a bizarre perception of moral imperative

This whole Sanford thing has gotten so, well, weird. Here we have Lindsey Graham telling David Gregory that the besieged governor should be allowed to keep his job, but only if he reconciles with his wife.

It makes my brain hurt.

First, let's set aside the strange spectacle of a single, and an almost certainly closeted gay, Republican senator essentially implying that Sanford becomes unfit for public office if he loses his marriage, though that alone makes me stare at Graham like he just leapt upside down onto the ceiling while cackling and spitting green goo. What difference does it make whether Sanford's wife agrees to reconcile or not, or for that matter whether he decides his marriage is worth saving or not? Who the f**k cares, and what does it have to do with his ability to do his job? Does his infidelity somehow become less egregious if he convinces his wife to stick around? If this happened because his marriage is emotionally over, is it more "gubernatorial" to stay in a loveless marriage than to get a divorce?

Either I just don't understand the southern conservative moral code, or Lindsey Graham doesn't.

ANOTHER pervert in the GOP moral police-- in Indiana

From Taking Down Words:

Clark County GOP Chair and newly elected Young Republican National Federation Chair Glenn Murphy is under investigation for criminal deviate conduct, a Class B felony, for allegedly engaging in oral sex with a sleeping victim. This is not his first run-in with the law for this kind of offense.

Read the investigative report and a prior arrest for sexual battery in 1998 here: glennmurphy.pdf

Naturally, he's since resigned from all his positions, "for business reasons." Heh. Hehe. HeheheheWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!!

The trolls at TDW are pretty funny, too. The best ones prove how this story shows that Democrats are hypocrites. Oh, and about how the liberal Supreme Court is enforcing its morality on good conservatives, or something.

we're getting stupider every day

Nevermind, this is the stupidest argument I've heard about the VA Tech massacre, coming from Newt Gingrich blaming the incident on, yes, liberals:

“Well, who has created a situation ethics, essentially, zone of not being willing to talk about any of these things. Let me carry another example. I strongly supported Imus being dismissed, but I also think the very thing he was dismissed for, which is the use of language which is stunningly degrading of women — the fact, for example, that one of the Halloween costumes this last year was being able to be either a prostitute or a pimp at 10, 11, 12 years of age, buying a costume, and we don’t have any discussion about what’s happened to our culture because while we’re restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold, we say it’s impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech. And I would argue that that’s a major component of what’s happened to our culture in the last 40 years.”

I know, I know, we could highlight a thousand points of wankery in this block, from Newtie's own authority to talk about moral values considering his past to the hysterically termed "political free speech." Suffice it to say this is yet one more example of why rhetorical hatchet men like Gingrich have no credibility and one of the biggest problems with our media is the fact that anybody asks what this jackass thinks in the first place with any intention besides contempt and ridicule.

have you heard about Deamonte?

It's a funny phenomenon: You take an obvious moral imperative and bring it out into the open, and people get so easily sidetracked into discussions of money, and options, and then it veers off into weird ideological quasi-realities where the central issue is personal responsibility and parental duties and who's to blame and class warfare and socialism and capitalism and "the market"... and then a story like this comes around and snaps the whole issue back to a moment of utter, cold, crystalline, clarity.

This is madness, and it must stop.