's presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani saying here? Earlier in the speech, he says, "We constantly present the false impression that government can solve problems that government in America was designed not to solve." So it appears that he's saying that authority can't solve our social problems. Then, in the above blockquote, he says that it's not authority that's the problem: it's freedom! Yes, if everyone would just submit to authority, we wouldn't have the law enforcement problems we have now. It's not that the government should be more forceful; it's that people should be more submissive to their governments! That way, we can have authoritarianism while still claiming that we have less government intrusion into people's lives.

So, not only is Rudolph Giuliani a shameless self-promoter and ignorant about foreign affairs, he is also for authoritarianism cloaked as willing submission to the government, so that it doesn't appear that the government is stronger.

Will Rudolph Giuliani win a Republican nomination? He would be a terrible candidate, so hopefully so (for the Democrats), but probably not, as I hope people aren't that stupid. With John McCain's most recent financial troubles, though, Giuliani might be the front runner. Are Fred Thompson's odds even that good? Does anyone really know who he is, outside of "that guy from Law and Order"? Oh, and he was in The Hunt for Red October.

If he isn't one already, I think I'll take post number 600 to make Rudy Giuliani a SEDHE Villain of the Forever.