Spitzer's "Emperor's Club"

Real Clear Politics reports:

Spitzer's "crusading" career as New York's attorney general is a catalog of abuses of prosecutorial power. He tried cases in the media instead of the courts by releasing embarrassing documents at press conferences and leaking carefully selected facts to sympathetic reporters. This is slander under the color of law, an attempt to ruin a target's reputation without actually have to prove the allegations against him. Spitzer smeared his victims by digging into their personal lives and spreading rumors about their infidelity (another disgusting irony of this affair). He blackmailed businesses into paying massive fines by threatening to file corporate indictments that would cripple a firm's ability to operate, even if it were eventually acquitted. He threatened respectable businessmen with the prospect of being hauled off in handcuffs in front of their families.

He did everything he could, in short, to bully the rest of the world into a solicitous state of submission—the state of terrorized subjects groveling before a tyrannical emperor.

A man like this is usually considered to have an ego that is too big, but the opposite is actually true. This kind of bullying is proof that Spitzer was so insecure he needed to prop up his faltering ego by forcing others to cringe in fear before him. His hiring of prostitutes is the dead giveaway, because it adds a touch of the pathetic: he needed the attention and adulation of others so badly that he had to pay for it.