Not a Toe Tapper, But Close

[Hoss]

Try again Hoss, you are smarter than that.

"Hypocrisy" the cornerstone of partisan politics.  If we applied a standard of removing all hypocrites from politics, our political system would become a vacuum.

President Clinton lowered the bar of the public moral expectation for all leaders.  If Clinton didn't resign, why should Sanford?

Did Clinton use the taxpayer money to transport himself to the location of said sexual act?  If Sanford did that, then you betcha he should resign.

My problem is with Sanford's patently 'holier-than-thou' attitude, and the Republicans' attitude about sexual deviancy in general.  If you go out on a bully pulput and subscribe to the notion of fidelity as part of your talking points, wouldn't it behoove you to 'practice what you preach'?

And with reference to WJC, this has been going in the White House FOREVER.  Thomas Jefferson wasn't immune from it and he was just our third president.  JFK wasn't either.  The only reason people blame Bill is because the 24/7 news cycle made him the poster boy for Presidential infidelity.  Let's not act like it hasn't been going on for two centuries.

[Conan71]

Did Clinton use the taxpayer money to transport himself to the location of said sexual act?  If Sanford did that, then you betcha he should resign.

My problem is with Sanford's patently 'holier-than-thou' attitude, and the Republicans' attitude about sexual deviancy in general.  If you go out on a bully pulput and subscribe to the notion of fidelity as part of your talking points, wouldn't it behoove you to 'practice what you preach'?

And with reference to WJC, this has been going in the White House FOREVER.  Thomas Jefferson wasn't immune from it and he was just our third president.  JFK wasn't either.  The only reason people blame Bill is because the 24/7 news cycle made him the poster boy for Presidential infidelity.  Let's not act like it hasn't been going on for two centuries.

We know it's been going on for two centuries.  If President Clinton hadn't been such an arrogant sociopath, he wouldn't have managed to so publicly stain the office of President.  (Pun semi-intended).

Sanford is a sanctimonious donkey.  But look at the essence of what you are saying: "moral hypocrisy should be grounds for dismissal for a Republican".  Should we dismiss other kinds of hypocrisy in our elected officials?  Should we give Democrats a free ride on it simply because they aren't beholden to some moral code?  Can we find anyone who isn't a hypocrite in elected positions?  If the standard becomes that hypocrisy is grounds for removal from office every state legislature in the country and our US HOR and Senate will look like the rapture just happened.

[Conan71]

Oh, and FWIW, Republicans not being tolerant of sexual deviancy is painting with a broad brush.  I don't have a problem with it, in fact, I rather enjoy it. 

[Hoss]

We know it's been going on for two centuries.  If President Clinton hadn't been such an arrogant sociopath, he wouldn't have managed to so publicly stain the office of President.  (Pun semi-intended).

Sanford is a sanctimonious donkey.  But look at the essence of what you are saying: "moral hypocrisy should be grounds for dismissal for a Republican".  Should we dismiss other kinds of hypocrisy in our elected officials?  Should we give Democrats a free ride on it simply because they aren't beholden to some moral code?  Can we find anyone who isn't a hypocrite in elected positions?  If the standard becomes that hypocrisy is grounds for removal from office every state legislature in the country and our US HOR and Senate will look like the rapture just happened.

Conan, Conan, Conan

You're reading into too much what I'm saying.

ALL public officials doing this should be held accountable.  The reason I find it so offensive in this case is because of the personal (not necessarily political) hypocrisy of the Governor.  If he had never said 'Clinton should resign', I would not be all over him like I am now.  Hell, Newt never got this kind of vitriol from me because he was not as much of a moral 'high-roader' as alot of Republicans are.  Once again, it comes right back around to 'those living in glass houses'.

And re-read my statement:

Republicans' attitude about sexual deviancy in general..

I know most Republicans aren't as Puritanical as some appear to be, but they have aligned themselves with that sect (the Evangelicals) who essentially do all the moral huffing and puffing.  But when you get right down to it, they're all mortal men, just like us.   

[Conan71]

Hoss, I'm simply sick and tired of the moral equivalency game, it's old and tired.  You know what pisses me off?  Hypocritical Democrats who come out publicly in support of gays and gay agendas or minorities and minority agendas, but have no trouble singling out and ruining gay or minority people's lives when it suits them politically.

I really could care less if Sanford is being a hypocrite.  Did he break the law or didn't he?  If he broke the law, impeach him and prosecute him, if not, they can wait till the next election and vote him out.

[FOTD]

Hoss, I'm simply sick and tired of the moral equivalency game, it's old and tired.  You know what pisses me off?  Hypocritical Democrats who come out publicly in support of gays and gay agendas or minorities and minority agendas, but have no trouble singling out and ruining gay or minority people's lives when it suits them politically.

I really could care less if Sanford is being a hypocrite.  Did he break the law or didn't he?  If he broke the law, impeach him and prosecute him, if not, they can wait till the next election and vote him out.

It's the cummulative effect, Conan. After a while, it's really humorous. We could play who's next. But few remain.

Michele Bachman gets caught with a dildo belt while going through airport security?

[Hoss]

It's the cummulative effect, Conan. After a while, it's really humorous. We could play who's next. But few remain.

Michele Bachman gets caught with a dildo belt while going through airport security?

Thanks for that mental image I'll try to be getting rid of the rest of the day.

[Hoss]

Hoss, I'm simply sick and tired of the moral equivalency game, it's old and tired.  You know what pisses me off?  Hypocritical Democrats who come out publicly in support of gays and gay agendas or minorities and minority agendas, but have no trouble singling out and ruining gay or minority people's lives when it suits them politically.

I really could care less if Sanford is being a hypocrite.  Did he break the law or didn't he?  If he broke the law, impeach him and prosecute him, if not, they can wait till the next election and vote him out.

And I'm right there with you.  It pisses me off when ANY party does it.

And as far as Sanford, I didn't call for his resignation until the rumor about him using taxpayer money to go to Argentina came up, which would be breaking the law.  If he did that, his a$$ needs to either resign or be impeached.  If it didn't happen that way, his conscience and the South Carolina gubmint needs to hash out what happens next.  At the least, he left the state for multiple days without informing the Lt Gov (or so has been reported) and that should be grounds for a reprimand of some sort I would imagine.

[Conan71]

Hoss, no argument there.  If he created an economic development trip just to go get a hot piece, then he's legally a fraud and he needs to be punished.  If the hot piece was incidental to the trip, different story.  I would assume that's going to be investigated heavily.

He's a flake and he should have let 2nd in command know that he was going to be in charge for five days.  I'd say this makes room for one more person on the GOP ballot in '12.

[Conan71]

It's the cummulative effect, Conan. After a while, it's really humorous. We could play who's next. But few remain.

Michele Bachman gets caught with a dildo belt while going through airport security?

Someone pass me the mental bleach, please.

[Hoss]

Someone pass me the mental bleach, please.

I'm just laughing insanely right now thinking of someone on the forum here just going to town with Photoshop and Google Image search for 'michelle bachman'....wow, I'm crying now I'm laughing so hard!  My coworkers think I'm even more nuts!

[RecycleMichael]

I know most Republicans aren't as Puritanical as some appear to be, but they have aligned themselves with that sect (the Evangelicals) who essentially do all the moral huffing and puffing.  But when you get right down to it, they're all mortal men, just like us.   

You mortals just crack me up.

I think moralists enjoy deviance because it is deviant. It balances suppression. Think of it as the Yin and Yang of Taoism.

[FOTD]

Mark Sanford Jokes
Late-Night Jokes about Gov. Mark Sanford's Sex Scandal
By Daniel Kurtzman, About.com

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/sexandpolitics/a/mark-sanford-jokes.htm

"Gov. Mark Sanford disappeared...and it turned out he was in South America. And then it turned out he was down there because he was sleeping with a woman from Argentina. Once again, foreigners taking jobs that Americans won't do." --David Letterman

"Gov. Sanford may have broken the law because he left the country without transferring power to his lieutenant governor. Yeah, apparently Sanford violated South Carolina's sacred bros before hoes law." --Conan O'Brien

"How dare this man, a married man, in this economy, outsource to a foreign country when there are plenty of slutty women living right here in the United States. Am I right, fellow Americans?" --Jimmy Kimmel

"Did you hear about Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina? He mysteriously disappeared last week and nobody knew where he was. Today, Sanford admitted to having an affair in Argentina. I'm like, great, now we're outsourcing mistresses." --Craig Ferguson

"Good for her I say! Good for you! Finally! I never understood why these women had to stand by their douchebag at the press conference. He's like, 'Oh I did this I did that then I took off her dress and then we went to Hooters'...I think what the wives should do is just wear a t-shirt that says 'I'm with stupid.'" --Craig Ferguson, on Mark Sanford's wife not appearing at his press conference

"The past couple of years there have been a whole bunch of scandals involving governors. You know things are bad when the most normal governor of the last decade was Jesse 'The Body' Ventura." --Craig Ferguson (Watch video clip)

"Last night, we talked about the strange disappearance of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. The media reported he was hiking the Appalachian Trail and forgot to tell anyone, including his wife and sons, over Father's Day weekend. We here reported that he had actually gone into the woods to chase a coyote and f*** it. It turns out, we were both wrong [on screen: a report saying Sanford had been in Argentina]. I apologize to you, sir, for implying that you were a coyote f***er. Clearly, you went to Argentina to have dirty, dirty sex with a capybara, a giant rodent indigenous to the Argentine region." --Jon Stewart

"Oh. Marital infidelity. You are just another run-of-the-mill human being whose simple moralizing about the sanctity of marriage is only marred by the complexities of their own life. Well, just another politician with a conservative mind and a liberal penis." --Jon Stewart

"Needless to say, this not great news for the Republican party. So many prominent Republicans have been caught in these situations lately: Mark Sanford, Larry Craig, David Vitter, John Ensign from Nevada. And do you want to know why this is happening? The gays. They've destroyed the institution of marriage and now this is what we get" --Jimmy Kimmel

"Well, you know what they say, in the way that no man can resist the wiles of an exotic Argentine woman, those same women are equally tantalized by middle-aged, fiscally conservative Episcopalians."--Stephen Colbert

"On Sunday was National Nude Hiking Day. It's not a great sign when your spokesman doesn't know where you are, realizes it's national Nude Hiking Day, and thinks, well that's probably where the governor is!'" --Craig Ferguson

"Apparently the governor said he wanted to do something exotic. Clearly what he meant was he wanted to do someone exotic." --Craig Ferguson

"Anybody here from South Carolina? Their governor down there, Mark Sanford disappears. He's gone for four days. The first time he said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Okay, I'm just dumb enough to believe that. Then he says, 'No, no, no, forget the Appalachian Trail. I was in South America.' Now, I'm not sure I'm with him. Today he said he woke up in Las Vegas, hung over with a tiger and a baby." --David Letterman

"But now it turns out that he was in Argentina with another woman. A married guy, got a family, he's in Argentina with another woman. And here's what I want to know -- why can't he be like our former governor and use a local escort service? What's the problem?" --David Letterman

"Today the governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, who's the head of the Republican Governors Association, held a press conference to reveal he had an affair with a woman from Argentina. People were shocked because Republicans traditionally don't do well with Hispanic women." --Conan O'Brien

"Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina -- this just keeps getting weirder. He was missing for five days. He finally showed up. He claimed that he was just hiking in the Appalachian Mountains. Then just today, he revealed that he was not hiking in the Appalachian Mountains, he was in Argentina the entire time -- in Argentina, where he was having an extramarital affair. Wow! It all seems insane until you realize who his mistress is -- Carmen Sandiego." --Jimmy Fallon

"Anybody here from South Carolina? Well, their governor, their Governor Mark Sanford just disappears for four days. Literally, takes a hike. He's out. And now, he's back. And he says, 'Well what's the big deal? I was just on a vacation to clear my head.' You see, we never had that head-clearing problem with Bush. You know what I mean?" --David Letterman

"This is a big story because his wife, the governor's wife, had no idea where the guy was for four days. And today he gets a call from Bill Clinton saying, 'Hey, who's your travel agent? Who, where, how do I -- how do I get in on this?'" --David Letterman

"People are calling him a hypocrite, because he's another family values politician having an affair, but I don't see it in political terms. I'm just embarrassed for my gender. Ladies, if you want to know what it's like being a guy, think about the fact that there's a man, the governor of a good-sized state, who asked himself, 'Hmm, can I sneak off to Argentina for a week with my lover without anybody finding out?' And somehow came up with the answer 'yes.' I hope that gives you a sense of what we're up against." --Jimmy Kimmel


More Bad News for the Religious Right: God Admits to Affair!
By Don Davis
"WHADDYA' WANT FROM ME; IT'S BEEN OVER 2000 YEARS SINCE I LAST HAD SEX WITH THE VIRGIN MARY."

[FOTD]

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Genius in the Bottle

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 27, 2009
WASHINGTON

As in all great affairs, Mark Sanford fell in love simultaneously with a woman and himself — with the dashing new version of himself he saw in her molten eyes.

In a weepy, gothic unraveling, the South Carolina governor gave a press conference illustrating how smitten he was, not only with his Argentine amante, but with his own tenderness, his own pathos and his own feminine side.

He got into trouble as a man and tried to get out as a woman.

He wanted to get his girlfriend a DVD of the movie "The Holiday," presumably the Cameron Diaz-Kate Winslet chick flick about two women, one from L.A. and one from England, who trade homes and lives. He was fantasizing about catapulting himself into an exotic life where stimulus had nothing to do with budgets.

With Maria, he was no longer the penny-pinching millionaire Mark, who used to sleep on a futon in his Congressional office and once treated two congressmen to movie refreshments by bringing back a Coke and three straws.

No, he was someone altogether more fascinating: Marco, international man of mystery and suave god of sex and tango.

Mark was the self-righteous, Bible-thumping prig who pressed for Bill Clinton's impeachment; Marco was the un-self-conscious Lothario, canoodling with Maria in Buenos Aires, throwing caution to the e-wind about their "soul-mate feel," her tan lines, her curves, "the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night's light."

Mark is a conservative railing against sinners; Marco sins liberally. Mark opposes gay marriage as a threat to traditional marriage. Marco thinks nothing of risking his own traditional marriage, and celebrates transgressive relationships. He frets to Maria in e-mail that he sounds "like the Thornbirds — wherein I was always upset with Richard Chamberlain for not dropping his ambitions and running into Maggie's arms."

Marco, the libertine, wonders how they will ever "put the Genie back in the bottle." And in the sort of Freudian slip that any solipsistic pol like Mark would adore, Maria protests in Spanglish: "I don't want to put the genius back in the bottle."

Mark is so frugal for the taxpayers that he made his staffers use both sides of Post-it notes and index cards, and once brought two (defecating) pigs named "Pork" and "Barrel" into the statehouse to express his disgust with lawmakers' pet spending projects.

Marco is a sly scamp who found a sneaky way to make South Carolina taxpayers pay for a south-of-the-border romp with his mistress.

Mark is so selfish he tried to enhance his presidential chances by resisting South Carolina's share of President Obama's $787 billion stimulus package, callously giving the back of his hand to the suffering state's most vulnerable — the jobless and poor and black students.

Marco is generous, promising to send a memento of affection that Maria wants to keep by her bed.

Mark hates lying. As he said of Bill's dalliance with Monica, "If you undermine trust in our system, you undermine everything."

Marco lies with brio, misleading his family, his lieutenant governor, his staff and his state about his whereabouts, even packing camping equipment to throw off the scent from South America. He told whoppers to his wife, a former investment banker who managed his campaigns and raises his four sons (solo on Father's Day). She put out a statement quoting Psalm 127 to snidely remind her besotted husband "that sons are a gift from the Lord."

Jenny Sanford told The Associated Press on Friday that Mark had told her he needed time to be alone and write, so she was stunned to learn he was in Argentina on a "Roman Holiday." Before he left to "write," she warned him not to skip off to the other woman.

Mark, who disdains rascals, agreed that he wouldn't. Marco, who is a rascal, skipped off.

Mark went back to work on Friday, giving his cabinet a lecture on personal responsibility and comparing himself to King David, who "fell mightily ... in very, very significant ways but then picked up the pieces and built from there."

Actually, the one thing David didn't do after his adulterous fall was build, because he was forbidden by God to construct his dream temple in Jerusalem.

Sanford should give his piety a rest. He told his cabinet that the Psalms taught him humility. (There's a chance that a younger Argentine boyfriend of Maria's also taught him humility, by jealously hacking into her e-mail account and leaking the governor's missives.)

Sanford can be truly humble only if he stops dictating to others, who also have desires and weaknesses, how to behave in their private lives.

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.

[guido911]

Is there a John Edwards and mistress sex tape?

http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/06/28/2009-06-28_aides_tale_of_john_edwards_sex_tape.html