Zipper Failure

As Henry Kissinger famously said: "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."

Among those for whom power and inappropriate sex are mixed, we can include politicians (President Clinton, Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina), businessmen (Mark Hurd formerly Chief Executive Officer of Hewlett Packard and Harry Stonecipher formerly Chief Executive Officer of Boeing) and high ranking members of the military (including former Director of Central Intelligence General David Petraeus)

That powerful people have been exposed with their zippers down - when they should be up - is nothing new. That all too many of them, after a brief period of seclusion, can attempt to return - sometimes successfully - to public life is an indictment of us as citizens.

Governor, now Representative, Sanford is a prime example. Less than four years after word leaked out of his adulterous affair with an Argentine woman (including the use of State funds for personal expenditures), the citizens of the 1st Congressional District of South Carolina overwhelming voted to return him to Washington DC.

Meanwhile, in New York City, two notorious zipper artists are running for office: Eliot Spitzer (Client-9 of a notorious high end prostitution ring) wants to be New York City Comptroller and Anthony Weiner (texter of pictures of his crotch to single women) wants to be Mayor.

In her column this week (click to read), Peggy Noonan discusses the life of former British Minister of War John Profumo who resigned from the House of Commons in 1963 following a sex scandal about which he lied to Parliament. Rather than attempting a political comeback by sleazily claiming personal redemption as a result of his travails, he simply spent the next forty years quietly doing his best to make the world a slightly better place. Most importantly, he sought no publicity and until 2003 never spoke publicly of his disgrace.

What a contrast to current American practice!

Were the voters of New York City and the nation to refuse to accept that the return to office of disgraced politicians, your correspondent might be less inclined to refer to New York City and Washington DC, respectively, as Sodom On The Hudson and Gomorrah On The Potomac.