There’s Justice for the Mark Sanford’s and Then There’s Justice for the Rest of Us
“The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.”
– Lady Marguerite Blessington
The Tattlesnake isn’t quite as forgiving as was Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown June 26. Alter said he felt sorry for Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) and concluded he was a ‘nice guy.’ Sanford’s having an extramarital affair is really none of our business, and even his lying about it, to an extent, is understandable, but there are some other dimensions to the lurid Sanford saga that display a ‘public servant’ who is considerably less than what most would consider a ‘nice guy,’ aside from his towering hypocrisy.
First there was his attempt to deny $700 million in federal financial aid to South Carolina’s schoolchildren and unemployed, merely to score political points with the GOP base with an eye to a 2012 presidential nomination. That doesn’t sound very ‘nice’ to me.
Then there’s the fact that, after all of the soap-opera revelations regarding his affair with a married Argentinean woman, and outrageous lies concerning his whereabouts as he disappeared for seven days, followed by tearful public apologies, he still refuses to resign.
Moreover, he has confessed to violating South Carolina state law prohibiting misuse of public funds and adultery – yet Sanford has not been arrested for either.
Many years ago, someone I didn’t know well, but well enough to verify that this happened, broke up with his wife and went on a three-day bender – he didn’t call in to work, he didn’t tell anyone where he was. When he reemerged sick, sorry and sober on the fourth day, he discovered he had been fired and no amount of pleading or apology was going to get his job back. It’s not hard to imagine that most of Sanford’s constituents would be in the same sorrowful unemployed state were they to vanish incommunicado for a week from their workplace. Yet Sanford still has his job. Incredible, but a perfect illustration of the two tiers of social justice in modern America: one for the rich and celebrated; another for the peons.
In another case, the wife of a friend, desperate to pay the family’s bills, developed the bad habit of ‘borrowing’ money from the petty cash box at work, which she always dutifully replaced when she got paid. Then one day she was caught red-handed. Not only was she dismissed from her job on the spot, but she was charged with petty theft and had to appear in court. Even though she offered to pay back what she had stolen, and begged the company to drop the charges, her boss was adamant – she had to be found guilty in court to teach her a lesson, and also to make it damn hard for her to find another job.
Sanford sails through over $8,000 in state funds obtained for the fraudulent purpose of visiting his South American firecracker and he doesn’t even get a slap on the wrist. Not only that, but I have yet to read one report emanating from our Big Media demanding that he be charged with any crime. Sanford has announced he’s going to pay back all or part of it, no one’s sure at this point how much, but there will apparently be no day in court for this louse.
My friend’s wife took a couple of hundred a month, which she paid back at the end of every month, and she gets a criminal record; Sanford purloins $8K – that we know of so far — and no one even calls for his arrest. This is justice?
And let’s not even get into Sanford violating the South Carolina state law banning adultery; we can be pretty sure that only applies to the poor and middle-class and not Republican Grandees like the Governor.
The AP reports that, on Friday, Sanford compared his pathetic transcontinental bedroom farce to the Biblical story of King David; is he really trying to goose up sympathy for himself among the Religious Right in this way?
Alter’s wrong – as they say in Brooklyn, Sanford is definitely no nice guy.
And, as they say most everywhere else but in the Big Media ‘Village’ of Washington, when you do the crime, you should do the time.
Or, at least, resign.
© 2009 R.S. Janes. LTSaloon.org.
What I find ironic is the fact that the Dittomonkeys think that going south of the border
for their sexcapades makes it alright.
I guess it is the same double standard the privileged are nurtured on from birth.
Prime example being;taking their underage daughters to India for breast augmentation to avoid the exposure to the very American doctors they want their Daughters to someday marry.
The Doctors from India that I know(American haters all)feel rebuked that They don’t have a chance at a slice of some of that underaged whitemeat,Brahma just does not cut it and that flies in the face of their privileged class’ dogma.
(You are simply not allowed to tell either race in that hallowed group,No!)
Yes it is a funny old world,the more that it changes,the more it remains the same.
The rich get richer and the poor,well,they starve.
Comment by Rainlander — June 29, 2009 @ 12:07 pm
You know that old saying “Time is money, my little sonny, and a rich man’s joke is always funny.” Well, actually, their jokes aren’t always so funny — like bailing out Wall Street’s ‘Masters of the Universe,’ the cretins running our biggest banks, and saving the bacon of the investors of two of the three major US auto companies.
Meanwhile, people continue to lose their homes, their savings and their jobs. At some point, there will be very little lower-and middle-class tax money to bail out the American aristocracy, the Chinese will cut us off, and the rich will have to start eating their own.
Then, if we’re lucky, we can start to build the future without so many overcompensated idiots in the way.
On the other hand…
Comment by RS Janes — June 29, 2009 @ 6:01 pm