The Sound of Breaking Glass
America loves nothing more than a sex scandal.
A collective peek up the panty-free skirt of a Former Teen Idol or a glimpse of nipple through the diaphanous gown of This Year’s Model beats the Comeback Victory, the Shaggy Dog, and the Horatio Alger story every time for getting the attention of the caffeine-fueled ADHD citizens of the Most Powerful Nation on Earth.
Combining sex with clergy, or sex and politics, will very nearly get the nation’s arbiters of all things newsworthy soiling themselves in excitement over the eyes and ears a sex scandal will send their way in the next 24-hour news cycle.
Thus, the front page of every newspaper in America today features the frowning, disconsolate mug of Eliot Spitzer. The lede story on every Internet news and gossip site tells the gripping tale of his ‘monumental’ fall from grace, the tragic story of Client 9 — the hard-bitten, former federal prosecutor-turned Governor of New York, who yesterday admitted to contracting for the services of a prostitute.
Conversation at water coolers throughout the land will feature breathless moralizing over the shame and ‘criminality’ of Mr. Spitzer’s behavior. Some of it will rightly consider the hypocrisy of a man who, at least partly, earned his public service stripes pursuing prostitution rings as the head of New York’s organized crime task force.
Few will ponder the difficulties of reconciling the illegality of prostitution with the fact of America’s (legal) multi-billion dollar adult pornography industry.
Calls for Mr. Spitzer to be treated like any other John nabbed in a prostitution sting — that is, not to be prosecuted for much of anything, or be otherwise bothered to face much more than the wrath of an angry spouse — will be inaudible among demands for his immediate resignation and pleas for his incarceration as an ‘example’ of the reprehensible public official.
Even less likely to be generally considered are questions about how the particular prostitution ring involving Mr. Spitzer became the subject of federal wiretapping activities in the first place, why the FBI and the IRS were bothered to examine the small-time bank transactions that led to the wiretapping, or why Mr. Spitzer has been the only person associated with the sordid affair so far identified.
Scott Horton at Harper’s magazine has relentlessly covered the corruption and debasement of the Bush Justice Department for years, and he asks a few of the germane questions unlikely to come up in today’s office gossip or to be found in the terabytes of email discussing the scandal on the Internet.
Mr. Spitzer forged his bona fides — and was elected governor of New York with 69% of the vote in 2006 — on the strength of his success prosecuting the white-collar crimes of Wall Street greed-heads and financial hucksters during seven years as the state’s Attorney General.
Widely regarded as a rising star of the Democratic party and hailed for his denouncements of securities fraud, price-fixing, excessive executive compensation, and environmental depredations, he once struck fear in the hearts of rapacious titans of high finance, and stood in stark contrast to the friends and benefactors of mighty power brokers in the Republican party.
Today he’s but another schmuck caught with his pants around his ankles, whose entire life of good deeds and a potential future of beneficial public service are drowned in the scum-ringed tub of America’s prurient self-regard.
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You are not shouting “conspiracy!” as one doesn’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater, but if there IS SMOKE, and FIRE seems the probable cause, than shouting about it might just be the right thing to do.
and
How come the mud the slimy bottom feeders fling sticks so much better than our high road mud?
Hey Lonoldbud: Exellent piece and sadly, so true as at the risk of being “elite”; it is incredible to the extent people can become so distracted by stuff, fear and “supposed to’s,” as to be rendered numb to what’s real.
Hence the reelection of Bush…………..for the “first” time I felt a tad uncomfortable in my Nationality.
Aaah, but all is not lost. Manana we are off to N’awlins for Spring break (and don’t get me going on that), filled with more joy and appreciation than dread.
Hope you and your cyberspace are well and can feel the blessings.
Our high road mud?
I don’t know any mud we need to crawl out of (as a species) affords ground higher than another to secure the future — though calling a spade a fire seems as good a strategy for doing so as I’ve heard.
The most beautiful thing is blessings do abound.
And I’m sure sanford understands well: there are few places like N’awlins, even today, to find them.
When I saw that “his bank noticed irregularities” I wondered immediately.
I understand there is software the feds use to analyze patterns of small transactions, to see if large sums are be transfered in broken-up packages; Adam Davidson at NPR was implying this afternoon that that was what set them off on Spitzer.
How then does it work that the bank was the one to tip off the IRS?
I read the New Yorker’s very hostile profile of Spitzer a month or so ago, and was bummed out both by the facts they accounted for and their spin of those facts… his tenure as governor has been rocky by any assessment, but I was still hopeful he was learning from his mistakes.
Now, until I see strong evidence to the contrary, my assumption is: the folks on Wall St., whose only impediment to a total orgy of laissez faire profiteering was Mr. Spitzer, had been combing the record for anything that would take him down.
The damn fools have already made enough of a mess of the financial establishment that any sane person would see this witch hunt as the desperate act of a community with so much real guilt on their souls as to make their fury at their antagonists truly vile.
Not that I have strong feelings about this…. its way past my bedtime. Oh, and how ’bout Geraldine? Gonna keep myself from going to sleep if I don’t cork it…
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has shone a light on the deeply ingrained, active misogyny that thrives in our culture, but I just have to say Geraldine Ferraro ceased being relevant by Thanksgiving in 1984. Her symbolic value to the Clinton campaign could only remain fungible if she kept her mouth shut — not because she’s a woman, but because she’s an idiot. Her remarks concerning Obama’s good fortune in having been born a black man are merely a prologue to the coming realization of precisely how ‘post-race’ our society is not.
Hoisted by his own petard. To wit:
“It’s not just schadenfreude — Spitzer’s foes reveling in his suffering. It’s that Spitzer became governor largely thanks to his many hyper-publicized cases against Wall Street titans like Dick Grasso and Hank Greenberg — cases that he pursued by going after everything and everyone connected with his targets, no matter how personal, by leaking constantly to the press and by making his own nasty, off-hand public comments. Keep in mind, Spitzer was charging Dick Grasso with making too much money…. [W]hen Grasso refused to settle, Spitzer’s ‘investigation’ wound up probing whether Grasso had had sex with his secretary and fathered a child out of wedlock. The apparent effort to beat Grasso into submission included threats of tawdry press leaks about alleged personal indiscretions — allegations Grasso denies, and for which little evidence ever materialized” — CNBC reporter Charles Gasparino, writing in the New York Post
Courtesy of Glenn Greenwald at Salon, here is a bit of well-worth-the-read insight into this affair.
There is no Spitzer conspiracy. The end of Spitzer means Leutenant Gov takes over, who is more liberal and African-American to boot.doc
Doc, you’re probably right about the absence of a grand conspiracy in this case.
I think it was more likely a situation where those with the power to do so could not resist an opportunity to bring down a guy they didn’t like so much.
It’s clear that far more resources were brought to bear here than are ordinarily employed in cases such as Spitzer’s, that his particular situation was treated in a way that a very few have ever been treated previously. But that alone doesn’t make it a conspiracy, in the same way the fact that the failure and ineffectiveness of every standing military and security protocol on 9/11 doesn’t make that particular event a conspiracy.
Spitzer’s downfall is karmic, in the end, as is everything else that happens in this life.
And karma just loves it some opportunity to play out…
OK Call it a double standard, entrapment, hipocracy and a variety of terms which allow the powerful to bend laws into serviceable weapons against their enemies and then back again handy tools to protect their own, and their cash. Its not the individual victim’s fall that hurts, but the degradation of justice in general which endangers us all.
who pays $7500 for a whore? hasn’t spitzer heard of reno, nevada? :}
I agree spitzer should have went to reno.he demonstrated bad judgement.and clearly does not understand economics paying 7500$ for whores.