Spitzer wrong … and had a target on his back

So the New York governor who was once the squeaky-clean white-knight attorney general, the scourge of Wall Street, is going to resign for being outed for paying for sex with gorgeous young escorts.

I get that. It’s really hard to muster up any sympathy. It’s difficult for me to think of him now other than as a “doofus,” to use the technical term.

So what about the other Johns? What about the sex workers, that being the term I prefer to use rather than hookers, or prostitutes, or all the worsewords and phrases that people will throw around? I don’t think any of them are, ummm, going down. Just the Emperors Club management, and Client #9, Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

What about Clients 1-8 and 10 to infinity? Who are they? Do we care? Does the F.B.I care? The New York Times?

It doesn’t look like it, does it.

Lots and lots of people broke the state laws in different states, in this case. More than a million bucks got spent on sex. It’s a drop in the bucket. Just google ™ “escort services”… do you think they’re all quaking in their five-inch heels?

I don’t.

But I bet they’re going to start screening out politicians, if they can. Let’s be clear here — the Emperors Club was singled out because the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. were investigating Eliot Spitzer, NOT because they were (gasp) running a high-priced escort agency.

“… in the Hauppauge offices of the Internal Revenue Service, investigators conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks found several unusual movements of cash involving the governor of New York, several officials said. “

That’s what The Times says. I do wonder just how “routine” this investigation was. This looks like a “gotcha” over a few thousand bucks. But it’s about sex, and there’s no defense when sex in involved, when everyone, especially you, knows your pants are down … knows your spouse is pissed and your family is devastated. Eliot Spitzer, if you read between the lines, also would have preferred not to use condoms when screwing a sex worker … another kind of crime to answer for, maybe, but not in court.

That Spitzer was stupid seems without question. But I don’t see anyone — even over at, say, Fleshbot, which has some otherwise excellent commentary — noting the likelihood that the banks and the feds were probably looking for anything they could get on the doofus governor of New York, who, after all, had made a shitload of enemies in his career.

I think the odds are 50-50 on whether Spitzer gets prosecuted … because the government really does not want to take the time to round up and make cases against all the other clients and the sex workers, and the government is going to feel like it has to do that in order to prosecute the former prosecutor.

But they might not. They might just decide he’s special, even though he isn’t. It would be a shame, maybe, if he took a bunch of otherwise OK sex workers and rich Johns down with him …

Update: Check out the questions and suspicions of a former Department of Justice lawyer here. Or, similarly … go check out “It looks like the Bush Justice Department just bagged themselves another Democratic Governor” …