Criticizing people for hypocrisy is analogous to criticizing them for having a pulse.

Acting unconscionably is the real sin.

No, I have no sympathy for Spitzer personally given how aggressively he prosecuted multiple prostitution cases and how guilty he is of rank hypocrisy and overzealous prosecutions.

I was all set to make a set of points, the most important of which being the one above, when GG went ahead and made them.

No, prostitution should not be illegal, but rather, well regulated. Drugs should largely be decriminalized except for the most dangerous and damaging (meth, for instance) but the "punishment" shouldn't be a long prison term unless violence was involved, but treatment.

Spitzer gets no sympathy for going down (so to speak) on this exactly for the reason I quoted Glenn on above. I hate self-righteous hypocrisy even more than plain, run-of-the-mill hypocrisy and Spitzer is guilty guilty guilty in spades. What a shithead moron he is.

The warrant crap needs to be investigated. This is also a case of Nixonian/Cheneyite/Rovian dirty trick nonsense, top-to-bottom. Just another example of the politicization of the "Justice" Department. As a matter of fact, this episode should be rolled into the forthcoming hearings on the AG firing nonsense. It's all of a piece.

"I will find something in them to have him hanged."

Failing that there's always the Bible. They got Joan of Arc for wearing armor and Leviticus forbids women to wear men's clothes.

There's always an angle.

Probably they have their own lobbyists to protect these income streams.

Wouldn't that be Guiliani Associates? Bernard Kerik?

If religion, marriage and other forms of psychological abuse and control that shame and punish safe, consensual and harm-free expression of sexuality

were disallowed, there would be no need or market for prostitution.

-- J.C. Miller

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 11:33 AM

Ditto, Right-on, and Amen.

Would be the number of women forced by threat to be prostitutes is about the same as the number forced to be strippers. Not many.

Thanks for having the courage to say this Glenn.

I look forward to the day where consenting adults can have whatever type of sex they want in their private space. Indeed, for those who are serious about that principle, laws against prostitution begin to look a lot like other anachronistic limits on human sexuality -- anti-sodomy laws, laws against sex toys, etc.

More broadly, it seems time for true liberals to adopt a proudly libertarian stance on social (though not economic) issues. I don't know what others' self-actualization might look like; but I do believe they are the best judges and affectuators of it.

he could say he just has a "wide stance". He could say the woman was rumored to have information about the whereabouts of Saddam's missing WMD. They said he "would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe", after all, so obviously he could have been waterboarding her.

It's excusable for the people who have wanted for years to take Eliot Spitzer down to scold him, heap scorn on him, and raise whatever hue and cry they can in order to oblige him to resign. He's been a scourge on them for years and this is the only way they can take him down.

What I don't get is why anyone else cares. For all those who are not reactionary troglodytes in the New York state legislature or sleazy Wall Street fund managers, it's hard to see what the stake is in seeing Spitzer go down.

So he's a hypocrite. I don't even agree with Glenn Greenwald on the importance of that. Lots of people are hypocrites. What matters is whether he did his job.

At the price these guys were paying I have to imagine that clients 1 thru 8 would be "interesting" people, too.

It would be amusing (in a bad way), to see some hard core supporter of warrantless wiretapping be brought down by people interested in what Spitzer was doing.

Kerik or Guiliani would be priceless.

it was the anti-porn feminists who made very shrill, hysterical charges against how e-e-e-vill and awful and terrible those dirty pornographers were. It was obvious to many of us back then that when comparing the jobs of the women who worked in sweatshops sewing together clothes for Kathie Lee Gifford (My sincere thanks to Ms Gifford for personalizing the issue and for giving the issue as face and a name) that sweatshop jobs were really not superior to that of performers in porno.

That's certainly not to say that pornography was a good job, obviously working in real estate sales or the like is clearly better, but taking the whole of the jobs that were available to women, pornography was hardly the worst they could do.

It majorly annoyed me then that the anti-porn feminists felt that we could afford to compromise the 1st Amendment in order to fight pornography. It was one of those issues where, in order to battle an evil thing, you're willing to do evil things and so you end up in a lose-lose situation, where you do evil things, but don't achieve the goal you're after.

You, Glenn, don't get to decide which laws matter and which don't, no more than republicans do. So spare us your lectures about political sophistication.

This is a really good and important point, because I argued that Spitzer has the right to break whatever laws he wants. For instance, I argued that when I said this:

Yes, prostitution is against the law in New York. No, Eliot Spitzer is not entitled to break the law. Yes, Eliot Spitzer should be treated the same as any average citizen who hires prostitutes (neither better nor worse).

And I also argued that Spitzer has the right to break the law the other day when I wrote about this topic, when I wrote:

And he should be treated no differently -- no better and no worse -- than the average citizen whom law enforcement catches hiring prostitutes.

Despite that, there is an amazingly high percentage of commenters who keep saying: "It's against the law! He has no right to break the law! Period" -- as though that contradicts anything being said here. Honestly, I don't know what else can be done to make the point any clearer.