And This On David Paterson Too

At 12:15 a.m., while of course we were all recovering from the strange drama of Olympic figure skating, we received an email from a reader: “The second NYT Paterson story brings it.” At 12:45 a.m., we received an email from another reader: “I haven’t read the whole thing, but it seems even more boring and inconsequential than the last one.” For a story had gone up online at the New York Times, written by the same people who had written the story earlier this week about David Paterson’s work friends

. This new story was strange! No one quite knew what to make of it. There was some very real, inexplicable strangeness, like how Paterson spent “long stretches in the Hamptons, relaxing with friends and mingling with wealthy donors and celebrities.” Bizarre. If you’re not, say, Eliot Spitzer, whose father collects a million dollars in rental income each year and who gave Spitzer his own Fifth Avenue apartment, one must do some hobnobbing with rich people, it would seem obvious. And! They assess his expenses. “There is a $304 tab at Le Cirque in Manhattan.” Well. You try and get out of Le Cirque for three hundred bucks. Who’s writing this, the Peoria Daily Scold? The only good news is that, at the end of the story, comes some tick-tock on the revolt in Paterson’s D.C. office, where his ex-girlfriend was installed and considered, by the staff there, not worthy. She is still employed there and those objectors, they are not.