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Authors, sign in!Remember Wilbur Mills back in the 70's cavorting with his "Argentine firecracker" in the Reflecting Pool? At least Mark Sanford didn't do that. He wasn't hitting on teenagers, like Mark Foley. He didn't hire hookers, like David Vitter, Eliot Spitzer, or Dick Morris. He didn't humiliate his family by dragging them in front of the cameras for "support," like Larry Craig, or, again, David Vitter, and again, Eliot Spitzer.
Like them, however, he did feel obliged to engage in one of the hallowed traditions of American politics, the public act of contrition, complete with references to -- drumroll! -- God, family, and -- don't forget this, everyone -- forgiveness. Remember how we're all supposed to forgive?
After he got the obligatory pieties out of the way, though, Sanford seemed remarkably, and refreshingly, honest. This was a love affair. He was smitten. Yes, he shouldn't have done it, as everyone agrees, but these things do occasionally happen between two real people. That he was so deluded by love that he thought he might actually be able to pull off the old double-fake and go to Argentina for a week is a sign of just how far gone the poor guy really was.
If would be easier to be sympathetic, however, if Sanford hadn't spent the last decade strutting around as the Biggest Baptist in the West and going on and on about the Collapse of the Family if gays get equal rights.
Published June 24, 2009 by John Petty |
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