If someone had asserted a week ago at this writing - early AM Monday - that within a week, Eliot Spitzer's career and Bear Stearns would both spectacularly implode, the most likely response would have been derision.

And yet here we are, with Bear being essentially nationalized - the Fed is taking over that firm's assets as collateral for a thirty billion dollar loan guarantee - and Eliot Spitzer officially handing over the reins to his lieutenant governor at noon today.

The Sheriff of Wall Street went down at the same time as Wall Street itself. How ironic. Per the New York Times, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers may be next down the rabbit hole.

At the bottom of that hole sits the same culprit in both cases: the Bush administration. Any serious look at the investigation into Eliot Spitzer has to come to the conclusion that the Bush Department of Justice was aiming for a hit. And that's what they got, signed, sealed and delivered courtesy of Alberto Gonzales. Any why Spitzer? Because he was the lone politician to take on the business practices that first came to pass in the Bush era, when Wall Street knew its practices wouldn't be scrutinized too closely, Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley be damned.

Greg Palast takes a closer look: