Dirty, Dirty

by digby

I’m not crazy about Ed Shultz, so I can’t say I’m thrilled that he will be taking Shuster’s place on MSNBC. The Limbaugh style, no matter what is actually being said, just doesn’t work for me. However, while I appreciate the fact that Shuster is a good journalist and very popular among liberals these days, he has a bitchy tabloid streak that I won’t be sorry to see him leave behind if he goes back to straight reporting.

Here’s an example from today’s Hardball. (Shuster is subbing for Matthews.) After yukking it up over the teen-age sex lives of Levi and Bristol for the thousandth time, he came out with this:

Now we move on to another tabloid staple — Eliot Spitzer! He been making the rounds. The former governor is hoping to emerge as a Wall Street expert in the financial crisis. The problem is, he’s having to answer about the prostitute scandal that forced him out of office.

On the Today show this morning, Matt Lauer pressed Spitzer on just how long he’d been frequenting high priced prostitutes.

Lauer: I just wonder if you could give me some ballpark of how long this went on and how frequently it went on?

Spitzer: Not frequently, not long in the grand context of my life. It was an egregious violation of behavior that I fell into, for many reasons, but none of them an excuse or justifiable.

[end video]

Shuster: You FELL INTO IT!?? Like falling into a trap or a pothole! Governor, you paid four thousand dollars for that activity. Per hour! You chose to spend it that way! You didn’t just .. fall into it.

I think we know what Spitzer meant by “fall into it,” but Shuster just wanted an excuse to talk about Spitzer’s zipper so he reached hard for some reason to show it. It was not his finest moment.

More importantly, it’s disgusting that Spitzer “has to” answer questions about his sex life at this point. They didn’t file any charges, he’s resigned from office and I don’t think the public really gives a damn. Certainly, they could acknowledge the scandal and then move on rather than insisting on grilling him about the details. It is gratuitous and embarrassing to everyone watching as well as the man himself. But it is typical juvenile media behavior, replete with the usual nauseating spectacle of middle aged men giggling over some other man’s sexual foibles. Ugh.

Eliot Spitzer is an expert on the financial crisis and he shouldn’t have to subject himself to the media’s puerile curiosity in order to share that expertise with the public. In a sane world, he would be working in an official capacity to straighten out this mess, but because he had unsanctioned sex he is now relegated to the sidelines — mostly because the press can’t seem to stop acting like a bunch of Jonas Brothers fangirls whenever a story makes them feel funny down there.