HARTMANN Welcome Back, Eric Greitens, You Creep The ex-governor is out of the basement, claiming “total exoneration”
H
e’s back. He’s back. Eric Greitens is back! This is the journalistic equivalent of winning the lottery. Greitens ascending from his basement was as deliciously perverse as President Trump descending that famous escalator. Last week, the most consequential debate in the General Assembly involved an obscure thing
called the “statute of repose.” Now, with any luck, we’ll once again be talking mistresses in repose. Gov. Mike Parson is must-notsee T . With his first celebratory email, Greitens reminded us that state government could be fun again. Greitens fearlessly re-mounted his bicycle of bile so effortlessly you’d never have known it was the same vehicle that his fellow Republicans ran into a ditch two years ago with their Ford F-150. Let us not forget: Greitens was pressured from office not by the liberal media, not by the Democrats, not by Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, but by his own political party, whose members mostly despised him. Greitens resigned May 29, 2018 — little more than a year into his term — under a breathtaking panorama of dark clouds including, but not limited to, Olympian hypocrisy in an extramarital affair, unprecedented corruption of political dark money, obvious
abuse of his own charity’s resources, campaign finance abuses, inaccessibility, lying, bullying and sanctimony. Aside from that, he was just another mediocre Missouri governor. It was the resolution of one of the least-compelling dark clouds — ethics violations — that occasioned Greitens’ triumphant return to the public stage last week. The state ethics commission had acted upon a complaint filed in July 2018 by one of Greitens’ Republican colleagues. It was a split decision. Greitens was found to have committed “no evidence of any wrongdoing.” This prompted our boy to blare out the now-customary Trumpspeak cry of “total exoneration!” which, if you’re old enough to remember last week’s column, translates to “you didn’t catch me.” Yes, Greitens was every bit as “exonerated” as Sen. Josh Hawley was in last week’s episode after a blistering state audit found he misused political operatives to
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turn his attorney general’s office into a campaign headquarters but hadn’t committed a crime. As in Hawley’s case, one needn’t read the fine print to understand the conduct at hand was morally repulsive even if was not criminal. The state ethics commission found Greitens’ campaign guilty of two violations substantial enough to levy an uncommonly large $178,000 in fines on Greitens. (If he forks over cash in the next 45 days, Greitens only has to pay $38,000, owing to politicians’ bipartisan agreement that punishment for their misdeeds should be deeply discounted. The next time you get a speeding ticket for $100, ask the judge if he or she would give you the “politician’s punishment” and settle for a twenty on the spot.) Greitens’ campaign finance violations were a tiny tip of a gigantic iceberg of misconduct. They were akin to charging someone with
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