Where's the real corruption?

The U.S. Attorney that brought down Elliot Spitzer, who as a public attorney aggressively pursued fraud, managed to ignore the greatest defrauders in history -- but managed to successfully attack someone for a knob-job or two.

Meet Michael Garcia, aka Ken Starr, Jr.:

* leaving his post as U.S. attorney in Manhattan to take up a $3 to 4 million per annum partnership at the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis.

* Garcia’s sudden move to Kirkland & Ellis was engineered by executive committee member Jay Lefkowitz—a high-powered neoconservative who authored President Bush’s stem cell research policy and was once considered to serve as White House chief of staff.

* Former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr also makes his home at Kirkland, and the firm recently hired former U.N. ambassador John Bolton as a “special advisor.”

These are all from the Scott Horton profile of Garcia, but its most compelling issues are in these two paragraphs:

Garcia served as the AWOL “sheriff of Wall Street” during the most serious collapse of financial institutions since the 1929 Depression. A consensus is building that this collapse is largely linked to a failure of regulatory oversight. That oversight should have been provided by Garcia’s office, which historically offers the prosecutorial muscle for the SEC and other regulators. In his 39-month tenure as U.S. Attorney, however, Garcia can claim no high-profile enforcement effort—not one.

Even more curious, however, is his most glittering prize: Eliot Spitzer, a man seen by many as a rising star in Democratic politics who was steadily eroding Republican power in Albany and built a reputation as a Wall Street watchdog. Spitzer got to the New York state house after a precedent-shattering two terms as New York’s attorney general. He used the position to eclipse the traditionally dominant role of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney in regulation of financial institutions, bringing sweeping lawsuits that challenged the barons of Wall Street over abusive practices—notably their habit of selling stocks aggressively to the public, while commenting internally, usually in quite colorful language, that the stocks were a bad bet.

So, Wall Street was saved (in time to be nearly ruined) by the non-harmful perversions of one man who made his reputation watching over them.

The GOP, saving their friends in time to bring down America...while not allowing one to actually "go down".