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.”
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Ah, but do you care if John-Boy Edwards was violating campaign finance laws to cover up his, ummm, baby-momma?
Yes. But by the time they got around to that part I was feeling insulted by the whole subject and had tuned it out.
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.