Pearls before swine

Elliot Spitzer, Governor of New York, has been identified as Client 9 in federal court papers concerning a wiretap in which he was caught arranging to meet a prostitute at a Washington, DC hotel on the evening of February 13 last month. Spitzer made his name rooting out corruption on Wall Street as New York’s Attorney General. This has got to be heart-breaking and a bit embarrassing for the legions of high-priced lawyers and private investigators dispatched to dig up dirt on Mr. Spitzer during those years. No word yet on whether he was back home for Valentine’s Day on February 14. His wife did appear with him at the press conference today in Albany where he admitted his involvement. She was sporting a very nice double string of pearls. I’m guessing those are new.

This could be important to the Presidential race, as Spitzer had pledged his super-delegate vote to Hillary Clinton. If Spitzer is forced to resign, he might also lose his super-delegate status, and the race is close enough that one delegate might make the difference. Can you imagine that Hillary might lose the nomination because of one man getting caught with his pants down?

When our correspondent in Ohio reported that Karl Rove had gotten heckled at Iowa State, I had to check it out. It turns out that Karl Rove appeared Sunday at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. (Iowa State University is a different school located 138 miles further west, not that our correspondent in Ohio should be expected to know that.) I did find some video on the event and some interesting quotes reported by The Daily Iowan and Iowa Independent:

Journalism professor Frank Durham asked a line of questions about the war in Iraq, suggesting "Bush has made 935 false statements about the security of Iraq." Rove interrupted, "These are left-wing think tanks underwritten by George Soros. Every bit of intelligence in the West confirmed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction because he wanted us to believe that he had them." Rove said Iraq "had nothing to do with 9/11.” “What it had to do was change the circumstances in the 20th century of transatlantic terrorism." Rove attacked the credibility of Ambassador Joe Wilson, calling him a liar and said he misled the American people in his New York Times op-ed piece.

Meanwhile, even further west in Iowa, Congressman Steve King has stirred some controversy with his remarks that “the radical Islamists, the al-Qa'ida and the radical Islamists and their supporters will be dancing in the streets” if Barack Obama is elected President. “His middle name does matter. It matters because they read a meaning into that, the rest of the world -- it has a special meaning to them. They’ll be dancing in the streets because of his middle name. They’ll be dancing in the streets because of who his father was and because of his posture that says, ‘Pull out of the middle east. Pull out of this conflict.’” Congressman King says calls to his Western Iowa office have been about 60 percent positive and 40 percent negative.