June 2009 has been a cruel month to the Dumbos. First Senator John Ensign (R-NV) and now Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) have turned the GOP into the Gnarly Old Penis. Forget Teddy K and Chappaquiddick and The Slickster and the stained blue dress; the GOP has white men who swing from both sides of the plate (Larry Craig (R-ID) and Mark Foley (R-FL) for the same sex; Ensign, Sanford, and John Ritter (R-LA) for the opposites). Talk about your equal-opportunity philanderers! As the Idiot-in-chief (43) said of gynecologists, "Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB/GYN's aren't able to practice their, their love with women all across this country." The Doofus-in-chief (43) could just as well been speaking of his fellow Dumbos practicing their love with whoever brung them to the dance. Even The Mighty Quinnette from Way Up North has introduced Young Love to The Love Party. Her faux outrage over Gap-Tooth's shot at her sexually active adolescent daughter in a Top Ten List rings hollow. The Mighty Quinnette paraded her pregnant daughter and the slacker who impregnated her before the nation and has the gall to play the indignation card when David Letterman suggests that Bristol Palin is sexually active. Duh! is the first sound in Dumbo. If this is (fair & balanced) hypocrisy, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
The Love Party
By Gail Collins
On behalf of the people of Illinois and New York, I’d like to thank South Carolina for giving us Mark (“I’ve been unfaithful to my wife”) Sanford. Finally, a governor who’s weirder than Rod Blagojevich and less responsible than Eliot Spitzer.
Really, we’re extremely relieved.
Sanford, as we all now know, went AWOL from his state last week, then re-emerged to admit that he had not been on the Appalachian Trail writing a book, as the chaotic explanations from his family and his staff had suggested, but in South America where he had gone to break up with his lover. “I spent the last five days crying in Argentina,” he said, completely ignoring all we have learned from Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Sanford was widely regarded as a Republican presidential contender. Many of you may have forgotten this, but for a while in 2008 he was a serious candidate to be John McCain’s running mate. (We now stop briefly to contemplate the possibility that there were even worse options than Sarah Palin.) Now, he’s become the second GOP hopeful in a week to do a swan dive off the adultery cliff. Perhaps the party has been too strict about the no-girlfriends-while-running-for-president rule. If they don’t drop it, pretty soon the youngest contender will be 75.
Until Wednesday’s unpleasantness, Sanford was chairman of the Republican Governors Association, otherwise known as the Association of Possible Presidential Contenders Plus Arnold. Over the past few years, he has tried to woo the party’s base with antics like bringing two piglets into the Capitol to protest political pork and refusing to accept $700 million in federal stimulus money aimed at preventing massive layoffs of public school teachers.
For a state with an unemployment rate above 12 percent, that ranks 39th in public school performance, that last caper might not seem all that entertaining. But it did draw the attention and affection of right-wing commentators, who nudged Sanford right up the potential-contender ladder.
However, all that is in the past. Although his wife issued a statement holding out the possibility of reconciliation, the press conference made it clear that sexual indiscretion is less the big problem here than the fact that Mark Sanford is a complete loony. “I won’t begin in any particular spot,” he said, rambling on about his “love for the Appalachian Trail” (where he didn’t go) and his fondness for “adventure trips” (clearly a personal specialty).
Then Sanford apologized to his wife, his sons, his friends, his staff, his in-laws, “anybody who lives in South Carolina” and people of faith “across the nation.” At this point, I had the terrible feeling that I was the only person in the entire country to whom Sanford was not conveying his personal regrets.
The peculiar thing about the apologies was that Sanford seemed to be under the impression that his worst dereliction of duty involved womanizing. I think I speak for us all when I say that if a governor wants to fly off for a rendezvous with his mistress, the first rule should be: leave a phone number. If you must flee to a love nest, make sure it’s one with an Internet connection.
“It was interesting how this thing has gone down,” Sanford told the assembled reporters, launching, with occasional teary asides, into an extremely boring story about how he and the unnamed Argentine had been good friends and then he tried to help her keep her marriage together, and then they started e-mailing and yadda yadda yadda. (When the governor said “I’ll tell you more detail than you’ll ever want” it was actually easy to believe him.) The whole confessional began to sound like an episode of one of those Finding Love reality shows, when the Bachelorette demands to know if her 25 suitors are all there for the right reasons.
There are some larger lessons here. I know you’re relieved to hear that, since it is highly unlikely that anybody actually gives a fig about Mark Sanford. (Including, perhaps, his beleaguered staff, which spent the last week fending off calls from the lieutenant governor and diligently filing Sanford’s daily Twitter.)
First of all, we may want to consider the possibility that the governor’s decision to reject the federal stimulus money was not a mighty stand against government spending but instead an early sign of total nuttiness.
Second, perhaps it is time to rethink the idea of constantly electing middle-aged heterosexual men to positions of high importance.
Third, although the governor-run-amok thing is worrisome, South Carolinians can take comfort in the fact their state gives its chief executive slightly less power than a game warden.
Fourth, before this search for a presidential nominee goes any further, I’m thinking it’s time for the Republicans to apologize for putting us through the Clinton impeachment. We seem to have pretty well established that sexual stone-throwing is a dangerous sport. Ω
[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Besides America's Women, which was published in 2003, Ms. Collins is the author of Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins. Her new book is about American women since 1960. Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.]
Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company
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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
