You will all remember the Senator from the great state of Idaho who was caught in a stall in a Minneapolis airport men’s room, legs planted wide on the floor and tapping away to attract the attention of men in the next stall over, won’t you? I call former Senator Larry Craig Tapper McWidestance and I now see that the Tapper McWidestance Award for Miscreants in a Legislative Body has been won by former Representative Christopher Lee (R-NY), a married man with a family, who used Craigslist to post a personal ad with a shirtless picture of himself. He described himself as a lobbyist and shaved a few years off his age in correspondence with a woman who contacted him from his post on “Women Seeking Men”. When she googled him and found out that the goods weren’t as represented, she sang to the news media and made the picture public.
Former Rep. Lee voted against the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. He obviously was applying it in his own life.
I do not rejoice that people who make wrong choices in their personal lives get bitten back from it. I have made wrong choices too, and have been duly bitten. Even people in public life have the right to a private life as well.
However, people in public life, especially those who advocate a moral code of some sort, should not break that moral code in private unless they are prepared for that to become public.
I’m not gloating (a male Democratic representative from NY had to resign a year or so ago when he was caught groping a male House page, so goose’s sauce is gander’s sauce). But what I’m continually learning in my own life as well as in reading the news is that consistency in one’s public and private lives is so much easier than doing one thing and advocating something entirely different. This cognitive dissonance in one’s life really makes it difficult to be authentic. It also makes it difficult to be a legislator.
as someone else pointed out, at least this one had the grace to resign within two hours of this going public, instead of going down the denial road. Not that I’m going to cut him a whole lot more slack than that.
Over 20 years ago, I used to go to college at the now former congressman’s district. I watch the coverage on Buffalo and Rochester TV websites. Some people are “Shocked!” while others are “Typical politician!”
With new media, I suspect there will be more stories like this in the future. How will these scandals affect the public sector?
Who knows.
How will these scandals affect the public sector? Who knows.
I am resisting the urge to howl, “The SHADOW knows……!”
This stuff has always gone on, and I think everyone knows that. From Thomas Jefferson’s liaison with Sally Hemmings up to Bill Clinton’s DNA on Monica Lewinsky’s dress, there have been scandals that have mostly been hushed up.
Years ago the Congresscritters and Presidents had the sole right of publicity for such things. So if Ms. X had said that President Y had raped her while she was cleaning the Oval Office, no one would have believed her and the news media would not have given her much time or space.
Today, with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, there are many and varied ways for unwanted news to get out about official bed shenanigans.
Those politicians who have been consistent in their moral standpoints in public and have lived up to those standpoints in private have nothing to fear. If a politician says that he’s for family values while cheating on his own wife (or her own husband) then I have no sympathy if the news gets out.
After Watergate, any scandal in politics is fair game, I guess.