Brass Knuckles

Interesting; on the Huffington Post this morning, Nora Ephron talks about the Elliot Spitzer debacle and right on cue defends his actions.

Meanwhile, Spitzer, who a year ago had a shot at national office, is today a laughingstock because of his reckless involvement in … what? Let’s just say this right out: in nothing. He arranged for a date with a hooker and she crossed a state line. This violates something called the Mann Act, which was passed in 1910, before women could vote. It’s the legal equivalent of an old chestnut, it seems barely constitutional, and no one with half a brain could possibly think of it as anything worth prosecuting anyone for. Although Eliot Spitzer might. This is the problem these guys get into: they’re so morally rigid and puritanical in real life (and on some level, so responsible for this priggish world we now live in) that when they get caught committing victimless crimes, everyone thinks they should be punished for sheer hypocrisy.

I’m not about to go into the hypocrisy of the left, and how if a Republican got caught, blah, blah, blah.  There are far better writers than me out there now digging and writing, and twisting a wry phrase or two.  Believe me, I was tempted to talk about how much better off Spitzer would have been had he diddled an intern, and the whole idiocy of the idea of a consenting intern or prostitute.  I read one comment that was just about perfect, though I can’t seem to find it now; in essense, the commenter said that prostitutes can’t consent, they’re paid to shut the hell up and let the john do what ever he wishes with them.

Victimless crime.  I guess it’s okay to be reduced to the level of a masturbatory device, as long as you’re well compensated.  I guess that the prostitute and the john then walk away, each happy with a perfectly economical transaction and with lives otherwise untouched and uneffected by the purely physical act.   Ironically, that would be the impossibly friendly and accomodating world that exists only in Hollywood liberalism and pornography.