Posted by
Playful Walrus on Tuesday, March 11, 2008 5:23:35 PM
Gotta love the Los Angeles Times. They ran an editorial today with this title and teaser:
Spitzer and Sinning
The governor's alleged lapses only show that trying to ban vices doesn't stop people from partaking in them.
Nowhere in the editorial is Spitzer identified as a Democrat. But I guess that isn’t necessary, since you know they’d never extend that courtesy benefit-of-the-doubt "it's no so bad" teaser line to a Republican caught in such a scandal.
But the editorial quickly diverts from the Spitzer scandal anyway, into smoking bans and stuff like that. Flouting smoking bans in bars, you see, is on the level of cheating on your spouse and putting your family at risk.
But governors have been getting caught with prostitutes for about as long as there have been governors, and Spitzer's alleged lapses are notable mainly as evidence of a nationwide recrudescenceof personal vices that resist all efforts at eradication.
See, it isn’t his fault. We should have expected him to do these things.
This may not be what Henry David Thoreau had in mind when he talked about civil disobedience. But the drinking and smoking refuseniks are part of a long tradition of Americans who have fought the law not out of nobility or high principle but out of their belief in the freedom of consenting adults to participate in shameful, unpopular or harmful activities.
It is civil disobedience! Fornicating with a prostitute when you are married to someone else is civil disobedience, now. Somehow, I don't think my wife would buy that one. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi engaged in civil disobedience for the sake of righteousness. That's different from rebellion against just morality.
And unlike Spitzer, who vigorously and self-righteously prosecuted prostitutes along with Wall Street bankers during his days as New York's attorney general, they're willing to go public with their tastes.
See, it would have been okay if Spitzer never reminded anyone else that it was wrong. It’s only wrong to do these things if you have noted and acted upon them being wrong before. Being a “hypocrite” is far worse than promoting or at least aiding and abetting in the corruption of our culture, you see. (I maintain that a hypocrite is someone who believes one thing but says/does something contrary – which is not necessarily the same as someone who says one thing and does another. It is possible to truly believe that something is wrong and still engage in it.)
We don't mean to imply support for prostitution, smoking or excessive drinking. There is, however, something encouraging in seeing even a self-destructive maverick spirit live on despite the best intentions of public scolds.
I wonder if they’d feel this way about people flouting “public scolds” about being “nonjudgemental” and protecting the environment. Something tells me that if I dropped a plastic bag on the street, they’d be a little upset about my “maverick spirit”.
Then there’s a piece about extremists/terrorist groups, and what a tough time they’ve been having since 9/11. The piece seems to focus more on “anti-government”/white supremacist groups (you know, “right-wing” white Americans).
But there’s a telling paragraph buried in the story:
The Department of Justice recently compiled a summary on foreign and domestic terrorism for 2002 through 2005. They found that 23 of the 24 attacks committed by domestic groups were perpetrated by "special-interest extremists active in the animal-rights and environmental movements"; the other was a white supremacist's firebombing of a synagogue in Oklahoma City. None was carried out by the traditional anti-government elements popular in the 1990s.
So the Leftist animal rights extremists and environmental whackos have been doing to the most destruction – and that’s only because the Islamofascist terrorist cells have been thwarted in their efforts, as noted in the article.