A Little Sumthin' Sumthin' On The Side For Sanford

Just another week in the news
with lots of celebrity nonsense which was over reported, as usual
and the big important story which was under reported, as to be expected.

I didn't want to let the week go by without commenting on craziness coming out of South Carolina.
While I'm generally nonchalant about people and their issues arising from affairs of the heart, I don't look kindly on the hypocrisy of politicians.
I've posted on Eliot Spitzer and his hooker habit
and the investigation into Dominique Strauss Kahn's affair
and John Edwards and his baby mama
so onto South Carolina's Governor Mark Stanford.

Here's a really bright and accomplished guy (ex wall street banker)
with a really gorgeous and super bright wife (also ex wall street banker)
and four fabulous sons

who risks losing his marriage and his career for this woman

OK so I understand that affairs of the heart are inexplicable and cause otherwise rational adults to behave in irrational ways

but risking his marriage, and future presidential bid, and doing it by using $8,000 in public funds for the affair is another thing entirely.
At the very least Mark Sanford is wealthy, so why didn't he finance his trip with his own money?

And what was up with the televised Mea Culpa, hadn't he embarrassed his family enough?

And why didn't he realize that as a public servant he was always under constant scrutiny?

What is it about the psyche of politicians, on both sides of the aisle, that allows them assume that there is one set of rules, moral and economic, that govern us little people while another set applies to their behavior. From Newt Gingrich to John Edwards, it seems that the more powerful the politician, the more likely it will be that he is getting a little sumthin' sumthin' on the side.

To borrow from a couple of comments from this article

What Sanford did was inexcusable but he didn’t drive off a bridge, flee the scene, and leave a girl to die, ala the Lion of the Senate.
He didn’t have a prostitution ring, a gay one in fact, run out of his house.
He didn’t lie under oath about a protein stain while serving as the POTUS.
He wasn’t a Grand Wizard of the KKK.

but

If his wife can't trust him, how can the people of South Carolina trust him.

Mark Steyn has an interesting take on "The Bubble" the Sanford claimed he was in and needed to escape.

In a republic of limited government, the governor, two-thirds of the state legislature and the heads of every regulatory agency should be able to go "hiking the Appalachian Trail" for a lot longer than five days, and nobody would notice.

Instead, we have the governor of South Carolina resorting to subterfuge worthy of one of those Mitteleuropean operettas where the Ruritanian princess disguises herself as a scullery maid to leave the castle by the back gate for an assignation with a dashing if impoverished hussar garbed as a stable lad. Perhaps some enterprising producer would like to option a Carolinian update of "Prince Bob," the hit of the 1902 theatrical season in Budapest, in which the eponymous hero, a son of Queen Victoria, escapes "the bubble" of Buckingham Palace by getting out on the streets and wooing a Cockney serving wench

He continues

I was asked the other day about the difference between American and British sex scandals. In its heyday, Brit sex was about the action – Lord Lambton's three-in-a-bed biracial sex romp; Harvey Proctor's industrial-scale spanking of rent boys; Max Mosley's Nazi bondage sessions, with a fine eye for historical accuracy and the orders barked out in surprisingly accurate German; Stephen Milligan's accidental auto-erotic asphyxiation while lying on a kitchen table wearing fishnet stockings…. With the exception of the last ill-fated foray, there was an insouciance to these remarkably specialized peccadilloes.

By contrast, American sex scandals seem to be either minor campaign-finance infractions – the cheerless half-hearted affair with an aide – or, like Gov. Sanford's pitiful tale (at least as recounted at his news conference and as confirmed by the e-mails), a glimpse of loneliness and social isolation, as if in the end all they want is the chance to be sitting at the bar telling the gal with the nice smile, "My wife, and my staffers, and my security detail, and the State House press corps, and the guy who writes my Twitter Tweet of the Day, don't understand me."

I don't know about this...somehow it sounds like Steyn is giving Sanford a pass and blaming it all on big government. Regardless of the size of the Sanford's state, staff and securitydetail...the entire situation shows bad judgement.