FOR GIULIANI, GOOD ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH.(MAIN)

Byline: MICHAEL BLOOD Associated Press

NEW YORK -- New Yorkers are rude and feckless. Jaywalkers stampede through traffic like livestock. Thumping stereos and shrieking car alarms conspire in an aria of anarchy.

Strip joints are threatening to turn neighborhoods into Sodom. Too many bars make too much racket, and lead-footed cabbies can't tell the difference between red and green traffic lights.

Who is saying these vile things about the nation's largest city, just when everyone else is saying how nice the place has become?

It's a guy who loves New York.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

He's tough. Preachy. Intimidating. Irascible.

And popular.

Luxuriating in a minor golden age of diminished crime and spiffy streets, New Yorkers are now being browbeaten with the refrain that good isn't good enough, that they somehow don't measure up to their commendable cousins in Topeka or Tulsa.

It's already old news that crime has dropped to 1960s levels, and that the bull market on Wall Street has turned the city budget into a cash cow. …