Do yourself a favor and spend five minutes with Rudy Giuliani by clicking the video above. There’s been plenty of talk all week about President Obama’s failure/refusal to visit the border, but few have articulated the reasons why it’s so important for Obama to make that visit as well as the former New York City Mayor did.

“You go to the scene of the crime. You go to the scene of the problem,” explained Giuliani. “As a leader, when you’re going to be in charge of making all these decisions, if you go, there are a lot of things you find out that you don’t find out by just having somebody tell you about it … it was my rule as mayor to go to the scene of every incident, not because I wanted to be there … I could sometimes see things that weren’t being reported to me. And to say he won’t go because he doesn’t want ownership of the problem shows that throughout this presidency, he puts politics ahead of being President of the United States.”

Right on, Rudy. Of course, I’d expect nothing less from a truly talented crisis manager like him.

Incidentally, Democrat Congressman Henry Cuellar of Laredo, Texas made another great point this week. While Obama has been using the excuse “I’m not interested in photo ops” in order to avoid the border, Cuellar points out that the answer, then, is rather simple: don’t bring any cameras! Cueller says cameras aren’t even an issue because they aren’t allowed at the air force base and border patrol station that he has personally visited. In other words, Barack’s excuse? Annihilated. He’ll need to come up with something better than that if he wants to stretch this out any longer.