Important Update:  This just in via  Salon (h/t Kathleen) on Rudy:

Finally, there’s Rudy Giuliani, of whom Joe Biden said, “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb and 9/11. ” Giuliani could have been a contender, but he ran out of verbs and nouns early in the race and, despite federal matching words, could never form a coherent sentence thereafter.

That Joe Biden is a card.  Now back to our regularly scheduled post:

I admit that it’s petty, but it brings me no small pleasure to see Rudy Giuliani, “America’s Mayor,” running a steady 36th in the race for Republican Presidential candidate.  It’s not that Americans have determined that Rudy was a nasty, vindictive, megalomaniac, but that nobody even cares that he’s running. 

But that begs the question, what’s happening on the Rudy front?  Well, thanks to Frank Pasquale at CoOp, parsing the pages of the  New York Times for up-to-the-minute Rudy info, we have an answer. 

In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”

That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.

They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy. Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel. “Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”

I can’t speak for anybody else, but I never tire of hearing new stories about what a vindictive, abusive, mean-spirited fellow Rudy is.  He was a petty tyrant as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and was no better as Mayor. 

Did I mention that Rudy gave us Bernie Kerik, reflecting his sound, deliberative judgment about people?

This is not to say that Rudy’s future, after he drops out of the Republican race in abject humiliation, is not bright.  After all, he has the Rudy law firm, the Rudy lobbying firm, the Rudy consulting firm to keep him afloat.  There are plenty of people who will pay Rudy a ton of money to buy his influence.

But if the Democrats take the White House, as they have kinda taken the executive mansion in Albany (if you consider Eliot Spitzer), Rudy’s influence may not be what it used to be.  Don’t cry for Rudy.  Jerry Springer can’t go on forever.