I used to think Elliot Spitzer was going to be our first Jewish president, but that scenario's seeming less likely: "Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning."
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So Much For That
10 Mar 2008 02:12 pm
Comments (85)
Jesus with all the shit he's done, could Spitzer be the worst governor in world history?
And I was hoping he'd be our first TV-era bald president!
Keep hope alive. Maybe it just proves that he's virile, as with McCain!
Does Eliot Spitzer have to choke a bitch?
I'm not sure this rules him out. It's time for a new and refreshing honesty in Washington! No more politics as usual!
Damn. I liked Spitzer, which simply shows how I've grown older but no wiser. Every politician without exception is an asshole who'd piss on his granny's grave for power. Liberal or conservative - there are no heroic politicians - there are only the slimy and the slightly less slimy. One should only commit to them as unsteady vehicles to get things done. Fuck Spitzer.
Spitzer wasn't going to be. Feingold could have been, if he had been inclined to run.
at least he ain't no fag like mcgreevey. suck on that, New Jersey!!!
Take that, you sonovabitch!
/bitter AIG employee
Oh, that prostitution ring. Mercy me.
Couldn't happen to a more arrogant douche bag.
"What does "involved" mean? Was he handling the scat tricks?"
Maybe he was involved in the same sense Barney Frank was, when Frank let his lover run a prostitution ring out of Frank's home?
Random Dude:
Well, compared to Jim Gibbons of NV, he's still bush league. But still. Holy shit, what a moron.
Re Matthew's comment "Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring"
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Spitzer's the GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK -- By definition, he's a walking prostitution ring.
What's the point?
It's crashed the NYT site. That's an impressive feat.
"suck on that, New Jersey!!!"
Now that's the New York spirit! Sometimes I miss being a New Yorker.
So would David Patterson be the first blind governor?
Too bad, he'll likely resign office. At least his employment prospects are only marginally dented. He can always get a gig running an urban record company.
Oy.
Fuck, his presidential aspirations, though -- this had better not mess up our chances to take the Senate this fall.
This will be the third gubernatorial resignation in the tri-state area in three years! And yet NY area people always complain about NH and Iowa's early contests! Need I say more.
Spitzer's campaign promised much and raised expectations for his term. This should serve as a warning to Obama if and when he wins the presidency. I guess this means no Spitzer for A.G. or Veep
Hillary for Governor!!
Was he just the piano player? For the record, his wife is a babe. Not that this matters, evidently. Figures. But he had to tell us about his perfect LSAT scores.
Matt I did too. He would have been a hell of a AG for Obama.
well, here's a shocker: fred getting his facts wrong.
here's another shocker: hubris remains a powerful force.
I'll be surprised if Wall Street doesn't declare tommorrow a holiday.
I'm also bemused at the picture of thousands of the most amoral scum in the universe falling to their knees in Manhattan offices , looking upward and crying out "THANK YOU, GOD!"
it's hard upstate for a pimp
Elliot Spitzer never had any prospect of becoming president. He's a bully and a hack who wouldn't be anywhere without his daddy's money, and he wasted the resources of the NY Attorney General's office on witch hunts against men who had the temerity to have earned their money instead of inheriting it. Vindictive, self-promoting prosecutors can perform a valuable service in the American political system, and Spitzer might have done so, had he focussed his energies on something important, like the incestuous relationship between bond rating agencies and issuers. Had he gone after Moody's and S&P, he might have ameliorated part of the current credit crisis.
The word I'm hearing is he'll resign soon. Too bad. I had really high hopes for Spitzer and now it looks he will indeed be known as a horrible governor involved with hookers.
Ha ha!
The word I'm hearing is he'll resign soon.
Seriously? I would have thought this was survivable (whether or not it should be). Maybe there is something more to it?
Okay, the cynic in me sees that as good news for Obama - it'll give him some breathing room for a few days as this story plays out in the media, and it puts sexual misconduct by elected officials (cough, Bill, cough) back into the publics mindset.
Oy. Just when things were looking good for Dems to take back the NY Senate...Joe Bruno must be dancin' in the streets.
"Involved in a prostitution ring" sounds so much seamier than "patronizes high-end hookers." I thought he was helping to run the thing or something.
I used to think Elliot Spitzer was going to be our first Jewish president,
No chance of that now-- he has to take a page from the Vitter playbook and commit himself to Jesus.
Ah. I put Nelson Muntz tag in, and the comment board took it seriously.
It's more pure schaedenfraude than anything else though.
Creep. Thanks Gov. Spitzer!
What does "involved" mean? Was he handling the scat tricks?
Moe, I don't often laugh at loud at blog comments, so I have to salute you for this.
Maybe Spitzer the self-satisfied publicity-seeking bully can handcuff Spitzer the humiliated john and frog-march himself out of his Fifth Avenue apartment and into the lights of the TV cameras, before sending himself off to be processed at Rikers Island, stopping only to hold a self-aggrandizing press conference in which he proclaims that his arrest of himself proves that, on his watch, not even the most powerful interests are above the law.
Ah, poetic justice. It's nice to see Spitzer and Giuliani both implode in the same year.
"and it puts sexual misconduct by elected officials (cough, Bill, cough) back into the publics mindset."
Chuck, that's a feature, not a bug, from the Clinton perspective. That's why they had no problem comparing Obama's campaign tactics to Ken Starr (of course, the really dirty pool was the Clintonistas treatment of the honorable Starr).
well, i needed some comic relief this morning, and Fred has provided it!
see, according to Fred, the "men" who work on wall street are all paragons of honesty and hard work: our job is to admire the wonderful way in which they do their jobs, the superior level of honesty that they show.
unless, of course, we are talking about "men" who work for moody's, whom spitzer didn't pursue: then, amazingly enough, they are crooked scum.
how it is that fred doesn't realize that these two thoughts don't go together - if the ratings agencies had spoken up, they would have spoken up to point out that the paragons of perfection on wall street were bundling up junk and selling it as though it were a AAA security - is something i'll have to ponder.
meanwhile, some call me tim, it might not be impossible for a politician in general to get away with "involvement" in a prostitution ring, but not when you have positioned yourself as mr. integrity (hence my reference to hubris).
THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS!! FOR HILLARY!!!
he wasted the resources of the NY Attorney General's office on witch hunts against men who had the temerity to have earned their money
It's so cute when members of the local Rotary Club suck up to NYC corporate CEOs!
Maybe Spitzer the self-satisfied publicity-seeking bully can handcuff Spitzer the humiliated john and frog-march himself out of his Fifth Avenue apartment and into the lights of the TV cameras, before sending himself off to be processed at Rikers Island, stopping only to hold a self-aggrandizing press conference in which he proclaims that his arrest of himself proves that, on his watch, not even the most powerful interests are above the law.
Ah, but Spitzer's not the Attorney General any more.
Luckily, now we have an AG who is not so self-aggrandizing. Andrew Cuomo. Oh, wait...
Nobody fucks with Bruno and lives to tell the tale. Jesus tittyfucking Christ.
Scanning the NYTimes article, it seems that "involved with" means "was a client of". This is a case where useing polite language actually makes the implicit accusation sound much worse.
he wasted the resources of the NY Attorney General's office on witch hunts against men who had the temerity to have earned their money instead of inheriting it.
Hmm. Got anything you'd like to share with us, Fred? Because you seem to be taking this rather personally.
FOX NEWS is reporting Spitzer will resign.
One horse-racy angle on this is that it is going to take media attention away from Obama's rebuttal of the Clintons' CIC "threshold" crap.
The NY Sun was on to this story this morning (they had a possible link to government officials - not Spitzer's name).
According to the Sun story, the ring charged up to $5,500 per hour. Wow - what exactly do hookers do for $5,500 per hour? Enquiring minds want to know...
I don't understand how you get caught doing this stuff. When you have that kind of money and prestige it should not be hard to arrange encounters with women who are under the impression that you will give them money later (but that's just a friendly gift). If you don't, you develop a bad reputation and they stop showing up. Then the price goes up to make up for the 'bad actors'. But that way you get plausible deniability all around. I thought rich people were supposed to be smart about this kind of stuff?
Chuck: This is a TRIPLE whammy for Obama: Spitzer is a Clinton backer. Hillary will be embarassed, and might have to denounced or reject his endorsement (?!).
She might lose a superdelegate in the process
(Anyone know how Patterson will vote?.
Nope, Spitzer never had any prospects. Too arrogant, too much Smartest Guy In The Room syndrome.
Not to get too off-track here, but looking back on 60 or so years of presidential politics, where has the VP slop ever mattered. Some may say LBJ, in '60, but careful analysis concluded otherwise. Did Agnew cost Nixon the presidency? Did Quayle cost HW Bush in '88? Could Bensen save Dukakis? Would Ike have lost without Nixon? People vote for the head of the ticket.
Why should Spitzer resign when David Vitter didn't? And frankly, hardly anyone even called for Vitter to resign. Admittedly it looks extra bad for Spitzer, since he's a former prosecutor who went after prostitute rings...but Vitter also has the moral hypocricy issue since he is a major moral-issues crusader.
Obviously what Spitzer's done is pretty sleazy, but Republicans can't call for his head after giving Vitter a pass.
Wow - what exactly do hookers do for $5,500 per hour? Enquiring minds want to know...
I haven't tried it myself, but my understanding is they have sex with you.
"Why should Spitzer resign when David Vitter didn't?"
I'm guessing he's folding so easily because there's something more he doesn't want people to find out? But if there's an investigation, surely that would get out too? I'm not really sure why he'd fold so easily, maybe he thinks the best way to combat this is to resign, disappear for a few years and resurface down the line? I can't think that's a very good plan either.
According to the Sun story, the ring charged up to $5,500 per hour. Wow - what exactly do hookers do for $5,500 per hour? Enquiring minds want to know...
When a governor, or any celebrity, pays a prostitute $5,500 I assume one of the things (he thinks) he's buying is absolute secrecy and discretion.
Maybe Spitzer should ask for a refund.
flipping through and stopped on Fox News: Spitzer has been indicted by a grand jury for the southern district of New York...
I was going to complain that this will bury Obama's nice comeback today to the commander-in-chief nonsense on tonight's newscasts but then I remembered that this will taint Clinton (he's on her side and a superdelegate) and it'll also remind everyone of what a problem it is to have a guy in office who can't keep his boners away from women who aren't his wife... in other words, Bill Clinton.
Spitzer issued a brief statement saying he's disappointed in himself for not holding himself to the same high standards he set for others. Nothing about resignation. Has to regain trust of his family. Didn't take any questions.
This is just speculation on my part, but if he is resigning then it may be because his "involvement" with this ring goes back to his days as AG, when he prosecuted a couple of NYC-based prostitution operations. That would be the height of hypocrisy. No defense possible.
On the other hand, it's also hard to see how he stays on even if his use of the service was just recent. Given the enemies he's made, the compromised position he'd be in and the terrible drain the investigation would be on his administration, how could he get anything done?
From the New York Times: "Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a person briefed on the federal investigation. "
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The stupid Democratic leadership thought George W wanted the Patriot Act in order to wiretap "Terrorists".
Ha ha ha. Why do I think about 50 politicans just started sweating bullets?
One difference between Vitter and Spitzer is how much support they could expect from their respective parties.
I don't know much about the New York Democratic Party, but presumably they aren't thrilled to be led by a former Attorney General currently under investigation for paying prostitutes thousands of dollars, and suspected of having dallied with prostitutes the evening before testifying in front of the US Congress, etc.
Whereas Vitter is a Republican Senator in a state which, at the time of the scandal, had a Democratic governor. So his resignation would have flipped the seat to the other party. With the Senate so closely divided the GOP leadership could forgive a solid, Church-going family man his unfortunate forays into adult baby fetishism and solicitation.
Feel free, if you're so moved, to start belting out "God Bless America."
So no resignation? He'd better not be dragging everyone else down with him.
If it turns out that his AG duties got him, let's say, a discount, he's toast.
It just shows, though, that NY state politics is bare-knuckle. (Perhaps that's what you get for $5500, Al?)
Ed Rendell!
The stupid Democratic leadership thought George W wanted the Patriot Act in order to wiretap "Terrorists".
I would like to think that nobody actually ever believed that. Surely the Democratic leadership just supported the Patriot Act so they wouldn't appear soft on national security. These wire-tapping programs were always about moral crimes - drugs, gambling and prostitution.
I don't understand how you get caught doing this stuff. When you have that kind of money and prestige it should not be hard to arrange encounters with women who are under the impression that you will give them money later (but that's just a friendly gift).
Yes, giving them money later is called "marrying them". Isn't that what Giuliani did?
Plus, in Louisiana, being caught with a hooker is less a crime, more of a badge of honor for a politician.
"The stupid Democratic leadership thought George W wanted the Patriot Act in order to wiretap "Terrorists"."
Sounds a bit like tinfoil hat territory to me. You know, many of us Democrats actually want federal wiretapping, so long as you have a judge approved warrant.
You know, the feds were allowed to wiretap before the Patriot act.
What I cannot understand is how a man, who, as AG, is intimately familiar with the depth of governmental wiretapping abilities, could be so utterly stupid as to think that he wouldn't get caught.
What Jayhawk said.
RE "What I cannot understand is how a man, who, as AG, is intimately familiar with the depth of governmental wiretapping abilities, could be so utterly stupid as to think that he wouldn't get caught. "
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For the same reason dogs chase cars. For the thrill.
He may have thought calling from a pay phone with no name given protected him.
Stupid. Your voice recording is as unique as a fingerprint, to advanced signal analysis.
Plus there's some many concealed cameras today. Unless you're calling from some rural areas, you --and your license plates -- are probably on tape within a block.
This post kinda undercuts the thesis of Matthew's earlier post -- which began:
"Megan Hustan bemoans the decline of the phone call as a tool of business"
And I was hoping he'd be our first TV-era bald president!
Gerald Ford was pretty bald, although of course he wasn't elected. Lyndon Johnson was sort of balding. I won't argue that Eisenhower was a TV-era president, but it could be argued, and he was way balder than Spitzer.
"It's so cute when members of the local Rotary Club suck up to NYC corporate CEOs!"
It's even cuter when ignorant lefties side with the faux class warrior with degrees from Horace Mann, Princeton, and Harvard who used his daddy's money to pay for his gubernatorial campaign, over men like Hank Greenberg and Dick Grasso. Compare their backgrounds to Spitzer's and see how stupid your bogus Rotary Club versus "NYC corporate CEOs" comment sounds.
Fuck off, Fred. Grasso and Greenberg were ludicrously over-paid CEOs. They weren't some "regular guys" picked on by Spitzer.
Way to parade your ignorance, Steve. D.
Looked up Silda Spitzer on Google - she's not bad looking. Not very clever of Elliot to go messing with a prostitute. Guess he doesn't know the first rule when getting caught, from "Guide for the Married Man": DENY! Deny! Deny, deny, deny!
Great post about her on the LA Times blog:
"Silda Spitzer, Prop Wife?
Why do so many women suck it up and stand grimly by, like a prop for the photo op, as the hubby spills his guilty guts for the cameras? Today Silda Spitzer looked like she might have had a gun at her back -- or she might have had one in Eliot's back -- but there she was nonetheless, ``at his side,`` as they say.
Stick with the marriage if that's what you want, by all means -- but let him twist in the wind alone. Just once, as the husband moves up to the microphone, I'd like to see one of these wronged women just walk offstage behind him, suitcase in hand, exit stage right.
YouTube has scored nearly a half-million hits for the video of a well-known broadcaster crashing a big Olympics press conference and, in front of those five emblematic rings, accusing her husband -- an even better-known broadcaster -- of having an affair. She dodges and weaves like a champion welterweight, shaking off the musclemen who try to hustle her offstage, to say her piece in front of the world's press.
Now that's what I'm talking about!
Posted by Patt Morrison on March 10, 2008"
Gotta agree with that - except that, OTOH, people who think conventional marriage and monogamy are somehow functional human concepts in the first place are mostly idiots.
Humans are not monogamous - at best they are "serially monogamous" - which is the same thing as saying they are not monogamous.
Get over it.
Spitzer has turned out to be possibly the most disappointing major Democrat of the past couple of years.
Here's the thing I don't get; Kissinger slept with Hollywood starlets because power is an aphrodisiac. I'm not expecting politicians to be paragons of moral virtue and be faithful to their wives. However, when you're the governor of New York, you have famous starlets in New York, a few of which would be willing to sleep with you without you paying them. Why go to a prostitute? It's just stupid. If he had just been banging Lindsay Lohan, people might think that was gross, but who would actually be calling for him to resign?
Also, if he's resigning, he might as well take another page out of the Hollywood playback and check into rehab as a way to avoid the press.
I swear to God, how someone can think they are familiar with the inner workings of insurance companies and also believe that corporate hierarchies are purely logical structures topped off by hard-working genius supermen is beyond me. Never mind the fact that, say, the victims of, say, accounting fraud at AIG were also these middle-aged white supermen.
Would middle-aged white businessmen use sham transactions to paint a rosier picture of their company so as to boost its stock price? That's just crazy hippy liberal talk from people who know nothing about the first law of economics, "People respond to incentives."
Barbar,
What, if any, of Spitzer's allegations about AIG were proved in court? He used leaks and innuendo to to attack people in the court of public opinion on meritless accusations.
If you're an big-time [male] politico, star athlete, or actor...you don't pay prostitutes to have sex with you as such, since you can generally get that for free.
You pay them to leave discreetly and shut up afterwards.
In that sense, Spitzer got ripped off.
The interesting question is whether he was a target of this or just got caught up in it by accident.
Fred,
The middle-aged white executives at AIG had to re-state several years of company earnings downward by several billion dollars. They also had to pay over a billion dollars in fines and restitution as part of a federal/state settlement. I guess to directly answer your question, there were five convictions recently (late February) over the Gen Re sham transactions.
Billionaire white man and longtime AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg filed a lawsuit against present and past AIG directors in 2007 (also presumably white captains of industry), as well as against PWC, another company led by white middle-aged captains of industry.
A perfect circle of white middle-aged men who had the temerity to earn their money rather than inherit it, I'm sure.
Barbar,
You're right, four former General Re execs and one former AIG exec (not all "middle aged white men", if that matters) were just found guilty on federal charges related to the characterization of $500 million in loss reserves at a $200 billion company. This two years after Spitzer was forced to drop all of his criminal and most of his civil charges against Greenberg (though he had already bullied AIG into showing him the door). As the WSJ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115768310139957263.html?mod=todays_us_opinion" rel="nofollow nofollow">noted then:
"Let's also recall that when this hoopla broke, Mr. Spitzer astounded even fellow prosecutors by threatening to indict AIG unless it fired Mr. Greenberg. Then he broke further prosecutorial codes by going on national TV to accuse Mr. Greenberg of fraud -- before he'd even filed charges. It was only months later, in the media blackout of the Thanksgiving holiday, that Mr. Spitzer leaked the news that he wouldn't pursue criminal charges. Now he's admitting most of the civil case is also bunk.
Not that any of this matters to Mr. Spitzer now. Surfing along on a wave of prosecutorial "triumphs" -- of which the Greenberg case was feted as one of those most significant -- he is cruising toward the governor's mansion. It's getting harder to believe that many of his suits weren't brought solely for that purpose."
Score one for the good guys. While there were material issues on Wall Street that could have benefited from some prosecutorial zeal, Spitzer focussed on minutiae like this while trashing Greenberg's reputation with false accusations (though not, for some reason, similarly attacking Warren Buffett, CEO of General Re's parent company Berkshire Hathaway. Could Buffett's political leanings have some reason to do with this?).
Isn't AIG based in New York City? Isn't Gen Re clearly the accessory rather than the prime driver of the shady deals? It was AIG's balance sheet that was being played with.
Meanwhile "most" of the civil charges against Greenberg remain (by my count, two out of six is not most, but four out of six is most).
And whatever -- this whole thing is irrelevant to your idiotic statement about the "temerity of earning money rather than inheriting it."
Comments closed March 24, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
What does "involved" mean? Was he handling the scat tricks?
Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | March 10, 2008 2:16 PM