Originally appeared at HyperVocal
Strip away your overtly partisan ideology and uncontrollable inherent biases. Empty your head of what you know and what you think you know.
Candidate A’s dereliction of duty included disappearing from office with no contact to his staff or constituents for six days, see-through lies about hiking the Appalachian Trail, the gigantic hypocrisy of supporting a constitutional amendment defining marriage as “one man and one woman” while being married to one woman and covertly dating another, and, of course, being charged by the state’s Ethics Commission with 37 violations, including spending taxpayer money on business-class flights.
Candidate B’s transgressions included engaging women in social media-based conversations behind his wife’s back, see-through lies about being hacked, and … well, what else? … masturbating too much (while alternating between the DM screen and staring at his naked body in the mirror)?
Is one better? Is one worse? That’s entirely up to you. It all depends on what you think about Democrats versus Republicans, what constitutes fidelity and hypocrisy, how much you value physical contact vis-a-vis cheating, and whether you believe in comeuppance for raging egomaniacs. But one thing is clear: Comparing Mark Sanford to Anthony Weiner is like comparing apples and some fruit that tweets crotch pics when it’s bored. It’s just lazy.
By Slade Sohmer
Good point. There is a big difference in scale.
One thing, though, which makes “L’affaire de Weiner” worse than you mention is that the pictures of his penis were unsolicited and somewhere on the spectrum of sexual harassment. (That was my impression at least. Is that not true?) That doesn’t make the two scandals comparable, but it does close the gap a little bit.