NOTE – I’m breaking a blog rule of mine today.  Politics are discussed below, although I do skewer both sides.

I was fooled.  Duped.  Hoodwinked.  And it’s my fault.  Ever since he was the Attorney General for the state of New York and attacked Wall Street cheaters with a zealous streak, I thought Eliot Spitzer might actually be one of the “good guys”, whatever that might mean when it applies to a politician.  But politicians are always bound to disappoint.  He’s not even in the same state as me and I could care less what party he belonged to but he seemed to actually have the public’s best interest at heart for a while.

Then, like most people who become drunk with power, he gets caught participating in the same vice he so vigorously fought to eliminate.  It’s about power.  It’s also about the ability to not abide by the rules most of society follows. It’s also about the rush of having the chance to maybe get caught.  The thing these politicians don’t seem to grasp is that the public actually does understand we’re all human.  We make mistakes and we have our vices.  But when someone winds up being two-faced about something, attacking it in public while participating in it out of the spotlight, that’s where I change my description of you from “human” to “hypocrite”.

This is NOT, I repeat, NOT an attack on any particular political party or organization.  They’re all rife with hypocrites like these whether they be megachurch pastors who physically abuse their wives or do meth and have gay sex all while preaching family values.  Republicans seem to also like the gay sex thing, especially in toilet stalls.  We’ve had Democratic presidents shooting their seed all over girls’ dresses although that does seem quite trivial now in comparison to sending thousands of Americans to die overseas for murky ideals at best.

Another good, yet fictional example of all this was on of HBO’s better shows this past decade – 'The Wire'.  It just finished it’s 5-year run last Sunday and really skewered politicians throughout.  The most telling example though was Tommy Carcetti, a Baltimore councilman-turned-mayor who, at least on the surface, appeared to truly care about fighting poverty and violence in his community.  But once he became mayor, it was obvious he then had his sights on the Maryland governor’s office and any move he made was calculated to allow him to advance his career.  Police services kept on getting cut until finally a detective started staging previously murdered bodies as though there were a serial killer on the loose.  Once the paranoia of this supposed serial killer set in, Carcetti saw his chances at being governor getting slimmer by the day.  He then threw all the resources the police needed their way until it was discovered that it was a ruse by the police to get funding to nab a drug dealer.  The bottom line was that the mayor talked about fighting crime but didn’t actually give the police the resources they needed until the violence was hurting his image in the polls.

This fictional tale isn’t really that fictional.  I see my hometown of Detroit is currently besieged by a crooked mayor about to (hopefully) resign due to sexual improprieties while in office, among other things.  Even worse is his last name is Kilpatrick; far too close to my surname.

Power is intoxicating.  I do believe that most people who get to the top of the heap in their profession have sold their soul at some point to get there.  It’s not solely politicians who fall into this trap.  I do feel bad for the wives who are trotted out during these shameful press conferences and have to hear their scumbag husband say he’s going to step down from office to spend time with his family.  Not only have these assholes violated their wedding vows, they then draw their family into their vortex of shame and trot them out to be shamed publicly with them.