Rudy, Rudy, Rudy

Giuliani 2.0 was rolled out last week, the new pro-choice conservative that wants everybody just to pipe down about those pesky social issues and take a look at his record. Problem is, people are taking the wrong look:

An examination of Mr. Giuliani’s handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of those who worked in the trade center’s ruins, Mr. Giuliani might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the attack.

Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in a lawsuit against New York City, along with more than two dozen interviews with people involved in the events of the last four months of Mr. Giuliani’s administration, show that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators.

At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers.

“The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns,” said David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor group.

See, just like a conservative, what was important to Giuliani was the appearance that something was getting done at Ground Zero, and damn the consequences. Actually, the consequences were hundreds of sick workers who apparently have only Michael Moore willing to help them.

In addition, the Washington Post reports that Rudy's performance making people sick after 9-11 was most useful to his own bank account:

On Dec. 7, 2001, nearly three months after the terrorist attack that had made him a national hero and a little over three weeks before he would leave office, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took the first official step toward making himself rich.

The letter he dispatched to the city Conflicts of Interest Board that day asked permission to begin forming a consulting firm with three members of his outgoing administration. The company, Giuliani said, would provide "management consulting service to governments and business" and would seek out partners for a "wide-range of possible business, management and financial services" projects.

Over the next five years, Giuliani Partners earned more than $100 million, according to a knowledgeable source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the firm's financial information is private. And that success helped transform the Republican considered the front-runner for his party's 2008 presidential nomination from a moderately well-off public servant into a globe-trotting consultant whose net worth is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars.

You might remember that one of the clients of Giuliani Partners was Purdue Frederick, the makers of OxyContin who dragged out an investigation into the addictiveness of the drug for years before having to pay a petty fine. And key partners in the company included Mafioso figure Bernie Kerik and a former FBI exec who was found to have stolen pieces of granite from Ground Zero as souvenirs.

And while his campaign is crumbling around him, Giuliani thinks that he can follow the WEsley Clark '04 path to the nomination:

Republican Rudy Giuliani has been stuck for weeks on a key decision in his presidential campaign: whether to compete in the Iowa Republican Party's straw poll in Ames this summer.

The former New York City mayor's top Iowa advisers have encouraged him to take part in the year's marquee national GOP event as part of building what Giuliani has said he hopes will be a winning campaign for the leadoff Iowa caucuses in January.

But the final say belongs to Giuliani, who plans to decide in the coming weeks how the event could benefit or cost him.

Nobody has skipped Iowa and won the nomination in either party (Clinton '92 being the exception because nobody really went up against local boy Tom Harkin), and if Rudy thinks he can do it, in a year where the primary calendar is MORE front loaded, he's smoking something. Missing the straw poll would be a major setback.

I'm more and more convinced that nobody will win the Republican nomination. Or John McCain, which is effectively the same thing.