The infallibility complex and megalomania

In today's NY Times [behind subscription wall], Paul Krugman disses Hillary for refusing to say she made a mistake in voting for the Iraq war. As he puts it:

The base is remarkably forgiving toward Democrats who supported the war. But the base and, I believe, the country want someone in the White House who doesn’t sound like another George Bush. That is, they want someone who doesn’t suffer from an infallibility complex, who can admit mistakes and learn from them.

He goes on to lambast McCain and Giuliani as well. In Giuliani's case, it's his refusal to accept criticism:

And as for Rudy Giuliani, there are so many examples of his inability to accept criticism that it’s hard to choose.

Here’s an incident from 1997. When New York magazine placed ads on city buses declaring that the publication was “possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn’t taken credit for,” the then-mayor ordered the ads removed — and when a judge ordered the ads placed back on, he appealed the decision all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.

A closely related Giuliani fault is his megalomania. I think the first time I became fully aware of that was back in 1987 when he frog marched Richard "Wiggy" Wigton out of the offices of Kidder Peabody, allegedly for insider trading. Poor Wiggy, who lived in Summit, NJ at the time, was disgraced. I have no idea where he is now, but that kind of incident could easily do a man in. Yet, Giuliani didn't even have enough evidence to bring the man to trial after destroying him. As the NY Times put it in a book review:

The most telling part of Mr. Fischel's account is his detailing of the excesses of the Government, both in hunting down Wall Street figures whose crimes were far from evident and, in a larger sense, in helping create such 1980's disasters as the savings-and-loan crisis. With barely controlled rage, Mr. Fischel recounts the stories of minor Wall Street characters like Timothy Tabor and Richard Wigton, who, on Mr. Giuliani's orders, was hauled away in handcuffs. He tells of the United States Attorney's willingness to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO -- a statute aimed at mobsters -- to cripple firms like Drexel and Princeton/Newport Partners, which were not cooperating to Mr. Giuliani's satisfaction. "The Government's police-state tactics," Mr. Fischel labels such methods. Inasmuch as the principals of Princeton/Newport had their convictions overturned on appeal on the ground that they had been convicted of things that simply weren't crimes, and Mr. Tabor and Mr. Wigton were never even brought to trial, it would be hard to disagree.

Just what we need is another president who believes in police state tactics.