Must be oyster season. . .

. . . with all the pearl-clutching going on:

As the world now knows, Giuliani, the former New York mayor, said at a dinner featuring Walker, the Wisconsin governor, that “I do not believe that the president loves America.” According to Politico, Giuliani said President Obama “wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”

And Walker, just a few seats away, said . . . nothing. Asked the next morning on CNBC about Giuliani’s words, the Republican presidential aspirant was spineless: “The mayor can speak for himself. I’m not going to comment on what the president thinks or not. He can speak for himself as well. I’ll tell you, I love America, and I think there are plenty of people — Democrat, Republican, independent, everyone in between — who love this country.”

But did he agree with Giuliani? “I’m in New York,” Walker demurred. “I’m used to people saying things that are aggressive out there.”

That's Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, who thinks that Republicans who don't explicitly defend Barack Obama are cowards and should be disqualified from the presidency. Here's the Milbank Standard::

This is what’s alarming about the Giuliani affair. There will always be people on the fringe who say outrageous things (and Giuliani, once a respected public servant, has sadly joined the nutters as he questioned the president’s patriotism even while claiming he was doing no such thing). But to have a civilized debate, it’s necessary for public officials to disown such beyond-the-pale rhetoric. And Walker failed that fundamental test of leadership.

Emphasis mine.

So, do you remember when a political candidate said this?

That would be the future Leader of the Free World, calling out his predecessor. The part I like the best is how he talks about Bush taking the national debt up to $9 trillion. As it happens, the national debt is over $18 trillion now. Perhaps Bush wasn't trying hard enough. This wasn't an unrelated third party questioning the patriotism of the president. This was the actual candidate. I'm sure Milbank was out of town that day or something, otherwise he'd have denounced Obama in the same way.

By the way, do you remember this?

I remember that a lot of Republicans were outraged by those statements, but there wasn't a general requirement that any of the 1988 Democratic candidates were duty bound to condemn the attack. If you want to go way back, there's this:

John Quincy Adams, the son of founding father and second president John Adams, began his career in public service by working as the secretary to the American envoy to Russia when he was still a teenager. He had an illustrious career as a diplomat, which formed the basis for his later career in politics.

The supporters of Andrew Jackson began spreading a rumor that Adams, while serving as American ambassador to Russia, had procured an American girl for the sexual services of the Russian czar. The attack was no doubt baseless, but the Jacksonians delighted in it, even calling Adams a “pimp” and claiming that procuring women explained his great success as a diplomat.

Yeah, politics can get a little nasty. Let's boil it down. At this moment, Rudy Giuliani speaks for no one but himself. He is not in the employ of Scott Walker or any other politician. Giuliani is, in fact, a private citizen, a prominent one but a private citizen nonetheless. If Scott Walker is required to denounce private citizens for expressing unkind opinions about the Leader of the Free World, he's not going to have much time to do anything else. Which is kinda the point.