Archives for 2008

I stand by my earlier assessments- to hell with Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer was a guy who used his office to essentially blackmail people to keep from being indicted, who used all sorts of hardball tactics to destroy people, and who seemed to relish it. he was a self-righteous crusader who used his office as a cudgel, bludgeoning people and ruining their reputations.

And he enjoyed it. So while I share Tim’s earlier concerns about what started this prosecution (and we will see how the Siegalman/Roger Stone angle plays out), and I think we live in a pretty screwed up country that a couple thousand dollars in transactions made by a multi-millionaire is all that is needed to start a huge investigation, I really have a hard time mustering any sympathy. If the shoe were on the other foot, Spitzer would be holding a press conference trying to destroy Client #9. Some of you may think of him as a reformer because you liked his results, I look at him as part of the problem.

Regardless, it is depressing to the nth order that Spitzer is going to go down for getting his rocks off with an escort, but this disaster hasn’t cost anyone so much as a cut in pay:

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East , U.S. officials told McClatchy . However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a “direct operational link” between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn’t due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday.

President Bush and his aides used Saddam’s alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001 , terrorist attacks.

Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had “bulletproof” evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam’s secular dictatorship.

Again, I am not letting Spitzer off the hook for being an abusive prosecutor and a first-class hypocrite (and I am so sick and tired of these assholes dragging their poor wives onto the podium after they get busted). Eliot Spitzer is losing his job, Bush is still in office and Don Rumsfeld is probably scheduling a book tour.

To me, that is criminal.

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