2 Reviews
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 Silverfox616 rated 6 months ago- Oh great scott, they found out....
- TapwaterJ rated 6 months ago
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It's the Adultery, Stupid
[As long as I am on the subject of sexual frustration in polyester . . . ]
The private follies of middle-aged male politicians are treated as weakness, perversion, corruption--anything but the real issue: human desire.
Vanity Fair, Michael Wolff
"Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race.
It has the power to alter elections, undermine parties, and, possibly, change history. Barack Obama is running for president today because the ex-wife of his favored opponent in the 2004 Senate campaign in Illinois, Jack Ryan, said her husband took her to swingers' clubs, handing the election to Obama.
Arguably, the Republican Party began its descent into possible oblivion when it lost its majority in 2006 not most of all because of George Bush's serial failures but, more concretely, because Mark Foley, a Republican representative from Florida, groped or wanted to grope congressional pages--that seemed to sum up the G.O.P.'s vulnerabilities, hypocrisies, and grossness more than anything, even the war.
Eliot Spitzer represents not just an especially louche scandal but a shame-on-us moment because we didn't see that Mr. Clean was Mr. Dirty. That's a lesson for us: Don't be snowed; assume the extreme. And that's a lesson for politicians: Your official self can't be so at odds with your sexual self--that's what gives scandal its bite. Getting Spitzer wrong means we have to be more tenacious in our analysis."
Ethics -- The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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