Ace: Only Monks Should Be in Public Office.

by Little Miss Attila on June 24, 2009

Well, we’re both against the double standard with respect to Democrats vs. Republicans. We merely disagree about what that standard should be:

Where suspicious circumstances existed with regard to a Republican, the press pushed it until they smoked him out. That’s actually proper.

But with Bill Clinton? Crickets.

Proper? If we really want public life to be a lowest-common-denominator kind of thing.

This is exactly why I didn’t cover the John Edwards baby story: I don’t really care about politicians’ private lives. I don’t care about their marriages. I don’t care about FDR’s indiscretions, or JFK’s. I care about Teddy Kennedy’s, because his involved manslaughter. I care about Clinton’s, because it involved perjury and amounted to a refusal to allow Paula Jones her day in court—and was related to his being a serial harasser.

But, in general, no: I don’t see politicians’ private lives as fair game, any more than journalists’ should be. I’m with Dennis Prager: if someone is otherwise competent, but has had a problem or two in his marriage, he might well be a better candidate than another one whose private life is otherwise “pure.”

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

I R A Darth Aggie June 24, 2009 at 1:43 pm

Ah, but do you care if John-Boy Edwards was violating campaign finance laws to cover up his, ummm, baby-momma?

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Little Miss Attila June 24, 2009 at 1:47 pm

Yes. But by the time they got around to that part I was feeling insulted by the whole subject and had tuned it out.

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John June 27, 2009 at 11:52 am

No promise made by an adulterer has any value at all.

Marriage is nothing if it is not a promise of sexual exclusivity towards another person. The SC governor, as well as a former governor from Arkansas that I could name, and others, have broken this promise, a promise not made to strangers whose support he needed for a personal ambition, but to the one woman that they professed to love above all others. If that promise means so little, then all other promises mean no more.

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