[jmacusa]

Spitzer The Younger roared into office and in his own words called himself a ‘’f**king steamroller’’ bent on ‘’taming Wall Street fat cats’’. While it's 's certainly true that ‘’pride(and arrogance) goeth before the fall’’, irony is often the quiet epitaph. So quiet and ironic, it bellows, if you know what I mean.Spitzer was surely driven by some desire for revenge perhaps in connection with his fathers real estate empire, maybe an enemy of dads needed ''taming'' and sonny boy here was going to have it. If ever someone needed to be hoisted on their own petard it was this little martinet.

[lbryce]

this little martinet.

What a colorfully descriptive word, martinet. I love it.

In English, the term martinet is usually used not in reference to the whip itself, but rather him who would use it, a person who demands strict adherence to set rules, especially such a person in the military. This sense of the word reputedly comes from the name of Jean Martinet, Inspector General of the army of Louis XIV and thus would be etymologically only by accident related to the earlier sense.

In an extended sense, a martinet is any person for whom a strict adherence to rules and etiquette is paramount: martinets often use etiquette and other rules as an excuse to trump ethics, to the point that etiquette loses its ethical ground. The Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was famously described as a "strutting martinet" by Time in 1977.