What Was Eliot Thinking?

Sick to my stomach. That’s my initial reaction to the breaking story of Eliot Spitzer’s admission that he has been involved with a prostitution ring.

What was he thinking? What is is that makes men in high profile political positions think they can get away with this kind of thing, even after Bill and Monica, even after Larry Craig’s toe tapping, even after…well, you can fill in the blanks. There are too many dozens of names and sex scandals to recount here.

It is the rush of power that makes these guys think they are invincible? Testosterone run amuck? Is the answer in the old joke about where men’s brains are? And is there a correlation between amount of crusading for other people’s morality a politician does and the likelihood that he will fall into illicit or immoral behavior patterns himself?

You tell me. This time I am completely speechless.

3 Comments

  1. stacy on March 10, 2008 at 10:36 pm

    I just watched the video of his statement to the press and I noticed his wife looks like she’s going to be physically sick, Not that I blame her, having to stand next to that fool while he’s making his announcement about how he violated his own moral code or whatever.

    I think that these guys are addicted to power and its trappings – memberships at exclusive clubs, expensive cars and buying influence-all of it- and they seem to believe that having these affairs on the side are part of all that. Personally, I think it’s major insecurity, which is a bit ironic.

    I read on the HuffPo today that Alan Dershowitz defended Spitzer with the “men don’t think with their brains, they think with another organ…” nonsense and you know what? That’s getting old. And it’s not exactly reassuring- there are certain times when you have to think with your brains and if they can’t make that distinction, then why should we trust them with so much power?

    I don’t really care about politician’s sex lives but I am left to wonder how anyone could be so stupid as to risk a life-long career on something like this. And it seems like the only reason he’s coming clean, so to speak, is because he got caught.

  2. Punditmom on March 10, 2008 at 10:36 pm

    What was he thinking? He wasn’t. The downfall of men since the dawn of time.

  3. Ceil Cleveland on March 12, 2008 at 10:37 pm

    I am wondering whether there might be an awful lot of Dionysian buried in those so stalwart political Appollonians. Maybe they think that all the pressure they live under by “a life of service” etc., and all their testosteronic fighting and in-fighting gives them a flat-out right to let Dionysus out and seek pleasure wherever they want to–and the devil and their families take the hindmost. Spitzer’s behavior, and all the other male politicos, misbehaviors is just baffling to me. Remember Sol Wachler in NY some years ago? Might have been governor, then president, but went to prison over a woman he stalked in a cowboy hat? (As a matter of fact, he married my husband and me–before becoming a loon! We often laugh about that, esp. since our first choice had been Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who found she couldn’t perform ceremonies in NYC–before becoming a Supreme Court Justice. Speak of ironies…..) And how could Spitzer possibly have gone to so much trouble and planning to be with these babes? One can, by stretching it, almost understand being swept away….but all this financial finagling?? (This news, on top of finding that l in 15 black men are in prison, and that a quarter of female teenagers have STD–well, it’s been quite a week. I’m getting to the old “what is this world coming to?” stage.) Now, what will Silda do? ceil

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