ON MORALITY

Perhaps at some point in the last eight years you've seen the cheeky "Can someone give Bush a blowjob so we can impeach him?

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" bumper stickers. Recent events have underscored just how much truth lies beneath that rather simple joke.

Ever since his Argentine Escapade the calls for Mark Sanford to resign have swelled into a deafening chorus. Everyone from the state GOP to the Democrats to the six largest newspapers in the state to his dog Skip have lined up to kick the Governor while he's down. There is near unanimous agreement that Sanford Must Go. But why? I suppose he did lie about his whereabouts and the idea of the Governor simply disappearing for a few days at a time is admittedly unusual, but I don't think either of those constitute a crime. What it boils down to is a simple issue of morality: Mark Sanford Must Go because he is a Bad Person. A month ago, before any of this happened, of course no one was calling on him to resign. Back then he was merely a horrendous Governor, which is OK as long as one is not simultaneously a Bad Person.

South Carolina is a swampy shithole with a couple of nice beaches and an unemployment rate second only to Michigan. In fact, South Carolina has the second-largest number of counties with official unemployment rates over 20% according to the May data – which is particularly stunning given that the official rates are wildly understated.

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(Click here for an interactive and larger map)

unempmap

Despite the rather obvious fact that his state is an economically devastated backwater, I'm sure you all recall that Gov. Sanford famously rejected the offer of $700,000,000 in Federal stimulus funds. Sure, the money was needed to prevent the layoff of 4,000 public school teachers and 700 prison guards, but Sanford decided that grandstanding for the Teabagging crowd was more important. It was more important – for him and his political ambitions. Not so much for the state.

See, this makes Sanford a bad Governor. A really bad one. It would have made perfect sense if there were calls for him to resign or efforts to impeach him. He violated his basic responsibility for the welfare of his state. Thank god he had a mistress so the residents of SC could be rid of him.

It recalls one of my favorite examples of the Bad Person/Bad Public Servant dichotomy. There have been many small-minded nitwits in the Cabinet over the years – especially since 1980, oddly enough – but few as talentless as James Watt. As Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, Watt:

decreased funding for environmental programs, restructured the department to decrease federal regulatory power, wished to eliminate the Land and Water Conservation Fund (which had been designed to increase the size of National Wildlife Refuges and other protected land), eased regulations on oil and mining companies, and favored opening wilderness areas and shorelands for oil and gas leases. Watt resisted accepting donations of private land to be used for conservation purposes and suggested that all 80 million acres (320,000 km²) of undeveloped land in the United States be opened for drilling and mining by the year 2000. The area leased to coal mining companies quintupled during his term as Secretary of the Interior. Watt proudly boasted that he leased "a billion acres" (4 million km²) of U.S. coastal waters, even though only a small portion of that area would ever be drilled. Watt once stated, "We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber." He also mentioned his Christian faith when discussing his approach to environmental management. Speaking before Congress, he once said, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations."

Other cute Watt quotes included describing environmentalists as, "a left-wing cult dedicated to bringing down the type of government I believe in" and "A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?"

Sounds like just about the worst Secretary of the Interior on Earth, right? The calls for him to resign must have been deafening, right? Well, not really. Then he held a press conference in which he responded to a question about diversity in his office with the immortal quote: "We have every kind of mix you can have. I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple." Two weeks later he was gone.

We are, as both a society and political system, wholly taken in by the delusion that everything that elected officials do is immune to judgment. Of course we blame them for things and hold things against them during elections, but we insist that you can't yank an elected official out of office just because you Don't Agree with Him.
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It's all just a difference of opinion. Agree to disagree. That's a noble idea, but it doesn't mean that we have to shovel the idea of objective right and wrong into a roaring furnace. A president who enters office with a large budget surplus and drives the budget, the economy, and the nation into the ground is a bad president. A Governor who ignores the interests of his state because he's eyeballing the White House is a bad Governor. Unfortunately the only thing we can agree upon are cartoonishly oversimplified moral judgments – he cheated on his wife, she embezzled money, he used to do drugs, and whatever else offends our collective puritanical side.
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Sure, South Carolinians are lucky to be ridding themselves of Sanford. But how pathetic are their reasons?

15 thoughts on “ON MORALITY”

  • Great quote from late 1860, when South Carolina became the first state to seccede from the Union and launched the war that killed more Americans than any other:
    " She is too small to be a republic and too large to be a lunatic asylum."

  • I went to Europe last summer, and I was fortunate enough to have a large family from South Carolina as a part of my group. Not only did they insist on speaking Spanish to everyone in every country we went to (which did not include Spain) and refuse to eat anywhere but McDonald's, but one of them also informed me that Abraham Lincoln ran for President six times. Even the insane amount of vino I drank that night didn't help me forget that.

  • Ah, but they're convinced those shitty political decisions are good decisions, or don't care about those decisions as long as Sanford is of good moral character, since forced birth trumps financial concerns. Which I guess is just paraphrasing what you said.

  • Question: Why is South Carolina in the hole? Michigan has the decline of the automakers to balloon their unemployment rate, but why is such a small state like S. Carolina in the pits? Anyone know what large industries they have there? I'm simply curious.

  • I find it sort of ironic that in the same two week span Sanford announces that he will remain in office, despite the personal cost, for the good of South Carolina and Palin announces that she will resign, despite the personal cost, because of the controversy surrounding her, for the good of Alaska.

  • We can pretend there are two sides to any political issue, to the point of the dumbass position that federal money = bad, even when you're as broke as SC. It's just that everybody agrees about the messing around on your wife. There's no political platform that calls that acceptable.

  • I suppose he did lie about his whereabouts and the idea of the Governor simply disappearing for a few days at a time is admittedly unusual, but I don’t think either of those constitute a crime.

    Aren't you being a bit disingenuous here, Ed? I don't know that anyone is calling for Sanford to resign just because he had an affair. A governor disappearing for five days on purpose, without informing his staff, his colleagues, the legislature, or fucking anyone where he's going, and without making arrangements for the governing of the state (such as it is) or any emergencies that might arise in his absence (like…a hurricane) is more than a bit unusual. I think even South Carolinians, inured as they are to fucknuttery in their government, kind of view that as gross negligence, incompetence, and unfitness for the job. That he pulled the disappearing act to go visit his girlfriend (and wasn't just incommunicado, but out of the damn country) is just the icing on the cake. Disappearing act on top of refusal of stimulus funds = fuck off, Governor.

  • Samantha B. says:

    Heqit is right on the mark.

    I had the same Bad Person = Bad Public Servant argument with a group of friends just after this thing blew up, and I still don't see how someone's morally questionable personal life has anything to do with their ability to act effectively as an elected official…except that in this case, Sanford disappeared for five days. You can't do that and expect to keep your job, *especially* when you're governor, and even if you are a shitty governor.

  • But you're overlooking the fact that he has pulled the disappearing act several times in the past and it never led to calls for his head to roll.

  • I thought his previous AWOL episodes were for something like 30 minutes or an hour, not days. Is my memory incorrect?

  • Daniel:
    There are several factors that have influenced SC's poor economic performance. Prior to the Civil War, the state had a largely agriculture-based economy made successful through a slave population that was more concentrated than even that of Virginia. Major crops included rice, indigo, and cotton. After the South lost the Civil War, the agricultural economy persisted in the form of share-cropping. Share-cropping is not a way to make money. It is a way to subsist, at best. After Reconstruction, the textile industry began to take off, due in large part to an utter lack of labor laws and a sometimes brutal resistance to labor unions (a resistance reinforced, incidentally, by many of the churches situated in the mill villages). Due to segregation and other kinds of codified racism, many African Americans left South Carolina for better opportunities elsewhere.

    The textile industry collapsed mid-century, as cheaper materials and labor could be had elsewhere. Since then, SC has attracted several large international corporations (BMW, Michelin, Milliken, to name a few) that are all based in Upstate South Carolina. The rest of the state has little in the way of industry and really never has. Many of the manufacturing jobs that have made SC even as successful as it is (or isn't) have been moved out of the country or the firms that provided them have closed. This is not new.

    In short, South Carolina suffers high unemployment because it has been dirt-poor for a looooong time. Even when it was comparatively wealthy (antebellum), that wealth was (and still is) concentrated in the hands of a very few. And these few are the ones who have been running the state for most of its existence as such. Poorly, I might add.

    And, I don't give a shit about the affair. I want Sanford out because he's recklessly indifferent to the welfare of the general population. He is indeed a shitty governor.

  • displaced capitalist says:

    But isn't it like what Michael Moore pointed out in Bowling for Columbine? It's all about the corporate media, it's all about what's popular and profitable. TV shows like Cops would be totally boring if they were going out and arresting corporate criminals unless it involved them taking off their shirt and running away from the cops half nekkid, right??

    The public finds a scandal over fiscal stimulus to be really boring, but you bet that the corporate Media will take the Sanford scandal and spin it into a delightful reality TV show where we can see all the juicy gossip over his mistress.

    Hell, even my Yankee understanding of who Mark Sanford is blossomed exponentially after this scandal broke out. Prior to this, all I heard was "the governor of some southern state (what's-his-name?) refused federal bailout funds."

  • Never underestimate the stupidity of the "American People." Sex is the bright shiny object that they can understand and focus on (for at least 5 minutes anyway.) Rejecting stimulus money? Huuuuuuh? Disappearing from his job for days, regardless of the reason? Whuuuuuh? The fact that he is plain and simple a fucking psycho? Duuuuuuh.

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