An Argentinian hacker exposes Mark Sanford’s emails to his Argentinian female friend. Sanford believes he will rise from this crisis like King David did in the Bible. Only problem on this latter front, such a rise never happened.
Read MoDo’s op-ed here.
PrairiePopulistsAndProgressives.net 
“The Republican Party will never revive itself until its sanctimonious pantheon — Sanford, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Palin, Ensign, Vitter and hypocrites yet to be exposed — stop being two-faced.”
–Maureen Dowd
I see this slightly differently. The GOP will never permanently revive itself until it abandons sanctimony. The kind of hypocrisy displayed by Mark Sanford is the kind of sanctimony that leads directly to the three steps in “one step forward and three steps back.”
In other words, until the GOP finds a way to stop judging Americans it will always be vulnerable to big drops in popularity. The drops may not be permanent — like the stock market, the drops are like over-corrections and seem to inch up within a year or so — but they’re fatal heading into elections.
It doesn’t help that their judgment always boils down to “s/he’s not a Republican and therefore has no validity.” For example, Dowd points out that Sanford was willing to trade Federal stimulus dollars benefitting South Carolina’s poor and politically disenfranchised for an improved personal status within the GOP. This is the logical equivalent of concluding these people don’t matter because they’re not, as GW Bush would say, “of his base.”
This kind of hypocrisy is especially wounding after 1998, when the GOP impeached a very popular non-Republic president, Bill Clinton. Hopefully they’ll pay full retail for that, and for a long time to come.
Yes, it would help Republicans to stop representing themselves as morally superior. They’re not, and everyone knows it.
And, if they want to be in charge in governmental positions they probably need to remember “the public good.” They need to remember that good government watches out for the public good and that sometimes outweighs the public costs. Improvements to our environment, to education, to health care are areas the government needs to take care of, and stop trying to privatize areas of public good so corporations can make profits off what government should be handling.
Maybe they need to reflect on Teddy Roosevelt founding the national parks or Eisenhower founding the national highway system. There is more to the public good than the military and until Republicans remember that, they deserve to remain no more than the inconsequential minority party.
I guess the hacker who outed Sanford’s emails was a younger and jealous boyfriend of Sanford’s Argentinian love interest. What tawdry mess…
He probably agrees with the old, “all is fair in love and war” quote. They do both seem to have the potential for bringing out the worst in people.
As usual MoDo hits hard with her snark. But how true it is. The truth is the same whether it’s Sanford’s weepy version or Maureen’s cutting whit.
And to think, how long did he lead the the lynching of Bill for his personal exploits.
Hypocrisy, thy name is legend.
Trusting a politician to be a exemplar of marital fidelity is like trusting a dog to watch your sandwich. I like them better, and think better of them, if they are true to their marriage vows, but I vote for them to be true to good leadership in politics.
It’s never been the act of infidelity as much as the hypocrisy of some who are unfaithful. If they’ve represented themselves to be morally superior while their conduct is the same as those they criticize and look down on, I figure they’ll lie about everything else too.
I think it was 0n the thread about the few women politicians being in the infidelity club, that someone observed that politicians were guys in high school who couldn’t get a date with a cheerleader, but when they have a lot of power, along with that comes tempting access to women unknown to them before.
Maureen has this compare/contrast style that I call a Dowdversion which is very good at pointing out all the hypocrisy between Sanford’s public image and his private actions. You can see them side by side at my blog.
Thank you for stopping by! I will check the blog.
I checked it out. It was worthwhile. Our friend is a fan of the MoDo. I am also, but a lesser one…