It's been a busy week for anyone trying to keep track of political sex scandals. (I assume such people must exist in a world populated by bird-watchers and train-spotters.) Two major Republicans going down and out ... both formerly top prospects for a presidential run in 2012.
You've got to wonder how many times politicians and religious figures in the Republican party need to be hoist on their own petards (as it were) before they start to shy away from the temptation to proclaim holier-than-thou positions on other people's personal choices. Or has hypocrisy lost its bite in American public discourse?
Comedian Chris Rock once observed that "Men are as faithful as their options allow." Apparently, powerful politicians have some options.
Conservatives may be especially vulnerable to these episodes because of their absolutist vision of morality. They find subtlety and gradation to be effeminate and unmanly. They like to “go with the gut,” and the gut, as we’ve seen, offers little in terms of learned analysis.
Matt Steinglass has written that these folks suffer from “an inability to cope with the ambiguity of information; or, to say the same thing, the ambiguity of reality. … [They] find it difficult to handle the discounting one must apply to large quantities of complex information drawn from different sources in order to come to a reasonable conclusion.”
If you’ve pondered how the world would be different today if the Clintons had simply said, “Our marriage is nobody’s business but ours,” or if you watched Governor Mark Sanford's self-righteous self-immolation yesterday and wondered what it would be like if a politician had the balls (pardon me, but it's the right word) to hold such a press conference without all the sniveling and groveling, check out this episode of the great radio show, This American Life. Here's a brief description from their web site:
"In the early stages of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, there was a period when one of the questions raised by the whole affair had to do with monogamy. Around that time, Roy Romer, the Governor of Colorado and Chair of the Democratic Party, admitted that for 16 years he'd had a relationship with an aide that his wife and family knew about. We hear tape from Romer's remarkable press conference in which he urged people to talk more realistically about how they really live in their marriages, instead of pretending they are monogamous."
* Title shamelessly stolen from The Daily Show.
