The moral of the story

Last night as we were falling asleep, I asked Rob to tell me a story. Daylight saving time is screwing with my head, so I wasn’t tired enough to fall right asleep. I was thinking it might be something about his day or maybe a time when he was little and he lit something on fire, I don’t know. He began “Once upon a time there was an attorney general…”

So yeah, everyone here is talking about Eliot Spitzer. And people aren’t saying the same things: I heard one publisher in my office yesterday yelling into the phone “Prostitution is NOT corruption!” He seemed to think everyone was making too big a deal out of this. I think that’s the attitude of someone who doesn’t expect much from our politicians and isn’t surprised by situations like this. Other people are shocked, horrified, amused, or sympathetic (but mostly just towards Spitzer’s wife and three daughters.)

It’s not that I’m surprised that yet another politician has landed in the center of a controversy. But I don’t think people are making too big a deal out of it when they say that Spitzer’s a hypocrite who has in the past taken the moral high ground when it comes to his peers, and is now looking pretty foolish. It would be preferable to have leaders we can respect, and who believe that they are not above the law.

I imagine that he will resign over this, though no decision has been made. This would give New York its first Black governor (and the third in our country since Reconstruction), David Paterson. So for now we can just wait and see what the end of this story is. In Rob’s version, he just sort of trailed off, mumbling something about seven high-end prostitute dwarves.