Spitzer Resigns

New York Governor Caught in Sex Scandal

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer (D), whose political party the mainstream media has studiously avoided mentioning, resigned today.  His resignation takes effect Monday.

Spitzer had been caught in an investigation of a prostitution ring that he has apparently been  patronizing for at least 10 years.  He was caught on wiretaps, the same kind of wiretaps he used to authorize as the state's Attorney General. 

The new governor, Lieutenant Governor David Paterson, is the son of a Harlem political dynasty, the first legally blind person to be a governor, and probably even further to the left than Spitzer.

As governor, Eliot Spitzer is the chief law-enforcement officer of New York State.  Yet he apparently violated not only myriad state laws, but also the Federal Mann Act, which prohibits bringing women across state lines for purposes of prostitution.  He had at least one encounter in the Mayflower Hotel with a hooker he brought down by train from New York. 

Spitzer was known to the service as George Fox, the name of a friend and contributor, or simply as Client 9.  (As one of the TV comedians quipped, he's a governor -- who were the eight ahead of him?)  (Why is the old song "Love Potion Number Nine" stuck in my head?)

Spitzer has a history of criminal activity aside from his involvement with the prostitution ring.  He threatened John Whitehead, the retired head of Goldman Sachs, after Whitehead questioned a dubious prosecution Spitzer undertook against a friend of Whitehead's.  His senior aides, presumably with his knowledge and consent, leaked confidential police information to the Albany Times-Union.  He used state resources and state police to spy on State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a Republican. 

And he claimed that he could run the state by himself, without the legislature, just by executive order.

He also devised a crooked scheme to enable his father, Bernard Spitzer, to fund his campaign for Attorney General in 1994 in violation of the state's campaign finance limits by collateralizing several buildings and using the real estate that his father had given him to secure loans of over $8 million.   He repeated the scheme in 1998.  He never paid his father back.

Eliot Spitzer used his post as Attorney General to run roughshod over the law and over whomever he thought was a good target to advance his ambitions.  He even went hard after prostitution rings that were competing with the one he was patronizing.  He is unfit to hold any office of public trust.

I feel sympathy for Spitzer's wife and daughters, for his friends, but Spitzer, who is described even by allies as sanctimonious, ruthless, and amoral, is simply reaping what he has sown.  It is time that it caught up with him.