After forty minutes of hitting Rudy Giuliani on Bernie Kerik, Judi Nathan’s police protection, contracts with Qatar, etc., Russert offers Giuliani a softball — that he oddly chooses not to swing at.

Russert asks about Huckabee’s comments from 1992, when he suggested AIDS victims ought to be quarantined, and other comments calling gays “sinful” and “abberant.”

Giuliani says “as far as I know, he’s changed his views… I’ve got enough of my own issues and statements that I have to deal with.”

Then, when Russert asks whether he agrees with Huckabee that gay behavior is sinful, and Giuliani says his thinking on this is informed by the Catholic church, that it is the act that makes it sinful, not the orientation. And then he talks about his own sins that he’s had to confess, and I think that’s about as close as we’re going to get to seeing him talk about the Judi Nathan-Donna Hanover overlap.

The transcript will be here, but when Giuliani said his thinking on the issue was influenced by Catholic teaching, I can’t help but suspect more than a few Catholic Republicans fell out of their chairs.

Russert closed by showing Giuliani, the vocal Yankee fan, in a Little League uniform in Garden City that said “RED SOX.” Giuliani noted, “I also played on a team called the Dodgers, also, that caused me a lot of grief with Yankees fans.”

Next Sunday, it’s Mitt Romney on Meet the Press. Interestingly, it’s his first appearance ever on the program; I would have figured he would have appeared there at some point in his governorship or during his 1994 Senate campaign. I’ll bet the “Meet the Press” minute next week features his father, the former Governor of Michigan.