Tony's Diary Package — page 66

osedly suggested Fauci is an oasis of rigor and reason in a barren desert of confusion and fear. Which, given who he works for, makes him an endangered species. During the Vietnam War, some US Army officer supposedly suggested that in order to save a village from the Vietcong they had to destroy it. And so, to save Dr. Fauci, we must destroy him -- at least in Trump's eyes. Now that might sound crazy, but we're dealing with a crazy president in crazy circumstances. It's not as if there's no relevant precedent here. Two words: Bill Bratton. Two other words: Rudy Giuliani. Who happens to be Trump's BFF. Before Giuliani grew old, deranged, and more qualified to be a spokesman for Miracle Ear than the president's lawyer, he was the reform-minded mayor of New York City. Rudy rode into Dodge, which is what Times Square resembled at the time, and vowed to clean it up. His hand-picked sheriff was Dorchester's own Bill Bratton. As police commissioner, Bratton did much to stem violent crime in the nation's biggest city, but even more remarkably got his cops to reduce the incidence of more minor, socalled quality of life crimes that had made New York less livable, from the tony sections of Manhattan to the Tony Fauci sections of Brooklyn. Bratton did his job too well. He ended up on the cover of Time magazine, hailed as the guy who pulled the worm out of the Big Apple. He became more popular than the mayor. This drove Giuliani nuts. Rudy had to be the smartest guy in the room, had to get all the credit. Sound familiar? So Bratton had to go. That wasn't Bratton's first rodeo. Long before he landed in New York, he became the face of progressive, modern policing in his hometown, the youngest-ever Boston Police superintendent. Police Commissioner Joe Jordan resented his overly-ambitious No. 2 so he busted Bratton. The point is, insecure bosses don't like being shown up by smarter, more competent subordinates. Small men make big mistakes.