The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson finds the Spitzer scandal right in his banal wheelhouse. He thunders:
I believe we can confidently imagine what was on New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's mind as he allegedly booked "dates" with $1,000-an-hour prostitutes: I'm entitled. I'm above the law. I'm so smart that I'll never be caught. Nobody gets hurt if nobody ever finds out.
We can practically see Spitzer twirling his waxed mustache, but is this at all a likely subjective characterization? It makes a monster of the man, leaping to the conclusion that all his motives were wicked or stupid. This is almost never a safe, accurate or fair assumption. Still, it is a very popular one in this case. I’m astounded by how little imagination nearly everyone, from the pundits to the people around me, has brought to bear on this matter.
Why, virtually everyone seems to ask, is Silda standing up with such a callous, hypocritical horndog at the press conferences? ("To increase the size of her settlement," is the reflexively cynical answer to this question.) But the reflexively judgmental response to this story is classically, egregiously American. As Karl Rove well knows, nothing stirs the savage indignation of his countrymen like the notion of unpunished sex.
But just to be the devil’s advocate for a moment, let’s think about how this scenario might just come to pass among actual human beings: Just imagine you are an accomplished, rich and powerful man, a politician. You've been married for several decades and you love your wife and children. But your marriage is now sexless; it's undergone the heterosexual equivalent of bed death. (Of course this never happens in real life, but... imagine.) You may or may not be wholly blameless, of course, but for reasons not entirely clear to you, your wife's skin now crawls when you touch her. She sometimes looks at you like you're her deviant uncle. And there doesn’t seem to be anything that you can do about it. You've tried different things and talked and talked about it, but that just seems to make it worse. She wants to want you but...it doesn't work that way. Complete impasse. You want to undertstand but you're frustrated and angry. You’re very, very hurt. You despair. You love your wife but you're not ready to live as a celibate. You don't want to divorce or have affairs, or take a mistress (as they do in some Old European countries) so you decide to go the route that makes for least emotional entanglement, least bad faith and so, to your way of thinking about it, least infidelity -- straight cash transactions at a rate which should buy confidentiality, and which maximizes your pleasure and minimizes your sense of victimizing anyone.
You’ve been an extreme straight arrow all your life, so you’re bad at this sort of thing. And in the circles you move in you can’t exaclty ask somebody for advice about how to do it safely. So, eventually the whole thing blows up in your face horribly. And everyone wants to know why your wife stands up with you at the press conference. It's almost as if she felt somehow complicit or responsible or at least personally caught up in the same tragedy. People just find it inexplicable. What a mystery....
Now I have no idea if any of the above scenario is true, and even if it is true, it’s hardly exculpatory. But it may have explanatory value.
One thing is certain, the scandal is the product of a political hit. Think of all the resources expended on catching a rich man buying sex. I’ve got news for my naïve fellow Americans, this is done by the captains of industry, and also done by them for the government officials they want to influence, every single day. It becomes prosecutable only in Karl Rove’s Justice Department (where his style still reigns, and he himself might still too) when it’s done by political enemies.
At a time when countless billions of dollars have been simply disappeard in the fog of the Iraq war, amid innummerable reports of fraud, negligence and corruption, amid reports of faulty armor, and dirty water, and rape and murder by our soldiers and contractors, we may wonder why there are so few investigations of this, so few charges against anyone. And at a time when trillions have been siphoned out of the American economy by pinstriped fraudsters whom the economic consequences of their schemes will never touch, why are so few of these people investigated? The answer is fairly simple: they are affiliated with the GOP.
The problem with this scandal is not that what Spitzer apparently did is so trivial as to be beneath prosecution; rather that this prosecution was selected from among an almost infinite array of other possible ones, and pursued to their exclusion. Its sensational nature recommends itself to the sanctimony of most, and therefore precludes the question: why this and why not the others?
Scott Horton, writing in New Republic, reminds us why we need to think about all this in other than the prurient and reflexively indignant ways:
The integrity of our criminal justice system rests on the notion that we investigate crimes, not people. As Robert Jackson, probably the greatest attorney general of the last century, put it:
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.
The way prosecutorial power is wielded divides a real democracy from a banana republic.
New Republic