Sin Tax

by digby

I don’t care much about the Sanford story except to the extent that I can’t help but feel some shaudenfreude at the downfall of all sanctimonious right wing hypocrites. It’s just such a prosaic, predictable tale that I don’t even want to have to think about it. He sounds to me like the kind of guy who really needs to leave politic and have his embarrassing mid life crisis privately on a boat in the Caribbean somewhere.

But this is a problem:

When South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford added a stop in Argentina to his trade mission to Brazil last June, the side trip should’ve raised eyebrows because he was undertaking a trade mission that the U.S. government was unwilling to make.

I don’t know enough about the Argentine situation to have an opinion about whether US policy was correct. (I suspect not.) But considering what we know about Sanford, it’s a little bit hard to believe that he wasn’t in accord with Bush.

But that’s not the problem. It’s the fact that he added the “stop” on to a taxpayer financed trip to Brazil. He’s agreed to pay the Argentine leg back, but that’s not actually good enough. The press probably needs to look into the whole trip because it’s a little bit too convenient that Sanford was going to South America at all when he just happened to have a mistress there.

This is the kind of stuff that actually is flat out corrupt. The government should not be paying for people to visit their mistresses and when they are caught, simply paying back the money isn’t sufficient. It’s called stealing and it’s against the law.

As far as I’m concerned Sanford’s romantic antics are pathetic and none of my business. But the idea that taxpayers are paying for them is outrageous. If a public servant can’t pay for his own trysts and needs government business trips to cover them up, then he needs to make other plans. When he’s a also person who waxes on about self-reliance and not depending on the government — even to the extent of refusing to take federal money to help the unemployed keep food on the table — then he has disqualified himself from public office. Sexual hypocrisy is venial sin. Stiffing poor people while stealing from government coffers is a crime. He should resign.

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