My Sunday Feeling

I know. Mark Sanford is old news. Michael Jackson, the so-called King of Pop, checked out under appropriately mysterious circumstances last week, pushing Sanford and his marital and political woes off the front page. At least for now.

From my perspective, the Sanford affair is more interesting than the death of Wacko Jacko. It is not unusual for crazy people to come to a bad end. And one had but to gaze upon Jackson's bleached out and oft retrofitted face to come to the inescapable conclusion that he was palpably insane. And so, MJ predictably snuffed it under the care and supervision of some shady cardiologist from Vegas while preparing for a world tour to try to put a dent in the ruinous debt load he had accumulated.

Crazy people come to bad ends. Not every Bible banging fiscal conservative Presidential aspirant has an Argentine hottie on the side. Now THAT'S interesting.

But let's not make too much of this. Most of us have done something stupid with our pants off. At the very least, we all have secrets we would just as soon nobody ever finds out about. Maybe we didn't do anything criminally stupid as did the aforementioned KOP, but we have all done stupid. Over sex. With money. In our professions. Sometimes stupid just pops up and knocks on the door. And we let it in.

But not all of us are in the public eye. And not all of us have staked out moralistic positions about our fellow human beings to induce the electorate to vote for us. Even still, my position is that if Mrs. Sanford can live with it, the good people of South Carolina ought to live with it as well. Sure, the fact that the Governor was catting around with a Latina version of his soul mate is plenty creepy. But if she can live with it, who are we to substitute our judgment?

Except for one thing. If I decide to blow the country it is pretty much nobodies business. But I have not opted for a public life with a public schedule. Mark Sanford up and blew the country leaving the entire apparatus of state government in the lurch. What possessed him to leave the country? I mean, those planes go both ways. Surely, he could have been sufficiently clever to somehow bring her over if he just had to see her. Poorer judgment cannot be imagined. And just because he paid the money back to the state coffers that financed one of his junkets doesn't mean that he didn't violate the criminal laws.

The affair it self is not that interesting. But the circumstances surrounding it and the fact that Mark Sanford thought he could keep this quiet are.

No. It is not unusual for insane people to have a bad end. Come to think of it, maybe Michael Jackson isn't the only whack job to go down in flames last week. He's lucky. He's dead.