Rudy Giuliani’s recent charge that President Obama “doesn’t love America” is a red herring, a smoke screen, and the kind of hypocrisy that Republicans love engaging in. Conservatives like to begin with the premise that they love America more than liberals or progressives do. That’s a conservative mantra that is entirely unproven.

But really, “loving” America is a pseudonym for not criticizing the policies of the American government, or criticizing the actions of the American military. Giuliani’s hypocrisy, as chronicled by Wayne Barrett, the author of “Rudy: An Investigative Biography,” includes the extent to which Giuliani sought to avoid the draft during the Viet Nam war, and how Giuliani is a consultant for the countries of Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. He apparently told a Tijuana audience of consulting clients in October that “America needs to stop lecturing other countries and start working on how to stop drug use in its citizens.”  As chronicled in an article by Stephen Foster, Giuliani was also a “consultant for the government of Qatar, the country his friend and FBI director Louis Freeh accused of hiding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed before the attack. That’s the ultimate triumph of money over memory, since he’s still talking, as recently as a week ago, about the ten friends and 343 firefighters he lost on September 11th.”