Schaden-over-the-edge-freude?

Josh Marshall and his crew at the happily and appropriately expanding Talking Points Empire (link is to the original Talking Points Memo, but TP Cafe and Muckraker also merit regular attention) have been making as much hay as any with the Giuliani Comedy Gala Campaign. I believe their dogged staff broke at least a number of the key elements of the history of law-evasion, sexual shilly-shallying, public deceit, and general scurrilousness that seems to be rudy's sine qua non.

I bet a trained professional could offer up some very interesting insights via a trait-by-trait comparison between rudy and george w. Of course there are quite a variety of professional disciplines and "specialties" that might be of use here. But even a casual (though not disinterested!) observer cannot avoid seeing, as a starting point, that they are both apparently congenitally amoral and wholly narcissistic. If it's not about them it is irrelevant and of no interest; no outside moral or ethical codes apply to their behavior; and the rest of us are of such a lesser race that either we cannot perceive repeated lying, self-contradiction, and farcical public appearances that to a neutral observer constitute self-mockery, or our awareness means nothing, as we are powerless in comparison to them.

I suspect that professionals in the mental health trades would have other diagnostic terms and programs to suggest if it were you or I or other less well-defended (and -funded) folks exhibiting these characteristics. But considering the evidence I routinely see downtown, apparently as a result of budget cuts for mental health care, any such recommendations might be basically irrelevant these days.

Both of these guys could easily blend in with the unhappy crowds of displaced and socially-challenged folks lining our urban sidewalks these days, though given their extreme hubris and an absence of empathetic skill and personal shame that few street folks could match, I suspect they'd either be organizing a gang or in the hospital within days.

Josh and the TPM crew have received (and deserve) kudos for their determined pursuit of obvious venality embodied by one Rudy Giuliani. Outing scalawags like him is an extremely important job if we want to at least pretend to have anything resembling civility and/or a republican style of government, where trust must play a large role.

But they did get a little tongue-in-cheek reprimand from one reader recently:

Now, I've enjoyed watching the Giuliani campaign trainwreck go over the cliff and explode in a fiery mess of failure -- in slow-motion -- as much as the next guy. But I think you may be taking the Schadenfreude a little too far.

Amidst all your mockery of Rudy's staggering ineptitude and one-note 9/11 concertos, you seem to have forgotten that the collapse of the Giuliani campaign will have real consequences for real people, who will no doubt suffer greatly once America's Mayor has slinked off the trail.

Who will Chris Matthews fantasize about punching out Ahmadinejad on the flight deck of the USS Charles Bronson?

What will Pat Robertson do while he waits for God to tell him which candidate he really wants to endorse?

Into whose ear will Norman Podhoretz whisper sweet songs about tactical nukes leveling terrorist huts outside Riyadh?

When you see the sad faces of men who've had their man-crushes crushed, their God-chosen candidate forsaken, and their hopes for never-ending war razed, you'll realize that even when mocking an incomparable twit like Rudy Giuliani, it is possible to go too far...