South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford admitted this week that he has been carrying on an extramarital affair. That was the second most shocking thing that he admitted, the first being that he ditched the responsibilities of his office and his family to spend a week with his floozy… ahem, mistress in South America.

Sanford, the Chief Executive Officer of the proud state of South Carolina (I believe their state motto is: The War isn’t over; we can still win this thing) ran away from home for a week without telling anyone. His office came up with the brilliant cover story that he went hiking, alone, in the woods for a week.

Now, caught in the web of his lies and betrayals, he came up with this gem of a defense: King David did it, too.  That’s right, God’s favorite king, who ruled Israel 3,000 years ago, had a fling with a hottie he spied bathing on a roof (no word on how Sanford met his mistress, whose name is reportedly Maria, but I’m sure she’d look fine doing a little moonlight rooftop bathing).

I don’t know about you, but I now feel that his actions are totally justified and that he remains a qualified, strong leader.  After all, the argument goes, if God didn’t feel the need to impeach David after he diddled Bathsheba and had her husband killed, who are we to judge Sanford?  By Governor Sanford’s measure, we should be giving him a medal of honor for not having anyone killed to cover up his affair.  What a guy!

Time to give it up, Governor.  You’re a Republican.  You can’t get away with this sort of thing.   Your conservative constituents care about this sort of behavior, and the Democrats are going to hate you no matter what you do, as long as there is a little ‘R’ in parentheses next to your name.

Nice try, quoting the Bible and all.  But you’re screwed on this one.  The only way out of this would be if some guy who used to be a pop star dies and the national media spend 24/7 covering that story, letting you drop off the grid.  Like that will really happen…

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Camp Campaign is proud to present the only political blog on the entirety of the Internet that will not focus on the President of The United States of America swatting a fly this week.

This week Barbara Boxer managed to re-insert herself into the news cycle by dressing down Brigadier General Michael Walsh at a Senate Committee hearing on the Environment and Public Works. Senator Boxer rudely cut off the Brigadier General in mid-sentence at the very beginning of his testimony and asked that he call her “Senator” instead of “Ma’am”. When I write that she “asked” him, I mean that in only the most technical sense. Based on her tone and overall demeanor, “demanded” might be a better word.

Ms. Boxer is, in fact, a senator. Mr. Walsh is, in fact, a soldier. In military protocol, “Ma’am” is the most respectful and appropriate term that an officer could use in addressing a woman. Boxer’s surly response demonstrates her contempt for the military and its protocol. Further, it shows just how pampered and ridiculous our elected leaders have become. Not just Senator Boxer, but I dare say the majority of our representatives feel that they have achieved an absurd level of entitlement based on their position.

Sadly, Ms. Boxer and her fellow senators have forgotten that they are in Washington to serve the interests of their constituents. Constituents like the fine folks at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) who are outraged, OUTRAGED, at President Obama’s callous treatment of a fly… oops, sorry. Back to Senator Boxer.

Ms. Boxer’s argument for the necessity of using her titles started with “It’s just a thing…”, which I agree with completely. She went on to say, “I worked so hard to get that title…” That explains a lot. She worked to get a title, not to get herself into a position to serve and better this country and its people. I wish I could say I was surprised, but our politicians have driven my natural sense of optimism right out of me.

If you want to comment on this article, please be sure to address me as Wordsmith Rowe. It’s just a thing….

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There were two big stories that highlighted the great political divide this past week. In case you missed one or the other: Republicans are furious with David Letterman and Liberals are furious with Carrie Prejean. In both instances, the offender said something that the offendee didn’t like one little bit.

In Letterman’s case, he mocked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and made very crude assertions about her 14 year old daughter. The Right-wing argument against Letterman goes like this: he abused his freedom of speech by saying things that are hateful. The Leftist defense is that he can say whatever he wants and those who don’t like him should just lighten up.

On the other end of the spectrum Carrie Prejean, Miss California, publicly stated that she feels that marriage should be kept between one man and one woman. The Left-wing argument against Prejean goes like this: she abused her freedom of speech by saying things that are hateful. The Right’s defense is that she can say whatever she wants and those who don’t like her should just lighten up.

For those keeping score, the Liberals are winning the War Against the Words. They have somehow managed to get Prejean fired from her job as Miss California. Donald Trump gave her her walking papers today. According to Trump, her firing had nothing to do with the furor over her comments from the Gay-rights community. I don’t think anyone, Left or Right, believes that.

The Conservatives are trying to muster a similar backlash against Letterman, but to no avail. Nobody’s listening. My favorite, completely unbelievable lie from the Letterman defense is that he was not talking about Palin’s 14 year old daughter when he said, “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game, during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” Funny guy. He was, of course, referring to Bristol, Palin’s OTHER daughter who is 18 and already has a child. The fact that Bristol wasn’t along on the trip to NY does nothing to dissuade the Letterman camp from sticking to their story. Facts don’t enter into it. After all, he’s a comedian, not a news man.

One person’s hate-speech is another person’s joke. I guess it just depends on your point of view.

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Dear Israel,
Hi. It’s me, your old pal the United States. We’ve been friends for a long time. In fact, I remember the day you first became a country. I’ve seen you grow up. I was so proud the day I saw you quell your first insurgency. It’s hard for me to believe that you’re over sixty years old already.
But now, well, I’ve got a new president, and I’m doing things a little differently. I don’t know how else to say this, but I no longer have your back. We’re still friends and all, but I’m trying to also be friends with the Muslim countries all around you, and most of them want you dead.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking their side. I want you to exist. I was just thinking maybe you’d give parts of yourself away. I’m sure that the Palestinians will be very grateful with their own little homeland and will immediately cease in their wishing death upon you and all that. It’s not like they’d be ungrateful enough to want more once you’ve given them a little something.

And look, just because my new president says Iran has the right to have nuclear power doesn’t mean that I want them to use it to wipe you off the map. I think if we ask real nice, they’ll only use it to provide power to orphanages and baby milk factories. Iran is just a bully. He’ll leave you alone if you just ignore him. There is no way that he’ll use the technology to build a nuclear weapon and destroy you. Yes, I know that’s what his president said he’d do, but I’m sure Iran will behave. Maybe he’ll even be friends with you someday.

So, good luck with the whole “not getting wiped off the face of the earth” thing. I’m rooting for you. Really. Not out loud you understand. I don’t want to upset my new friends. But deep down inside, I’m pulling for you. But you’ll understand if I ask you to keep it just between us, right?

Love,
USA

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I recently had a great conversation with Bill Hirsch, author of the best selling book - Designing Your Perfect House: Lessons from an Architect Bill had some clear and astute thoughts about how people move from liberal to conservative at different points in their lives.

The political conversation was so passionate that I wanted to share the text of it right here in its entirety:

I did not vote for Obama, but my kids did. I could easily imagine myself being enamored with him when I was their age. I worked for Hubert Humphrey. I couldn’t stand Nixon. I though Jimmy Carter was a breath of fresh air and I voted for him. But it didn’t take long for me to see how inept and naïve he was and what a bad president he ended up being. I lost my job during his economic mess. Construction ground to a halt and many of us were laid off.

I did not like Reagan at first and did not vote for him. But during his years in office, I found myself agreeing with his love of country, his believe in our own individual abilities, and the whole idea that we accomplish things ourselves and the government doesn’t accomplish anything for us. I learned that lowering taxes does stimulate economic growth and actually increases the number of dollars the government receives because even though they are taxing incomes at a lower rate, they are taxing higher incomes at that converts to more dollars. I changed from a bleeding heart liberal to a conservative. Winston Churchill said that if when you’re twenty you are not a liberal, then you have no heart. And if when you’re forty you’re not a conservative, then you have no brain. That pretty much describes my evolution.

But now we get another President like Carter. President Obama feels the government needs more money so they raise taxes, and he feels the government should spend money to stimulate the economy so they raise taxes, but all they really do is throw a wet blanket on the economy because when we pay higher taxes, we have less money to spend. That means everything economic slows down. It’s just idiotic. History is repeating itself right before my eyes. We apparently have not learned anything.

I live in North Carolina. I voted for McCain because I couldn’t, in good faith, vote for Obama (Carter revisited). I would have preferred Romney, even though he was hardly the perfect candidate in my opinion. McCain would have been a mediocre president at best. But he would have been less harmful than Obama. In a couple of years you’ll be able to do a story on Obama voters who got Change they never expected. I’m thinking of change that was harmful to them.

I think that Obama is a tremendously articulate guy. But he misrepresented himself to get elected. That’s the way it goes, I guess. I wish he had really been the man many voters thought he would be. But he isn’t. He never really explained the change he would implement. Nobody pressed him to explain himself. He’s like the Manchurian Candidate.

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I’m offended. Actually offended. I’m not the easily-offended type. I don’t think I’m even the regular-offended type. It takes a lot to truly offend me. I may not agree with you. I may not like what you say. But to find something at which I actually take offense just doesn’t happen every day.

And then along comes Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s choice to be the next Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States of America. She’s a far-left liberal who’s interpretation of the Constitution differs from my own in nearly every way. But that’s not offensive; that’s just life.

She doesn’t support gun rights, even though they are guaranteed by the Constitution she is sworn to uphold. Irritating, but not offensive. She doesn’t believe that helpless unborn babies have any rights at all. That is just horrifying, but not a matter of personal offense to me.

No, I’m offended because she said that she thinks, and I quote, that a “wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

The great civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is spinning like a top in his grave right now. His dream of a nation in which his grandchildren could be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character just took a giant leap backward.

Now don’t mistake what I’m saying. My outrage is not so much because one woman made a racist remark eight years ago. The real problem here is that no one (outside of the Rush Limbaughs of the world) seems to care. Where is the anger? Where are the cries for the President to withdraw her nomination? (Other than day time talk radio, that is.)

I’m not ashamed to be a white male. I was born this way; I’ll die this way. There is nothing I can do to change who I am, and there is no reason to want to. Political correctness has run amok for too long. This is one wise white male who has had enough.

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The Federal government is using 2.6 million of your tax dollars to fund a study to find out why Chinese prostitutes drink so much. Really. I’m not kidding. I know that $2.6 million is peanuts in the scheme of the federal budget, but it’s not nothing. Nothing, it so turns out, is the appropriate amount for the US government to spend on a study involving drunken Chinese hookers. In fact, as a public service, I am willing to answer the questions that the study was designed to answer for free. Ready… here we go…

I’m pretty sure they drink because they are prostitutes… in China… and as such life kind of stinks. That’s just off the top of my head, but I’m betting that in five years, after the government has dumped $2.6 million into this ‘study’, that is what the results will tell us. Another question in the study - and I again remind you that I am not making this up - why do Chinese prostitutes engage in risky sexual behavior when they’re drunk? The $2.6 million answer will have to wait, but the free answer is: because they’re paid to. They’re prostitutes! In China! I’m thinking that they’re getting drunk because they know they are going to engage in the risky sexual behavior, not the other way around.

A second study, being conducted in Argentina, is researching why gay men engage in risky sexual behavior while drunk. That’s another $400,000 of your tax dollars at work. What part of ‘drunk’ don’t these researchers understand? And how did they convince Congress to vote for this crap? We are paying for sociologists to try to rationally codify inherently irrational behavior. Three million dollars later we’ll have nothing to show for it, except maybe a request for additional funding.

I want to know who is making up these asinine studies while drunk. Or just how drunk our representatives in Congress were when they approved this nonsense. In fact, maybe I’ll put in a bid to study the knuckleheads who are coming up with these studies and the Congressmen who approve them. I should be able to put the whole thing together for oh, say, $3.2 million.

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I am unaccustomed to agreeing with our current president. Not because I’m a partisan or a bigot or an obstructionist. I just find that we disagree on virtually everything, from smoking (he does, I don’t) to abortion (he wants to make it even more widely available, I don’t) to the division of powers (he endorses a centralizing government, I’m more of a federalist) and on and on. The point is that I don’t disagree just to disagree, but the President and I have found little common ground in his first 100 days in office.
And it looked like that trend was going to continue last week when the Obama administration agreed to an ACLU request to release photographs of American soldiers allegedly ‘torturing’ enemy combatants. Note, I used the word allegedly AND put torturing in quotes. ‘Nuff said about that.

While I am on board with a transparent government and freedom of information, I’m more on board with guarding our shores from threats foreign and domestic. Releasing pictures showing what could be construed as cruelty on the part of American soldiers toward presumably Muslim detainees would almost definitely stir up wide-spread resentment against America and jeopardize the lives of the soldiers who have dedicated their lives to defending us from harm.

Then, President Obama did an about face. Quite suddenly, he un-agreed to release the photos and basically told the ACLU to sue if they don’t like it. Now, daring the ACLU to sue is kind of like daring me to eat a hot, fresh doughnut. It doesn’t take much prodding.
The President made the right decision, eventually. The public’s right to see the pictures is trumped by the national security concerns inherent in releasing them. What’s more, President Obama has now found an opponent so liberal that he is on their Right, putting him and me firmly on the same side of the argument.

Stand your ground, Mr. O. I’ve got your back. And words I never thought I’d write: thank you, ACLU. Your out of control self-serving wackiness has given me and the Prez a chance to bond on at least one issue. Now, about those cigarettes….

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Remember the Air Force One fly over of New York City that caused such a ruckus a few weeks back? Well, don”t hold your breath waiting for those stunning photos of Air Force One against the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty to be released any time soon. The Publicist in Chief has decided that the pictures are now classified and will not be released to the public.

Questions abound in my mind. The obvious thought is that the President is embarrassed by the monumental stupidity of the stunt and does not want the decision to fly an airliner low over New York City in the post-9/11 world to be rehashed in the media. That makes some sense, but I would argue that the damage has been done and the taxpayers deserve to see the photos that were taken at their expense.

Theories disputing the White House’s official stance are all over the Internet. Most center around the occupants of the plane. Are there photos showing just who was aboard Air Force One? Are there people whose presence in the photos would cause a stir among the populace? I’m guessing - and this is just a guess - no.

For one thing, the purported purpose of the flight was to get photos of Air Force One passing by the Statue of Liberty. Those pictures would, by necessity, have to be taken from a vantage point outside of the aircraft. The roll of film containing the fly over pics logically wouldn’t contain pictures of the occupants of the plane.

But even if you don’t buy that argument, who could be on the plane that the Obama Administration wouldn’t want you to know about? Given the administration’s generally disdainful attitude toward public inquiry, it seems more likely they’d say “Yeah, thirty ACORN ‘community organizers’ were on the plane, but we want to stay on message and talk about my healthcare plan.” Why would the executive branch pick this one time to abruptly shift from surly to sneaky?

I’m not buying the rumors. In this particular instance, I am firmly on the side of the President and his official story. We can’t see the pictures because President Obama doesn’t want us to. End of story… until someone sues under the Freedom of Information Act.

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This week Senator Arlen Specter, after serving for the last 29 years as a Republican, switched his party affiliation to the Democratic Party. The question is: why? His assertion is that he has remained constant while everyone else in the Republican Party has moved steadily to the Right so that his ideals are no longer represented by the party.

His critics on the Right contend that he has betrayed the party for selfish practical purposes. Their argument is that he knew he could not win the Republican primary to be held next year, so he jumped ship to run as a Democrat.

Not to be lost in the finger pointing is the fact that with Al “Please Take Me Seriously” Franken poised to win his long-contested seat, Specter’s defection would give the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. President Obama and the DNC will try very hard to convince you that this is just a coincidence, that Senator Specter did what he did because his principles demanded it. They took the unusual step of answering an unasked question by insisting that Specter will not be a “rubber stamp” and further asserting that there was no “quid pro quo”.

Those seemingly unnecessary denials taken together imply, to my cynical mind at least, that Specter was bribed by the Democrats (although not necessarily with the knowledge or consent of the President) to jump ship. Whether the bribery was in the form of under the table money, promises of campaign support, or a coveted leadership position on a powerful committee is unclear. I find it hard to believe, however, that his sudden change of heart was not influenced by the Democrat’s desire for an absolute majority in the Senate.

We’ll have to watch and see if there is a single instance in which Specter sides with his old allies on the Right, or if he acts as the “rubber stamp” despite President Obama’s claims to the contrary.

I personally don’t bear any ill will toward the senator. Really, I don’t. But as a political observer and a big fan of irony, I find myself hoping that he loses in the Democratic primary next year. It would be interesting to see where he’d turn next. Bull Moose Party, maybe?

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