Rudy Lies

Well, that's not news. But this time we mean he lies about something besides "forsaking all others."

Per ABC News, the Nasty Man is running a radio spot in New Hampshire in which he claims that his odds of surviving prostate cancer in the American health-care system were 84 percent, and while in England they would have been 44 percent.

Wow! That English commie-symp socialized medicine sucks! Too bad Lady Thatcher couldn't have stayed in office a thousand years longer so that she could have done away with it.

Or at least that's what he is hoping we'll think. In fact, the five-year survival rate for Englishmen with prostate cancer is 74.4% and rising. Not as good as the the US, where we have more aggressive screening protocols, but still vastly better than Giuliani claims.

So he's lying. Well, technically, he's not lying. That would involve creative thinking. Giuliani is in fact quoting numbers bandied about by David Gratzer, a physician and conservative think-tank employee. Giuliani found them in an article by Gratzer with the coldly scientific title "The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care." When pressed by reporters, Gratzer cited a 2000 report by the Commonwealth Fund. When Giuliani was asked why he cited the bogus numberts, a staffer answered that "the campaign did not attempt to independently verify the statistics."

Ahhh. We get it. You can't say somebody is lying when they spread false information, as long as somebody else spread it first.

In other words, Giuliani isn't to blame. He was just relying on faulty intelligence reports.