Domestic Ruling Class Warfare

Like the Kwame Kilpatrick situation, the Elliot Spitzer situation ought to be instructive to folks seeking to understand how politics actually work. THIS public humiliation is a case study in how the ruling class fight each other via proxy.

Vice setups and the like are perfect tools for derailing the continuing political viability of selected managers of public resources and public opinion. (politicians). Spitzer, like Kilpatrick, is a political brand. He as accumulated brand value and in one fell swoop, he has squandered a professional lifetime building the brand.

Most folks look at this kind of thing and just call it vice. Certainly, there is an aspect of that at play here, along with an aspect of technotragic stupidity, and plain old stankass tendencies. The fact of the matter, however, is that it goes much deeper than that.

The demise of Gov. Spitzer is an exemplary case study in the way in which rich folk use the apparatus of state as a private security service (bank/IRS/FBI) as private investigators. Folks have extremely short memories. The Privacy Act and its corollary Freedom of Information Act were initially enacted in response to allegations that the Nixon administration used the IRS as an instrument of harassment for Nixon's political adversaries. Remember all of this as we watch the continuing "political" spectacle playing itself out in the Democrat presidential primaries....,