Eliot Spitzer
“Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth:” – Proverbs 24:17I admit I stumbled by sporting a broad smile when I heard Eliot Spitzer got nabbed in a prostitution ring. The grin I could not help was telling of my opinion of his activities as governor, not the man. He is only a man after all. And this is what is important to remember; no one is innocent. We all have something we hope never comes back or is found out, maybe only thoughts, maybe a failure to hold to our principles when opportunity comes in perfect arrangement at our weak moments. I realized the error of my grin, but then I realized the truth behind it.
I didn’t wish evil to befall the man, I wished a way out of the fiscal mess his spending spree is causing New York. He is the image of George Bush operating at the state level. Anyone who believes Bush is spending us to national doom cannot fail to acknowledge Spitzer is spending this over taxed state to a similar fate, unless they are hypocritical party partisans. I hoped his resignation would come from this and provide an opportunity for us to have another who might actually cut the spending and shrink the government in New York. Albeit, this is a great deal to hope for.
As far as the man goes, he has issues, one of which is to call this a mistake and against his core values. This only occurred when he got caught, so it is reasonable to recognize that he doesn’t have those core values, really, since a mistake happens once, not many times, deliberately repeated. It is encouraging to know he understands what his core values should be, but he clearly needs to work on that.
The other issue has to do with self-worth. To pay four to five thousand dollars and hour for sex says something about a man’s perceived value of himself. There is nothing a woman could do, sexually, that is worth one-hundredth of that amount. And of course there is his wife and family and the appropriate guilt he should have had while doing these things, not to mention the misappropriation of money.
All this displays a clouded mind out of balance and not capable of the reasoning and judgment needed to create laws affecting public life and to lead the governed.
But he has not yet resigned, and NPR radio is busy, as I write, making apologies for him, dumbing down the moral standard, excusing him because others have done it—the word mistake is making the rounds, in the metaphor of accident, and citations of our permissive trend toward immorality in the vein that it is something which ought to move more quickly and never should have been part of our social fiber.
posted by Smith @ 12:17 PM
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