Margo Howard | 07/01/2009 8:25 am
Whatever Happened to Discretion?
Editor’s Note: A longtime journalist, Margo Howard went into the family business (her mother was the fabled Ann Landers) in the 1990s as Dear Prudence. Her broad experience and understanding of human nature provide answers for the troubled — and entertainment for everyone else. Margo’s advice column, Dear Margo, appears twice a week — on Thursdays and Fridays — on wowOwow.com.
What’s up with Gov. Mark Sanford? I cannot remember another public confession so loaded with detail. It’s as though he were a "sinner" looking for forgiveness, and we are Oprah. Sanford is making John Edwards’s stonewalling look positively admirable. (You know … it was only one night and the baby isn’t his.)
I heard a reporter from South Carolina saying on NPR that the governor apparently “wanted to talk." I’ll say. We learned the Argentinean bombshell was his "soul mate," that he "had crossed the line before" — but "not the sex line" — on trips out of the country to unwind with the boys. He went public with this tidbit: "This was a whole lot more than a simple affair. This was a love story."
However … let’s hear it for the little woman. Three cheers for Jenny Sanford who threw him out. How refreshing to see a political wife act like a woman instead of some humiliated helpmate who is often trying to save a political career. No Silda or Hillary she, in effect saying to the public: "If I don’t care, why should you?"
I am trying really hard not to entertain feelings of schadenfreude about love-struck dude being yet another one in a long conga line of Republican moralists who are caught with, well, their pants down. I am frankly embarrassed for the guy. How much more dignified to have sought out a therapist if he had the need to spill? In one of his confessionals he said he had blown up his career, his marriage and the lives of his children. So: what next? Putting on my advice columnist hat I would recommend that he move to Argentina to be with Chapur and become a gaucho, or something. And also that he sit down and shut up.

























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The difference is that the Democrats don’t run on a platform of family values. If a person is running on the idea that marriage is sacred, and then he (or she) turns around and is having an affair, then he is a hypocrite. If a person is running on the platform that gays don’t deserve to have the same rights as other citizens, and then he goes around sleeping with men, he’s a hypocrite. Certainly the whole Clinton thing (which I thought the Republicans had gotten over. Seriously, any time Bush was criticized in his first term it was like, "But … but … Clinton got a blow job!!") was pretty low. However, I can’t help but noticing that many of the Republicans who filled our airwaves ranting about family values have since committed affairs or divorced their spouses.
Essentially, I’m saying if you’re going to talk the talk, you’d better walk the walk. Or in the words of Jon Stewart, "Why do so many people with conservative brains have liberal pensises?"
What used to be called ‘Midlife Crisis’, and now is being referred to as the story of David in the Bible…..is really way more than I need or want to know about….
Maureen Dowd has some good advice in yesterdays opinion column—-maybe Sanford should read it as he travels through his emotions and throws them out at all of us, hoping to discover ‘the answer’……
What is intriguing to me…is that the Republican moralists have seemed to gather round him as consolers, instead of insisting that he is in over his head, or has crossed a line, and SHOULD take time off from his office, FOREVER! What is also curious to me, is that the Dems are not mimicking the Republican ’modus operandi’ of attack, destroy, and slander the man……
Is it that Dems are more in touch with reality? Or are they less ‘moral’? and therefore ‘understand’? Or could it be that the Dems are adult enough to ‘rise above’ the pettiness that is used as a substitute, by the GOP, for competence?
It’s simply not a democratic republican issue. His is a personal issue. No party is more moral than the other when it comes to "affairs of the heart." To suggest that democrats are adult enough to "rise above" well, all I can say is you might want to go back and reexamine Bill Clinton, Jack Kennedy, John Edwards and the like to see how well your theory is working for you that democrats uh…."take the high road."