STOP RUDY.

Like Matt (and Garance), I think JMM gets this exactly right:

I know I've said before that Romney's profound and almost incalculable phoniness is a terrifying prospect to behold in a possible president. But the danger of phoniness, aesthetic or otherwise, cannot hold a candle to the truly catastrophic foreign policy Giuliani would likely pursue if he got anywhere near the Oval Office. Watching him campaign it's pretty clear that the guy has no real sense that posturing and pandering to ethnic paranoia in New York City simply isn't the same as running a national foreign policy. The people he's coalescing around himself as his foreign policy advisors are the ones who are going to help him learn as he goes. And they are simply the most dangerous, deranged and deluded folks you can find in American political and foreign policy circles today. It's really not an exaggeration. Scrape the bottom of the "Global War on Terror" Islamofascism nutbasket and you find they've pretty much all signed on as Rudy advisors.

First, you have the fact that choosing to be advised by people like Daniel Pipes and Norman Podhoretz in the first place shows in itself that Giuliani lacks the requisite judgment to be President, sort of like pushing your mobbed-up police chief to head the Department to Homeland Security. And then, were he to be elected, these crackpots would actually be advising a President with little knowledge or experience in the field, which would be terrifying.

Matthew Duss offers a full rundown in the Prospect about Giuliani's prospective war cabinet. If you want to spend enormous amounts of money and kill millions of people in service of policies that will be counterproductive for both democracy and American national security then Rudy's your man. It's also more than a little scary that in the primaries his lunatic foreign policy positions are his selling point; to the extent that he remains something of a longshot to win the GOP nomination, it's almost entirely because of his uncharacteristically rational positions on abortion and gay rights.

--Scott Lemieux