A Plea for Mendacity

Sometimes, I dislike America intensely. Maybe it's partly a matter of linguistics, but still...

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's mother said yesterday that she was praying for her son as pressure mounted for a criminal probe into his secret trip to visit his lover in Argentina. "I love him and support him," Margaret Sanford, 83, said while sitting on a wooden picnic bench outside her home.

After going missing for days, the married father of four admitted Wednesday to a yearlong affair with a woman who lives in Argentina. In a tearful news conference, the two-term Republican asked for forgiveness and explained that a friendship with the woman had blossomed into romance a year ago, around the time of a state-funded trip to South America.

For Heaven's Sake, can't she pray in privacy? Certainly her brand of Christianity hasn't done much for the son she (presumably) brought up. Alright, we Europeans (at least we Germans and certainly the English) are a stuck-up bunch when it comes to religion, but this is obscene.

But what I find even worse is to describe the making of an adulterous relationship as "a friendship with (a) woman (that) had blossomed into romance." Romance? BLOSSOMED? Pukebags anybody?

Not that politicians at this end (or people generally) do not commit adultery. But at least it isn't hyped to the max (to use another disgusting Americanism) or maybe they are just not as often found out, be that because they are less dumb than their American counterparts or because there is just less interest in other peoples' sex lifes. Whatever, so far we have been spared that cheesy view of adultery, the snivelling of the perpetrators and, thank God for small mercies, Mum's sanctimonious drivel as the icing on a turd that tries to sell itself as a chocolate truffle.

There IS, after all, a difference between mendacity and hypocrisy. The former can sometimes be necessary for sanity's sake, the latter destroys it.

The rest of the tripe is here.