Spitzer Update

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is reportedly working on a resignation plan and may resign as earlier as today.

Law enforcement officials have also confirmed to the New York Post "that Spitzer didn’t want to wear a condom," which was the unsafe activity about which we were speculating on Monday.

I'm still reading lots of shocked expressions that Spitzer was a patron of the sex industry, even as reports emerge that he's been doing this for a decade or more and dropped nearly a hundred thousand dollars on the habit. CNN's senior legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, who attended law school with Spitzer, said, "To say this is a shock is an understatement" and called Spitzer "the straightest arrow I know." The level of shock and perplexed betrayal and general whatthefuckitude from his friends and allies is interesing; it's a swirling morass of confusion where circled wagons, fierce denials, and accuser-discrediting would be, if the story were ever so slightly different.

If one of the sex workers had made allegations against Spitzer without the benefit of a wiretapped phone call to back up her story, every person who is now incredulously calling Spitzer a "straight arrow" etc. would be refusing to believe even the possibilitiy of his involvement in this scenario, or would bury any suspicion well below the feelings of righteous indignation that one of their own was being smeared by that woman. But Spitzer's been busted bigtime, and there's no room for denials or planting the seeds of doubt about the character of that woman or any of the usual plays out of the playbook—so all his allies can do is express shock and dismay, wonder how it could be he was doing something like that right under their noses. But we knew him!

It's a curious thing to see. And it is worth remembering the next time one of those women makes an allegation against a public figure.

But it won't be.