I've changed my mind. I want Eliot Spitzer back.
I'll admit it: I flew off the handle. I got worked up about the "unprotected sex with call girls" business. It was a gut thing. I've stayed at the Mayflower. Now I have to sleep on top of the bedspread, and that's no way to live.
And I let my feelings for my daughters and sisters get in the way of my practical appreciation for what a neutral-to-good thing prostitution is. (Thanks commenters!)
I've had some time to think it over and it seems to me that now, more than ever, we need men in government so honest -- and friendless -- that they have to pay for their own whores.
Men like Eliot Spitzer.
Why was a man in Eliot Spitzer's position booking his own hookers? (My brother-in-law, Charlie, says it has something to do with being a prosecutor, and seeing every partner in a criminal enterprise as a potential witness against you, later.) But I think it's sadder and simpler than that.
He did it because no one else would.
Eliot Spitzer is the kind of guy who has to throw his own bachelor party.
But he's also the kind of public servant who gets all the way to the governor's mansion without picking up a single rich benefactor willing to pick up picking up his pick-ups.
No human pays $5000 for sex. Only companies do. Because they can deduct it as entertainment. It's like when a corporation lends you their private jet to campaign in. That's what private jets are for.
Where did Eliot Spitzer screw up? He screwed up by refusing to owe anybody any favors.
Eliot Spitzer is Ralph Nader with a penis.
Isn't that the kind of man you want working for you?
--
Compare Spitzer's dreary, hotels.com shenanigans with the ease and grace of a night with Neil Bush.
Here's Neil being deposed during his divorce. His then-wife's lawyer is asking him about getting lucky on an Asian business trip and coming home with a case of Herpes (my least favorite Sherlock Holmes story, by the way):
Marshall Davis Brown: "Mr. Bush, you have to admit that it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her."
Neil Bush: "It was very unusual."
Brown: "Were they prostitutes?"
Bush: "I don't -- I don't know."
...
Brown: "Did you pay them for that sex?"
Bush: "No, I did not."
Brown: "Pick them up in a sushi house?"
Bush: "No. ... My recollection is, where I can recall, they came to my room."
--
See? That's how it should work.
And I know what you're going to say: Neil Bush can do what he wants. He's not the government. But who's being naïve, now, Kay?
--
Maybe we need some kind of public financing system for degrading, dehumanizing illicit politician sex. Get the special interests and the big money out. Just put a little check-off box on everyone's taxes. Call it the 1040SLEZ-E.
--
By the way, it only took forty-eight hours to find Spitzer's "Kristen," and she was working for an international call-girl ring, under an assumed name. It's been 22 days, and completely legitimate businesswoman Vicki Iseman -- who did absolutely nothing wrong with John McCain -- is still missing.