The liberal media pile-on over the Sanford and Ensign extra-marital affairs aren’t just a collaboration of double standards, they’re off base too.
Consider the New York Times’ Gail Collins:
I’m thinking it’s time for the Republicans to apologize for putting us through the Clinton impeachment. We seem to have pretty well established that sexual stone-throwing is a dangerous sport.
Gov. Sanford and Sen. John Ensign (R, NV) may be cheating idiots who didn’t have the decency to divorce their spouses first, but they weren’t found guilty by a federal judge for perjury and then use their office to obstruct justice — as did Clinton.
That’s the point: despite the historic revisionism by the liberal base the rationale behind the Clinton impeachment wasn’t that he was an immoral anathema to family values, but that he lied during a sworn deposition in which his prosecutors were establishing a pattern of abuse during a sexual harassment case. Once more the “feminists” at the NYTs and their ilk show they are only feminists when it’s politically convenient for them.
Here’s another point: the brazen double-standard liberals follow in cases of politicians sexual misconduct. This shouldn’t be “The Long Winter” for Republicans, as today’s Washington Post puts the outing of Sanford and Ensign. Family values and such topics are no more dead today than the day before. It’s not Republicans who are smeared, but Sanford and Ensign, as they should be. The difference is that these men are officially outcasts in the eyes of fellow Republicans, whereas Democrats who do the same are excused by their apologists in the liberal base — who instead just hope and pray for the next Republican to foul up in order to even the score.
Whether the party plank is family values, free-market economics, limited government (this being Gail Collin’s biggest beef with Mark Sanford), or other, when our Republican leaders let us down the answer isn’t to disqualify the issue, it’s to purge the offending politician from the ranks.