Centrist Pundits

To be honest, I didn’t think I’d be bringing up Senator Ensign again.

CNN has their political ticker, a website off their main page that does brief political news stories.  I find it a very useful website for scanning what the major political stories of the day are.

Tonight, one of the stories is:  http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/07/08/report-senator-tried-to-stop-colleagues-affair/  which is about the efforts of Senator Coburn to get Ensign to break off his affair.  It is a news article about a more complete story located in the Las Vegas Sun, at http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/jul/08/spouse-ensign-affair-says-senator-should-resign/

Now, in the article, it says that the husband of the woman having an affair with Ensign reached out to a conservative Christian senator, Coburn, for assistance in ending the affair.  That’s all well and good, a story about a good man trying to help another man behave well.  Right?

I want to call attention to one line in the middle of the Sun article:

“The group, including Coburn, a well-known conservative, confronted Ensign and suggested that the Hamptons needed to be given financial assistance — in the millions of dollars — to pay off their $1 million-plus mortgage and move them to a new life away from Ensign.”

I guess I could be misreading this, it doesn’t explicitly say it, but is that saying what I think it is saying?  That a group of people including Senator Coburn, in their attempt to get Ensign to break off the affair, suggested that he pay off his mistress to just go away?  Isn’t that just called “hush money” most of the time?

I think CNN really buried the lead on this one.

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I don’t like hypocrisy much.  Sometimes, I’m a hypocrite, I admit that, but I try to avoid it and I try to point it out in politicians.  I don’t know why I would expect politicians to be any better about it than others, but it seems to me that if you are in a leadership position, you should be spend more of your time addressing the truth than scoring with cheap shots.  One area I’m not so good at with my own hypocrisy is taking Democrats to task as easily as I take Republicans to task.  It really is a bipartisan affliction.  But, today’s example DOES happen to be a Republican, so we’ll just have to run with that.

Senator John Ensign has admitted to an extra-marital affair.  John Ensign, who has campaigned and advocated for the defense of marriage, has had an affair.  Of course, to a conservative like Senator Ensign, defense of marriage just means that marriage has to be between a man and a woman.  One man and one woman is the common phrasing, and there is indeed one man and one woman in Ensign’s own marriage – just because he also had a woman on the side, does that make him a hypocrite?  Maybe not.  It does to me, but maybe not.

What about the fact he called on Bill Clinton to resign after Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewisnsky came out?  That should firm up his hypocrite credentials, unless he resigns (which most people consider unlikely due to the weak Republican bench in Nevada and that Ensign has said he wants to remain in the Senate).  You can’t even make a case that Clinton’s was worse because it was a staffer – Ensign’s lover was a member of his staff.  At least no relation of Lewisnky ever asked the Clintons for hush money (well, as far as we know)

To be fair, he has resigned his leadership post in the Senate.  Perhaps he thinks that is sufficient.  But while the situation isn’t exactly parallel, I wonder what he would have thought of such a concession from Clinton.  I am inclined to think not much.  And while I don’t think he was really on the fast track for the Presidential nomination some people think he was on, this really has messed up his own political future and, indeed, the Republican party of Nevada.  I can’t imagine the sheer number of people who are angry at him right now.

I’m actually a devoted husband, and I don’t “get” cheating, but I also don’t really have a moral problem with people who get sex from more than just their spouse, as long as their spouse doesn’t object.  I have no idea what Ensign’s wife thinks of all this, but that’s their business.  It only really becomes the business of the people when the politicians uses sex issues to push their own agenda before being caught themselves.  This is why Spitzer had to resign – not the extra-marital sex or even the prostitutes per se, but because he had been such a force against such things in the past.  And it is the same with Ensign.  He made a bed and has to lie in it, if you’ll pardon the expression.

But as I mentioned yesterday, sometimes things are more about political calculation than what is right.  And the politics of Neveda say Ensign should stay in.

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