I really do not give a good God Damn who the prostitute ex-Governor Spitzer hired for his private instant gratification session is.   She grew up not 15 minutes from my residence but her identity and everything about it are unimportant.   She is irrelevant.   Yet the media insists on knowing and publishing everything it can possibly learn about her.   That's very sad but not as sad as the actions of a man who was entrusted with a lot.   Human beings have weaknesses.   There's no doubt about it.   But we cannot simply write this off as some powerful man's fatal flaw.   We cannot even consider the apologists' commentary about "sexual addiction" or any sort of affliction Mr. Spitzer might have "suffered" which caused him to fall from grace.   The fact is Mr. Spitzer is a sentient being who committed a horrendous act which broke the pact he had made not only with his own sense of morality but also with every citizen of the state of New York including his wife and children.

It is one thing for the holier-than-thou, do-gooder, law-enforcer-turned-Governor to break a law which the apologists consider minor.   "It's just sex, after all, isn't it," they wonder.   "There's no victim!"   It is quite another thing for the man holding the reigns to arguably one of the biggest positions of power in the country to flaunt money laundering and who knows what other laws.   I'd like to know that law enforcement officials are 100% certain that the funds for this tryst came out of Mr. Spitzer's own personal pocket.   If there's any chance that any of the money came out of the state's treasury, Mr. Spitzer ought to repay it, pay a hefty fine for the transgression, and do the time required for embezzlement.   I hope this thing is carried to its logical legal end.

Aside from the legal aspect of this "victimless" crime, I'd like to see the public consider this from the point of view of the victims.   There's no such thing as a victimless crime once you get past perhaps parking tickets.   This man's transgressions had a lot of victims.   The most obvious one is his wife who has suffered the humiliation a spouse always feels in situations like this.   Oh, the apolgists will claim its no big deal because "everybody does it."   That's as far from Truth as it can be.   The fact is not a very high percentage of real adult men visit prostitutes once they get out of their teens and early twenties, away from their "frat buddies," and grow up into adulthood.   Spitzer is 48, married with children, and a very successful politician.   Prostitutes shouldn't be something which even enters his thoughts.   They shouldn't have entered his thoughts for two or three decades.   Its child's play.   It's something little boys mess around with during the days when they're out drinking until 3:00 am, getting into fights with other boys, and generally trying to grow out of their post-adolescent hormonal rage.   These are not the acts of a grown-up man.

I feel most badly for the man's children who are at an age during which they suspect their parents are losers anyway but now they know their father is one of the biggest losers going.   They now know that Dad pays thousands and thousands of dollars to have sex with a poor girl trying to pay her way through college.   They now know their Dad likes to have hours-long sexual encounters with girls nearly their own age.   That's about as bad as it gets.

The New York public is also a victim in this although hopefully it wasn't their money which was squandered on the playtime of the little boy.   One wonders what other sorts of breaks with the public trust Spitzer engaged in over the years.   When you encounter a liar, you go back over everything he has ever told you because you know instinctively that this cannot be the first time he lied to you.   The apologists will claim that's ridiculous but it stands to reason that this man has been entrusted with a lot and he cannot even live up to the agreement made with the most important people in his life, his wife and children.   He destroyed the trust with them and we expect he was honest when dealing with the contract he made with the rest of us?   How naive is that?

I've grown weary of these little boys in the seats of power.   The rest of us are out here trying to be fair, honest and make things work in our lives.   These people put obstacles in our ways constantly.   They tell us they know what's best for us but they cannot live up to a modicum of ordinary morality.   To hell with all the little boys!

Labels: Media