Saturday Morning Ramblings

Gail Collins is currently the most insightful writer on the New York Times Op-Ed page. She more than makes up for the long drought of Maureen Dowd, whose columns over the past few months are all but unreadable. Today Collins hones in on Rudy Guiliani and Bernard Kerik ("Rudy and Bernie:? B.F.F.'s"). Easy targets, of course.

Today's choicest bon mots:

Loyalty is a terribly important consideration, if you're choosing a pet, but not a cabinet member.

The former mayor does, however, have a bad memory. We know this because he obtained an annulment of his 14-year-old first marriage on the grounds that he had forgotten that his wife was his second cousin.

On Kerik's fitness for heading up the Department of Homeland Security. ....a position for which he was approximately as well qualified as I am to be quarterback of the New England Patriots.

On Guiliani's loyalty to Ray Harding, who orchestrated an mayoral endorsement of Guiliani by the Liberal Party of New York. (Guiliani ended up appointing Ray's son Russell to head up the New York City Housing Development Corporation. Russell showed his gratitude by embezzling $400,000 for vacations, parties, and gifts.) We will not even go into the pornography part, except to point out that of the 15,000 sexually explicit images found on his computer, only a few were of children.

And then on a front-page story of Kerik's 16-count indictment, the reporters inform us that Kerik wore a flag pin on the label of the dark blue suit he modeled at the federal courthouse in White Plains. Puffed up and "defiant", he plans to fight the charges, though not, unfortuately, with his B. F. F. by his side.