By now most of the world should know that Rudolph Giuliani’s South Carolina campaign chair is not a cocaine dealer. No, none of that. He’s merely alleged to have given the stuff away.

One of our minor obsessions here at The Big Con is how, when it comes to conservative failure, obvious patterns – the sinkhole epidemic, right-wing terrorism – get reported, in our “liberal media,” merely as isolated incidents, one after the other after the other.

The case of the Palmetto State Party Boy reminds me of another: that the Republican Party, and especially its presidential campaigns, is staffed stem to stern with alleged criminals.

Romney’s got two. His director of operations is a loon with a habit of impersonating police officers for his own freakish purposes, a crime carrying a penalty of up to one year in prison. More gravely, the co-chairman of his Utah finance committee is being sued for alleged “physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse” of the residential boarding schools he operated.

And as I reported here, ol’ Hollywood Fred Thompson keeps around as a close advisor a man whose most notable resume line is his work stealing campaign documents for Richard Nixon.

The California Republican Party has hired an undocumented immigrant – or, as Republicans like to call them, “illegal aliens” – to run its operations.

Giuliani? Where to begin. The coke guy. The fact that his consulting firm has kept employed a pedophile priest (“cautious but relentless” in “pursuing his victims,” a grand jury found) accused of covering up 60 molestation accusations. His old pal Bernie Kerik: sickening, isn’t it, that Giuliani tried to foist this man on the nation to protect our homeland security? He’s since pled guilty to ethics violations committed while working for the city. Kerik also had mob ties – a fact upon which he’d been briefed. He coughed up that admission after, at first, saying he’d had no idea.

As for Giuliani himself, his proclivity for skipping meetings of the Iraq Study Group so he could rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars giving motivational speeches is merely a moral, as opposed to a literal, crime. So we’ll keep him off this list for now.