Gov. Mark Sanford seems to have lost contact with reality. Consider. On one hand, he’s day dreaming of becoming President of the United State, while at the same time and with the other hand, he’s wooing a “very dear friend of eight years” who happens not to be his wife or mother of his four sons.
His relationship with Miss Argentina started with him counseling her that she should go back to her husband and children because it’s “God’s law.” From there on, things got very, very steamy and wacky. We’ll never hear the end of — “I spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina”— on SNL and Letterman.
The drip, drip, drip of dalliance details in the Republican Christian conservative group continues.
Gov. Mark Sanford’s bizarre behavior of going AWOL and leaving the state of South Carolina without leadership, leading his staff into believing he was off meandering along the Appalachian Trail, abandoning his four sons on Father’s Day, then actually flying to Argentina to “cry for five days” with his beloved, is too much on the crazy side for most of us to accept as anything but bizarre.
This is the same Mark Sanford who voted for three of the four articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton. It is revolting to watch his family values campaign video where he preaches family values and morality as his wife and four sons frolic around him. He abused the same marriage rights he wants to deny to same-sex couples. He’s a first-class hypocrite and should resign from office.
Yesterday Mark Sanford looked positively shell-shocked during his free-range, rambling, directionless press conference. The only positive thing about it was that he didn’t drag his innocent wife along with him, as did wide-stance Sen. Larry Craig, hooker-addicted Eliot Spitzer, and call-girl addicted Sen. David Vitter. He did refer to her as a faithful workhorse and dutiful campaign manager…rather like a sweaty sock. Jenny deserves better.
Add to the lingering mix, the messy life of Sen. John Ensign who had an affair with a staffer while her husband served as Ensign’s former chief-of-staff. He even used funds inappropriately to boost her position, salary and those of her relatives. Ensign is a member of the men’s Christian ministry, “Promise Keepers”, which is committed to building strong marriages. Sure.
Look at the messy, sordid lives of Former Speaker Newt Gingrich and hate talk-show host, Rush Limbaugh who some purport to be the leader/s of the conservative Republican Party.
There is something about this endless list of social conservatives, generally right wing hypocrites of the Republican persuasion, where extramarital affairs, gambling, alcohol abuse, prostitution and sexual pursuit of minors have taken a toll.
From their pulpits, they preach moral virtue, family values, right-to-life, marriage between only “one man and one woman” and abstinence from sex before marriage. Their world is 6,000 years old. They push for religious legislation on these “family and moral values” despite public outcry to the absurdity of most of it. They are hypocrites of the highest order.
The typical “American” family isn’t picture perfect. Misplaced memories and old movies rekindle the family image as a faithful, sober, hard-working father married to a stay-at-home devoted wife and mother where a passel of happy, loved, well-educated, fulfilled children sit around the dinner table every night and exchange educational tidbits of knowledge. And no one gets into trouble. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a typical American family any more or precisely how those “family values” are supposed to be applied to all.
Even Bobby Tindal, one of the brightest in the Republican Party, has his problems.
The fundamentals of the morality platform of the conservative Republican Party are violated on a whim. Democrats certainly are not free of their share of scandals, but they don’t moralize and push for religious legislation on core family values then lead lives that are far afield from what they preach and insist on for others. It’s no wonder Republicans have such long faces (except in Kansas and the Deep South).
The only thing absent from this picture is what? Women. Women. Women. Well, except for hapless Sarah Palin who seems to become embroiled in a new controversy each week.
Women have to work twice as hard in this country…maybe ten times as hard as men to reach the same status in politics and the corporate world. Canada’s Supreme Court has five women out of nine members. Our Supreme Court has one woman and eight men. Women are vastly outnumbered in the Senate and Congress. Women work too hard to get where they are to be led astray by the foolishness that captured all those men listed above. We should be electing more qualified women to high office. Jenny Sanford probably would have made a much better governor of South Carolina than her husband. She left a good job on Wall Street to marry him and run his campaigns….and father his children.
And, Obama should equalize the bench and other high positions with qualified women as vacancies occur. There are many other women like Olympia Snow and Barbara Boxer who would serve us well. We should elect more women to render balance to our political structure.
Lastly, I’m weary of having the news dominated by the Sanford/Ensign-like hypocrisies. Indiscretions are one thing….but blatant hypocrisy is unforgivable.
