It's all over the news. Generals David Petraeus and Joe Allen. Important and powerful men in serious, maybe career-ending, trouble, for what? Cheating on their wives. Sure there's talk of breaches of national security, but that wasn't the problem. If it had been, these men would be under arrest and charged with treason. They would not have resigned, and there would not be ominous discussion of maybe not promoting them.
Although the consequences were not as great, the same thing happened with Bill Clinton. He had an affair with some girl. His wife was probably disappointed and angry, but she got over it and decided to keep him. Not Congress, though. They worked to escalate his misbehavior into lying to them (He was asked if he cheated on his wife, and he said no. How completely unexpected.) and impeached him.
At least Dominique Strauss-Kahn imposed himself on someone. He may have "attacked" her. An act like that deserves attention.
You could write a book, apparently, about JFK's adventures in the embraces of other women. You could write the book if you wanted to. If you really cared. And let's not get started with Franklin and Eleanor, the reportedly long-suffering, or at least long cheated on, Eleanor.
And the tragic-comical Gary Hart. He lost, but at least it could be said he agreed to play the game.
Larry Craig is sort of another matter. Generally speaking, who cares what adolescent stunts he pulls with other big-enough boys in public bathrooms? The problem was that he held himself out as some sort of paragon of straight and strict morality, like "Senator Jackson" in The Birdcage. If he got what he was asking for, the demonstration of his hypocrisy is what he was asking for.
And the televangelists! Jim and Tammy Fay. And Jimmy Swaggart. I googled “preachers who get in trouble regarding sex“ and ran out of interest long before I ran out of time, which was long before I would have run out of material.
The fundamental facts are that "men think with their dicks," and that some women are what Pete Townsend calls "starfuckers." Oh, right, I forgot the caprices involved in "falling in love." Yeah, that, too.
But really, who does care? And if anyone thinks they do, why do they? Because they're stuck-up, thin-lipped, over-anxious moralists? Or somehow self-conscious about their caricaturish “religiosity?“ Or secretly ashamed hypocrites? Or nothing more than yentas with way too much time on their hands? Not our problem! There is, of course, “the media,” which typically has nothing more honorable or substantive to do than to scare up meaningless and irrelevant stories for the purpose of having stories to tell. But if we weren't willing to hear them, they wouldn’t bother to tell them.
We need to regain some sense of perspective, and proportion, and social decency. Men who cheat on their wives are disrespectful to those wives. And they're answerable to those wives, not to me. People who need to deprive such men of their reputations and careers and separate values to society are disrespectful to everyone. They are answerable to me. And my answer to them is “No.” "Get a life!"
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