Eliot Spitzer › 2.0: The Blogmocracy

Posts Tagged ‘Eliot Spitzer’

The New York creep-off election, or can’t Gotham do better than Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer?

by Mojambo ( 170 Comments › )
Filed under Bill Clinton, Democratic Party, Elections, Media, Politics at July 12th, 2013 - 8:00 am

I guess not as it appears that “creepiness” is their main attraction.

by Andrew Klavan

It’s never a good idea to judge another person’s sexual peccadilloes too harshly. Illicit sex is a crime for which, given the opportunity, all of us have the motive. Thus today’s fire-and-brimstone preacher of morality is often tomorrow’s guy-arrested-in-a-Motel-6-handcuffed-to-a-male-stripper. Better to follow the great wisdom of the West in these matters: Let he that is without sin—namely no one—cast the first stone. Or, if you prefer Shakespeare: “Shame to him whose cruel striking/kills for faults of his own liking.”

Having said all that: What kind of creep-fest are New Yorkers staging this election, for crying out loud? As I’m hearing it out on the West Coast, the lead candidate for mayor is a guy who tweeted pictures of his dingus to various women and then publicly lied about it, and the comptroller race is between a whoremonger and the madam who supplied him. Really? The YMCA used to have a slogan: “Character counts.” In New York from now on, you ought to add, “For nothing.”

The madam is a libertarian and, as I understand it, a bit of a joke. But the dingus-tweeter, disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, and the hooker boy, disgraced former governor Eliot Spitzer, both Democrats, are considered serious candidates. That makes sense, I guess. The Democrats are the party that celebrated Teddy Kennedy as the Lion of the Senate, even after he drove his likely mistress into the drink and left her to drown. This is the party of a president who carried on a sleazy Oval Office affair with a woman half his age and had his minions slander and intimidate other women who plausibly accused him of rape and grotesque sexual harassment. […….]

Of course, the GOP has its share of sexual rogues and clowns. South Carolina governor Mark Sanford spent taxpayer dollars while carrying on an extramarital affair in Argentina and then (which is worse in my book) cried about it—and yet he still made a successful comeback run for Congress. Congressman Mark Foley took strong action against child pornography when he wasn’t sending sexually suggestive e-mails to underage male pages. And who could forget Senator Larry Craig, whose “wide stance” in an airport men’s room stall got him accused of trying to pick up the undercover cop one stall over? [……]

On average, it seems to me, Republicans punish sexual transgressors more harshly, and certainly the left-wing media is relentlessly one-sided in the matter. Sanford, Foley, and Craig got no media quarter on the one hand, whereas on the other, Newsweek actually tried to bury the Clinton affair story, filmmakers turned out the documentary Client 9 to try to soft-soap Spitzer’s whoring, and NBC’s Today show brought on “experts” during the Weiner scandal to advise us to stop being so “puritanical” and get over it.

Should we get over it, I wonder? Is New York’s current Creep-Off election a token of the city’s sophistication, a harbinger of the end of the republic, or something in between?

Conscious of our own frailties, none of us should rush to play the puritan, it’s true. The so-called “character issue” that so-called journalists are always yammering about largely strikes me as a flimsy excuse to pornographize the news with straight faces. Any way you rationalize it, a humiliated spouse, a disgruntled paramour, even heartbroken children are really none of the public’s business. Judged individually, many sex scandals come to seem irrelevant after the first shock of contempt passes. Much as I dislike Anthony Weiner politically, he doesn’t seem to have broken any laws, and the worst that can be said about Bill Clinton’s proven indiscretions is that they demonstrate what a second-rate JFK he was even when it came to philandering.

And yet, in a larger sense, a society devoid of sexual shame is one in which the powerful are free to prey upon the weak for pleasure. […….]There really is such a thing as being too sophisticated, too laissez-faire. Even worse is the cynicism that glosses over gross personal abuses to pursue political goals. I never once looked at Teddy Kennedy after Chappaquiddick without thinking of a 28-year-old campaign worker pounding helplessly on the window of a submerged Oldsmobile while the rich, powerful senator who put her there walked away with few consequences. Lion of the Senate, my eye!

Likewise, as I look at the New York Creep-Off from afar, I can’t help but question the great city’s wisdom. It’s not that people like Weiner and Spitzer should be hounded and condemned for their mistakes indefinitely. Let them go about their business. Truly, let them thrive. But when it comes to choosing leaders, can the city really find no one better? It’s a representative government, after all. Why can’t New Yorkers find someone who represents them at their best?

Read the rest – New York’s Creep-Off Election

Tags: Andrew Klavan, Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Mark Sanford
Posted in Bill Clinton, Democratic Party, Elections, Media, Politics | 170 Comments »

Client No. 9 gets a prime time show on CNN – can Bernie Madoff or John Edwards be next?

by Mojambo ( 137 Comments › )
Filed under Media, Politics at June 25th, 2010 - 9:00 pm

Hey Eliot Spitzer will be sharing the mike with “conservative” (now that’s a real laugh) Kathleen Parker, thereby having an uber liberal debate a standard progressive Obama butt kissing liberal (why, was David Frum, David Brooks or Andrew Sullivan not available?) next month on CNN at 8 PM to compete with Bill O’Reilly and Krazy Keith Olbermann. The CNN promo referred to him as “the Sheriff of Wall Street” which was a real hoot. He was the tyrannical and power mad New York Attorney General who ran wild and did more damage then any good, costing many low level workers their jobs. Ashley Dupre his favorite call girl (“Kristen”) said if the show is not on Fox she won’t watch it – which shows she is smarter then Spitzer. The question is will Kathleen Parker make Eliot Spitzer take his stockings off during the show? (Ashley reported that Spitzer would get buck naked but never remove his socks – must have feet that got cold pretty easy!). This has ratings disaster written all over it. By the way is there a sleazier looking guy around then Eliot Spitzer?

hat tip – Instapundit

by Walter Shapiro

As a New York City resident for almost three decades, there is only one vote for state and local office that fills me with daily remorse and even shame. It was my November 2006 decision to pull the lever on an old-fashioned voting machine for Democratic gubernatorial candidate and alleged reformer Eliot Spitzer.

We all know how that played out for Client No. 9 of the Emperor’s Club prostitution service. Sixteen months later, with his distraught wife Silda at his side, Spitzer resigned as governor, reading a prepared statement that began with these words, “In the past few days, I’ve begun to atone for my private failings . . .”

We also know how long those days of atonement lasted – about long enough type “I’m so-o-o-o-o sorry and I’m already plotting a comeback” on his BlackBerry. These days, I probably feel more remorse and shame for voting for him than Spitzer feels about his staggering hypocrisy in prosecuting prostitution rings as New York attorney general and patronizing them as governor. Spitzer’s downfall was less about sex than about the betrayal of public trust.

Now CNN is pairing Spitzer in prime time with conservative newspaper columnist Kathleen Parker, matching a Pulitzer Prize winner with a Prostitution Prize winner. Nothing cable TV news does these days in its bottom-feeding race for ratings surprises me. Probably at this very moment some business channel is negotiating with the federal prison authorities to allow a certain convicted Ponzi schemer to host a show direct from his cell called “Investing the Bernie Way.”

Just so there is no ambiguity: I would sooner tune into Al Jazeera in Arabic or a highlight reel of 1950s TV test patterns than to watch Eliot Spitzer pontificate on CNN. As the defrocked governor contemplates his political future, I should also stress that I would not vote for Spitzer again for any public office even if his only competition on the ballot were Boss Tweed and John Edwards.

My ire at Spitzer is partly triggered by the embarrassing record of his hand-picked successor, David Paterson, an accidental governor who put the “hap” in “hapless.” Whether helping his former driver (now a trusted aide) try to wiggle out of an accusation of domestic violence or presiding passively throughout a budget crisis, Paterson has made New York almost as much of a state-government laughingstock as Illinois (Rod Blagojevich) or South Carolina (Mark Sanford). Spitzer’s legacy: A new poll found that 83 percent of New York voters label the state government as “dysfunctional.”

But Spitzer’s larger sin (and I do not use this word accidentally) lies in his zealous obsession with instant rehabilitation. If public humiliation becomes a temporary inconvenience that quickly morphs into a prime-time TV slot, it undermines all social sanctions against bad behavior. Even Richard Nixon grudgingly recognized that a decent society requires a decent interval before a disgraced political leader can dream of resurrection. Compared to Spitzer, Nixon was a slacker in the comeback department.