Six Ways of Looking at Mark Sanford

• I was having trouble keeping the GOP sex scandals straight - this flowchart is a big help.
• The Daily Show hit the Mark Sanford story perfectly, then - perhaps realizing the man had actual feelings for his mistress and was genuinely messed up and upset about what had happened - dropped it. Minority of one here, but I say Sanford's behavior appears to make sense in the context of a normal human life (as opposed to what some of these other clowns were up to). Stewart's tagline - "just another politician with a conservative mind and a liberal penis" - seems about right. If we're going to mercilessly mock a disgraced Republican, let's pick someone else.
• Meanwhile, the San Jose Mercury News, once known as a 'news-paper', put the text of Sanford's e-mails to his lover on the front page, so that an inquiring and educated public, exercising their Right to Know, could judge for themselves whether his romantic blandishments distinguished him as a possible presidential contender in 2012. Yes, I know they were repeating the story from South Carolina's The State. And I suppose this is big news in whitey no-sexy land. But so what? All of this occurred as California's government teetered on the brink of insolvency - a development that the Merc placed, if I recall correctly, below the fold.
• Sanford owes Michael Jackson - big time.
• Maybe Sanford has enough time to reconcile with his wife, have a religious experience, and come back and contend in 2012. I doubt it - more likely he's the new Gary Hart - but this episode has humanized him and made him a national figure. He has to figure out how to keep his current job though, and that may be a little tricky in chaste-judgmental-moralistic South Carolina.
• Clinton's intern-diddling can't hold a candle to these guys. And karma's a bitch.