Sanford Was Smitten

Sanford was head over heels. Kind of feel bad for him on a human level. Okay, I'm over it. Men in power will never learn, will they? They'll risk everything for lust and excitement and I imagine, a break from the dullness of their personal lives. I'm sure politics leaves them no time to nurture their family life, which is why the Obamas seem intent on date nights and emphasizing family.

John Dickerson says there is a disturbing "glee" over Sanford:

I'm not offering Sanford's humanity as an excuse. I'm just marveling at how few people stopped for a moment to even nod to it. My thoughtful colleague William Saletan and Andrew Sullivan were exceptions. Maybe there are others. Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford's human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he's caused, the hypocrisies he's engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all.
Sanford's fumbling efforts to explain how he's tried to rescue himself with his faith offered some people an opportunity to make fun of his religion, as if a confused, lost, flawed person were the right spokesman for anything. People tend to think the most awful thing about a person is the most true thing. They also apparently think it's the most true thing about his or her associations. So an e-mail arrived asking, "[I]s there any Republican not sleeping around?" Maybe Sanford should have been a presidential candidate. He apparently represents an entire party and an entire religion.

I would say the lesson here is conservatives gotta stop signing up to be Promise Keepers and they gotta stop preaching values. They have to make things right in their own house. They aren't the arbiters of what's right and wrong.