No he is NOT a "true conservative"

City Journal describes itself this way:

City Journal is the nation’s premier urban-policy magazine, “the Bible of the new urbanism,” as London’s Daily Telegraph puts it. During the Giuliani Administration, the magazine served as an idea factory as the then-mayor revivified New York City, quickly becoming, in the words of the New York Post, “the place where Rudy gets his ideas.” The Public Interest goes further, calling City Journal “the magazine that saved the city.”

I have no beef with that description, but it is obvious that they feel as though they were really "put on the map" by their association with the Giuliani administration. That sense of kinship with Rudy has led them to start a campaign to present Giuliani as a "true conservative" who is the most electable Republican in the race. In the Winter issue of CJ Steven Malanga pens an article called Yes, Rudy Giuliani Is a Conservative in which he attempts to make that case. Here is a sample:

Not since Teddy Roosevelt took on Tammany Hall a century ago has a New York politician closely linked to urban reform looked like presidential timber. But today ex–New York mayor Rudy Giuliani sits at or near the top of virtually every poll of potential 2008 presidential candidates. Already, Giuliani’s popularity has set off a “stop Rudy” movement among cultural conservatives, who object to his three marriages and his support for abortion rights, gay unions, and curbs on gun ownership. Some social conservatives even dismiss his achievement in reviving New York before 9/11. An August story on the website Right Wing News, for instance, claims that Giuliani governed Gotham from “left of center.” Similarly, conservatives have been feeding the press a misleading collection of quotations by and about Giuliani, on tax policy and school choice issues, assembled to make him look like a liberal.

He spends the rest of the article laying out Giuliani's conservative credentials, although he never even attempts to rebut the charges that Rudy supports abortion, gay unions and gun control. Instead we are led on a journey through Giuliani's crime fighting, tax cutting and union busting (or at least union resisting).

All of this is true, but it does nothing to cancel out the fact that Rudy only satisfies half the definition of a genuine conservative. He still supports abortion on demand, the destruction of marriage through legalized gay unions and the disarming of the population (which will lead inevitable to the enslavement of the population).

Also Malanga does not even touch on Giuliani's support for amnesty for the alien criminals who have invaded that nation and his desire to bring in tens of millions more through a "guest worker" program. I suppose he realizes that his "Rudy really is a conservative" case will utterly collapse if he draws our attention to that.

I would like to ask the City Jorunal crowd, and all the other Julie Annie supporters, to answer this question. If Rudy had raised taxes in New York City over 20 times and caved in to every single demand of the City's public employee unions and if there were six times as many people on various kinds of public assistance after his tenure as mayor than there were before he came to office and he had turned the City's law enforcement over to the ACLU with the result that crime had tripled during his time as mayor, BUT he was dead set against abortion, believed that the Second Amendment recognized an absolute right to own crew served machine guns and had flown down to Boston to chain himself to the doors of the courthouse in an attempt to stop gay wedding ceremonies would you still be saying that he was a "true conservative"?

You say that we should accept him even though he is wrong about half of the conservative equation because he is right about the other half, but would you still accept him if his rights and wrongs were reversed? Or is it just that you consider the social conservative issues to be dispensable, or even an embarrassment?

After all being seen as anti-gay, pro-gun and anti-abortion doesn't help you get invited to Manhattan cocktail parties.

If you think that Giuliani is the best we can do this time around then say so. But please stop insulting our intelligence. If you attempt to buy something in a store with a twenty dollar bill that is perfect on one side, but blank on the other you will be arrested for counterfeiting. Trying to pass off a 50 percenter as a "true conservative" is just as bad.