I am now officially a tad ticked off. It would be nice if liberals would be consistent. I do not believe it is right to, in effect, whine "But they do it, too, and no one cares!" In fact, people do care that David Vitter hired prostitutes to dress him up as Sweet Pea from Popeye and take care of his "needs". It's the press that seems to think that, paying a woman to perform such deeds is much less bad than a consensual blow job provided for free to the President of the United States. Indeed, the judgment of the American people is remarkably healthy on the difference here - consensual adultery is not a big public problem; breaking the law by consorting with prostitutes, no matter how "high end", being illegal, is not to be tolerated. All the whining about whether or not prostitution "should be" legal suddenly sounds like a whole bunch of question begging to my ears.
The worst example of this kind of thing - and there are many others - is Glenn Greenwald. I respect his judgment, his political fervor, and his ability to write long blog posts that people actually read. On this issue, though, he attempts to make the point that the differences between David Vitter and Eliot Spitzer can be boiled down to schadenfreude - it's always fun to catch a moral scold being immoral. He does point out that Spitzer, too, was a bit of a scold, prosecuting a couple high end prostitution rings; yet, as I note in comments here, he apparently only used these as leads for phone numbers.
I think it should be a simple equation - regardless of how one feels about the legality of prostitution, it is currently illegal. Public officials take an oath of office to uphold the law. We currently have a federal administration that is neck deep in lawlessness. To excuse Spitzer because one believes prostitution to be "victimless" (I really don't get that one) misses the point that it is illegal. The kind of blatant hypocrisy on an issue such as this really irks me; liberal bloggers now reveal themselves to be partisan hacks, no different from the Republicans who ignore the vast law breaking of their co-party members.
Sorry, but we should be better than that.
UPDATE: Jane Hamsher asks some interesting political questions, completely ignoring the simple fact that they would have been irrelevant had Spitzer not be consorting with prostitutes. As far as DoJ going after high-end prostitution rings, and the Mann Act - if the ladies were crossing state lines, that is a violation of federal law, putting the acts in question directly in the lap of federal prosecutors and law enforcement. Furthermore, this was the highest of high-end rings - it catered to international types, probably including diplomats and others who would be under scrutiny from the feds. I have no problem understanding why the feds might be checking it out.
The bank transfers? That is a bit unsettling, I'll admit, but, again, Spitzer should have been smart enough, or at least kept his brain out of his crotch long enough to realize that the Bush DoJ would discover whatever dirt on him there was to find. Sorry, but to me this just goes to his judgment - he thought he was untouchable, except when he paid for it.
