The Political Lynching of Mark Sanford

It has not been a good week for anyone famous. First Ed McMahon died. Then Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died hours apart from one another. Pitchman Billy Mays died suddenly. But nothing died faster in the past week than the career of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.

Gone for nearly a week, talking heads were practically screaming about the whereabouts of the governor, nearly wagging their fingers at him for leaving town and not saying where he was going to everyone who would later demand to know. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought that these anchors were using television and radio to lecture Mark Sanford, who they mistook for their teenager, for staying out too late. (One unintentionally hilarious example was an anchor complaining about what would happen if a hurricane hit South Carolina without the governor present. My guess is that no one else would have been able to stop the storm either.)

Needless to say, I found all this attention excessive. Before this year, most Americans probably did not know who the three-term congressman and second term governor was. I first learned of Mark Sanford last year as a Ron Paul-type of Republican, known for fiscal sanity, vetoing excessive spending, and for opposing Real ID and the doctrine of nation-building. As a congressman, Sanford voted against H.R. 4655, the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, and was quoted in The American Conservative saying, “I don’t believe in pre-emptive war. . . . For us to hold the moral high ground in the world, our default position must be defensive.” In short, Mark Sanford was my kind of Republican.

So how shocking was it to learn that the man who kept the promise to serve no more than three terms in Congress, could not keep the promise of fidelity to his wife?

In brutal honesty, I was crushed when I learned the news of his affair, not for the pain caused to his family, but that his chances for president in 2012 were dead.

Now some think that since Governor Sanford succumbed to perhaps the most pervasive temptation in men, he is no longer qualified to serve as governor or in any higher office. There is plenty of merit to this argument. If a man cannot keep his marriage vows, how can he keep his vow to defend the Constitution?

It has been propagandized that having a mistress as far away as Argentina was made possible by the taxpayers of South Carolina. Or as The New York Times headlined it, “Governor Used State’s Money To Visit Lover.”

Not quite. The governor was on a state business trip to South America to negotiate trade and managed to work in some time with his mistress. But this whole incident, in a bizarre way, illustrates the fiscal conservatism of Mark Sanford. It doesn’t appear that the governor hopped down to Argentina every weekend on a jet subsidized by the taxpayers. He saw his mistress, but at a time when it made business sense for him. If this wasn’t so depressing, it would be a little funny.

Despite the cacophony of calls to resign his office, Mark Sanford refuses to listen. It was my expectation that he would. But why should he? Adultery breaks a commandment, but nothing in the U.S. Constitution. He did not lie about the affair. He did not use state money with the explicit purpose of seeing his mistress. According to my count, the only crime Mark Sanford has committed was his refusal to accept stimulus money.

Then the fuss regarding his “disappearance” became clear.

Governor Mark Sanford, the scourge of big spending Republicans in his own state, was an enemy because he regularly vetoed their big spending schemes. Before this year, Mark Sanford was a little known, but rising star in the Republican Party. He became known nationally for his refusal, some say grandstand, regarding the stimulus package. Even if he was merely grandstanding, it was a more convincing show than some GOP governors like Sarah Palin, who willfully held her hand out before taking heat for her hypocritical stance of denouncing President Obama’s ridiculous spending while readily willing to accept “her share” of it.

Contrary to popular conception, Republicans as a whole are not in favor of small government nor do they favor less intervention at home and abroad. At election time they sure are, but not once they get into power.

Occasionally a Republican will cut taxes, but only on rare occasions do they cut the spending that is needed to prevent the tax cuts from becoming deficits. The problem for Republican Party establishments like the one in South Carolina is that Mark Sanford was the rare politician who kept his word on government spending and fiscal responsibility. In fact, the first South Carolinians who would reap the benefits of Sanford’s demise, Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer and Sanford’s political rival, State Senator Jake Knotts, whose primary challenger Sanford supported, are the loudest voices calling for the governor’s resignation or at least an investigation. Maybe Republicans do believe in truth commissions!

Sanford's fellow South Carolinian, Jack “The Southern Avenger” Hunter, illustrated in January of this year just how South Carolina Republicans see the governor:

“Sanford has had one primary guiding principle his entire political career: limited government. Not just limited government rhetoric, the sort of lip service provided by milquetoast Republican to pacify their right wing base, but genuine, strict, fiscal conservatism and the guts to back it up. If you ever need a good illustration of just how duplicitous the GOP can be, just take notice of how frequently South Carolina Republicans get angry at Sanford for daring to actually represent the limited government principles they pretend to. It’s as if they’re saying, ‘Come on, Mark, you didn’t really think we meant all that conservative stuff, did you?’ . . . which to some makes him dangerous.”

Dangerous indeed.

I cannot say whether Bauer, Knotts, or anyone else knew with any certainty that Sanford was having an affair or if their agenda was the hope to stick something on Sanford, something to discredit the man and ultimately destroy him, but something smells in this fiasco besides the governor. My Campaign for Liberty co-patriot, Anna Lutz of South Carolina, related an answer she received from Knotts and State House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham that there is “more to come.”

Turns out, there was more before this even began. An anonymous Sanford staffer leaked e-mails to The State newspaper, a paper seeming to revel in Sanford’s demise, tipping them about a woman in Argentina – in December 2008. Suddenly it becomes apparent how an absent governor, neglecting no actual duties, could warrant such wall-to-wall attention, almost as if on cue. Perhaps it was the misstep Sanford’s enemies were waiting for.

Why else would Republicans be so elated to expose a private affair that had been disclosed with the family? In this, we see that Republicans, particularly in the case of South Carolina, do not care about limited government. They care about power. If they cared one lick about limiting government, they would be in front of the cameras saying exactly this, “Mark Sanford may be an adulterer, but he has been truthful, with his family and with us, about a tragic indiscretion. Importantly for our purposes, he has been a competent governor who has been loyal to his political principles. Until it can be proven that Governor Sanford’s moral failing in his private life has caused him to break a law, he deserves our support because the governor has been a steadfast supporter of the Republican Party platform and the people of South Carolina who have elected him to public office five times without defeat.”

Of course, no GOP hack in the Palmetto State is saying anything even remotely like this. That should say it all.

This diatribe notwithstanding, my own personal regard for Mark Sanford has taken a serious blow in the past week. After Ron Paul and his son Rand, Mark Sanford was probably my favorite Republican, and knowing that he has committed a serious moral failure calls his capacity to lead into question for the first time in my experience with him.

But Mark Sanford’s infidelity no more disqualifies him from the capacity to continue in office or ascend to higher office than does anyone’s perfect marital fidelity qualify anyone for high office either. After all, the only thing that is inherently different about Mark Sanford today as opposed to the beginning of June is the fact that we know about his unfaithfulness.

While he has been far from perfect politically (endorsing John McCain for president twice - ick!- he infamously deferred to also-ran warmonger Newt Gingrich earlier this year on Fox News Sunday regarding pre-emptive strikes on North Korea), but Republicans could do far worse than a so-far repentant adulterer.

(H/T: Anna Lutz)

100 Days In

Before handing out awards to congratulate President Obama for being the first black president to host an Easter Egg Roll or the first black president to struggle with his teleprompter, let us look at his real accomplishments thus far, good (yes, some) and bad (plenty).

President Barack Obama has endured a mountain of criticism for his cabinet nominees and members. A number (Geithner, Daschle, Sebelius) have been rightly deemed tax cheats and have embarrassed the president and the ones in charge of vetting candidates. Americans generally have a low tolerance for politicians who get away with something that would land normal folks in heap big trouble. The president’s claim of a "new era of responsibility" gets questioned when an unusual number of his nominees have tax troubles, especially when many Americans themselves are struggling, as well as when the president promises “change” by digging up Clinton-era partisan hacks. However, a compliant media has done much to keep the new president rather unscathed.

Upon the assumption of his office, Barack Obama was faced with an economic crisis not of his doing, but of which he took complete ownership. His method of alleviation was ramming through an economic stimulus bill in the same manner and through the same rhetoric of his much-detested predecessor: this emergency is too catastrophic to wait any longer; if we wait any longer, we will be doomed. The bill is too important to read. Pass it or we will all die. Sound anything like the Patriot Act?

After campaigning against 8 years of Republican corruption and proliferate spending, the president embarked on the aforementioned stimulus bill and the pork-laden omnibus bill, bringing the Obama budget soaring somewhere around $4,000,000,000,000 for fiscal year 2010. While the spending done by the Republicans during George W. Bush’s reign was beyond reprehensible and also worth protesting, the monumental debt already created under President Obama sends the message that Bush-era spending was only the beginning.

In the whole financial debacle, the president insisted that spending would get us out of the recession. That assertion assumes that since a lot of spending and bailouts got us into this mess, lots more spending and bailouts will get us out. It is an assertion that many Republicans share when they are in power that no matter how much short-term success it might generate, the value of the dollar continues to plummet and making the another recession inevitable. It is the same old solution only wrapped in a much bigger box.

One of the most defining aspects of the Bush administration was its "Global War on Terrorism," designed to quash tyranny abroad so that liberty in American can be preserved. Actions such as the Patriot Act and the excesses permitted to agencies like the TSA and others have certainly undermined American liberty at home. An incident at Lambert Airport in St. Louis, MO has already been chronicled here before, but another incident in the Southwest suggests that unarmed and unsuspicious Americans are still harassed by their government, even under the supposed civil liberty-minded President Obama (begin video at 8:01, then here, and here).

On the foreign policy front, President Obama promised change but so far has not delivered much. He quickly announced that American troops would be leaving Iraq by August of next year, that is, excepting the 50,000 "residual" forces that are scheduled to remain until at least 2011. However, as news trickles in that Sunni insurgents don’t play nice when the bribe money starts to dry up and civil war resumes, there will be added pressure on the president to keep troops there to pacify the latest uprising and make John McCain’s suggestion that troops stay there for 100 years sound like it came out of Barack Obama’s mouth.

Farther east, as the president promised, Obama has already escalated matters in the increasingly lawless Afghanistan. With poor supply lines, a disintegrating Pakistan quickly succumbing to the Taliban and more Afghans looking to the Taliban for help, American troops will be either relegated to being person bodyguards for President Karzai in Kabul or left to wander in the desert until they get picked off.

Why? There is nothing to be won in Afghanistan. Bin Laden is nowhere to be found. The Taliban is taking over again and the Afghans, notoriously xenophobic, are not resisting local thugs in favor of foreign armies. So the question must be asked again, why does the president want to wander in this graveyard of empires?

The recent and much-publicized Latin American trip drew a lot of attention, particularly from the president's critics on his right. He was called weak for merely sitting and listening to Nicaraguan Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega delivery an anti-American screed. President Obama was denounced for shaking the hand of Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez at the same summit. Rather than turning tables over in disgust over the president’s inclination to grin and bear it, perhaps he was acting like a new head of state should act: quietly. None of these Latin American clowns, who have wrecked their countries almost without exception, pose any threat to the United States. Are we supposed to shoot down any foreign head of state that has the audacity to question the God-given right of the American government to do whatever it wants around the world? The American Conservative columnist Daniel Larison rightly points out that there is nothing to fear from these goons: they thrive (or even survive) based on anti-American rhetoric. The president was right to either let them do their schtick or outright ignore them. It was an episode of calm disposition, something sorely lacking under President Bush.

The president’s dealings with the Somali pirates and hostage situation were swift and effective. The situation was rather quickly defused as the abducted captain was rescued and all of his captors were killed or surrendered. He dealt with stateless warriors in the only way that was manageable and despite calls from all corners to confront the stateless Somalia, (bombing them) he has rightfully deflected all pleas thusfar to enter into another tribal fiasco.

It has only been 100 days, but it looks like things are remaining very much the same. The new regime has only repackaged the same old disasters and called it "change." Some things have been good, as those that have been covered here, but the future is not very bright. Debt soars higher than sky-high and the foreign wars look here to stay, even under a Democratic president. As the old saying goes, people get the government they deserve.

Stop It!

One of my favorite Mad TV sketches features Bob Newhart, as a therapist whose only advice to any patient was contained in two words: Stop it! When a woman who suffers from an irrational fear of being buried alive in a box comes in, his advice is the same: "Stop it!" No matter what inner difficulties the woman brought up, the therapist’s answer was always “Stop it!” I heartily recommend that our lawmakers see Bob Newhart’s most recent rendition of therapy.

One of President Barack Obama’s first initiatives as the chief executive is to implement an economic stimulus package that he repeatedly tells his countrymen is designed to save the American economy from the catastrophes of tax cuts and capitalism.

It should not be too surprising that Democrats wish to pass a package that would be the more invasive than any government measure into the economy since the New Deal, at a time when the current hardships are still nowhere near those endured during the Great Depression, which was only exacerbated because of those interventions. In short, the stimulus package is not so much meant to stimulate the economy, but an initiative to create more political capital for the new president. One portion that has since been excluded from the package, perhaps due to its sheer odiousness, was bailout money for Planned Parenthood (I don’t know about any of you, but I don’t believe the killing industry has any shortage of business).

The more President Obama says some version of "We have to do something because to do nothing would be worse," more people will get scared, remain scared, and eventually begin to believe it. Think of it as a Patriot Act for Democrats.

The Democratic president disparages the Bush tax cuts, one of his predecessor’s finest measures, because the national debt skyrocketed and our nation’s financial institutions crumbled during the final months of the lame duck administration. In other words, the new president is trying to tell us that the economy is teetering toward collapse because Americans were allowed to have more money in their paycheck, and nothing to do with the ridiculous spending spree President Bush and the Republicans went on. President Obama’s prescription for economic recovery seems to be, don’t cut taxes, but go on a ridiculous spending spree. President Bush’s problem was not that he cut taxes, but that he cut taxes, and then did not begin reducing the size of the government to compensate for the lost revenue. President Obama wants to leave taxes where they are, for the time-being it would seem, and then increase the size of the federal government.

Now that the Democratic-bashing portion of the blog is through, let us move on to the Democrats’ henchmen.

What should be more surprising, but that I fear is not, is that the Republicans are willing co-participants in this mad spending scheme as well.

How? you might say, didn’t every House Republican vote against the stimulus bill as it appeared in the House of Representatives? Yes, but every House Republican voted against a massive spending bill that could have caused revolts among their constituents had they voted for it, and every House Republican voted against a massive spending bill that did not need any of their votes.

The Democrats have such a strong majority in the House that they got the bill passed without any Republicans. By voting against the bill out of pure political expediency, they avoided the heat from their home districts. While many Republican cheerleaders on talk radio praised the Republicans and suggested that they might be returning to their fiscal principles, their votes meant nothing because the bill still passed.

By having nothing to lose by doing so, they voted against it. We still need time to see if the Republicans have made a prodigal journey back to fiscal sanity.

But what really made me reach for the Tums is what the party’s senators began attempting once the package reached their chamber.

When Democrats first suggested a $300 billion stimulus package, the Republicans gave the nod to them and then some: they said $445 billion would be just fine.

Republican senators want to give tax credits to homeowners since the housing market bubble has utterly popped. A tax credit, which sounds like it might be good, is really just another manifestation of welfare. Whereas a tax cut in the form of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, allows the taxpayer to keep more of their income in their paycheck, a tax credit is a check from the federal government, with money that was printed from out of nowhere.

We can honestly say that we have a bipartisan government.

President Obama, during his never-ending campaign, said that he would bring Americans together and help heal our partisan wounds. Well, all that has happened since he took office is bring Republicans and Democrats together in a massive feast of pork. The parties are fighting over how much money should be in these stimulus packages and that should sound off alarms to conscientious citizens.

The only debate occurring over the spending bills are regarding how much should be spent and on what. There is no debate regarding whether so much money should be spent in the first place.

People seem to have forgotten that one short year ago, President Bush introduced a stimulus package to help boost a slumping economy. The stimulus did nothing to stop the collapse and nationalization of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers. President Bush’s massive spending bill did nothing to stop the impending economic disaster. President Obama’s massive spending bill is even more massive and will only exacerbate the problem and ultimately cause more suffering for reasons already illuminated.

My prescription for the economy is to actually do very little. The current system cannot fix the disaster. It has been the invasive bipartisan federal government of this country that has caused this disaster.

Another appealing solution is to simply eliminate the Federal Reserve, that corrupt printer of bad money, which is the topic of Thomas E. Woods’ forthcoming book, Meltdown, A Free Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts will Make Things Worse.

Let this prescription for the horrific levels of spending and bad money be quick and to the point: Stop It!