In this day and age, Republicans and Democrats are no longer two sides of the same coin. They are now mortal enemies, deadlocked in political warfare, and no one has a clear advantage over the other. Furthermore, with cable media covering politics 24/7 the noise produced from this war is amplified to levels we have never experienced. Okay, so now that I have been needlessly dramatic in setting the stage, let’s talk about the one area politicians from both sides can agree on: both parties have sex scandals with some amount of depravity.
To demonstrate this, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow had an interesting idea. She created the “Post-Bill Clinton Modern American Political Sex Scandal Consequence-o-Meter”. Yes, a very interesting name, and altogether fitting. On this meter, Maddow created two axes; the horizontal axis gauged how prosecutable the scandal was, and the vertical axis gauged how creepy the scandal was.
Here’s a few things I took from this. First off, John Edwards is gonna get it. He was rated the most prosecutable and the most creepy of all the politicians featured on the meter. Second, this might be the most moderate scale of anything political out there. For every Democrat who had a scandal, you could find a Republican with a similar scandal. The Democrats have Anthony Weiner, but the Republicans have Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Democrats have Eliot Spitzer, and Republicans have David Vitter.
In the end I concluded that when it comes to sex scandals, both sides really do throw stones from their glass houses. If one side has a scandal, the other side really can’t comment on it since their side has defended their own embattled politician engaged in similar activities. In other words, you can’t be a hypocrite. Finally, how pathetic is it that the most glaring similarity between our warring political factions is that each has similar sex scandals? You’d think they could be similar on something meaningful, but I guess you just need to have your priorities in order when you take political office.
