Did Eliot Spitzer Have to Go Down?

Personal sordid sex scandals have never really held incredible interest for me. While I am an advocate for integrity and honesty and believe that how we live our lives matters, we all have personal failures and at any time we may need to ask forgiveness from our loved ones and the community at large.

For this reason, I was not particularly interested in the Spitzer prostitution scandal. His undoing was personal and did not include impropriety as the Governor of New York. What I hoped for then and now is for Eliot Spitzer and family to be made whole as they work through a most difficult time. It's been a year and they seem to be healing. Let's hope so.

Now, what does have incredible interest for me is Spitzer's appearance on "Fareed Zakaria GPS" this afternoon. During the interview I was particularly struck by the comment that the red herring is the AIG bonuses. Spitzer sees it as a scheme to refocus us from the "12.9 billion dollars" paid to Goldman Sachs, the same company where President Bush's Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, was CEO. The $168 billion dollar bailout to AIG was given and Lehmann Brothers was allowed to fail. If AIG failed the likes of Barclays in the UK would not have gotten their billions of taxpayer dollars either.

Timothy Geithner, as the former President of the New York Federal Reserve, is also under a cloud of suspicion. Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Noureil Roubini assert that those who were a part of the financial crisis, Geithner et al, could not possibly now manage it. Taleb, Roubini, and Huffington have all said that the same people who got us in this mess cannot get us out of it. It's not looking good. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but is it coincidental that the sex scandal with Spitzer came out at such an opportune time?