Watching Eliot Spitzer jaw-jut his way through his new CNN talk show is a morbid, train-wrecky sort of thrill.<\/p>\n
There was a time when great men (and women) who disgraced themselves slouched off into oblivion.\u00a0\u00a0 And disgrace is hardly too strong a word for Spitzer.<\/p>\n
His self-immolation included a ham-handed entanglement with prostitutes, followed by that blood-chilling public moment with his wife, Silda, who looked anesthetized with pain at his side.<\/p>\n
Along the way, Spitzer left the state of New York institutionally crippled at a time when we desperately needed steady leadership.<\/p>\n
In the first weeks after his downfall, it seemed that the former governor might accept a sort of dignified internal exile.\u00a0\u00a0 He was spotted walking his dogs in Central Park.\u00a0 There was talk of a quiet law practice.<\/p>\n
But no.\u00a0 With the great man dead and buried, CNN decided to prop up the zombified remains.<\/p>\n
Powerless and stripped of all moral significance, it appears that Spitzer is still perfectly capable of summoning opinions, invective, and that edgy, unpleasant stare.<\/p>\n
If you were eating dinner with the man, that expression would make you fear he was about to take the food off your plate. Which is probably what his co-host, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Kathleen Parker, is thinking right about now.<\/p>\n
But the truth is that Spitzer isn’t the only political zombie shuffling across the television landscape.<\/p>\n
Fox News is haunted by Karl Roves and Mike Huckabees and Sarah Palins, figures whose scandals, legal entanglements, and political setbacks have left them in kind of mass-culture limbo.<\/p>\n
Obviously, some of these figures hope to prove that a kind of revolving door exists.\u00a0 Their banishment to the TV aether is seen as a way of staying relevant and proving their down-home, guy-or-gal-next-door normalness.<\/p>\n
But I’m skeptical.\u00a0 When now-convicted former Republican whip Tom DeLay went dancing with the stars he unwittingly crossed over for good into the land of the political undead.<\/p>\n
And it’s hardly surprising, in hindsight, that John Edwards’ sex-scandal involved dalliances with a woman who was filming him for a series of “webisodes.”\u00a0\u00a0 One wonders whether he was flirting with his mistress or with the camera.<\/p>\n
In any event, it was, in political terms, a fatal attraction.<\/p>\n
But with his gee-gosh good looks and his TV-friendly grin, it can only be a matter of time before Edwards gets a shot at his own daytime TV show.<\/p>\n
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there were no second acts in American lives.<\/p>\n
Watching Palin’s self-hagiography on the TLC channel, or Spitzer’s irony-free moralizing on CNN, you can’t help but wish it were so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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