March 11, 2008 by lonbud

The Sound of Breaking Glass

America loves nothing more than a sex scandal.

A collective peek up the panty-free skirt of a Former Teen Idol or a glimpse of nipple through the diaphanous gown of This Year’s Model beats the Comeback Victory, the Shaggy Dog, and the Horatio Alger story every time for getting the attention of the caffeine-fueled ADHD citizens of the Most Powerful Nation on Earth.

Combining sex with clergy, or sex and politics, will very nearly get the nation’s arbiters of all things newsworthy soiling themselves in excitement over the eyes and ears a sex scandal will send their way in the next 24-hour news cycle.

Thus, the front page of every newspaper in America today features the frowning, disconsolate mug of Eliot Spitzer. The lede story on every Internet news and gossip site tells the gripping tale of his ‘monumental’ fall from grace, the tragic story of Client 9 — the hard-bitten, former federal prosecutor-turned Governor of New York, who yesterday admitted to contracting for the services of a prostitute.

Conversation at water coolers throughout the land will feature breathless moralizing over the shame and ‘criminality’ of Mr. Spitzer’s behavior. Some of it will rightly consider the hypocrisy of a man who, at least partly, earned his public service stripes pursuing prostitution rings as the head of New York’s organized crime task force.

Few will ponder the difficulties of reconciling the illegality of prostitution with the fact of America’s (legal) multi-billion dollar adult pornography industry.

Calls for Mr. Spitzer to be treated like any other John nabbed in a prostitution sting — that is, not to be prosecuted for much of anything, or be otherwise bothered to face much more than the wrath of an angry spouse — will be inaudible among demands for his immediate resignation and pleas for his incarceration as an ‘example’ of the reprehensible public official.

Even less likely to be generally considered are questions about how the particular prostitution ring involving Mr. Spitzer became the subject of federal wiretapping activities in the first place, why the FBI and the IRS were bothered to examine the small-time bank transactions that led to the wiretapping, or why Mr. Spitzer has been the only person associated with the sordid affair so far identified.

Scott Horton at Harper’s magazine has relentlessly covered the corruption and debasement of the Bush Justice Department for years, and he asks a few of the germane questions unlikely to come up in today’s office gossip or to be found in the terabytes of email discussing the scandal on the Internet.

Mr. Spitzer forged his bona fides — and was elected governor of New York with 69% of the vote in 2006 — on the strength of his success prosecuting the white-collar crimes of Wall Street greed-heads and financial hucksters during seven years as the state’s Attorney General.

Widely regarded as a rising star of the Democratic party and hailed for his denouncements of securities fraud, price-fixing, excessive executive compensation, and environmental depredations, he once struck fear in the hearts of rapacious titans of high finance, and stood in stark contrast to the friends and benefactors of mighty power brokers in the Republican party.

Today he’s but another schmuck caught with his pants around his ankles, whose entire life of good deeds and a potential future of beneficial public service are drowned in the scum-ringed tub of America’s prurient self-regard.