Harvard lawprof Alan Dershowitz used to be a dynamo.  Sure, a wacky one, but always full of bizarre theories and ready to attack.  He barked and he bit, with that wild ‘fro whirling around his frothy mouth.  Vibrant and relevant, Dershowitz made his bones by being on the cutting edge of attacking the establishment. 

But now he’s gone.  He’s been gone for a while.  And yesterday, this piece in the  Jewish Daily Forward (h/t to Gustitus at The Defense Perspective who, much to my surprise, must be a regular reader of the JDF) proved that poor Alan is still gone.  Not gone as in dead, but gone as in “gone mainstream.”

Beyond his sadness for his former Harvard researcher, young Eliot, which is fair enough though hard to imagine how this same young fellow learned at Dershowitz’s knee, his sadness is for the “waste” of it all.

Throughout our history, men in high places have engaged in low sexual activities. From Thomas Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton, great political figures have behaved like adolescent boys in private, while at the same time brilliantly and effectively leading our nation in public.

Our nation, unique among Western democracies, is obsessed with the private lives of public figures. Whether it be Larry Craig soliciting favors in an airport bathroom or Rush Limbaugh getting illegal pharmaceuticals in a parking lot, this obsessive focus on the private imperfections of public figures threatens to drive many good men — and soon, good women — out of public life for fear that they will brought down by their private peccadilloes…

Eliot Spitzer can be charged with hypocrisy for prosecuting prostitution rings while patronizing prostitutes himself. The voters would have had every right to hold his hypocrisy against him had he run for office after completing his term. They could have considered the recklessness of his conduct in evaluating his ability to perform his public functions. But forcing him to resign constitutes an abuse of the political and criminal processes, an abuse that would only be compounded by using vague criminal statutes to prosecute him for federal crimes for which no one is prosecuted.

How sad to see poor Alan so confused.  It’s a duty, a mitzvah, to clear up this sorry mess. 

Eliot, your one-time protégé, was not forced to resign because of his private peccadilloes.  Indeed, he was not forced to resign at all.  Nor did he have an affair, as many historic figures did.  He chose to resign in the face of his own shame for his actions and in the face of criminal charges that may be levied against him as they have against many, many others.  Crimes, Alan, not sex. 

This young woman was not his date, or even his girlfriend.  She was prostitute, which is why he had to come up with a way to finance his expensive appetite that trampled the law.  He smurfed money to hide his payments to a prostitution ring.  That ring was a gang of people engaged in criminal conduct, and he worked with them to find a means to be a enjoy their criminal enterprise.  You can argue that it should not be a crime, but as long as it is a crime, then law-abiding people generally try not to engage in it.  This goes for Governors as well.

If Eliot Spitzer was caught having “an affair,” it probably would have helped his reputation in New York, where he’s not admired for his humanity.  Indeed, few would believe him capable of having an extra-marital affair, mostly because of the unlikelihood of getting a woman to agree to it.  He isn’t the best looking fellow, and was never well-regarded at small talk.  This could explain why he needed to pay for it. 

But to have Mr. Clean committing crimes is not the same thing as Jefferson and Sally Hemings.  Sex may make the crime more salacious to the public, but it would have been no different had he committed the crime for any other purpose.  Are all the money launderers and smurfers in prison tragic? 

It’s nice how, in your later years, you’ve come to have such empathy for high government officials. But when did firebrand Dershowitz start forgiving people who obtained great power from the responsibility that goes along with it?  When did wild-man Dershowitz excuse hypocrisy in the exercise of police power?  The Alan I remember was never an apologist for the powerful.  He was a defender of the downtrodden.  Where did he go?

So no, professor, Spitzer isn’t paying an unfair price for a sexual peccadillo, or for joining an impressive list of men who loved women too well.  He resigned out of shame of his own creation, and should he be prosecuted, as I believe he will, it will be for the commission of crime and nothing more.  That his conduct was hypocritical presents an irony.  If it was criminal, then he suffers a fate solely of his own making.  There’s nothing vague about it.