So, I was eating breakfast this morning (warm pumpkin bread with whipped butter) and reading the days headlines on Google News when Mr. Jones came downstairs and prodded me to surf to the New York Times website.

 "I just think you need to see this quote."  The Sanford in Argentina story had not yet broken, so the cover story was about Silvio Berlusconi and his rampage to keep Little Silvio in 18-year old girlflesh.  The quote?

 This is a man whose exploits in septuagenarian lechery are famous.  And now, finally, the Italian people MAY have had enough.  Maybe.  If the opposition could get it together.  I laughed a little, and shooed him away from my laptop.  Lots of blogs to read, and little time before I had to head out.

Later today, though, the story got better.  As the Sanford story broke, I IMed Mr. Jones with my Shock! and Dismay!  which smelled like a brief bloom of schadenfreude.  Another member of the "Family Values" party bites the dust.

He repies:

Mr. Jones: Yeah.  I saw.  Clumsy....an Italian wouldn't have been so clumsy ;)

 
So, accuracy or inaccuracy of that statement notwithstanding, now you know that Mr. Jones and I are well suited in the cynicism department, at the very least.  But there's something to this.  Over and over again, our politicians fall prey to these traps.  John Ensign.  Mark Sanford.  Bill Clinton. 

Maybe it's time to admit that the kind of men who seek higher office are also the kind of men who will have affairs.  That the alpha dog mentality necessary to want to lead a country often goes hand in hand with the mentality that leads those men to act out with models or women who are employed by them or women who will call them "Daddy."

Neither party, it would seem, has a corner on virtue.  Is time to decide that, while I wouldn't want to be Mrs. Berlusconi, or Mrs. Vitter, or Mrs. Clinton...that maybe it's okay that their husbands remain in the jobs they were elected to?

I'd call that a change I could believe in.