Monday, June 29, 2009
Splitting hairs: A TigerHawk poll!
Client Number 9 thinks that Mark Sanford is worse than he is. His rationale is that he did not fall in love with the prostitutes with whom he transacted. Spitzer's moral parsing is interesting, and might equally go the other way. What say you? Take the poll!
13 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Jun 29, 02:09:00 PM:
C.S. Lewis wrote in the Screwtape Diaries that Satan loves this line of argument.
By , at
Mon Jun 29, 03:14:00 PM:
Does the fact that one is an illegal act and the other isn't come into play?
And how does hiring one prostitute while actively prosecuting other prostitutes fit in the equation?
Anyway, I assume that Spitzer considers himself morally superior to Bill Clinton.
By 
Diane Wilson, at
Mon Jun 29, 03:23:00 PM:
Where was the option to vote for "a pox on both their houses"? I didn't see that in the poll.
Also, Spitzer broke more laws, and demonstrated greater cynicism and hypocrisy; he also shows no remorse at anything other than getting caught. I note that he doesn't think these seem to matter.
By , at
Mon Jun 29, 03:54:00 PM:
And how does hiring one prostitute....
He got *caught* hiring one prostitute but the owner of the escort service stated that Spitzer was regular customer who enjoyed the um...favors of several of her call girls over the years.
Thus, not only did Spitzer break the law, spend large gobs of his family's money on anonymous sex, but he put himself and his wife (assuming they were still having sexual relations) at risk by engaging in sex (and unprotected sex to boot) with women who sleep with other men by the hour.
Holy crap. What kind of a married man risks his marriage (and his career) by repeatedly paying for sex by the hour? If my husband is going to put his c*ck inside of someone, I would pray that he would have the decency to know her last name.
By Elise, at
Mon Jun 29, 04:45:00 PM:
Infidelity is infidelity, but if I had to choose, I'd rather my husband cheated on me with a woman he loved/desired/cared about rather than with one he bought. Disease concerns and the general ickiness factor seem less with an emotional connection than a purely financial one. The former would make me furious; the latter would make me throw up.
However, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that falling in love is like catching the flu: random, out of your control, unavoidable. I've always liked what Mary Stewart had to say about it in The Ivy Tree:
"One can't help who one falls in love with." Julie was offering this shabby cliche as if it were the panacea still sealed all glittering in its virgin polythene. [snip] It seemed that, to Julie, falling in love was an act as definable and as little controlled by the will, as catching a disease in an epidemic. That there came a moment when the will deliberately sat back and franked the desire was as foreign to her as the knowledge that, had the will not retreated, desire would have turned aside and life, in the end, would have gone as quietly on.
Considering that Sanford was friends with his inamorata for seven years before he fell in love with her, he had plenty of opportunities to assert his will prior to the fall. Considering she was far, far away, asserting his will after he fell would have been as simple as not emailing or calling her - it's not like he had to see her every day and be constantly tempted.
Perhaps I'm jaded and cynical but I suspect his falling in love was about problems in his own life - demented infatuation is such an effective form of denial - and his seeking counsel to deal with his forbidden passion was about having an excuse to obsessively talk about the object of his desire.
Spitzer on the other hand is just plain creepy. I'm sorry to hear Mrs. Spitzer wasn't available for comment because I kind of hoped there *wasn't* a Mrs. Spitzer anymore.
By , at
Mon Jun 29, 04:48:00 PM:
I have a hard-on for Spitzer -- and not the good kind -- because my day job made me too aware of how Eliot abused his prosecutor's office to advance his career, pay-off friends, and attack percieved enemies. I've written about this on TH at length in the past.
This guy won't go away, and is instead intent on rehabilitating himself. To me, it just proves how insane this guy is -- how MSM can't report a story straight, and how low most of our elected officials really are. In hindsight, Eliot should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent to drive a stake through his heart.
Go Tigers! He's one of yours, I believe.
By , at
Mon Jun 29, 04:49:00 PM:
Meant to sign, that was Link at 4:48 pm
By Christopher Chambers, at
Mon Jun 29, 05:09:00 PM:
I thought this was going to be the "how much do we hate Michael Jackson's father" post. lol
By , at
Mon Jun 29, 05:09:00 PM:
Both of these individuals are lying, despicable cowards, unworthy of holding any office requiring ethics and honesty. That being said, that Mr. Spitzer, whom was an officer of the court, and someone whom made his reputation as a ruthless prosecutor has the chutzpa to question the integrity of anyone is assinine. He broke, deliberatly broke various laws related to prostituion, repeatedly. He exposed his wife to any variety of sexually transmitted diseases, and, perhaps most importantly, he whole heartedly disregarded, and disgarded, a sacred oath he took with his wife. He didn't have the courage to dissolve the union he had with his wife before he began his wanton romps with the trollop of the day. Mr. Spitzer is a criminal and a pompous jack**s. Gov. Sanford seems to have confined himself to being a non-criminal cad, which may be somewhat less despicable, but, no less dishonest.
By , at
Mon Jun 29, 05:23:00 PM:
What is truly unfortunate is that a formerly good guy like Mark Sanford is being compared to a complete dousche bag like Elliott Spitzer.
How low can one go...
By , at
Mon Jun 29, 07:31:00 PM:
I couldn't answer the poll: falling in love with someone else is worse than sleeping with a prostitute, but the kind of person who sleeps with a prostitute is worse than the kind of person who falls in love with someone else.
Also, what Elise said - there's willpower involved, at least at the beginning.
By , at
Tue Jun 30, 11:49:00 AM:
Aren't these both data points on the same continuum? The key question is, "how vigorously does the captive media (MSM) work against you?" Sanford, because of his party and opposition to the Kenyan and Spitzer, because of karma, very vigorously. Edwards, beloved of the captive media for so long, not very vigorously. And Kennedy, Kerry and Biden, pimps of the captive media, with no vigor or interest at all.
By Sissy Willis, at
Wed Jul 01, 06:34:00 AM:
Poll results suggest Tigerhawk readership = a covey of old-fashioned romantics.
