After nearly 50 pages of heated comments, it's hard to believe no one else has pointed out the true role that Spitzer is serving for us:

SCAPEGOAT

Americans are often portrayed as apathetic, ignorant, puritanical hypocrites, but I think the charge of apathy is quite unfair. Americans are in fact passionately offended and enraged about the countless humiliations of modern-day indentured servitude. It's just that we're not normally provided with a convenient enough means of collectively blowing off steam, too lazy to get off our butts, and too cowardly to tar and feather the criminal parasites who've been blatantly bleeding the country into financial ruin.

That's why scum like Spitzer are such a blessed relief. Finally, we get to sink our claws into some politician who richy deserves it. It doesn't really matter what he's guilty of, or even it's actually a crime. We already know he's a crook and a slimeball just like all the rest of them. But now we've caught one of them in the act, and you can be damned sure we won't let him off easy.

Of course, ever since we collectively scapegoated Saddam and his entire wretched country over 9/11, we've felt a little self-concious about our self-righteousness. Sometimes it just takes a little sexual titilation to unleash the pent-up waves of moral outrage, and on that we can all thank Spitzer for tonight's happy ending.

Try to understand the point I was trying to make, if you will, which has nothing to do with either ideals or sociopathy, but rather how we approach complexity, and try to do it justice.

In some, hell maybe in a lot of ways, you are smarter and better informed than I..

For that reason I suspect, I find a good deal of what you say to be cryptic to the point of unintelligibility.

To me, the person who is an idealist is someone who has principles. Without principles we are blown hither and fro by the winds of whim and random chance and there is a chance that we might do any damn thing, including a holocaust.

I firmly believe that George Bernard Shaw was right when he said that all progress depends on the unreasonable man since the reasonable man adapts to the situation.

If everyone is reasonable and adapting to the situation then the situation will never change, at least not from the efforts of those inside that system since they will not make any effort to change the system.

Pragmatism would demand that we choose the lesser of two evils, but that still leaves our choice as an evil. I for one reject the choice of the lesser evil. If I cannot choose a positive change then I will refrain from making a choice (and yes I know that is a choice itself).

There's an old saying about lead, follow or get out of the way.. I'll choose none of the above.. If I think the leaders and followers are headed in the wrong direction I have no problem at all putting my ass right in their way.

I'm stubborn, opinionated, self righteous, arrogant and a jerk. And those are my good qualities.

Daft, Glenn. Of course that's not the case. This is a somewhat serious offense, whether or not you think it is. It's not analogous to gambling or plain vanilla adultery at all. And the offense is compounded by the fact that this guy has prosecuted prostitutes before. So he has to resign because no one will be able to take him seriously any longer. As for why pornography's legal and prostitution isn't, pornography's protected speech, so long as it's not obscene and doesn't involve children, while prostitution isn't speech at all. Now, you might be able, I suppose, to ban being paid to appear in a porno... but that would have a chilling effect on pornographic speech, so I don't know if even that would be constitutional.

Yes, I've finally understood that about you. If you're interested, you might look up my defense of Glenn's tone in an earlier thread. It makes a similar point. Antithesis is by it's very nature brutal and uncompromising; otherwise it isn't genuine. That's in fact what's wrong with the currently fashionable definition of bipartisanship, and with the Democrats' overly-clever theories of triangulation. Bill Clinton is a lot smarter than either one of us, but that didn't prevent him outsmarting himself.

Still, being an advocate of the antithetical doesn't really require that we be jerks -- although most of the time, the dialectic doesn't express an opinion one way or the other about the machinery which carries out its imperatives.

So, Aych, be all you can be, I don't really mind. It's just that I'm doing something else.

It's not so much apathy as a self willed blindness to reality.

I have connections to a lot of vets through my work and my family. The local American Legion post has been doing a lot of burials of troops for the last four years and I'm puzzled to my core at their attitude.

I get the feeling that a lot of them are angry deep down about what is happening, particularly with respect to the troops coming home in transport tubes (euphemism for coffin). But they by and large utterly refuse to discuss why we are burying so many "heroes", all they want to do is honor the dead, not ask, or even listen to, hard questions as to why so many young men and women are coming home as corpses.

My tentative hypothesis is that they are terrified of the answers that hard questions might lead them to but I'm more than willing to entertain other ideas.

The way most of these guys and a few gals define patriotism is so different from the way I do that there is often little basis for mutual understanding.

I love your blog, and I read it almost daily. I haven't watched the television coverage of the Spitzer story, but I'm sure it is over the top, sleazy, lurid, ridiculous, etc.

Nevertheless, this time I think you're off-base. I'm a proud liberal, and, yes, I do in fact think hiring a prostitute is reprehensible. Call me old-fashioned, but I think it's bad conduct to pay for a woman to have sex. And I would think so whether it was a friend or the president of the United States.

The act may not deserve the status of a crime, and it's certainly ridiculous to say that he should be criminally prosecuted for it. But it's not right for any man -- and it's usually men who say this -- to claim that there's no victim in prostitution. Maybe "victim" isn't the right word, since it leads us back to "crime," but ... think about it. Think about the way so many men look at women today, the language, the pornification of young women, etc.

Your attitude -- that this is no big deal -- is exactly the sort of thing that conservative and moderate Americans find distressing about liberals. (Mind you, I think they're wrong! But here you are playing into their stereotype.) They think we're morally bankrupt, that we feel something should be a scandal or "reprehensible" only when it's demonstrably illegal, and even then only when it's a certain sort of crime. In fact, liberals usually have the better side of most of the moral arguments; all liberals need to do is to better defend our positions. But here, I just think you've got it wrong, and you're sending out the wrong message.

The guy did something that it's right for us not to tolerate in public servants. He doesn't deserve to be prosecuted -- of course. But it's not crazy for the public to want its servants not to engage in such behavior, and for the public to demand that its servants resign when they do. I think his behavior is degrading and hypocritical, I would not want to have to explain it to my child if he continued in office, and I think it is absolutely proper that the public demand he step down.

We don't need to demand that our elected officials be perfect. But how could Gov. Spitzer ever go to a school or any sort of event where young people -- half of them women -- should, presumably, be looking to him for some sort of leadership? It's wrong to say that in public figures we can, or even should, be able to separate out completely their policy from their personal lives.

Where's the exact line? Who knows. (Most people people got through the Clinton adultery thing, but if he'd *paid* her, I doubt we'd see it the same way.) They're public figures, and it is not unreasonable to want public figures to be responsible for both their public selves and those parts of their private lives that emerge.