I’m watching Tim Russert rip Rudy apart on “Meet the Press”: during the course of an exchange over why Hizzoner’s then-girlfriend was getting police protection before anyone knew she was his girlfriend—Rudy’s answer: it was the NYPD’s decision, not mine – Russert asks if it’s okay, then, for the mistress of the President of the United States to get our tax dollars in this way. Rudy deftly deflects the question, but I think it deserves an answer.

After all, we’re an empire, now, and the monarch has his prerogatives: having a mistress, an option open to any ordinary male with a certain testosterone level, is certainly one of them. In any empire, the king’s mistress is an unofficial and yet powerful position—as history shows—and certainly the monarchical security penumbra extends to her (or, these days, him …). Rudy is probably telling the truth that it was the NYPD’s decision, and not his own, to assign a security detail to guard his then-girlfriend, Judith Nathan. If and when Rudy ensconces himself in the Oval Office, one imagines that, if he maintains the high testostorone level typical of Mediterranean men, the Secret Service will have to make a similar call.

Should taxpayer money be spent on subsidizing our ruler’s sins? The question answers itself. Just imagine if Al Qaeda managed to knock off the presidential paramour—the terrorists will have won! What are you, some kind of pacifist surrender-monkey? Those fundamentalist Muslim fanatics want to kill us, not because we’re bombing the shit out of them and have been meddling in their affairs ever since the postwar era, but because we bring “Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!”

What’s so “democratic” about the Presidential mistress? Think about it: given a basic natural endowment, and the requisite feminine wiles, any girl can grow up to fill that particular office, if she plays her cards right.