North Star Writers Group - Syndicated Commentary: Opinion, Humor and Features

June 25, 2009

Found: Mark Sanford . . . the Perfect Republican Candidate

They loved him. They worshipped him. When he announced his opposition to the Obama stimulus plan and attempted to refuse the $700 million in federal money that would have flowed into his state through it, they very nearly canonized him. And with each of his countless declamations and pronouncements against Obama activities and statements, be they health care reform or cautious support for the Iranian resistance, the neanderthal Republican base became more and more convinced that they had found their 2012 savior in the person of one Mark Sanford.

There is no reason whatsoever that Sanford’s recent confession to whoring around on his wife should change that. In fact, it should do nothing but solidify his position.

Sanford’s Wednesday press conference, in which he confessed an adulterous affair with an Argentinean woman, capped a drama-filled week in which the mercurial South Carolina governor had seemed to have fallen off the very edges of the earth. Had he gone hiking along the Appalachian Trail? Was he frantically writing in seclusion, far from the circus of state government? Had he been teleported to an alternate universe, or traveled through time to the Pleistocene era? No one seemed to know. Not his wife. Not his staff. Not his lieutenant governor, or members of his security team. And certainly not the U.S. embassy in Argentina, or the Argentinean government – even as he cavorted about that South American country in the company of his comely but illicit companion.

Time was when an American politician (See: William Jefferson Clinton) would have been hoisted on his own petard for boinking outside the marital bed, particularly if done on the taxpayer’s dime. Today’s new, modern Republican Party, though, has changed all that. Sanford joins Larry Craig, Mark Foley, David Vitter, John Ensign and others who’ve initiated a new sexual revolution on Capitol Hill: When they’re not getting diapered by hookers or cruising for hot man-on-man action in airport bathrooms, they’re jetting off to South America on $21,000 of taxpayer dimes while leaving taxpayer-owned decoy vehicles filled with hiking equipment in airport parking lots far from their actual destinations. As per Sanford.

Miracle Mark got all weepy-bawly in true crocodilian fashion as he recounted his misdeeds to a roomful of reporters and announced his penance – resignation from the chairmanship of the meaningless, unknown, irrelevant Republican Governors Association. The vultures were already there to pounce: Sanford’s 2012 presidential hopes were finished before they started, sayeth the oracles at Fox News (the same ones with the prescience to forecast the current McCain presidency, as it happens).

Why should this be? It’s not as if immorality, corruption and misappropriation of public funds had ever stopped a family-values Republican before. Professional tramp Warren Gamaliel Harding threw down the man-trollop gauntlet way back in the ‘20s with his countless dalliances, and in the years since, a succession of Bible-clutching Republican snakes have done their damnedest to live up to his standard. Mark Sanford is only doing what Republicans do best – serving their own grasping, selfish interests, regardless of the cost to their families, their constituents or the country.

That they simultaneously proselytize to the rest of us about our morals – there is no more staunch a defender of Traditional Marriage Between A Man And A Woman Than Mark Sanford! – is an irrelevancy, mere political theater.

By his actions, Mark Sanford has shown that he has exactly what it takes to assume the mantle of Republican leadership, and to carry the standard of his party in its failed bid for the White House in 201 – a completely hollow soul. Where Republicans are concerned, we should expect nothing less.

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