More Cover to the guy who leaves his socks on -Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

Every few years we are treated to total film fantasy that cover over the true story that alter the history of the entire reality of what actually happened. Why? To promote political propaganda of an extreme leftist point of view.

Past instances of these film fantasies include obvious phonies as JFK that should have the name's of the characters changed to protect the viewers. Most thoughtful people with a basic foundation of cultural literacy understand that this was just another of Oliver Stone's screeds against America. Oliver Stone was a great and compelling screenwriter, but his mindset is fallacious. It has left the uninformed and young who see his films, as JFK, filled with fiction based on "Jim" Garrison's delusional theories., and go away thinking they have seen history.

Another outlandish example of a fantasy film passing itself off as fact was Erin Brockovich.

Excerpts-
The American Spectator : Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

By James Bowman on 11.19.10

Alex Gibney's Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer begins with a portentous saying about how mankind occupies the middle ground between angel and animal. This is the movie's way of suggesting that its subject, the disgraced former governor of New York who got caught patronizing a high-priced "escort" agency, was, or is, a little of both himself. This, of course, meshes nicely with Mr. Spitzer's own rather comical self-importance in speaking of his downfall as "a Greek tragedy" and comparing himself to Icarus who, flying too near the sun, was brought down by "hubris." This might have sounded a bit better coming from someone else, but not a lot. Either way, the hyperbole is a smoke-screen of attempted human interest to mask an underlying political purpose: namely, the rehabilitation of Mr. Spitzer, who is now co-hosting a talk-show on CNN with Kathleen Parker, by casting him as the victim of a conspiracy to effect his ruin by Wall Street fat cats and Republican dirty tricksters.

In this it is also like Mr. Gibney's telling us the story of how, as a boy, little Eliot would play Monopoly with his property developer father and cry when the old man bankrupted him. So that's why Attorney General and later Governor Spitzer was such a hard-ass. Perhaps, too, that's why he felt he had to go looking for love in strange places -- and away from home. No wonder, then, if he told one of his Wall Street targets that "You and I are at war… I will destroy you" -- "I hope I didn't say that" he says with a laugh to the camera -- and that his subordinates in the attorney general's office used to say that the boss's evil twin "Irwin" had reported for work that day when he was in one of his especially hard-charging phases. All these things are hinted at, rather than made explicit in Client 9, but its psychologizing is still meant to convey the illusion of understanding and so make us forget how little need there is, except politically, to make such a production out of accounting for some pretty commonplace vices and character flaws.

But the purpose behind the documentary is also to make the story it has to tell a heroic as well as a tragic one: the story of a good man, once known as "the Sheriff of Wall Street," who just might -- as it is hinted more than once by the film and not denied by Mr. Spitzer -- have saved us all from the financial catastrophe that followed his departure from the governor's mansion in disgrace by only six months. Mr. Gibney relies on the fact that, since then, it has presumably become much easier to believe in the angelic part of Mr. Spitzer's career, not apparent to everyone who had dealings with him at the time, and in the retrospective justification for his legal assault on those too-highly-paid Wall Street types, especially Maurice "Hank" Greenberg of A.I.G., who have come to seem well-deserving of his attentions.

Yet what if Eliot Spitzer was neither angel nor animal but just a flawed human being? Obviously, it would make a less compelling story that way, but it would also rob it of what every political documentary needs-- and what documentary is not political these days? -- namely, a satisfyingly lurid set of villains. Presumably they are midway between devils and animals. So we shift back and forth between these men -- in particular Mr. Greenberg, Ken Langone, and Joe Bruno all of whom speak of him (as it were) between gritted teeth and so are supposed to damn themselves out of their own mouths -- and what the film can hardly fail to point to as the sleazier side of Mr. Spitzer's life as patron of high-priced prostitutes. "I'd like to think I'm not a vindictive person. And a basic tenet of my faith is forgiveness," says Mr. Langone. "The most harm that Eliot Spitzer's done to me is I'm defying my faith. I can't forgive him. I should, but I can't."

What inspired Mr. Langone's unforgiving wrath was Mr. Spitzer's pursuit, as attorney general, of New York Stock Exchange chairman Dick Grasso back in 2004 for making more money than he thought him entitled to. Mr. Langone, the founder of Home Depot, was chairman of the Exchange's compensation committee at the time and so also was one of Mr. Spitzer's targets. Mr. Gibney suggests without making the allegation directly that Mr. Langone had his nemesis under surveillance and must have been the one that tipped off the Feds about his hooker habit. They, in their turn, are thought to have been working under the political direction of the Bush administration's Justice Department in bringing a prosecution against the escort agency, the Emperor's Club, only for the sake of leaking to the press the identity of Client 9 -- then-Governor Spitzer. The bad guys also include Roger Stone, a bizarre figure on the fringes of Republican politics who is assumed to have had a hand in Spitzer's downfall and himself lends credence to the allegation by speaking confidingly to Mr. Gibney's camera as a man who knows more than he cares to say.... (cinyinues at link)