Five ways Elliot Spitzer is not Anthony Weiner

The punditocracy is trying to convince us that the implosion of the Weiner campaign seeps automatically over to Elliot Spitzer’s. It might, but they aren’t the same guys by a mile. Here’s why:

1. Spitzer doesn’t lie.

Well, unless you count not telling his wife about the top-dollar prostitutes, which is admittedly not a minor point. However, once the facts were out, Spitzer swallowed the medicine, copped and quit. He did not spend $45,000 of his campaign funds to pretend to be investigating how someone who looks just like him could possibly be stealing his identity to bang hookers. Weiner, by contrast, who compounded his original goofball act by trying to cover it up and then, incredibly, went out and did it all again, is an order of magnitude more deceitful.

2. Spitzer is not trying to push the reset button and go back to where he left off.

Spitzer is aiming for a technocratic gig and conceivably could stay there for years digging around in pension investment contracts and keeping the expert looters away from our hard-earned retirement money. He could also snoop around city spending and keep those guys from carrying out the sorts of egregious scams that have occurred under Bloomberg—the supposed finance expert. Meanwhile, Weiner is trying to get back on the big stage. He was always much cleverer at the sound bite than at legislative achievement, and he needs the limelight to be effective—Spitzer doesn’t.

3. Spitzer may actually be remorseful.

This is tricky because one cannot ‘see into the hearts of men’, as Werner Herzog would say. And sincerity generally should not be admitted as a political category—who cares if our public figures believe what they’re saying? That’s not the point. But in this case, of personal failings that bring the mighty down low, it’s fair to ask whether lessons have been learned or not. In Weiner’s case the negative answer is so painfully obvious that he has ‘turned shamelessness into performance art’ (Maureen Dowd). Spitzer, on the other hand, shakes his head at himself and knows he can only aspire to a modest role toiling in the corners of the system that he once towered above. One catches in him a glimpse of humility, a rare coin in this realm.

4. Spitzer has the right enemies and a lot of them.

Weiner has plenty of people trying to shoo him away, but not because he’s any particular threat to their interests. He’s just a distraction and a laughingstock, but had he not self-immolated, he would be pulling in chits and racking up endorsements and campaign cash from all sorts of dubious types. He’s a crafty political operator who had a saleable product, which was going to be available to the highest bidder(s). But the mere idea of Spitzer in the Comptroller’s job is giving bankers, hedge fund runners and union chiefs sphincter spasms. They’re writing massive checks to get teddy-bear Scott Stringer elected instead. If it were Weiner, they wouldn’t give a shit because they’d know his stint would be business as usual until he could get a new shot at something more glamorous. But it’s impressive how Stringer rolls up the endorsements steadily from all sorts of people across the political spectrum. In part, it’s because he’s a decent enough guy, but it also suggests that Spitzer is scaring the boots off people.

Yves Smith had another densely argued technical piece this week on how pension funds are scammed by hedge funds and their law firms. She knows about this stuff from her gigs at Mackenzie and Mitsubishi, and her columns lately have provided Spitzer with a detailed road map of how to cost these professional crooks mucho cash in a short time. Stringer, by contrast, has neither the chops nor the skills to worry these types even if he had the will. His latest announcement that he would go after welfare cheats taking advantage of Hurricane Sandy relief money is not reassuring—crimes by inept hucksters are the type of low-hanging fruit that the big crooks are more than happy to support.

5. Spitzer is on his own.

This is really just a reiteration of #4, but it’s also worth remembering that Spitzer is now completely outside the Democratic Party structure, a fact pounded home daily as those still inside it line up against him. If he wins, he will owe nothing to anybody and have no reason to think he can go any further in the face of universal hostility and resistance. The only reason he has a shot now is that his entry into the race was such a huge surprise that the party apparatus could barely mobilize in time to block him. That isn’t likely to happen again. In short, Spitzer could set up shop and prepare for a very long tenure making the political establishment uncomfortable, and that, fellow citizens, should gladden our heavy hearts.

Why we need Spitzer

Here’s a good reason to ignore perfectly nice Scott Stringer in the contest to become New York City Comptroller, a sort of inspector general office: Stringer has just announced that he will create, if elected a ‘Sandy Tracker’, some sort of entity that will expose fraudulent use of federal hurricane aid dollars.

Fair enough, Scotty boy, we need to make sure no one scams FEMA out of a few thousand. But the Comptroller’s office oversees billions in city pension funds. I notice you’re not setting your sights on the vast fee-scamming practiced by Wall Street that extracts cash from hard-working average citizens. No wonder the Democratic establishment is desperately trying to make sure you win and Eliot Spitzer doesn’t. They’ll be delighted to watch you haul in a few losers while the real hustlers in private equity chuckle in their yachts.

Egyptian military opens fire on crowd

The anti-Morsi demonstrators who poured into the streets a few weeks ago chanting, ‘The army and the people are one hand’ might be suffering a few pangs of guilt now that the Egyptian people’s army has staged a deliberate massacre—as well they should be. It was their political cover that gave and continues to give the generals permission to slaughter Muslim Brotherhood supporters in the streets and to drum up charges against the imprisoned former president. Post hoc criticism of military ‘excesses’ doesn’t change that.

Morsi gravely miscalculated the meaning and significance of his narrow electoral support. He mistook numbers for power and thought that the ‘legitimacy’ provided by the polls would trump all resistance. Perhaps there’s some peculiar logic in a party so single-minded about the role of a supernatural being in people’s affairs maintaining to the bitter end such blind faith in the mystical power of a vote despite the country’s revolutionary upheavals.

It’s now pretty clear that the success of the anti-Morsi demonstrations had a lot to do with clever work by influential remnants of the Mubarak regime, wealthy businessmen and the deeply MB-phobic security forces. One doesn’t have to fancy religious fundamentalism to regret that the reactionaries who benefited from the Mubarak dictatorship now have the upper hand.

The revolutionary youth and unions that toppled the dictatorship two years ago now see the fruits of their sacrifices being reaped by the generals and their rich allies. Perhaps they regret cheering so loudly when the military issued an ultimatum to Morsi, an elected, albeit autocratic, president and then promptly arrested him. If a president more to the liberals’ liking comes to power one day, what’s to prevent the army from bouncing him out, too? Egypt could start to look like Pakistan or imitate the old patterns of Turkey or, for that matter, Latin America where militaries long formed a shadow state.

Muhammed El-Baradei and the other civilians who rushed to the generals’ side after their coup to offer to replace the guy they couldn’t beat in the voting now look like accomplices to mass murder. The Coptic Pope might be rethinking his eager post-coup backslapping as well, given the possibility that resentful fundamentalist Muslims will consider Egypt’s Christians—10% of the population—even more worthy of reprisals.

It’s encouraging that some of the democratic organizations like the April 6 Movement are distancing themselves from practices like the army’s deployment of snipers to assassinate Egyptians expressing their political beliefs. Given the descent of Syria into a nightmarish state of permanent war and trouble in neighboring Libya and Tunisia, the Arab Spring is desperately in need of some good news.

Weiner not right in the head

Never could figure out why people are so enamored of Anthony Weiner in the first place, but the latest episode of compulsive behavior should put a dent in his unquenchable ambitions. Not that people’s sexual behavior should be of particular interest to voters—after all, Mayor Koch successfully protected his personal closet throughout his three terms and later life despite his habit of throwing his undies in the faces of guys he had just met (including one of my former bosses).

But Weiner demonstrably has a screw loose to have thought nothing of sending more racy photos by phone to his female conquests AFTER making himself a national laughingstock the first time. You have to wonder about the long-suffering wife pitching in to save his sorry ass instead of saying, Let’s go home.

My own objection to Weiner is not his randy sex life—perish the thought—but his opportunistic and unfortunately very skillful usage of every hot-button issue that pops up. The guy is a non-stop PR machine, deploying techniques learned at the knee of sleazebag Charles Schumer, but there’s nothing behind it except personal ambition. In fact, Weiner is a virtual reincarnation of Koch—aggressive and mean-spirited, but also wise-cracking and just entertaining enough to make New Yorkers laugh and give him a pass.

If Weiner had been born in Alabama, he’d be a starlet on the Tea Party circuit denouncing taxes and gun control. He has a lot of psychic energy, and now we can see once again—in case we missed it the first time—that it comes from being cuckoo. It’ll be good to see him back out of the mayor’s race or get beaten at the polls, but we can also count on him to pop up again for a new electoral cycle after the latest mess dies down—the man can’t help himself.

Birds of a feather

There are two nominations being discussed now for important posts in the Obama Administration. For a supposedly smart guy, it’s hard to imagine how on earth he could want two utter incompetents to join him in what must be a lonely second term. But such is the perverse logic of our current political culture that Lawrence Sommers, a failed gambler, and Ray Kelly, a racist asshole, should be angling for top jobs.

Let’s start with the execreable Sommers, who is most famous for saying that women aren’t very good at math and science (now being discussed as a possible replacement for Bernanke at the Federal Reserve). This surreal statement wasn’t enough to send him packing to a remote mountain cave for life, but as this post by Yves Smith details at length, there were many previous reasons to dislike the guy especially for his colleagues at Harvard University, where he was president.

Sommers ignored all expert advice on investing the multi-billion-dollar Harvard endowment by people with a proven track record and insisted on getting his mitts on the dough directly. He proceeded to blow through $2 billion of it before being bounced, providing many juicy commissions for his Wall Street buddies. Obama then rewarded him with an influential position in Washington. This should tell us something important about Obama, but remarkably few people have got the message.

Kelly is our police chief here in New York, responsible for the radical criminalization of all black and Hispanic males, especially those roughly around Trayvon Martin’s age. He persecutes dissidents, bullies the elected politicians and generally acts like the head enforcer for an East European politburo. The Murdoch press loves him and is promoting him to be the next head of Homeland Security. Here are all the reasons why that should not happen.

Obama may not appoint either of these goons, but he hasn’t dismissed the idea—quite contrary. If he and his gang feared popular disgust as they briefly did during the Occupy heyday, they wouldn’t dare.

I’m too weary to argue with people who think the problem facing our nation is the bad old Republicans, who admittedly are losing their few remaining marbles by the minute. That’s true enough, and yes, they represent domestic fascism in the bud. But with these two corrupt and loathsome elements representing the alternative, anyone still thinking the Democrats offer some sort of credible answer is almost equally cuckoo.

Rule[r]s of law

And speaking of legality, the government line on NSA-depantser Edward Snowden, repeated ad nauseam from all available parapets, is that he has been charged with crimes and should come ‘home’ to respond. This sounds ever so reasonable fair because, after all, we have rules, right? He broke them, right? So all nations near and far should do the decent thing and cooperate with our legal system by making him come face judicial proceedings with full guarantees, etc., etc.

The soothing tone does not mean, however, that there is any policy consistency behind it any more than Florida’s ‘stand your ground’ law is color-blind. Consider the exactly contemporaneous case of ex-CIA station chief in Milan, Italy, Robert Lady, who has been convicted in an Italian court of kidnapping. And not just any kidnapping. Lady, according to the uncontested trial results (he flew the coup and so was tried in abstentia), led a team leading led a team of two dozen criminals in the pay of the U.S. government who in 2003 snatched an Egyptian citizen off the streets and shipped him to Egypt where he was summarily tortured. This was done in gross violation of the right to asylum for political persecution (by Hillary’s great friend Hosni Mubarak). The U.S. refused to do anything to facilitate the trial, and the agents remain at large.

Lady has been hiding out in Panama and was arrested there a few days ago. But instead of insisting on the sacred rule of law in this case, the U.S. government put pressure on that tiny country, which promptly buckled and handed Lady back to the Americans. So much for the safety of political exiles enjoying legal residence in a NATO country.

So keep that case in mind when you hear all the Obama-Kool-aid-drinking liberals whine about how Snowden broke his secrecy agreement and, mercy me, we can’t just be going around letting people do illegal things, now can we? After all, we might then have assassins, kidnappers and torturers running loose everywhere.

Our litigious, unfair, world

At the same time that the state acts in increasingly lawless and arbitrary ways in its treatment of us, its citizens, we seem addicted to resolving everything through lawyers and courts. As the nightmarish Trayvon Martin case sadly illustrates, legality is not the same as justice, and as we pile ever more sensitivity to laws (and especially lawsuits) into our daily existence, the idea of fairness that should backstop all this lawyering and judging threatens to disappear.

There is a billboard near my domicile that I see regularly on the elevated No. 1 subway line that reads: “INJURED? YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A LARGE CASH REWARD”. It is accompanied by the smiling faces of two lawyers who from their happy visages must be enjoying a booming business.

The only thing left out of that message is the word, “GREAT!” There is something amiss when illness or harm is a thing to be celebrated, but tort lawyers now drill the idea into all of us that any misfortune can and should be monetized. This is perverse. Not only does this instant ambulance chasing add no value to our collective well-being, it blocks any possibility of learning from the normal course of human error.

I saw an example of this recently involving the case of a patient who sought PEP at a local hospital emergency room. PEP stands for ‘post-exposure prophylaxsis’, i.e., the HIV treatment that when taken immediately after a dangerous event can block the establishment of HIV infection. It has been used for years in hospital settings to treat needlestick injuries involving infected blood. When administered promptly, PEP can mean the difference between a life-long medical condition and a harmless scare.

It can also be used after an episode of risky sex, and there is a protocol in place to offer it in emergency rooms throughout the city. The kid who sought it, an out-of-town visitor, had reason to fear infection and asked a hospital ER for it. But he unfortunately ran into at least two nurses who had never heard of it. External intervention turned the situation around, and the patient finally got the treatment after insisting, but a less assertive or connected visitor would not have. A messy brouhaha ensued, and ACT UP, which has resuscitated itself as an advocacy and monitoring organization, staged a protest action last week.

In a sane world involving a mature organization, this sort of miscue would lead to proper soul-searching, review of procedures and a search for performance improvement. Instead, the hospital involved curled itself up like an institutional porcupine, refused to admit any of the facts, emitted PR spin worthy of a politician in a whorehouse, in at least one case blatantly lied, and exploited the patient’s gratitude for the service he eventually did obtain with tendentious quotes from his thank-you email.

None of which made sense to me until I thought about the hospital’s immediate fear of a lawsuit. Nothing would prevent the patient, were he to find himself HIV-positive anyway, from bringing an action accusing the hospital of responsibility due to the PEP delay. Instead of a search for the truth, the hospital immediately retreated to the lawyerly position based on the overriding principle of ADMIT NOTHING.

Civil suits should be extreme measures that we resort to when harm has occurred through negligence and with two goals in mind: to prevent further misconduct and to compensate the injured party. Our current system does neither of these things well and in the process undermines the opportunity to learn from honest human mistakes. If we were protected by a more benign safety net and could rely on the government to care for us in time of medical or other needs, there would be less urgent chasing after vulnerable institutions by passles of guys in suits. And there might be more creative energy devoted to making things work better instead of pretending that nothing ever goes wrong.