A)  Spitzer was years ahead of anyone else in seeing the dangerous lawlessness of Wall Street, and despite being torpedoed in a very suspicious manner by an extraordinarily excessive Bush-led FBI right before the whole thing hit an iceberg, the former Governor and Attorney General of New York has a lot of important things to say about the financial crisis that has brought the country to its knees, and possibly some pretty interesting insights about who the chief culprits are, and what might be done now.

Or,

B)  Well, Spitzer was soooo smokin’ hot until this whole hooker thing came along, and then, wham, he was, like, so embarrassed to walk his dog and stuff on the upper east side, you know, ’cause it’s a lot like the Village where you just see everybody, but he’s about halfway through the publicist rehab thing, and even though he’s way getting bald, his wife forgives him, and he jogs, and now he even takes the purse dog out too, since he’s not so embarrassed as he used to be.  He still goes to restaurants off hours, though, even with Ed Koch, and he totally wouldn’t answer when I asked if he’s had therapy.

Alert Hag readers familiar with that and other fine publications will naturally suspect (B), of course, and be, rather discouragingly, right.  Minutiae like AIG, Joseph Bruno, Charles Grasso, and others are mentioned in passing as minor, nemesis-like characters in the larger, more revealing drama of hookers and dog-walking, retribution and redemption, the macho wheaten terrier vs. the sissy bichon frise’, sitting in the backs of restaurants, and strictly enforced self-flagellation, performed solely as theatre, of course, for the benefit of the media.  This timely and crucial progress report helpfully informs the eager reader that a chastened Eliot is doing a pretty good job, but it’s not done.  The end.

Page after excruciating page of cinematic, touchy-feely tripe about his childhood, family, daughters, etc, nothing about anything worthwhile.  Nothing.  I mean, honestly, Darman could have at least shoe-horned in a pertinent fact by calculating how many hookers the AIG bailout could have bought, perhaps with a graph of little hookers, represented by that mudflap icon, stretching up one side of the page.  Nope,  Too boring and math-y.  Has Maureen Dowd dipped into her plastic surgery fund to endow a Journalism School somewhere?  It certainly looks that way, especially in HDTV, and on the pages of Newsweek.

I wish it were still astonishing, rather than just more of the same, to encounter such prurient, gossipy nonsense, even as the economy crumbles due in no small part to miscreants with whom Spitzer was uniquely familiar, plopping out of the rear end of another MSM dead-ender.

Six pages, and so many dead trees, that we’ll never get back.