Too Legit To Quit?

Now let me see if I have this straight . . . Mark Sanford refuses to resign the governorship of South Carolina and Sarah Palin is leaving the governorship of Alaska?

And she's resigning because she's not a quitter?

Sanford has no credibility in his state left, and may also have broken state laws by traveling for, ahem, personal business on taxpayers' expense. Yet Palin, who probably has as much power as she's ever going to have - even though she governs fewer people than the borough president of Brooklyn, New York - is walking away from it all to do . . . something. In her incoherent announcement of her plans Friday, she declared that she's be promoting "conservative values" to help unite Americans around the Republican party, even though voters soundly rejected her traditional values - which includes shooting wolves from helicopters - in November.

Even Karl Rove calls her strategy for a greater role in the GOP "risky," though he gives her too much credit. I don't think she really has a strategy. (Her "strategy" may be amounting to little more than attempting to escape the negative attention a recent Vanity Fair article on her vice presidential campaign.)

Say what you will about Mark Sanford. He may misquote Andrew Lloyd Webber lyrics and speak in flowery metaphors, but at least he gets his points across.

He Wines and Dines With Argentines

I can't keep up with this story.

Not only was South Carolina Mark Sanford in Argentina instead of hiking in the Appalachians, he was having an affair with a woman in Buenos Aires.

He even wrote steamy love letters to his mistress with the kind of European-style erotic prose normally unassociated with politicians from the American South. He may even know how to tango.

Trouble is, he might have traveled there on the taxpayers' expense.

And he was away on Father's Day, despite the fact that he has four sons.

Wonder how this all looks to Richard Shindell, the American folk singer-songwriter who moved to Argentina in part to escape people like Mark Sanford?

A once-promising political career has ended because Sanford chose to wine and dine with an Argentine.

No Kuwaitis. That's not his style. ;-)

Mark His Words

The latest from South Carolina: Mark Sanford did not hike the Appalachian Trail after all, though he'd considered it. He spent his absence doing something less explicable: He went to Argentina.

Alas, he was not considering political exile.

Maybe he was hunting for Nazi war criminals! :-D

All Sanford said was that he wanted to go someplace exotic after a long legislative session, so he went to Argentina and took a drive along a coastal highway.

I hope he didn't rent a convertible, because it only gets up to fifty degrees or so in Argentina at this time of year - it's winter down there!

Wonder if he knew that?

News of the Weird

U.S. Senator John Ensign of Nevada looked to be in big trouble when it turned out he had an affair with a staffer's wife, but when the Republican lawmaker announced the affair himself to short-circuit an extortion scheme against him, it got him a warm reception from his fellow GOP senators. They applauded him at their weekly luncheon. That showed 'em! :-D

Meanwhile, Mark Sanford, South Carolina's Republican governor, went on a five-day hike on the Appalachian Trail without telling his wife, the lieutenant governor, the South Carolina state police, and just about everyone else in the state.

Oh yeah, he might have hiked naked.

I didn't know Republicans were trying to get themselves back to the garden. Sanford wanted to get back to Eden!

He has a better chance than John Ensign.