Slipping on Blood

According to an extensive report in The New York Times, the state’s new governor, the redoubtable Elliot Spitzer, once attorney general of the Empire state, has slipped on blood.

Evidentially, carrying into his new office some of the bad habits he so carefully cultivated as New York’s attorney general – some dare call him Caligula – Spitzer planted a story in an upstate newspaper that was designed to discredit his chief foe in the state’s legislature, State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.

Problem was the information leaked to the paper was rancid, and not entirely true. Newspapers generally resent being manipulated in this way and, even as I write, it may be supposed that several managing editors of various newspapers are knotting the rope they will use to hang Spitzer.

The poor fellow probably lapsed for a moment into his discarded skin as attorney general and thought he was dealing not with a powerful legislator but rather with some small time businessman who had run afoul of one of many of the city’s punishing regulations; in the normal course of doing business as attorney general, Spitzer would have bullied the miscreant in print and then arranged privately for the usual shakedown.

These methods did not work on Bruno.

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