He seems a little off. Jim Cramer, the screaming idiot on Mad Money, is a close friend, so that should tell you a lot about him.
He seems a little off. Jim Cramer, the screaming idiot on Mad Money, is a close friend, so that should tell you a lot about him.
I'm like best friends with his Deputy Regional Representative. She knows him and vice versa. She's a little unsure if she has a job right now.
Chuck d, I think that you've got some issues too.
I've seen him, but I haven't met him. He's very lean and chiseled, and I got the impression of earnestness and humorlessness, although I think he could smile for the camera when that seemed warranted.
I went to Harvard Law with him, although I knew Silda much better.
I knew him at Princeton. He was a Run For President of Student Govt type. Had a number of classes with him at Woodrow Wilson School. It's sad news all the way round.
One problem with that last post. Aren't most runners skinny nerd types that are annoying to be around?
So why are you on letsrun?
I met him down in person in Washington DC last month...
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You mean did I ever receive an "Eliot Spritzer?"
He spoke at my college graduation in 06'. A long speech on the importance of ALWAYS satisfying your carnal urges. Very inspiring.
tennis player
Emperor of the North wrote:
He seems a little off. Jim Cramer, the screaming idiot on Mad Money, is a close friend, so that should tell you a lot about him.
Spitzer was an asshole. He put people out of the business forever on little to nothing. He pandered. He politicked his way too the top and played with people's careers and freedom like it was funny.
He overlooks 90% of the worst crap, and puts the some scapegoat who was responsible for little to nothing of the actual problem into prison.
He should be put in a maximum security prison for abusing state funds.
I want to see him cry on television. I want to see his career destroyed. I want him to know what it feels like when it comes back at you. He's an ugly, stupid, little man worthy of being governor of NY.
spitzer was/is a runner as well.
Criminal elite wrote:
Emperor of the North wrote:He seems a little off. Jim Cramer, the screaming idiot on Mad Money, is a close friend, so that should tell you a lot about him.
Spitzer was an asshole. He put people out of the business forever on little to nothing. He pandered. He politicked his way too the top and played with people's careers and freedom like it was funny.
He overlooks 90% of the worst crap, and puts the some scapegoat who was responsible for little to nothing of the actual problem into prison.
He should be put in a maximum security prison for abusing state funds.
I want to see him cry on television. I want to see his career destroyed. I want him to know what it feels like when it comes back at you. He's an ugly, stupid, little man worthy of being governor of NY.
I agree with this post. His actions as DA proved he was never fit for office.
Ah, silly New Yorkers who bought the media hype but never cared to look any deeper. You got the governor you deserved.
asdfjksdfkljsd wrote:
I agree with this post. His actions as DA proved he was never fit for office.
Ah, silly New Yorkers who bought the media hype but never cared to look any deeper. You got the governor you deserved.
SPITZER'S APPALLING APPETITES
John Podhoretz
March 13, 2008 -- ELIOT Spitzer's unwilling ness or inability to quiet his extracurricular hunger for sex-for-pay upon assuming high office is not only the proximate cause of his downfall, but the key to understanding the profoundly grave weakness of character that runs through his entire public life.
To know why Spitzer fell and fell so hard, you need only consider his appetites.
I'm not referring to his food intake - though the rangy Spitzer has always had about him "a lean and hungry look," to use Shakespeare's description of one of his villains. Rather, I'm referring to his incapacity to refuse himself anything he wanted - to exercise even the most minimal self-control when it came to satisfying his appetites.
Spitzer's effort to satisfy his appetite for public office, which began to manifest itself in 1994, led him to attempt a complex scheme to evade campaign-finance law. To disguise the fact that his father was paying for his election bids, he designed a series of difficult-to-follow and extremely brazen loan transactions and repayments.
He lost that election, but his scheme went undetected. So he did it again four years later - and lied and lied and lied about it - until he finally had to acknowledge that he had been working to skirt the law. His admission nearly cost him his 1998 bid for attorney general.
He promised he would clean it all up. The fact is that, since the transactions involved his family's money, we don't know if he ever really did. I doubt it.
His effort to satisfy his appetite for fame led the new attorney general for the state of New York to become little more than a public-sector blackmailer - threatening Wall Street companies with costly and ruinous legal actions that compelled them to arrange substanceless settlements with Spitzer's office.
His effort to satisfy his appetite for abasing others who would not do his bidding made itself evident in the AG's defamatory bullying of Richard Grasso, the New York Stock Exchange chief who Spitzer decided had just made too much money, and of Hank Greenberg, the insurance executive who found himself rousted from his job and at risk of going to prison for no good reason whatsoever when he was just this side of 80 years old.
Also nearly 80 years old, and under threat from a public official with the power to indict, was John Whitehead - a Wall Street lion of unimpeachable reputation who defended Greenberg from Spitzer's attacks in an op-ed piece. While on vacation, Whitehead received a nightmarish phone call in which Spitzer told him he would be very sorry for what he had done.
And Gov. Spitzer's aides (yeah, sure) sought to destroy the 77-year-old Joe Bruno, the senior Republican in Albany, by any means necessary.
A Freudian psychoanalyst might wonder what appetite, exactly, Spitzer was seeking to satisfy when he decided to try and take down these elderly men.
Saul Bellow once poignantly described the disease of the soul afflicting his character Henderson the Rain King as a voice inside crying out "I want, I want, I want!" Henderson didn't know what it was he wanted, which is why he was a character one could care about.
That, too, has been Eliot Spitzer's cry - "I want, I want, I want!" Alas, for his family, for New York state - and now for himself, Spitzer knew all too well what he wanted at every moment of every day. And he saw no reason why he shouldn't have anything and everything his ceaseless hunger coveted - the law, good judgment, common sense and often simple humanity be damned.
New Yorkers knew what Spitzer was capable of, yet the fawning New York press chose to ignore his character flaws since he was a Democrat.
I KNEW HE WAS A FRAUD & A HYPOCRITE FROM THE DAY HE SWAGGERED INTO CAPITOL
Frederic U Dicker
March 13, 2008 -- ALBANY - I saw many signs early on that Eliot Spitzer was to politics what Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry was to religion - a consummate hypocrite - but few, if any, of his governmental colleagues (and even fewer members of the largely fawning press corps) appeared able to see it as well.
To many of them, Spitzer could do no wrong.
They thought he was "right" on the issues that supposedly counted - government involvement in the private economy, hostility to Wall Street, gay marriage, even more campaign-finance restrictions (that favor the wealthy like Spitzer) and tighter gun laws.
So what did it matter if he turned into a boorish Richard Nixon when he unleashed the State Police on his leading Republican nemesis, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, or repeatedly violated his self-proclaimed principles of government openness, public accountability and an end to influence of special interests?
Well, it mattered to me, and I didn't care if he was "right" or "wrong" on any particular issue.
I wrote Spitzer off as an agent of reform in the wake of the Dirty Tricks Scandal last July, when he repeatedly lied to the public and sought to smear me.
The Post broke the story July 5 and two weeks later, our findings were confirmed in a bombshell report by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
During the two weeks leading up to Cuomo's report, Spitzer and his aides did their best to spread rumors - in the political community and among the press - that I was merely carrying water for Bruno, lying about the facts, engaging in a crusade against a "progressive" Democrat, and supposedly compromised by some unspecified relationship.
When Cuomo's report came out, Spitzer claimed his office had cooperated fully with the attorney general.
But the next day, we learned his chief-of-staff and his communications director hadn't cooperated at all. One may, in fact, have lied under oath.
In the weeks that followed, Spitzer repeatedly claimed to have answered every question about the scandal, and law-enforcement sources said he then pressured Albany DA David Soares to issue a report absolving him of responsibility.
Now there's considerable evidence that - surprise - Spitzer was in on the plot from the start.
His penchant for hypocrisy first started to became clear to me during his second term as attorney general.
As he declared war on Wall Street and other corporate abusers, Spitzer also declared war in effect on his own oath of office: a commitment to the state and federal constitutional guarantees of the presumption of innocence.
Time after time with high-profile corporate officials - most conspicuously, former American International Group CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg - Spitzer railed on national television that his targets had broken the law.
But in most cases - after the damage to reputations was already done - no charges were brought.
From the start of his term, I spotted signs of trouble:
* Spitzer told me that - in a gesture of openness - he would lift some of the harsh "Fort Pataki" security that had been imposed on the Capitol - well before the 9/11 attacks - to help then-Gov. George Pataki avoid contacts with the public.
Spitzer never did that, either.
* Another tip-off came when Spitzer "reformed" the state's old Ethics and Lobbying commissions. But Spitzer's supposed reform put the formerly semi-independent agencies directly under the governor's control.
Asked why he had done that, Spitzer bluntly responded, "Because I wanted it" that way.
The Ethics Commission's failure to thoroughly investigate the Dirty Tricks Scandal might explain the "wisdom" of his actions.
* Shortly before he took office, I heard Spitzer and his aides speak contemptuously of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the governor's most important legislative ally, as the battle over a new state comptroller emerged.
I thought at the time, "If he's going to war with Silver before he even takes office, how can he hope to win legislative support for his programs?"
Got that one right!
* I saw and heard Spitzer's nastiness on Inauguration Day, Jan. 1, 2007, when he gratuitously insulted Pataki to his face by comparing his 12 years in office to the 20-year slumber of Rip Van Winkle.
Later that month, I spoke to a stunned Assembly Minority Leader, James Tedisco, who was still recovering from the verbal tongue lashing by the newly self-declared "f- - -ing steamroller."
I thought again, "How can a governor who is battling Silver and declaring himself a steamroller ever hope to get along with what is, under our state Constitution, a co-equal branch of government?"
* In February 2007, I followed Bruno on his Valentine's Day "peace mission" as a 77-year-old Bruno marched down to the Executive Chamber with a bouquet of eight red roses meant as a friendship offering to the still-brand-new governor.
Spitzer greeted him with a gratuitously insulting crack that put the future target of the Dirty Tricks Scandal on notice that the governor was out to kill him politically. "What are these, one for each of your members?" asked the governor, referring to his determination to whittle down Bruno's even-then tenuous Senate majority.
* I certainly remember the repeated claims by Spitzer and his aides that the new governor would rein in the out-of-control influence of special-interest lobbyists that turned Albany under Pataki into a throwback to the days of Boss Tweed.
"He's not going to allow them. He's going to change all that," Spitzer's then-spokesman, Darren Dopp, told me on several occasions.
Now Dopp, after losing his job in the wake of the Dirty Tricks Scandal, works for megalobbyist Patricia Lynch, who just last Friday threw a $1,000-a-ticket breakfast in Manhattan for Spitzer.
To me, that said it all.
Saw him up close once at Carnegie Hall a couple years ago - in center orch, near front, with that clenched jaw (whata' jaw), square shoulders (but thin like all the runners here love), and continually receding hairline ... always hoped he'd do good ... but I guess not. Was always smiling but, I guess, not happy.
The Ivy League is having a tough year. Princeton loves to tease Harvard and Yale , now they have Eliot the great.
??? He did do good. He got after Wall Street and began to crack down on their bullshit.
