A man of strong values, if you ignore the having affairs with multiple patients
and getting one pregnant and pressuring her to get an abortion part.
You would almost think you could come to
some general conclusion about this.
As they endure humiliating headlines, damaging federal investigations and tough scrutiny of their personal lives, scandal-tarred lawmakers aren’t just surviving this midterm year. In many cases, they’re thriving.
By any traditional standard of acceptable behavior for politicians, they should be dead men walking. Instead: Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), a physician who was revealed to have once impregnated a patient and then asked her to get an abortion, won his primary and is a virtual lock to win reelection.
Other examples given include Rep. Vance McAllister (R-LA), caught on camera making out with a female campaign aide, the indicted Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY), and Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC), who was installed in the House after vanishing from his post as South Carolina governor for days, only to be discovered returning from a tryst with his Argentinian mistress.
(No seriously, the guy actually vanished from his job for multiple days. His aides couldn't find him, the rest of the people in government couldn't find him, they eventually found his car at the airport and found him in person only when he popped on back, apparently surprised that not showing up for your job as governor of South Carolina in order to screw your secret foreign mistress was something people would notice. Apparently not even that is enough to earn the permanent displeasure of South Carolina voters, however, and we can only speculate on what would be.)
You might especially think that Scott DesJarlais would be in trouble with the values voter crowd, since screwing your female patients and pressuring them to get abortions afterward is pretty much the poster-child definition of what values voters are supposed to be against, and they've been passing new laws about the latter by the shovelful of late. Nope.
[B]y the time voters cast ballots in August, they’d been hearing about DesJarlais’ personal life for years — enough time, at least for a slim majority of them, to get over any concerns.
DesJarlais reminded voters why they’d elected him to Congress in the first place, casting himself as a steadfast conservative who opposed President Barack Obama.
A steadfast conservative who is pro-screwing-his-medical-patients and pro-getting-them-abortions, but doggone it he's against Obama! Get to the pollmobile, ma, we're votin' for that guy!
You would almost think—and this is an odd thought, but bear with me here—that what politicians actually do is inconsequential, compared to what they say. But it's selective, so it can't quite be that either. Whether an elected official has to resign his job as a result of visiting a prostitute or having an affair seems to depend primarily on how close to the values voters crowd they are, with stalwart and well-known perverts like Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) getting a pass where a less valuesish Eliot Spitzer will not. The more you espouse values, in other words, the more you're allowed to not have any.
You would almost think you could come to some general conclusion about that. Perhaps. It also seems to occur more regularly in the southern states, among southern Republicans, and if you were an especially obnoxious person you might try to come to some conclusions about that, too.