It may be that Giuliani’s perplexing ability to hold himself out to the media as a foreign policy/national security candidate while possessing absolutely no qualifications in these areas is coming to an end.  We can only hope.  Faced with a choice between working with the Iraq Study Group or bringing in a lot of cash through speeches, he chose the latter.  It’s not so surprising that he did, since he probably has even less relevant expertise to offer than some of the other worthies assembled for that commission. 

Now he wants to weasel out of trying to have it both ways last year.  Having had a chance to serve as part of the ISG, which he blew off, he would like to associate himself with it by saying that he would have been part of the effort but for his future presidential campaign.  He says this for two reasons.  The obvious reason is that his preference for cash over public service on a key foreign policy matter shows him to be something of a fraud of a foreign policy candidate.  The other reason is that he would very much like people to associate him with the ISG now that the administration has started reconsidering its recommendations after six months of little or no progress in Iraq.  This would also partly make up for his impressive lack of any ideas about what should be done in Iraq.

Update: I don’t know what Nexis shows, but trusty old Google News tells me that media all over the place have been picking up the Giuliani-ISG story.  True, a lot of places have just picked up today’s AP wire and run with it, but the story is receiving coverage.  Relevant here is the fact that Newsmax, a site popular with many conservatives, was one of the first to pick up the story.  Unlike Giuliani’s total lack of national security credentials to date, this story is not going to go unreported.  The AP story has the added bonus of including the report of Giuliani’s (now former) South Carolina chair being indicted on drug charges.

Second Update: Media Matters has a nice skewering of Politico for being largely oblivious when it came to this story.