Eliot Spitzer vs. Bill Clinton

In France, high government officials often have mistresses. However, the French public, which can grasp the concepts "live and let live" and "mind your own business," does not seem to mind, and so life goes on.

Whereas in America, high government officials buy prostitutes. All the ones who have not been caught already loudly protest the awful immorality of those who have, to the general applause of the prissy-yet-prurient American citizenry.

You know, maybe this is why so many right-wingers hate Bill Clinton so berserkly (besides, of course, the fact that he raised taxes on millionaires.) Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky was legal, unpaid, between adults, and, for both parties, entirely voluntary. It's almost as though he were one of those loathed Frenchmen! Real Americans don't care a bit for love affairs like that.

It gives one hope, though. A boy out of Arkansas rising to the cultural level of a Frenchman! It's like seeing a chimpanzee learn to fly an airplane. It goes to show that the revolting cultural backwardness and mouth-breathing vulgarity of Americans isn't biologically inevitable. If Bill Clinton can transcend it, the rest of the American public could too.