What struck me was that the extreme recklessness (or cluelessness) for Gov. Sanford, just days after the whole blow-up about Sen. Ensign, to have suddenly taken off secretly for Argentina for a week for as assignation with his paramour without telling anyone and without communicating with anyone during his time away, wife included, as to where he was gone (or worse, perhaps lying to his staff where he had gone) and expected that he could get away with it.

But on reflection, I agree that trying to make a competition between this (hopefully) single episode and a lifetime pattern of reckless behavior by our ex-President was out-of-bounds.

I think Gov. Sanford has taken over the “reckless” crown from Bill Clinton.

That was over the top. He isn’t even the President, and he’s not a serial adulterer (he says), and his paramour is an adult, not an intern. Nowhere near as reckless. BC is still the King. Sorry I wasn’t more clear.

I agree that the press will do its best to make the rest of your comment come true.

Rather, (as I alluded to in the 4th paragraph), I’m talking about the developing of a conditioned reflex among voters, and each reinforcement progressively becomes harder to overcome. It’s the drip, drip, drip on the Republican rock that threatens at some point to seriously weaken it.

We do need to keep the focus on Obama and the Democratic extreme policies. But our job is made so much harder when our leaders create the distraction.

It’s a real stain on our political leadership today that when I heard about this trip to Argentina, my first thoughts were suspicions of sex and adultery. Even worse that this actually turned out to be true.

After the past week, it’s going to be a long, long time before the American public is going to take any Republican politican seriously about supporting family values.

And the operant conditioning of the American people from these episodes will further fray the trust that Americans are willing to put in Republican politicians and by association, damages the credibility of the Republican party – which is particularly damaging when you’re a shrinking minority to start with.

A dark day for the Republic.

Plus we can quickly get back to talking about the Obama agenda for increasing unemployment, now that the Stimulus is proven to be a miserable failure.

I’m depressed.

I don’t know if we’ll ever know specifically how the MSM would have handled Maryland Gov O’Malley (D) doing the same thing, but I think that this story would have viewed as “fun” by at least the MSM in the state, regardless of which party the Governor was.

There was nothing wrong with Mark Sanford going to Argentina. The problem was him not telling his staff so that this issue became a major story.

Hey, I’m libertarian enough to think that this country would be better off if all it’s elected officials vanished for a week (or month or year or term) or two. The problem with Mark Sanford is not that he “vanished” but that it was not communicated correctly by him to his staff and, consequently, from his staff to the public.

Pretty sweeping attacks on the Governor, all hanging on a thread of a single trip.

What responsibilities did he neglect? What tasks didn’t get done due to poor management?