A drum roll, please, as we add Mark Sanford to the Clinton-Spitzer-Edwards-Ensign-Vitter-Craig Parade of Alpha-Male Idiots that’s been a regular feature on this blog. Again I shake my head, dumbfounded: What possesses people who already have so much to arrogantly, blindly grab even more?
Their collective autobiography title: Insatiable. As Springsteen sings in “Badlands”:
Poor man wanna be rich,
Rich man wanna be king,
And the king ain’t satisfied ’till he rules everything.
But as loathsome as Sanford is, as hypocritical as he is for voting to impeach Clinton for his sexual gamesmanship, then subjecting his own family to worldwide ridicule, there’s got to be an even hotter circle of hell for the media leeches who have now printed the private e-mails between Sanford and his Argentine flame.
I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years, so I know he’s a public figure and I know he has no legal recourse, and some of the e-mails were sent on state equipment, yeah, yeah, but this is doubly disgraceful. Not only does it add more pain and humiliation to Sanford’s family, it drags the most private thoughts of a man and woman into the voyeuristic glare. What “right to know” justifies this? What public good does it serve that outweighs the damage done? This reminds me of scenes in Orwell’s 1984, where Winston Smith learns that Big Brother’s reach has no boundaries.
I would never have published these e-mails. I’m not even posting a link to them. What a lousy day for journalism.
