A Sexy Bastard AND a Great American...?

I’m willing if you are.  Whaddaya say?  Can we just drop the whole “sex” card from politics?  Based on recent behavior, this preoccupation with people’s private sex lives isn’t doing either party any good.  Is it?

Sex has long been the plaything and downfall of the rich and powerful.  The list is lusty and sordid.  When should we begin?  Let’s start just before the media started reporting this stuff.  JFK was famous for his afternoon “flings” in the White House.  The media knew, but didn’t report it.  After that, LBJ came along and he too was famous/infamous for his own dalliances with secretaries and other White House workers.  There was smoke in the rumors about Bush One and we got actual fire with Clinton and Lewinski.  That’s just the Presidents.  The lesser members of the Washingtocracy have been very busy indeed.

The last couple of years have really seen the unleashing of the elected sex hounds.  While Newt Gingrich was calling for Clinton’s resignation, he was banging the future Mrs. Newt #3 while still married to Mrs. Newt #2.  Larry Craig was caught in a men’s room in a Minneapolis airport.  He was in there for illegal sex while carrying on about Clinton from the Senate floor.  Senator John Ensign was born again, or so he said.  It didn’t stop him from fooling around with the wife of a staffer.  He made things worse, of course, by hiring the woman’s husband AND son!  Those were just a few of the recent Republican players and I’m probably leaving some out, but you know the Dems can’t really be far behind in the head count.  Probably isn’t really “heads” they’re counting, is it?  Sure enough, Democratic New York Governor Elliott Spitzer rutted himself right out of office.  Seems he had a taste for high-priced call girls.

And now we have the latest, lamest, whiniest public mea culpa of all.  South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford wasn’t on the Appalachian Trail after all.  Seems he was on the trail of something else in Argentina.  We all knew what it was days ago when he wife said she didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.  That told us that she knew exactly where he was and exactly what he was doing.  He was away, having sex.  And shooting his political career through the heart?

Why do they do it?  I assume it’s partly the sex and partly the “getting away with” something.  Maybe they’re as dweeby as they appear.  There must be something to this political power/sexual urge thing.  After all, it was Henry Kissinger who said “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” And come onnn, if a mope like Henry Kissinger could get laid….

I don’t claim to know anything about these miscreants and their abilities, but I am willing to grant that most of them are more than they appear.  Most appear, on both sides of the aisle, to be right out of central casting.  Pretty, thin, fashionable, and that’s just the men.  I assume some of them must have abilities beyond being able to win regular popularity contests.  Some of them must have something to contribute, but we’re tossing them out the door over what—sex?  Please.

I never trusted sex.  I never trusted any urge that made me lie to people I care about just to feel good for a few moments.  But that’s all sex is, isn’t it?  No matter how much email Sanford and his senorita shared, no matter how compromised his wife and family were by their written intimacy, it was only the physical stuff that got them in trouble.  And let’s face it, the non-sexual components of a relationship are the most meaningful anyway, right?

So I say let’s call off the sex thing.  If you have sex outside your marriage vows, it doesn’t stop you from being a good lawyer or doctor or even a good radio host, why should it interfere with being a good politician?  It shouldn’t.

So you go ahead, you politicians.  It is possible in my book to be a sexy bastard and a great American.  Get all the action you want.  There’s just one thing.  If you have the sex, don’t condemn others for the same thing.  If you have the sex, don’t dare to apologize in some pathetic public sobfest.  Because the sex is no big deal.  The hypocrisy is a big deal and that we won’t forgive.