SubscribeThose who are questioning the Governors absence loudest, seem to ignore the fact in the age of Internet and blackberry, Public servants can address the people’s business from just about anywhere you can boot a laptop. If the Governor were truly “missing” in the sense implied by some in the media, his security detail would have already alerted the appropriate federal and State agencies.It's like an ignorance-and-naivete burrito, wrapped up so tightly together.
Write something? Who even says that? Usually you'd be more specific, like, a book? A novel? A manuscript? A poem? A letter? Fill out a bill? Just something?ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MARK CARRY TWO PIGS INTO THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND GET PIG CRAP ALL OVER HIS COAT AND SHOES ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MARK CARRY TWO PIGS INTO THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND GET PIG CRAP ALL OVER HIS COAT AND SHOES ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MARK CARRY TWO PIGS INTO THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND GET PIG CRAP ALL OVER HIS COAT AND SHOES ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MARK CARRY TWO PIGS INTO THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND GET PIG CRAP ALL OVER HIS COAT AND SHOES ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MARK CARRY TWO PIGS INTO THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND GET PIG CRAP ALL OVER HIS COAT AND SHOES ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MARK CARRY TWO PIGS INTO THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND GET PIG CRAP ALL OVER HIS COAT AND SHOES ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MARK CARRY TWO PIGS INTO THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND GET PIG CRAP ALL OVER HIS COAT AND SHOES ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MARK CARRY TWO PIGS INTO THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND GET PIG CRAP ALL OVER HIS COAT AND SHOES ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MARK CARRY TWO PIGS INTO THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND GET PIG CRAP ALL OVER HIS COAT AND SHOES ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MARK CARRY TWO PIGS INTO THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND GET PIG CRAP ALL OVER HIS COAT AND SHOES
This is really weird. Why would he call his office and not his wife, especially once he'd (supposedly) been told that everyone was freaking out about him being missing?Further* evidence that he's a closeted gay man. His self-loathing has spread from beyond just himself; he now detests his wife, and internally blames her for his sexuality.
Either the whole Appalachian Trail thing is a terrible cover story, or this guy is an idiot. Either way that's it for his Presidential ambitions.I don't think it's quite that simple. The Republican Party doesn't really seem to mind nominating philanderers, e.g. McCain, or blatant idiots, e.g. Palin.
So he took a plane to the Appalachian Trail?Maybe he's doing the north-to-south hike.
So he drives off in a state car and goes to the airport?
While I believe every person deserves a vacation, our constitution gives only one man authority to act in case of an emergency - the governor of South Carolina. Should the governor decide to vacation away from South Carolina again, it is my sincere hope that he will take his security detail and keep his cell phone on so that he can be reached in case of a large-scale emergency.I love the way he phrased that; so courteous, so gentle, but at the same time, that "I do hope the Governor keeps his cell phone on next time he bugs off somewhere without warning" is just priceless. I love the South for this.
2 pm presser. Get popping.
If you wanted to go hiking on a coastline, would you really pick Argentina in winter?
Haggard's gay prostitute is claiming that Sanford was in Colorado Springs with him
"Governor Sanford would never engage in the incredibly immoral acts Mr. Jacobs has alleged took place," the spokeswoman said. "Governor Sanford believes homosexual acts are a sin and violate the Bible and the sacred institution of traditional marriage, which is why he fully supports South Carolina's Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as being between only a man and a woman."I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
Yes, but "car was identified" strikes me less as "That's a car!" and more as "That's the car of Sanford's nineteen year old poolboy!"According to the source, a second car was identified at the Columbia airport, next to the SUV Sanford is believed to have used.BREAKING NEWS: A source says it is possible a third car was parked next to the second car. Another source claims that the airport parking lot may have been full of cars, and possibly even trucks.
Did he really think that the best way to keep an affair under wraps was to disappear for SIX DAYS without letting anybody know that he'd be gone or where he'd be going?
'Adultery' is the living together and carnal intercourse with each other or habitual carnal intercourse with each other without living together of a man and woman when either is lawfully married to some other person.
"Below are excerpts of e-mails, obtained by The State newspaper in December, between Gov. Mark Sanford and Maria, a woman in Buenos Aires, Argentina."
"You have a level of sophistication that so fitting with your beauty. 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 ..."I'm waiting for the loofah line !
“They are ‘the Family’—fundamentalism’s avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the ‘new chosen,’ congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential ‘cells,’ to pray and plan for a ‘leadership led by God,’ to be won not by force but through ‘quiet diplomacy.’ Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have written from inside its walls.
The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the Far Right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a ‘family’ that thrives to this day. In public, they host prayer breakfasts; in private they preach a gospel of ‘biblical capitalism,’ military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao, Doug Coe, the Family’s current leader, declares, ‘We work with power where we can, build new power where we can’t.’
Sharlet’s discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the Cold War, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not ‘What do fundamentalists want?’ but ‘What have they already done?’”
Meet ‘The Family’God, I hate religious idiocy.
GNN: What are some this group’s core ideas and what level of secrecy is involved here?
SHARLET: The goal is an “invisible” world organization led by Christ — that’s what they aspire to. They are very explicit about this if you look in their documents, and I spent a lot of time researching in their archives. Their goal is a worldwide invisible organization. That’s their word, and that’s important because it sounds so crazy.
What they mean when they say “a world organization led by Christ” is that literally you just sit there and let Christ tell you what to do. More often than not that leads them to a sort of paternalistic benign fascism. There are a lot of places that they’ve done good things, and that’s important to acknowledge. But that also means they might be involved with General Suharto in Indonesia and if that means that God leads him to kill half a million of his own citizens then, well, it would prideful to question God leading them…
To majority media and other Democrats : we police our own, and you don’t get to judge.The right-wing seems just a little bit defensive today, huh?
By all means report the facts. I’m sure you’ll be happy to cover every salacious detail. Have at it. Be sure to cover the pain and suffering of Governor Sanford’s family. While you are at it, cover the depth to which all South Carolina and nation-wide Republicans and conservatives rightly feel betrayed.
Beyond that, just shut up. Shut your lying, hypocritical, power-above-patriotism, hyper-partisan, two-faced, shamelessly double-standard bearing pie hole.
You don’t get to judge.
“The standard Sanford has set for other politicians over the years has been fairly high. A member of the House of Representatives during the heyday of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, he was often a harsh critic of the president for his marital misconduct.
This is ‘very damaging stuff,’ Sanford declared at one point, when details of Clinton's conduct became known. ‘I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally (to resign)... I come from the business side,’ he said. ‘If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he'd be gone.’
Explaining his decision to back impeachment articles against Clinton, he added, ‘I think what he did in this matter was reprehensible... I feel very comfortable with my vote.’”
"The bottom line in politics is, I think, at the end of the day to be effective in standing for both the convictions that drove you into office and the principles that you outlined in running. And that is not restrained to simply the world of Caesar, it applies to what you think is right and wrong and everything in between."
if he used public money for this, most likely a criminal as wellAs rtha pointed out, he's definitely a criminal, regardless of whether he used public money for this or not.
The thing is (and this is where the schadenfreude comes in for me) ... is that Republicans don't really allow themselves to have "human" sexualities.Yes they do. They don't allow others to do so.
"About six months ago, an anonymous tipster sent The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., copies of e-mail messages supposedly exchanged between Gov. Mark Sanford and a woman named Maria in Argentina.
Reporters sent e-mail back to the originating e-mail address and to the woman, whose e-mail address was included, in an effort to verify that the messages were genuine. They never heard back, and so the paper did not publish them until Wednesday, after Mr. Sanford admitted having an affair.
'We had not determined they were authentic,' Leroy Chapman, the political editor at The State, said of the e-mail. 'What it was, was a puzzle piece that was hardly discernible.'
It took a second tip — this time that the governor was on an airplane from Argentina — for the paper to put together the story.
....On Tuesday, The State received its second tip, this time from an airline passenger who said, according to Mr. Chapman: “We’ve seen your governor on an airplane. He’s not on the Appalachian Trail.” This tipster suggested that the governor would be returning from Argentina.
Mr. Chapman dispatched Gina Smith, a political reporter, to the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Wednesday morning to meet a flight from Buenos Aires. 'He definitely was surprised to see me, and I was equally surprised to see him,' said Ms. Smith, in an interview on MSNBC. 'It was just sort of a hunch that he would show up at the airport in Atlanta.'
Late Wednesday, The State posted several of the e-mail messages it received in December on its Web site and was to print more in Thursday’s paper. But with one mystery solved, another endures: Mr. Chapman said he still did not know who sent the e-mail to the paper in the first place. 'It’s kind of a moot point,' he said, 'but I’m still curious.'"
Scott H. Huffmon, a political science professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., said it was unclear whether there would be pressure on the governor to resign. “His opponents,” Dr. Huffmon said, “are sitting back trying to figure out if they’d be better off with a completely emasculated governor to deal with or if they’d be better off with André Bauer,” the lieutenant governor, who would take office if Mr. Sanford resigned.
...But [State Senator John] Land said that he doubted there would be pressure for Mr. Sanford to go because a resignation would mean that State Senator Glenn McConnell, the powerful president pro tem, would have to become the lieutenant governor, a relatively powerless position.
I've seen a lot of commentary calling the presser a train wreck, but honestly, I can see myself in his spot being equally rambly and unfocused and freaked out, so that makes me tend to be more sympathetic, not scornful.He should have resigned. And had he resigned, if he were so freaked out an unfocused and blah blah blah, there's no need for a press conference.
Then in one of the most brazen gubernatorial decisions ever made, he decided to stop being governor for a few days....
The problem: The constitution does not allow him to do that. It is generally assumed that when a governor becomes governor, he is governor all the time, because, well, it’s kind of important.
That reckless and dangerous decision could have been disastrous had something happened that required emergency decisions that only the governor is empowered to make.
From last Thursday until he got back in town Wednesday, no one knew who had the authority to make those decisions because no one could reach the governor and he had not transferred decision-making power to the lieutenant governor as described in the constitution.
It was all so unnecessary. Governors throughout state history have found ways to relax without creating a constitutional crisis.
"The tip was so sketchy that the paper had decided not to send a photographer with [Gina] Smith. Acting reflexively, she snapped a quick photo with her digital camera, then called out to Sanford."
"On or around the day his wife asked him to move out, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford booked a ten-day trip to Buenos Aires, a person familiar with the governor's travel plans told POLITICO.
Sanford booked the trip on Delta Air Lines on June 10, using the company's SkyMiles program, the source said. He bought a ticket for June 18, returning June 28.
Jenny Sanford said yesterday, June 24, that she'd 'asked my husband to leave two weeks ago.'
Sanford's trip was cut short after the local press raised questions about his absence, but the dates offer a glimpse into both his decision to depart as his marriage frayed, and after months of counseling.
The bookings also cast light on the governor's recklessness, and his belief, or hope, that he could vanish from the state for well over a week without raising questions about his absence.
He spent his time in Buenos Aires in Palermo, a fashionable residential neighborhood, and was not, reportedly, a recluse: He was seen in the local bar, Guido's, with Maria Belen Chapur last week."
"Guido’s bar and restaurant at 2843 is probably the street’s most iconic feature, a quirky Italian place with no actual menu, where you are at the mercy of your waiter."
"South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford tells the Associated Press that she discovered her husband’s affair in January when she found a letter to the governor from his mistress.So, it was a secret 10-day rendevous with his mistress. He didn't go down there to break-up with Maria.
She also says she had told Gov. Mark Sanford at the time to end the affair and was shocked to learn that he had gone to Argentina last week to meet his paramour when he mysteriously dropped out of sight for five days. She says she had believed that he had gone somewhere to work on writing a book."
Then he claimed he went to break it off and spent '5 days crying in Argentina' when in fact it seemed he booked a 10 day bonkathon.
South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford said Friday her husband repeatedly asked permission to visit his lover in the months after she discovered his affair.The woman was swinging, too, having a lover contemporaneously with his affair with her, and also married.
I have a strong suspicion of who is responsible for this evil act that was directed at me but also destroyed the lives of so many others.Sorry, what? The guy that released the emails isn't the one who was cheating on his wife and skipping out on Father's Day to fuck you, Maria. The only people responsible for "evil acts" are you and Mark.
"For most Christians, at some point in your marriage, if you're married long enough, you do it because that's what we're called to do — out of obedience instead of out of passion. And I think that's where Mark and Jenny are right now."Thank God, he says without irony, that I'm not a Christian, then. Twenty-odd years of passion and love for my wife and not the least temptation to seek sex elsewhere.
"For most Christians, at some point in your marriage, if you're married long enough, you do it because that's what we're called to do — out of obedience instead of out of passion. And I think that's where Mark and Jenny are right now."What does it mean that God wants Mark and Jenny to suffer through a long, loveless marriage? Why would God torment Mark by allowing him to discover his unobtainable Argentinian soulmate? Why would God deny Mark love and passion?
The state constitution allows the state's top elected officials to elevate the lieutenant governor if the governor is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office," but no law defines what that means. "This section deals more with actual inability, on a respirator in a hospital because he's had a stroke or heart attack, not because he's nutty"…LOL. The comedy shows are going to have a hay-day. (hey-day?)
"Gov. Mark Sanford is acting like a love-struck teenager.
Or, maybe he has a deeper personality disorder, some experts speculate.
As the saga of Sanford and his Argentine lover continues, the public, the governor’s political rivals and some allies are speculating about the governor’s mental stability and whether he’s able to lead the state.
While mental health experts are reluctant to pin a diagnosis on the governor, their observations of his behavior suggest a chemical imbalance, narcissism and impulsive behavior.
Sanford has not sought professional mental health treatment, said Joel Sawyer, the governor’s spokesman.
But some fellow politicians are saying the governor needs help."
I would imagine that if she was really a cold-hearted woman who married him for professional/positioning reasons, she might not have had FOUR kids with the man, giving up her high-powered career in the process.
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posted by Ironmouth at 5:33 PM on June 22, 2009 [17 favorites]