IT’S THE SAME GIULIANI AS EVER Those asking ‘What happened to Rudy’ are missing the point

sopher and ethicist Sissela Bok, author of “Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life,” told Bill Moyers that it’s so easy to lie that “sometimes people just slip into it, they don’t even stop to think.” She explained, “Lying, of course, is a way of gaining power over other people through manipulating them in various ways, and this is something that children learn. They also learn to keep secrets. And then I believe we almost have to unlearn that. If we are to mature, we have to unlearn any enjoyment of that power.”

Macbeth believed the witches’ prophecy of his infallibility because he wanted to believe in it. Any decent analysis of the play would begin by asking why he was predisposed to this self-deception.

When the history of this era is written years hence, it seems impossible to imagine that Giuliani’s role in it will be understandable without the context of his childhood. It’s a story that we could never fully comprehend without the relentless reporting of Barrett, who wrote often in this space, and who we miss in so many ways.

Rudy’s father, Harold, worked as a plumber and bartender, but he had trouble holding a job and, as Barrett discovered, spent 16 months in prison for robbing a milkman a decade before Rudy’s birth. After his release from Sing-Sing, Harold worked as an enforcer for his brother-in-law — Rudy’s uncle — who ran a loan-sharking operation out of his bar.

For obvious reasons, Rudy doesn’t often speak about his personal history, but one has the sense that he hasn’t done much privately to come to terms with it either. (He used to mock those who asked him introspective questions by joking about being put on the couch, even as he ridiculed a ferret-lover on the radio and demanded he get psychological help.)

It’s common to say that all politicians lie. If one includes as lies interpretations or selection of facts that serve a case they’re trying to make, then it’s true that all politicians — like all lawyers — lie. One might even argue that it’s their core function.

But if by lying one means baldfaced lies, without any basis in fact, then it’s categorically false. As Bok taught us, these types of lies are the act of children, and it simply isn’t true that all politicians make them. I watched my candidate, Ruth Messinger, as closely as I watched Giuliani, and she never lied in this way — not once, ever. She was an adult.

The man who’s now using the law in a desperate attempt to defend the transgressions of a lawless man, who’s speaking off the cuff lest he disappear from the spotlight even for a moment, who’s darting around Eastern Europe drumming up support for a fabricated theory and daring us to catch him in a crime, that’s a child.

And to anyone who’s been paying careful attention, he has always been one.

Mandery is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.