Narrowing Republican Field
June 24th, 2009 by Jon Taplin
The Republican Presidential Prospect Self-Destruction Derby continues. Charlie Crist, John Ensign, Mark Sanford, Newt Gingrich (his old affair will haunt him now), John McCain. What is it about these self-righteous pols that can’t keep it in their pants?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwBirf4BWew
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwBirf4BWew
hardly a Republican issue
hardly a Republican issue
hardly a Republican issue
Family values, baby! Family values…
It’s really quite hilarious in a way, but these assholes are so out of touch that they really do think they’re untouchable…or they’re all just incredibly self-destructive. No, it’s not a Republican issue except that the Repubs are the ones that make the big deal about morality and values. They put themselves up on a higher pedestal, and therefore they fall farther when the truth comes out.
Schadenfreude is alive and well in America…
Family values, baby! Family values…
It’s really quite hilarious in a way, but these assholes are so out of touch that they really do think they’re untouchable…or they’re all just incredibly self-destructive. No, it’s not a Republican issue except that the Repubs are the ones that make the big deal about morality and values. They put themselves up on a higher pedestal, and therefore they fall farther when the truth comes out.
Schadenfreude is alive and well in America…
Family values, baby! Family values…
It’s really quite hilarious in a way, but these assholes are so out of touch that they really do think they’re untouchable…or they’re all just incredibly self-destructive. No, it’s not a Republican issue except that the Repubs are the ones that make the big deal about morality and values. They put themselves up on a higher pedestal, and therefore they fall farther when the truth comes out.
Schadenfreude is alive and well in America…
Family values, baby! Family values…
It’s really quite hilarious in a way, but these assholes are so out of touch that they really do think they’re untouchable…or they’re all just incredibly self-destructive. No, it’s not a Republican issue except that the Repubs are the ones that make the big deal about morality and values. They put themselves up on a higher pedestal, and therefore they fall farther when the truth comes out.
Schadenfreude is alive and well in America…
Doug- You’re right. John Edwards should go on that list.
Doug- You’re right. John Edwards should go on that list.
Doug- You’re right. John Edwards should go on that list.
Don’t forget Gary Hart.
Don’t forget Gary Hart.
Don’t forget Gary Hart.
Or Thomas Jefferson…
Or Thomas Jefferson…
Or Thomas Jefferson…
Or Thomas Jefferson…
Hello–Bill Clinton
Hello–Bill Clinton
Hello–Bill Clinton
Hello–Bill Clinton
After the mile-long list of self-righteous “Abstinence Only!” Republican ayatollahs getting caught with their doodles in somebody else’s throw pillow, I would think that anyone on the right would cringe to bring up Bill Clinton. But I guess there’s no climax quite as intense as hating Clinton.
There must be relief that at least this latest A Vote For Me Is A Vote For Jesus type is straight. Although the way this story has mutated on an hourly basis, we’ll see if that part holds up overnight.
After the mile-long list of self-righteous “Abstinence Only!” Republican ayatollahs getting caught with their doodles in somebody else’s throw pillow, I would think that anyone on the right would cringe to bring up Bill Clinton. But I guess there’s no climax quite as intense as hating Clinton.
There must be relief that at least this latest A Vote For Me Is A Vote For Jesus type is straight. Although the way this story has mutated on an hourly basis, we’ll see if that part holds up overnight.
After the mile-long list of self-righteous “Abstinence Only!” Republican ayatollahs getting caught with their doodles in somebody else’s throw pillow, I would think that anyone on the right would cringe to bring up Bill Clinton. But I guess there’s no climax quite as intense as hating Clinton.
There must be relief that at least this latest A Vote For Me Is A Vote For Jesus type is straight. Although the way this story has mutated on an hourly basis, we’ll see if that part holds up overnight.
Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman. Read his lips.
Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman. Read his lips.
Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman. Read his lips.
This is such an old take. Democrats can’t win by being counter-self-righteous because it only sets them up for coequal self-righteousness and hence vulnerability. The sins of the flesh are like the biblical rain: they fall on the Republican and Democrat alike. The temptation is heightened by lackeys who encourage a sense of invulnerability in all those who hold higher office, be they senators, governors or other high state officials. Sex, under those circumstances, becomes yet another expression of power lust.
When we judge persons dealing with such power, viz such temptation, we judge ourselves, really. Mark Sanford didn’t represent, nationally, some kind of corsetted morality; he represented fiscal responsibility. What his downfall, so tragic for him and his family, has to do with policy is difficult for me to imagine.
Yet, he’s through, clean through, and I for one don’t take comfort in another contender’s vacating the stage. In general I’d say, the more the better. Gary Hart was staging a fascinating debate before he got caught compromising himself on a boat named “Monkey Business”. In that instant, Hart was through, and all that he’d learned and stood for became a dead letter.
Yet it’s also true that the MSM tend more readily to forgive Democrats even the most outrageous indiscretions, and to let the Barney Franks of that particular party live to fight [or lose] another day.
Note: I write this wearing a green eyeshade, and not a partisan’s Boater.
In other words, Who really loses here?
Who really lost were Sanford’s wife and kids. If he were single, dating, and all that, this would be fine, but clearly he betrayed the trust of his family. If one is going to fuck around town…or around the globe…one should do it cleanly, and I mean that both physically and emotionally. He didn’t.
We all lost, Rick. We all lost. And if the other side tries to trump this up, they’ll lose too, on another day. Still, I appreciate your upholding “traditional family values”.
I don’t understand this form of puritanism in what is an otherwise liberal blog.
Why are affairs in the realm of self-destruction (referred to on this site as Thanatos) and not Eros?
Politicians are grownup people and they should be allowed to have their affairs like everyone else.
I personally don’t like having affairs, but I know those who do and they’re still productive members of society and some of them even manage a family.
As I am not a politician, if ever I meet women I like, I have the freedom to break up with my girlfriend (if I am so inclined) and pursue whatever happiness I think I may find in another’s arms.
And it’s nobody business but my own.
A politician can’t do this. He’s married and has to keep up a public front. So he ends up flying to Argentina to have a rendezvous with his mistress.
So WHAT??
Who CARES?
This should remain between him and his family. The public should not meddle in this, and in my opinion – it’s a private matter.
Why should politicians be held to this impossible moral standard?
Why should they be made to resign from politics for that which others do with impunity?
Only in America.
Whomever (*ahem* Rush) still claims America is a conservative country, probably knows what he’s talking about….
Cool, Armand. I too happen to be naturally monogamous–I guess I find it more interesting than playing the field–but I recognize as really good people many of those I’ve known, and even loved, who don’t share my proclivities. Most of them have been hypocrites, but we all are hypocrites in one way or in others, and hypocrisy, strictly speaking, is not necessarily a bad thing, only a humanly necessary condition.
This business of tying a politician’s public capacity to his or her private transgressions…it’s difficult enough to judge as it is, but doing it in the context of the pol’s party affiliations–that’s just absurd.
If only sexual morality were outside of U.S. politics (as they are in France, where the Pres divorced and married his mistress wo blinking an eye).
But what’s outrageous here is that the GOP has set themselves up as the “morality policy” — particularly vis a vis Bill Clinton’s pants. So it is ironic that their Standard Bearer should be forced off-stage due to his own indiscretions.
If only Sanford and Newt and their buddies had not been so enthusiastically railing against the sins of the Democrats, I could feel more sympathetic, and less like gloating. hahaha
I have no personal moral outrage about this as a sexual affair, but I learned a long time ago that it’s best to finish up one sexual relationship before starting another to minimize the hurts that are otherwise almost inevitable. This guy messed with people who love(d) him, and he will pay the price.
In this case, it’s the exposure of hypocrisy that is so delicious to those of us with the liberal bent. If these guys (and it does seem to be mostly male politicians who drop trou in the most inappropriate ways) weren’t so high, holy, and mighty about everything we wouldn’t care a whit.
I just watched him speaking to the press.
He was deeply regretful about going through a rough patch in his life, and obviously has some unworked issues with his family.
Yet the American media (and obviously the American people) feel it’s newsworthy to get all the details NOW.
Keith Olbermann even went on to quote on the air an email Sanford sent his mistress, in which he wants to touch this woman’s soul.
Olbermann couldn’t help but add that Sanford also mentioned the woman’s tanline and (touching it) but he wouldn’t quote it.
This is yellow journalism.
It’s disgusting that it passes for news.
He might have messed with people he loved – but that’s not why he’s on the news. He’s on the news because it’s juicy.
What goes on with his family and his love-life has no place in the public discourse.
The humiliation of having to stand there in front of the world and tell deeply personal things, just made me sad.
Vultures.
Self-destructive?
Seems like this guy is on the fast track to hooking up with a woman he cares deeply for, and couldn’t run away from the ugly (and gleefully humiliating) world of politics.
I wish this guy and his family all the best in life, however it turns out. And hopefully, as far as he could get from the public eye.
I heard Sanford’s account in its entirety, Armand, and it struck me as something that pained him to the core, rather than as some schtick he memorized. Had I been there I’d have squirmed and written in my steno pad sideways.
All this time I was wondering about how it happens that this story should have knocked off the front pages the alternative story of bodies stacking up in Iranian hospitals.
Hugo,
“All this time I was wondering about how it happens that this story should have knocked off the front pages the alternative story of bodies stacking up in Iranian hospitals.”
I had the same thought. There’s the real story, the story needing to be told, examined and digested. But its moved below the fold to make room for Sanford & Co. Who makes those decisions anyway?
One senator said Sanford stood up “like a man,” and admitted his wrong doing. My question is why didn’t he stand up like a man and not cheat on his family? If he had maritial problems he should have solved those before hitting the trail in search of new love.
And my question is who are you to tell another man how to solve his marital problems?
How is that any of your business?
Who are you to judge?
How is it alright for Keith Olbermann to read aloud pieces of a private mail to the entire world?
And then joke and commentate about it with Finnegan – a comedian from VH1 – all the while giggling like bullies in a school yard.
Seems to me Sanford is well on the side of Eros and not Thanatos.
And Jon,
despite the MSM deeming this newsworthy, I find it discomforting that you would choose to regurgitate this also – and in such a judgmental vain.
“Self-Destruction Derby Continues”….really?
Is that what it is – a derby?
Sounds like there’s very little left of Sanford’s self. He’s all public now.
It isn’t interesting that he had an affair. That’s common. It’s interesting that he took all those risks, left all those emails then embarked on a missing weekend where he would obviously get caught.
This is great day time news cycle twaddle: absolutely worthless to know but fun to talk about.
Politics is now entertainment meaning it is no longer a game of who wants you but who likes you. He’s hosed but what a tale to tell of a tail to whale. Fish stories make the campfire brighter.
There are some things that come with a job and if you want to do that job then you need to uphold the standards. Years ago I was in the ministry. I remember some of my single colleagues wondering why they could not have a single gal stay over night with them in the church housing. I told them they could, but they needed to find another profession as that behavior is not acceptable in the ministry. A governor has responsibilities and it appears the Sanford did not meet those responsibilities. If he does not want to get picked on he needs to be in another profession.
Uh huh.
And I bet that’s what you guys all said in 1998 too.
“News cycle twaddle.”
“Who really loses here?”
“Human tragedies overseas obscured by stupid scandal.”
And I bet that’s what you’ll say when the next Democratic politician is caught in hanky-panky and then lies about it.
You keep glossing over the real problem here. I don’t care if this guy screwed everything that wasn’t nailed down. It’s no business of mine. It’s the fact that he’s a Vote-For-Me-And-God-Will-Smile, Abstinence-Only, We-Are-The-Righteous Republican moral ayatollah, fulminating with rage about Bill Clinton, calling for his head on a pole, and then turning around and doing the exact same thing.
If you think that kind of reeking hypocrisy in our legislators, and the impact it has on things like family planning, birth control, teen pregnancy, and therefore the abortion rate, is mere “news cycle twaddle” that “makes the campfire brighter,” then I can only say I disagree.
Dan nailed it. The GOP has been the “moral majority” bully, preaching one thing but always practicing another. Keep Government off our backs, except in the most personal, private matters, and then, they should be the arbiters of what’s “moral” for us mere mortals, while they conduct their own “private” lives with the same human foibles they see as “moral weakness” if committed by a Democrat.
That is the part that makes schadenfreude inevitable. Throw another log on the fire.
Lewinsky was the end of civilization as we knew and an investigation that resulted in our being open to the attacks on 9/11 and the six years of knee jerk hell that has followed. Meanwhile we had to explain oral to our kids over dinner while Starr ran through $80 million.
Stupid? Naw. Just politics as usual.
If y’all want to get on the moral turpitude talking points bandwagon and do a round of bitter butter battling that helps no one and simply ensures we’ll do this again when the next cat gets caught with paw in fur, go ahead. Sometimes it is precisely the right thing to laugh and move on with it. Let his voters vote him out. They are already mad at him for trying to turn down the stimulus money. A lost weekend is nothing but twaddle, and it will cost him dearly but in the greater scheme of things of the Republic, it’s only yak and smack.
Who takes the Republicans seriously about morals these days anyway? Or the Democrats for that matter?
While we are adding to the endless list of phonies, how about Ted “I did not have sex with that dead woman in the back seat” Kennedy, soon to be a sainted paragon of the Democratic Party?
Seems to me that one fundamental here is that we refuse to recognize what we humans really are, what we do and how we act and react and think and emote. Teachers who sexually abuse students, students who “sext,” and threaten teachers with “exposure” via perjured statements if their grades don’t get raised or recommendations perfected, priests who grope the altar boys and figured out how to build a safe haven for their own kind in the bosom of the Church, guys who shoot their families and themselves in the free exercise of their Second Amendment “rights,” “Jihadicidists” who detonate their personal anti-personnel bombs in the middle of their co-religionists, not to mention “bankers” and politicians and lobbyists who steal from the rest of us and our great-grandchildren too and lie about their uprightness and how it was all good for the entire United States of America, and pick up any newspaper or spend ten minutes scrolling around YouTube and you can pick out any possible number of other examples.
There’s that nice pasteboard image that those among us who aspire to moral ascendancy hold up in front of our real faces, supported by the many players in the Great Narrative who hold that there actually are such paragon-ish unitary monads (yeah, redundant) as “father” and husband” and “mother” and “wife” and “elected leader” and “priest” and “teacher” and so forth. People who tell us they “stand for something.” Ideals and models that we should all aspire to, or at least WE should, what they do is “exceptional” if not exceptionable.
But the mask-holding human critters who stand behind these sham figures are actually animals animated by those little electrical storms that charge around the limbic systems of our brains, reined in and steered only with difficulty by the “higher functions” in the cerebrum. Music and passion and pleasure and the urge to reproduce or at least get it on, hatred, tribalism, even the sense of the divine, are all spun together in the yarn that defines our lives.
Why-do we hate (or maybe just envy) the successful hypocrite? Because we really know our own predilections? Know deep down that we could cheat or rape or kill or lie or steal or betray with nary a qualm, happy to rationalize our own behaviors but with that Puritan’s impulse to see ourselves as better than others, free to rationalize, free to hold that everyone else should do what I say, not what I do or so yearningly want to do?
Sanford’s weepy performance strikes a chord of “understanding” or “forgiveness,” which
apparently also played in the hearts of Jimmy Swaggart’s congregation when that “pillar
of self-righteousness” got caught getting off on rent-a-ladies pulling thongs up into their “throw pillows.” And did the self-abasement/mea culpa/I don’t-deserve forgiveness but I throw myself on your mercy song and dance. He’s back on TeeVee after a few years, peddling the same intolerant messages. Check our Robert Duval’s movie “The Preacher” for a lovely archetype.
And even apologies are debased, CEOs caught in some spotlight doing Something Wrong, trying, on the Spin Doctor’s advice, to “issue a public or even private apology,” or “display contrition,” which works in Japan at least, to allow them to get away with what-ever.
We are not what we think or feel we are.
That doesn’t mean that there’s no moral force in the universe. Or does it?
“We are not what we think or feel we are.”
Sez who?
last nite we sat around, drank wine and talked about the world. Prohibition has poisoned us all. Drug laws winking at use has led us down the path of least resistance to where we are now – voyeurs at a good man’s heartbreak, the march toward torture and fraud fried on a griddle of national self deception. When we lie about basic and simple things like God’s natural products and how they are the spawn of evil we can only hope that sooner or later the economics of the current situation will force a sea change in our current sad state of affairs. Years ago I knew the debasement of the currency and the undermining of morality was simply tied into something as elementary as dope. When will Arnold legalize, tax and escape from the 33% of the legislature involved in the downfall of everything the rest of world knows is good? California dreaming is nothing but a hope that soon economics will make your state wake up. As goes the west, so goes the rest.
Look around.