I’m sure many of you are watching the train wreck of the sanctimonious Governor Eliot Spitzer with the same degree of fascination and disgust I am. It's like watching Jerry Springer's show, only we get to say we're following the news.

It turns out that Client #9 for the inflated-price rent-a-mistresses at the Emperor’s Club also went by the name “George Fox.” Which offends Quakers everywhere. For us, it’s sort of like appropriating “Martin Luther” or “St. Francis of Assisi” as your sin alias.

George Fox founded the Quakers and spent a lot of time in prison for insisting on the right to practice faith in his own way. Spitzer was more interested, it seems, in practicing on “Faith,” whoever she might be, in his own way, which sounds to have been possibly unpleasant, not to mention unsafe.

The Quaker George Fox was given to saying things like this:

Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you.

That is so not Eliot Spitzer.

Apparently Spitzer wasn’t thinking of Friends, the real name of the Quakers (The Religious Society of Friends). He used the name of a personal friend and campaign contributor. That’s almost more tacky than using the name of some upright guy who died 300 years ago.

I’m thinking the Friend-of-Eliot was probably the hedge fund consultant George Fox who said:

People have no clue there are 100-percent or 97-percent down mortgages they can qualify for. What the buying public needs to do is sit down, put a financial plan together and see what products are available out there.

Creepy though this other Fox may be, friends don’t use friend’s names to visit houses of ill repute. I'm pretty sure of that rule, even though I don't think I know anyone who does that kind of thing--and if they do, not at $4,000 a pop.

Power corrupts. It makes people think the rules don't apply to them.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sort of glad to be an ordinary, oatmeal-eating, God-and-mom fearing Midwesterner living a small life in the pleasant, pretty darn decent town of Wauwatosa, and trying to do it in a  kind and F/friendly fashion. Most of the time.