March 17, 2008

Great Start, Buddy.

You've got six more deadly sins to go; please get back to us in a timely fashion.

—The MSM and The Blogosphere

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Yeah. What Is It With These Freakin' Northeastern States?

I mean, really.

It isn't like my governor . . . . Oh, shit. Never mind.

Carry on.

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Of Course, If We're Not Careful,

people are going to start mixing up the McGreevy and Spitzer scandals. Which would lead to some who are only sort-of paying attention to believe that Spitzer is gay.

And that McGreevy was the worst hypocrite on planet Earth.

And that Mrs. Spitzer had three-way sex with her husband and "Kristen."

And that Mrs. McGreevy really didn't know her husband was seeing prostitutes.

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March 16, 2008

The Right Kind of Three-Way . . .

How much time did I spend, in my twenties, trying to get it out of my boyfriend why it wasn't gay for us both to hop into bed with another woman, but it would be if we got into bed with another guy?

"If there are two men in the same bed, it's gay," he told me. "End of story."

Thank goodness Governor McGreevy didn't see it that way. Oh, wait . . .


Via Insty, who's downright tabloid-ey lately. Oh, wait . . .


P.S. Did you see the pix? Bunk.

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Belle Sees the Good in McCain.

That's the first step toward healing!

She's right. Earmark reform is fundamental. It's always easy to imagine that it can be put off, or that "at least our guys aren't as abusive as the Dems" (which isn't true—both parties are horrible about this).

Check your legislators' records on this; Belle links to the list.

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March 14, 2008

The House

. . . is voting on the FISA bill today; it doesn't look good, even after last night's sooper-secrud session.

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March 13, 2008

Look. If He Was Involved in a Scandal That Had a Sexual Component to It,

then he must be a Republican. Maybe he just didn't know it. Like, he was a closet Republican or something. I mean, you have to come out to yourself before you can come out to the rest of the world.

Right?

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Waxing Poetic

. . . on the Spitzer scandal.

(So far, there are takeoffs on T.S. Eliot, S.T. Coleridge, and Lewis Carroll. Join the fun!)

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Random Line from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles:

"You're going the wrong way! You're going the wrong way!"

To which John Candy replies, "how do they know which way we're going? They must be drunk."

Steve Martin: "Yeah; how would they know?"

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March 11, 2008

Don't Be Silly, Glenn.

It isn't like they were the same hookers.

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Radar on the Spitzer Scandal

More insight from Heidi Fleiss:

"It's so easy not to get caught," reformed Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss tells Radar, adding that she provided service to many a well-known politician [in] her day. "I saw many famous people—more famous than Eliot Spitzer—and you know what, you pay people right, you treat them right, you don't have a problem." The devil, she says, was in Spitzer's particular freak, which left the gals who are alleged to have serviced him describing the governor as "difficult," with demands that involved "things that, like, you might not think were safe."

"I'm sure he wanted anal sex without condoms," Fleiss says, speculating but strangely confident.

There are worse things, of course. If you're not a hooker. (Hint: tiny women shouldn't date men who are hung like firehoses. Moderation in all things, or you end up with sore ovaries.)

But if Spitzer was as "difficult" in the bedroom as he was in his political life, I'm sure he made just as many enemies in the one realm as in the other. To be fair, however, it was his handling of the financial arrangements that led to his undoing.


Via Dan Collins Karl at Protein Wisdom.

UPDATE: Error fixed; I don't know why I got the Protein Wisdom guys mixed up—maybe because those people all look the same to me.

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I Keep Feeling

. . . like there's a really good White Album joke to be made about the Spitzer situation, if I could only think of it.

No—not that White Album. That White Album.


Via Hackbarth.

(The Beatles! Whatever happened to them? They were so hittable before they became 50% dead.)

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"Eliot Mess"

Bidinotto on the weird myopia of the media; and their refusal to see the Spitzer scandal as being about more than sex.

He thought he was an Untouchable; but then, that is the way of those consumed by lust.

Lust for power, that is.

Yup.

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More on "Selective Prosecution" in the Spitzer Case . . .

Both Karl and Dan Collins of Protein Wisdom had fun with Harper's's Horton, and his cries of selective prosecution.

Karl:

The law on “structuring" . . . would not be at all obscure to a bank, which was obligated to report suspicious activity to the IRS. Moreover, once this information was reported by ABC News, anyone can Google “structuring” and find it immediately. The feds were not on a politically-motivated fishing expedition—they got a report from a bank of suspicious activity requiring investigation.

Dan Collins explains that not only did the entire thing start with a tip from a bank, but (as he ironically notes): "so anxious was the DOJ to prosecute the guy that theyÂ’ve been driving the US Attorney bonkers," trying to get a signoff on an indictment of a public official.

Selective enforcement always scares me. But I'm not convinced that Spitzer was targeted because he was a Democrat; it seems more like his own arrogance and foolhardiness unraveled his career.

It's as if he were a rather disconnected version of William Jefferson Clinton—without, of course, Clinton's brilliance.

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Puttin' on the Spitz

The Wall Street Journal had a nice recap of the Spitzer scandal today:

Mr. Spitzer's recklessness with the state's highest elected office, though, is of a piece with his consistent excesses as Attorney General from 1999 to 2006.

He routinely used the extraordinary threat of indicting entire firms, a financial death sentence, to force the dismissal of executives, such as AIG's Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. He routinely leaked to the press emails obtained with subpoena power to build public animosity against companies and executives. In the case of Mr. Greenberg, he went on national television to accuse the AIG founder of "illegal" behavior. Within the confines of the law itself, though, he never indicted Mr. Greenberg. Nor did he apologize.

In perhaps the incident most suggestive of Mr. Spitzer's lack of self-restraint, the then-Attorney General personally threatened John Whitehead after the former Goldman Sachs chief published an article on this page defending Mr. Greenberg. "I will be coming after you," Mr. Spitzer said, according to Mr. Whitehead's account. "You will pay the price. This is only the beginning, and you will pay dearly for what you have done."

Jack Welch, the former head of GE, said he was told to tell Ken Langone -- embroiled in Mr. Spitzer's investigation of former NYSE chairman Dick Grasso -- that the AG would "put a spike through Langone's heart." New York Congresswoman Sue Kelly, who clashed with Mr. Spitzer in 2003, had her office put out a statement that "the attorney general acted like a thug."

These are not merely acts of routine political rough-and-tumble. They were threats—some rhetorical, some acted upon—by one man with virtually unchecked legal powers.

Eliot Spitzer's self-destructive inability to recognize any limit on his compulsions was never more evident than his staff's enlistment of the New York State Police in a campaign to discredit the state's Senate Majority Leader, Joseph Bruno. On any level, it was nuts. Somehow, Team Spitzer thought they could get by with it. In the wake of that abusive fiasco, his public approval rating plunged.

Mr. Spitzer's dramatic fall yesterday began in the early afternoon with a posting on the Web site of the New York Times about the alleged link to prostitutes. The details in the criminal complaint about "Client-9," who is reported to be Mr. Spitzer, will now be played for titters by the press corps. But one may ask: Where were the media before this? With a few exceptions, the media were happy to prosper from his leaks and even applaud, rather than temper, the manifestly abusive instincts of a public official.

There really is nothing very satisfying about the rough justice being meted out to Eliot Spitzer. He came to embody a system that revels in the entertainment value of roguish figures who rise to power by destroying the careers of others, many of them innocent. Better still, when the targets are as presumably unsympathetic as Wall Street bankers and brokers.

Acts of crime deserve prosecution by the state. The people, in turn, deserve prosecutors and officials who understand the difference between the needs of the public good and the needs of unrestrained personalities who are given the honor of high office.

Read the whole thing.

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Jaime Weinman

. . . immortalizes the Spitzer scandal:

(Tune: "Love Potion # 9")

I took my troubles to the Emperor's Club,
For understanding and a special rub.
They gave me a form and a questionnaire to sign,
And told me that my title was "Love Client # 9."

I said to Kristen: "I'm a fool for love,
And incidentally, I am not the gov.
I don't like corruption, except, of course, for mine,
And honey, please address me as 'Love Client # 9.'"

More at the link!

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Spitz-Takes

I don't necessarily think the Spitzer prosecution was politically motivated; this is a sociopath's just desserts. But I am curious about Scott Horton's assertion in Harper's that the charges against Spitzer fall under the heading of "white slavery"; isn't that term often used to designate prostitution itself? The fact is, any law that's subject to selective enforcement should be reviewed—that is indeed, one of the problems with prostitution laws in the first place.

A governor of a powerful state, however, cannot be engaging in activity that opens him up to blackmail, and any elected official who doesn't recognize limits to his power is undermining democracy itself—no shit. Spitzer was, from all accounts, a tyrant of the kind that brings out the long knives —no mater what political party he or she belongs to. And thank goodness for those long knives, also known as "checks and balances."


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