Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Friday, March 28, 2008 2:16:26 PM
This can be an embarrassing state to live in, as well as an expensive one. Both of these are taxing in different ways. I won't cover the tax issue of the moment this moment (I'm not angry enough), but I just want to comment on a couple of recent NY embarrassments.
Our newly ex-governor Eliot Spitzer has been all over the news for many reasons, starting with the exposure of his involvement with a prostitution ring that he laundered mega-bucks to for...er...something you would have thought would have been available at home, although if his private persona is as abrasive as his public, maybe it wasn't available, and who could blame Mrs. Spitzer? Finally, some papers are doing what the Wall Street Journal (God bless 'em) has done for years and exposing his abuses of power, both as Governor and before that as Attorney General of New York. This is welcome, although if it had been done before maybe we wouldn't have elected this pervert thug as Governor in 2006. What I haven't seen is anyone mention that in his coercive tactics as Attorney General (usually targeting prominent, innocent men), he was emulating one of the most power-abusing prosecutors in American history, Lawrence Walsh.
Walsh, of course, was the Special Prosecutor who was appointed to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan and Bush I administrations. His job was not to produce truth or justice; it was to produce a Democrat President in 1993. His favorite tactic was to threaten innocent administration figures with a dozen or more indictments, which he knew would not stand up in court. He would tell the victim that he knew that they would be acquitted, but that the cost of defending themselves from the false charges would bankrupt their families, so they had better plead guilty to a few of the false charges to avoid having to pay to defend against the many. (Elliot Abrams wrote a moving account of having been a Walsh target in
Undue Process. Ignore the leftist review Amazon chose to publish.)
This of course, is prosecutorial malpractice on stilts, but as Walsh and Spitzer learned, the press will let you use anything short of the rack to obtain guilty pleas, as long as you target someone the media wishes harm to.
The other brief point of emabrrassment I want to mention is the latest contretemps of our carpetbagger Senator, Hillary "Bill's moral compass" Clinton. Much has been made about her lying about her visit to Bosnia as First Lady (snipers, etc.) Most of us have known for 16 years or so that Hillary is no less a congenital liar than Bill is; what amuses me is that people are actually saying that we need to elect Hillary Clinton as President to replace President George W. Bush, who has been lying to us for eight years (which isn't true, by the way, but that's another topic for another day). Maybe they mean that President Bush hasn't been lying enough...