Next time you’re in a jam, you might want to consider a lawyer other than Chuck Schumer.  His 1600 SAT score and Harvard Law degree notwithstanding, the best defense the senior senator from New York could muster on behalf of Treasury Secretary nominee Tim Geithner was much of a left-handed, damning with faint praise, compliment.  It amounted to saying: compared to some of the crooks on Wall Street, Geithner’s not bad!

As per Gail Collins’s NYT column this morning [emphasis added]:

In the Senate, Schumer argues that Geithner’s errors “pale before the myriad mistakes made by the operators of financial institutions.”

Got that?  The man Pres. Obama wants to oversee the financial institutions might not be a total straight arrow, but he’s not as bad as Bernie Madoff and some of the other guys he’s going to be regulating. What an endorsement!

Schumer’s logic fails on even the most casual of consideration.  The Madoffs and others had billions of other people’s money on which to work their misdeeds. Geithner had only his own 1040 form–and seems to have abused it pretty badly.

Is the best Schumer can come up with on Geithner’s behalf?  Remember: need legal help?  Call 1-800-GETLAW . . . not Chuck!

Note: if Schumer was a weak attorney for the defense, Republican Senator Jon Kyl was vigorous and probing in his cross-examination of Geithner, as Byron York describes at NRO.