Ashley Alexandra Dupre

I rarely blog to music, but this morning, I'm listening to a pop tune, Can You Handle Me?, by Ashley Alexandra Dupre -- the 577,716th person to do so already today .

Such sad fame.

I am all about my music, and my music is all about me… It flows from what I’ve been through, what I’ve seen and how I feel.

So says her MySpace page, which has become wildly popular since Ashley was identified as Kristen, the girl behind the Eliot Spitzer scandal, the girl that grew up Ashley ... Youmans. A precursor of what was to come?

Since she recorded the track -- which is conventional pop stuff: I know what you want, you got what I want. I know what you need. Can you handle me? -- how much more she's been through; how much more she's felt.

It is easy to by sympathetic to her ...

When I was 17, I left home. It was my decision and I’ve never looked back. Left my hometown. Left a broken family. Left abuse. Left an older brother who had already split. Left and learned what it was like to have everything, and lose it, again and again. Learned what it was like to wake up one day and have the people you care about most gone. I have been alone.

... but she made willful choices of glamor and comfort over morality and decency, and now at what should be the tender age of 22, she's paying the consequences.

While most 22 year olds from broken homes in Jersey living in New York would have a dumpy apartment shared with multiple roommates, she opted for a luxury rental skyscraper in Manhattan, The Chelsea Landmark, where imported Italian marble, floor-to-ceiling windows and a gym with a whirlpool and yoga and Pilates studios are offered. Rents start at $3500 a month for a studio of less than 1,000 square feet.

(We live in a 4,000 square foot home in one of the most desirable communities in one of the highest priced counties in the nation, and we pay about double that ... for our mortgage, not our rent.)

Aspiring singers having a hard time finding gigs do not live in such places, but Ashley found a way to secure such high-level material comforts.

There was, of course, another way: honest struggle and hard work, with the knowledge that if you do well, material comforts will come, and that whether you do well or not, spiritual and human comforts -- richer by far -- can be yours. But our pop society does little to reinforce that course. I'm sure there are many young kids who don't even know it's an option.

Instead, they see fame and wealth heaped on many who have done very little to earn it, and they have no measure of success save for the material measure.

As a father of three incredible daughters, who were all here at home last night for a few greatly appreciated and warm hours, I found this paragraph the saddest on Ashley's MySpace page:

Influences: My Brother, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera, Frank Sinatra, Patsy Cline, Carly Simon, Diana Krall, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Aerosmith, Lauryn Hill, Keisha Cole, U2, Jack Johnson, Vivian Green

Not a father in sight, not a mother (although her mother told the NYT they are close and Ashley did legally changed her last name to her stepfather's), not a youth pastor, not a teacher, not a saint or a Savior.

Perhaps I'm being unrealistic. Perhaps I am asking too much of a 22-year-old girl who aspires to be a musician. Perhaps, close as we are, my daughters wouldn't list me as particularly influential in their lives, even though I know I am.

But there were years, many years back, when divorce would have been an easier option than staying together, but unlike Ashley's parents (whose exact circumstance I know nothing about, so I'm not judging), we put the girls first. To put self and selfishness ahead of them, or ahead of God's clear directive to not divorce except, maybe, in cases of adultery, we stuck it out, got over what turned out to be a short spell of trouble, and gave our girls a safe, nurturing, reaffirming home.

None of them left at 17.

I can't take credit for recognizing the importance of staying, though. I was helped by the fact that love never left me or my wife, and by our church, which taught a lot about the importance and sanctity of marriage, and exposed me to plenty of men who had toughed it out through worse situations than ours. How lucky I was to have had that influence!

Her influential brother told AP:

"She's just trying to get through this. We are all trying to be supportive of her."

Will that be enough?

Lefties Line Up For Spitzer

Even those at the peak of leftist commentary, like Glenn Greenwald, can sense that there's something wrong with the hypocrisy of (soon to be ex?) Gov. Eliot Spitzer:

That hypocrisy precludes me from having any real personal sympathy for Spitzer, and no reasonable person could defend him from charges of rank hypocrisy.

But that doesn't mean he shouldn't get a good, secularist, amoralist defense:

But how can his alleged behavior -- paying another adult roughly $1,000 per hour to travel from New York to Washington to meet him for sex -- possibly justify resignation, let alone criminal prosecution, conviction and imprisonment? Independent of the issue of his hypocrisy -- which is an issue meriting attention and political criticism but not criminal prosecution -- what possible business is it of anyone's, let alone the state's, what he or anyone else does in their private lives with other consenting adults?

Indeed, one of Greenwald's commenters, DCLaw1, takes it a step further, with nodding heads all around:

I have always found it very curious that one of the following, but not the other, is illegal:

(a) Two people have sex, one of them gets paid for it;

(b) Two (or more) people have sex, all of them get paid for it, and it is videotaped and sold to third parties as a commodity.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument why this difference makes any actual sense.

In that, DCLaw1 is absolutely right. They ought to throw the porn stars, directors, producers, gaffers, editors and best boys in the slammer, too. There was a day, before Free Speech got naked, when that would have been what people like then-DA Spitzer did to earn their keep.

Whoa. The heads just stopped nodding.

But the Left has much bigger fish to fry than simple morality in the Spitzer case. As Scott Horton writes in Harpers:

It looks like the Bush Justice Department just bagged themselves another Democratic Governor.

Horton has a figure, undocumented, that under Bush's Justice Department, 5.6 times more cases were opened against Dems than Republicans.

He would like us to think that these are all high profile political cases, but he offers us no data to prove it. In fact, he says, "Indeed, a study of the cases out of Alabama shows clearly that even cases opened against Republicans are in fact only part of a broader pattern of going after Democrats."

Let me hazard a guess here. More drug dealers and pimps are Dems than Republicans. Are we being told to elect Clinton or Obama so the purveyors of crack and whores, and crack whores for that matter, will face less prosecution?

And stop me if I'm reaching here, but in watching The Godfather, I never got the sense that anyone in the Corleone circle of influence was a big man in the GOP elite.

Of course, we know from ABC that it was suspicious fund transfers that got Spitzer in trouble, not hooking up with hookers, and we know that it was a bank that initially reported him to the feds, not Karl Rove.

Are we being told to vote for Obama or Hillary so suspicious fund transfers are to be ignored? Hmmm. Maybe.

That seems to be Firedoglake's POV, given the questions asked there:

1. Why would the bank tell the IRS and not Spitzer himself if there was a suspicious transfer?

I believe it's this troubling thing called the law.

2. What is the USA doing prosecuting a prostitution case?

Her point, of course, is that the local DA, not the feds, should be prosecuting it. Certainly that's a harken back to the Clinton admin, whose Justice Department was notoriously soft on sex crimes. But look at the facts: A person from New York was doing business on a large scale with a prostitution ring in DC. Federal jurisdiction, baby.

3. Mike Garcia is a Chertoff crony.

She's following this case a lot closer than I am, but please ... cronyism? Cronyism, thy name is politics. The Dems are all over cronyism during the Bush Admin. It must be because they were exhausted containing their outrage during eight years of Clinton cronyism. This rings of 9/11 Truther Whacko garbage.

4. How did Spitzer's name get leaked to the media, and who did it? Didn't happen to Dave Vitter.

The answer is Karl Rove, of course! Why ask? And if we're so concerned about such questions, Jane, who leaked the FISA surveillance story to the media?

5. Why did Mike Bloomberg suddenly start talking about running for governor recently?

Could it be because he decided not to run for president? Spitzer is 18 months into his term ... about time to fire up an opposition campaign, ya think?

6. The Mann Act? Are you kidding?

People who don't like prostitution being prosecuted don't like the Mann Act and are always harping about it being a political tool more than a prosecuting tool. But it was written to provide the tool for prosecuting interstate prostitution. I kid you not.

7. Spitzer's been in the line of fire of the GOP hit squad for a while.

Technically, that's not a question. But here's one for you, Jane: What high profile, ambitious Republican has not been in the Dems' line of fire for a while?

Eliot Spitzer's fall is a great personal tragedy and his family has the misfortune of it also being a great political spectacle. By turning his crime and fall into a rant against prostitution laws, Bush, old laws, the GOP, Chertoff and goodness knows what else, the Left is doing their man no favors.

But I'd rather watch their ranting than Spitzer himself, any day.

Spouse Abuse

As New York governor and superhero crusader in his own mind Eliot Spitzer faces the camera and admits he's just another guy who thought power would cover his sins -- just like the guys he so aggressively prosecuted to win the governor's mansion -- keep an eye on his wife.

There she is, playing the faithful political wife role, and through the entire clip, the camera never once inches over to the left to bring her more completely into the frame. It's as if to the media she is nonexistent.

Watch her eyes. For the most part, they are locked on the statement he's reading. Every once in a while she looks quickly at him with an expressionless expression, then returns her gaze to the sheet of paper.

That's shame, folks. She can't bring herself to look at the man she married. She certainly can't look at the people in the audience, much less the people on TV. She may remember him saying:

"I had a simple rule. I never asked if a case was popular or unpopular. I never asked if it was big or small. I simply asked if it was right, or wrong."

Apparently the simple rule did not apply to the person who was supposed to be closest to him, the person he was supposed to give the great gift of trust to.

That's why, despite the camerawork, she is anything but nonexistent. She is, in fact, central to this story:

Mr. Spitzer is likely to resign, perhaps as early as today, according to a person close to him, which would effectively end his political career just 16 months after he was elected New York's governor by a wide margin. "But first he's dealing with this personal tragedy at home," this person said.

It's not covorting with prostitutes that caused Spitzer's fall from grace -- it's idiotically defying the basic moral rule of not cheating on your wife. No wife, no resignation. Don't kid yourself; the morals of politicians only go so far.

As a public service for those who haven't seen the sordid details yet (you cave-dwellers!), here they are, courtesy of WSJ, which also provided the indent copy above:

Mr. Spitzer had registered under the name "George Fox," according to a person briefed on the situation, using his own Fifth Avenue Manhattan address. Mr. Fox, a hedge-fund consultant, is a longtime friend and supporter of the governor's. A person close to Mr. Spitzer said Mr. Fox had no involvement in the matter.

At around 9:30 p.m., the woman, who used the name Kristen, entered Room 871, as designated by the client, the complaint says. Shortly after midnight, Kristen reported to her boss that the appointment with Client-9 went well and she collected $4,300, partly as a deposit for future trysts, it says. "I'm here for a purpose. I know what my purpose is," it quotes Kristen as saying after the encounter.

If you want your fill of sordid details -- four pages of it -- where to you turn? The Daily News, of course.