intermittent thoughts on my life and work as the chess coach at IS 318, a public middle school in Brooklyn

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

my name was awesome

What an interesting performance! What do you guys think? Alan thought Sanford's body language suggested he was completely lying/performing.(suspicious behaviors?: shrugging his shoulders, looking down a lot, having his tongue in his mouth) Alan is a big expert on the non verbal cues.Jesse thought he was apologizing for something he knew his social circle would disapprove of, but that he himself didn't really feel was so wrong. That made a lot of sense to me.

Myself, I think who you are sleeping with is your pretty much entirely your own business, so I felt some initial sympathy for the guy. On the other hand, it's annoying when people only figure out that life is complicated when they themselves fuck up.

(from the NY Times: The governor was not known as a moralist but has frowned on infidelity and as a congressman voted to impeach President Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky affair. “He lied under a different oath, and that’s the oath to his wife,” Mr. Sanford said at the time on CNN. “So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”)

Also, I don't know what people even mean to convey when they apologize for something they thought about and decided to do. Sorry how? And these fantastic leaked emails,

("I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night's light - but hey, that would be going into sexual details ...")

Jon Stewart's take: "Just another politician with a conservative mind and a liberal penis."

FOX News' take?He's a Democrat.... (!!)just like Mark Foley was.

update: (July 6) ok, if I were married to this guy, I would divorce him for being unable to shut up. It feels almost like he's exaggerating his own debasement but allowing himself to hold on to this one, redemptive excuse of love.

I have to admit, as a die-hard Democrat, when I first heard about another hypocritical Republican caught cheating on his wife, my reaction was one of glee and another one bites the dust.

After listening to Sanford's press conference, however, I can't help but be somewhat impressed with the man. He obviously fell in love with this other woman after eight years of communicating -- not your typical one night stand. I believe him when he said he spent 5 days crying in Argentina.

To be married with children and truly in love with another person that loves you has got to be agonizing, and I feel sympathy for him regardless of my feelings regarding his politics.

Sure, your wife's business also, no doubt, but I don't get why people automatically assume politicians’ private lives affect their professional capability. I wouldn’t change plumbers or dentists if I found out my plumber/ dentist was some weird philandering dwarf-lover.It seems very understandable to me that politicians can’t stop themselves having affairs—the whole point of their job is to get other people to like them and choose them and do what they say.

"It seems very understandable to me that politicians can’t stop themselves having affairs—the whole point of their job is to get other people to like them and choose them and do what they say."

Our politicians are supposed to be responsible adults who know the difference between right and wrong. I realize that last sentence is idealistic drivel written by someone who is way past the age where naivete should factor into perception but that is how I feel.

To oversimplify, if a politician's wife can't trust him to do what he is supposed to do (or to refrain from doing what he is not supposed to do), then how are the voters supposed to believe in him and his professed stances on the issues our society faces?

At the level of governor of a state or national officeholder, I think that politicians should lead by example and not just babble meaningless pablum which they have no intention of holding themselves to. When Sanford was in the House of Reprentatives and Bill Clinton was up for impeachment Sanford stated that the real crime was the bond of trust with his wife that Clinton had broken and that was Sanford's rationale to vote to impeach. Yet, Stanford is now resisting calls for his resignation.

Who he is in love with is his and his wife's and it seems this other woman's business.Having said that, it is a character issue - but not in the usual way it is interpreted. It sounds like he is really in love with this other woman and so I hope the three of them (gov, gov wife and this other woman) all find happiness ultimately.But if you are the governor, even if you need to get away for a while, he should have let someone know how to reach him and if he were to be out of touch, have the Lt. Gov run things. Governors have gone on vacation, taken ill or just taken time away and there is process that should be used. You just don't take off for 5 days regardless of your political affiliation. If he had said that he and his wife were having some issues and he needed to take a few days off to sort out some private matters, there would be some gossip, but this happens a lot everyday. But to just take off - he is really love sick or out of sorts - maybe he should resign and get his life sorted out first.

Hypocrisy is never pretty but as vices go it's probably one of the better ones. At least the hypocrite acknowledges the importance of standards and expectations even while he or she fails to live up to them. If you think of it there are only 2 ways to avoid being a hypocrite: 1.) to live up to your high standards every day without fail, ever, OR, 2.) to not have high standards at all. # 1 is probably impossible and I personnally prefer hypocrisy to # 2.

The governor was not known as a moralist but has frowned on infidelity and as a congressman voted to impeach President Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky affair. “He lied under a different oath, and that’s the oath to his wife,” Mr. Sanford said at the time on CNN. “So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”

...

Um, OK. He voted to remove someone from secular political office because he committed what Christians consider a sin by cheating on his wife.

So explain to me why he's "not known as a moralist"? Because he didn't get on enough talk shows to make much of an impression?

Politicians, in general, are sociopaths. You have to lie on a daily basis, to everyone who might have a microphone or video camera or a voter registration card. You have to advocate for dumb laws you don't even have the time to read, because your handlers tell you to and to appease the special interests who spent a lot of money to get you in office.I would imagine that cheating on a spouse does not have the same emotional baggage to a politician than to a normal human, crocodile tears notwithstanding. And yes, this trait cuts across party lines.

Steve H, your expectation seems especially unrealistic when it's applied to the state governors we elect.

Let's also not forget a certain ex-governor who painted himself as a "compassionate conservative," then decided it would be a good idea to leave citizens in the lurch after a category 5 hurricane and subject a bunch of random foreigners to arbitrary imprisonment and torture.

We're becoming a nation of prudes, hypocrites and voyeurs. It's pathetic that these politicians feel the need to go on national television to confess their sins. This guy screwed up because he left the country without telling anyone (while supposedly being in charge of an entire state). Elliot Spitzer screwed up b/c, well, at least in this country paying for sex is illegal (although seemed like a pretty mutually satisfactory arrangement to me). Clinton screwed up because he lied about the whole thing, and most reprehensibly, tried to accuse monica of being a liar to deflect suspicion on himself(unforgivable in my book).Patterson screwed up b/c he's an idiot. The list goes on and on. We inundate our childred with sex on TV and teach teenage girls to dress like sexpots, and then moralize and flagulate ourselves for adult transgressions we label sins. This is maybe a sad story of unfullfilled love. What bothers me most about this guy is that he is that he is apologizing in an effort to save his career not apparently his family (he seemed to have suggested that the press conference was the first chance he had to apologize to his kids!!!). Would have been better to just tell people its none of their business (other than the leaving the country part unannoucned for which he should have apologized). Maybe the republicans will learn a lesson and scrap the whole family values routine which they get hung with every time.

There are all sorts of situations that involve a specialized facet of life that one has to learn by doing: chess, playing a musical instrument, job interviews, learning a new language, and... romance.

These all have to be learned, and one of the annoying things about learning them is that all beginners make the same sort of mistakes, no matter how old they are when they start learning. That's why it's best to hit them young so that if you're going to make the big mistakes, you do it at an age when they are easier to recover from.

He seems to me like someone who just never dated -- probably just married his wife because her list of qualifications looked like what he was looking for -- so he has no idea what romance is like and got totally blindsided.

As for Fox news, they are merely anticipating the point in the next few years when all elected officials are Democrats and the only Republicans public figures are talk show hosts.

Republican Sex Scandals Dwarf Those of Democrats.They've been blaming everything on Bill Clinton since BEFORE the 1992 election & they're still blaming him (In case you [anon. {ugh!}] didn't notice, Bill Clinton has been OUT of office since January of 2001). By far the worst thing Clinton ever did was bowing to the Republicans by signing off on NAFTA which was initiated by Bush 41. The Lewinski "sex scandal" was a gigantic politically motivated & unfortunately effective distraction.

C'mon. Clinton was one of a long line of politicians in sex scandals. Jefferson was accused (correctly, it seems) during his term of an affair with Sally Hemmings, one of his slaves. (c.f. http://tinyurl.com/ls32bl). This stuff is as old as mankind itself. Blaming your political opponents for it, either way, is silly.

It's the wife job to satisfy the husband in marriage, if the guy runs of to bang a woman in Argentina and leavs his state unattented to--You have to blame the woman for not satisfying her man, perhaps this is crude and archaic but I believe this is the real reason!