Mark Sanford, Digging That Hole Just A Little Deeper

I don't have much else to add to the saga of Mark Sanford except to say that Argentina is a hell of a long way to go for a booty call. Well, that and it is yet another defeat for the small government movement since Sanford was one of the few governors to voice any opposition to Obama's runaway deficit spending.

The news did spur me to read a March profile of Sanford that had run in the American Conservative. The issue had been lying around my office and I had never bothered to pick it up before. It's a decent piece and fairly flattering towards Sanford, though the author obviously had no inkling of Sanford's indiscretions.

Amusingly the magazine is now trying to distance themselves from the governor. In the print edition the profile is titled "Plain Right: Can South Carolina's Governor Save the GOP?" The online version has been retitled "The Strange Case of Mark Sanford."

Anyhow, the one bit from the article that really does fascinate is this nugget about a different scandal involving Sanford:

During Sanford’s first gubernatorial campaign in 2002, an 8-year-old African-American girl wandered onto a Sanford family property on Lady’s Island and drowned. A source close to the governor said she fell into a “retaining pond.” Her family’s lawyer, Manning Smith, called it a “pit.” Other sources claim that Sanford, who owned a hydraulic excavator at the time, digs holes on his property to unwind. According to a source involved in the settlement, the governor’s insurance company paid the girl’s family “around $300,000.”

He digs enormous holes in the backyard to unwind? Umm, okay ...

Humpday Post

Something about the incoming e-mail *ding* that can be constantly heard in an open work-space really perturbs me. My cube neighbor coughing up internal organs followed by a oink (I think it's a swine flu joke) isn't pleasant either.

Funny item in the Onion today: World's Worst Person Decides To Go Into Marketing

I'm thinking you could do a similar item for Human Resources...

I'm not sure what I think about this Gov Sanford MIA story. It's interesting, that's for sure -- and makes for good reading -- but I don't think I don't know if I should/or would care one way or the other if I was still a resident of South Carolina. I'm leaning towards no. But I like the guy a lot so I'm willing to admit some bias towards thinking he ISN'T a fucking lunatic.

It's hard though being a libertarian sympathizer (speaking of myself) when most of your political leaders are in fact borderline lunatics. It makes you -- in a case such as this one -- a little gun shy about defending the guy right off the bat.

(We could argue for a while about where exactly Mark Sanford fits on both the libertarian scale and the crazy scale. I'd argue he is pretty advanced on the libertarian scale and just the right amount of crazy. But I wouldn't be willing to place a large bet on either one of my guesses.)