In the wake of the [well-deserved] fall of Elliot Spitzer, “the fight for a progressive NY goes on”
What made Eliot Spitzer a great Attorney General was his fearlessness in taking on the big money crowd. He believed that everyone was equal before the law, and he was unafraid of the Lords of Wall Street.
He tapped into an unspoken dismay in our society about the obscene inequality that characterizes American life - [...]
We should also keep his resignation in perspective. It’s not earth-shaking, even as it’s a terribly sad time for his family and staff, many of whom are terrific public servants. But we should remember what a real scandal is — for instance, when a President dishonestly launches a pre-emptive war and thousands and thousands of people die as a result. We need to tell the difference between appallingly bad behavior and appallingly bad policies. [...]
We will look to our new Governor, David Paterson, and to progressives in the Assembly and Senate to pick up the ball that Spitzer dropped. It means being both pragmatic and visionary. We need to fight for paid family leave and publicly financed elections, for preserving affordable housing and for a foreclosure moratorium, for subsidy reform to save taxpayer money and for green jobs/clean energy policies to save the planet, for reducing taxes on working families while asking the wealthy to pay their fair share, for adequate investment in education and health care and transportation.
Fundamentally, we still want our state to be a place where one’s life chances are not determined at birth.
(emphasis in the original)
As a mom who successfully navigated the treacherous shoals of raising teenagers, I learned early on that getting into arguments about a teen’s wishful thinking (“mom, why can’t I have that tank top and jeans? $150 is too much? Just write a check for it!”) never reached them realistically. TANSTAAFL wasn’t in their vocabulary. What I did was engage in a “teachable moment” — give the girls a reasonable budget amount of cash for back-to-school shopping then dropped them at the mega-mall in the morning and told them to call me when they were done. They knew what they had was it. Nothing “extra” coming before Christmas no matter the whine factor.
Amazing how quickly they learned to be savvy shoppers and inventive-kid entrepenuers for extra cash. And the arguments that really amounted to accusations about how “unfair” I was because I didn’t fulfill everything on their wishlist (“you have money, we don’t!”) faded into old family history.
What I see in “progressives” is family lessons never learned.
They should, like, grow up.
Comment by J. Peden on 3/15 @ 2:02 pm #
unspoken dismay
Propagandized dismay would be more like it. What have the author’s cultists ever done about anyone’s actual dismay, other than to gratify their monkey-brains by proving to each other that they are oso empathetic sensitives, while blaming everyone who is not in their Cult for any dismay whatsoever, including their own dismay for being forced to have been born?
Why don’t they just form an official Church and get it over with? What, no contributions forthcoming?
Comment by Christopher Taylor on 3/15 @ 2:02 pm #
Yeah well… they have to try to make it seem like he was a betrayer of the cause, not an exemplar of it.
Comment by Jimmie on 3/15 @ 2:06 pm #
Just goes to show you that progressives loves them some authority as long as it’s aimed at targets they like. It’s why fascism is such a smash hit.
Comment by Jeffersonian on 3/15 @ 2:06 pm #
Apotheosis of a thug. What did you expect from the herd that has spend the last 60 years lapping at the saltlicks of every totalitarian that managed to shoot his way to power?
Comment by lee on 3/15 @ 2:52 pm #
What I see in “progressives†is family lessons never learned.
They should, like, grow up.
I’m afraid the problem is family lessons just aren’t taught.
Comment by DWB on 3/15 @ 3:21 pm #
Wasn’t Spitzer from an elite family? Didn’t he go to an elite school? Didn’t he live in an apartment that was a luxury of his family history?
Is this an example of birth based obscene inequalities?
Something tells me little Elliot didn’t have a paper route as a kid…. I learned some pretty good lessons about life on mine.
Comment by happyfeet on 3/15 @ 3:36 pm #
I just can’t see how having a paper route isn’t being really a lot a part of the problem. Least in my lifetime.
Comment by maggie katzen on 3/15 @ 3:39 pm #
PAPERIST!!!!
Comment by happyfeet on 3/15 @ 3:42 pm #
Can I haz cupcake? Happy Birthday you!
Comment by maggie katzen on 3/15 @ 4:45 pm #
um, you’ll have to beat my brother in law to my house to feed the animals, happyfeet. and thanks.
Comment by The Sanity Inspector on 3/15 @ 5:20 pm #
Wall Street white-collar criminals should be prosecuted because they are white collar criminals, not because the prosecutor is fulfilling liberals’ marxoid Robin Hood fantasies.
Comment by B Moe on 3/15 @ 6:24 pm #
…liberals’ marxoid Robin Hood fantasies.
Which always seem to get wrong that Robin Hood was stealing tax money from the Sheriff, who was the tax collector, to give said tax money back to the people it was stolen from initially. Robin Hood wasn’t into wealth redistribution, he was a tax reformer.
Comment by Big Bang Hunter (pumping you up) on 3/15 @ 6:30 pm #
- Proggs remind one of the accident of birth everytime they open their mouths. Its as if their mental growth was stunted so they’ll never be able to see over the lunch counter of life.
- I’m going to take a wild guess here, and assume when a SecProg uses the term “accident of birth”, they mean somehow the kid escaped abortion.
- Spitzer does believe everyone is equal under the law, just not himself.
- Spitzers family is worth a half billion with a “B”. I guess if you’re going to pick a Robin hood, you might as well choose a hood that knows a lot about robin.
- Seems to me if you’ve a SecProg whos been able to successfully run the baby murder gauntlet and achieve birth, you should already consider yourself Uber lucky.
Comment by Merovign on 3/16 @ 7:23 pm #
Why should that be any less backwards than the rest of their economic program?
Evan Sayet got it right again – it’s literally an inverse view of reality, kind of like watching the news in “moral film negative”.
Comment by daleyrocks on 3/16 @ 8:08 pm #
Seems to me if they had lower tax rates, Robin Hood wouldn’t have had to do what he did. Supply side economics, catch the fever!
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